Part 2
Rural and Indigenous women perform much of their agricultural activities as unpaid family members or as self-employed workers. A lot of this work has become mythologized as being a virtuous act (Limki, 2018), given the way it centres community care. However, this view provides a framework for the exploitation of women’s labour. Women not being paid for their labour within the home and environment to sustain their communities does not occur in a vacuum however, it has its genesis in colonialism. The colonial history of labour has seen unwaged work being performed by enslaved and colonized people, while waged work was seen as the realm of the white man. Non-Europeans were seen as ontologically similar to nature, setting the stage for both nature and the bodies of non-europeans to be exploited and dominated. Today, this remains an enduring effect of coloniality on nations such as Guyana which were colonised and where minoritized groups are still expected to perform unpaid labour for the benefit of others. Paying attention to how these systems of inequality related to race and gender were manifested through colonialism, rather than viewing it as structural or relational is necessary for a wider understanding of the coloniality of work and its impacts on colonized peoples. These relations of dominance and subjugation in work “manifests as class differentiation, but, more crucially, become intensified along lines of gender, sexual and racial difference,” (Limki, 2018, p. 327). This demonstrates the varying level of subjugation faced by women with intersecting identities that are intensified under relations of domination and exploitation. This makes the point that the marginalisation of diverse groups is not merely a structural effect but instead is an ontological effect of colonial modernity.
