Reproducing Revolution: Women’s Labor and the War in Kachinland

In Reproducing Revolution, Jenny Hedström explores the Kachin revolution in Myanmar from the perspective of female soldiers, female activists, and women displaced by the violence in northern Myanmar. Hedström argues that the household is an inherently gendered, militarized, and political space that impacts, and is in turn impacted by, the external conflict with which it coexists. In this context, women’s everyday labor--the gendered work of childcare, farming, fighting, and forging connections both across households and between the household and the army and the nation--is key to revolutionary survival. Hedström calls this labor militarized social reproduction, and in Reproducing Revolution she demonstrates that such labor is critical to the military effort, and that warfare itself is shaped through everyday domestic action.

Jenny Hedström is an Associate Professor in War Studies at the Swedish Defence University. She is the author of Waves of Upheaval. Her research and teaching concerns the relationship between households, gender, warfare, and peacebuilding; often with a focus on Myanmar.