International Feminist Journal of Politics

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When food becomes a feminist issue: popular

feminism and subaltern agency in the World
March of Women

Janet M. Conway

To cite this article: Janet M. Conway (2018) When food becomes a feminist issue: popular
feminism and subaltern agency in the World March of Women, International Feminist Journal of
Politics, 20:2, 188-203, DOI: 10.1080/14616742.2017.1419822

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2017.1419822

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INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS, 2018
VOL. 20, NO. 2, 188–203
https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2017.1419822

When food becomes a feminist issue: popular feminism

and subaltern agency in the World March of Women
Janet M. Conway
Department of Sociology, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

ABSTRACT
In ongoing contests over neoliberal globalization, feminists are increasingly forging
alliances with non-feminist others around common struggles, both locally and
transnationally. This is indicative of a broader shift in transnational feminist politics
from intra-movement to inter-movement alliances, and maps onto a historic
transition from the UN era (roughly 1985–1995) to the global justice era (roughly
1995–present). Engagement with new partners on non-traditional issues is shifting
the scope and contours of the feminisms in question and raising anew the question
of hierarchy in transnational feminist networks and in their coalition politics. This
article traces the appropriation of food sovereignty by the World March of Women
in the context of its alliance with the transnational peasant movement, Vía
Campesina, the development of a feminist politics and discourse of food
sovereignty, and enquires into the relationship between these processes and
“grassroots” members of the March – the rural, peasant and Indigenous women who
are understood to be the primary subjects of a feminist politics of food sovereignty.

KEYWORDS Social movement alliances; feminist alliances; food sovereignty; transnational feminist networks;
popular feminism; subaltern agency; World March of Women; Vía Campesina

Introduction
Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced
through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food
and agriculture systems. It puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart
of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations. (Nyéléni 2007)

Since this 2007 declaration at the International Forum on Food Sovereignty in Nyéléni,
Mali, food sovereignty has been adopted as a political project by peasant movements
and their allies worldwide. Alliance-building efforts by the international peasant
network Vía Campesina meant negotiating the concept of food sovereignty in dialogue
with other perspectives.1 In the case of its alliance with the World March of Women dis-
cussed here, an emergent feminist politics of food sovereignty has appeared. In co-orga-
nizing the Nyéléni forum, a gathering of 500 small-scale food producers worldwide, all
representing peasant organizations, feminist activists of the March collaborated with
Women of Vía Campesina, a formal women’s committee composed of rural and Indigen-
ous women farmers, to advocate successfully for an equal number of female delegates

CONTACT Janet M. Conway jconway@brocku.ca Department of Sociology, Brock University, St. Cath-
arines, Ontario, Canada
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 189

to the Forum, equal pay for female (cooks) and male (builders) workers whose labor sup-
ported the Forum, and to organize a women’s assembly that met before and during the
Forum to analyze food sovereignty from a feminist perspective.2 Two prominent issues
emerged: women’s access to land3 and the affirmation of women’s essential knowledge
of food production and preparation4 – both crucially linked to “women’s autonomy as a
condition for food sovereignty” (Nyéléni International Steering Committee 2008, 23).
By 2010, the World March of Women, a predominantly urban and non-peasant fem-
inist network, had affirmed “common goods, food sovereignty and access to resources”
as one of its four global fields of action. This move has seen food sovereignty increas-
ingly taken up by activists across the global space of the March (Dufour 2016). This
article traces the appropriation of food sovereignty as a political priority by the World
March of Women as a transnational feminist network (TFN)5 and the development of
a distinctly feminist politics and discourse of food sovereignty in the context of inter-
movement alliances with rural and peasant movements. It situates these developments
within a broader historical shift in the transnational feminist politics of alliance-building
from a predominantly intra-movement (among feminists) to an inter-movement (with
non-feminist others) dynamic which, in turn, maps onto a historic transition in inter-
national feminist politics from the UN era (roughly 1985–1995) to the global justice
era (roughly 1995–present). The article further examines the relationship between
these processes and “grassroots” members of the March – the rural, peasant and/or Indi-
genous women who are understood by the March to be the primary subjects of a fem-
inist politics of food sovereignty – to ask what these political developments signify in
terms of subaltern agency in a TFN in this new era.6
This account of the feminist politics of food sovereignty in the March is based on a
series of interviews conducted with international leaders of the March and members
of the Brazil-based International Secretariat (IS) in 2013, as well as analysis of documents
relevant to the appropriation of food sovereignty at the international scale of the March.
Because these official discourses tend to be globalist in nature, devoid of place-based
specificities, and the activists tend to downplay questions of internal conflict and
inequality, and thus of power relations, I have also drawn on field observations from
Brazil. This research has been conducted within the context of a collaborative project
funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Shifts in transnational feminist alliance-building

Under conditions of neoliberal globalization, feminisms are increasingly engaged in
forging alliances with non-feminist others7 around common struggles, both locally
and transnationally. Engagement with new partners on non-traditional issues is shifting
the scope and contours of the feminisms in question, both enriching and constraining
them, with many implications for international feminist thought, politics and strategy
(see Conway 2012). Where those alliances involve subalternized others, they replay long-
standing questions of hierarchy in transnational feminist politics.
Until recently, much research on TFNs and alliance-building has been grounded in
the experience of feminist organizing at the UN since the 1970s. Through the 1980s,
third world feminists’ critique of the Western liberal project of global sisterhood proble-
matized hegemonic Western feminism, sparking a rethinking of collaboration across the
North–South divide and enabling the emergence of South-based feminist perspectives
on the international scene. The problem of hierarchy in this context was primarily
190 J. M. CONWAY

understood as North versus South, which was further considered indexical of hierarchies
of race, class and nation, both within the Global North and internationally. Scholarship in
this vein documented a shift from a politics of global sisterhood to one of intense net-
working and coalition-building among feminists in NGOs, academia, government and
inter-governmental institutions premised on the recognition of difference as the basis
for feminist collaboration – although scholars remain divided on how thoroughgoing
this shift was and whether it gave way to political convergence or ongoing contention.8
Notwithstanding widespread sensitivity to difference, especially to North–South differ-
ence, the question of the “popular,” the “grassroots” or the “subaltern” in transnational
feminist politics is often submerged in frequently undifferentiated discourses of differ-
ence in which the South stands in for the subaltern.
The 1980s and 1990s witnessed the proliferation of TFNs of significant geographic
diversity around different issues, demonstrating increasing specialization and operating
at different scales and in a range of modalities (Dempsey, Parker, and Krone 2011;
Moghadam 2005). These networks, heavily peopled by scholar-activists, were well posi-
tioned to intervene in new international policy domains that were foregrounded in a
series of UN conferences through the 1990s. Such increased opportunity for inter-
national legal and policy reform was associated with a concomitant decline in mass
movement mobilization and public protest by feminists (Sperling, Ferree, and Risman
2001).
Feminist thinking about alliance-building began to shift again in the mid– to late–
1990s in the context of neoliberal globalization, the generalized assault on living stan-
dards worldwide and the threat of rising fundamentalisms. With the real prospect of roll-
backs in women’s rights at the UN, coupled with the eruption of anti-globalization
movements, long-standing TFNs – such as, for example, the Association for Women’s
Rights in Development – began to rethink their strategies, calling for broader networks
and alliances and a return to movement activism (see Harcourt 2013). In pursuit of these
goals, TFNs participated in anti-globalization demonstrations and the World Social
Forum process (Conway 2007, 2013; Eschle and Maiguashca 2010). Philips and Cole
(2009, 192) call this “another world feminism,” distinct from that of the UN orbit,
embedded in broader social and economic justice movements for utopian futures,
where gender equality is pursued with and within other social/economic justice
movements.
In this anti-globalization context, feminist alliance-building took on new orientations
less focused on policy expertise and lobbying in institutional spaces, and more invested
in mass protest and popular mobilization. Secondly, feminists were increasingly entering
into alliance with non-feminist others and with mixed-gender movements, not only or
even primarily with other feminists. Philips and Cole (2009, 188) argue that “feminists’
willingness to integrate themselves into … mixed alternative social movements rep-
resents a strategic decision to change the repertoire and form of feminism – not the
cooptation or abeyance of feminism.”
As a TFN, the World March of Women came together at the height of the anti-globa-
lization mobilizations and exemplifies this shift in orientation. The March’s long-term alli-
ance with Vía Campesina and its project of food sovereignty is a case in point. However,
even as such movements are oppositional and anti-capitalist, their grassroots character
cannot be presumed. Batliwala (2002, 397) argues that the ubiquitous attribution of
“grassroots” to social justice movements obscures real differences in power and voice,
or agency, between materially marginal populations and their champions.
 INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 191

Transformations putatively in favor of subalternized populations do not obviate the

question of hierarchy within TFNs and in their coalition-building efforts.

The World March of Women: popular feminism and subaltern agency

The World March of Women is a large and complex network, active on every continent
and operating at multiple scales. It consists of localized women’s groups organized in
autonomous national agglomerations, or National Coordinating Bodies (NCBs). The
demographic composition and formality of its constituent groups varies considerably
within and between national contexts (Dufour 2016, 161ff.). At the time of writing,
there are about sixty active NCBs. In its inaugural international action in 2000, 5500
groups from 159 countries participated, but numbers of groups fluctuate with waves
of mobilization, as local groups pick up and lay down the banner of the March at will.
Some sustain the March as a permanent movement, while others treat it as a periodic
mobilization, and NCBs and local groups appropriate (or not) international priorities in
highly differentiated and uneven ways.
The form, modalities and composition of the World March of Women distinguish it
from other TFNs structured for engagement with the UN. The organizing modalities
of the March – primary among them being the idea of marching, but including
singing, chanting, drumming, protesting and popular education (Giraud and Dufour
2010, 95) – aim to mobilize women of the “popular sectors,” or those who are economi-
cally marginalized and struggling for a decent life, and who constitute demographic
majorities in most societies. Although the March includes middle class and educated
women in its ranks, it is oriented to the concerns arising from the lived experiences
of poor and working class women. The popular feminist character of the March as repre-
senting “class-inflected gender struggles” is particularly attributable to the influence of
its massive Brazilian chapter and its IS, based in Sao Paulo from 2008 to 2013, both
expressions of a socialist feminism aligned with mixed-gender organizations of the
popular classes engaged in redistribution struggles (see Lebon 2016).
From its inception in 2000, the March has prioritized movement-building in activist
milieux over institutional engagement. Its capacity to mobilize street presence in differ-
ent world regions and its alliances with non-feminist others are central to its understand-
ing of itself and its feminist struggle to change the world. The March thus represents a
critique and alternative to many TFNs marked by their travels through the UN, with their
orientations to NGO-ization, policy advocacy, cultures of expertise and the consequent
privileging of the agency of urban, highly educated feminist policy experts and lobby-
ists. The March resists any a priori ranking of feminist issues, particularly the body politics
of sexuality and reproductive rights which they see prevailing in many TFNs, over ques-
tions of land, food, water and work. The March likewise does not insist on the feminist
self-identification of its member groups, even as it actively works with its base through
popular education processes to construct a collective feminist identity. While there are
other TFNs who prioritize such concerns and share an anti-capitalist critique, the March
differs in its social class composition, its organizing modalities and its South-led globality
(Conway 2017).
To observe the popular and grassroots character of the March is to recognize a col-
lective political aspiration, deeply instantiated in some places but exceedingly unevenly
realized across the global space of the March. Even where the March is strongly rooted in
putatively popular organizations, the socio-economic positioning of these organizations,
192 J. M. CONWAY

as well as their class character and composition, varies widely across national and world
regional contexts – from unions and parties of the left to small, isolated groups of illit-
erate rural women – but remains decidedly non-elite and anti-elitist. More decisive for
the March than the demographic makeup of prospective member groups is their politi-
cal alignment with popular struggles, and their modalities of organizing and activism.
This rootedness in and commitment to the popular does not, however, amount to
subalternity.
Spivak (2005, 476) makes an important distinction between the subaltern and the
popular that is helpful here: “subalternity is where the social lines of mobility, being else-
where, do not permit the formation of a recognisable basis of action.” That is, the sub-
altern – being subaltern – cannot exercise agency, understood as “institutionally
validated action, assuming collectivity, distinguished from the formation of the
subject, which exceed the outlines of individual intention” (476). Recalling her famous
essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak,” Spivak argues that subaltern agency is not recogniz-
able, and is therefore not representable. She questions any political strategy that appro-
priates the disenfranchized, arguing for engagement with subaltern (female)
subjectivity so as to make unrecognizable resistance recognizable. This, she says,
involves grafting the constative to the performative in subalternity, a process of
coming into agency in which organic intellectuals (following Gramsci) have an irreduci-
ble role to play.
Agency calls for the putting aside of difference. Agency presumes collectivity, which is where a
group acts by synecdoche: the part that seems to agree is taken to stand for the whole … all
calls to collectivity are metonymic because attached to a situation. And they work by synecdoche.
(480)

For Spivak, subaltern agency is conditioned by the possibility to be “publicly empowered

to put aside difference and self-synecdochise to form collectivity” (481), and for those
working with them “to build infrastructure so that they can, when necessary, when
the public sphere calls for it, synecdochise themselves without identitarian exploitation
from above” (482).
The popular feminist character of the March does not eliminate the danger of fem-
inist ventriloquism vis-à-vis the subaltern – something that can be interrogated only
with reference to specific, situated practices. But can it create conditions of possibility
for subaltern agency? Because I am concerned with thinking about the March as a
TFN, the emergence of an international feminist politics of food sovereignty and its
implications for transnational feminist politics more generally, I am more interested in
assessing to what extent the March can be said to instantiate an “infrastructure” for
agency (Spivak 2005, 481), or a process through which subaltern agency can emerge
and become representable in a politics of the popular, constituting the groundwork
of subaltern political will within the March and beyond.
Between international actions, the March’s enactment as a transnational network is
heavily constituted by its IS, which moves to a different world region every five years;
by its International Committee, composed of two representatives of the five world
regions of the March; by a triennial International Meeting involving delegates of all
active national co-ordinations; and by regular transnational and trilingual communi-
cation flows. The IS is currently in Mozambique, after stints in Quebec (2000–2006)
and Brazil (2006–2013). This practice of moving the IS, while extremely costly in
organizational terms, reflects a recognition of how power becomes institutionally
 INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 193

sedimented in particular places and amongst certain groups, and represents a con-
crete strategy to disperse power across geographic sites in a transnational network
and, particularly, to shift power and leadership to the Global South. Such organiz-
ational practices in the March reflect the political sensibilities of other North–South
networks founded in the 1990s (Dufour 2016, 160). Although such practices amelio-
rate North–South hierarchies, they do not, in themselves, combat other forms of
entrenched hierarchy within these networks, such as those arising from race, class,
gender or other forms of subalternity.
While the March is acutely respectful of place-based difference, actively combatting
North–South inequality and seeking to equalize national and world-regional weight in
its practices of representation, it has not produced explicit discourses or mechanisms
addressing hierarchies of scale in a transnational network, or addressed how these
map onto class and status inequalities among its activists (Conway 2008). The March
has occasionally sought to address other equity issues – for example, requiring each
NCB to appoint a young activist (under 35 years old) as one of two delegates to an Inter-
national Meeting. However, these efforts have been episodic and piecemeal (see Giraud
2015). Otherwise, in seeking nominations for its ten-member International Committee,
the March has been clear that these women are expected to engage in intense work
in their regions, sustaining communications and doing outreach to build the March,
strengthen alliances, participate in political spaces as representatives of the March
and contribute actively to formulating the March’s positions (WMW 2016). In short, can-
didates need time and resources in addition to the endorsement of their NCBs to be eli-
gible. Aside from the IS, March activists are not paid, so participation is either voluntary
or materially supported by their organizations. Participation at this level of the March is
premised on a logic of representation and requires time, personal capacities, organiz-
ational connections and material resources – conditions that are not often found
among subaltern constituencies.
The March’s federative structure and delegated bodies of international decision
making, while on paper resembling older forms of internationalism or INGOs, is actually
only very weakly bureaucratized and professionalized. This is due both to the March’s
chronic lack of financial resources and to its ethos of local autonomy, wherein constitu-
ent groups and NCBs are constantly and variably enacting when, how and if to act as the
World March of Women. The March is marked by extreme organizational and spatial/ter-
ritorial fragility, instability and mutability (Dufour 2016, 161) and also by a practical and
political recognition of place-based difference in a transnational network. From these
practical limitations, embodied realities and political commitments, the March seeks
to construct a global feminist identity and a politics that is permanently open-ended,
produced through dialogue and grounded in collective action.
Processes of political construction are no less power-laden for being collective and
dialogical, but their power relations are more subtle, complex and consequently difficult
to see, analyze and assess. Spivak (2005, 482) suggests that what is decisive here is how
and if the progressive intellectual (here: feminist activist) can “learn to learn from below,
from the subaltern,” rather than to study, objectivize, or otherwise instrumentalize them.
The question thus becomes to what extent the March’s feminist politics of food
sovereignty is produced through such learning and comes to provide infrastructure
for subaltern agency.
194 J. M. CONWAY

Political dynamics and power relations within a transnational feminist

network
There is a now well-established discourse in the March of international solidarity-build-
ing around food sovereignty, directly attributable to dynamics within the international
bodies of the March in which the IS (Brazil-based at the time) exercised inordinate influ-
ence, as we shall see. This is laid over an exceedingly uneven geography, within and
between countries, of diverse practices enacted by the March’s constituent groups.
These practices relate to food preparation, production, consumption and marketing;
rights and access to seeds, land, water and oceans; and protection of local ecological
resources, whether from extractivism, commodification/dispossession or effects of
climate change – which, through “discursive practices of articulation” (61) at the inter-
national scale of the March, have been resignified as part of an international and
cross-movement political project for food sovereignty. Thus, in the March, food sover-
eignty has been taken up in “the vernacular,” (73) rooted in localized practices, contexts
and identities (Masson, Paulos, and Beaulieu-Bastien 2017).
Although there was a plethora of already-existing grassroots practices, food sover-
eignty as a specific political discourse entered the March through four intersecting
routes, originating in different places and at different scales in the network, involving
different actors and operating at varying intensities. One early route, ostensibly internal
to the March, was in the formulation of its 2005 Women’s Global Charter for Humanity,
which was grounded in an elaborate process of consultation with its participating
groups. Rural women’s groups who were members of the March, particularly in Latin
America and predominantly in Brazil and Peru, proposed the inclusion of food sover-
eignty as part of the March’s vision.9 This meant a discursive shift away from food secur-
ity, which had appeared in the 2000 platform, but in neither case was the concept
elaborated.
Notably, however, this process was underway at the same time that food sovereignty
as a concept was trickling down through Vía Campesina’s local organizations, with
which these rural women’s groups were also affiliated. The intertwined nature of their
political identities and loyalties, as peasants and women simultaneously, and in the
context of a quasi-official alliance emerging between their networks, gave impetus to
their advocacy of food sovereignty within the March. For example, ANAMURI (Asociación
Nacional de Mujeres Rurales e Indígenas), a member group of Vía Campesina composed
and led by Indigenous and peasant women, initially presented Vía Campesina’s project
of food sovereignty at an International Meeting of the March. ANAMURI subsequently
became a member group of the March and a leading organization of the Chilean
NCB, and is presently represented on the March’s International Council.
A second route came in the course of the March’s 2005 International Action, which
entailed a relay of the Charter across national frontiers. Many of these cross-border
actions were in remote areas and involved local/rural women’s groups in organizing
the actions.
As the Letter [Charter] and Quilt traveled from country to country, small rural towns proved to be
important stopping points and protest zones. Local groups from these areas were responsible for
organising activities around the Letter and generating national recognition from other leaders.
This shattered the traditional image of the feminist movement being led by urban women
living in large urban centers. The new dynamic was reflected in the Letter’s demands, which
emphasised rural women’s concerns. (Nobre 2011, 295)
 INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 195

With the increased protagonism of rural women in the March, their concerns around
food sovereignty became more audible at the international scale of the March in the
strategic planning process that followed the 2005 actions. With these developments,
consciousness of the urban-rural vector as an axis of difference in the March requiring
political attention was articulated in the March’s international documents, starting in
2006.
A third route, and the most politically influential, was at the international scale
through the alliance incubating between Vía Campesina and the World March of
Women in the context of the Brazil-based World Social Forum process. This route was
brokered in decisive ways by March activists based in Brazil and later by the Brazil-
based IS.
The success and durability of this alliance, along with the March’s embrace of food
sovereignty and associated rural agendas, must also be understood in the context of
developments within the March in Brazil and the transition of the IS of the World
March of Women from Québec to Brazil in fall 2006. This is a fourth route by which
food sovereignty entered the March. This transition coincided with both a strategic plan-
ning process that would set the March’s agenda for the next five years and the prepara-
tory process for the Nyéléni forum underway among social movements in Latin America
and in which the March was implicated. Thus, there was a complex interplay between
the international and cross-sectoral alliance politics of the March and its internal nego-
tiations, across place and scale, and across urban-rural, North–South and inter-continen-
tal difference.
The international alliance between the World March of Women and Vía Campesina
emerged in the early years of the WSF process. Brazil was the home of the World
Social Forum and site of major global meetings in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005 and
2009. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, the March’s international alliance with Vía
Campesina was heavily mediated by the Brazilian NCB. With the move to Brazil, the
new IS was staffed by Brazilians deeply implicated in the processes of the national
March in Brazil.
Sempreviva Organização Feminista (SOF) was the host organization of both the
Brazilian NCB and the Brazil-based IS of the March. SOF, a national-scale Brazilian fem-
inist NGO, had a history of relations with rural women’s groups and concern with
questions of land and rurality that pre-dated the March – for example, through its
support of the Marcha das Margaridas, or March of the Daisies, a national-scale mobil-
ization of rural women organized by CONTAG (Confederação Nacional dos Trabalha-
dores na Agricultura – National Confederation of Agricultural Workers). This
mobilization became part of the March’s international action in 2000. After 2000, as
the Brazilian NCB constituted itself as a permanent entity, with SOF serving as its
host organization, CONTAG also became a member. The MST (Movimento Sem
Terra – Landless Workers’ Movement) has been a formal ally of the March in Brazil
since that time also. Rural women’s groups affiliated with the March in Brazil were
among those to advocate that the March make food sovereignty an international
priority.
Considering the Brazilian context more closely gives us a more textured view of the
agency of rural women in the March. Aside from their national-scale coalitional partici-
pation in the March through organizations like the MST or CONTAG, rural women – who
have carried food sovereignty as a project of the March – are organized in small groups
of ten to fifteen women in dozens of small villages concentrated in several provinces of
196 J. M. CONWAY

Brazil, notably in Rio Grande do Norte. They are active, articulate practitioners of agroe-
cology and advocates of the solidarity economy. In these localities and as part of the
Brazilian NCB, these groups are the March and they are visible, present and outspoken
as such. Most are barely literate, having elementary education at most, and bearing
many children from their mid-teens onwards. Our field observation suggests a strong
two-way relationship between these women and national and international leaders of
the March, in that the March lends importance and visibility to them and to their
work at scales beyond the local – for example, by supporting them to participate in
national fora. In 2012, the March organized a national-scale action in solidarity with
these groups to protest land-grabbing and displacement by agribusiness. For many
years under the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores – Workers’ Party) government, SOF lever-
aged support for this work through a program for rural women within the Ministry of
Agrarian Development, and the March built on this history of practice. In the lead-up
to the Nyéléni forum, national and international leaders of the March based in Brazil con-
ducted consultations to formulate a feminist position on food sovereignty, including a
workshop with these groups in Rio Grande do Norte.10
This example and others gleaned from fieldwork in Peru and Mozambique testify
to the March’s deep relationships in some places, built over many years, with very
marginalized women. This is highly uneven and contingent on local practice. While
working with subalternized women is not a matter of debate in principle for the
March, how to proceed in practice is, in some places, fraught with conflict. In Brazil,
these relationships are part of an effort by the March to articulate a societal project
based on concrete solidarity and dialogue, and is deeply rooted in participatory pro-
cesses with and within organized groups of economically marginalized women.
However, even the best practices of solidarity and dialogue do not neutralize deep
inequalities in political voice. March organizers bring their own ethico-political orien-
tations to the struggles with which they choose to ally, and which underpin the
popular education and organizing resources that the March provides. As discussed
above, economically marginalized women also lack the material means with which
to participate in the international decision-making bodies of the March in any sus-
tained way.
Understanding the emergence and development of a sui generis discourse of food
sovereignty in a TFN like the World March of Women, and assessing subaltern agency
in that process, is thus a complicated epistemological task. It involves a tangled
history of relations among several distinct forces operating at different scales in the
network, and in which rural, peasant and Indigenous women are variably implicated.
It is simultaneously a story about the political dynamics and discursive strategies of
knowledge production and solidarity-building across place and scale within a TFN,
and between a TFN and its allies – both feminist and non-feminist – in agrarian move-
ments. These agrarian movements also operate in various places and multiple scales,
as do their alliances with the World March of Women. It is thus simultaneously an
intra-feminist and a cross-movement story that complicates our understandings of
how such networks are constituted and operate. At the same time, it is impossible
to tell this story without reference to particular geographies of power in the March,
in this case in Brazil, their interpolation with particular grassroots constituencies,
and how these map onto particular politics of food sovereignty. With that in mind,
we now turn to feminist organizing around food sovereignty at the Nyéléni forum.
 INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 197

Towards a feminist discourse of food sovereignty: the centrality of

women’s work
The invitation to co-organize Nyéléni pushed the March to organize itself globally on the
question of food sovereignty, leading it to convene delegations from fifteen countries
on five continents. Vía Campesina’s discourse of food sovereignty lent force and coher-
ence to myriad food and land struggles that were already underway in the March in
many localities.11 In preparation for its engagement with the Nyéléni forum and to
inform the March’s strategic planning process, Miriam Nobre, along with Mafalda Gal-
dames Castro from ANAMURI (Asociación Nacional de Mujeres Rurales e Indígenas) in
Chile and affiliated with Vía Campesina, made the case for food sovereignty as a priority
field of action for the World March at its International Meeting in Lima in November 2006
(Marche Mondiale des Femmes 2006). A month prior, SOF had convened a national
workshop of thirty-three women from fifteen Brazilian organizations as part of a Brazilian
and Latin American preparatory process in advance of Nyéléni. It involved many women
from groups affiliated with the March, both urban and rural, along with other popular
movements, including the MST and Vía Campesina (SOF 2006).
These mutually-reinforcing processes laid the basis for the March’s emergent dis-
course on food sovereignty. Vía Campesina’s understanding of the struggle for food
sovereignty remains foundational and appears wholly adopted without critique in the
March’s documents, which state that food sovereignty requires: (1) agrarian reform;
(2) agroecology; (3) no GMO seeds; (4) the right to water; (5) the decommodification
of agriculture (Marche Mondiale des Femmes 2006).
Further echoing Vía Campesina, the March valorizes small-scale family agriculture,
claiming further that it entails conditions favorable to rural women. However, they
also inject observations about women’s subordinate status in rural households and com-
munities and discrimination against women farmers by laws and public institutions.
For the majority of women in the countryside, the peasant model of production, the peasant way
of life, is more favorable because it integrates production and reproduction, and because it com-
prises a diversity of products and production processes in which the work of women is fundamen-
tal. This model is close to agroecological practices, for example with the use of local [and natural]
fertilizers, is in harmony with the cycles of nature, with shorter routes to market, etc. … The ques-
tion is how, starting from this way of life, peasant women can not only resist, but have a good
quality of life and possibilities for personal growth. And how to convince their male partners
and comrades in the movements that this is the perspective that includes all men and women,
without distinction between those who are “consolidated” or “integrated” and those who are
“not víable” … However, in reality there are many family farms in which the adults are only
women [there are no adult men—in other words, female-headed households]. These are
viewed as incomplete or economically unsustainable. The material survival and the emotional
relationships are totally linked to the community’s sanctions towards the women who transgress
the rules, which restricts the field of women’s possibilities. There are many ways to deny the rights
of women to be farmers: it could be to deny them land property, or the power to decide how to
use it, or in the form of invisibility in relation to public institutions. (Nobre 2006)12

The March’s critical view of women’s subordinate status co-exists somewhat uneasily
with its stalwart endorsement of Vía Campesina’s metadiscourse of food sovereignty
and the peasant way. On the one hand, theirs is a classic “add women – but do not
stir” approach that enriches Vía Campesina’s food sovereignty discourse without sub-
stantially disrupting it. On the other hand, epistemologically including the work
assigned to women in a gendered division of agricultural labor, not to mention the
198 J. M. CONWAY

also unrecognized and unpaid care work that enables the reproduction of the agricul-
tural unit, as well as recognizing the unequal and gendered power relations in rural com-
munities, as in the extract above, also in effect stretches the meaning and scope of food
sovereignty.13
In inviting its allies to co-organize the Nyéléni forum, which was to be a critical
moment in the consolidation of an international movement for food sovereignty, Vía
Campesina indicated its willingness to open up the concept of food sovereignty. For
the March, it was an opportunity to introduce issues of women’s work and the gendered
division of labor with which it was already preoccupied.14 In its approach to food sover-
eignty, the March seeks to visibilize and valorize the essential but taken-for-granted
labor of women in family agriculture, and to strengthen their practical decision-
making power and secure their land rights as producers of food.
The March engages in critical feminist work on food sovereignty, but carefully. It does
not explore the extent to which feminist claims could challenge or destabilize Vía Cam-
pesina’s food sovereignty project and the gendered divisions of labor that remain
unproblematized within it. The political alliance with Vía Campesina and unqualified
support for its struggle is sine qua non, as it is for the women of Vía Campesina, even
as they agitate for representation and make similar claims within Vía Campesina and
associated agrarian organizations.15
This slow and careful approach, while perhaps overly cautious from a feminist per-
spective, is consistent with two of the March’s core political commitments: on one
hand, its politics of alliance with mixed-gender movements on the global left in the
interest of a common struggle against neoliberalism; on the other, its popular feminist
character, wherein its feminism is produced through an open-ended process of collec-
tive construction, grounded in the lived realities of subalternized women. The March’s
process of producing a feminist discourse of food sovereignty is deeply dialogical
with the knowledges and perspectives of (mostly non-feminist) women in peasant
movements, with whom the March collaborates.
Rural women in the March themselves see many aspects of their daily lives/labor as
inextricably related to the work of food sovereignty, including the propagation of med-
icinal plants, securing potable water and cooking fuel, and the selection, saving and
exchange of seeds (Masson, Paulos, and Beaulieu-Bastien 2017). Women’s environ-
mental activism to defend ecosystems is also fundamental to the viability of local
food systems, as are struggles against land and water grabbing by states and transna-
tional corporations. These activities link resource rights and access to the commons
to food sovereignty, over and against privatization and enclosure. Women link their
activities in marketing and distribution of food, as well as their ability to purchase
and prepare food, as integral aspects of food sovereignty – claims that the feminists
of the March and allied rural movements use to link food production both to the pro-
curement and consumption of food, and to women’s care work. In so doing, they
provide ways to articulate food sovereignty to non-producer and non-rural sectors,
and construct potential linkages between rural and urban women.

Urban-rural alliances among women

Even in the lead-up to Nyéléni, the March placed greater relative emphasis on the essen-
tial role of consumers and urban populations in the struggle for food sovereignty than
did its agrarian movement allies. Urban women, like their rural counterparts, remain
 INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 199

overwhelmingly responsible for feeding families, as both rural and urban women pur-
chase some or all of their households’ foodstuffs. The March links decent incomes for
consumers to the valorization of producers, but they also recognize the need to
combat cultures of consumption through which many urban women are drawn to pur-
chase cheap, prepared, industrial food. A major driver of this pattern is the time crunch
experienced by women, both urban and rural, due to their double working day: because
of persistent gendered divisions of labor, women still bear overwhelming and often
exclusive responsibility for the care of children, the health and feeding of the family,
and the care of the sick and elderly on top of any paid employment. To challenge
urban food-buying habits, where many choices are determined by price and ease, the
March argues for the need to challenge social organization – that is, to reduce the
work day, make public transport easier and more accessible, and share domestic work
with men.
From this early period of the March’s engagement with food sovereignty at the inter-
national scale, it recognized that the concept more readily mobilizes rural rather than
urban women, and is more immediately resonant across the Global South than in the
North. The March thus saw an important role for itself in forging alliances between
urban and rural women within its own network. To do that, March activists reasoned,
it had to link the struggle for food sovereignty to women’s reproductive/care work
and the commodification of everyday life in relation to women’s bodies (Nobre 2011).
Reflecting back on the Nyéléni forum some years afterwards, the March wrote,
For the WMW, the main problem was how to hold this discussion in an urban context. How can we
create and consolidate alliances between women in the countryside and women in the cities? It
[Nyéléni] was a very rich experience, but one that confronted us with a contradiction. How do we
recognise and value reproductive work, which has been made invisible and neglected by patriarchal
capitalism, while refusing to be held solely responsible for it, and remained confined in this function
that is associated with the traditionally feminine caring and nurturing role? (WMW 2008, 40)

Sovereignty and autonomy of women and peoples

In discourses of food sovereignty, both of Vía Campesina and the March, the societal
project of food sovereignty is deeply embedded in an older, larger discourse of
popular sovereignty. This is one of the reasons for its powerful resonance across the
global South where it articulates living memories of anti-colonial nationalism with con-
temporary popular struggles against both transnational corporations and rapacious and
repressive post-colonial states. The March, alongside other movements of the global left,
vigorously defends the notion of popular (and national) self-determination as the right
that precedes all other rights. In its embrace of food sovereignty, this principle of self-
determination is extended on two fronts: (1) the assertion of women’s autonomy and
bodily integrity, and (2) the defense of territories. The two are consistently linked. On
the first of these fronts,
food sovereignty refers to the right of peoples, nations or states to define their food and agricul-
ture policy so as to protect their production and their culture with regard to food from threats
posed by others. It is an issue relevant to feminists, not only in our role as citizens, but also in
our struggle for women’s autonomy, autonomy to choose how to work, how to assure our sub-
sistence, how to enjoy ourselves, how to love, to have children or not, to live without violence
and to construct our future. Personal autonomy presupposes societies without inequalities in
which peoples are masters of their [collective] destiny … To struggle against the oppression
and exploitation of women is fundamental for peasant struggles for food sovereignty. To struggle
200 J. M. CONWAY

for food sovereignty is fundamental for women’s struggle for their autonomy, for the sharing of
responsibilities and for the continuity of human life (Marche Mondiale des Femmes 2006).16

On the defense of territories, while there has been an evolution in food sovereignty dis-
course from an affirmation of the sovereignty of nations to that of peoples and commu-
nities, the sovereign of food sovereignty remains ambiguous and problematic (Edelman
2014). The Nyéléni declarations recognize Indigenous peoples as also having claims to
land, and they articulate a position around the need to negotiate and share land among
different stakeholders, but there is little recognition of the specificity of Indigenous
claims to territory beyond their shared status as peasants.17 On one hand, the
March’s discourses remain in this vein, smoothing out conflict and stressing commonal-
ities among subalternized groups, in a universalizing, quasi-class discourse. Women’s
traditional peasant knowledge is linked to Indigenous peoples’ claims about the signifi-
cance of their traditional knowledges, and the need to preserve them for humanity and
protect them from piracy and enclosure by corporate patenting efforts. On the other
hand, without confronting conflicting claims to territory, the March also gestures
beyond the Nyéléni consensus. Women’s land rights are affirmed alongside the guaran-
tee of Indigenous land rights and Indigenous women’s participation in decisions about
their way of life on their territories.
Beyond the alliance with women fisherfolk and marisqueiras [women who harvest shellfish or
other seafood], what is necessary is alliance with indigenous women and quilombolas [women
who live in quilombos, i.e., villages created by freed slaves in the (then) wilderness]. We need
to learn with them the notion of territory which considers in an integrated way, people and
their way of life, land, water, biodiversity and nature’s cycles. And, from that notion, build our
analysis and propositions.18 (Nobre 2006)

Conclusion
The feminist politics and discourse of food sovereignty of the World March of Women is
an uneven work in progress in which the agency of rural, peasant and Indigenous
women comes in and out of view and, throughout, is mediated through practices of
popular education and processes of representation in an organization-based coalition.
Its future development is intimately interwoven with both that of the March’s alliance
with Vía Campesina and its relations with women in rural movements, both within
and beyond the March’s membership. Conversely, the future contours of the food sover-
eignty discussion also depend heavily on how non-peasant movements like the March
appropriate it as part of their own vision and strategy for an alternative future. The
March, along with other social movements on the left, particularly in Latin America,
are seizing on food sovereignty as a political tool to aggregate many struggles in a
counter-hegemonic anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist politics, in which appeals to the
popular are constant even as subaltern agency in such politics remains in question
(e.g., Declaración 2006). These other struggles include resistance to free trade in agricul-
ture, privatization of land and sea-based resources, land-grabbing by states and corpor-
ations, and dedication of agricultural lands to biofuels. More recently, struggles against
extractivism and climate change have also been clustered under the food sovereignty
umbrella.
In Latin America and elsewhere, rural populations are on the frontlines of these
struggles; and in mixed movements and through their own autonomous organizations,
women are on the frontline, defending rural livelihoods and environments. In Brazil,
 INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 201

rural women are the best organized sector of the women’s movement, with hundreds of
local, regional and national organizations (Nobre 2006). For the March, the embrace of
food sovereignty is consistent with its commitment to counter-hegemonic alliance-
building on the left, but it is also central to its commitment to improving the lives of
poor women (rural and urban, North and South) and expanding their autonomy, to
their living the good life, as they see it, and to building global solidarities among sub-
alternized populations in defense of life. With all the attendant ambiguities of such a
project, the March’s popular feminism suggests some ways to construct an infrastruc-
ture for subaltern agency.

Notes
1. For historical studies of Vía Campesina, see Desmarais (2007); Patel (2006); Borras and Franco
(2009).
2. For background on Women of Vía Campesina, see Desmarais (2007, 161ff).
3. Key issues here include gender bias in both land reform legislation and customary rights that favor
a single male as holder of title and prevent women from holding land via inheritance, in widow-
hood or after separation. Women likewise cannot access credit or technical assistance indepen-
dently. With increased corporate land grabbing and privatization, women’s subsistence
production and access to the commons is further restricted. These conditions force rural
women to migrate to cities to search for alternative livelihoods.
4. Women produce 80 percent of food in poor countries; but their knowledges extend beyond food
production narrowly conceived to include saving seeds, medicinal plants, animal husbandry and
the protection of biodiversity. These knowledge traditions challenge vertical systems of technical
support.
5. In designating the March as a TFN, I am following contemporary scholarly usage, e.g., Moghadam
(2005). I differentiate between transnational and international elsewhere (see Conway 2017).
6. The social relations of marginalization or subalternization are distinct to different contexts, so
different axes of difference are more or less salient (Giraud 2015, 100). As the substantive focus
of this inquiry is the politics of food sovereignty, I focus the question of subaltern agency on
rural, peasant and Indigenous women.
7. I use the term “non-feminist others” to designate mixed-gender movements as well as women’s
organizations that do not identify themselves as feminist. My purpose is to highlight the distinct
nature of the feminist politics of inter-movement, as opposed to intra-movement (among femin-
ists), alliances.
8. Antrobus (2004); Jain (2005); West (1999); Desai (2008). For discussion, see Hawkesworth (2006,
130ff).
9. Interview via Skype with Miriam Nobre, November 18, 2013.
10. Personal communication with Elsa Beaulieu Bastien, December 7, 2015.
11. Interview via Skype with Miriam Nobre, November 18, 2013.
12. Translated from Portuguese by Elsa Beaulieu Bastien. This document is a report on the consul-
tations conducted in Brazil by the March to develop its reflection on food sovereignty.
13. See also Agarwal (2014); Razavi (2009); Park, White, and Julia (2015);
14. Interview via Skype with Miriam Nobre, November 18, 2013.
15. See also Brochner (2014); Deere (2003); Deepak (2014); Sachs (2013).
16. Translated from French by author.
17. See Rosset (2013).
18. Translated from Portuguese by Elsa Beaulieu Bastien.

Acknowledgements
The author thanks Dominique Masson, Pascale Dufour, Elsa Beaulieu Bastien and Anabel Paulos as well as
the anonymous reviewers for their valued feedback on earlier versions of this article.
202 J. M. CONWAY

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This research was funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 435-2013-
0058.

Notes on contributor
Janet M. Conway is Canada Research Chair in Social Justice at Brock University. She works on the politics
of transnational social justice movements under conditions of globalization. She is author of Edges of
Global Justice: the World Social Forum and Its “Others” (Routledge 2013) and Identity, Place, Knowledge:
Social Movements Contesting Globalization (Fernwood 2004).

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