Popular Peasant Feminism in La Via Campesina in Latin America

From Gender Equality Discourse to a Peasant Feminist Agenda

Rural women’s political agency in social movements and in the popular feminist struggle was fundamental for them in introducing an agenda of gender issues to CLOC and LVC. They advocated for the incorporation of women’s rights and gender issues into debates on agricultural policies and practices and gender parity in participation and leadership and created an international political space for women’s organizations. During LVC’s First International Conference (held in Mons, Belgium, in 1993), the organization expressed a commitment to strive for women’s equal rights to political and economic resources and equal participation in decision making. However, it did not establish the mechanisms that would ensure the integration of women into the organization. For instance, the LVC leadership board elected at the First Conference had no women, and in its Second International Conference (held in Tlaxcala, Mexico, in 1996), only one woman joined the movement’s leadership and women made up just 20 percent of the participants, an attendance rate similar to that of the First Conference (Desmarais, 2011). ¹ To address these gender-based issues, a women’s special commission was created in 1996 and lasted until 2000.

This commission was particularly important to the creation of the Women’s Assembly—a meeting that has preceded CLOC congresses since 1997 and LVC congresses since 2000 as “a room of one’s own” (Woolf, 1929), a significant mechanism in the dynamics of women’s struggle for voice, leadership, and gender equality. Francisca Rodrigues of ANAMURI, shows how this space has enabled women to participate in LVC’s major debates on agriculture and production: “Here we prepare ourselves to improve our interventions in Congress, because women feared to speak, and the men became surprised with the women’s level of debate” (interview, Santiago, 2011). Women’s organization and their participation in international peasant movements have also enhanced their agency in local spaces. “Women became empowered. When we discuss with the government, we know what we are debating,” says Florencia Aróstica of ANAMURI (interview, Santiago, 2011).

The Women’s Assembly has been crucial in promoting gender parity within peasant movements. Gender parity was officially adopted by LVC in 2000 at its Third International Conference (Bangalore, India). This demand was driven by Latin American women, members of CLOC, who were already at the forefront of peasant feminist discourse (LVC, 2017a). The First Latin American Assembly of Rural Women, held just before CLOC’s Second Congress (in Brasília in 1997), led to the approval of gender parity by CLOC’s leadership. As a result of their agency, the congress also approved a requirement that women make up 50 percent of attendees at its seminars and at international events (LVC, 2015a). ² Alícia Muñoz of ANAMURI ³ reports that the men were skeptical that women could mobilize enough women to reach 50 percent attendance at the Congress, “but we organized ourselves and achieved this goal.” As a result of these measures, women made up 43 percent of the delegates at the 2000 International Conference in Bangalore, where they held LVC’s first Women’s Assembly (Desmarais, 2011). The congress approved a gender position paper that provided a gender analysis of agriculture in an international context; addressed principles and commitments about women’s roles, positions, needs, and interests, and highlighted an intersectional perspective connecting gender to class and ethnicity; all in an effort to reach gender parity at all levels of the movement (LVC, 2000). Furthermore, the Bangalore conference institutionalized gender parity in LVC’s leadership. Thenceforth each world region would be represented by two members (a man and a woman) on the international coordinating commission. Also, since then, each member organization has been required to delegate equal numbers of men and women to the movement’s international gatherings (LVC, 2017b).

The high regard in which LVC holds gender equality, a demand of the feminist movement at the international level, has pushed the issue onto the agendas of members’ regions and organizations, expanding opportunities for peasant and indigenous women to organize at the national and international levels (Suárez, 2005). For instance, the MST adopted gender parity policies in participation and leadership positions in 2000, increasing women’s participation in the movement. As the MST member Isabel Grein remarks (interview, Curitiba, 2011), “When we started with a man and a woman [in leadership positions] we progressed. Before, women were considered to be in a secondary position.” Even though gender parity in the MST’s national leadership was adopted only in 2005 (Zarzar, 2017), this shift in the movement’s internal organization allowed women to participate in various activities, meetings, and training sessions. These experiences politicized them and encouraged them to voice their opinions, to pass their knowledge on to their communities, and to overcome the culture of silence and women’s subaltern status.

While gender parity in leadership positions is increasing in LVC, by itself it does not guarantee equal participation in decision making, since representation does not automatically result in effective leadership. LVC women claim that for equality to become effective, gender parity needs to be accompanied by the establishment of women’s chapters within member organizations, adequate budget, and gender-focused training for both men and women (LVC, 2017b).

Women still strive to have their voices, ideas, and history valued in mixed-gender organizations. According to the MST member Simone Rezende (interview, Lapa, 2018), “it has been very hard for women to get space within peasant organizations.” She claims that women want to be respected as leaders, but their leadership and discourse are still often viewed through the lens of a masculine model of leadership, in which traditionally male skills and spaces have been more valued, leading to gendered hierarchical relations. According to most of the women leaders of CLOC-LVC interviewed for Pamela Caro’s (2013) research, there is still a difference in the way opinions are valued. In mixed spaces, it is very difficult for women to speak and have their problems included on the agenda. Men usually speak first and establish the conditions for debate. Male organizational models hold back gender parity and equal participation in decision making, since they foster discriminatory practices toward women and explicit sexism (Caro, 2013). Nonetheless, ANAMURI's Francisca Rodrigues highlights the role of women’s organizations in assisting peasant movements and their members’ identities as women, generating a new organizational culture that has led to significant steps toward breaking up the male-dominated and masculinized structures of the movements (LVC, 2019).

Despite many challenges, this conflict and collaboration between mixed-gender organizations and autonomous rural women’s organizations has moved CLOC-LVC forward on gender issues, resignifying feminism from their lived realities as peasants and indigenous women—an unprecedented phenomenon in Latin America. Rural women have broadened their concept of gender equality to incorporate a feminist perspective on emancipation and social transformation (Schwendler, 2012; 2013). The Fourth Assembly of the Committee of Peasant Women of CLOC-LVC (in Quito in 2010) was a landmark in the collective construction of peasant and popular feminism. Roughly 400 peasant and indigenous leaders from Latin America and the Caribbean discussed feminism, patriarchy, and violence against rural women and in their final declaration announced: “Without feminism there is no socialism.” ⁴ This slogan identifies feminism as a precondition for “human emancipation, to build another possible world,” argues MST member Itelvina Masioli (interview, São Paulo, 2011). “The women claimed that the anticapitalist struggle inherent in rural social movements must include the antipatriarchal struggle both outside and inside their organizations” (Caro, 2011). This requires the end of the belief that the emancipation of women would occur as a result of the empowerment of the working class, a concept that has guided many left-wing unions, social movements, and political parties in Latin America and the world at large.

Despite feminism’s having been part of rural women’s organizations and political practices, it has taken a long time for them to identify their struggle for emancipation as feminist and place it on the public class-struggle agenda. While they have organized their agenda around gender and class issues, they have avoided calling themselves feminists because of its negative connotations. Historically, feminism has been taboo in the countryside, since it was considered a petit-bourgeois ideology (Schwendler and Thompson, 2017), popular with urban, middle-class, educated people. This kind of prejudice and misconception was found particularly in communities where the Catholic Church had a strong influence (Boni, 2013; Paulilo, 2006). Paradoxically, because of the Liberation Theology movement, ⁵ the church was an important incubator for women’s organization and popular feminism, particularly during the Latin American struggle for democratization (Paulilo, 2006).

The organization of national, continental, and subregional training schools for rural women by the CLOC-LVC Women’s Network and its alliance with other popular transnational feminist groups such as the World March of Women have paved the way for a broader understanding of gender equality and feminism. Such awareness has empowered rural women to voice their demands, confront discrimination, and identify their practices and struggles for gender equality as feminism. It has led them to build their own peasant and popular feminism in the fight for a socialist society. In this process, ANAMURI’s Francisca Rodrigues (2021) highlights the role played by the March in the CLOC-LVC training schools. “We felt that our feminism was class-based because it was part of the peasant struggle and, therefore, of the people. The political definition provided by the March inspired us to define our own feminism. This is definitely something that brings us together.”

This connection has been fortified and transformed into a feminist socialist position since the March has embraced LVC’s food sovereignty paradigm and incorporated rural agendas. Nevertheless, as Janet Conway (2018: 198) argues, the March engages very carefully with critical feminist work on food sovereignty, since it “does not explore the extent to which feminist claims could challenge or destabilize Vía Campesina’s food sovereignty project and the gendered divisions of labour that remain unproblematized within it.” She considers this approach consistent with two of the March’s core political commitments: (1) its alliance with mixed-gender movements in the struggle against neoliberalism and (2) its popular feminism, a collective construction rooted in the lived conditions of subalternized women. Despite its ambiguities, “the March’s popular feminism suggests some ways to construct an infrastructure for subaltern agency” (201).

Rural women’s agency in their own countries has also been crucial to forwarding a feminist agenda within Latin American peasant movements. A remarkable example of women’s subversive action was the fight against monoculture tree plantations undertaken by the women of the Brazilian branch of LVC. Through a symbolic protest on March 8, 2006 (International Women’s Day), they broke the silence about the social and environmental impact of the growing “green desert” generated by the eucalyptus monoculture, criticizing government investments on the expansion of fast-wood plantations. Approximately 2,000 peasant women entered Aracruz Celulose’s main eucalyptus and pine seedlings production unit ⁶ in the state of Rio Grande do Sul and destroyed greenhouses and thousands of eucalyptus saplings. They took the seedlings to the FAO’s Second International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development in Porto Alegre to declare that humanity needs to look after the planet and produce healthy food.

Their actions were controversial to the Brazilian public, since they pitted peasant, indigenous, and black communities against agribusiness (Schwendler, 2014). Indeed, since the 2000s, women have organized similar yearly protests against “corporate control over land resulting in displacements and the end of local uses of ecosystems as they are replaced by monocultures” (Gerber, 2011: 165) and to put forward public policies for a peasant-driven agricultural model. These actions have strengthened women’s position inside the peasant movement: “This led to a very big change within the movement, in the recognition of women in the struggle” (Priscila Monnerat, interview, Lapa, 2018). “It shows our comrades that we are able to direct our struggle . . . nowadays, we publicly adopt a feminist and classist position” (Ivonete Tonin, interview, Palmeira das Missões, 2011).

Hugo Chávez’s prestige as a left-wing head of state was also influential in overcoming opposition to popular feminism in the peasant movements. At the World Social Forum in Belém, Brazil, in 2009, Chávez acknowledged that “true socialism is feminist” (Osava, 2009). He declared himself a feminist and claimed that “a true socialist has to be feminist . . . if not, something is missing” (Ranjitsingh, 2016). Chávez linked the struggle against class and women’s oppression in a popular twenty-first-century feminist socialism (Ranjitsingh, 2016: 107). This undoubtedly encouraged and influenced CLOC-LVC’s women’s regional assemblies to include an explicit feminist approach in the movement’s socialist project (Palacios, 2011).

This feminist proposal, ratified by the Fifth Congress of CLOC-LVC in Quito in 2010, has not been exempt from conflict and opposition. For many organizations, communities, and women, particularly indigenous ones, popular feminism is a subversive idea. Sandra Trafilla, a Mapuche ANAMURI member (interview, Santiago, 2011), suggests that popular socialist feminism is not clear even in women’s organizations: “We do not all share the view that we are feminists. It is very hard to discuss it with indigenous women.” She also criticizes feminism when it is not linked to other struggles for social equality: “I believe in an egalitarian society. There have been advances, but the fight cannot be only for freeing women, we must liberate the people as a whole.” Mapuche women mobilize primarily for justice for their people, including collective and cultural rights. They also reclaim the concepts of cooperation and balance to improve women’s status in relation to men (Richards, 2005: 216). There is a tension between the notion of gender equality and the duality or complementary of roles in the indigenous worldview, a concept that values the ancestral, respect for the family, and the Pachamama (Mother Earth) but excludes development for women (Caro, 2013). This means that, in terms of the communal ideology, women do not have decision-making power on behalf of the community. Their contributions are linked to their domain in the gender division of labor (Pape, 2008).

Mixed-gender peasant and indigenous organizations have taken positions that explicitly reject describing the peasant movement as feminist. They argue that this weakens their organizations and cultures because it challenges the concept of family. The woman leaders of CLOC-LVC interviewed for Caro’s (2013) research pointed out that they still face criticism in their communities about feminism, in part because of its association with lesbianism. The belief that feminism will destroy the family and the heterosexual couple and, consequently, undermine family-based agricultural production is still present. One of the organizations participating in the Fifth Congress of CLOC-LVC argued in a letter titled “Reflections on the Concepts of Feminism and Family” that “true socialist revolution will come about from a strengthened perspective on the family and not from outside concepts that are contrary to our realities and are introduced under pressure, weakening our organizations, families, and culture” (LVC, 2014: 24). This point of view clearly expresses a concept of family as a harmonious and unified entity, assuming that whatever is good for every member is good for women. However, feminist analyses demonstrate that households are more precisely characterized by “hierarchy and inequality, and that to benefit male household heads does not necessarily benefit women and children on a par with men” (Deere and León, 2001: 339). The concept of family as a harmonious unit has guided Latin American agrarian reforms and other state programs, as well as unions and social movement struggles, leading to gender exclusionary policies that have been enforced and reinforced by legislation that legitimizes men’s dominant position and the lack of recognition of women’s rights.

It has not been easy for women to place feminism within the peasant movement’s agenda. Despite all the changes that have taken place within these organizations, there is still the view that gender is secondary to class struggle and a tendency to subsume women’s complaints under more general demands (Caro, 2013). Simone Rezende (interview, Lapa, 2018) of the MST claims:

It is very recent that the peasant movement is debating feminism and that we call ourselves feminists. And this is not easy. This has not been absorbed by all organizations. We are living in a moment in the world in which it is ugly for social organizations to say that they do not endorse the gender agenda. It is not that they have accepted it but that it is shameful not to do so. And we as women need to be aware of this. Otherwise, we delude ourselves at the level of debate.

Caro (2013) asserts that although male leaders have accepted gender proposals, they have not put into practice the specific platforms required to question inequalities and the traditional sexual division of labor. Alternatively, as observed by Priscila Monnerat of the MST, “there are already many men appropriating this debate and claiming to be feminists too.” Priscila notes that in the settlements “there are women who have a feminist practice but still do not have this more theoretical debate on feminism, especially those from the grassroots.” Significantly, it is the struggle, the analysis of women’s own reality, and the collective construction of popular peasant feminism that have led CLOC-LVC’s women to perceive themselves as part of the larger instrument of women’s organization that is feminism (Calaça, Conte, and Cinelli, 2018).

Building a Social Movement with a Popular Peasant Feminist Identity

The fight the popular peasant feminism laid out in the 2010 CLOC Congress advanced and ratified a strategy for achieving a socialist transformation (CLOC-LVC, 2015). The work of incorporating gender issues into LVC at the local, national, and transnational levels has enabled women to move forward the debate, open spaces for their participation, and collectively construct feminism (LVC, 2021). At the international level, in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 2013, during the Fourth LVC Women’s Assembly, Latin American women and their process of developing a political proposal for the construction of popular peasant feminism inspired many debates. They challenged LVC organizations to expand this debate within their own organizations (LVC, 2013). According to ANAMURI’s Francisca Rodriguez, the support for a popular feminist agenda is not unanimous across the movement. There is, however, agreement within congresses such as the Seventh CLOC Congress in Havana in 2019, whose final declaration states “Con Feminismo Construimos Socialismo” (With Feminism We Build Socialism). In this sense, Rodriguez emphasizes that the number of compañeros and peasant and indigenous women supporting these ideas has been increasing (LVC, 2019).

MST-CLOC activists acknowledge that class and peasant identity has become crucial in the collective popular construction of feminism in the countryside, as stated by Priscila Monnerat: “We peasants recognize ourselves in a peasant and popular feminism. It is not separated from the matters of class, but it also looks for specific concerns of the rural woman. It is the working class of the countryside.” Class identity has enabled the alliance between class-oriented feminist movements and rural social movements in the struggle against neoliberalism, its agricultural emphasis on food as a commodity and the capitalist colonialist system, which has dispossessed peasants and indigenous communities from their territories and depreciated their knowledge systems and practices.

It is worth noting the alliance of rural women of CLOC-LVC with other popular and transnational feminist groups such as the World March of Women advocating for food sovereignty and environmental justice and against violence against women in the countryside. The Nyéléni World Forum for Food Sovereignty (held in 2007, in Selingué, Mali), organized by LVC, the World March of Women, and other international organizations through an international steering committee, was a landmark amongst such alliances, enabling the advent of “an emergent feminist politics of food sovereignty” (Conway, 2018: 188). More than 500 representatives from more than 80 countries of organizations of peasants/family farmers, artisanal fisher-folk, indigenous peoples, landless people, rural workers, migrants, pastoralists, forest communities, women, youth, consumers, and environmental and urban movements gathered to strengthen a global movement and solidify the principle of food sovereignty with the input of different sectors and women’s agency (Nyéléni International Steering Committee, 2008). Given gender parity in participation and in the women’s assembly before and during the forum, two significant issues powerfully emerged: “women’s access to land and the assertion of women’s knowledge of food production and preparation. These establish women’s autonomy as a condition for food sovereignty” (Nyéléni International Steering Committee, 2008: 23).

Popular peasant feminism, through women’s agency, has imprinted a feminist perspective on the peasantry and its popular agricultural project (ANMC, 2018). LVC has politicized the word “peasant,” and its members identify themselves as “people of the land,” reflecting their belief in the right to be on the land, to produce healthy food, and to be recognized for that function in society (Desmarais, 2009). LVC women identify themselves as those who have cared for the land, seeds, and the ecosystem and fought against patriarchy, the sexist system, and violence (LVC, 2017b). Itelvina Masioli of the MST (interview, São Paulo, 2011) says, “If we women do not bring our demands to the agenda, no one will do it, but we . . . connect our needs to the development of a project related to food sovereignty, as a principle of social struggle, with political autonomy of the people and of production.”

CLOC-LVC’s women advocate for a feminism that contributes to social transformation and the development of a peasant agroecological agriculture, with gender justice (Schwendler, 2017). ANAMURI member Mafalda Caldame (interview, Chiloé, 2011) says, “We will not establish a class struggle without women’s autonomy and their recognition as subjects worthy of rights. Therefore, our class struggle cannot renounce the fight for women’s emancipation.” However, she argues that, in contrast to those of the feminist organization in Chile, ANAMURI’s demands “involve not only sexual and reproductive rights but also food sovereignty, autonomy in the communities, the right to self-determination, and the right to land and territory.” For the MST’s Daiane Oliveira (interview, Lapa, 2018), “peasant and popular feminism goes beyond [mainstream] feminism. . . . We have the specificities . . . of rural women. We bring the debate on seeds, the reality of peasant women, the preservation of water, of nature. We take agroecology as the main agenda, in the sense of real changes in relationships, not only with nature.”

CLOC-LVC women connect redistributive claims, particularly the question of property, with issues of recognition, transforming gender relations and ending women’s subordination to men (Deere and León, 2001). Nancy Fraser’s (2007: 32) two-dimensional feminist approach combines a politics of recognition with a politics of redistribution and explains that only such a politics can prevent “truncating the feminist agenda and colluding with neoliberalism.” It also provides a normative standard for assessing social justice across multiple axes of women’s subordination, including race, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and religion.

Through collective resistance against multiple forms of oppression, CLOC-LVC’s women are building a feminism from their peasant mode of being, living, and producing— from their knowledge and culture (Schwendler, 2017). MST member Daiane Oliveira (interview, Lapa, 2018) says that “peasant and popular feminism needs to be an antiracist, antisexist, antipatriarchal, antihomophobic feminism but one that brings all the specificities that are ours as rural women.” This class feminism seeks transformation with a rural identity, linked to the life experiences and the cosmology of farmers and original peoples (indigenous and black) by stressing a supportive decolonized coexistence of different people and cultures (CLOC-LVC, 2010). Decolonizing gender, from this perspective, enacts “a critique of racialized, colonial, and capitalist heterosexualist gender oppression as a lived transformation of the social” (Lugones, 2010: 746).

Decolonial feminism can be seen as “the possibility of overcoming the coloniality of gender”—“racialized, capitalist gender oppression” (Lugones, 2010: 747). It emphasizes the resistance of black and indigenous people to colonization, slavery, and sexual exploitation and the denial of indigenous and peasant culture and its knowledge systems (Bard Wigdor and Artazo, 2017). It involves women striving for the recognition of their ancestral knowledge, of the work they do in the fields, and of their contribution to the democratization of healthy food for society. Through training courses, peasants and indigenous women are materially strengthening themselves; they are learning (and teaching other women) to recognize and value their reproductive and productive work and increasing their self-confidence. In the process, they are becoming more aware of gender inequalities and violence.

According to the indigenous communitarian feminist Lorena Cabnal (2018), black and indigenous women maintain a strong connection with their female ancestors, recognizing their knowledge, resistance, and wisdom and invoking their energy for the fight against the intersecting oppressions women still face. Sandra Trafilla, a Mapuche member of ANAMURI (interview, Santiago, 2011), claims: “There has always been resistance since the Spanish invaded the territory. Nowadays, there is a resistance struggle for the recovery of the lands,” to recreate traditional forms of organization on it. The Chilean state, instead of addressing Mapuches’ demands, has sponsored mass land-grabbing projects and criminalized, imprisoned, and labeled indigenous leaders as terrorists (Barrera, 2017). ⁷ Trafilla shows that women also face other kinds of oppression: “In Mapuche communities, it is said that our culture is dual, but when you analyze the community practice there is a patriarchal practice. . . . Men have privileges that women do not.” Alícia Muñoz (interview, Santiago, 2011) adds: “When we go to indigenous communities, they say they are not suffering from violence, but they are. [On the other hand,] you will find empowered women who know the importance of the themes that ANAMURI addresses.” In this struggle, feminism has contributed to the acknowledgment that the paradigm of gender complementarity, rather than producing gender equality, can reproduce women’s political exclusion (Pape, 2008). Cabnal (2018) discusses this issue from a patriarchal-convergence approach (the encounter of indigenous, Western, and African patriarchies in the context of colonization) that still has a great impact on women’s lives in Abya Yala (the indigenous name for the Americas). The intersecting forms of oppression, particularly the racism experienced during colonization, led to massive sexual violence against indigenous and black women and the expropriation of the territory and the bodies of indigenous and black men and women (Cabnal, 2018), which were considered nonhuman (Lugones, 2010).

Only recently have peasant movements recognized that gender issues should also be connected to racial issues with an intersectional approach—according to Daiane Oliveira of the MST (interview, Lapa, 2018) a great challenge for the movements: “We understand that we can no longer discuss the gender issue without linking it to class and race. We advanced a lot in the class debate, and from women’s struggle we progressed in the gender debate, but the racial discussion, for example, it’s done only or almost only by and for black women and men.” In the construction of popular peasant feminism, the women of CLOC-LVC have acknowledged capitalism, gender, and race as main axes of the system of exploitation and domination of women, especially peasant, indigenous, and black women (LVC, 2018b). They believe that patriarchy, sexism, racism, and class discrimination are an integral part of the structural violence of capitalism (LVC, 2017c). In this regard, in the United States, Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991: 1252) says that the “failure of feminism to interrogate race means the resistance strategies of feminism will often replicate and reinforce the subordination of people of color.” Therefore, intersectionality may provide the resources for dealing with the overlapping systems of oppression and discrimination faced by women (Crenshaw, 1991). This is particularly important in Latin America, where poverty has been not only feminized but also racialized. By embracing an intersectional analysis of patriarchal regimes of power, a feminist theory of resistance has the potential to capture the political subjectivities and experience-based epistemologies of black [peasant, and indigenous] women and subaltern people (Hernández-Reyes, 2019). In the context of LVC, this intersectional decolonized feminist perspective is linked to the struggle for the “recovery and defense of people’s land-body-territories” (Cabnal, 2018), a political declaration of indigenous women that brings together the landscape of their bodies and the defense of their territory.

The Fight for Food, Land, Territory, and Body Sovereignty

Communal land and territories have been defended by indigenous, black, and peasant communities and organizations in Latin America as an alternative to the capitalist, neoliberal model of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2007). This model has operated through “the commodification and privatization of land and the forced expulsion of populations” (Harvey, 2007:159), increasing violence and an enormous loss of biodiversity, sovereignty, and control of seeds and food that prevents the democratization of access to land (LVC, 2015a). Neoliberal governments have privatized collective land such as in indigenous areas of Latin America through a “gender-friendly” discourse (Jacobs, 2010). Thus, it is particularly important to secure women’s land rights in different systems of land tenancy not only as individual private property but in combination with the struggle for agrarian reform (Suárez, 2005).

The women of LVC continue to fight for popular and feminist agrarian reform, declaring feminism a condition for achieving food sovereignty (LVC, 2021). This includes a feminist economic approach recognizing both women’s participation in the peasant economy and the need to address women’s access to land and other assets as a potential means of increasing their bargaining position within households and communities (Agarwal, 1994; Deere and León, 2001). This can be seen as an important measure for overcoming the cycle of poverty, gender discrimination, and violence, given that “women’s economic dependency leads to the acceptance of violence and submission” (Izabel Grein, MST, interview, Curitiba, 2011)). In other words, “With empty pockets, there is no emancipation of women” (Daiane Oliveira, MST, interview, Lapa, 2018)).

Peasant agroecology is the basis of LVC’s proposal and vision of food sovereignty for the peoples of the world. In the name of healthy food democratization, biodiversity, and care of the people and the planet, CLOC-LVC women, through campaigns, massive demonstrations, training sessions, and agroecological practices, have strongly opposed the expansion of an agriculture dependent on chemicals and genetically modified plants and argued for the development of an ecological, sustainable, and feminist peasant agriculture (Desmarais, 2003; Suárez, 2005; Samper-Erice and Charão-Marques, 2017). In 2001, the Continental Assembly of Rural Women of CLOC-LVC proposed that LVC launch an international campaign ⁸ to defend seeds as “the heritage of women, who discovered them, . . . [and] the heritage of indigenous peoples and peasants who, over the course of history, have spread, improved, and diversified them” (Rodrígues, 2021). The campaign, adapted to each local culture and social movement, involves the exchange of seeds and knowledge and strong organized opposition to the privatization of seeds, genetic manipulation, intellectual property, and all forms of appropriation of life.

After 17 years of campaigning and negotiation, LVC now has an important tool to guarantee the peasants’ right to seeds in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, approved on December 17, 2018. Worldwide, there have been major fights against genetically modified organisms and for the right of rural people to preserve, control, protect, and develop their own seeds and traditional knowledge. Brazil is the second-largest producer of genetically modified organisms in the world. In October 2013, in Petrolina, Pernambuco, 5,000 farmers of LVC, including women, occupied a Monsanto seed production facility ⁹ and replaced the varieties of genetically modified maize being grown there with creole seeds. In 2012, after decades of peasant mobilization by women, social movements, and farmers for access to land and for food sovereignty through street protest/marches, occupation of buildings, land, and public spaces, Brazil adopted a national policy for agroecology and organic production that recognizes the role of peasants’ own creole seeds. Additionally, the implementation of the Program for Food Acquisition since 2003 has allowed some of the country’s largest peasant organizations to grow their seed systems, with families selecting and using peasant seeds, community seed houses, and large-scale programs to provide seeds to hundreds of thousands of families (LVC, 2015b).

In this context, peasant women have reoriented an agenda that has historically been designed for the domestic and feminine sphere, food. “It was women [who fought] for the preservation of seeds, for cultivation on a small scale, for food sovereignty, for bringing healthy food to the family first” (Daiane Oliveira, MST, interview, Lapa, 2018). Alícia Muñoz of ANAMURI (testimony, Curitiba, 2017) reasonably points out that “what has anonymously been done by peasant and indigenous communities, particularly by women, without the use of chemicals, today is called agroecology.” Recent studies have revealed that women have practiced agroecology throughout history (Faria, 2009; Siliprandi, 2013). One of the main epistemological novelties in agroecological studies, according to the Brazilian agroecologist Siliprandi (2013), is the demonstration of women’s role, connected to care, the social reproduction of life, and an economy whose importance has been rendered invisible in the reproduction of capital.

Women farmers have contributed to the construction of a feminist epistemology through which they have expanded the practical, theoretical, and political meaning of agroecology. They claim that “Without feminism, there is no agroecology”—a slogan created during the Eighth Agroecology Congress (held in Porto Alegre in 2013) by the women’s working group of the Articulação Nacional de Agroecologia (National Network of Agroecology—ANA) to protest against women’s invisibility and to underline that agroecology entails ecological farming with a social shift in gender relations. By identifying themselves as authors of agroecological experiments (Coradin, 2020), these women are recontextualizing agroecology from the perspective of a new “ethics of care” (Tronto, 2007) that places feminism center stage and redefines it through collective praxis. A feminist agroecological perspective seeks to “build different relationships between humans and nature and between humans,” according to Sandra Maier of the MST (interview, Lapa, 2018). Understood as a mode of life, diversity, and healing of the land-body-territory, agroecology is not attuned to oppression and violence.

Considering the patriarchal gendered regimes and the historical silence surrounding gender violence in the countryside, peasant women have declared the need to fight for land, territory, and body sovereignty, rejecting violence against women in all its forms (LVC, 2013). In the same vein, indigenous women of communitarian feminism—a feminist concept that reinterprets the historical realities of indigenous women according to their worldview, endeavoring to break with ancestral and Western patriarchy—have defended the connection between body-territory and land-territory. Cabnal (2018) points out a political incongruity, since their bodies are still expropriated, when someone defends the territory-land and does not defend the territory-body of women.

Violence against rural women ranges from incarceration to the disregard of the right to possess objects and documents, physical aggression, sexual abuse, embarrassment, and humiliation (Pulga-Daron, 2010). The lack of financial resources, landownership, and political representation deprives rural women of their potential to resist gender violence. These elements, added to geographic isolation and difficulty in obtaining protection services, act directly in the constitution of intrafamily violence (Bueno and Lopes, 2018).

A significant step taken by the global peasant movement toward a feminist agenda was the world campaign “For an End to Violence against Women,” launched at LVC’s Fifth International Conference in Maputo in 2008. Throughout this campaign, LVC has been calling for member organizations to organize actions and training processes to raise awareness, provide visibility, stand in solidarity, and denounce all the forms of violence— physical, sexual, psychological, and economic—that rural women experience. The major mobilizations and actions of the campaign have most often taken place on March 8, International Women’s Day, and November 25, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. With colorful marches, sit-ins, food donations, forums, meetings, blood donations, and online festivals, women have shown the value of feminism in the struggle against patriarchy and capitalism. Their activities also include mechanisms: reporting and monitoring of human rights violations, exerting pressure upon governments to comply with international agreements and laws, and creating effective legal instruments for supporting victims of violence (LVC, 2021).

To confront gender violence in rural areas, LVC organizations have implemented actions such as MST’s discussion and adoption of three rules: (1) the need to report, (2) the requirement that aggressors undergo gender training, (3) the possibility of aggressors’ being expelled. Nowadays, MST also recognizes the importance of understanding and transforming masculinities, particularly the way men (re)produce sexist practices and gender-based violence such as sexual harassment, which is very common in militant groups. Since 2015 they have been organizing men’s assemblies such as debates, film screenings, and studies conducted by women (MST, 2020).

ANAMURI has focused on workplace violence. It has also addressed domestic violence through training sessions, but according to the activist Maffalda Caldame (interview, Chiloé, 2011), this is a difficult theme to discuss with rural and indigenous women. They are afraid to acknowledge and denounce the intimate details of domestic violence—a situation that may have contributed to ANAMURI’s decision to focus on gender violence in the workplace. Since 2009, on November 25, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, ANAMURI has held an ethical court called “No More Violence against Women in the Workplace.” Although it has no power to legally condemn the agro-export industries, the court places under a spotlight, investigates, and denounces human and worker rights violations against female agricultural workers (sexual harassment and working conditions). According to Maria Cartagena (ANAMURI and temporera union leader, interview, Copiapó, 2011), there is much evidence of sexual harassment in the workplace: “For young women to continue working, the supervisors take advantage of the situation.” It has also been reported by Ximena Callardo (ANAMURI and temporera union leader, interview, 2011) that “if you want to keep your job you must go out with the boss. Otherwise, he will fire you,” meaning that if a woman refuses or questions it, immediately the labour threat will be in place.

Women’s gathering and their collective actions have played a role in the development of a feminist consciousness and solidarity. “I’ve discovered that women free themselves only together; alone, in our case, it is impossible. I see that without a debate on feminism, gender, and violence, progress is impossible” (Simone Rezende, MST, interview, Lapa, 2018)). Resistance to the coloniality of gender implies collective acts: “One resists it from within a way of understanding the world and living in it that is shared and that can explain one’s actions, thus providing recognition” (Lugones, 2010: 754)

Women who engage in gender debates and take leadership positions are more empowered to resist subordination and domestic violence. Leonilde Medeiros (2010), a well-known researcher of Brazil’s social movements, notes that women’s perception of subordination does not emerge immediately from involvement in the struggle but is related to participation in and creation of conditions that contribute to the denaturalization of masculine domination and the rearrangement of gender roles. Medeiros also highlights that the reorganization of gender roles is more visible and permanent among women who assume leadership positions and have access to theoretical analysis.

Generational differences play a significant role in this process. Women of younger generations, who have more access to formal education and have been involved in the feminist and antiglobalization campaign, are making a substantial contribution to advancing the feminist agenda from a more inclusive intersectional perspective, particularly concerning issues of gender and sexual diversity. Besides their mobilization to fully participate in political and decision-making processes in their social movements, communities, and families, young women have been advocating for the recognition of and respect for diversity of all kinds, including race, gender, sexuality, and class. Considering gender and generation disparities in the countryside, LVC youth’s articulation since the 2001 CLOC and 2004 LVC conferences has been organized around the youth assemblies for advancing the concept of feminism and the food sovereignty proposal from the perspective of gender justice and diversity. The younger generations were mainly the ones who first raised awareness of issues related to gender and sexual diversity in LVC. Around 50 LGBTQIA+ individuals and allies organized their own side meetings during the movement’s Seventh International Conference (LVC, 2017d). The conference registration form allowed delegates to openly indicate their gender and sexual identities. In the past 10 years there has been a great increase in the number of peasants and other food producers who feel comfortable and safe identifying themselves as LGBTQIA+.

This debate has already been initiated within some member groups of LVC, including the MST. Ever since the first meeting, prompted by young MST members, of the Landless LGBT in 2015, the movement has slowly opened its doors to the debate of LGBT issues. Daiane Oliveira of the MST (interview, Lapa, 2018) acknowledges that “this process is happening due to the youth leadership, who . . . placed themselves forward in history, saying ‘No, we are here, wanting to be heard and wanting to be seen within the movement.’” She underlines that “even some youth who are not part of the LGBT community discuss sexual diversity and race issues much more than many of our comrades who have been in the movement for years.” Daiane claims that the “debate on gender and sexual diversity still needs to be advanced beyond those in the LGBT community.”

Sexual diversity has not yet been officially included in LVC’s political agenda. The movement has, however, acknowledged the negative effects of the heteropatriarchal regimes in the countryside and committed to increasing its capacity to understand and create positive environments around gender and sexual diversity. LVC recognizes that the “lack of tolerance for diversity is part of the process of dispossession of rural youth” and envisions a “diverse, nonviolent, and inclusive countryside” (LVC, 2017e). Additionally, the 2017 conference raised the idea that the concept of feminism should go beyond the binary idea of dividing people between women and men, arguing that sexual and gender diversity should be embedded in the movement’s food sovereignty concept (LVC, 2017b).

Conclusion

The concept of peasant and popular feminism is under construction from Latin American rural women’s practice and theorization in CLOC-LVC. This concept is deeply rooted in class struggle, in women’s connection with land-territories, and in their collective resistance in the countryside. Moreover, it is embedded in their gender-based mobilization as working-class women with diverse cultures, knowledge systems, and identities. Because of indigenous and black women’s agency within peasant movements, the issue of race has recently been included as another axis for understanding women’s subordination and resistance. Younger women, particularly LGBTQIA+ groups, have challenged the binary gender perspective. These are significant steps for building an intersectional decolonized feminist approach.

Organized around gender-oriented demands and strategic anti-neoliberal political struggles, rural women have furthered a feminist agenda and confronted the patriarchal gender regimes in the countryside and in their organizations. From a gender perspective, they have been struggling for equality, against structural and domestic violence, and for political participation and recognition of their agricultural activities—all necessary steps for guaranteeing food sovereignty, biodiversity, and the subsistence of families. The feminist agenda includes the defense of a popular and peasant agroecological agricultural project with gender justice based on a new ethics of care and on feminist principles, practices, and struggles for rights and autonomy.

Although CLOC-LVC women have only recently identified themselves as feminists, over time they have produced oppositional and situated feminist practices and epistemologies. The organization of women’s training schools with the support of popular transnational feminists such as the World March of Women had led them to recognize their struggle as class-based feminism, embedded in their rural identity and linked to the cosmology of farmers and original peoples (black and indigenous). Nowadays, they recognize that their struggle has always been feminist and that the gender and class-based actions they perform as rural women are what is called popular peasant feminism. Rural women resignify feminism from their class-based feminist struggle and agroecological agricultural experience, and this has enabled them to address LVC’s food sovereignty paradigm from a decolonized feminist perspective. This, in turn, is connected to the fight for land, territory, and body sovereignty, which implies a combined struggle against the expropriation of land and the expropriation of women’s bodies.

Women’s agency within CLOC-LVC has led the international peasant movement to embrace popular peasant feminism as a political strategy for the struggle for transformation. Support for this perspective across the movement is not, however, unanimous. The reasons for resistance to it may be related to the persistent outlook that feminism is a bourgeois, imperialist import that divides the class struggle. Also, the centrality given to class has placed gender struggles in a secondary position in which women’s grievances become specificities that are incorporated into the agenda as more general demands.