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The Problem with Empowerment: Social Reproduction and Women’s Food Projects in Jordan

In Jordan, many women’s small food businesses and nonprofit projects have been supported as a sustainable rural development strategy. The prevalence of these projects in bazaars and festivals in Jordan indicates their prominence. Most studies of these projects have framed them in terms of microfinance or development goals such as women’s empowerment. The framework of empowerment has been widely critiqued, however, for its Western-centric assumptions about gender and economy. Instead, this article asks how women in rural food producing businesses and organizations are shifting social reproduction. By centering the question on social reproduction, or the work—paid or unpaid—that sustains life, food production for sale is not de facto more valuable than food production for the family. Through this focus on social reproduction, I found that rural women’s food projects often used their rural woman identity to build food projects that changed the social and spatial contexts of how they provided for their families. These changes depended heavily on how they engaged with development networks, how they organized or participated in producers’ organizations, and how they produced and sold their food. Analyzing food production as part of broader social reproduction calls attention to the nonmarket consequences of these food projects such as impacts on social relationships, identity, and food as sustenance. Identifying these nonmarket consequences is essential to better understanding how rural development efforts affect the social and economic fabric of rural life without assuming a priori what that life should look like.