THE TRAGEDY OF THE ENCLOSURES: AN ECO-FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE OF THE SALE OF OXYGEN AND PROSTITUTION IN COSTA RICA

Abstract

This paper develops the premise that capitalism and patriarchy, which understand
conservation in terms of enclosure, use it as another instrument of colonization of the Third
World, women’s work, and nature. This paper connects two aspects of this process: the first
is the enclosure of the forest for as an oxygen generator/carbon sink; and the second is the
enclosure of women’s labour through prostitution. As biodiversity and women’s non-wage
labour comprise the support system that local communities use for survival, selling oxygen
and prostitution have become a war on subsistence and, consequently, an expansion of
poverty. The author concludes that Costa Rica’s debt crisis provides grounds for
restructuring accumulation in the industrial world by selling oxygen/carbon sink capacity as
the technological solution to environmental destruction, and provides grounds for repairing
masculine anxiety, or “masculation,” by selling its women’s and children’s bodies as a result
of the inequality crisis