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Rights, Reform, and Negotiation: Land Dispossession, Gender, and Alternative Models for Justice
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to address the 2019 collective land tenure reforms from the perspective of local women farmers in the Moroccan Gharb by focusing on the implementation of a corporate agenda with global and local dimensions and its production of a mainstream discourse on women’s rights and gender inclusion. Among the questions this paper attempts to answer is: how does women’s rights rhetoric negotiate with, resist, and support neoliberal land tenure reforms? The research for this discussion is based on in-depth interviews with women farmers and participant observation in classes that they are attending to educate themselves about the new land tenure reform laws and policies. Based on this data, the paper explores how local women farmers negotiate with dominant land dispossession policies and feminist rhetoric staged by the government, donors, and women’s rights NGOs regarding the representation of women’s land rights. In this vein, this paper draws attention to the way that human and women’s rights rhetoric is deployed as a strategy of co-optation by governance feminism (Hally 2018). Through an analysis of interviews with urban feminists, officials from American corporate organizations funding land privatization, and with women identified as the beneficiaries of communal land privatization efforts across various rural Moroccan sites, this paper has two aims: first, to provide a context for the emergence of the discourse on Moroccan women’s land rights in the early 2000s, and second, to explore the ways in which local farmers negotiate with rather than confront the ongoing violence of land expropriation and dispossession across the rural Moroccan Gharb.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Morocco
Sub Area
None