ABSTRACT
The commoditization of life currently underway in rural India, represented in each of the above quotes, is a deeply gendered process. In this chapter, I use my conceptualization of feminist commodity chain analysis – a methodology which tracks the creation of value in global commodity circuits – to study the wide-ranging transformations unfolding in rural India. Feminist commodity chain analysis provides an account of why rural people consent to produce things, cotton seed in this instance, in modern ways – as contract farmers – why they desire and fi nd consuming modern things, like Ponds powder, pleasurable, and why they are simultaneously perplexed – troubled, unsure, hesitant – about these new practices. My purpose is twofold: fi rst, to delineate a feminist methodology to conceptualize how commodities work their way both materially and semiotically through commodity chains; second, at a time when the rural transformation in contemporary India is characterized as an “agrarian crisis” and a “rural resurgence,” I develop a more nuanced understanding of change as contradictory and experienced by people in its throes as perplexing. Through a case study – a feminist commodity chain analysis
of cotton seed in Andhra Pradesh – I show how commodity production and consumption are reconstituting gender relations, gender ideologies and gender identities in ways that both suit and exceed the logics of capital. “Agrarian crisis” and “rural resurgence” narratives of rural transformation in India do capture elements of truth; however, a feminist commodity chain analysis is necessary to understand how and to whom these characterizations apply, differentially, and how they fi t together.
