Gender analysis of land: beyond land rights for women?

Gender analysts of development have worked on land and property relations in poor rural areas for over two decades and the JAC 2003 special issue carried a range of work reflecting some of these research trajectories. This article is both a response to Bina Agarwal's paper on ‘Gender and Land Rights Revisited’, in which she reiterates her advocacy of land rights, and also an argument for why we should temper her transformatory expectations, recognize the complexity of what she sees as ‘social obstacles’ to women claiming land, and not rush to policy closure on land rights in all circumstances, or to blanket prescriptions. It argues for a renewed emphasis on reflexive ethnographic research with a focus on gender as social relations, on subject positions and subjectivities, on the meshing of shared and separate interests within households and on power residing in discourse as well as material assets.