Bt cotton and the voices of the widows in the face of farmer-suicides

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article deploys the culture-centered approach to foreground the everyday constructions of farmer-suicides amid the agrarian epidemic among the farmer-widows to attend to the everyday structures that constitute the meanings of the suicides. The depictions of the patriarchal structures of decision-making in agriculture are intertwined with the broader erasure of the interplays of inequality in farmers’ experiences from the discursive sites of neoliberal agriculture. Furthermore, the voices of the widows disrupt the monolithic construction of agricultural technologies as tools of modernization and progress dominant in the development communication scholarship, instead, depicting the ways in which new technologies (such as Bt cotton) are constituted within, and reproduce, the overarching inequalities.