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.

Although the February 2021 military coup brought an end to a decade of far-reaching political, economic and cultural change in Myan­mar, the attempt to restore a masculinized, military dictator­ ship has met widespread popular resistance. Here, women have held a pivotal role in opposition to military rule. This wide-ranging volume – rich in detail and analysis – is not just the first comprehensive account of the multifaceted processes of gendered transformation that took place in Myanmar between 2011 and 2021. It also offers a deeper understanding of the current political situation and of the ways in which the country’s political landscape might continue to be reshaped.

Women’s work is critical to revolutionary projects, yet is often written out of war stories. After the 2021 Myanmar military coup, new and renewed patterns of violence, displacement and resistance spread across the countryside, disrupting and reworking agrarian life. Bringing together interdisciplinary feminist insights from the fields of war studies, political ecology, and geography, this project draws on methodologies such as participatory photography and critical mapping to understand gendered relations of land, labor, and love in the Myanmar Spring Revolution. Through collaborations with farmers, artists, and activists, we seek both to document everyday experience and to enact a more emancipatory politics. Read our graphic novel, A Revolutionary Mother, the story of a woman living through the Myanmar Spring Revolution.