Performative technologies: agricultural research for development and gender

ABSTRACT

The article draws on insights from feminist literature, science and technology studies (STS) and governmentality studies to explore how technologies introduced through agricultural research for development (ar4d) participate in performing gender. Drawing on gender audits of two international agricultural research institutions, we discuss the performativity of three types of technologies: material technologies intended to increase agricultural productivity, such as new seed varieties; social technologies, such as household surveys and evaluation techniques used to monitor projects; and political technologies, such as participation, deployed to enlist farmers in the adoption of productivity-enhancing material technologies. We show that all three technologies participate in performing gender as they are introduced into rural environments, sometimes in interaction with an “apparatus of gender” that emerges from gender mainstreaming. But performances are not uniform, producing both an iron cage of hierarchical gender dualism, but also enactments that exceed the vision of the apparatus, blur binaries and diffract the realities they project in unanticipated directions.

KEYWORDS:

• Agricultural technology
• gender and development
• science and technology studies (STS)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay is Associate at the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) Amsterdam where she has worked for 21 years founding and leading KIT Gender. An Indian feminist who has worked for the last two decades internationally on gender and development, Maitrayee is among the first generation of gender and development trainers and advocates. Her research interests include citizenship and governance, including a critique of gender mainstreaming as technology of government. Her most recent edited work Feminist Subversion and Complicity: Govermentalities and Gender Knowledge in South Asia (Zubaan Books, 2016) interrogates feminist politics in development. Maitrayee was Visiting Professor at the Graduate Studies Institute in Geneva in 2015 and is currently a research associate.

Elisabeth Prügl is Professor of International Relations at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva where she directs the Institute’s Gender Centre. Her research focuses on gender politics in international governance, the United Nations, and the European Union, and she has published books and articles on this topic. Currently she directs two research consortia on gender and land commercialization, and on gender dimensions of violent conflict, with partners from Nigeria, Ghana, Cambodia, and Indonesia, funded by the Swiss Programme for Research on Global Issues for Development (r4d).

Notes

1 Beginning in the 1980s there has been extensive experimentation with the liberalization of the agricultural sector “through the removal of guaranteed prices and export crop controls, the dismantling or cutting back on public provisioning to farmers (marketing, credit, inputs, infrastructure and other services), and the boost given to corporate farming for export” (Razavi 2009, 3).

2 Thus, for example, whether light appears as a wave or particle depends on the way it is measured and with what apparatus, but it has reality in both forms.

3 Respondents are numbered in order of appearance in this paper separately for ASARECA and CIMMYT.

4 The cultural construction of a new, modern woman to represent the new nation was achieved by separating the domain of culture into the material and spiritual spheres (Chatterjee 1989; Mukhopadhyay 1998). In the material sphere the claims of the West were accepted as superior and to be imitated, and this was the domain of men. The spiritual sphere, imagined as representing the distinctive culture of the East, was designated female. This dichotomy in day-to-day life maintained an ideological separation of on the one hand the home, wherein resided Indian spirituality and authenticity, and on the other, the outer world of material pursuits. The distinctively Indian feature of this otherwise archetypical patriarchal dichotomy was that women as the keepers of the spiritual quality of the nation, had to be protected from becoming wholly westernized, which meant strict monitoring of their dress, education, manners, relations in the home and world. Thus “modern” did not imply the emergence of women as autonomous subjects of rights but rather as subjects of a reformed patriarchy. This prototypical respectable woman became the norm and a signifier of the emerging elite class and citizen othering thereby lower class women who could not fulfill this norm because of their life situation.

5 See Shiva and Bandyopadhyay on the 1970s Chipko movement in India, a major social movement of forest dwellers; see also Escobar and Alvarez (2018) on the 1980s new social movements in Latin America.

6 Although intersectionality may seem not to be at the center of our analysis, it is nevertheless an integral part of the examples given, as gender does not exist outside of other social divisions: of class, race, caste, ethnicity, religion and nation. However, the way in which gender intersects with other social divisions is specific to histories and contexts. Thus in South Asia class and caste are major factors, as is religion. To be a Hindu woman in a Muslim country or vice versa positions a woman in specific ways.

7 Respectful address for elder sister.