The global countryside: peasant women negotiating, recalibrating and resisting rural change in Colombia

Abstract

This article utilises a gender lens to consider the notion of the ‘global countryside’ through a case study with four peasant Colombian women living in the mountain town of Toca, Boyacá. In seeking a bottom-up understanding of rural globalisation, as it is experienced in the everyday lives of peasant women in Colombia, we drew on a methodology that included participant observation and photo elicitation interviews. Data reveal the inflections and incursions of the global into women’s work and family lives, in particular, gendered implications of the emergence of a globalised countryside. At the same time, the results demonstrate women’s agency in recalibrating and resisting discourses of globalisation as they create places and strategies for subsistence based on peasant values and economic strategies. Finally, based on our results, we problematise the universalising tendencies of urban/Western feminist critiques of rural women’s lives which have been embedded in assumptions about modernity, development and liberalism.