This article explores the links between rural livelihood change and gender identities and relations in the Philippines. To bring the feminist and agrarian scholarly agendas closer together, I present ethnographic accounts from Naga City, Bicol, to examine how daily discourses and practices of livelihood change are implicated in (re)producing social iden-tities along gender lines, as well as class and geographical lines. The first part of the article presents the ways in which gender is constituted in the state policies and programs governing agrarian change. Drawing on policy documents and interviews with state officials, civil servants, local academics, and NGO leaders, I note how state practices and policies both influence people’s tendency to diversify and are imbued with inher-ently gendered discourses. In the second part of the article, the location and scale of analysis shift to one location expressive of these official discourses: Pacol, a small farming community located on Naga’s peri-urban fringe. By working through ethnographic accounts provided by households in Pacol, I examine how state-fed gendered discourses are (re)enacted during livelihood diversification and (re)produced in intra-household activities, decision-making processes, and other quotidian performances.
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