No abstract

Advancing women’s empowerment and gender equality in agriculture is a recognised development goal, also within crop breeding. Increasingly, breeding teams are expected to use ‘market-based’ approaches to design more ‘demand-led’ and ‘gender-responsive’ crop varieties. Based on an institutional ethnography that includes high-profile development-oriented breeding initiatives, we unpack these terms using perspectives from political agronomy and feminist science and technology studies. By conceptualising the market as an ongoing, relational performance made up of discourses, practices and human and nonhuman actors, we trace how the market is understood as an effective socioeconomic institution for soliciting demand, but also becomes a normative agenda. Construed as a demand variable, the relational and structural dimensions of gender are rendered less visible, which might strengthen rather than transform power relations’ status quo. On the other hand, a feminist science and technology perspective broadens the field of vision not only to the gendered dimensions of crop breeding, but also to the nonhuman actors, such as the crops and traits falling outside the market sphere of interest. By putting political agronomy and feminist science and technology studies into conversation, the article contributes to the development of a feminist political agronomy.

Gender matters in agriculture, and crop breeding teams are increasingly being asked to develop plant varieties that respond to the needs and preferences of men and women. Achieving gender-responsive crop breeding requires communication and cooperation across disciplines, not least between crop breeders and gender specialists. The coming together of plant sciences and gender studies necessitates novel ideas, concepts, and approaches that unite nature with culture and the material with the social. However, the development of such approaches is still in its infancy. Empirically grounded in experiences in and observations of social and natural scientists working at the intersection of gender and crop breeding in an African context, this article contributes to filling this gap by proposing the concept of the “feminist crop.” The feminist crop captures the entanglement of crops with women’s embodied practices, knowledges, capabilities, and power, and contributes to an ethico-onto-epistemological and methodological investigation of how intersectional gender identities and relations are embedded in plant–people entanglements. Using examples from banana, yam, and cassava, I explore how the feminist crop can expand the boundaries of how we think about agency, power, and empowerment in agriculture, as well as how plant genome editing grounded in the feminist crop concept may be used as a feminist tool to entangle plants and people in more socially just ways. Ultimately then, the feminist crop contributes to advancing feminist crop breeding.