2020 Enloe Award Essay

Gendered repertoires of contention: women’s resistance, authoritarian state formation, and land grabbing in Cambodia

ABSTRACT

As strongmen and autocrats become increasingly visible in global politics, what gendered resistances arise and how do these contend with repressive regimes? Since 2017, following a severe purge of his critics, Cambodia’s longstanding Prime Minister Hun Sen has put the country under a near total form of authoritarian rule. His regime has been bolstered by a distinct mode of accumulation involving large-scale land transfers to foreign and domestic allies, which have systematically evicted and dispossessed a large number of the country’s smallholder farmers and the urban poor of their homes and agricultural lands. Amid this surge of “land grabbing,” Cambodian women from across the country have led and sustained public protests to reclaim their lands. In this article, I study the routines and performances of poor women’s collective action against the state and outline four distinct types of “repertoires of contention” used by women in their protests: strategic positioning, anti-politics, self-sacrifice, and solidarity. I argue that these repertoires are embedded in and enact the authoritarian state that they contest and advance the notion of the “gendered authoritarian state” that is made visible in contentious interactions between the state and its dispossessed citizens.

Author Saba Joshi (she/hers/her)