Third World feminist agrarian struggles and the colonial question for transnational feminist solidarity

Abstract

abstract Third World agrarian feminists have, through debates and struggles over the course of at least nine decades, explored the meanings of liberation – directly through involvement in land and agrarian struggles, and indirectly through solidarity with movements against raising other related social justice questions. The link between feminist agrarian movements and the broader movements is partly based on a common historical concern with gender as a colonising substructure. In the still largely agrarian south, for instance, the gender question to class would highlight the regimes of gendered labour which fracture solidarity among working people, and ask whether feminist resistance can undermine the basic gendered structure of reproduction that stabilised the colonial/capitalist mode of accumulation. To ethnicity, the question would be the extent to which feminist movements can overcome reactionary nationalisms in order to reach for global Black solidarities on the basis of shared transnational histories. To race, the question would be the extent to which Black feminists can overcome the universalising tendencies of empire in order to retain a structural critique of the ways in which structural racism aids capitalist exploitation of gendered labour. Drawing on these concerns, this article examines various contemporary feminist agrarian questions from a global south vantage point, highlighting the limitations which these questions present to the (de)colonial present, and possibilities that exist in articulating a position in which the colonial question is core to gender and Black feminist solidarities.