This study explores accounts of women engaging in sugarcane labor to replace lost household income in the wake of the devastating chronic kidney disease (CKD) epidemic among male sugar workers in northwestern Nicaragua. Results show that the simultaneous increase in women field laborers and shrinking supply of able-bodied men has transformed a once highly guarded masculine space—the sugarcane fields—and resulted in an emasculation of agriculture.
Findings are based on analysis of 48 in-depth interviews with households located in rural barrios in the municipality of Chichigalpa, Nicaragua, located 130 km from the capital city of Managua and considered the epicenter of the CKD epidemic in Nicaragua. Respondents were asked about life history, household livelihood strategies, the effects of CKD on household wellbeing, and their perceptions of the causes and consequences of CKD. Interviews were coded and analyzed in NVivo by first using an exploratory middle-ground approach followed by more focused thematic coding, resulting in the major theme “emasculation of agriculture.”
Understanding how globalized agriculture affects gender relations in vastly different spaces and contexts enables a reevaluation of simple and sedimented gender binaries within agricultural production to viewing gender relations as fluid and in constant conversation. By showing both (ill) men and (healthy) women performing newly feminized sugarcane field labor in the same historically situated space, I consider how local femininities and masculinities are deployed and reconfigured in order to make sense of swift changes in the gendered division of agricultural labor. Whereas women’s performance of traditional masculinity is supported by tropes of femininity, sick men experience an emasculation as they labor in newly feminized tasks, or are unable to labor at all. In this context, the feminization of agriculture, both in terms of women’s recent participation in sugarcane labor and the re-coding of certain tasks, is accompanied by an emasculation of agriculture that transforms gender identity and gender relations.
The data presented widens the analytical lens to bring men’s experiences back into view to examine the complexity of gender interrelationships in agriculture. The chronic kidney disease epidemic among sugarcane field laborers provides an opportunity to critically reflect on the ways in which global agrifood systems materialize at the local level and the implications of these localized effects for thinking about the fluidity of femininity and masculinity in agriculture. Additionally, research findings suggest that the new gendered division of sugarcane field labor functions to reinforce the structural conditions that underlie the chronic kidney disease epidemic.
