Feminist Crops: A More-than-Human Concept for Advancing Feminist Crop Breeding for Development

Abstract

Gender matters in agriculture, and crop breeding teams are increasingly being asked to develop plant varieties that respond to the needs and preferences of men and women. Achieving gender-responsive crop breeding requires communication and cooperation across disciplines, not least between crop breeders and gender specialists. The coming together of plant sciences and gender studies necessitates novel ideas, concepts, and approaches that unite nature with culture and the material with the social. However, the development of such approaches is still in its infancy. Empirically grounded in experiences in and observations of social and natural scientists working at the intersection of gender and crop breeding in an African context, this article contributes to filling this gap by proposing the concept of the “feminist crop.” The feminist crop captures the entanglement of crops with women’s embodied practices, knowledges, capabilities, and power, and contributes to an ethico-onto-epistemological and methodological investigation of how intersectional gender identities and relations are embedded in plant–people entanglements. Using examples from banana, yam, and cassava, I explore how the feminist crop can expand the boundaries of how we think about agency, power, and empowerment in agriculture, as well as how plant genome editing grounded in the feminist crop concept may be used as a feminist tool to entangle plants and people in more socially just ways. Ultimately then, the feminist crop contributes to advancing feminist crop breeding.