Lands of struggle, bodies in resistance: Women and food sovereignty in Martinique

Abstract

At the intersection of colonial history, political ecology and Caribbean feminisms, this article analyses the practices and trajectories of women farmers in contemporary Martinique. Drawing on a decolonial Caribbean ecofeminism it examines how these women reconfigure their relationships to land, knowledge and politics. This is done against the backdrop of what this article conceptualises as the coloniality of the land, namely the enduring structures of colonial domination that continue to shape land access, agricultural models, and epistemic hierarchies. Based on twelve semistructured interviews and a corpus of local media and institutional sources, the article takes a reflexive, situated standpoint to identify three contributions of this framework: the valorisation of holistic practices linking bodily care and land stewardship; an epistemology of resistance grounded in the legacies of plantation agriculture and chlordecone contamination; and the emergence of horizontal collective action outside institutional channels. The article also examines the limits of these practices, namely the risks of essentialisation, institutional co-optation, and internal tensions among women farmers.