Feminist Approaches to Understanding Women’s Work in Indian Agriculture: Continuities and Discontinuities

This article will attempt to trace feminist discourses and theoretical perspectives to understand women’s work in the rural economy, largely focused on India and South Asia. This scholarship has drawn from a range of theoretical standpoints, resistance movements and lived experiences of women workers. While historically evolving from Marxist and socialist feminist articulations, eco-feminist perspectives, blended with livelihood perspectives to add value to the framing of women’s roles in the production, reproduction and sustenance of life within households and communities. Feminists have tried to bring conceptual specificity while simultaneously addressing structural questions, be it through the expansive understanding of social reproduction or feminist political ecology. Given the feminist discussions on the need to have an approach integrating the different worlds of work, formal, informal and domestic, the current agrarian distress across several regions has also interrogated the patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies underpinning them. Despite being on the margins of scholarship, feminist approaches have reluctantly been incorporated into mainstream discussions as well as into some policy gestures.