Cultivating Alternative Livelihoods Strategies and Gender Identities in Naga City, Philippines

Abstract

This paper examines how livelihood diversification and labour intensification in peri-urban areas are also sites in which gender relations are unsettled and (re)configured. With the aim of strengthening the links between feminist and agrarian change scholarship, I present an ethnographic account from Naga, a medium-size city in Bicol, Philippines, to explore how daily discourses and practices of livelihood change are implicated in (re)producing social identities along gender, as well as class and geographical, lines. In the first part of the paper, attention is devoted to the ways in which gender is constituted in the state policies and programs governing agrarian change. Drawing on policy documents and interviews with state officials, civil servants, local academics and NGO leaders, I highlight how local state practices and policies are both implicated in people’s tendency to diversify, and imbued with discourses that are inherently gendered. In the second part, the location and scale of analysis shift to one location expressive of these official discourses; Pacol, a small farming community located on Naga’s peri-urban fringe. Specifically, I consider how state-fed gendered discourses are (re)enacted in the process of livelihood diversification; how they are worked through in intrahousehold activities, decision-making and other performances.