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Bitter Cane: Gendered Fields of Power in Sri Lanka’s Sugar Economy
Author(s): NandiniGunewardena
Source:
Signs,
Vol. 35, No. 2 (Winter 2010), pp. 371-396
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2010, vol. 35, no. 2]
䉷2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2010/3502-0004$10.00
Nandini Gunewardena
Bitter Cane: Gendered Fields of Power in Sri Lanka’s
Sugar Economy
In 2006, in the wake of the current oil crisis and the scramble for biofuel
energy, the global sugar agribusiness giant Booker Tate put forward a
pious proposal to help the island nation of Sri Lanka expand domestic
sugar production to help meet its consumption and fuel needs. The mis-
guided economics of this and Booker Tate’s previous management of the
Pelwatte Sugar Corporation (PSC) in the 1980s sparked an outcry by
environmental activists, civic groups, and social scientists. They called
attention to the environmental, economic, and social costs that outweigh
the benefits touted by this project, including the near–slave labor con-
ditions, dire poverty, and ecological implications of the proposed expan-
sion of 57,500 acres, which adjoins some of the last protected forests in
the country. Yet recent price hikes in the global sugar market have con-
vinced Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Food and Supplementary Crops Devel-
opment to seriously consider Booker Tate’s investment bid, to the tune
of US$200 million, to increase sugar production to 32 percent of domestic
consumption needs.
1
In this article, I examine how commercial sugar production is impli-
cated in subverting preexisting forms of gender parity in the southeastern
Uva province among subsistence communities that had relied on shifting
agriculture (also referred to as slash-and-burn or swidden agriculture) as
their primary livelihood strategy for generations.
2
I illustrate how the
incursion of commercial sugar production into subsistence cultivation ar-
eas in southeastern Sri Lanka has led to dramatic reconfigurations of
women’s roles, women’s decision-making power, and the valuation of their
productive contributions to society, effectively recasting the gender con-
1
The recent increases in sugar prices to US$490 per ton incur an annual expenditure
of US$10 million (12 billion Sri Lankan rupees) on sugar imports for consumption needs.
2
I use the word “parity” to describe this gender system in which various sources of
autonomy were traditionally available to women typically evident in swidden (shifting) farm-
ing systems (see Geertz 1963), as distinct from egalitarianism, since the ethnographic record
has established that there are no fully gender egalitarian human societies.
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372 ❙Gunewardena
structs in the region. Ethnographic data I have collected over the past
two decades (Gunewardena 2007b) reveal how shifts in the labor process
have spillover effects on local gender constructs, resulting in an altered
gendered production of power in the region. I draw on the framework
of feminist political ecology to analyze the gendered power relations
embedded in the ecological, economic, and political terrain of the sugar
economy of southeastern Sri Lanka.
Historical processes of proletarianization and impoverishment in co-
lonial (e.g., Guyana, Fiji, Java) and postcolonial (e.g., the Philippines)
societies evidence the enactment of similar power configurations in sugar
production.
3
I document how disempowering constructions of gender
have diffused to the rural periphery via the sugar enterprise and have
entered local discourses and practices concerning gendered labor capacities
and by extension women’s capacities in general, given the interlinkages
between the spheres of social reproduction and production (Benerı´a and
Sen 1981). The proliferation of gender-hierarchical notions, ideologies,
and practices espoused in the development of the sugar economy and by
PSC’s particular strategies (e.g., labor recruitment and hierarchical cate-
gorization) are responsible for disempowering shifts in women’s lives.
Women’s labor (newly subordinated to male control, in stark contrast to
the complementary gender division of labor evident in subsistence farming
systems) is crucial for the development of the sugar economy in Sri Lanka
yet is assigned low remuneration and devalorized as unskilled, unpro-
ductive, and secondary. I argue that the institutional operation of capital
and power on the sugar estates has led to a redefinition of gendered
capacities and to the devaluation of women’s work, leading to new con-
structions and sources of male power, which are derived from the hier-
archical gender ideologies held by the sugar agribusiness PSC as the in-
stitutional site vested with social and economic power.
The commercial sugar economy, in other words, has rendered the rural
spaces it has incorporated into social sites where newly constructed sym-
bolic, discursive, and ideological meanings of masculinities have begun to
circulate, making invisible women’s work, household economic contri-
butions, and decision making, thereby serving to inscribe their subordi-
nation.
4
These patterns reflect the dynamics and potency of the power
3
See, e.g., Rodney (1981), Reddock (1985), Shameem (1990). See also Seenarine
(1996).
4
These newly constructed masculinities establish men as sole heads of households, bread-
winners, primary decision makers, and authority figures, contrary to prevailing gender con-
ceptualizations. In discussing the effects of these constructs on women, I am referring to a
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S I G N S Winter 2010 ❙373
invested in the sugar agroindustry as representative of modernity, progress,
and development, together with contemporary national conceptualiza-
tions of gender that are mobilized and manipulated in enacting these
processes. Drawing upon the theorizing put forward in postcolonial and
transnational feminist scholarship, I argue that the sugar economy ulti-
mately rests on the conversion of women at the margins of the society—
the disenfranchised rural periphery—into millennial subalterns not unlike
the colonial subalterns of the sugar economy of the sixteenth to the eigh-
teenth centuries.
Method
This article draws upon two decades of research, beginning with eighteen
months of in situ fieldwork from July 1986 to December 1987 at two
sites incorporated into the sugar economy—Kande Village (pseudonym),
a subsistence farming hamlet that falls under the rubric of “ancient vil-
lages,” and subsistence farming communities surrounding and incorpo-
rated into PSC—and subsequent visits in 1990, 1993, 1996, 2000, and
2005.
5
I relied on the techniques of participant-observation, working with
women on their daily household chores and agricultural activities, in-
cluding work on their sugarcane fields, supplemented with focus-group
interviews with groups of women, joint and separate interviews with their
husbands and male kin, as well as interviews with administrative figures
(village headman, the registrar of births and deaths, county administrative
officials, ritual specialists, field officers, and the upper-echelon managerial
staff of PSC). Time-allocation studies were used to document the gender
division of labor (in household activities, subsistence farming and work
on cane fields, marketing, decision making, and household fund man-
agement). In addition to the data on women’s economic contributions,
data were collected on local gender roles, norms, and expectations and
on the valuation of women’s work at each of the sites.
symbolic invisibility of women’s work, as evidenced by and a result of the absence of gender-
disaggregated data on the agricultural sector in stark contrast to the open acknowledgment
of the significance of women’s contributions to household production among subsistence
farming populations.
5
Referred to by Sri Lankan scholars as parani gam, these ancient villages embody the
social and economic arrangements, including gender constructs, that prevailed prior to the
era of modernization. These villages were virtually untouched by three centuries of colo-
nialism because of their remote locations and their affiliation with indigenous populations.
My research has been documented in a 1994 video, “Bitter Cane: The Transformation of
Women’s Lives in the Sugar Economy of Sri Lanka,” an ethnographic film funded by the
Swedish International Development Agency.
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374 ❙Gunewardena
Sugar, neoliberal globalization, and the feminization of commercial
agriculture
The feminization of agriculture (Deere 2005) is characterized by women’s
increasing participation in agricultural work on subsistence and market
crops. Neoliberal scholars who perceive the growth in women’s employ-
ment as an opportunity for women to secure financial and thereby social
autonomy consider this a positive trend (see, e.g., Mellor 1976; Bennett
1992). Yet the relative absence of concomitant rewards and returns, to-
gether with the drudgery inherent in agricultural work and unsupportive
policies (e.g., land lease terms and insufficient agricultural extension in-
formation, credit, and technology), contravenes such assertions. Emerging
evidence of wage differentials between male and female workers, their dif-
ferential placement in the agricultural labor hierarchy, and women’s reduced
decision making in comparison to subsistence farming suggest the converse.
These trends support the arguments advanced early on by Ester Boserup
(1970) and more recently by Lucia Da Corta and Davuluri Venkateshwarlu
(1999) that the greater participation of women in agricultural wage work
did not bring about a corresponding improvement in their household
decision-making roles—something they refer to as the “Women’s Em-
powerment Paradox” (1999, 76). In sum, women’s higher participation
in unremunerated and unpaid (i.e., family/household) agricultural work
has been associated not with empowerment but with reduced autonomy
and decision-making power, increased subsistence insecurity, and social and
economic dependence on males (Kennedy and Cogill 1988). These disem-
powering consequences are related to the incursion of gender-hierarchical
labor models that are inherently a part of the structural features of capital-
intensive agriculture instead of an inevitable outcome of agricultural
modernization.
With the increasing globalization of agriculture, yet another concern
involves the repercussions of women’s work in export-oriented agriculture
and the food commodity chain—from labor in the fields to processing
and marketing. Emerging research has documented parallel experiences
of women in diverse social locations, with gendered wage disparities that
translate not only into deleterious social implications—the devaluation of
women’s productive contributions and their relegation to secondary
roles—but also into economic consequences, since insufficient incomes
require intensified labor investments by women in order to purchase ag-
ricultural inputs as well as household subsistence requirements. These
disempowering trends are also rooted in the classification of women as
supplemental earners, and their incorporation at lower occupational levels,
based on the gender-biased perceptions of farmers as male that prevail
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S I G N S Winter 2010 ❙375
among policy makers, development planners, and agricultural service bu-
reaucracies alike.
The rich body of analytical work on women’s incorporation into and
experiences in globalized manufacturing offers a useful comparative van-
tage point for understanding the marginalization women experience in
the globalization of agriculture. Yet, given the differences in the labor
processes in the manufacturing sector as compared to agriculture, as well
as the contrasting ways in which the transnational production of consumer
and food commodities are integrated into the global economy, we cannot
collapse the analysis of two sectors. The nature and rhythms of agricultural
labor as compared to assembly-line work lead to subtle but significant
differences in the occupational hierarchies, supervision requirements, and
demands of the worker. Drawing on the evidence offered by several fem-
inist scholars (Ong 1987, 1991; Wolf 1992; Kurian 1998), Sutti Ortiz
(2002) notes that “in many countries, most subaltern jobs in plantations,
textile factories, apparel, and electronic industries are reserved for women
as employers exploit their socially junior status to pay them lower wages”
(406). The resort to recruiting a supposedly docile and cheap female labor
force is embedded in the preoccupation with generating profit, apparent
both in global agroindustrial production and the globalized manufacturing
sector. In order to understand the distinctive ways in which this process
occurs in these two sectors, it will be useful to examine the different mech-
anisms that permit the creation of such a pool of labor and the processes
that ensure and sustain a continuous supply of cheap, female labor.
6
Toward this end, I use a feminist political ecology framework (Roche-
leau et al. 1996) to trace the production of gendered difference and
hierarchy in the sugar economy of Sri Lanka. While the introduction of
commercial sugar farming has affected the biodiversity of the region and
compromised the ecologically viable livelihood strategies that were com-
mon in southeastern Sri Lanka, my concern lies more with the resulting
sources of gender-specific social and economic disempowerment. The axes
of power that collude in the creation of a gendered subaltern include the
patriarchal and often gender-blind policies of the neocolonial state, the
capital-intensive and profit-driven strategies of global agroindustrial en-
terprises, and the dynamics of class and status in local contexts.
7
I explore
6
The putative docility of women workers is documented in Jayaweera, Dias, and
Goonewardene (1994), Ganguly (2003), and in my research at PSC.
7
Because of their greater poverty and social marginality vis-a`-vis urban populations that
have also had the benefits of superior educational institutions, rural populations in Sri Lanka,
especially in this remote rural peripher y, are located at the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic
hierarchy.
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376 ❙Gunewardena
the tensions evident in the competing constructions of gender held by
local communities, state bureaucrats, and the administrative cadre of the
transnational agribusiness firm Booker Tate and how they intersect with
deepening class cleavages that have emerged through the cash-crop econ-
omy as these processes work in tandem to redefine gender norms and
relations. Women’s struggles against such forces may be curtailed by brutal
state repression of local rebellions in the political turmoil and ethnic strife
that Sri Lanka has been engulfed in over the past three decades.
8
As elsewhere—for example, in Latin America (see Arizpe and Botey
1987; Deere 1990, 2005; Hamilton 2000), India (see Ganguly 2003),
Africa, and China—Sri Lanka’s previous efforts in commercial agricultural
development (e.g., the Mahaweli irrigation and resettlement project) have
misconstrued or blatantly ignored the gender constructs in rural areas,
including women’s productive contributions and decision-making roles.
9
Swarna Jayaweera, Malsiri Dias, and Nedra Weerakoon Goonewardene
(1994) and my own field research in the Mahaweli have revealed the ill-
informed bifurcation of spheres of production by Mahaweli administrators
(males to the primary agricultural activities and women to homestead
activities) evident in gender-specific land allocation patterns.
10
As in the
Mahaweli, at PSC too settlers are allocated a plot for the primary crop
(rice in the Mahaweli and sugarcane at PSC), which is expected to be the
primary responsibility of a male head of household, and a separate parcel
of land for the homestead, which includes an area for home garden crops,
assigned as women’s domain. This strategy of land allocation alone has
proved to be disempowering for women since their assignment to home-
stead production came to be associated with a subordinate role in the
marital relationship, leading to a social devaluation of women’s economic
contributions. Contravening the prevailing recognition of dual/shared
headship across the Dry Zone areas of Sri Lanka that evidence Kandyan
customs, such presumptions about male headship have led to expectations
8
A rebellion initiated by youth of the rural underclasses that gripped Sri Lanka from the
late 1980s until the early 1990s was centered in the southeastern region.
9
Several procedures associated with the Mahaweli project have been documented to have
overlooked customary practices and thus have diminished preexisting sources of social and
economic autonomy for women. For example, land titles to resettled householdswere granted
to male household heads, effectively reducing women’s access to land, capital (needed to
purchase agricultural inputs), and agricultural services.
10
Between 1990 and 1992, in my role as the gender consultant for the Mahaweli Ag-
riculture and Rural Development project, I collected data on women’s productive activities,
documented in two technical reports (Gunewardena 1990, 1992).
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S I G N S Winter 2010 ❙377
of female dependence.
11
As a result, extension knowledge and technology,
credit, and marketing assistance were channeled to male settlers, while
women were provided training solely on supplemental income-earning
activities on their homestead allotments.
12
I demonstrate the manner in which globalized and neotraditional pa-
triarchy, in the form of national development authorities and global agri-
business, collude and share culpability in this process. As with other global
commodities (see Haugerud, Stone, and Little 2000), the power vested
in global agribusiness and neoliberal state directives, as well as the value
assigned to a food commodity juxtaposed with the marginal symbolic and
economic value assigned to the rural periphery, shape the experiences of
women drawn into the sugar economy in Sri Lanka. These dynamics are
also complicated by the colonial and postcolonial histories of the sugar-
producing regions of Sri Lanka and by the way gender has been inscribed
in these convoluted trajectories.
The history of sugar in Sri Lanka
Historically, sugarcane was cultivated on a noncommercial basis in rural
home gardens in the arid southeastern and northern regions of the coun-
try; it served as a sweetener for villagers without easy access to markets
that sold refined white sugar imported from Cuba and elsewhere or to
the unrefined local sweetener called jaggery (hakuru in Sinhala) derived
from the fishtail palm (kitul in Sinhala). Unlike the four-hundred-year
history of commercial sugar production in the Caribbean, large-scale sugar
production in Sri Lanka dates back only to the 1960s, when state-spon-
sored, low-technology sugar mills were established in the southeast. Their
inability to reap high yields led to curtailed operations. The Pelwatte Sugar
Corporation was established in 1981 during the era referred to as the
Open Economy, and commercial operations began in June 1986 under
the management of Booker Tate, the biggest international sugar specialist
11
The Kandyan region constitutes an ethnohistorically contiguous area extending from
the central highlands across much of what is referred to as the Dry Zone of Sri Lanka, where
a distinct set of social customs and organization prevailed, documented (Knox [1681] 1983)
as providing significant sources of gender autonomy through codification in Kandyan law.
12
The male cadre of (Ministry of Agriculture) extension officers in the Mahaweli scheme
and at PSC made glib assertions that female extension officers were unnecessary because
male farmers would share extension information with their wives.
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378 ❙Gunewardena
in the world.
13
Domestic sugar ventures were envisioned as part of the
government’s adoption of import substitution, meant to save valuable
foreign currency, and coincided with the severance of ties with Cuba, Sri
Lanka’s long-term sugar supplier. Ironically, another purported reason for
embarking on the agroindustrial production of sugarcane was to spur the
development of the impoverished southeastern regions.
The field site: Pelwatte Sugar Corporation
Located in the southeastern district of Moneragala, the most impoverished
district on the island, PSC incorporated over eight thousand hectares
(approximately 17,600 acres) of land.
14
Two decades later, it is considered
the primary commercial sugar production operation in Sri Lanka today.
At its inception, PSC boasted of generating employment for over three
thousand employees and an additional field labor force of over six thou-
sand seasonal or casual workers and was slated to meet 74 percent of the
sugar production capacity of the country. To date, PSC has been able to
generate only approximately 10 percent of domestic sugar needs (Asian
Development Bank 2002).
The PSC was established on state land that had been “occupied” pri-
marily by Sinhala populations who practiced shifting cultivation for gen-
erations.
15
In order for PSC to be established, many members of this
population were classified as illegal squatters and ousted, while those with
lease documents were coaxed and cajoled to resettle on the sugar plan-
tation. Many resigned themselves to relocating deeper into the nearby
jungle or were evicted.
The process of assessing compensation made to these farming house-
holds, including the calculation of value for the land, fruit, and vegetable
crops, entailed a great deal of duplicity and manipulation, also furthering
these households’ economic vulnerabilities. Home garden crops, including
fruit-bearing coconut, papaya, mango, lime, and so on, which were a
source of seasonal supplementary income, were assigned meager and ar-
13
The phrase “Open Economy” refers to the economic liberalization program that al-
lowed private investment capital and was adopted by the fiscally and sociopolitically conser-
vative government that came in to power in 1977, the United National Party.
14
Poverty in Moneragala is due to its harsh ecoclimatic conditions and bureaucratic/
political negligence. It records the highest unemployment, malnutrition, and subsistence
insecurity rates in the country today. At its inception, PSC had 52 percent government
ownership and Booker Tate, jointly with Kerry Engineering, had 48 percent ownership.
15
Under the prevailing Crown Lands Ordinance, this land was deemed state-owned land
and generally interpreted as accessible freehold to the public.
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S I G N S Winter 2010 ❙379
bitrary values and assessed as low as 250 rupees (approximately US$2)
each. Assessors entrusted with this task often negotiated or pressured
villagers to agree to minimal amounts, a strategy that further reduced the
total compensation received while serving as a reminder of the villagers’
vulnerability to the power represented by PSC. The promise of lucrative
returns from cane was used to convince this population to resettle on the
PSC estate. Incorporated as settlers, they were allocated two hectares (ap-
proximately four acres) of land for sugarcane and homestead plots of half
an acre each. Many resettled householders complained of the stony, virtually
uncultivable plots of land, unsuitable for any form of farming, that they
were allocated. By contrast, the former bed of an ancient reservoir that
clearly contained the most fertile land on the site was chosen as the location
of PSC’s nucleus estate where experimental trials that helped identify the
best cultivation practices and optimal inputs of water, fertilizer, and pesti-
cides ensured a constant supply of cane to assure a production flow.
In a politically appealing move, individuals selected through a land
lottery from the land-scarce southern provinces were also allocated land
on PSC. Caste and occupational differences, divergent livelihood strate-
gies, differences in exposure to urbanization, and contrasting gender ide-
ologies between these settlers and those from the preexisting villages char-
acterized the social dynamics of the settlement area. Southern settlers long
assimilated into colonial and postcolonial social customs had a tendency
to look down upon the locals as unrefined and underdeveloped. Their
alignment with PSC’s primarily male, urban, educated administrative cadre
culminated in further validating the emerging gender reconfigurations and
disparities.
Commoditized sugar, commodified labor
The history of capitalism is replete with instances of labor commodification
driven by the dogged preoccupation with maximizing profits. As con-
firmed by a recent International Labor Organization report (Pigott 2003),
strategies of labor deployment seen at PSC were common in the priva-
tization of sugar production in the 1990s in many developing nations:
“Many sugar mills in developing countries have switched to ‘outgrowers’
or ‘independent growers’ to raise their cane, which eliminates their need
to hire often well-paid workers” (Pigott 2003, 3). The outgrower scheme
assures a steady supply of cane for the ongoing operation of the sugar
refinery at PSC and transfers the production risks to the outgrower. While
the settlement scheme, on the other hand, is designed to augment the
labor supply, settlers’ lack of title to the land they cultivate as lessees on
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380 ❙Gunewardena
PSC land, their lack of choice in the plot allocated to them, and their
indebtedness to PSC for the capital required for land clearing, seed cane,
and agricultural inputs (as discussed below) adds other layers of risk that
have left many destitute.
Sri Lanka’s colonial history informs us that a strong sense of peasant
independence has made labor a fickle commodity. British colonial au-
thorities, for example, found it extremely difficult to recruit labor from
the Sinhala peasantry for work on tea plantations. As a result, a “coolie”
(a term commonly used to refer to manual workers of Indian origin or
descent, traced back to the Hindi word for day laborer) labor force was
imported from neighboring southern India—the Tamil estate laborers—
who to date form a disenfranchised and extremely impoverished popu-
lation on Sri Lanka’s postcolonial tea plantations. The perception of wage
labor as a degrading condition has persisted in a tradition of resistance to
kuli (wage) work. As a result, PSC faced a challenge to meet the extensive
labor needs of sugar cultivation. The mechanism of dispossessing sur-
rounding communities of their land was instrumental in drawing the much
needed labor force into PSC.
Women were thus drawn into the field labor force on the PSC cane
lands from the ranks of the landless farmers in the nearby countryside.
Their landlessness derived either from being ousted from the land they
occupied because they did not possess a title deed when PSC took over
state-owned land that was considered freehold land or from their loss of
land as a result of a combination of lost or damaged harvests and the
cycle of indebtedness. Women who are widowed, abandoned, or “di-
vorced” form another category of wage laborers.
16
Household poverty,
then, is the primary reason women resort to wage labor. Changes in the
social organization of production set in motion by the expropriation of
land by PSC have therefore had a direct impact on compelling women
to become wage laborers on company-owned sugar land. The sugar econ-
omy in Sri Lanka thus provides an interesting case study to understand
the commodification of labor, particularly women’s labor.
It is now well established that colonial plantation economies resorted
to the classic tactic of taxation as a method of dispossessing peasants of
their subsistence cultivation landholdings, a strategy complemented by
the clearing of forest reserves for plantation crops (Bandarage 1983; Chat-
terjee 2001). Coercive labor regimes that disempowered local populations
16
Since many conjugal unions were not formally registered in this region of Sri Lanka,
I have placed “divorced” within quotation marks to signify the commonly accepted practice
of dissolution of conjugal relationships.
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S I G N S Winter 2010 ❙381
socially and economically were an inherent part of these schemes. As in
colonial tea plantations, colonial states involved in sugar production im-
plemented a range of efforts to subordinate land and labor to sugar’s
intense requirements. As Pal Ahluwalia, Bill Ashcroft, and Roger Knight
(1999) argue, the nexus of subordination was formally broken only in the
second half of the twentieth century, leaving a potent legacy of colonialism
that echoed the patterns of class differentiation, proletarianization, and dis-
possession of indigenous populations in the respective colonized states.
Similar processes are evident in a postcolonial era in the way global agri-
businesses, many (including Booker Tate) with ties to former colonial en-
terprises, expropriated land, albeit with the sanction of the neoliberal state.
17
Since the sugarcane plots allocated to them are under a lease agreement,
settlers on PSC land also experience a great deal of insecurity in tenancy
on the sugar estate. Settler households that experience a bad crop one
season, for example, and fall behind on their lease payments become en-
trapped in a cycle of debt. Some households that were leased uncultivable,
stony land from the outset found themselves falling deeper into debt each
subsequent season as they had to put out money for the seed cane, fer-
tilizer, and land-clearing costs. Many were ultimately forced to sell or
relinquish their land and thus rendered landless. Similar processes of pro-
letarianization are seen in colonial and postcolonial sugar production in
Java (see Knight 2000), Fiji (see Shameem 1990), and the Caribbean (see
Tomich 1991). According to an estimate by one settler, 80 percent of
settler households provide field labor for the PSC cane lands. These wage
laborers provide the bulk of the labor on the sugar estate, tending to the
daily routine of clearing, planting, weeding, and harvesting the cane fields
under the most exploitative labor conditions. The relative lack of bar-
gaining power of these groups has left them vulnerable to conceding to
the terms of the capital-labor equation as determined by PSC.
This classic tactic of separating direct producers from the means of
production made the survival of chena (slash-and-burn or shifting agri-
culture) farmers extremely insecure in Sri Lanka since many had little
knowledge of the technical (agronomic) aspects of sugar cultivation, and
as settlers on PSC land they had to rely exclusively on sugar income to
17
The fact that Booker Tate’s parent company, Booker Plc., is referred to as a “company
inextricably linked to Europe’s imperialist past” (company profile online, http://www.reference
forbusiness.com/history2/94/Booker-plc.html), given its history of sugar and rum busi-
nesses in colonial British Guyana, makes for an unsettling prediction about its contemporary
practices. See also Mintz (1986), Shlomowitz (1984), and Bosma and Knight (2004) for
documentation on land appropriation and labor practices in the global sugar industry.
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382 ❙Gunewardena
meet all subsistence needs. Accustomed to steady, albeit small bits of
income and home garden crops to supplement their subsistence needs,
settlers on PSC found it challenging to accommodate a shift to the four-
teen-month harvesting cycle of sugarcane that meant sporadic income.
Those who managed their income well emerged relatively unscathed from
this process, while settlers who were less effective at stretching their in-
comes over fourteen months became heavily indebted, and many were
converted into a wage labor force—either working the land of other cane-
growing households or seeking employment in the nucleus sugar area
under the direct operation of PSC.
De-essentializing gender in Sri Lanka: Ruptures and departures
The shifts in gender roles and relations brought about by agricultural glob-
alization is of particular concern to Southeast Asia, where age-old patterns
of complementary and relatively egalitarian gender relations are increasingly
eroded by the commercialization of production (Ong 1987).
18
While the
island nation of Sri Lanka is physically located in South Asia, customary
practices in Sinhala society evidence continuities with Theravada Buddhist
notions of gender and personhood (Dewaraja 1999) prevailing across
Southeast Asia. Kandyan Law, the local code that governed social relations
across vast expanses of the interior, from the seat of the ancient kingdom
of Kandy in the highlands and over the landmass known as the Dry Zone,
included many provisions instrumental in ensuring women’s autonomy.
Bilateral inheritance, cross-cousin marriage, and neolocal residence pat-
terns encoded in Kandyan Law assured women’s continued ties with their
consanguine kin and served as a source of economic, social, and personal
security for women, evidencing the gender parity I allude to above. A
woman’s right to retain her last name and to represent herself in a court
of law feme sole are also symbolic of the relative legal and economic au-
tonomy inscribed in Kandyan codes of law.
19
While colonial reforms (the
introduction of Roman Dutch law and British proscriptions on Kandyan
marriage, land ownership, and inheritance laws) dramatically transformed
many of these sources of autonomy, their hold over the remote rural
18
See n. 2 on gender parity.
19
The last name in the Kandyan area, usually referred to as the ge name (Sinhala term
for family or clan) is derived from a title held by a male ancestor, a place of origin, or another
distinguishing feature of the family. The prefixed ge name is carried on by all descendants,
male and female.
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S I G N S Winter 2010 ❙383
periphery was less tenacious given the distance of these areas from the
colonial centers of power.
Contemporary gender constructs in Sri Lanka (e.g., expectations of
domesticity, purity, virginity, and respectability; de Alwis 1997) are shaped
by a confluence of forces: Victorian gender codes popularized during the
colonial era (Grossholtz 1984; de Alwis 1997); tempered strands of the
Brahmanic scale of values (Obeyesekere 1984); the Buddhist revival move-
ments of the 1800s (Obeyesekere 1997), which promoted puritanical
gender ideals; and globalization processes; as well as the oft-forgotten
influence of indigenous gender codes.
20
Because much of the recent lit-
erature on Sri Lanka has concentrated on the plight of urban and periurban
women, the unique gender constructs in indigenous and rural areas be-
yond dominant constructions of gender have been rendered invisible.
Recent studies that explore women’s experiences in the globalized man-
ufacturing sector (Lynch 1999; Gamburd 2000; Hewamanne 2003) cite
women’s resourcefulness in negotiating space between the prevailing nor-
mative gender codes and an emerging agentive class consciousness. Con-
trary to these findings, and in line with scholars who caution against the
dangers of romanticizing resistance, my research has unearthed the serious
constraints imposed by the increasing poverty and structural constraints
of agroindustrial labor on the agentive assertions of women incorporated
into PSC.
21
The hegemonic structuring of gender prevalent in contemporary Sri
Lankan society has also been shaped by the intersection of recent con-
structions of class and citizenship emergent in the globalization processes
that the country has been entangled in over the past two decades. Women’s
labor migrations to the Persian Gulf countries as domestic workers since
the 1980s and their extensive participation in transnational manufacturing
in Sri Lanka’s export processing zones have also led to interesting recon-
figurations, altered expectations, and stringent stipulations pertaining to
ideals of conduct and gender relations.
22
Yet another factor that has com-
plicated the fluidity of gender constructions in recent times is the revival
20
Gananath Obeyesekere (1984) notes that although India’s orthodox Brahmanic gender
codes—which emphasize female virginity at marriage, chastity, complete devotion by a wife
to her husband, submissiveness, and humility—have diffused to the south, local institutional
features of Buddhist strictures mitigate their strict adoption.
21
On the dangers of romanticizing resistance, see Abu-Lughod (1990), Fernandes
(1997), and Gunewardena (2007c).
22
For discussions of the redemarcations of gender ideologies in Sri Lanka’s export
processing zones, see Rosa (1994), Lynch (1999), Hewamanne (2003), and Gunewardena
(2007a).
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384 ❙Gunewardena
of Sinhala nationalist ideologies mobilized in the context of the ethnic
conflict that has gripped Sri Lanka for over three decades as a means of
demarcating legitimacy in the contested terrains of nationalism and po-
litical power (Obeyesekere 1992; de Alwis 1997; Marecek 2000). None-
theless, their continued social and physical distances from urban centers
of political and economic power have limited the hold of such hegemonic
constructions in the southeastern region. We may surmise, then, that the
emergent forms of gender subordination evident today in this part of the
country can be attributed primarily to the gendered construction of power
in the operations of sugar agribusinesses.
Gender parity in chena farming systems
The gender constructs among villages practicing shifting agriculture (re-
ferredtoashen in Sinhala, anglicized as chena) reflect a high degree of
parity evidenced also in swidden farming systems elsewhere. This is partly
due to the local meanings invested in the labor arrangements of chena
cultivation, in which women’s work is considered essential and valuable.
It may also be related to the adoption of Kandyan Law through inter-
marriage with indigenous residents by Kandyan villagers who fled the harsh
repercussions of the rebellion of 1818. Such gender parity is evidenced
in several social norms and practices: complementary gender division of
labor, the explicit valuation of women’s contributions to household pro-
duction activities, joint decision making in household affairs, joint house-
hold headship, exclusive assignment of household fund management to
women, equal property inheritance rights for women and men, women’s
right to an independent income from their land even within a marriage,
and the absence of dowry and associated expectations of virginity and
chastity.
Gender parity in productive work is captured in a local concept called
karata-kara (a Sinhala term, literally meaning shoulder-to-shoulder). This
notion embodies the complementary tasks assigned to a conjugal pair and
the parallel responsibilities they bear in sustaining the household. In ad-
dition to role complementarity in the gender division of labor, the notion
of karata-kara also embodies the value attached to women’s productive
contributions, considered essential for chena. While karata-kara signifies
the partnership between a couple in production activities, the related
arrangement of dual household headship, maha denna (two household
heads in Sinhala), captures the partnership in household decision making
sans gender privileging that is prevalent across the Dry Zone not only in
the southeast but also in the north-central provinces of Sri Lanka. Yet
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S I G N S Winter 2010 ❙385
another source of economic autonomy derives from the role allocated to
women in managing common household funds and recognition of them
as better money managers. Finally, women experience no restrictions on
their physical mobility and participate extensively in household decision
making.
Bitter spaces: Fields of power, fields as power
Undermining preexisting sources of gender parity among subsistence-
cultivating communities in the southeastern region of Sri Lanka, the in-
troduction of a gender-stratified labor hierarchy at PSC has led to the
emergence of hitherto nonexistent forms of gender disparities. The power
relations inscribed in such a hierarchical gender division of labor have led
to the erosion of the practices discussed above that served as sources of
women’s autonomy. One mechanism that has permitted this process is
the official status and relative power held by members of the PSC ad-
ministration as representatives of the state and bearers of national devel-
opment agendas. Their social location vis-a`-vis local communities invested
them with a certain salience and credibility as the forces of modernity
through which hierarchical gender norms and roles gained currency. This
in turn placed a tacit pressure on local settlers to acquiesce to these gender
norms and practices, lest they be branded as socially backward, a stig-
matized caricature of the more socially conservative rural populations,
often portrayed as hesitant to embrace the trappings of modern attire and
social conventions. Because of their efforts to avoid such pejorative char-
acterizations, attempts to acquiesce to these so-called modern gender
norms and practices have become more and more common among local
populations.
Furthermore, in stark contrast to the gender norms prevailing among
the subsistence villages of the Uva region, southern settlers on PSC lands
held a sharp gender-hierarchical concept of male household headship.
Because of the relative social power held by more “modernized” south-
erners, joint headship came to be perceived as an ancient (read: backward
or primitive) custom. When I queried settler women on the institution
of joint household headship, the response was one of embarrassment,
given the association of these traditional vestiges with stigmatized non-
modernity. This trend evidences the hegemonic hold of dominant versions
of gender and related discourses that have gained currency among settler
households, given their extensive incorporation into the fields of power
embodied in PSC. Even though women’s labor is crucial on estate cane
fields, it has become devalorized as unskilled, unproductive, and secondary
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386 ❙Gunewardena
and, as a result, has been underremunerated and newly subordinated to
regulation by male supervisors. Because of the interconnectedness of the
spheres of social reproduction and production, and because of the re-
configurations in the gender division of labor associated with PSC and its
powerful social and financial location, these labor processes have led to a
wider gendered production of power in the local social context.
Labor processes and organization
PSC employs a near-exclusive female labor force for the arduous and lower
status work of planting, weeding, and harvesting cane. Throughout the
fourteen-month cultivation cycle of sugarcane, groups of women workers
bent over digging sticks, hoes, and machetes are visible on the PSC cane
fields. Apart from the monotony and physical exertion involved, especially
in cane cutting, the daylong exposure to the harsh tropical sun was one
of the impositions that women I interviewed reported as the most difficult
to bear. “We start cane work as young women and have aged ten more
[years] by the end of the season,” remarked one woman, stretching out
her arms to reveal the darkened contours and emerging furrows on her
skin. “Even though most of us cover our heads and wear long-sleeved
shirts, there is no way to escape the searing sun,” added another. “Try
slicing onions and chilies for the night meal after these gashes,” exclaimed
another, referring to the unavoidable cuts and scrapes women incur from
the sharp, needle-like protrusions at the edge of the sheaf of cane.
The women cane cutters I interviewed also informed me that initially,
at the launch of PSC, the field labor was largely male. After an incident
where a group of men armed with cutting knives confronted the PSC
administration about wage inequities and labor conditions, new policies
were introduced that mandated the return of cutting knives at the end
of the day and the recruitment of a presumably less volatile female labor
force. Other low-status work for which women are recruited includes
clerical and secretarial work in the administrative operations of PSC and
work as sugar packers or the cleaning crew in the sugar factory.
Men, on the other hand, have been incorporated into more diverse,
higher-status occupational categories in the fields (e.g., as supervisors and
researchers), in the refining plant, and in administrative work. They there-
fore dominate the occupational hierarchy in the field, the factory, and the
administrative offices of PSC. Male labor is exclusively deployed in the
middle- and higher-level administrative roles and in the lower echelon of
field administration (manning the field offices responsible for land clearing,
timely harvesting, and other tasks that ensure the smooth operation of
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S I G N S Winter 2010 ❙387
the annual cycle of cane production). Only men are hired as machine
operators and tractor drivers, given the responsibility for “technical” tasks
such as spraying fertilizer, charged with the distribution and collection of
the cutting knives used by women cane cutters, and assigned the super-
vision of workers in the cane fields.
One of the most striking distinctions between the cane fields at PSC
and the feeder cane land owned by surrounding villagers is the tense silence
on the former and the cacophony of voices on the latter, sprinkled with
the occasional shout to a child to stop chewing on a cane stalk, a “hoo
hoo” call to a neighbor on an adjacent plot, and the sound of raucous
laughter among women exchanging jokes to break the tedium of work.
Family and kin labor deployed in the latter context relies on the reciprocal
labor institution (attam in Sinhala) common throughout Dry Zone vil-
lages that lends to the conviviality of the work site. By contrast, the pres-
ence of a supervisor monitoring the pace of work, directing stern ad-
monishments, and effectively controlling the labor process makes work
on the sugar estate fraught with tension.
The silence on PSC sugar fields is only interrupted by the sound of the
wind swishing through the cane grass, the distant whir of the mechanical
arm of a cane-loading machine lifting the bundles of cane cut by women
wage workers into a conveyance bin, and the occasional instructions barked
out by an impatient supervisor. The difference in the gender composition
of the labor force adds the final stamp of distinction between these two
sites, with village-grown cane drawing in any available labor, regardless of
gender, while women wage workers predominate on the cane fields at PSC.
Ironically, in my interviews with PSC managerial staff, they indicated
a preference for women field workers because of an alternate construction
of women workers as hard-working, easy to manage (discipline and con-
trol), and more compliant (submissive). Managerial discourses that con-
struct women as a group that can be subjugated easily add to the emerging
local discourses that construct women as powerless. These parallel dis-
courses prevail in a delicate tension and inform us of how women subjects
are newly constituted to reflect current relations of power. Ultimately, the
exclusive reliance on women as field laborers reflects more than an oc-
cupational division of labor. It speaks to the power inflected in the po-
sitions of authority allocated to men and to women’s disempowerment
in the process.
The labor contract on agroindustrial sugar in Sri Lanka
The labor contract for women field workers is tenuous in that it offers
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388 ❙Gunewardena
no work security or permanence. Hired as seasonal casual laborers, women
perform the majority of the unskilled, nonmechanized, backbreaking, te-
dious, and repetitious jobs like planting, weeding, and harvesting, which
are low in the occupational hierarchy but essential for sugar cultivation.
The authoritarian role of a male supervisor functions as the primary tool
to extract maximal productivity. These women are paid on the basis of
unit harvested, weeded, or cleared, individualized tasks that isolate them
from one another—a distinct difference from the team harvesting systems
in traditional villages. Traveling into fields at dawn from adjacent villages,
women field workers are given their implements (cutting knives, hoes,
etc.) and expected to return them at the end of the day in exchange for a
signature on a time card that assures them of their meager monthly pay.
Their discipline and control is predicated on the argument surrounding the
importance of timing in cane operations, and the exploitative tactics such
as low wages rest on the supposedly socially marginal status of women.
Wage inequities are one aspect of the gender-differential patterns of
labor exploitation in sugar production. Women workers in the sugar fields
of PSC earn substantially less, partly because they are classified as field
hands, whereas men occupy supervisory positions. Even in the rare in-
stances when men participate in cane cutting, however, men’s wages av-
erage 175–200 rupees per day, far above women’s wages of 100–150
rupees per day, a pattern evident in colonial sugar plantations in the Ca-
ribbean (Rodney 1981) and elsewhere.
Aside from the basic injustice of inequitable wage standards and the
neglect of minimum daily wage stipulations, the financial dependence on
men conferred on women as a result of such wage practices is also im-
plicated in women’s subordination. Reversing their previous standing as
valued contributors of critical labor power in chena cultivation of subsis-
tence crops, women’s economic dependence on the larger wage package
earned by men has led to the erosion of women’s sense of autonomy.
This process has also contributed to the emergence of a notion of women’s
social dependence on men and an ideology of women’s inability to fend
for themselves.
A related paradoxical consequence of the emerging gender-stratified
labor force is that despite the preponderance of women in the cane fields,
laboring long hours in the hot sun, local discourse about cane work has
begun to construct women as physically vulnerable. Reflecting notions
that are wholly contradictory to the reality, such discourses depict women
as incapable of bearing the tedium of laboring in the cane fields or of
coping with the dangers of elephant encroachment.
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S I G N S Winter 2010 ❙389
Bitter talk: Discourses of dependence
Contravening the visible evidence of women workers toiling in the estate
cane fields year round, a new discourse has emerged that constructs women
as physically weak and unable to protect themselves from the dangers
inherent in cane work. One male settler captured these sentiments as
“woman’s inability to extricate herself from assault by man or beast”
(referring to women’s vulnerability to predatory males and elephant en-
croachment on the cane fields). In this discourse, cane fields are con-
structed as dangerous terrain unsuitable for helpless women who need
the protection afforded by male kin who are superior in physical strength.
While these assessments appear to be articulated within a stance of pro-
tectiveness, such discourses of female vulnerability allude more to emerg-
ing constructions of female dependence, at once social, economic, and
physical. The freedom of movement that women enjoyed in their villages
of origin is not available in the settler villages of PSC. Women settlers I
interviewed registered fear of the dangers of sexual violation as well as
the taint to their morality as a serious concern that restricted their physical
mobility. Nonetheless, women’s strategic deployment of the emerging
discourses that depicted them as powerless and dependent evidences their
agentive efforts in this context.
“I am but a woman, I don’t know how to manage these things,” claimed
one very capable settler woman bemoaning the loss of her sugar harvest as
a result of a brush fire in the settler cane fields. Her effort to characterize
herself as a woman with limited power in the social context of the PSC
sugar estate and the new sugar economy reveals the insidious ways in
which the discursive construction of gender-role expectations work and
are strategically manipulated by some women. This strategy was useful
not only to highlight her plight in this situation but also to enlist the help
of the PSC administrative hierarchy in resolving her dilemma. Even though
her demeanor and conduct conveyed personal strength and courage, the
verbalization of helplessness served her as an instrumental tactic because
it was consonant with the powerlessness she was expected to display.
Women’s internalization of such characterizations affords them a measure
of security given that the cane fields of PSC have become a site for priv-
ileging male social and physical power. While the discursive production
of female vulnerability aims to create a new form of female dependence,
women often resorted to a seeming acquiescence in their efforts to salvage
some social and economic gains.
Constructing women as helpless subjects in the cane fields has had a
spillover effect in the domestic arena, where women’s financial contri-
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390 ❙Gunewardena
butions are increasingly dismissed as insignificant by males who claim sole
household headship. These ideas extend also to reduced participation in
household decision making as men claim that, too, as a strictly male do-
main and deride women’s ability to make effective decisions pertaining
to household matters. The emergence of this discourse has represented a
dilemma for low-income households hovering at the edge of poverty,
which cannot withhold women’s labor from wage work because of the
financial contribution it makes to the household. Among better-off settler
households, however, the tendency has been to pull women out of the
field labor force, prompting the estate management to seek women’s labor
from distant, more impoverished villages.
Bitter sweet: The lure of riches and the lessons of resource depletion
As many settlers at PSC soon learned, the agrophysiology of sugarcane is
such that, as a monoculture, it depletes large amounts of soil nutrients
(Hartemink and Wood 1998), requiring incremental additions of fertilizer
inputs with each successive planting cycle in order to secure and sustain
high yields. These include costly biocides to control pests and diseases,
herbicides to control weeds, and inorganic fertilizer, applied according to
the quantities specified by PSC horticultural experts at various points in the
twelve- to fourteen-month maturation cycle of sugarcane. Even with the
application of the scientifically determined quantities of inputs, unpredict-
able factors such as inadequate rainfall in a given year can result in low crop
yields. In the sample of 130 settler households from which I collected
production data, 84 percent had documented evidence of harvesting be-
tween 176 and 325 tons of sugarcane in 1986. In the subsequent harvest
of 1987, 89 percent had harvested under 100 tons of cane. In addition
to the outlay of cash required for harvesting and delivery, settler house-
holds also faced other charges levied by PSC for the lease of their cane
plot, land development, land preparation, and establishment of the ratoon
crop. Since these require advance cash at the beginning of the cultivation
cycle, most settler households rely on a loan secured from PSC at a com-
mercial interest rate (12.5 percent in 1987). A decade later, the interest
rate had climbed to the prevailing 18 percent. Many settler households also
secure funds in advance for the labor they need to hire to bring in the cane
harvest. Given the biophysiology of sugarcane, harvesting must be under-
taken in a timely manner in order to maximize economic returns, that is,
to safeguard against the rapid depletion of sucrose content and ensure
immediate delivery to the sugar mill. The statements of accounts that settlers
shared with me revealed that by the time the various charges are deducted,
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S I G N S Winter 2010 ❙391
they either have very little income or in many instances have incurred a
further debt to PSC. After repeated debt cycles, these settler households
are converted to those relying primarily on wage labor as a means of survival.
An additional concern registered by settlers I interviewed had to do
with what they perceived as unfair disparities in the agricultural extension
knowledge made available to them compared to that used in the cultivation
of the PSC nucleus estate, where the optimal procedures of horticultural
science were applied. Moreover, the fact that the nucleus estate was es-
tablished on the most fertile land in the area is another factor they attribute
to the pauperization processes they are experiencing.
Given the extensive labor requirements of sugarcane, the conversion
of PSC settlers to a reserve wage labor force is suggestive of a near-
purposive strategy by PSC management to enable its access to cheap labor
as and when necessary. The prohibitive costs of mechanical harvesting and
the initial capital outlay required for the machinery, equipment, and run-
ning costs, as well as the negative impacts on the biomass and ground
cover, further underscored the need for manual labor. The PSC’s resort
to the strategy of using women as the cheapest and most manageable
labor resource, with low wages and placement, has effectively served as a
disruptive and disempowering force for women in particular.
Conclusion
Contrary to the neoliberal claim that participation in commercial agri-
culture (capital moderated by the market principle) provides women a
source of independent income and serves as a source of empowerment,
the introduction of sugar as a transnational agribusiness into Sri Lanka’s
previously subsistence economies of Moneragala has had a detrimental
effect on women. Emergent gender reconfigurations and associated dis-
courses dismiss the contributions women make to household income
through their work on the cane fields, contrary to preexisting gender
constructs that assigned a high value to women’s roles and labor contri-
butions.
23
Given the structuring of gendered labor hierarchies and wage
differentials in globalized agriculture, a structure that mirrors that of trans-
national manufacturing, and the ideologies of dependence and subordi-
nation it summons, mere access to a source of income appears insufficient
23
On preexisting institutionalized forms of shared responsibility, see my discussion above
regarding karata-kara, joint household headship that allowed women’s extensive partici-
pation in household decision making on productive activities and the explicit acknowledgment
of women’s labor contributions among shifting agriculturalists.
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392 ❙Gunewardena
for empowering women. Moreover, focusing on income as the sole source
of autonomy and empowerment obviates an understanding of cultural
sources and bolsters the commodification of labor that capitalism relies
on to accelerate profit generation.
This article documents the shift in agricultural labor relations via the
gender hierarchical configuration of capitalist production relations ex-
emplified in commercial sugar production in southeastern Sri Lanka. De-
spite the relatively high degree of preexisting gender parity in this region,
dominant conceptualizations of gender and notions of social hierarchy
mobilized and manipulated in the sugar economy have set in motion a
transformation of gender and labor relations and women’s social position.
I have traced the discursive production of distinctly gendered forms of
power that confer uneven privilege in the sugar economy to the structuring
of the sugar agribusiness PSC as a neoliberal capitalist enterprise that relies
on a cheap and manageable labor pool. While the practices associated with
appropriating land for PSC and the injudicious allocation of nonproduc-
tive land to settlers have worked in tandem to create a semiproletarianized
labor force, it is the circulation of disempowering gender ideologies in
the hiring practices and occupational structure of the sugar economy that
has proved to be most detrimental to women. The relative social status
and economic power vested in the PSC administration served as a dis-
cursive field for establishing a new form of gendered power relations. The
associated discourses constructed only partial truths about local social and
gender arrangements and cultivation practices, normalizing males as holding
preeminent roles in agricultural work, which subsequently led to women’s
increasing marginality, in contrast to men’s growing centrality in the sugar
economy. Ironically, the tendency of rural populations to emulate the prac-
tices of the urban and middle classes in a struggle to overcome their marginal
social status has complicated these processes. Hegemonic gender constructs
and associated practices are increasingly subscribed to by rural populations
in attempts to shed their stigmatized social positioning in this deeply class-
polarized society.
24
This nexus is the route through which a transformation
of the preexisting gender parity has been made possible and the disem-
powerment of women has begun to take place.
International Development Studies, International Institute
University of California, Los Angeles
24
While ethnic and political polarities form additional axes of hierarchy in Sri Lanka, I
refrain from including these in the present analysis given that this research location was
primarily an ethnically homogeneous one.
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S I G N S Winter 2010 ❙393
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