This PhD thesis by Daun Cheong explores why social progress towards gender equality in agrarian societies remains slow by analysing policies, academic research, and empirical evidence of farmers’ lived experiences and their interrelationships, paying particular attention to the relationship between agricultural innovation and gendered agrarian labour.
It examines the impacts of innovation that extend beyond the technical and material, investigating the reconstruction and renegotiation of gender and labour dynamics, which ultimately shape the lived experiences of subsistence farmers. By employing post-structuralist feminist approaches, including feminist critical discourse analysis, social reproduction, and capabilities framed as relational autonomy, the thesis demonstrates the gender discourses produced by policies and research, the new subjectivities they construct and frame, and the processes through which they shape reality. Empirically, the research adopted a mixed method approach including micro-focus group discussions, surveys, key informant interviews, and systematic document reviews focusing on women subsistence farmers in Nepal’s Terai region.
In doing so, it provides a more nuanced and well-articulated understanding of the slow social progress towards gender equality in the agricultural and rural sectors. The slow progress can be attributed to several key factors: the dominant and narrow gender discourses produced by policies and research, which favour individualistic and isolated solutions over a systematic approach, and the lack of social and institutional recognition and support for social reproduction, which significantly limit women’s capabilities to translate the opportunities of agricultural innovation into their desired outcomes.
This study contributes to the literature by challenging the legitimacy of gender policies and unpacking how policies have problematised gender inequality in agriculture, thus paving the way for new directions in gender policy research. Building on and transcending existing debates that call for equal access and opportunities for women and highlight gender norms as constraining factors to progress in gender equality, this thesis explored what happens after participation. More specifically, it has shown that engagement in innovation creates a transitional space in which old and new subjectivities coexist and compete, and women perform both subjectivities at the expense of their well-being in navigating this new space of opportunity, subsidising production and reproduction with their additional labour.
This thesis argues that sustainable agriculture requires a focus on social sustainability alongside economically and environmentally viable solutions. This means moving beyond agricultural innovations that focus on production technologies and practices, and economic development that often relies on the subsidisation of women’s labour. More critically, it requires imagining, deliberating and exploring broadened, alternative and counter-hegemonic discourses towards transformative social change for gender equality and justice.
The defense of this thesis is October 1, 2025. For more info:
Rural Sociology Wageningen University 