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.