Women’s Movement for Land and Livelihood: A Case Study of Odisha

Abstract

This chapter focuses on grassroots women's resistance and struggles against corporate and state power to save their livelihood sources in the state of Odisha. It deals with the significance of women's struggle and resistance against the state and corporate power to protect their land and livelihoods. The chapter looks at two movements and discusses women's agencies and emerging political voices in the State. A feminist reading of anti-globalization is aptly described by Mohanty, who argues for a intimate, closer alliance between women's movements, feminist pedagogy and cross-cultural feminist theorizing, inter-twinning questions of subjectivity, agency and identity with political economy and the state. Basu argues that women's movements can address a variety of goals unlike feminism but its constituencies are only female where as for feminism, its constituency can be both male and female. Ray argues, women's movements are shaped and influenced by political fields, which include actors such as the state, political parties, social movements, broader actors within civil society.