Paper short abstract:

In this paper I show how the idea and practice of Fair Trade informs women’s situated empowerment sensibilities in Darjeeling

Paper long abstract:

Fair Trade is a market based social justice movement that aims to address the inadequacies of conventional global trade by empowering marginalized producers through creating sustainable links between reflexive Western consumer activists and Southern producers. In its unfolding, Fair Trade has myriad gendered articulations in local communities, ranging from strengthening patriarchal projects of dominating women's labor to becoming a resource for women's activism against such tendencies. In this paper I show how the idea and practice of Fair Trade informs women's situated empowerment sensibilities in Darjeeling. Affected by a changing production scenario with the rise of organic tea production and Fair Trade certification, women tea-farmers in Darjeeling disassemble and reassemble the tenets of the global Fair Trade initiative to concretize their situated aspirations for justice. Based on long term ethnographic research on a tea cooperative in Darjeeling, I argue, that by creatively juxtaposing Fair Trade and swaccha vyāpār, a local translation of Fair Trade, women tea farmers upheld their own development imaginaries and questioned the depoliticizing tendencies within transnational justice regimes that tends to use them as mere instruments of market based justice. Therefore, in Darjeeling, we witness the emergence of new modalities of women's collective self-governance, which are influenced by interactions with market forces but at the same time stand to critique them.