Between the state and the yard: gender and political space in Haiti. Issue 9 (20th August 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Moore, Sophie Sapp
• Is Part Of: Gender, place and culture. Volume 28:Issue 9(2021)
• Page Start: 698
• Page End: 718
• Publication Date: 2021-08-20
• Subjects: Feminist geography -- Haiti -- political geography -- postcolonial -- social movement -- the state; Human geography -- Periodicals; Feminism -- Periodicals; Géographie féministe -- Périodiques; 305.305
• DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2020.1846500
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0966-369X

Abstract

Abstract: This article examines the gendered political geography of postcolonial Haiti. It draws from the author's long-term ethnographic fieldwork with the Mouvman Peyizan Papay (MPP), a peasants' movement established in 1973, to highlight the experience of rural women on Haiti's high Central Plateau. It mobilizes foundational work in feminist geography to address a lack of attention to the political in analyses of gender and rural life in Haiti. In so doing, it shows how militant women question and challenge patriarchal power in their daily negotiation and transformation of political space. This article proposes that women's practices of economic and sexual autonomy enact a vision of liberation that seeks to resolve the tension between the anticolonial and patriarchal dimensions of political power in Haiti. It first traces a political genealogy of the postcolonial Haitian state, and then shows how women have long been active, if unrecognized, participants in left political struggle. Next, it looks more broadly at how patriarchal power inflects agrarian space through gendered norms of property and personhood. Finally, it proposes the lakou (yard) as a space of transformation in relations between gender, land, and capital, and shows how women have cultivated and defended political space between the state and the yard.