In the Law & On the Land: Finding the Female Farmer in Myanmar's National Land Use Policy

Abstract

This paper draws upon twelve months of activist research to examine Myanmar’s female farmer on the land and in the law. For rural women, the female farmer was an anomaly with emancipatory implications, one associated with a particular material conditions, social relations, and attitudes. In contrast, the female farmer in the National Land Use Policy text was a rights-bearing legal subject produced by a set of negotiations in which individuals acting as experts ‘rendered technical’ (Li 2007) distinct ontologies of land, law, and gender. Examining the production of and relationship between these representations helps problematize Myanmar’s contemporary political transition by providing an ethnographic entry point to chart shifting discourses and subjectivities