Paper short abstract:

Pushing the boundaries of the commons, this paper argues that industrial modernization is commoning women’s labor with allusions to a natural resource and a tradition. Based on an ethnography in the Antalya region of Turkey, it shows how women's work has been imagined as a common resource.

Paper long abstract:

"Tomatoes are like children” became a proverb since the industrial tomato production is introduced to the Antalya region at the epicenter of Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. The size of plastic greenhouses in the coastal valleys of Antalya is modeled according to the year-long labor performable by a nuclear size family. Yet, in this industrial model of agriculture women's work, framed as part of the family labor and without direct access to cash, has been imagined as a common resource in the market and in the family. Theoretically, pushing the boundaries of the commons, this paper argues that industrial modernization has been commoning women’s labor with allusions to a natural resource and a tradition. The skill is subsumed once women’s work in the tomato greenhouses is likened to caring for children. Descriptions of this gendered labor by experts, firms, bureaucrats and traders fuses the boundary between reproductive labor and factory work. Thus, the tomatoes are called "our children".

While the industrial modernization tale in Antalya created statistical categories of “family farming” and “small producer”, the criteria of achievement is described based essentially on the quality of women’s labor. This paper highlights the power of capital in creating categories that subsume and exploit women’s labor in the family as commons. Based on ethnographic research, the paper further argues that women’s consciousness of the value and exploitation of their own labor creates a political space which reclaims this commons.