The Agrarian Question of Gendered Labour

Abstract

This chapter focuses on labour processes associated with rural and agrarian economies through a theoretical exploration of reproductive labour as an agrarian question. We argue that under the global neoliberal economic regime and the resulting labour fragmentation, capitalist markets increasingly rely on such reproductive labours which are gendered. The labour required to ensure the survival of the labouring population (workers and relative surplus population), which includes care labour as well as various forms of subsistence production of goods and services has been relegated to being invisible and ‘feminised.’ Beyond denoting women’s historical burden of reproduction, we apply the notion of feminisation to mean that every productive activity now becomes a mere act of survival and therefore assumes less importance to both national and global concerns. We suggest that reproduction constitutes the core of the agrarian question of labour and may have implications for the politics of societal transformation.