Latent alliances: the Women’s March and agrarian feminism as opportunities of and for political ecology

Abstract

On 21 January 2017, the day after a bitterly contested presidential inauguration, nearly 5 million women and men marched and protested in 673 places across the globe – under the banner of the Women’s March. The March exceeded and expanded expectations on many levels, from organizational projections to media classifications to scholarly analysis. One aspect of the March – and its ongoing repercussions – that has eluded attention is its latent links to and alliances with women-led agrarian movements underway in the United States and internationally. Rendering the March merely urban does a disservice to the subtle ways agricultural politics and even agrarian resistance permeated its political messages. I argue that a feminist political ecology analysis – particularly a postcolonial, intersectional one rooted in anti-racism and anti-classism and following the lead of Black agrarian womanism – helps elucidate the latent alignments between and among the Women’s March and transnational women-led agrarian movements, such as those of La Via Campesina. As such, the burgeoning field of feminist political ecology is well-equipped to help connect the applied intersectional visions at work in the Women’s March with those of agrarian feminist movements, even as this task provides an important intellectual opportunity for political ecology itself.