Since the early 2000s, India has been a world leading hub for cross border reproductive treatments, in particular surrogacy, with the nation positioning itself as the “mother destination” for transnational commercial surrogacy, offering “First world services at Third world prices”. State policies, lack of legal regulation, state of the art medical infrastructure and a steady supply of women ready to take on the role as surrogate mothers against meager remuneration have been key factors behind the Indian success story. Yet, a gradual process of regulation in recent years, culminating in the introduction of the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill 2020, has forced the industry to reinvent itself in order to maintain its role as a market leader in a booming global bioeconomy. This article takes the 2020 bill as a starting point for an exploration of the key trajectories that the Indian reproductive industry has taken since. This includes moving into new market segments, such as the unregulated practice of oocyte donation, and expanding globally into new geo-political contexts. Through these practices, India has successfully rebranded itself as a world leading “pre-conception assemblage hub” where embryos are assembled and implanted into surrogates who carry their pregnancies to term in countries with no protective legislation. The article begins to map the emerging links between the reproductive industry in India and East Africa - where diasporic networks are mobilized in the creation of new reproductive markets, dominated by Indian IVF providers. In particular, we discuss the current expansion in Kenya, which we situate against the backdrop of the colonial entanglements between the two countries. While the ART industry in Kenya is still young, we suggest that these emerging developments illuminate the effect of the ban on commercial surrogacy in India, which appears to have resulted in a partial relocation to countries that lack regulation, shifting the precarious conditions of surrogates in India to other women, elsewhere, in ways that rearticulate colonial racial hierarchies and migration patterns.

A new generation of transnational anti-gender actors are framing themselves as human rights champions and protectors of the rights of the “natural family”. To better understand these actors’ norm diffusion, including their re-styling of anti-gender narratives in contemporary iterations of heteroactivism and its potential threat to LGBTIQ+ rights, in this article we analyse the social media tactics of a key transnational anti-gender actor: the International Organization for the Family (IOF). The analysis is focused on the organisation’s Twitter (now X) account and we draw on theories of network media logic, connective action, and connective emotions. Two periods of activism – the first a low-intensity period in 2021 and the second a high-intensity period in 2022 – were purposefully selected for the analysis. In this article, we identify differences between the two periods, noting that the period covering the flagship event, the World Congress of Families (WCF) in 2022, was markedly less LGBTIQ-hostile and adversarial than the first period. IOF thus appears to be inspired by heteroactivist frames during the WCF and abides by logic that should trigger user interaction and content spreading. The lack of interactions and engagement with IOF Twitter content in either period indicates the need for more research on which logics apply to anti-gender audiences. We discuss the findings and what they may imply in a context like Sweden, a country whose self-image as a global champion for women’s and LGBTIQ+ rights may make it ill-equipped to counter the onslaught of transnational actors’ norm entrepreneurial activities.

This dissertation seeks to contribute to the body of research on gender, neoliberal globalisation and work, and on the forms of resistance people engage in within a deeply unequal global order. It was devised in relation to developments during and after widespread, unprecedented labour and social protests among farm workers in export-oriented agriculture in the Western Cape, South Africa, 2012–2013. The protests, referred to in popular discourse as the ‘farm worker strike’, are widely held to have been spearheaded by people in the most precarious positions: seasonal workers, including migrants both from within and outside South Africa, many of whom were women. The dissertation draws on multi-sited ethnography conducted among farm workers in several of the areas to which the protests spread, during what I refer to as the post-strike moment.

The aim of the study is to contribute to an understanding of differently positioned farm workers’ experiences of work and life precarity, organising and resistance – as well as to the interlinkages between these phenomena. Using intersectionality as an ‘analytic sensibility’, the dissertation explores how power relations linked to gender, race/ethnicity and nationality/migration status may be understood as shaped by, and contributing to shaping, work and life precarity. It also looks at how these hierarchies are articulated through labour regimes on farms and through workers’ resistance. Moreover, it interrogates labour activism as a route to resisting not only socio-economic deprivation and apartheid legacies, but further to restoring a sense of dignity (of labour).

The dissertation engages with various broader theoretical discussions. It deliberates on the overlaps between the notions of feminisation of labour, precarious work and precarity – conceiving of precarity as a feminised phenomenon. Experiences of precarity in the Western Cape farmlands, it suggests, are shaped by the devaluing of some workers, linked to racism, sexism and global inequalities, as well as to historical and contemporary processes of dispossession. The dissertation also describes how (some) female farm workers, through presenting themselves as knowledgeable about their rights, and through accentuating feminised aspects of care and responsibility in their activism, position themselves as respectable. Furthermore, through identifying silences and exclusions in representations of farm workers, it contributes to writing black/African female migrant workers back into the strike narrative as important and militant actors. Finally, the dissertation argues that attention to multiple forms of violence – slow, structural, symbolic and direct – and the violence of globalisation under neoliberalism is crucial in order to understand the messy and violent aspects of the ‘farm worker strike’. Importantly, it explores these topics as informed by broader global developments, through which power, control and the retention of value are increasingly placed outside of the deeply unequal spaces that constitute commercial farming areas, discussing links with Sweden as a destination for South African wine and deciduous fruit.

In 2012/2013, widespread rural unrest — commonly referred to as the “farm worker strike” — broke out in the Western Cape, South Africa. This exposed not only poor salaries and working conditions, but also the disparity between representations of farm workers as too restrained by paternalism to dare challenge farmers and the open defiance displayed by protesters. Initial participants were identified as pertaining to categories of workers that for long were relegated to the discursive shadows in representations of Western Cape farm workers: seasonal and casual workers residing primarily off-farm, out of whom many were black South African women and migrants from neighbouring countries. Consequently, they were dismissed by some as not being (real) farm workers. This article explores the protests as a moment when contestations and renegotiations of the meaning of the category “farm worker” were brought to the surface. It suggests that paying attention to intersecting power relations of gender, race/ethnicity and nationality may illuminate silences and exclusions in representations of farm workers.