Feminizing the agrarian frontier: labor, gender, and plantations in the Llanos of Colombia (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant)

This resource is an application for a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Understanding plantations as a privileged mode of food and energy production in the Global South, my research broadly examines the feminization of the labor force in the expansion of the oil palm industry. In particular, I plan to study the recent and increasing incorporation of women as wage workers under the expansion of the plantation economy in a frontier region in Colombia. My multi-scale analysis connects women's experiences on an intimate and local scale with national state policies and private company programs to promote woman’s wage labor in relation to oil palm expansion. By centering the experiences of women workers, my project explores the tension between the ongoing production of gendered and racialized laboring bodies for capitalist accumulation and women’s ability to build a different future for themselves and their communities. My case study is located in a village in the Llanos region, the largest oil palm area in the country and “the last agrarian frontier,” according to Colombian state officials. Building on feminist analysis of labor, and critical studies of plantations, my research expands our understanding of the role of gender and race in agrarian transformations and in the reproduction of the plantation economy.