Biography
Lorena Rodríguez Lezica is from Uruguay and completed her undergraduate studies in the United States and my graduate studies in Ecuador. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Agrarian Social Studies in Argentina. She works at University in Uruguay, where she is part of different interdisciplinary groups on agrarian issues and women, feminism and social struggles. She also partakes in the Latin American group Feminist Critical Views of Territory. Her research activities have been focused on addressing social inequalities and resistance in rural areas both in the agricultural farmers’ and wage-workers’ world.
Abstract
Women, struggles for territory and reproduction of life: the agrarian question revisited in Uruguay
The debate on the agrarian question has become more complex when taking into account the confrontation with unequal relations of different kinds. A decade ago Akram-Lodhi and Kay (2010) proposed seven analytical frameworks to study agrarian problems and address social transformation in rural areas. Among these, I am particularly interested in shedding some light on the agrarian question of gender, a critique of the way in which agrarian struggle and change have been reduced to class struggle.
During the last fifteen years (2005-2020) of a progressive government in Uruguay, much research was done on what was perceived as the revitalization of agricultural workers’ unions. In this paper, I pretend to problematize other struggles within rural syndicalism, where women become the protagonists. I aim at interrogating what happens when the image of a union is no longer materialized in the figure of a male worker. What happens when we focus on their struggle as female agricultural workers? In this way, I aim at shedding some light on the constraints they face as female workers in their experience of struggle as well as the strategies they find to overcome those constraints. To answer these questions, I analyse insubordination experiences of women who work in the agrarian phase of the citrus sector in Uruguay.
In Uruguay, not much research has been done to approach the role of women in social struggles against precariousness of work and life in agroindustry. This paper focuses then on the struggles of female agricultural workers both at the work and organization levels. It also aims at sharing some thoughts over the experience of a feminist collaborative methodology, through the commitment to accompany their struggle.
Bibliography:
Akram-Lodhi, H. y Kay, C. (2010). Surveying the agrarian question (Part II): current debates and beyond. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 37(2), 255-284.
Affiliation: Universidad de la República, Uruguay