5:29pm October 6, 2014

“When we hear the word “farmer” we picture a man. You don’t say “Bob, the male farmer”, while it’s common to hear “Bob, the male nurse.” Because here farmer is “naturally” male and nurse is “naturally” woman. Yet, the U.N. says that 2/3 of the world’s food production is by women. In many societies, women as a gender equals the people who grow the food. Women are historically the farming class, to put it another way. But as soon as capitalist development infects agriculture, with farming as a cash export business, then the ruling class reassigns land and fanning to men as part of their gender identity. This isn’t dead history. It’s a transformation going on right now in tribal areas of lndia, in Zimbabwe, throughout the neo-colonialized Third World. Everywhere women are being driven of the land and Nature has nothing to do with it. Weren’t we once told by euro-capitalist culture that farming was naturally male (allegedly because of their physical strength), while being confined to unpaid domestic work in the house was natural to women? Neither role was ever “natural” in the slightest. Of course, as we know by the truth that they never applied to the Afrikan women and children who with Afrikan men actually did the back-breaking labor of growing much of amerikkka’s most profitable crops for centuries. In that sense, Afrikan women have always been defined by settler amerikkka not merely as less feminine, but as not being women at all. Existing as neither male nor female in white amerikkkan culture, Black women have been treated as being without human gender. As Toni Morrison has said, Black women have been viewed by amerikkka as part work animal and part reproducing machine.”

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