Part 2
Rural and Indigenous women perform much of their agricultural activities as unpaid family members or as self-employed workers. A lot of this work has become mythologized as being a virtuous act (Limki, 2018), given the way it centres community care. However, this view provides a framework for the exploitation of women’s labour. Women not being paid for their labour within the home and environment to sustain their communities does not occur in a vacuum however, it has its genesis in colonialism. The colonial history of labour has seen unwaged work being performed by enslaved and colonized people, while waged work was seen as the realm of the white man. Non-Europeans were seen as ontologically similar to nature, setting the stage for both nature and the bodies of non-europeans to be exploited and dominated. Today, this remains an enduring effect of coloniality on nations such as Guyana which were colonised and where minoritized groups are still expected to perform unpaid labour for the benefit of others. Paying attention to how these systems of inequality related to race and gender were manifested through colonialism, rather than viewing it as structural or relational is necessary for a wider understanding of the coloniality of work and its impacts on colonized peoples. These relations of dominance and subjugation in work “manifests as class differentiation, but, more crucially, become intensified along lines of gender, sexual and racial difference,” (Limki, 2018, p. 327). This demonstrates the varying level of subjugation faced by women with intersecting identities that are intensified under relations of domination and exploitation. This makes the point that the marginalisation of diverse groups is not merely a structural effect but instead is an ontological effect of colonial modernity.
With agriculture being seen as an industry primarily aimed at building the mother colonies, when the colonial governments’ investment returns in the area began to slow, they did not see the necessity of improving the yields for subsistence agriculture. With the era of industrialization and emancipation from slavery acts being passed across the colonies, subsistence agriculture virtually disappeared, with women being the primary ones to sustain the sector. Given that there was also a shift from agriculture towards more wage labour as colonial societies progressed along the European tangent of modernity, many men within their rural and Indigenous communities would move to urban centres for wage labour or explore extractive industries with higher rates of pay, creating additional care requirements for women. This, in turn, led to subsistence labour becoming even more feminized, devalued and no longer seen as productive as waged labour. Within the pluriverse however, agricultural and care work is not guided by colonial modernity that dictates a natural progression from farm labour towards waged work, but rather acknowledges the importance of these various experiences and would ensure that they are well paid as they provide integral interconnected value to our world. While this type of growth might be considered non-modern through a colonial lens, utilizing an anti-colonial one will facilitate important acknowledgement that does not marginalize ecological, rural and Indigenous knowledge. It divests from growth as being unidirectional, arguing that growth can be omnidirectional.
Rural and Indigenous women in Guyana are predominantly impacted by unpaid care work tied to subsistence agriculture, further marginalizing them through time theft, lack of income, and invisibilizing their contributions towards the labour market. With rural and Indigenous women being primarily from marginalized identities, and the expectation of providing care labour still being persistent, it is apparent that the coloniality of work still affects how the labour of these women is viewed and valued. Subsistence labour in rural and Indigenous communities has become increasingly feminized due to patriarchal views surrounding women’s labour and connection to nature, increasing women’s care burden within their homes and communities. This particularly impacts urban and Indigenous women whose ancestors provided unwaged labour to the building of the former colonies they now call home. The persistence of this practise of unpaid subsistence labour is evidence of the maintained coloniality of work within formerly colonized nations such as Guyana, and its impacts on historically marginalized groups such as rural and Indigenous women.
