| Summary/Abstract |
The vision of food sovereignty calls for radical changes in agricultural,
political and social systems related to food. These changes also
entail addressing inequalities and asymmetries of power in gender
relations. While women’s rights are seen as central to food sovereignty,
given the key role women play in food production, procurement
and preparation, family food security, and food culture, few
attempts have been made to systematically integrate gender in food
sovereignty analysis. This paper uses case studies of corporate agricultural
expansion to highlight the different dynamics of incorporation
and struggle in relation to women’s and men’s different position,
class and endowments. These contribute to processes of social differentiation
and class formation, creating rural communities more complex
and antagonistic than those sketched in food sovereignty
discourse and neo-populist claims of peasant egalitarianism, cooperation
and solidarity. Proponents of food sovereignty need to address
gender systematically, as a strategic element of its construct and not
only as a mobilising ideology. Further, if food sovereignty is to have
an intellectual future within critical agrarian studies, it must reconcile
the inherent contradictions of the ‘we are all the sa
|