Since its inception, La Vía Campesina (LVC) has progressively placed gender equality at the core of its food sovereignty agenda, developing Popular Peasant Feminism (PPF) as a new political horizon. Despite multiple achievements, existing literature on LVC's gender equality discourse identifies several critiques: neglect of intra-household gendered division of labor, tension between gender equality and the defence of "family farming," and the risk of essentializing the woman–food relation. Yet much of this literature has addressed global LVC's declarations, risking homogenization of local struggles. Using "location" as an analytical lens for studying processes of, and struggles for, life making in agrarian realities (Mezzadri et al., 2025), this presentation analyses the case of the Sindicato Labrego Galego (SLG) - a rural union in Galicia (Spain) and member of LVC - as a local instantiation of PPF.

Drawing on discourse analysis and interviews with SLG's Women's Secretariat, it shows how Galicia's history of minifundio, male emigration, and agricultural modernization (from Franco's developmentalism to the Common Agricultural Policy) produces a distinctive peasant feminist struggle that, while resonating deeply with global LVC discourse, diverges in ways that overcome scholarly critiques of the same discourse. By highlighting these differences, tensions, and innovations, this case reveals that pluralizing the study of LVC's feminist perspective is not merely an empirical corrective but a theoretical necessity for understanding how gender-just agri-food transformations are being developed in different locales, and especially in Europe, where studies on peasant women's struggles are still scarce.

This lecture is based on ongoing research, developed in collaboration with Stefania Barca (full professor in Contemporary History at the University of Santiago de Compostela) and Bibiana Martínez Álvarez (external collaborator HISTAGRA - University of Santiago de Compostela). 

Bio note

Eleonora Gea Piccardi | Postdoctoral researcher and research assistant on the EU Horizon Project 'GREENPATHS: European Knowledge Hub on Just Transition Pathways.' She is part of the international network Just Transition and Care, for which she co-authored a policy report titled "Just Transition and Care Work: An International Inquiry" (forthcoming on the UNRISD website-United Nations Research Institute for Social Development). In 2024, she completed her PhD in Social Sciences at the Centre for Social Studies (University of Coimbra), defending a thesis on the feminist, ecological, and decolonial foundations of Kurdish Democratic Confederalism. Her research examined both Rojava (North and East Syria) and the Kurdish diaspora in Europe. Her current research focuses on ecological transitions and care work through (decolonial) feminist political ecology and economy perspectives, exploring how struggles in the sphere of socio-ecological reproduction are shaping alternative pathways for a just transition.

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