‘Land for my children’: Gendered moral economies, social reproduction and resistance against land grabs in rural Cambodia

Posted on 13 May 2024

New article by Dr Saba Joshi

photo of Saba Joshi

Dr Saba Joshi has a new article in the Journal of Agrarian Change this week.

In ‘Land for my children’: Gendered moral economies, social reproduction and resistance against land grabs in rural Cambodia Saba emphasises the relationship between social reproduction and moral economies of resistance that evolve through historical and social relationships to land. Such a perspective, Saba argues, enables gendered and materialist understandings of struggles for land, homes and life in rural Cambodia and simultaneously helps us account for the active, visible roles women have played in these contemporary forms of resistance against land grabs.

Abstract

This article elaborates the connections between women's roles in household and community social reproduction and their leadership in resistance against land dispossession. Drawing on interviews with women land activists in two rural provinces, situated in south and central Cambodia, it examines the beliefs and processes of meaning-making underpinning women's activism against state-sanctioned land acquisitions through an examination of the symbols, discourses and imaginaries of land, home and social reproductive labour that embed their struggles. It argues that rural women's resistance makes visible gendered moraleconomies-moored to agrarian social relations and shaped by the modalities of social reproduction that legitimate contestation against state-sanctioned land dispossession.