The invisible afterlives of extractivism: a queer feminist landscape perspective on Quiruvilca, Peru

This article presents the “afterlives of extraction” from one of the oldest mines in Northern Peru, Quiruvilca, where informal mining began after formal mining ended. Academic debates on extractivism in Latin America have largely ignored questions about the afterlives of formal mine closures, which leave hazardous waste and a vacuum filled by informal mining. Landscape perspectives expose past and present power structures, corporate irresponsibility, and the long-term consequences of neoliberal extractivist logics. However, much landscape literature remains implicitly andro- and anthropocentric, reproducing several dualisms that risk reducing care workers to non-agents. I advocate for a queer feminist landscape perspective that is attuned to invisibilities—the microtraces of care labor, the mythic end of mining, wider contexts of economic possibility and environmental degradation—to inform contemporary debates on environmental justice.