The gendered dimensions of an ‘herbicide revolution’: a feminist analysis of herbicide adoption in central India

• Herbicide adoption transforms women’s labor and rural gender relations. • A feminist lens reveals trade-offs in “labor-saving” agricultural change. • Herbicide use can erode women’s social spaces and ecological expertise. • “Drudgery” is context-specific and can devalue women’s unpaid labor. • Labor-saving tools like herbicide may not reduce women’s total workload. Across much of the world weeding has primarily been a form of feminized agricultural labor. As such the rapid spread of herbicides across India, and much of the global South, has significant implications for the ways that women’s labor is employed and valued in agrarian economies. Understanding these shifts is of critical importance given global calls for agroecological or environment-friendly agriculture that respects planetary boundaries. Drawing from feminist gender and technology literature, this paper sketches out the contours of these shifting labor regimes around weed economies, arguing that increased herbicide use is both cause and symptom of a broader shift in gendered socio-ecological relations. Drawing from qualitative and ethnographic data in eastern Madhya Pradesh, India, we argue that shifts in gender relations and new social entitlements have made herbicides a viable strategy to minimize one of the more arduous tasks of paddy production, weeding. However, while herbicides may “empower” some women by enabling them to reduce their weeding burden, these shifts are crosscut by class, ethnicity/caste, and capacity for mobility. This paper then traces out three ways that women are being ambiguously impacted by herbicide use in terms of social differentiation, skill, and spaces of socialization. We argue that spatiotemporal considerations are key and while herbicides may improve women’s lives in the short-term, they amount to a long-term deskilling of critical gendered ecological knowledge. We conclude by returning to calls for more environmentally sound agriculture and work to imagine how food systems could properly value the human labor of weeding.