Feminist Crops: A More-than-Human Concept for Advancing Feminist Crop Breeding for Development

Gender matters in agriculture, and crop breeding teams are increasingly being asked to develop plant varieties that respond to the needs and preferences of men and women. Achieving gender-responsive crop breeding requires communication and cooperation across disciplines, not least between crop breeders and gender specialists. The coming together of plant sciences and gender studies necessitates novel ideas, concepts, and approaches that unite nature with culture and the material with the social. However, the development of such approaches is still in its infancy. Empirically grounded in experiences in and observations of social and natural scientists working at the intersection of gender and crop breeding in an African context, this article contributes to filling this gap by proposing the concept of the “feminist crop.” The feminist crop captures the entanglement of crops with women’s embodied practices, knowledges, capabilities, and power, and contributes to an ethico-onto-epistemological and methodological investigation of how intersectional gender identities and relations are embedded in plant–people entanglements. Using examples from banana, yam, and cassava, I explore how the feminist crop can expand the boundaries of how we think about agency, power, and empowerment in agriculture, as well as how plant genome editing grounded in the feminist crop concept may be used as a feminist tool to entangle plants and people in more socially just ways. Ultimately then, the feminist crop contributes to advancing feminist crop breeding.

Gender matters in agriculture: gender norms and relations shape how, under what conditions, and to what ends different groups of men and women produce, process, consume, store, trade, and market seeds, crops, and crop products (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2011; Kerr 2017; Quisumbing et al. 2014; Raney et al. 2011). In turn, gender differences in agriculture may manifest themselves in the form of different knowledges of and preferences for crop species and traits (Marimo et al. 2020; Weltzien et al. 2019). For instance, women farmers in West Africa have been found to prefer sorghum varieties that can withstand low soil fertility as they experience less reliable access to fertile land, manure, and fertilizers (Leiser et al. 2018). Public crop breeding has a relatively long tradition of including the perspectives of men and women farmers, commonly during evaluation of released or soon-to-be released crop varieties (Ashby and Sperling 1995; Chambers, Pacey, and Thrupp 1989; Sperling, Loevinsohn, and Ntabomvura 1993), while input from social scientists has been considered most relevant later in or in the aftermath of the crop breeding process, such as during adoption studies and impact assessments. More recently, in a bid to increase adoption and development impacts of improved crop varieties, more systematic approaches for incorporating gender and social sciences perspectives earlier in the crop breeding process are being developed (Ashby and Polar 2019; Forsythe et al. 2021). Such initiatives and projects are making important conceptual and methodological strides toward gender-responsive and transformative crop breeding.

However, interdisciplinary application of natural and social sciences is hampered by the different onto-epistemological groundings on which the disciplines are based. Of most concern for the present article is the nature-culture and material-social dualisms that crop breeders and gender specialists largely operate on either side of, respectively. Thus, in moving towards feminist practices and outcomes of crop breeding, there is also a need for novel ethico-onto-epistemological (Barad 2007) ideas, concepts, and approaches.

Inspired by feminist technoscience studies, critical plant studies, and related scholarships, this article explores what may be gained from applying a naturecultural and sociomaterial ontology and more-than-human and distributive notion of agency in the context of crop breeding for development by introducing the concept of the “feminist crop.” The largely theoretical exploration is empirically grounded in personal experiences in trying to combine a background in molecular crop breeding with gender and feminist studies, as well as through interactions with natural and social scientists working at this intersection. As part of my doctoral fieldwork, I interviewed crop breeders and gender specialists working in or together with the CGIAR Consortium (formerly the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) in Africa about the ways in which they incorporate gender and women’s interests, needs, and empowerment in their work. I also observed first-hand the struggles and successes in working across disciplines through participation at workshops and conferences that dealt with gender-responsiveness and transformation in crop breeding and seed systems in Africa.

I start by illustrating the close entanglements that exist between people and plants, and the ways such entanglements may be gendered. Subsequently, I introduce the feminist crop, before exploring the onto-epistemological and methodological implications of this concept for crop breeders and gender specialists, using banana, yam, and cassava as examples. The exploration will include an investigation of how plant genome editing may be wielded as a tool for feminist intervention and politics in and through crop breeding. Finally, we arrive at the ethical groundings of the feminist crop, which asks us to take responsibility for what comes to matter and what becomes excluded in plant–people entanglements.

The article contributes to both the field of crop breeding and gender studies—not least in being among the first to address the intersection of feminism and plant genome editing, thus adding to a growing literature on the societal implications and democratization of the technology (e.g., Jasanoff, Hurlbut, and Saha 2015, 2019; Montenegro de Wit 2020; Shaw 2020; see also Bryant and Pini 2006 and Ezezika, Deadman, and Daar 2013)—as well as to feminist technoscience studies by expanding its scope to the relatively unexplored area of crop breeding for development in an African context. African (feminist) science and technology studies is a growing, albeit comparably small, field of study (WiSER, n.d.; but do see, e.g., Augusto 2007; Bauchspies 2009; Borenstein 2021; Foster 2017; Henry, Oliver, and Winters 2019; Lamoureaux and Rottenburg 2021; Mavhunga 2017; Okune 2020; Paxling 2019a, 2019b; Pollock 2014; Rottenburg 2009). Engaging with African feminist and womanist scholarships, local and Indigenous knowledges in Africa, and African women’s and men’s unique experiences with material culture and technology can contribute novel ways of understanding innovation, subjectivity, agency, power, philosophy, ontology, epistemology, and ethics, all of which are at the heart of feminist technoscience studies. Agricultural knowledge and (bio)technological innovation represents an important vantage point from which to study such and related aspects, given the centrality of agriculture in the lives of many African women and men, as well as the situatedness of plant breeding at multiple intersections of interest, including North-South, local-global, coloniality-indigeneity, nature-culture, material-social, plant-people, and masculinity-femininity. There is, furthermore, a need to treat the African continent not simply as a place from which data can be extracted and to which Western-derived concepts can readily be applied, but a place of theory-building and concept-formation (Mavhunga 2017). This article attempts to do just that, all the while recognizing my own position and privileges as a white scholar from the North.

Historically, plants, seeds, and food are thought to have been particularly important in the construction and reproduction of the “female self,” including in African countries, as women have been, and in many communities continue to be, the primary experimenters, collectors, exchangers, carers, domesticators, and processors of plants (e.g., Amadiume 1987; Avakian 1997; Avakian and Haber 2005; Carney 2001; Fritz 1999; Hastorf 1998; Howard 2003; Inness 2001; Jaffe and Kaler 2016; Shirungu and Cheikhyoussef 2018; Steenkamp 2003; Tapia and De la Torre 1998; Tyler and Fraser 2016; Williams-Forson 2006, 2010). In these roles, women may find a source of security, skills, knowledge-making, joy, pride, privilege, and self-esteem, as well as drudgery, frustration, concern, and worry. Undoubtedly, crops and food also play an important role in the construction of male identity and masculinity (e.g., Greenebaum and Dexter 2018; Korieh 2007, 2010; Saugeres 2002; Sumpter 2015). For instance, in Northern Ghana, cultivation of millet, including the delicate practice of weeding, is at the heart of men’s identity (Padmanabhan 2007).

In turn, humans help make plants who and what they are: through “formal” and “informal” crop breeding, we literally help determine what the plants look like, can do, and what they experience. As human behaviors and social systems, including the structures and practices of crop breeding, are often strongly delineated along lines of gendered power relations, the biological-material properties and capacities of plants—their “plantiness,” defined by Head, Atchison, and Gates as “an assemblage of the shared differences of plants from other beings” (2012, 27)—may come to invite or inhibit the doing of particular gender performances and relations. Head, Atchison, and Gates further note how “the specifics of plantiness help us to consider the specifics of plant agency—how it comes out of certain material capacities—and how that prefigures relations with people” (27).

We thus see how plants and people are not separate, bounded entities but rather emerge in and through naturecultural and sociomaterial relations with each other: they are plant–people entanglements (Van der Veen 2014), a concept used by Hodder (2011) to describe the various ways and forms in which humans and things get caught up with and depend on each other (see Barton and Denham 2018 for a beautiful visual illustration of plant–people entanglements). Such an ontological understanding has epistemological, methodological, and ethical implications, which will be explored following the introduction of the feminist crop concept.

The concept of the feminist crop captures the entanglement of crops with women’s embodied practices, knowledges, capabilities, and power. It delineates a co-constituted nature of humans and plants that is at the same time ubiquitous, grounded, and gendered. The concept contributes to an ethico-onto-epistemological and methodological investigation of how intersectional gender identities and relations are embedded not only in human systems but in plants and more specifically plant–people entanglements, which shifts the thinking and practices of both biophysical researcher and social scientists. By bringing together the natural and the material on the one hand, and the social and cultural on the other, the feminist crop further provides a common ground on which the two disciplines can engage. Another key feature of the feminist crop is that it situates ethics and justice at the heart of crop breeding. More specifically, the feminist crop advances a decision-making process guided more explicitly by an ethics of mattering and exclusion, which asks scientists and their institutions to promote epistemic justice and take responsibility for what comes to matter and what becomes excluded in plant–people entanglements. Ultimately then, the feminist crop contributes to advancing feminist crop breeding.

The feminist crop should not be mistaken for promoting a feminine science (Harding 1991) or breeding for “women’s traits” or “women’s crops.” Such language may reinforce heteronormative and essentializing assumptions that can have real sociomaterial implications, for instance by restricting access to and control over more lucrative income-generating opportunities by women (Polar et al. 2021). Additionally, calling crops feminist may be accused of anthropomorphism (Gibson and Gagliano 2017), which may seem paradoxical given that a more-than-human ontology is meant to challenge human exceptionalism and subvert the tendency of perceiving nonhumans from an anthropocentric perspective. Furthermore, given the plurality of feminisms, it may appear contradictory to talk of a feminist crop in the singular. However, the feminist crop is meant to be adaptable to multiple ways of understanding feminism or other African alternatives such as womanism, as well as being an acknowledgment of the agential (feminist) capacities and selfhood of plants, as recognized in Indigenous cosmologies and knowledge systems for centuries (e.g., Kimmerer 2013; Kohn 2013; Miller 2019; Nathen 2018).

Next, I explore some possible implications of the feminist crop to the thinking and doing of crop breeders and gender specialists.

The main concern of crop breeders is how the genetics of the crop plant interact with the environment to give the plant its phenotype. Comparably less attention has been paid to how the choices crop breeders make in the field or in the lab implicitly involves a decision about who and what gets entangled and disentangled and in what ways. Applying the feminist crop concept infers not only an appreciation of the constitutive role that nonhumans play in the making of plant breeding knowledge but also acknowledging that, once disseminated, crop plants have agency in shaping human identities, roles, and relations.

To illustrate the agential capacity of crops that the feminist crop engenders, I draw on my past experiences working as a biotechnologist on genetically modified bananas (Musa spp.) in a plant sciences laboratory in Nairobi, Kenya. Through the incorporation of two genes from sweet pepper (i.e., Hrap and PflpI), these bananas were modified to become resistant against the plant disease Banana Xanthomonas Wilt (BXW). My daily laboratory life consisted of a whole mishmash of “actants” (see, e.g., Latour 1996 for a definition): bacteria, genes, embryonic banana cells, antibiotics, nutrients, enzymes, petri dishes, pipettes, PCR machines, and computer software. I felt disappointed, frustrated, and sad when the bacteria did not behave as I wanted them to or the banana plants died, even after long hours of tending to. I felt confident, excited, and joyful when green, fluorescent light was emitted from the banana cells, literally signalling to me that they had successfully been genetically transformed. The power of hindsight ultimately led me to understand that every one of these actants played a meaningful role in the making of this knowledge, which in turn produced the very actants themselves, myself included. In what ways, then, did the choices made in the lab, which were structured by this array of actants and their relations, imply a choice about who or what would become entangled and disentangled and in what ways?

Bananas are of cultural and ritual importance in several African countries, as well as a pivotal source of income and food high in starch and some essential vitamins and minerals (Karamura et al. 1999; Mbabazi et al. 2020). In choosing bananas as the crop of choice and BXW as the problem to be addressed, the around 100 million people who depend on the cultivation of bananas, most of whom are small-scale farmers residing in East and Central Africa (Karamura, Karamura, and Tinzaara 2012; Tripathi, Mwangi et al. 2009; Tripathi, Tripathi et al. 2013), initially became entangled. Simultaneously, people whose more pressing concerns include low soil fertility, drought, socioeconomic factors such as lack of markets and roads, and other pests and diseases, got partly disentangled (e.g., Panama disease, sigatoka, weevils, and nematodes) (e.g., Wairegi et al. 2010). Furthermore, the choice of the cultivars “Sukali Ndiizi” and “Cavendish Williams” narrowed the plant–people entanglement to those who cultivate small dessert bananas and larger commercial bananas, respectively. Additionally, those apprehensive about or unable to adopt (for instance due to lack of money and other productive resources) improved crop varieties and, more specifically, genetically engineered crops became further disentangled.

Moreover, prioritizing agronomic traits implicitly meant prioritizing those socioeconomic and sociocultural groups whose main interests relate to production and marketing and less so with processing and consumption (e.g., good taste and aroma, soft texture, and yellow color). Due to gender norms and roles in banana farming and value chains, women have been found to be more concerned with cooking quality (and thus cooking bananas), such as heat-retaining ability, and men with beer quality (and thus beer bananas) and cultivars with big bunches and extended shelf life (Marimo et al. 2020; Rietveld and Farnworth 2018; Sanya et al. 2018). Furthermore, in East Africa, men are commonly the ones controlling the banana plantations, although women contribute much of the labor, such as during weeding and management of disease (Rietveld and Farnworth 2018). Consequently, breeding for increased productivity (through disease resistance) may disentangle women whose preferences and needs are not met or entangle women in ways that increase their drudgery (Addison and Schnurr 2016). In other words, becoming entangled is not intrinsically positive. Thus, it is not enough to merely ask who and what gets entangled and disentangled, but also in what ways and with what outcomes.

Then again, breeding for BWX resistance may entangle in beneficial ways those men and most notably women who spend time and effort having to manage the disease, and who may lose income and other opportunities because of the disease. It may also help re-entangle women who have adopted other crops (e.g., maize) in favor of bananas due to the high disease pressure caused by BXW. Ultimately, however, as bananas often represent a cash crop, men are traditionally responsible for harvesting and controlling the income from sales (Rietveld and Farnworth 2018). In some cases, women feel like they have no choice but to sell bananas without their husbands’ permission, which may result in domestic violence (Rietveld and Farnworth 2018). Again, we see how women and men become differentially entangled.

What may technical advances within molecular crop breeding hold for feminist crops and feminist crop breeding? Could molecular breeding tools expand our possibilities of engaging with plantiness and plant agency in ways that allow for more socially just entanglements to be made? Following Deboleena Roy, I will argue for a reframing of “how we might think about molecular biology and feminism together, how we may be able to work together to create new lines of flight to think about the world that we inhabit, and how we can produce knowledge about that world” (2018, 24). I draw attention to genome editing and more specifically the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and CRISPR-associated protein (Cas) system. Genome editing using CRISPR-Cas takes advantage of an adaptive immune system in bacteria and archaea to control the introduction of targeted, sequence-specific variation (Jinek et al. 2012). While there is still some way to go before CRISPR editing of plants become economically and technically feasible (e.g., Massel et al. 2020), as well as politically, regulatory, socioculturally, and ethically acceptable in certain parts of the world (e.g., Bartkowski et al. 2018; Rock and Schurman 2020), new opportunities for feminist crop breeding may unfold as CRISPR-Cas editing becomes increasingly advanced and versatile.

For instance, improved opportunities for conducting functional assessments of gene functions and regulatory elements can enhance our understanding of the molecular and physiological basis of preferred plant characteristics that have yet to be translated into “breed-able” traits (e.g., “good aroma” and “ease of threshing”). Genome editing can also help conserve genetic variation and desirable qualities of landraces and local varieties that are often highly appreciated for their culinary and cultural value or introduce genetic variability in cases where the gene pool does not contain genetic variability for traits important for certain uses and user groups. Additionally, genome editing can prove helpful in breeding for polygenic traits (i.e., controlled by multiple genes), such as in the case of many quality traits that traditionally are considered more important to women (Marimo et al. 2020; Teeken et al. 2018; Weltzien et al. 2019). Furthermore, the ability to now add both qualitative and quantitative traits to elite varieties in a single generation without the effect of linkage drag (i.e., where undesirable genomic segments are linked to the gene of interest) enables breeding teams to respond more swiftly to new understandings of the gendered nature of plant–people entanglements and to shifting user preferences (Scheben and Edwards 2018).

Finally, the development of “lab-free” genome editing protocols, where genome editing is performed directly in glasshouses and growth rooms (e.g., Massel et al. 2020), could help meet some of the critique that the more laboratory-oriented and technically advanced, and thus less accessible, knowledge underlying this form of crop breeding may increase the “distance” between scientists and laypeople (or, rather, lay experts) (Bonneuil, Foyer, and Wynne 2014; Montenegro de Wit 2020; Wynne 2001). Still, emphasis should be placed on developing a democratic and inclusive innovation process, particularly in light of findings suggesting limited integration of user and gender perspectives in banana research and technology development (Kawarazuka et al. 2020; Sanya et al. 2017), which has contributed to low levels of varietal adoption in some cases (Akankwasa et al. 2016; Marimo et al. 2020; Thiele et al. 2021). This is sobering considering the experiential and tacit knowledge and expertise that both men and women hold as a result of their central roles in banana food and cropping systems and value chains (Ajambo et al. 2018; Bechoff et al. 2020; Karamura et al. 2004; Kawarazuka et al. 2020), which is (or should be) central to the breeding process.

A democratic, inclusive research and innovation process would require opening up spaces for meaningful participation and decision making, as well as institutionalizing local and Indigenous knowledges and women as intellectual, technological agents through creative, collaborative, and participatory action research and transformative learning (e.g., Baker 2012; Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe 2009; Mezirow and Associates 2000; Montenegro de Wit 2020; Shaw 2020; Song and Vernooy 2010; Wakeford and Sanchez 2018; Weasel 2011). Developed in such a way, and grounded in the concept of the feminist crop, CRISPR-Cas can come to play important roles in advancing gender-responsive and transformative crop breeding.

Many social scientists are concerned with the closely interlinked concepts of agency and power in understanding social structures, behaviors, and relations, including pathways of empowerment and disempowerment (e.g., Cornwall 2016; Galiè and Farnworth 2019; Gammage, Kabeer, and Rodgers 2016; Kabeer 1999; Pansardi 2012; Rowlands 1997). Most commonly, nonhumans are treated simply as resources and assets that affect, among others, a person’s ability to bargain and make decisions. However, by conceiving of human agency and action as mediated not only through social relations but through and (re)configured by plantiness and plant agency, we can come to understand the construction and reproduction of intersectional gender identities and relations and (dis)empowerment in agriculture in novel ways.

An illustrative example includes that of yam and cassava in Nigeria. Until more recent times, the starchy yam (Dioscorea spp.) played an important political, economic, sociocultural, and ritual role in Nigeria and in particular among the Igbo people, as evident in the Eating of New Yam Festival (ikpo ji) and the celebration of the yam spirit (Ahiajoku) (Amadiume 1987; Korieh 2010). Known as the “king of crops” (Achebe 1959, 33–34; Korieh 2007, 2010), yam was considered a men’s crop and a defining feature of male identity, prestige, and authority (Amadiume 1987; Korieh 2010). The cultivation of yam further helped shape production relations, trade, land use and tenure systems, and marriage and social alliances (Korieh 2010), commonly in favor of men who came to control the most important factors of production, including women and children who often provided much of the labor in producing and processing yams (Korieh 2010).

However, as land became degraded and labor scare during times of hardship and war, starting with the 1918 influenza pandemic and World War I, the hardy, woody root crop cassava (Manihot esculenta) fared better than yam (Korieh 2010). Up until then, partly due to its toxic and bitter compounds, cassava was considered a “poor man’s crop” mostly used for animal feed (Korieh 2007). Reinforced by the food crisis of World War II, the demand for cassava further increased and its production became rather lucrative (Korieh 2010). Thus, by the 1970s and onwards, the Igbo went from a “yam people at heart” to a “cassava people at heart” (note, however, that yam remains an important crop in many parts of Nigeria, see, e.g., Obidiegwu and Akpabio 2017) (Korieh 2007).

Most noteworthy to our story, however, is that, while men also participated in cassava production, it was Nigerian and Igbo women, at times with contribution from their children, who dominated production, processing, and marketing (and, in several parts of the country, continue to dominate) (e.g., Apata 2019; Taiwo and Fasoyiro 2015; Wossen et al. 2017). Korieh notes that “many women were eager to admit that their role in household subsistence had increased significantly in recent times. This transformation in some cases brought out negative responses from the men who now see themselves as welding less authority in their households” (2007, 299). In other words, cassava helped strengthen the economic position of women and thus shaped the social and economic relations between women and men, and with it came a fracturing of the male–yam identity (Korieh 2010). Moreover, women and women’s groups started to build new knowledges, skills, practices, and cultures associated with cassava, which in turn enhanced their sense of self-esteem, independence, and confidence (Korieh 2007, 2010; Ottenberg 1956). The strengthening of women’s (economic) position can further be seen in relation to historical gender ideologies, including the “ideology of female industriousness, economic self-help, and self-sufficiency” (Amadiume 1987, 40).

We thus see how agency and various forms of power became mediated through women–cassava entanglements, which helped configure empowerment pathways along which women could define and pursue novel life choices and goals. Furthermore, it was not only women who benefited from these women–cassava entanglements: as the once-neglected “poor man’s crop,” which was mostly considered appropriate for animal feed, became a national symbol, cassava was itself empowered; it dethroned yam, the “king of crops,” and became the “mother of all crops” (Korieh 2007).

The empowerment mediated through women–cassava entanglements can only be understood in the context of the larger ensemble in which plant–people entanglements are embedded, which in this case included the H1N1 virus, soil quality, warfare, gender ideology, capitalist agriculture, colonial rule, food scarcity, and urbanization. For the purpose of this article, however, I draw attention to how the plantiness of cassava “affords” (Nally and Kearns 2020) particular possibilities and actions that may benefit (some) women.

The ability of cassava to grow in relatively marginal soils with little input even during dry spells may benefit women who have less reliable access to fertile land and other productive resources (e.g., Ferraro et al. 2016; Korieh 2010). Furthermore, cassava allows for more flexible time management and provides a source of food when no other fresh food is available as it can be left in the ground for over two years while still retaining most of its nutritional value (Korieh 2010; Uchechukwu-Agua, Caleb, and Opara 2015). Like potatoes, then, cassava exhibits a “survival ecology” affordance (Nally and Kearns 2020) that helps support household food security, which traditionally is the responsibility of women. In contrast, yams are seasonal, challenging to store, and require more labor (e.g., Ferraro et al. 2016; Korieh 2010). Additionally, cassava can be processed and consumed in multiple ways that often reflect regionality and ethnicity (Etejere and Bhat 1985). Today, fermented cassava products such as fufu, lafun, and garri make up a key component and source of carbohydrates in the diets of many Nigerians, while the more highly nutritious leaves are used in preparing leaf sauce and for animal feed (Achidi et al. 2005; Ferraro et al. 2016).

However, one should avoid painting an overly romanticized picture of the relations between women, and people and small-scale farmers more generally, and plants. Importantly, there is a need to integrate an intersectional lens in the study of plant–people entanglements. Indeed, plant–people entanglements are contingent, flexible, and dynamic: not all women (and men) become entangled with cassava in the same ways (and some become disentangled all together), and there are limits to the extent to which the plantiness of cassava can be empowering. For instance, the toxic properties of cassava, along with low levels of lipids, minerals, vitamins, and protein, mean that it interacts with the human body in ways that may put people (including pregnant women and children) at risk of zinc, iron, and vitamin A deficiency and neuropathy (Gegios et al. 2010; Osuntokun 1980). Additionally, in-ground storage means that women are often victims of theft. Albeit a study from Malawi, Chiwona-Karltun et al. (1998) found that poor women in particular, who due to their lower social status are more vulnerable to theft, plant bitter cassava to deter thieves (also see Forsythe, Posthummus, and Martin 2016), even though the bitter cassava requires more processing and thus labor to render the roots edible. In other words, bitter taste and toxicity could represent a strategy of “interrupting power” (Foster 2019), as Laura Foster (2017, 2019) observed for Hoodia plants in South Africa, only here bitterness offers a way for poor women in their entanglements with cassava to act against thieves.

Additionally, once harvested, cassava rapidly deteriorates (although, once processed, cassava products can be stored for up to six months) (Zainuddin et al. 2018), which can be a problem for women who lack access to post-harvesting facilitates and markets. Moreover, while its cultivation may require less labor than certain other crops, the processing of the root can be laborious, time-consuming, and harmful (e.g., Okareh, Ogunfayo, and Atulomah 2015). Finally, Forsythe et al. (2015, 2015) demonstrated how the extent to which women can benefit from commercialization of cassava depends on factors such as resource endowment, decision-making power, regionality, ethnicity, migratory status, and life stage.

What, then, are some of the implications of the feminist crop concept for social scientists working within crop breeding for development? Most notably, analytical frameworks for investigating agency and power in agriculture, as well as tracing and supporting pathways and interventions through which women’s empowerment and social change can be achieved, need to take plantiness, plant agency, and “planty knowledge” (Pitt 2017) into consideration. In the first instance, this could entail empirical investigations of how different intersectional groups of men and women involved in food and cropping systems conceptualize and experience (dis)empowerment in relation to plants. Furthermore, social scientists may need to ask new types of questions that capture both sides of the co-constructive, naturecultural, and sociomaterial equation, such as not only how social identities, relations, and structures shape different preferences for crop plants and traits, but how the plants themselves may shape such preferences. Methodological inspiration can be drawn from, among others, more-than-human and multispecies ethnography (e.g., Gibson 2018; Kohn 2013; Myers 2017; Nathen 2018; Pitt 2015, 2017). As Gibson notes, “By showing, watching, strolling among, discussing, doing, picturing and being guided by plants, we can come to appreciate their agency. By engaging in the practices of people who worked with plants, we could gain insight into the multiple ‘matterings’ that emerged in and through such plant practices” (2018, 96).

The discussion on who or what gets entangled is fundamentally a discussion about ethics and justice. In particular, the feminist crop advances a decision-making process guided more explicitly by an “ethics of mattering” (Barad 2007) and an “ethics of exclusion” (Giraud 2019). An ethics of mattering and exclusion ask us to take responsibility for which plant–people entanglements come to matter, figuratively and literally, through our thinking and doing as natural and social scientists, while stressing the need to make evident and politicize who and what acts; who and what impacts decisions; who and what is responsible; and who and what becomes entangled and disentangled and in what ways. Whose values, knowledges, worldviews, interests, meaning systems, and lives come to matter and are excluded?¹ How can we bring excluded humans and nonhumans into the crop breeding process? To design for and from the margins of entanglements?

Tending to such an ethics implies tending to the socially situated nature of technoscience (Haraway 1988). In other words, an ethics of mattering and exclusion is an ethics that is reflexive and contextually accountable on both the individual and institutional level: it includes a recognition of how our positionality and social embodiment and embeddedness, including inherent biases and deep-seated norms and values, shape our thinking and doing as scientists; and the need to situate actants, biological and technical events, and the micropractices and micropolitics of scientific institutions in the broader context of dominant structures and practices of knowledge production (Roy 2018).

Indeed, studies have demonstrated the ways in which agrarian development, plant sciences, and plants themselves have shaped and been shaped by, among others, state formation, capitalism, colonialism, racial politics, and patriarchy (e.g., Brockway 1979; Carney 2001; Cullather 2010; Eddens 2019; Hobhouse [1985] 2005; Ives 2017; McCann 2007; Mintz 1985; Osseo-Asare 2014; Ross 2014; Schiebinger 2004). This mutual shaping has often come at the expense of local and Indigenous men and in particular women, whose relationships with crops, seeds, and food, and the knowledges, skills, and expertise that arise from these relationships, often fail to be meaningfully acknowledged and integrated in agricultural technoscience (Allen and Sachs 2007; Alston 2000; Kitetu 2008; Resurrección and Elmhirst 2020; Stads and Beintema 2017; Twagira 2014; Twyman, Muriel, and García 2015), also as it relates to agricultural biotechnology (Bonneuil, Foyer, and Wynne 2014; Ezezika, Deadman, and Daar 2013; Fitting 2010; Montenegro de Wit 2020). To this day, plant breeding remains highly implicated in North-South relations, where actors such as private sector donors and international development agencies headquartered in the Global North have much of the definitional, agenda-setting, and decision-making power.

Accordingly, far from being objective and neutral, the practices of plant breeding, including priority-setting and varietal design, are highly political, power laden, and value driven. In other words, the feminist crop has to challenge and take root in a larger entanglement characterized by uneven and intersectional power-knowledge hierarchies that tend to favor some values, knowledges, knowing subjects, and plant–people entanglements over others. Thus, the feminist crop also promotes a breeding practice that advances epistemic justice: a process through which knowledge systems that have been overshadowed by scientism and epistemic and molecular imperialism are recovered (Visvanathan 2005).

In the context of agriculture, to understand gendered power relations requires us to observe the deep and complex bonds of plant–people entanglements. I have proposed the concept of the feminist crop to capture the entanglement of crops with women’s embodied practices, knowledges, capabilities, and power, and to contribute to an ethico-onto-epistemological and methodological investigation of how intersectional gender identities and relations are embedded in plant–people entanglements. I have further demonstrated how research into African food and cropping systems and plant breeding can help expand the boundaries of how we think about agency, power, and empowerment, and shed light on how plant–people entanglements come, or can come, to matter in different ways to different people.

Both natural and social scientists can benefit from thinking in terms of plant–people entanglements: crop breeders ought not to consider plants and their interactions with the environment (the “natural” and “material”) in isolation, just as much as gender researchers and social scientists ought not to consider humans (the “social” and “cultural”) in isolation. Indeed, crop breeding is a deeply sociomaterial and naturecultural practice that is as much about nature, climate, (epi)genetics, and plant physiology as it is about people, belonging, culture, discourses, value systems, and meaning-making.

What becomes evident, then, is the intimate connections, mutual intelligibility, and complementarity between the thinking and doing of crop breeders and gender specialists: both address plant–people entanglements. Assuming an ethically embedded knowledge practice—which promotes epistemic justice and asks us to take responsibility for what comes to matter and what becomes excluded—each discipline may contribute unique perspectives, knowledges, and skills on how to entangle plants and people in more socially just and constructive ways. Moreover, plant genome editing grounded in the feminist crop concept, along with participatory action research and transformative learning, may represent one way of engaging more profoundly with “plantiness” and plant agency to advance feminist crop breeding.

¹ Exclusions are not inherently negative and can be productive and creative (Giraud 2019). Productive exclusions in this context could be, for instance, omitting crop traits that are harmful to women and discriminatory institutional norms, practices, and relations.

Achidi, Aduni Ufuan, Olufunmike A. Ajayi, Mpoko Bokanga, and Bussie Maziya-Dixon. 2005. “The Use of Cassava Leaves as Food in Africa.” Ecology of Food and Nutrition 44 (6): 423–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/03670240500348771.

Addison, Lincoln, and Matthew Schnurr. 2016. “Growing Burdens? Disease-Resistant Genetically Modified Bananas and the Potential Gendered Implications for Labor in Uganda.” Agriculture and Human Values, no. 33, 967–78. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-015-9655-2.

Ajambo, Susan, Anne Rietveld, Lilian W. Nkengla, C. Niyongere, D.B. Dhed’a, D.O. Olaosebikan, E. Nitunga, et al. 2018. “Recovering Banana Production in Banana Bunchy Top-Affected Areas in Sub-Saharan Africa: Developing Gender-responsive Approaches.” Acta Horticulturae, no. 1196, 219–28. https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2018.1196.27.

Akankwasa, Kenneth, Gerald F. Ortmann, Edilgnaw Wale, and Wilberforce K. Tushemereirwe. 2016. “Early-Stage Adoption of Improved Banana ‘Matooke’ Hybrids in Uganda: A Count Data Analysis Based on Farmers’ Perceptions.” International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management 13 (01): 1650001. https://doi.org/10.1142/S0219877016500012.

Allen, Patricia, and Caroline Sachs. 2007. “Women and Food Chains: The Gendered Politics of Food.” International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food 15 (1): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.48416/ijsaf.v15i1.424.

Alston, Margaret. 2000. Breaking through the Grass Ceiling: Women, Power and Leadership in Agricultural Organisations. Amsterdam: Harwood.

Amadiume, Ifi. 1987. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London: Zed Books.

Apata, Temidayo. 2019. “Analysis of Cassava Value Chain in Nigeria: Pro-Poor Approach and Gender Perspective.” International Journal of Value Chain Management 10 (3): 219–37. https://dx.doi.org/10.1504/IJVCM.2019.10022069.

Augusto, Geri. 2007. “Knowledge Free and ‘Unfree’: Epistemic Tensions in Plant Knowledge at the Cape in the 17th and 18th Centuries.” International Journal of African Renaissance Studies - Multi-, Inter- and Transdisciplinarity 2 (2): 136–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/18186870701751673.

Ashby, Jacqueline, and Louise Sperling. 1995. “Institutionalizing Participatory, Client-Driven Research and Technology in Agriculture.” Development and Change 26 (4): 753–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.1995.tb00573.x.

Ashby, Jacqueline, and Vivian Polar. 2019. “The Implications of Gender for Modern Approaches to Crop Improvement and Plant Breeding.” In Gender, Agriculture and Agrarian Transformation, edited by Carolyn E. Sachs, 11–34. London: Routledge.

Avakian, Arlene Voski, ed. 1997. Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking. Boston: Beacon Publishing.

Avakian, Arlene Voski, and Barbara Haber, eds. 2005. From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.

Baker, Mahina-a-rangi. 2012. “The Korowai Framework: Assessing GE through Tribal Values.” New Genetics and Society 31 (1): 87–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/14636778.2011.597984.

Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bartkowski, Bartosz, Insa Theesfeld, Frauke Pirscher, and Johannes Timaeus. 2018. “Snipping around for Food: Economic, Ethical and Policy Implications of CRISPR/Cas Genome Editing.” Geoforum, no. 96, 172–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.07.017.

Barton, Huw, and Tim Denham. 2018. “Vegecultures and the Social-Biological Transformations of Plants and People.” Quaternary International 489 (September 30): 17–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2016.06.031.

Bauchspies, Wenda K. 2009. “Potentials, Actuals and Residues: Entanglements of Culture and Subjectivity.” Subjectivity, no. 28, 229–45. https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2009.19.

Bechoff, Aurélie, Lora Forsythe, Maria Njau, Adrienne Martin, Gaspar Audifas, Adebayo Abass, and Keith Tomlins. 2020. “Women Eat More Rice and Banana: The Influence of Gender and Migration on Staple Food Choice in East Africa.” Ecology of Food and Nutrition 59 (5): 506–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/03670244.2020.1755278.

Bonneuil, Christophe, Jean Foyer, and Brian Wynne. 2014. “Genetic Fallout in Bio-cultural Landscapes: Molecular Imperialism and the Cultural Politics of (Not) Seeing Transgenes in Mexico.” Social Studies of Science 44 (6): 901–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312714548258.

Borenstein, Hannah. 2021. “Tracking Work from the Wrist: Surveillance of Ethiopian Women Athletes for Capital.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 7 (1): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v7i1.34037.

Brockway, Lucile H. 1979. “Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens.” American Ethnologist 6 (3): 449–65. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1979.6.3.02a00030.

Bryant, Lia, and Barbara Pini. 2006. “Towards an Understanding of Gender and Capital in Constituting Biotechnologies in Agriculture.” Sociologia Ruralis 46 (4): 261–79. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9523.2006.00417.x.

Callon, Michel, Pierre Lascoumes, and Yannick Barthe. 2009. Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Carney, Judith. 2001. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chambers, Robert, Arnold Pacey, and Lori Ann Thrupp, eds. 1989. Farmer First: Farmer Innovation and Agricultural Research. London: Intermediate Technology Publications.

Chiwona-Karltun, Linley, Jonathan Mkumbira, John Saka, Mette Bovin, Nzola M. Mahungu, and Hans Rosling. 1998. “The Importance of Being Bitter: A Qualitative Study on Cassava Cultivar Preference in Malawi.” Ecology of Food and Nutrition 37 (3): 219–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/03670244.1998.9991546.

Cornwall, Andrea. 2016. “Women’s Empowerment: What Works?” Journal of International Development 28 (3): 293–313. https://doi.org/10.1002/jid.3210.

Cullather, Nick. 2010. The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Eddens, Aaron. 2019. “White Science and Indigenous Maize: The Racial Logics of the Green Revolution.” Journal of Peasant Studies 46 (3): 653–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2017.1395857.

Etejere, Emmanuel O., and Ramakrishna B. Bhat. 1985. “Traditional Preparation and Uses of Cassava in Nigeria.” Economic Botany, no. 39, 157–64. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02907839.

Ezezika, Obidimma C., Jennifer Deadman, and Abdallah S. Daar. 2013. “She Came, She Saw, She Sowed: Re-negotiating Gender-Responsive Priorities for Effective Development of Agricultural Biotechnology in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 26 (2): 461–71. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-012-9396-9.

Ferraro, Vincenza, Clara Piccirillo, Keith Tomlins, and Manuela E. Pintado. 2016. “Cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) and Yam (Dioscorea spp.) Crops and Their Derived Foodstuffs: Safety, Security and Nutritional Value.” Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition 56 (16): 2714–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/10408398.2014.922045.

Fitting, Elizabeth. 2010. The Struggle for Maize: Campesinos, Workers, and Transgenic Corn in the Mexican Countryside. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. 2011. The State of Food and Agriculture 2010-2011: Women in Agriculture: Closing the Gender Gap in Agriculture. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. https://www.fao.org/3/i2050e/i2050e00.htm.

Forsythe, Lora, Adrienne Martin, and Helena Posthumus. 2015. “Cassava Market Development: A Path to Women’s Empowerment or Business as Usual?” Food Chain 5 (1): 11–27. http://doi.org/10.3362/2046-1887.2015.003.

Forsythe, Lora, Helena Posthummus, and Adrienne Martin. 2016. “A Crop of One’s Own? Women’s Experience of Cassava Commercialization in Nigeria and Malawi.” Journal of Gender, Agriculture and Food Security (Agri-Gender) 1 (2): 110–128. http://doi.org/10.22004/ag.econ.246033.

Forsythe, Lora, Hale Tufan, Alexandre Bouniol, Ulrich Kleih, and Geneviève Fliedel. 2021. “An Interdisciplinary and Participatory Methodology to Improve User Acceptability of Root, Tuber and Banana Varieties.” Internal Journal of Food Science and Technology 56 (3): 1115–23. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijfs.14680.

Foster, Laura. 2017. Reinventing Hoodia: Peoples, Plants, and Patents in South Africa. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

———. 2019. “Critical Perspectives on Plants, Race, and Colonialism: An Introduction.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5 (2): 1–6. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i2.32309.

Fritz, Gayle J. 1999. “Gender and the Early Cultivation of Gourds in Eastern North America.” American Antiquity 64 (3): 417–30. https://doi.org/10.2307/2694142.

Galiè, Alessandra, and Cathy R. Farnworth. 2019. “Power Through: A New Concept in the Empowerment Discourse.” Global Food Security 21 (June): 13–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2019.07.001.

Gammage, Sarah, Naila Kabeer, and Yana van der Meulen Rodgers. 2016. “Voice and Agency: Where Are We Now?” Feminist Economics 22 (1): 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2015.1101308.

Gegios, Alison, Rachel Amthor, Busie Maziya-Dixon, Chedozie Egesi, Sally Mallowa, Rhoda Nungo, Simon Gichuki, et al. 2010. “Children Consuming Cassava as a Staple Food Are at Risk for Inadequate Zinc, Iron, and Vitamin A Intake.” Plant Foods for Human Nutrition 65 (1): 64–70. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11130-010-0157-5.

Gibson, Prudence, and Monica Gagliano. 2017. “The Feminist Plant: Changing Relations with the Water Lily.” Ethics and the Environment 22 (2): 125–46. https://doi.org/10.2979/ethicsenviro.22.2.06.

Giraud, Eva Haifa. 2019. What Comes after Entanglements? Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–99.

Harding, Sandra. 1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Head, Lesley, Jennifer Atchison, and Alison Gates. 2012. Ingrained: A Human Bio-Geography of Wheat. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing.

Henry, Jade Vu, Martin Oliver, and Niall Winters. 2019. “Global-Local Divides and Ontological Politics: Feminist STS Perspectives on Mobile Learning for Community Health Workers in Kenya.” Learning, Media and Technology 44 (3): 235–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2019.1628047.

Hobhouse, Henry. (1985) 2005. Seeds of Change. Five Plants That Transformed Mankind. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint.

Hodder, Ian. 2011. “Human-Thing Entanglement: Towards an Integrated Archaeological Perspective.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17 (1): 154–77. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2010.01674.x.

Howard, Patricia L. 2003. Women and Plants. Gender Relations in Biodiversity Management and Conservation. London: Zed Books.

Inness, Sherrie A. 2001. Cooking Lessons: The Politics of Gender and Food. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publisher.

Ives, Sarah. 2017. Steeped in Heritage: The Racial Politics of South African Rooibos Tea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Jaffe, JoAnn, and Amy Kaler. 2016. “Coffee Ceremonies, Gender, and Food Security in Two Ethiopian Villages.” In Transforming Gender and Food Security in the Global South, edited by Jemimah Njuki, John R. Parkings, and Amy Kaler, 117–59. New York: Routledge.

Jasanoff, Sheila, Benjamin Hurlbut, and Krishanu Saha. 2019. “Democratic Governance of Human Germline Genome Editing.” The CRISPR Journal 2 (5): 266–71. https://doi.org/10.1089/crispr.2019.0047.

Jinek, Martin, Chylinski Krzystof, Fonfara Ines, Hauer Michael, Jennifer Doudna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier. 2012. “A Programmable Dual-RNA–Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity.” Science 337 (6096): 816–21. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1225829.

Kabeer, Naila. 1999. “Resources, Agency, Achievements: Reflections on the Measurement of Women's Empowerment.” Development and Change 30 (3): 435–64. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-7660.00125.

Karamura, Deborah Alice, Eldad B. Karamura, and William Tinzaara. 2012. Banana Cultivar Names, Synonyms and Their Usage in Eastern Africa. Kampala: Bioversity International.

Karamura, Deborah, B. Mgenzi, Eldad B. Karamura, and S. Sharrock. 2004. “Exploiting Indigenous Knowledge for the Management and Maintenance of Musa Biodiversity on Farm.” African Crop Science Journal 12 (1): 67–74. https://doi.org/10.4314/acsj.v12i1.27664.

Karamura, Eldad, E. Frison, D.A. Karamura, and S. Sharrock. 1999. “Banana Production Systems in Eastern and Southern Africa.” In Bananas and Food Security, edited by C. Picq, E. Fouré, and E.A. Frison, 401–12. Montpellier: International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain.

Kawarazuka, Nozomi, Elias Damtew, Sarah Mayanja, Joshua Sikhu Okonya, Anne Rietveld, Vanya Slavchevska, and Béla Teeken. 2020. “A Gender Perspective on Pest and Disease Management from the Cases of Roots, Tubers and Bananas in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.” Frontiers in Agronomy 2 (7). https://doi.org/10.3389/fagro.2020.00007.

Kerr, Rachel B. 2017. “Gender and Agrarian Inequities.” In Agricultural Systems: Agroecology and Rural Innovation for Development, edited by Sieglinde Snapp and Barry Pound, 333–70. Cambridge, MA: Academic Press.

Kimmerer, Robin W. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.

Kitetu, Catherine Wawasi, ed. 2008. Gender, Science and Technology: Perspectives from Africa. Dakar, Senegal: Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa.

Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Towards an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Korieh, Chima J. 2007. “Yam Is King! But Cassava Is the Mother of All Crops: Farming, Culture, and Identity in Igbo Agrarian Economy.” Dialectical Anthropology 31 (1): 221–32. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-007-9022-9.

———. 2010. The Land Has Changed: History, Society and Gender in Colonial Eastern Nigeria. Calgary, AB: University of Calgary Press.

Lamoureaux, Siri, and Richard Rottenburg. 2021. “Doing Postcolonial Gender: An Approach to Justifying Rights, Resources, and Recognition.” Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society 4 (1). https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2021.1984040.

Leiser, Willmar L., Fred Rattunde, Eva Weltzien, and Bettina Haussmann. 2018. “Sorghum Tolerance to Low‐Phosphorus Soil Conditions.” In Achieving Sustainable Cultivation of Sorghum: Genetics, Breeding and Production Techniques, edited by William Rooney, 247–72. Philadelphia: Burleigh Dodds Science Publishing.

Marimo, Pricilla, Cynthia Caron, Inge Van den Bergh, Rhiannon Crichton, Eva Weltzien, Rodomiro Ortiz, and Robooni Tumuhimbise. 2020. “Gender and Trait Preferences for Banana Cultivation and Use in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Literature Review.” Economic Botany 74 (2): 226–41. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12231-020-09496-y.

Massel, Karen, Yasmine Lam, Albert C.S. Wong, Lee T. Hickey, Andrew K. Borrell, and Ian D. Godwin. 2020. “Hotter, Drier, CRISPR: The Latest Edit on Climate Change.” Theoretical and Applied Genetics, no. 134, 1691–709. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00122-020-03764-0.

Mavhunga, Clapperton Chakanetsa, ed. 2017. What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Mbabazi, Ruth, Robert Harding, Harjeet Khanna, Priver Namanya, Geofrey Arinaitwe, Wilberforce Tushemereirwe, James Dale, et al. 2020. “Pro-vitamin A Carotenoids in East African Highland Banana and Other Musa Cultivars Grown in Uganda.” Food Science and Nutrition 8 (1): 311–21. https://doi.org/10.1002/fsn3.1308.

McCann, James C. 2007. Maize and Grace: Africa's Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500–2000. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Mezirow, Jack, and Associates. 2000. Learning as Transformation: Critical Perspectives on a Theory in Progress. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Miller, Theresa L. 2019. Plant Kin: A Multispecies Ethnography in Indigenous Brazil. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Mintz, Sidney. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin Books.

Montenegro de Wit, Maywa. 2020. “Democratizing CRISPR? Stories, Practices, and Politics of Science and Governance on the Agricultural Gene Editing Frontier.” Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 8 (9). https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.405.

Myers, Natasha. 2017. “Becoming Sensor in Sentient Worlds: A More-than-Natural History of a Black Oak Savannah.” In Between Matter and Method: Encounters in Anthropology and Art, edited by Gretchen Bakke and Marina Peterson, 73–96. London: Bloomsbury Press.

Nally, David, and Gerry Kearns. 2020. “Vegetative States: Potatoes, Affordances, and Survival Ecologies.” Antipode 52 (5): 1373–92. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12652.

Nathen, Tihana. 2018. “‘Being Attentive’: Exploring Other-Than-Human Agency in Medicinal Plants through Everyday Rastafari Plant Practices.” Anthropology Southern Africa 41 (2): 115–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/23323256.2018.1468720.

Obidiegwu, Jude Ejikeme, and Emmanuel Matthew Akpabio. 2017. “The Geography of Yam Cultivation in Southern Nigeria: Exploring Its Social Meanings and Cultural Functions.” Journal of Ethnic Food 4 (1): 28–35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jef.2017.02.004.

Okareh, Oladapo T., Idowu A. Ogunfayo, and Nnodimele O. Atulomah. 2015. “Hazards Associated with Small Scale Gari Processing in Ibadan Metropolis, Nigeria.” actaSATECH 6 (1): 64–69. https://www.actasatech.com/download.php?file=Journal-169.pdf.

Okune, Angela. 2020. “Open Ethnographic Archiving as Feminist, Decolonizing Practice.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 6 (2): 1–24. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v6i2.33041.

Osseo-Asare, Abena Dove. 2014. Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Osuntokun, Benjamin O. 1980. “Cassava Diet, Chronic Cyanide Intoxication and Neuropathy in the Nigerian Africans.” Human Nutrition and Diet, no. 36, 141–73. https://doi.org/10.1159/000393156.

Ottenberg, Phoebe V. 1956. “The Changing Economic Position of Women among the Afikpo Ibo.” In Continuity and Change in African Cultures, edited by William R. Bascom and Melville J. Herskovits, 205–33. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Padmanabhan, Martina A. 2007. “The Making and Unmaking of Gendered Crops in Northern Ghana.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 28 (1): 57–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9493.2006.00276.x.

Pansardi, Pamela. 2012. “Power to and Power Over: Two Distinct Concepts of Power? Journal of Political Power 5 (1): 73–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2012.658278.

Paxling, Linda. 2019a. “Exploring Technology Design among Mobile Entrepreneurs in Kampala: An Open Space Workshop.” Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries 86 (2): e12116. https://doi.org/10.1002/isd2.12116.

———. 2019b. “Women’s Tech Initiatives in Uganda: Doing Intersectionality and Feminist Technoscience.” In Gendered Power and Mobile Technology: Intersections in the Global South, edited by Caroline Wamala Larsson and Laura Stark, 151–65. New York: Routledge.

Pitt, Hannah. 2015. “On Showing and Being Shown Plants: A Guide to Methods for More-than-Human Geography.” Area 47 (1): 48–55. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12145.

———. 2017. “An Apprenticeship in Plant Thinking.” In Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds, edited by Michelle Bastian, Owain Jones, Niamh Moore, and Emma Roe, 106–20. New York: Routledge.

Polar, Vivian, Jacqueline A. Ashby, Graham Thiele, and Hale Tufan. 2021. “When Is Choice Empowering? Examining Gender Differences in Varietal Adoption through Case Studies from Sub-Saharan Africa.” Sustainability 13 (7): 3678. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13073678.

Pollock, Anne. 2014. “Places of Pharmaceutical Knowledge-Making: Global Health, Postcolonial Science, and Hope in South African Drug Discovery.” Social Studies of Science 44 (6): 848–73. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312714543285.

Quisumbing, Agnes. R., Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Terri L. Raney, André Croppenstedt, Julia A. Behrman, and Amber Peterman. 2014. Gender in Agriculture: Closing the Knowledge Gap. Dordrecht: Springer.

Raney, Terri, Gustavo Anríquez, Andre Croppenstedt, Stefano Gerosa, Sarah Lowder, Ira Matuscke, Jakob Skoet, and Cheryl Doss. 2011. The Role of Women in Agriculture. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Resurrección, Bernadette P., and Rebecca Elmhirst, R. 2020. “Is Epistemic Authority Masculine?: Reflections on Gender, Status and Knowledge in International Agricultural Research and Development.” In Negotiating Gender Expertise in Environment and Development: Voices from Feminist Political Ecology, edited by Bernadette P. Resurrección and Rebecca Elmhirst, 42–52. New York: Routledge.

Rietveld, Anne M., and Cathy R. Farnworth. 2018. Towards Gender-Responsive Banana Research for Development in the East-African Highlands. CDMX (Mexico): International Wheat and Maize Improvement Center.

Rock, Joeva, and Rachel Schurman. 2020. “The Complex Choreography of Agricultural Biotechnology in Africa.” African Affairs 119 (477): 499–525. https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adaa021.

Ross, Corey. 2014. “The Plantation Paradigm: Colonial Agronomy, African Farmers, and the Global Cocoa Boom, 1870s–1940s.” Journal of Global History 9 (1): 49–71. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022813000491.

Rottenburg, Richard. 2009. "Social and Public Experiments and New Figurations of Science and Politics in Postcolonial Africa." Postcolonial Studies 12 (4): 423–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790903350666.

Rowlands, Jo. 1997. Questioning Empowerment: Working with Women in Honduras. Oxford: Oxfam.

Roy, Deboleena. 2018. Molecular Feminisms: Biology, Becomings, and Life in the Lab. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Sanya, Losira Nasirumbi, Florence Birungi Kyazze, Haroon Sseguya, Paul Kibwika, and Yona Baguma. 2017. “Complexity of Agricultural Technology Development Processes: Implications for Uptake of New Hybrid Banana Varieties in Central Uganda.” Cogent Food & Agriculture 3 (1). https://doi.org/10.1080/23311932.2017.1419789.

Sanya, Losira N., Reuben T. Ssali, Kenneth Akankwasa, Kephas Nowankunda, Alex Barekye, Mary G. Namuddu, and Jerome Kubiriba. 2018. “Gender-Differentiated Preferences in Breeding for New Matooke Hybrids in Uganda.” In State of the Knowledge for Gender in Breeding: Case Studies for Practitioners, edited by Hale A. Tufan, Stefania Grando, and Catherine Meola, 87–94. Montpellier, France: Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research.

Saugeres, Lise. 2002. “The Cultural Representation of the Farming Landscape: Masculinity, Power and Nature.” Journal of Rural Studies 18 (4): 373–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0743-0167(02)00010-4.

Scheben, Armin, and David Edwards. 2018. “Towards a More Predictable Plant Breeding Pipeline With CRISPR/Cas-Induced Allelic Series to Optimize Quantitative and Qualitative Traits.” Current Opinion in Plant Biology 45 (B): 218–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbi.2018.04.013.

Schiebinger, Londa. 2004. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Shaw, Amanda. 2020. “Gender, Race, and Transgenic Crops.” In Routledge Handbook of Gender and Agriculture, edited by Carolyn E. Sachs, Leif Jensen, Paige Castellanos, and Kathleen Sexsmith, 185–99. London: Routledge.

Shirungu, Michael Murundu, and Ahmad Cheikhyoussef. 2018. “Therapeutic Powers of Medicinal Plants Used by Traditional Healers in Kavango, Namibia, for Mental Illness.” Anthropology Southern Africa 41 (2): 127–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/23323256.2018.1486217.

Song, Yiching, and Ronnie Vernooy. 2010. “Seeds of Empowerment: Action Research in the Context of the Feminization of Agriculture in Southwest China.” Gender, Technology and Development 14 (1):25–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/097185241001400102.

Sperling, Louise, Michael E. Loevinsohn, and Beatrice Ntabomvura. 1993. “Rethinking the Farmer’s Role in Plant Breeding: Local Bean Experts and On-Station Selection in Rwanda.” Experimental Agriculture 29 (4): 509–19. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0014479700021219.

Steenkamp, Vanessa. 2003. "Traditional Herbal Remedies Used by South African Women for Gynaecological Complaints." Journal of Ethnopharmacology 86 (1): 97–108. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-8741(03)00053-9.

Sumpter, Kristin C. 2015. “Masculinity and Meat Consumption: An Analysis through the Theoretical Lens of Hegemonic Masculinity and Alternative Masculinity Theories.” Sociology Compass 9 (2): 104–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12241.

Tapia, Mario E., and Ana De la Torre. 1998. Women Farmers and Andean Seeds. Washington, DC: International Plant Genetic Resources Institute.

Teeken, Béla, Olamide Olaosebikan, Joyce Haleegoah, Elizabeth Oladejo, Tessy Madu, Abolore Bello, Elizabeth Parkes, et al. 2018. “Cassava Trait Preferences of Men and Women Farmers in Nigeria: Implications for Breeding.” Economic Botany, no. 72, 263–77. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12231-018-9421-7.

Thiele, Graham, Dominique Dufour, Philippe Vernier, Robert O.M. Mwanga, Monica L. Parker, Elmar Schulte Geldermann, Béla Teeken, et al. 2021. “A Review of Varietal Change in Roots, Tubers and Bananas: Consumer Preferences and Other Drivers of Adoption and Implications for Breeding.” International Journal of Food Science and Technology 56 (3): 1076–92. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijfs.14684.

Tripathi, Leena, Maina Mwangi, Steffen Abele, Valentine Aritua, Wilberforce K. Tushemereirwe, and Ranajit Bandyopadhyay. 2009. “Xanthomonas Wilt: A Threat to Banana Production in East and Central Africa.” Plant Disease 93 (5): 440–49. https://doi.org/10.1094/PDIS-93-5-0440.

Tripathi, Leena, Jaindra N. Tripathi, Wilberforce K. Tushemereirwe, Geofrey Arinaitwe, and Andrew Kiggundu. 2013. “Transgenic Bananas with Enhanced Resistance against Xanthomonas Wilt Disease.” Acta Horticulturae, no. 974, 81–90. https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2013.974.9.

Twagira, Laura Ann. 2014. “‘Robot Farmers’ and Cosmopolitan Workers: Technological Masculinity and Agricultural Development in the French Soudan (Mali), 1945–68.” Gender & History 26 (3): 459–77. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12084.

Twyman, Jennifer, Juliana Muriel, and Maria A. García. 2015. “Identifying Women Farmers: Informal Gender Norms as Institutional Barriers to Recognizing Women’s Contributions to Agriculture.” Journal of Gender, Agriculture and Food Security 1 (2): 1–17.

Tyler, Shakara, and Alyea Fraser. 2016. “Womanism and Agroecology. An Intersectional Praxis Seed Keeping as Acts of Political Warfare.” In Emergent Possibilities for Global sustainability: Intersections of Race, Class and Gender, edited by Phoebe Godfrey and Denise Torre, 19–30. New York: Routledge.

Uchechukwu-Agua, Amarachi D., Oluwafemi J. Caleb, and Umezuruike L. Opara. 2015. “Postharvest Handling and Storage of Fresh Cassava Root and Products: A Review.” Food and Bioprocess Technology 8 (4): 729–48. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11947-015-1478-z.

Visvanathan, Shiv. 2005.” Knowledge, Justice and Democracy.” In Science and Citizens: Globalization and the Challenge of Engagement, edited by Melissa Leach, Ian Scoones, and Brian Wynne, 83–94. London: Zed Books.

Wairegi, Lydia, Piet J. A. Van Asten, Moses Tenywa, and Mateete Bekunda. 2010. “Abiotic Constraints Override Biotic Constraints in East Africa Highland Banana Systems.” Field Crops Research 117 (1): 146–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fcr.2010.02.010.

Wakeford, Tom, and Javier Sanchez Rodriguez. 2018. “Participatory Action Research: Towards a More Fruitful Knowledge.” In Connected Communities Foundation Series, edited by Keri Facer, and Katherine Dunleavy. Bristol, UK: University of Bristol/AHRC Connected Communities Programme.

Weasel, Lisa H. 2011. “Conducting Research from the Ground Up: Using Feminist Participatory Methodologies to Inform the Natural Sciences.” International Review of Qualitative Research 4 (4): 417–29. https://doi.org/10.1525/irqr.2011.4.4.417.

Weltzien, Eva, Fred Rattunde, Anja Christinck, Krista Isaacs, and Jacqueline Ashby. 2019. “Gender and Farmer Preferences for Varietal Traits.” In Plant Breeding Reviews, edited by Irwin Goldman, 243–78. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons.

Williams-Forson, Psyche A. 2006. Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

———. 2010. “Other Women Cooked for My Husband: Negotiating Gender, Food, and Identities in an African American/Ghanaian Household.” Feminist Studies 36 (2): 435–61. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27919110.

Wossen, Tesfamicheal, Gezahegn Girma, Tahirou Abdoulaye, Ismail Rabbi, Adetunji Olanrewaju, Jeffery Bentley, Arega Alene, et al. 2017. The Cassava Monitoring Survey in Nigeria: Final Report. Ibadan: IITA. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/80706.

Wynne, Brian. 2001. “Creating Public Alienation: Expert Cultures of Risk and Ethics on GMOs.” Science as Culture 10 (4): 445–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505430120093586.

Zainuddin, Ima M., Ahmad Fathoni, Enny Sudarmonowati, John R. Beeching, Wilhelm Gruissem, and Herve Vanderschuren. 2017. “Cassava Post-Harvest Physiological Deterioration: From Triggers to Symptoms.” Postharvest Biology and Technology 142 (August): 115–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.postharvbio.2017.09.004.

Ida Tarjem is a PhD Fellow at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). Her research explores the interface between plant breeding and gender using perspectives from feminist technoscience studies, critical plant studies, and political agronomy.