Gender and Rurality (Routledge International Studies of Women and Place)

Gender and Rurality

Routledge International Studies of Women and Place SERIES EDITORS: JANET HENSHALL MOMSEN AND JANICE MONK, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS AND UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA, USA 1. Gender, Migration and Domestic Service Edited by Janet Henshall Momsen

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Gender and Rurality

Lia Bryant and Barbara Pini

New York

London

First published 2011 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2011 Taylor & Francis The right of Lia Bryant and Barbara Pini to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bryant, Lia. Gender and rurality / by Lia Bryant and Barbara Pini. p. cm.—(Routledge international studies of women and place ; 10) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Women in rural development. 2. Rural women—Social conditions. classes. I. Pini, Barbara. II. Title. HQ1240.B79 2010 305.409172'4—dc22 2009053908 ISBN 0-203-84828-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN13: 978-0-415-48899-0 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-84828-9 (ebk)

3. Social

For Tim and Katerina Bryant, and Maria Tamvakas For my sisters Judith and Catherine Pini

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

1

Introduction

2

Gender, Rurality, and Indigeneity

21

3

Gender, Rurality, and Ethnicities

39

4

Gender, Rurality, and Class

58

5

Gender, Rurality, and Heterosexuality

79

6

Gender, Rurality, and Disability

101

7

Gender, Rurality, and Aging

117

8

Conclusion

137

Notes Bibliography Index

1

151 155 189

Acknowledgments

Lia would like to acknowledge administrative and intellectual support from colleagues from her university, and in particular from the Hawke Institute and the School of Psychology, Social Work, and Social Policy, University of South Australia. A similar version of Chapter 2 was published in the Journal of Rural Studies, as Ramzan, B., B. Pini, and L. Bryant. 2009. Experiencing and Writing Indigeneity, Rurality and Gender: Australian Reflections. Journal of Rural Studies Special Edition, De-centring White Ruralities: Ethnicity and Indigeneity, eds Ruth Panelli, Phil Hubbard, Brad Coombes, and Sandie Suchet-Pearson, 435–443. Chapter 4 was also published in the Journal of Rural Studies, as Bryant, L., and B. Pini. 2009. Gender, Class and Rurality: Australian Case Studies. Journal of Rural Studies 25 (1): 48–56. We thank the editors and publisher of the Journal of Rural Studies for permission to reproduce these. Special thanks to Routledge International Studies of Women and Place series editors Janet Momsen and Janice Monk for their interest in our work and insightful feedback. Many thanks are owed to the women and men who participated in interviews, and who generously gave their time to share their stories with us. Finally, we acknowledge the Australian Research Council for funding that enabled collection and analysis of some of the data used in Chapters 4 and 5.

1

Introduction

Over the past two decades we have witnessed an incredible growth in scholarship on the subject of gender and rurality. Testament to this is the recent publication of a range of edited collections detailing the experiences of men and women living in rural areas of the industrialized West (Bock and Shortall 2006; Buller and Hoggart 2004; Campbell, Bell and Finney 2006; Goverde et al. 2004; Little and Morris 2005). Paralleling this expansion in knowledge has been an increasing interest in questions of inclusion, belonging, and ‘otherness’ in the field of rural social science more generally (e.g. Cloke 1997a, 2006a, b; Cloke and Little 1997). As feminist scholars, we have been delighted and energized by these developments, but we have also experienced a contradictory sense of discomfort and discontent as we reflected upon them. We experienced this early in 2008 when Australia’s newly elected Rudd Labor Government announced a ‘2020’ summit to which one thousand of the nation’s ‘best minds’ were invited to map a policy future for the country. Half of the group responsible for ‘rural Australia’ was women. Clearly, it was no longer accurate to claim, as academics had done merely a decade ago, that ‘rural women are invisible’ (e.g. Alston 1995; Sachs 1996). Again, we rejoiced in this visibility, but our commitment to inclusion meant we also queried, ‘Which rural women are visible?’ When we noted that the women selected to speak on and behalf of rural Australia were, in the main, older, white, able-bodied, married landholders, a sense of unease emerged. This book addresses these feelings of ambivalence on a number of counts. First, while it seeks to continue the important project of furthering knowledge about rurality and gender, it equally seeks to disrupt it. We disrupt and examine gender and rurality by using data obtained predominantly from Australian farming women and men to argue that experiences of gender and rurality cannot be examined in isolation from other social locations. In this respect, we seek to interrogate categories such as ‘rural woman’ and ‘rural man,’ and explore the ways in which gender coexists and melds with Indigeneity, ethnicities, class, sexuality, disability, and age for women and men living in Australian rural locales. Inherent in this analysis is an examination of power in rural spaces, and

2

Gender and Rurality

the diversity and multiplicity of oppressions, resistance, and agency. As such, the book rejects totalizing claims about male dominance and female subordination. Instead, it seeks to understand and challenge how, at particular times and in specific spaces, inequalities are produced and contested between women and men, and, further, between groups of women and men. The second way in which this book addresses our contrary reactions to the escalation of work on rurality and gender, and, more broadly, the ‘rural other,’ is through our adoption of a feminist approach to our subject. In particular, we engage the feminist theoretical notion of intersectionality as a means to conceptualize, and give voice to, heterogeneity in the lives of rural men and women. In recent years, feminists have debated intersectionality as a means of addressing the perennially vexed issue of the multiplicity and diversity of women, and, moreover, the historical exclusions of feminism as a political project. It has been seen as a means of moving beyond what Butler (1990) caricatured as the normative means of addressing difference; that is, via an ‘embarrassed etc.’ at the end of a sentence following the naming of ‘gender, race and class.’ Yet, despite the concept of intersectionality being viewed as ‘the most important contribution that women’s studies has made so far’ to knowledge, to date it has been notably absent in the rural social science literature (McCall 2005, 1771). This book, by adopting an understanding of gender that has variously been described as ‘postmodern feminism,’ ‘third-wave feminism,’ and ‘post-structural feminism’ (Brooks 1997; Colebrook 2004; Zalewski 2000), speaks not just to a feminist audience but to all rural studies academics who, like us, are committed to emancipatory social research. In this framing, gender is viewed as a social process that is relational, dynamic, and historically and socio-politically specifi c (Witz, Halford, and Savage 1996). This conceptualization of gender is far removed from that which characterizes it as a stable, fi xed, and binary entity associated with the biological bodies of ‘men’ and ‘women.’ As Alsop, Fitzsimmons, and Lennon (2002, 79) note, this shift from seeing gender as ‘a process rather than a “role” is intricately connected with ‘the shift from things to words,’ and, more specifically, the notion of ‘discourse.’ Scott (1988, 35) defi nes discourse as an ‘historically, socially and institutionally specific structure of statements, terms, categories and beliefs.’ There is a range of discourses by which we constitute ourselves as ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine,’ but these do not all have equivalent status (Davies and Harre 1990; Weedon 1987). The notion of discourse is intricately connected to power. As St Pierre (2000, 485) explains, ‘once a discourse becomes “normal” and “natural” it is difficult to think and act outside it. Within the rules of a discourse, it makes sense to say only certain things.’ Ramazanoğlu (1993) argues that this does not mean that subjects are determined by

Introduction

3

discourse or without agency. Instead, she asserts that resistance is implicit in the Foucauldian notion of power. To contextualize the chapters which follow it is important at this juncture to highlight that rural scholarship and explorations of meanings of rurality have largely emerged from Britain and the United States with the Australian context and its conceptualizations of places receiving less attention in theorizations of the rural. There are unique characteristics about Australian rural places that make for different spatial and social relations. Firstly, Australian rural places are characterized by more recent white settlement which occurred through European colonization and the declaring of Australia as ‘terra nullius’. From 1992 Australian courts recognized native title, that is, Indigenous connection to the land via traditional law and title. However, obtaining native title remains difficult and is often contested. The introduction of native title has been an established legal principle in other countries colonised by Britain (Canada, New Zealand, and the eastern US). Nevertheless, Australia, unlike these other countries continues to have no treaty or formal agreement made with traditional owners. This political context excludes Indigenous peoples from their inalienable citizenship rights (see Chapter 2). Thus, Australian rural places are predominantly constructed as white spaces shaped by white European forms of governance and economic activity like mining and agriculture (Altman 2006). Further, while Australia is one of the most urbanized countries in the world on a par with Japan, the US, and Canada, settlement patterns differ according to states and territories. For example, in Western Australia the greater proportion of the population resides in the capital city of Perth whereas in Queensland the population is more evenly spread throughout rural and urban places. Although rural settlement patterns are heterogeneous (with coastal regions growing and inland communities declining) commonly rural communities are characterized by small populations across vast distances (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS] 2007). Nationally rural economies overwhelmingly rely on sheep and beef production and/or the extraction of mineral wealth (ABS 2007). In rural Australia service sectors, employment opportunities and social relations are shaped by the economic foundations of the community (see Chapter 4). In this book we give particular emphasis to farming communities, however, as we discuss in Chapter 4 with reference to the work of Gibson-Graham (1996), in mining communities and mixed farming/mining communities there are different class and political relations. In this book we aim to enrich the international literature on rurality by introducing a range of Australian places to explore how the intersections of gender with Indigeneity, ethnicities, class, sexuality, and disabilities reflect the specificities of context. Thus, we begin the book by asking the question, ‘What is rurality?’ and by enumerating the different ways in which the rural has been theorized.

4

Gender and Rurality

Given our sympathy towards social constructionist approaches, we afford specific attention to explaining how this conceptual lens has been used to deconstruct the concept of the ‘rural idyll,’ and particularly the potential of socio-cultural representations of rurality to create divisions and boundaries. We explain that, in undertaking this work, rural social scientists have largely drawn on the notion of ‘the other’ with very little critique, and further, with little or no reference to the substantial body of feminist work on difference. In light of this neglect, we introduce the term ‘intersectionality,’ and elaborate on its strengths and weaknesses. This review foregrounds a discussion of the book’s methodology and our struggles with what Fine (1994, 72) refers to as ‘working the hyphens’; that is, nominating and representing differences sensitively and reflexively. Before concluding the chapter, we provide a brief outline of the book and the ways in which each chapter seeks to contribute to more polyvocal knowledge about gender and rurality.

WHAT IS RURALITY? Increasingly, the literature on ‘what is rural’ has become complex and multilayered, raising questions about whether the rural really exists, for whom and how? Is it simply a representation contrived in popular dualisms; that is, rural in opposition to urban? Is it the idyllic versus the backwater? Or is the rural an anachronism for national identities built on representations of the specificities of rurality to place? Paul Cloke (2006c) identifies three significant theoretical lenses through which rurality has been conceptualized: functional; political economy; and social constructionism.1 We explore these in the subsequent text. The functional emphasizes land use and small settlements where there is a strong relation between buildings and landscape, and cohesive identities constructed on ‘living as part of an extensive landscape’ (Cloke 2006c, 20). These functional understandings draw on Tönnies’ (1963) classic theorization of rurality that invokes a rural/urban divide, differentiating between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society). Such understandings assume that a rural community is an agricultural community, and that the identities of people that live within rural places are homogenous—specifically white, middle-class males (Philo 1992). Functional understandings of rurality are often represented in state policies and official data collection, which construct the rural on the basis of population size, distance from urban centers, and/or economic activity (agriculture). The political economy approach emphasizes the differential relationships of places within nations and globally. Political economists with an interest in the rural have focused on the structuring of agricultural production, its relation to consumption, and its impact on rural social relations (Cloke and

Introduction

5

Goodwin 1992, 1993; Friedmann and McMichael 1989; Goodman and Redclift 1991; McMichael 1995, 1996). Using Actor Network Theories (ANT), rural studies scholars have traced the human and natural networks involved in production, marketing, sales, and consumption of food (van der Ploeg and Frouws 1999; Whatmore and Thorne 1997). McManus’ (2001) study of sausages and networks shows the multiple stages and actors involved in the creation of a sausage: from the calf bought for the feedlot, to what it is fed, and for how long; for which market it is determined; how it is slaughtered; and which parts are bought by which companies, then sold and reproduced into food, and finally sold again to stores for consumer purchase. He traces the ecological impacts, global markets, and consumption patterns. These globalized dimensions and directions of economic and social change in political economy and ANT perspectives have led to questions about the appropriateness of over-focusing on the local, with scholars questioning the concept of ‘rural.’ As Cloke (2006c, 20) says, the ‘localities debate . . . destabilised the spatial basis for rural studies’ (see also Halfacree 2006). Social constructionism, the third purview of rurality identified by Cloke (2006c), focuses on negotiated, contested, and lived meanings of rurality, particularly idyllized meanings and the interconnections between constructions of rurality and nature. Bounded terms like ‘rurality’ and ‘community’ carry inherent meanings associated with identities of place on which the social constructionist lens focuses. Geographer Doreen Massey (1987, 1994) has strongly informed social constructionist perspectives on rurality, arguing that spaces are subject to global dynamics without losing the particularity of place. Thus, the social constructionist approach provides spatial analysis that distinguishes and emphasizes the fluidity and hybridity of space and place, and their relation to time (Massey 1994). She argues that any attempt to name place, ‘to establish boundaries, to secure the identity of places, can in this sense therefore be seen to be attempts to stabilize the meaning of particular envelopes of space-time’ (Massey 1994, 5). She goes on to label them as: . . . attempts to get to grips with the unutterable mobility and contingency of space-time . . . For such attempts at the stabilization of meaning are constantly the site of social contest, battles over the power to label space-time, to impose meaning to be attributed to space, for however long or short a span of time. (Massey 1994, 5) Thus, Massey (1994, 2) shows us that space must always be thought of in time, not as an absolute dimension; that the spatial is ‘social relations stretched out’. This broader understanding of space and the broader social constructionist perspective on rurality can be illustrated through an examination of the notion of the ‘rural idyll,’ as this is a concept that attributes meaning to place and which has a long history in rural studies.

6

Gender and Rurality

RURALITY AS SOCIALLY-CONSTRUCTED: THE RURAL IDYLL While the rural idyll is a dynamic concept, four key themes can be identified from literature on the subject of socio-cultural constructions of rurality. First, writers argue that there are some common values and notions associated with social meanings of rurality. These include the centrality of nature, community cohesion, safety and physical gains associated with ‘outdoor’ lifestyles, harmony, permanence, security, inner strength, as well as family values, community cohesion, and an emblematic nationhood (Rye 2006; Short 2006). These qualities and values associated with the rural suggest the countryside is a place ‘untouched’ by the harsh influences of urban life (Halfacree 1993). In sharp contrast, the rural has also been socially constructed as pre-modern—as a ‘backwater,’ ‘dull,’ and ‘traditional’ (Cruickshank 2009; Jentsch and Shucksmith 2004). These dominant meanings, values and emotions associated with rurality are conveyed via a myriad of media from fiction, poetry, art, and music to advertisements, children’s stories, military texts, and fi lms (Bell 1997, 2000; Campbell and Kraack 1998; Horton 2008a, b; Short 2006; Woodward 1998; 2000). A second key dimension of the rural idyll is that it is shifting, changing, and context-specific. While key characteristics such as beauty and purity continue to be associated with the notion of rurality, they are not fi xed or static (Bell 2006). For example, more contemporary notions of the rural include discourses and practices of preservation of the countryside for consumption, recreation, healthy lifestyles, and adventure, primarily by middle-class residents (Bocock 1993; Duruz 1999; Lash and Urry 1994; Miele 2006; Tonts 2005). The partial nature of the rural idyll is also discussed by Berg and Forsberg (2003), who note that work on the phenomena of the rural idyll is largely British, and that material, social, and cultural conditions in a different national context will mediate how the rural is understood and characterized. For example, historically the Australian landscape in popular discourse has been described as the antithesis of the British. It is dry, red, brown; a landscape of bold skies, vast spaces, and sparsely populated towns. Australia’s rural idyll emerged in the 1880s, constructed by Australian-born white settlers, and in particular a generation of city-based writers and artists like Banjo Paterson, Henry Lawson, Steele Rudd, and Tom Roberts, who found the ‘real Australia’ in the bush (Hirst 1978). However, as Gorman-Murray, Waitt, and Gibson (2008) posit, cultural representations of rurality in Australia have changed since this time and will be different at specific state, regional, and local scales. A third theme is that the rural idlyll is critical to defi ning who is included in, and who is excluded from, rural spaces. As Short (2006, 133) argues,

Introduction

7

the rural idyll ‘acquires meaning only through the consciousness of, and contradistinction between an assumed “other” which is un-idyllic.’ Those who fit within hegemonic (re)constructions of rurality are the authentic protagonists in rural life; those who do not are marginal, for they are seen as lacking and illegitimate. In an Australian context, this is demonstrated by Pini et al. (2010), who show how engagement in farming becomes a marker of inclusion or exclusion in rural communities. Pini et al. (2010) examined correlations between farming and rurality by exploring the ways in which school teachers perceive students from ‘farming’ and ‘non-farming’ backgrounds. Young people whose families were involved in agriculture are named and described as ‘country’ kids, while this was not the case for young people from mining families. The authors demonstrate that in distinguishing between students in this way, teachers draw upon a range of emotional descriptors. For example, farming, and therefore ‘country kids,’ are industrious, hold traditional values, are well-mannered and unassuming, while ‘mining kids’ are positioned negatively as apathetic and overly concerned with material goods and consumption. Thus, in this respect, students from farming backgrounds are constructed as emblematic of notions of the idealized Australian countryside, while students from mining backgrounds are seen as contrary to such constructions. In this book, we further explore how rurality is conflated with farming in an Australian context, and the construction of the rural subject as principally a white male farmer who farms traditional agricultural commodities (e.g. sheep, beef, and crops; see Chapter 4). In a study undertaken by Cloke, Millbourne, and Widdowfield (2002, 66) on rural homelessness in the United Kingdom, those who are outside dominant formulations of what/who constitutes rurality are rendered invisible. In summing up the many denials of the existence of homelessness in rural areas, Cloke et al. (2002) write that ‘rurality and homelessness are discursively non-coupled’ by rural residents through ideas, perceptions, and practices that position the rural as purifi ed and unsoiled by social problems. Similarly, Hughes’ (2004) research on lone parents reveals that despite the growth in this population in rural areas, the perception remains that the ‘problem’ of lone parenthood is an urban one (see also Hughes and Nativel 2005). Like the homeless, the lone parent is characterized in a negative manner (for example, as welfare dependent, immoral, and lazy), which is, as Cloke, Millbourne, and Widdowfield (2000) contend, ‘out-of-place’ in the imagined rural idyll. These renderings of the homeless and lone parent have material as well as discursive implications, resulting in a lack of service or policy provision, and/or exclusionary and discriminatory treatment. Implicit in the aforementioned discussion is a fi nal theme in studies of social and cultural constructions of rurality: their intimate connection to power relations and inequalities. This is an issue addressed by Jo Little

8

Gender and Rurality

(1986, 1987, 1997a, b), who, using data from questionnaires and interviews with women in rural English villages, drew early attention to the gendered nature of the rural idyll. She argued that women’s subordinate position in rural society is related to the fact that the constituent features of the rural idyll, such as the emphasis on home and community, exert strong pressure on women to restrict them to a domestic role. She contended that structural and situational barriers that reduce rural women’s access to paid employment further compound this pressure. Hughes (1997) added empirical evidence to this argument by examining women’s participation in paid work in rural England. She explained that rural women who did participate in paid employment, and therefore ‘did not conform to the moral codes were not only noticed, but also judged’ (Hughes 1997, 135), and that this surveillance and sanctioning operated to deter women’s full participation in the rural workforce. As the previous discussion demonstrates, the task of deconstructing rurality and its powerful capacity to marginalize has grown in rural social science internationally over the past two decades. This work has typically used the concept of ‘the other’ to bring into question the rural as white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, and middle-class, and to denote exclusions from such dominant constructions of rurality (Bell 2006; Chalmers and Joseph 2006; Cloke 2006a, b; Cloke and Little 1997; Milbourne 1997; Murdoch and Pratt 1993; Philo 1992). Despite this prolific use of the notion of ‘the other,’ it has seldom been subject to critique in rural studies.

RURAL STUDIES AND THE OTHER Early work on the subject of ‘the rural other’ in the early 1990s was closely associated with the influence of postmodern and post-structural theorizing and their attendant concerns with plurality. Indeed, the discussion of ‘the rural other’ in Philo’s (1992) much cited paper, ‘Neglected Rural Geographies: A Review,’ and moreover in Murdoch and Pratt’s (1993) reply, is located within a much more comprehensive debate about the challenge postmodern theories bring to our understanding of the rural. The changes that were occurring in rural spaces in the 1990s, such as gentrification and in-migration, also provided the impetus for turning to ‘the other’ in rural studies. Milbourne (1997) introduces a collection of papers titled Revealing Rural ‘Others’ by making reference to ‘newcomer groups’ in rural areas; groups who have no connection to farming but are concerned with environmental issues. Milbourne (1997), Murdoch and Pratt (1993), and Philo (1992, 1993) use a range of terms alongside ‘the other,’ including ‘the hidden,’ ‘the invisible,’ ‘the marginalized,’ ‘the excluded,’ ‘the peripheral,’ ‘the voiceless,’ and ‘the neglected.’ Related to these terms and the notion of ‘the other’ is a concern with social equity. For example, Philo (1993, 433)

Introduction

9

asserts that his interest is in ‘injustice, exploitation and possible ways of improving conditions in the lives of rural “others”.’ Cloke and Little (1997) address the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of the concept of ‘the other.’ They provide a brief genealogy of understandings and the emergence of the term in scholarly work. They draw on Edward Said’s (1978, 1986, 1993) work on Orientalism to examine the concept of ‘the other’ as one which relies upon delineating the core and the peripheral: those who belong and those on the margins. They transport this idea to the rural and suggest that rurality is subject to forms of colonization that defi ne the parameters of belonging in rural communities. Cloke and Little (1997) also refer to some of the potential problems of using ‘the other’ as a focus of research. In particular, they warn of the prospect of empirical studies privileging some groups and people who may be ‘obviously’ more different from the archetype of the rural, and those who may be considered more appealing and interesting. Intricately connected with this concern is the potential tendency for research on ‘the other’ to be mere ‘tourism or voyeurism of the subjects concerned,’ rather than ‘sustained, empathic and contextualised research under clearly thought through ethical conditions’ (Cloke and Little 1997, 11). Cloke (2006a, b) has undertaken the most expansive critique of the use of ‘the other’ in rural contexts. He draws our attention to the lack of precision in the use of the term, and specifically what constitutes ‘the other’ and how to theorize it critically in rural studies. Indeed, in this small body of scholarship there is a very limited level of self-reflexivity and critical analysis about its use. The term is left to speak for itself rather than being scrutinized for its limitations or possibilities. Further, in many instances, ‘the other’ is synonymous with one aspect of subjectivity or life experience, such as sexuality (Valentine 1997), race (Kinsman 1997), poverty (Cloke 1997b), or homelessness (Cloke 2006a). However, Cloke (2006a) problematizes how ‘the other’ comes to be known and constituted, suggesting this occurs initially and automatically by self-referencing. He argues that ‘from this viewpoint it seems impossible to get beyond the same to that other which is both present and absent, everyday but foreign, commonplace yet unexpected, unknown and not looked for’ (Cloke 2006a, 449). In order to distinguish research on ‘the other’ that uses a self-referential frame from that which moves beyond a view from the self, Cloke (2006a, 455) uses the respective terms ‘Self of the Self and Other of the Other.’ Largely absent from the rural studies literature about ‘the other’ and theorizations of ways to understand the rural as encompassing multiple subjectivities, experiences, and practices is the rich and voluminous feminist work which, since the 1960s and 1970s, has called attention to the complexities of social categorization as a means of exploring difference. To redress this, in the following section we turn to feminist theory and introduce the most recent work on intersectionality to argue its usefulness for rural studies.

10

Gender and Rurality

INTERSECTIONALITY Given that issues of diversity, difference and multiplicity have been so central to feminist theorizing and debates in recent decades, it is difficult to imagine that a question such as, ‘Who is the subject of feminism?’ would ever have been considered self-evident. However, the universalization of the category ‘women’ was contested as early as the 1960s and 1970s. In this early second-wave feminist period, it was Black feminist women in particular who disrupted essentialist assumptions about the nature of women’s oppression. These scholars argued that the experiences of white women were not necessarily synonymous with their own, and that for them it was not the singular category ‘women’ that shaped their lives but the dual categories of race and gender (Beale 1970; Davis 1980; Lorde 1984). Arguments that posit there is no unitary group ‘Black women’ because differentiation occurs according to divisions such as social class or sexuality (King 1992; Thorne 1992) further complicate this terrain. The fracturing of feminism through these collective critiques focused theoretical and empirical attention on the question of difference. Indeed, it was this nomenclature—that of ‘difference’—which feminist writers widely utilized. However, the concept of difference has itself been the subject of feminist discussion. Knapp (2000) identifies three perspectives on difference in feminist debates. The fi rst focuses on differences between women and men at the subjective and structural levels, and draws on notions of gender hierarchies and inequalities. The second considers social difference across gender categories, underpinned by identity politics; that is, a sense of solidarity within specific groups of women. The third perspective shifts attention to differences within individual subjects, and therefore multiple power relations. As Knapp (2000, 218) contends, this focus on the axes of difference is problematic; it is ‘more of an absence than a substantive presence.’ Burman (2003, 295) elaborates upon this theme, noting that ‘talk of difference is not about all differences, but about those that, within dominant discourses, are marked with other kinds of “ds” as deviant or deficient.’ As she explains, the notion of difference presumes the ‘power and privilege’ of the dominant to name who is ‘different,’ and the terms on which those deemed different can speak or be ‘given voice’ (Burman 2003, 297). This is compounded, she writes, because too often studies of difference result in the differences we nominate becoming reified and separated from each other. Key feminist schools of thought, such as radical, liberal, and socialist feminisms, are intricately connected to this type of conceptualization of difference (Brah and Phoenix 2004). In more recent times the concept of difference has taken on new meaning, particularly as feminist writers have sought to avoid binary and disconnected notions of difference by drawing on post-structural understandings of multiple subjectivities and relational positionings (Archer 2004; Larner 1995; Linstead and Pullen 2006). Archer (2004) explains that Derrida’s

Introduction

11

notion of ‘différance’ has been influential in unsettling the notion as being complete and fi xed. Thus, as she notes, differences can shift and/or new differences can emerge. While feminists have viewed the fluidity of this conceptualization of difference positively, concerns have been expressed about the possibility of eroding the feminist political agenda that is focused on long-standing and continuing differences (Zack 2005). West and Fenstermaker (1995) are also representative of attempts to refashion the notion of difference. Like others, including Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1983), and Bola et al. (1998), they reject additive approaches such as notions of ‘double’ or ‘triple’ disadvantage, jeopardy, or oppression. These writers argue that difference is not experienced as singular categories but rather as compounded categories. Further, as Valentine (2007, 13) contends, conceptualizing difference in this way assumes a normative identity as white, heterosexual, able-bodied, and male, to which other identities are added. As a counter to the problems inherent in the additive approach to difference, West and Fenstermaker (1995) argue that differences such as gender, class, and race need to be understood as situated accomplishments. They suggest that by attending to the contextual circumstances in which certain accomplishments come into being, we can explore modalities of difference as intermeshed. Following publication of West and Fenstermaker’s (1995) interactionist notion of difference in Gender and Society, a symposium on the issue elicited some vigorous criticism, again highlighting the thorny nature of the ‘difference question’ for feminism. Collins et al. (1995), for example, argued that the focus on interactions denies the importance of structural conditions of power. They stated that the framework ‘strips the very categories of race, class, and gender of meaning and then recasts the problems of institutional power in the apolitical framework of how we might “do difference”’ (Collins et al. 1995, 493). As some feminists have sought to reconfigure the notion of difference, others have embraced the concept of intersectionality. Kimberle Crenshaw (1989) fi rst referred to intersectionality in a paper exploring Black women’s participation in the labor market. She invoked the term to ‘denote the various ways in which race and gender interact to shape the multiple dimensions of Black women’s employment experiences’ (Crenshaw 1989, 539). Since this time, the term has been used in disparate, sometimes inconsistent ways (Jordan-Zachery 2007, 255; Phoenix and Pattynama 2006, 188). Brah and Phoenix (2004, 76) provide a useful definition of the term as encompassing a focus on multiplicity, agency, structure, and context: ‘Intersectionality [signifies] the complex, irreducible, varied, and variable effects which ensue when multiple axes of differentiation—economic, political, cultural, psychic, subjective and experiential—intersect in historically specific contexts.’ In a recent examination of the term ‘intersectionality,’ Davis (2008) explains why it has been afforded so much currency in contemporary feminist scholarship. Inspired by the postmodern project, intersectionality

12

Gender and Rurality

enables exploration of shifting and multiple identities that enmesh and interlock. It encourages the identification of knowledge as situated, thereby allowing researchers to reflect on their own intersectional positions (West and Fenstermaker 1995; Valentine 2007). It is also critical that intersectionality focuses attention on power, and opens up opportunities for studying power at different scales and in different forms. This is because, as has been noted in the literature, scholars in the field of intersectionality have drawn on different theoretical perspectives to examine power relations. They have adopted systemic and constructionist approaches, Foucauldian discursive constructions of power, and performative reproductions and transgressions, thereby making and marking social divisions of inequality (Prins 2006). Davis (2008) further posits that intersectionality enables feminists to focus on the social and material aspects of women’s lives without abandoning modernist categories of race, class, and gender. At the same time, ‘a key insight of intersectional theory holds that modes of inequality, such as race, class and gender, can combine in ways that alter the meaning and effects of one another’ (Morris 2007, 491). Despite these positive assertions about intersectionality, feminist writers highlight the challenges posed by its adoption and use. In particular, McCall (2005) draws attention to the complexity of using intersectionality in theoretical and empirical analyses, which in essence relate to broader complexities of categorization. She suggests that how we use and understand categories depends on our approach to categorization. McCall (2005) identifies three key approaches: anti-categorical; intra-categorical; and inter-categorical. Anti-categorical complexity is based on the idea that social life is multiple and fluid, and therefore cannot be reflected in categories. This position suggests that categories impose a stable and homogenized social order. Methodologically, this means that categories and the process of categorization are rendered suspect because the process of naming leads to boundaries of exclusion and inclusion. The insights from this approach can lead to a healthy critique of categories rather than their simple abandonment: . . . the category of gender was fi rst understood as constituted by men and women, but questions of what distinguishes a man from a woman—is it biological sex, and if so what is biologically male and female?—led to the defi nition of ‘new’ social groups, new in the sense of being named but also perhaps in the sense of being created. There are no longer two genders but countless ones, no longer two sexes but five. (McCall 2005, 1778) Intra-categorical complexity is the philosophical flow-on from the critiquing and pushing of boundaries provided by the anti-categorical approach. It is the foundation for intersectionality, as scholars working within this frame focus on ‘social groups at neglected points of intersection’ (McCall 2005, 1774).

Introduction

13

The inter-categorical approach, which is perhaps the most reflective of intersectionality, ‘requires that scholars provisionally adopt existing analytical categories to document relationships of inequality among social groups and changing configurations of inequality along multiple and conflicting dimensions’ (McCall 2005, 1773). In presenting her typology of categorization in intersectionality research, McCall (2005) points out that work will typically cross boundaries and defy prescriptive or singular defi nitions. McDowell (2008) takes up this issue, drawing on empirical data from a study of the labor market position of recent migrants in the United Kingdom. She writes that despite her ‘theoretical commitment to anti-categorical approaches,’ she hears in her participants’ stories ‘the intersection of discourses of categorical difference among employers, managers and workers themselves [that] continues to produce and reproduce categorical inequalities’ (McDowell 2008, 501). Ultimately, McDowell (2008) argues for the utilization of multiple categorical approaches to intersectionality to retain a focus on structure, culture, and subjectivity; interaction, agency, and resistance. For example, she explores the gendered-sexualized-racialized identities of migrant workers, employers, and customers, and the interactions between them, situated in different occupational contexts. The ways in which participants negotiate, resist, and/or take up hegemonic identities are examined within the context of an analysis of the broader processes and practices of global capitalism. In another exploration of intersectionality in the geographical literature, Valentine (2007) uses six specific stories from a single narrative that exemplify how identities are constructed differently in shifting spatial contexts, for example, across a range of social institutions such as home and work. Power operates as hegemonic discourses and structures that exclude and include within these spatial contexts. Thus, for Valentine (2007), space is an important dimension of intersectionality in the construction of subjectivities. The complexities of using intersectionality as an approach to feminist research have raised questions in the academy about the concept’s usefulness. Indeed, scholars query whether intersectionality is a concept, a theory, or a heuristic device for critical feminist theories (Davis 2008; Phoenix and Pattynama 2006). Some believe its ambiguity results in poorly framed theory; some express concern that it lacks coherent methodological procedures to inform theoretical development (Rosenberg and Howard 2008; Yuval-Davis 2006); and others raise concerns about the seemingly endless list of social divisions it brings forth (Butler 1990; Ludvig 2006). As Yuval-Davis (2006, 193) states, Crenshaw (1989) originally presented her model of intersectionality as ‘a visual image of a person standing at a road junction, vehicles coming at her from an indeterminate number of cross-cutting roads.’ However, intersectional studies or theories are likely to become unwieldy, and possibly meaningless, if they attempt to use limitless axes of social divisions to capture ‘the

14

Gender and Rurality

full diversity of women’s experiences,’ thereby universalizing experiences of women across specific categorizations (Centre for Women’s Global Leadership 2001 in Yuval-Davis 2006, 13). This may remove from view the different political positions and power dynamics within identity groupings in specific socio-historic settings. Other feminists argue that it is possible to under-theorize social divisions and categories when key markers of social difference such as race, gender, and class are examined as intersecting (e.g. Skeggs 2004). As Valentine (2007) observes, feminists working on interconnections struggle to decide which analytical category to afford primacy. Bryant and Hoon (2006) also remark that empirical studies focused on multiple social categories often confl ate core categories like class and gender. Ludvig (2006, 247) draws our attention to the question, ‘Who defi nes when, where, which and why particular differences are given recognition while others are not?’ This question calls researchers to account for their methodological and theoretical judgments. Perhaps a rigor in which to frame intersectionality may be found in the methodological approaches to this concept. In considering this, we now detail our methodological path in writing this book.

METHODOLOGY In this book each chapter includes a brief section outlining the specific methods used to provide the data presented. However, broader methodological considerations concerning the subject matter and the overall process for inquiry need to be addressed here. In terms of the former, we were guided fi rstly by our feminist framework, and, as feminists, by our concern with placing ‘the social construction of gender at the centre’ of our inquiry (Lather 1988, 571). Thus, making gender a central category of analysis for a book about rurality was uncomplicated and self-evident. However, when we began questioning what differences we would name, and the implications of naming some differences and not others, it became more complicated. Cloke (2006a, 447), and Cloke and Little (1997, 11) contemplate these questions in a rare rural social science methodological discussion about the politics, ethics, and practice of studying difference. They warn against selecting differences for analysis that are more easily identified and categorized, and/or favoring the study of what may be seen as more exotic and seductive differences. They rightly assert that these choices may be at the expense of researching less tangible, more transient aspects of identity as well as what may be portrayed as the more ordinary or mundane differences. Inherent indecisions about ‘what’ differences to study are questions of ‘how’ to study differences. In this respect, we struggled with issues of

Introduction

15

how to represent difference in a meaningful, respectful, and sympathetic way; in a manner that mediated our own power as researchers and was focused on contributing to more inclusive and equitable rural communities. Again, Cloke (2006a), and Cloke and Little (1997) have written on this matter, cautioning researchers against the tendency for superfi cial and cursory work. In responding to Cloke (2006a), and Cloke and Little’s (1997) advice, we sought direction from the feminist literature which, as we have explained in the previous section, has a long history of scholarship debating difference, and more specifi cally the issues of power, positionality, and politics in studying difference (Moss 2002; Ramazanoğlu and Holland 2002; St Pierre and Pillow 2000). As Australian-born white women, we began with the work of feminist writers on Indigeneity. These writers have argued that understanding difference requires acknowledging whiteness, and, in doing so, acknowledging the fact that its privileges occur as a result of Indigenous people’s dispossession from their land and white Australia’s continued refusal to acknowledge native title (Moreton-Robinson 2004, 6). Given that on June 30, 2006, 69 percent of the Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal people in Australia were living in regional, rural, and remote areas of the country, this contention clearly has critical resonance for any examination of difference and diversity in non-metropolitan areas of our nation (ABS 2007). These considerations led to our decision to begin this book with a chapter on gender, Indigeneity, and rurality. In working through the question of what other differences we would discuss in this book, we enlisted two further strategies. The fi rst involved returning to the original impetus for this book—our sense that there was more to the categories ‘rural woman’ and ‘rural man’ than portrayed in the literature. This was a sense that came from our research as well as our backgrounds. We returned to data from earlier research we had undertaken and looked at it through the lens of difference. The chapters on class, sexuality, and age emerged from this process. There are, of course, inherent problems in utilizing data from studies undertaken with a different purpose in mind, particularly when intersectionality theorists suggest that specific approaches may be required to research intersectionality effectively (Flintoff, Fitzgerald, and Scraton 2008). Yet we saw benefits in our decision to use such data, as it came from research we had undertaken in communities where we had long-term relationships, commitments, and interests; a situation in which we felt we could contextualize the data and undertake a sympathetic reading of the narratives. It was also sobering for us to return to this data and ‘see’ disparities that we had not seen before across class, sexuality, and age. In this regard, we were constantly hearing Davis’ (2008, 70) voice telling us that the notion of intersectionality ‘initiate(s) a process of discovery, alerting us to the

16

Gender and Rurality

fact that the world around us is always more complicated and contradictory than we ever could have anticipated.’ The second strategy was to reflect on our own knowledge and encounters of inclusion/exclusion as both rural and urban residents, and the ways in which these informed our desire to destabilize any sense of a coherent category ‘country woman.’ It became clear during this process that we had a shared history of experiencing difference as a result of our family’s migrant heritage, and, for one of us, of having a sibling with a physical disability. We had tacit knowledge that such differences existed in rural areas, but because we had rarely seen them acknowledged in writing about gender and rurality, we wanted to name them and write about them. This led us to develop the chapters on ethnicities and disabilities. We were cognizant of the rightfully contentious methodological debates within these fields. In disability studies, for example, research approaches have been condemned as oppressive for failing to engage authentically and collaboratively with people with disabilities, and for lacking any commitment to praxis (e.g. Oliver 1992; Rioux and Bach 1994; Shakespeare 1997). Associated with this has been discord over the role of non-disabled researchers in disability studies (e.g. Stone and Priestley 1996; Tregaskis and Goodley 2005). We were consequently aware that undertaking research ‘with’ rather than ‘on’ people with disabilities, and ‘with’ rather than ‘on’ ethnically diverse populations would require a long and involved period of time in the field. 2 While we were willing to devote time to such a task, we realized that the costs would be prohibitive without external funding. Ultimately, we arrived at two different solutions: we would draw on textual material for the chapter on disabilities, and interviews with Anglo and leading members of a farm women’s group for the chapter on ethnicities. The latter chapter, like that on sexualities where we use interviews with young married farming couples, explores ‘the other’ through the hegemonic and the naturalized. In this sense, we address the criticisms made by feminist, rural studies, and intersectionality scholars that the concept of ‘the other’ should not allow us to lose sight of the discourses and practices of the normative, such as those of ‘heteronormativity’ or ‘whiteness’ (e.g. Valentine 2007; Wilkinson and Kitzinger 1996). The above factors that shaped our decisions to draw on the data we have (e.g. utilising data from already completed studies, lacking funding for extensive new fieldwork) has meant that this book does focus a great deal on farming people and communities. It is the case that those we interviewed in Chapter 7 have never farmed and some participants whose experiences are described in Chapter 3 were not involved in agriculture. However, Chapters 4 and 5 examine the lives of farmers and Bebe whose story is shared in Chapter 2 at times describes herself as a farmer. This concentration on agriculture is potentially problematic in a book which seeks to disrupt hegemonic notions of rurality given that, in much popular and academic discourse, farming and rurality are conflated and non-farming

Introduction

17

experiences of the rural silenced. At the same time the intersectional analysis engaged in this book means that we offer a very different reading of agricultural people and communities from mainstream rural scholarship. That is, a reading which demonstrates the heterogeneity of the category ‘farming’ as it is inflected by different social locations such as, for example, Indigeneity, age, ethnicities or class. In this sense we reveal not only the multiplicity and complexity of the identities ‘farming man’ and ‘farming woman’ but, importantly, the multiplicity and complexity of the broader subject groupings ‘rural man’ and ‘rural woman’. Our hope is that this will invite much needed future critical work further interrogating difference and diversity in rural spaces.

OVERVIEW There are eight chapters in this book, six of which discuss gender and rurality and their intersections with Indigeneity, ethnicities, class, sexuality, disability, and aging. Following this introduction, Chapter 2 explores gender, Indigeneity, and rurality in an Australian context. It addresses in more detail the complexities of researching difference that are alluded to in the previous discussion of methodology. We heed feminist methodological advice on the need for transparency and reflexivity in research on ‘the other’ (Letherby 2003), turning to the purview of whiteness studies to examine our own subjectivities and knowledges as ‘racially embodied’ (MoretonRobinson 2000b, 350). This discussion provides the context to enunciate our methodological approach to studying gender, Indigeneity, and rurality. Central to this approach has been our collaboration with Bebe Ramzan, an Indigenous Australian woman living in the remote Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands (APY Lands). Through engaging in what Watson and Huntington (2008) describe as ‘a conversation,’ we learn about Bebe’s experience and perceptions of home, rurality, rural communities, land, and gender. The knowledge Bebe shares is particularly pertinent to the notion of intersectionality, which, as explained earlier, had its genesis in attempts to name and understand how ‘women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism’ (Crenshaw 1991, 26–27). For Bebe, her gendered identity is much less critical than her identity as an Indigenous person, and, further, as a rural person. Therefore, her life cannot be understood by a feminism that refuses to be grounded in a focus on multiple structures, discourses, and practices of oppression and exclusion. Having examined Bebe’s experience of the rural, we return to the growing literature on critical whiteness studies to explore the intersections between gender, ethnicities, and rurality. The limited scholarship on ethnicities and rurality has begun to be addressed in recent years, but very little of this newly emerging work considers gender. Chapter 3 contributes to addressing this gap in the literature

18 Gender and Rurality through interviews with twelve white women members of an Australian women’s farming organization. This organization differentiates itself from more established groups for agricultural women that are seen as traditional, conservative, and hierarchical, and concerned with the domestic and familial sphere. However, like the ‘older’ style groups, the ‘newer’ organization has a largely all-white membership. Our purpose in this chapter is to explore how women members understand this white hegemony. The network is presented as having a transparent and inclusive membership process. Interviews reveal, however, that involvement is circumscribed by membership of other classed and racialized networks, and participation in other classed and racialized activities. Such activities are closely entwined with hegemonic discourses of an imagined rurality as communitarian and neighborly, and afforded considerable moral worth. According to participants, these are not activities that occupy the ‘ethnic other’ woman because she is too traditional and family-oriented, or too busy and overburdened. Overall, in the interviews we hear the acknowledged authority of the middle-class to name, to label, and to ascribe value to those designated as ‘other’ (Sayer 2005). Closely embedded in this is the normative, ‘ordinary power’ of whiteness (Kobayashi and Peake 2000, 393). In Chapter 4, we move to a subject that has been much more widely canvassed in rural social science: the subject of class relations. However, while rural scholars have focused on the implications for class from processes of gentrification, and agricultural and rural restructuring, these analyses have remained largely ungendered. Similarly, feminist rural studies have rarely investigated subjectivity as gendered and classed, yet, as this and further chapters of the book will demonstrate, class is central to gender relations in rural spaces. To explore intersections of gender, class, and rurality, we utilize data from interviews from two separate Australian studies of farming families. Narratives highlight the ambiguity of class, the gendered and classed nature of voluntary organizations in rural spaces, and moral values and signifiers associated with what it is to be a ‘good’ farmer and a ‘good’ community member. This qualitative examination of gender and class in rural spaces draws attention to class as being more than a ranking on an occupational scale, property ownership, or degrees of engagement in consumption. Rather, it reveals class as emotionally inscribed in ways that are gendered, economic, and moral, and represented through symbolic signifiers and cultural narratives. In Chapter 5, we interrogate the ways in which ‘heterosexuality is naturalized in (and through) space’ in rural areas (Hubbard 2000, 198), and how this intersects with gender. To begin, we again examine existing literature on the subject. We report that in rural studies, sexuality has been explored largely through the lens of ‘the other,’ focusing attention on understanding rural gay and lesbian sexualities (e.g. Bell 2003; Gorman-Murray, Waitt, and Gibson 2007, 2008; Phillips, Watt, and Shuttleton 2000) rather than on the hegemonic rural heterosexualities. To situate our discussion,

Introduction

19

we review the feminist literature on heterosexuality. We introduce Stevie Jackson’s (2005a, b) notion of heteronormativity as a means of understanding how heterosexuality is woven into everyday practice and institutional structures. We then present empirical data from a study of thirty-eight Australian farming couples aged between eighteen and thirty-three years. The narratives show the varied, contradictory, and at times indistinguishable ways in which discourses, meanings, and performance of gender and sexuality interrelate in the agricultural context, where boundaries between business, work, and marriage are blurred. Chapter 6 examines what it means to be a person with a disability living in a rural community. A textual analysis of a weekly television program, Australian Story, presented on Australia’s national public station, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, provides data for the chapter. The program we examine, ‘With this Ring,’ tells the story of Gayle and Mac Shann, a young married couple living on a property in rural Australia, and the impact on the couple of a farming accident which has left Gayle physically disabled. Through this textual analysis, we show the ways in which Mac and Gayle are situated within, and against, some of the dominant cultural scripts of gender, disability, and rurality. Also reverberating through this discussion is the exposition of the ‘morality’ of heterosexuality (Cresswell 2005), introduced in the previous chapter. Nature is a central motif by which this is signaled. Thus, we learn that the ‘naturalness of heterosexuality and nature’ are intertwined (Johnston 2006, 204). Studies of intersectionality rarely consider aging (McMullin 2000; Zajicek et al. 2006). However, we concur with King (2006, 47), in that studying aging adds a ‘dynamic dimension to the intersectionality perspective’ as people ‘grow into’ old age, and the advantages and disadvantages this social location may hold. Thus, in Chapter 7, we consider the intersections between gender, aging, and rurality. To date, work on age and gender by rural scholars has predominantly focused on youth, particularly children. At the same time, demographers claim that, proportionately, there is a more rapidly growing aging population in rural areas than in urban areas. To give insight into the lives of this population, we use narratives from faceto-face interviews with eight women and men, over the age of sixty years, who live in a country town in northern Queensland. The data demonstrate no substantial gendered difference of meanings associated with rural communitarianism, particularly in its most idyllic form. However, mechanisms for belonging, such as through membership of sporting or volunteer clubs, are strongly gendered. Also evident is that aging causes tensions, as well as opens up possibilities as men and women approximate or reject hegemonic gender norms around care work, physicality, and attractiveness. Chapter 8 draws the book together by identifying two key themes which resonate across our explorations of gender, rurality, and intersectionality: the critical importance of the body and emotions. Like so much of the subject matter in this book, these are under-researched areas in rural social

20 Gender and Rurality science generally and rural gender studies more specifically. We thus revisit the previous chapters by highlighting what each had to say about the body and emotions. Following this, we return to the notion of intersectionality, and use the empirical data to assess its strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we acknowledge that we have had the opportunity in this book to look at only some of the ways in which exclusions and inclusions are created for men and women in rural spaces. We suggest these limitations highlight the need for further work that interrogates the ways in which different social locations mediate, and shape, rurality and gender.

CONCLUSION Given that the literature on gender and rurality, and more specifically gender and farming, has been ably and comprehensively reviewed elsewhere (Bock 2006; Brandth 2002; Friedland 1991; Little 2006; Little and Panelli 2003; Panelli 2006; Shortall 2006; Whatmore 1994), we have not sought to repeat the exercise here. Rather, we have introduced the key terms of importance to this book: our understanding of gender and the different ways in which rurality has been theorized in the rural social science literature, particularly the notion of the ‘rural idyll’ and its key features. These include the fact that dominant socio-cultural constructions of rurality are intricately connected to circumscribing the discourses and practices that belong in the rural, and those that do not. We have argued that today there is a growing body of literature deconstructing the rural idyll and its relationship to asymmetrical power relations and diversity, difference, and multiplicity in rural spaces. While we have welcomed this growth in scholarship, we have suggested that much of this work has been undertaken with limited reference to feminist theory, and specifically the feminist notion of intersectionality. This concept, which today is widely enlisted in feminist work, is an attempt to adopt a more sophisticated and nuanced way of understanding differences between women (and men). This is what informs the following chapters, which explore how gender and rurality intersect with Indigeneity, ethnicities, class, sexuality, disability, and age.

2

Gender, Rurality, and Indigeneity

INTRODUCTION Having acknowledged the ‘difficulties of dealing with difference’ (Ang 1995, 59) in Chapter 1, including the methodological and epistemological dilemmas such a research focus raises, in this chapter we address the ethics of naming and acquiring knowledge about ‘the other’ much more overtly than in the rest of this book. In particular, we examine our own positionality as white Australian feminist academics, drawing on the lens of critical whiteness studies and more specifically on the work of Australian Indigenous feminist scholars.1 These scholars contend that the dispossession of Indigenous people from their land has afforded white women, and white feminist women, power; power that is largely omniscient and invisible across white Australia (Behrendt 2005; Huggins 2002; Moreton-Robinson 2000a, b). One way in which white feminists have deployed this power has been via research, as they have ‘interviewed, questioned, observed, followed, interpreted, analyzed and written about’ Indigenous people (Fredericks 2008, 114). Here we address the criticisms Indigenous scholars have raised about such research and outline our own attempt to undertake research about gender, Indigeneity, and rurality. Central to the latter has been a collaboration with Bebe Ramzan, an Indigenous Australian woman living in the remote Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands (APY Lands) bordering South Australia (see Figure 2.1). Bebe provides the opportunity for us to listen to her experiences and perceptions of being an Indigenous woman living in rural Australia. We use the verb ‘listening’ deliberately as it is consistent with our aim to ‘converse’ with Bebe and privilege her authority and knowledge as the subject rather than object of research (Watson and Huntington 2008). Consequently, unlike other chapters in this book, which are structured upon analyses between rural scholarship, social theories, and narrative to provide a context for annunciating and examining intersections between gender and rurality, this chapter draws on Bebe’s experiences of the rural to shape and structure predominant themes. Prior to turning to feminist theorizing about Indigeneity and its resultant questions for methodologies, we wish to raise two important considerations.

22

Gender and Rurality

The fi rst is that the experiences of Indigenous peoples in Australia remain shaped by European colonization. Huggins (2002, 4) asserts that ‘in Australia’s case, the situation is in many senses worse’ in that whites declared Australia ‘terra nullius,’ and no formal agreement or treaty was ever made with traditional owners of the land. Secondly, Bebe’s experiences cannot be generalized to all Indigenous women. As Langton (2003) suggests, Indigenous peoples in Australia have discursively been placed in dichotomous subject positions as ‘authentically’ Indigenous, with, for example, strong cultural ties to the land and hunter-gatherer behaviors, or ‘in-authentic,’ that is, urbanized and removed from their culture. Marcia Langton (2003), alongside other Australian Indigenous scholars and activists (e.g. Onus 2003), makes clear that multiple and diverse subjectivities are not the domain of white people. Indeed, not only is there complex diversity within Indigenous cultures in the same rural regions (as well as across regions), but subjectivities associated with gender, Indigeneity, and rurality intersect in different ways, constructing and reconstructing varied subject positions of ‘Indigenous rural woman.’2

FEMINIST THEORIZING ABOUT INDIGENEITY The landmark text by Geonpul woman and academic Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2000a), Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism, represents a significant challenge and interruption to the universalizing and homogenizing orthodoxies of white feminism. At the center of Moreton-Robinson’s (2000a) critique is her naming and unmasking of the subject position ‘white middle-class feminist.’ This subject position, she says, masquerades as the universal woman, denying Indigenous women’s histories, traditions, and experiences. Data from interviews with white feminist academics in Australia and critiques of feminist literature emphasize the normalizing of ‘whiteness’ in the pedagogies, research agendas, and theorizing of women’s studies. Moreton-Robinson (2000a) juxtaposes the contemporary feminist concern with questions of difference with the failure of white middle-class feminists to recognize and critique their own positionality as racialized subjects. She writes, ‘whiteness as race, as privilege, as social construction is not interrogated as a “difference” within feminist political practice and theory’ (Moreton-Robinson 2000a, xviii). Integral to the privilege enjoyed by white middle-class Australian feminists, MoretonRobinson (2000a) argues, is colonization and the appropriation of Indigenous land. She further suggests that feminism will continue to be partial in knowledge and practice, and a contributor to racial hierarchy unless white feminists recognize and renounce their power and dominance. In her book and subsequent work, Moreton-Robinson (2000a, b, 2003a, b, 2005, 2006) displaces the white subject of feminism by drawing on theories of ‘whiteness’ within critical race scholarship. 3 She cites the seminal

Gender, Rurality, and Indigeneity

23

study by Ruth Frankenberg (1993) in which the author examines whiteness as a cultural practice, socially constructed in the narratives of thirty white Californian women.4 Like Moreton-Robinson (2000a), Frankenberg’s (1993, 234) naming of whiteness and white people is explicitly political. Her intent is to help ‘dislodge the claims of both to rightful dominance.’ This is consistent with the broader literature on whiteness that began emerging in the 1980s and has since flourished. Collectively, this literature documents the plurality of whiteness and its historical, social, and cultural specificity, as well as ideologies, practices, and discourses that have rendered whiteness invisible but hegemonic (e.g. Bonnett 1997, 2000; Jackson 1998; McGuinness 2000; Twine and Gallagher 2007). As whiteness has become an increasingly common theoretical lens, concerns have been raised about its potentially negative effects. These include apprehensions about the re-centering and reification of whiteness, the appropriation of whiteness studies for recuperative whiteness politics, and the possibility of essentializing whiteness (Ahmed 2004a, 2007; Pease 2005; Riggs 2004b). Despite these anxieties, feminist scholars such as Moreton-Robinson (2005), Cuomo and Hall (1999), Nicoll (2000, 2004), Brewster (2007), and Gunew (2007) have argued for the salience of whiteness theories. In particular, they have argued for the importance of understanding what Australian Indigenous academic and author Lillian Holt (1999, 44) characterizes as ‘part of the powerful, part of the fold, part of the majority, which doesn’t necessarily have to examine itself.’ These feminist scholars suggest that the prism of whiteness is critical to understanding and challenging the production of knowledge and the favoring of particular knowledges. This, they explain, is because epistemic practices are inextricably linked to the exclusion of the racialized ‘other’. In a particularly enlightening illustration of how this may manifest itself in the daily practices of academic production, Moreton-Robinson (2006, 254) analyzes negative comments made by white women in reviews of her book. 5 She identifies the way in which her own knowledge as an Indigenous woman is dismissed, undermined, and caricatured by reviewers who demonstrate ‘a limited desire to accept what Indigenous people know about the subject position “middle-class woman” because the white self is not perceived as an Indigenous social construct.’ Moreton-Robinson’s (2006) analysis and the broader critique of the relationship between knowledge and whiteness necessarily raises critical challenges in writing between Indigenous and white feminist women. We address these challenges further in the following section.

METHODOLOGY Collectively, we have undertaken a wide a range of research projects on gender in rural Australia over a number of years (e.g. Bryant 1999, 2003, 2006; Pini 2004a, 2005a, 2006, 2008). These have focused largely on

24

Gender and Rurality

white women and men. In conversations with each other about our work, we reflected on our understanding and practice of diversity. This led to the realization that we had, in many ways, avoided undertaking Indigenous research for a number of reasons. 6 Among these is our feminist values, which guide what we do and how we do it as researchers, including our concern with the ethics and politics of knowledge claims, and with power relations in research relationships (Ramazanoğlu and Holland 2002). We are also conversant with some of the highly contentious debates in the feminist literature about the involvement of white feminist women in Indigenous research. This meant we faced questions such as, ‘Who are the beneficiaries of this research, and particularly, how would Indigenous people benefit?’ ‘In what ways could we learn from Indigenous people but not appropriate their knowledge?’ ‘Given our positionality as white Australians and white academics, what right do we have in seeking to research Indigenous issues?’7 This type of reflexive examination of one’s research is, of course, widely engaged and valued in feminist work (Pini 2003a, 2004b). However, reflexivity, or what Teariki (1992, 85) labels ‘honest self-appraisal over motives, defi nitions, interpretations and accountability,’ has been seen to be particularly critical in research with Indigenous people (De Ishtar 2005). Thus, we began talking critically to each other about our own histories with Indigenous Australians, and scrutinized our own work on gender for its unmarked whiteness. We also observed the advice of both Moreton-Robinson (1999) and Nicoll (2000) that in the Australian context, white feminists working in the field of Indigenous studies must address the particular issue of land ownership. For us this meant, and continues to mean, acknowledging that our privileges occur as a result of the theft of Indigenous people’s land and the continued refusal of white Australia to acknowledge Native Title. As we continued our conversations and reading, we experienced the ‘challenge and the discomfort’ that Moreton-Robinson (2000a, xxv) suggests people may experience in reading this literature. We continued to question each other about our positionality, particularly in light of Nicoll’s (2000) astute observation regarding the propensity of white women to assert their anti-racist credentials. As Nicoll (2000, 381) argues, the subject position ‘good white woman’ has been invoked throughout Australian history with horrendous results, as exemplified in the removal of Indigenous children from their mothers (see Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997). In a more extensive discussion on this theme, Nicoll (2001) and Riggs (2004a) contend that notions of tolerance, benevolence, and egalitarianism have been central motifs in imaginings of the Australian nation, and, moreover, key rhetorical devices engaged to limit or deny Indigenous sovereignty. Standfield (2004), who labels this ‘benign whiteness,’ illustrates this phenomenon through reference to a range of events such as the way in which the 1967 Referendum to include Indigenous Australians in the census is constructed in the national psyche. The referendum is depicted

Gender, Rurality, and Indigeneity

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as marking a break with a ‘bad’ racist past, which situates the oppression of Indigenous Australians as a solely historical phenomenon and thus denies the ongoing disadvantage they face. Moreover, it is represented in a selfcongratulatory manner as indicative of the benevolence and anti-racism of ‘good white Australians.’ As these thoughts percolated, we returned to our desire to contest the ‘invisible traditions’ of geography (Bonnett 1997, 197) in terms of our own field of rural studies. Lia continued these conversations with her colleague and friend Deirdre Tedmanson, a post-colonial scholar undertaking action-based research in the APY Lands. Lia met Bebe at a seminar given by Deirdre and Bebe on the capacity held in Indigenous rural communities. Bebe is an Indigenous woman of similar age to Barbara and Lia. (They are all in their forties.) She has spent most of her life living in an Australian city, has tertiary qualifications and extensive work experiences, including the establishment of a small business in the APY Lands. She has undertaken governance positions in the APY Lands and is often an advocate for her community. Deirdre facilitated a further meeting between Bebe and Lia to discuss Indigeneity and rurality. This led to an informal interview. The design and analysis of the interview were informed by the work of Indigenous feminist scholars cited previously, feminist methodological scholarship (e.g. Letherby 2003; Ramazanoğlu and Holland 2002), and the literature on research practice and Indigenous people (e.g. Louis 2007; Robinson 1994; Smith 1999; Teariki 1992). 8 We also drew upon the experiences of other rural researchers investigating Indigeneity (e.g. Panelli et al. 2008). The key aim was to give primacy to Bebe’s knowledge. In this regard we found academic geographer Annette Watson and Athabascan hunter Orville Huntington’s (2008) description of the meaning and creation of Indigenous knowledges about moose hunting instructive. Watson and Huntington (2008, 259) engage Donna Haraway’s (1990) metaphor of ‘conversation,’ rather than ‘discovery,’ to connote their efforts to represent Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies respectfully and meaningfully. As we listen to the ‘conversation’ between these authors, they switch between their fi rst person narration of the hunt, arguments grounded in academic theory, and those embedded in Indigenous spirituality.9 In seeking to materialize the image of the ‘conversation’ in our own research, the interview was largely open-ended. It consisted of just seven broad questions relating to the theme of living in a rural community as an Indigenous person. However, this was not a ‘text-book interview,’ and what transpired was more akin to a conversation, as the two hour discussion flowed on from a day of socializing. At specific times, Bebe directed the interview and focused Lia on questions about the rural when she moved away from the topic. The exchange occurred at Lia’s home during a visit to Adelaide by Bebe, who gave permission for our discussions to be taped and transcribed.

26

Gender and Rurality

The analysis of the transcript was undertaken by the authors in four phases in order to reflect the influence of positionality on the text. In the fi rst instance we read the interview to identify and prioritize key themes. The second phase involved Bebe analyzing the transcript alone, and then holding a conversation with Lia to clarify discrepancies in the interview text and to raise themes from the interview she wanted to highlight to readers. In the third stage, Bebe also read and commented on our interpretation of the interview in terms of our nominating and prioritizing themes. The fi nal stage, which involved revising the chapter in light of our further reading and reflection, as well as external feedback, was undertaken without Bebe’s input because she was not available to participate.10 Having to curtail the conversation at this juncture was problematic in terms of our commitment to ensuring Bebe’s voice was heard throughout each phase of the research, but is a reminder that Bebe’s involvement in this project was in addition to her other domestic, familial, volunteer, and paid work. The presentation of Bebe’s interview is structured on the basis of our analytical discussions. In responding to Bebe’s narrative, we retained the metaphor of ‘conversation’ and focused on her knowledge, as well as our own lack of knowledge, about Indigeneity and rurality. Our aim was not to decipher or dissect Bebe’s knowledge, but to consider how this knowledge complements and/or challenges our own. In practice, this aim of listening and hearing Bebe’s narrative without interposing academic knowledge or white, gendered assumptions was as difficult as we supposed. However, being aware of different knowledges and differences in equality associated with these was not enough to circumvent our inherent understanding as the privileged knower. This became apparent when, after spending the day with Bebe, Lia remarked to her that she was aware that she had, at several points throughout their conversation, attempted to prompt Bebe to discuss Indigeneity and rurality in the context of family, spirituality, and landscape. Each time Bebe had not responded, continuing on her own narrative trajectory. Lia had assumed homogeneity about the importance of meanings of spirituality and land for Australian Indigenous peoples, and expected these themes to be reflected in Bebe’s understanding of the rural. This salutary lesson is an ongoing challenge, which continued while writing and which we hope will remain challenging to readers as they learn from Bebe’s knowledge about gender, Indgeneity, and rurality in Australia.

HOME, PLACE, AND SPACE The APY Lands are part of Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara, and Yankunytjatjara country bordering South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory (see Figure 2.1). They are in the far north west of South

Gender, Rurality, and Indigeneity

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Australia. They cover 103,000 square kilometers. The combined countries which border the region cover 350,000 square kilometers. There is a population of 2,600, which accounts for approximately 9 percent of the Indigenous population in Southern Australia and 0.5 percent of the Australian Indigenous population. The APY Lands consist of several communities. In the late 1970s, outstations or ‘Homelands’ were formed. These were areas where Indigenous people who had either statutory ownership or affi liation through family came to live (Altman 2006). In 1981, the South Australian parliament passed legislation granting freehold land title to Indigenous peoples of the region (The Pitjantjajara Land Rights Act 1981). Essentially, the legislation aimed to provide the diverse groups of traditional owners, via a local executive board, with a decision-making and consultative process for the commercial and social use of their lands. In recognition of ownership of the land by Indigenous peoples, non-custodial residents and visitors needed a permit to enter the Homelands. It must be made clear, however, that this legislation provided only conditional autonomy to traditional owners. The Act provided the State Minister for Indigenous Affairs with power to intervene in the

Figure 2.1 Map of Australia indicating the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands (APYL).

28 Gender and Rurality governance of the Homelands and to suspend the executive board. This Act was altered in 2005, restricting autonomy in relation to self-governance by reducing the number of community members consulted before decisions could be made about governance, entry to the Homelands, infrastructure, and other issues.

Homelands I first went there (from Adelaide) in 1986 to work at Pukatja. That was my first taste of the Lands but I knew some of the people there already because we still kept in contact with the aunties and uncles. I worked there on and off until going back to live in 1994 full-time with Mum on the Homelands. She was born there but had been raised in Colebrook Home (Eden Hills). Dad had always said, “When I pass away, go back home to your own people,” which is what Mum did.11 We moved to the Homelands for Mum to establish herself and her family ties, and we have been living there ever since. She still had her language. She’s Yankunytjatjara. They still speak Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara these days. Initially when I went back in 1986 they started establishing the Homelands. I think the phrase ‘Homelands’ actually came out of South Africa but here they are also called ‘Outstations’ because they are established outside of the main community. When the Homeland movement began, it resulted in a lot of people going to live on country. They had a family tie with those countries, and a lot of people recognized that they would be better off. They would be better off in terms of their family would be there and not in amongst the whole community (among different families).12 When we first stayed on the Homeland, we lived in a shed with a dirt floor. Then the longer we stayed, the shed was replaced with a basic nomadic kit, specifically made for remote areas. It was a one room dwelling which could have rooms added to it at a later stage. It was six by six meter squared with a sink at one end. We had to wait until other Homelands who had nothing to live in could have something established on their Homeland, and until more funding was available in order to get two more rooms. These were temporary dwellings, so they were not lined, not air-conditioned, and they were absolutely stinking hot in summer. Bebe’s comments reflect contested geographical debates about the plurality of meanings and experiences of house and home. Included in these debates are white feminist interventions that have argued that romanticized constructions of home as refuge and sanctuary fail to incorporate the experience of women for whom the home may be a site of violence or oppression (e.g. McDowell 1999), as well as commentaries from African-American

Gender, Rurality, and Indigeneity

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feminist scholars who have argued that discourses of home are not just gendered but racialized, and that, in a racist society, home has been a sanctuary and shelter for black women (Collins 1991; hooks 1991). Bebe’s story contributes to these debates as she enunciates ontologies of home that contrast, and yet, at times, merge with privileged White/Anglo ontologies. This complexity is amplified by the fact that as an Indigenous woman, Bebe is, by defi nition, ‘already at home’ (Spark 1999, 58); but with her land appropriated, she is ‘homeless and out-of-place’ (Moreton-Robinson 2003c, 37). Bebe’s construction of ‘home’ also encompasses ‘country/ies,’ a notion that speaks to the shared relationship she has to the land through her kinship groups, to the natural and supranatural phenomena held within this land, and to collective identity through mutual language and customs (Palmer 2004a, b). This can be distinguished from the way in which ‘country’ has been used in white Australian settler discourses, including scholarly discourses, as the opposite of the city, encompassing a pastoral, white middle-class elite whose stories are of the taming, conquest, and ownership of land, or of occasional and temporary heroic setbacks in such a pursuit (Goodall 1999, 162; Suchet 2002, 144). Geographers researching Indigenous Australians have noted the pervasiveness of this latter white configuration of ‘country,’ or what they label ‘outback mythology,’ and the marginal or absent place afforded to Indigenous people in this imagined space (Gill 2005, 712; Waitt, Figueroa, and McGee 2007, 261). Importantly, claims to ‘home’ for Bebe and other Indigenous people rest upon their ability to fulfi ll a complex set of criteria determined by a white legal system, just as their capacity to access resources to establish a physical dwelling on the Homelands requires negotiation with a white bureaucracy. Homelands are thus embedded in colonialism, and not just in terms of their administration. Like Native Title, their very necessity comes ‘from the fact of colonialism’ (Cunliffe 2007, 765). Understanding the materialities, associations, and relations of home for both Bebe and ourselves means appreciating that home is an ‘intensely political site,’ enmeshed in the invasion and occupation of Indigenous land (Blunt and Dowling 2006, 188).

Rurality and Rural Communities When people cut up crook13 about what they don’t have in the cities, think of those poor buggers out there (on the APY Lands). That’s not to say they’re looking for sympathy. You don’t have a health service because they won’t go out to the Homelands. I suppose it’s the same with a lot of rural communities that are non-Indigenous. I know a lot of banking closed down in rural areas and small towns. They have to go miles away, but so do Indigenous people. The other thing is parts for cars, if your car breaks down. And the roads are not fixed. And paying big prices for fuel. There is no public transport at all on the APY Lands.

30

Gender and Rurality There’s no high schools so I’ve currently got my niece doing open access, which is through the phone, but how many other Indigenous kids can actually do open access and on their own? It’s virtually what the kids are doing. It is supported and supervised through the home, and depends on the parents. So if the parents don’t speak enough English, how can they support the children in supervision and tutoring? It also depends on you having a phone line and computer access. To look into what occurs in a community, it’s very easy to say, “Well look at those communities, they’re disgusting.” But there is a lot of politics goes in, and that’s politics from outside the Lands. Bureaucrats that actually sit in government places and say, “You should have this and you should have that.” Communities do know what needs fi xing; chances are they have been telling the government for years, but it suits the government to do nothing about the problem, or apply a bandaid fi x up. So I don’t have a lot of time for government, whether it’s Liberal or Labor, and I don’t see that there is a big difference between the two. We don’t really want the citi-fi ed thing. You know, you get people coming from outside of the Lands, who’ve lived in cities all their lives or elsewhere, and they say, “We do this, and this is how we do it over there.” They don’t seem to click that maybe that was a different situation. And different situations need different solutions. City life is like this, you get up by the time, you go to bed by the time, you eat by the time, you’ve got to catch transport. You (Lia) live the life now that I used to have. I’m not really a cheery person, but out of the city rural people are really friendly. You can sit and have a talk with them, you can do that on the Lands when you are shopping. On the Lands you do not do anything by the time because you have your own time, but in the city you have no time. It is not your own. No wonder people in town walk around with their faces scraping the ground. There are no friendly faces or even happy faces. They all walk around like zombies. No one has the time of day.

Shaw’s (2007, 46) study of ‘the Block’ in inner city Sydney reveals that since colonization Indigenous Australians have been marginalized in urban spaces, viewed by white Australians as more legitimately associated ‘with isolated and disconnected “outback” locations.’ Further, Shaw (2007) argues that whiteness has been consolidated in city locales in recent years, and Indigenous people have been demonized and excluded as a result of shifting consumption practices, gentrification, and the emergence of loft apartment living. At the same time, Bebe’s narrative indicates that the rural has been a problematic space for Indigenous Australians. Like the dominant expressions of urbanity identified by Shaw (2007), dominant expressions of rurality exist which have historically constructed non-metropolitan Australia as white. Central to these hegemonic discourses of rurality that romanticize and privilege a fabled frontier or outback is the notion of the ‘rural community’ as a repository of communitarian and

Gender, Rurality, and Indigeneity

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traditional values; the embodiment of a friendly, clean, peaceful, and rustic lifestyle (Bunce 2003; Poiner 1990). Indigenous people have typically been invisible in this characterization of Australian rural communities. We learn from Bebe that this has had material implications, resulting in a lack of health, education, and public transport services. Bebe explains that as well as being absent in discourses of rurality, Indigenous bodies have, paradoxically, been present, and this presence impacts upon the politicization, access, and delivery of social services. That is, when Indigenous rural communities have been afforded attention by powerful institutions such as the media or the state, they have remained ‘the other’ to normative rural communities as they have been labeled neglectful, harmful, and unable to care for themselves.14 Indeed, it is a ‘narrative of dysfunction’ that is said to have informed Australian government policy related to Indigenous communities (Behrendt 2007; Slater 2008). Bebe makes clear that her community’s knowledge regarding social service needs remains unheard because bureaucrats enter rural Indigenous communities to assert white urbanized solutions, which have proven ineffective. Indigenous scholar Nakata (2003) argues that prevailing imperialist notions of Indigenous peoples remain in ‘post-colonial’ Australia, and continue to hold ascendency over strategies and approaches by government to improve Indigenous health and wellbeing while denying Indigenous knowledge, power, and agency. Despite the fact that Indigenous people have been marginalized and excluded by hegemonic discourses of rurality, we hear echoes of the conventional socio-cultural version of rurality in Bebe’s comments; she positions her community as signifying an idyllic space because of its friendliness and the slow pace of life. As she explains, in the city she is not particularly jovial, but in her country community she stops and chats with people while shopping. This provides evidence of the types of everyday practices of creating and recreating community, and the importance of specific material spaces for demonstrating community that have been described in other studies of non-Indigenous rural communities (Liepins 2000a; Neal and Walters 2008). Bebe is aware that her own experience and perspective of community contrasts with how it is depicted externally, but challenges and resists these pejorative representations to remind us of the failure of successive Australian governments to listen, and respond to, Indigenous people’s own knowledge about their needs and the needs of their communities. Whereas cultural geography has understandably placed greater emphasis on legacies of colonization than on resistance and agency (Nash 2002), Bebe is making the point that legacies of colonization co-exist with agency and pleasure.

Farming It has never been acknowledged or emphasized what Indigenous people did for the pastoral industry. They are in some ways now, but they didn’t for a long time. And those places were actually kept going

32

Gender and Rurality because of Indigenous workers. Without them they would have had bugger all (agricultural industry). The Pit Lands are not really different to (other) rural settings. They graze animals—cattle and horses; they keep chickens, and so forth. Okay, a lot of them aren’t farming in the sense that they are growing wheat, but some have small hobby farms with sheep on it and so forth. I’ve got a few cattle and do small-scale stuff. I saw ads on television, and this really annoyed me, about people in rural country towns getting depression because of the drought and farms being affected, and no employment and money worries. And I thought, “They all live in rural areas. What about the Indigenous people living in remote areas, such as the Pit Lands? Does anybody ever think about them actually being depressed? And they’ve got a bloody lot to be depressed about.” The APY Lands are so dry. We tend to grow our own things to cut down on the costs. I mean, three dollars or four dollars for a scrappy looking lettuce, or some of the stores selling potatoes separately instead of bagged potatoes. Who wants to pay eighty cents per potato? If you want to buy direct from Coles in Alice Springs, you need to have an account and credit card, and how many Indigenous people on the Lands have that?

In her narrative, Bebe disrupts the whiteness of Australian defi nitions of farming. She challenges the equation of farming with industrial agriculture and enterprise, and argues for a more nuanced understanding of farming that would encompass her own small-scale, non-industrial model. At the same time, she confronts us with the ‘social power’ of our whiteness (Bonnett 1997, 2000). For us, as white academics, this includes the power to include and exclude in terms of knowledge production, as well as the power to categorize and classify so that we may largely ignore Indigenous experiences of drought or farming, and label them as white. In recent years, the type of farming Bebe describes has become increasingly marginal as a result of expanded industrialization and corporatization. There is, of course, a considerable rural studies literature that has critiqued the agri-industrial model and detailed alternative agricultural practices and operations, but this has not extended to exploring Indigenous people’s experience of farming. This omission has implications in terms of culture as well as sustainability, as Wirf, Campbell, and Rea (2008) assert in a study of the values and responsibilities the Anmatyerr women of central Australia have for water. Whereas the authors’ specific focus is on the gendered relationships, roles, and values Anmatyerr people have in relation to water, they note that a broader issue is the failure of Australian natural resource management to consider the environmental knowledge of Indigenous people. By highlighting not just the Indigenous contribution to agricultural Australia, but also the erasure of this contribution in historical narratives of the nation, Bebe reminds us that, as academic white women, we also have the

Gender, Rurality, and Indigeneity

33

power to inform what is remembered, not just on an individual level but also on a national scale. As Gill and Paterson (2007, 116) have commented, ‘the myriad Aboriginal involvements in pastoralism have been largely forgotten and have gone unmarked’ in the remembering of Australian pastoral landscapes. Bebe demonstrates how the typically unacknowledged power of whiteness mediates very ordinary, even mundane tasks such as grocery shopping, watching television, or banking, and reveals that this is central to ongoing racial inequality. For us, whiteness means we can access fruit and vegetables at a reasonable cost, we can obtain a bank account and credit card, and we can see ourselves mirrored in media representations. These are the ‘routine structures of economic and political life’ that ‘come unreflectively with the territory of being white’ (Duster 2001, 114), and which Bebe tells us are not available to Indigenous rural Australians.

Land A few years back, when I worked at APY, I’d seen the maps with all the mining areas marked out, not only where resources are likely to be, but where mining companies have put in exploration claims. Most of the APY Lands have exploration claims over it. This will then affect Homelands and the people who are living on them. I guess in some ways too, it makes it a bit easier with the mining and what the government wants, the fact that a lot of Indigenous people are not resident on their Homelands. They are in the communities, or elsewhere, either for health reasons, education, or their cars have broken down and they have no money and are waiting for parts, or it’s closer to the store because of having no car, or their bore has broken down so no water. It really does look like the government is actually just starving the guts out of the rural areas by provision of no services. So, you really wonder, are they doing it because they are after the mineral resources? If farmers move to town, land becomes available and it becomes open slather for the mining companies. What I think is really funny is that the government pays a lot of attention to encouraging tourists, but in their own country Australia has one of the oldest living cultures, some 40,000 years old or older, and the Indigenous people are treated like absolute dirt. When visitors travel from overseas, they want to see what they call ‘real Indigenous Australians,’ and here the government is almost starving them out of their own lands. The meaning of land is ‘a key point on which Western and Indigenous worldviews have historically diverged’ (Shaw, Herman, and Dobbs 2006, 270). Indeed, Bebe’s description of her encounter with the colonial construction

34

Gender and Rurality

of the APY Lands as property to be claimed, owned, mapped, and explored on account of its rich mineral deposits sits in contrast with her sense of this same area as her ‘home’ and ‘country.’ The fiction, reified through such resource-dependent terminology as ‘exploration,’ and such activities as ‘mapping,’ is that this is empty, unoccupied, unused land. Importantly, it is the Western construction of land that traditionally has been privileged. Gill (2005), for example, explains that Indigenous pastoralists have often been ‘criticized for not using land “productively” when they give credence to social and cultural concerns above economic imperatives.’15 At the same time, rural social scientists have become increasingly attentive to the potentially damaging environmental effects of mainstream land use practices and knowledges, thereby demonstrating the potential of engaging with Indigenous constructions of land. Bebe explains that white Australia deems it appropriate that Indigenous people’s relationship to the land is as a product of cultural tourism. As Waitt (1999) found in his analysis of a media campaign selling Australia to an international market, Indigenous people are represented as uncivilized and inferior, but noble and in tune with nature. Central to this promulgation of Indigenous Australians is the repeated colonial mythology of terra nullius. Bebe tells a different story of Indigenous people inhabiting land that has been their ‘home’ for over 40,000 years, and simultaneously of Indigenous people who are not a primitive people frozen in a timeless and static historical period, but a people of the twenty-fi rst century who require health, education, communication, and transport infrastructure.

GENDER AND RURALITY Rural living, as in remote living, requires jobs to be done. Whether you are a man or a woman, Indigenous or not, neither gender nor color is a consideration. You’ve just got to do the thing because you know, you’re out there. It’s like going out to dig in the ground. If you had to plant a crop, would you say, “I can’t do it because I’m a woman?” What if there is no man? Are you going to starve to death because your gender kept you from digging the ground? It’s the same with cars. You know I am not mechanically minded, but I had to learn—change tires, strip and clean a carbie 16 —the alternative is that if you don’t do it, there is nobody there who will do it for you. So you learn, and you do it—it’s called survival. Most of the people who live a rural life are brought up knowing there are chores to do, regardless of gender. I’ve had to do digging to lay down a pipe when we first moved onto the Homeland, put in a tap, change my own tyres, erect structures (not big ones), and the usual lifting and so forth. I’ve dogs, chooks, a few cattle. We’ve had to nurse sick animals, put them down. And it can be

Gender, Rurality, and Indigeneity

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a lot of work, heavy at times, tiring and boring, but it has to be done— whether you are a man or a woman. In a review of the literature on ‘Indigenous and More-Than-White-Anglo Geographies,’ Panelli (2008, 802) argues that by engaging with Indigenous knowledge we reveal the partiality of mainstream social geographies with their ‘culturally and temporally specific views of the world and productions of knowledge.’ We felt the veracity of this claim as we reflected on Bebe’s comments about home, rurality, rural communities, farming, and land, and experience it again now in relation to her thoughts about gender and rurality. Like many white feminists, we have privileged gender in our work on rural and farming women, but for Bebe, her gendered identity is much less critical than her identity as an Indigenous person, and, further, as a rural person. In affording lesser significance to her gendered social location and greater significance to her Indigenous social location, Bebe echoes a sentiment that has been repeatedly emphasized by feminist Indigenous writers (e.g. Huggins 2002; Langton 2003; MoretonRobinson 1999, 2006). At the same time, in dismissing the importance of gender and highlighting her rural identity, Bebe echoes sentiments expressed by white rural women detailed in a range of feminist rural scholarship (e.g. Alston 1995; Shortall 1994). There is an equivalent commonality between Bebe’s practicality, pragmatism, and refusal to be constructed as a victim of patriarchy, and the characteristics and perspectives of white rural women outlined in the literature. Bebe draws attention to farming as an embodied occupation and beyond this the physicality required of rural living. There is recognition that conventionally, technological knowledge, and physical and emotional strength and tenacity may be associated with men/masculinity, but Bebe explains that this gendering of traits and tasks becomes immaterial in rural spaces. Obvious connections can be made between Bebe’s narrative and the white rural women described by Grace and Lennie (1998) in an Australian study focusing on questions of identity. They argue that, ‘[g]rounded as they are in the practicalities of daily life in a physical environment which is often challenging, many Australian rural women develop impressive levels of practical and managerial competency, physical strength, self-reliance and robust determination’ (Grace and Lennie 1998, 363). This is strongly reflective of Bebe’s experience, and demonstrates that rurality may shape the perspectives and everyday lives of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women in non-metropolitan areas in shared ways.

CONCLUSION By detailing the experiences of Bebe, an Indigenous woman living in rural Australia, this chapter adds to work such as geographer Chris Gibson’s

36

Gender and Rurality

(1998, 172) study of Indigenous bands and where they play and what they play in Australia, which ‘[offers] up new challenges to more orthodox cultural geographies of rural life.’ Bebe gives voice to an Australian rurality that is not immediately recognized by urban Australians and white rural Australians. She highlights the primary place white farmers have had in constructions of rural Australia, despite the integral role Indigenous people have played in the establishment and development of pastoral industries. Bebe also details the limited infrastructure and services in this part of Australia, but notes that while this has been problematized by government and media, the rural landscape imagined in these circles rarely encompasses Indigenous Australians unless they are constructed as a tourist product. She explains that while mining corporations and government see her land as potential mineral wealth it is her ‘home’ or ‘country’ and is associated with connections to ancestry. The key aim of this chapter was to give voice to Bebe’s knowledge about rural life. The second and associated aim was to detail, and reflect on, the way we approached this task, particularly in light of the questions we asked ourselves before undertaking this project. Ultimately, we would have liked to have had the opportunity to talk with Bebe about this second aim in far more detail, but this was not possible. However, we did have a preliminary conversation with Bebe about the fi rst question we posed: ‘Who are the beneficiaries of this research and how would Indigenous people benefit?’ She emphasized that she enjoyed the conversation leading up to the writing and was excited by the prospect of publication as a means of giving greater visibility to Indigenous people in rural Australia. To broaden the benefits to Indigenous people, we now have a responsibility (and the resources) to circulate this chapter widely and bring Bebe’s voice to other audiences, particularly those outside of academia.17 This is particularly important, as we are significant beneficiaries of the research. We are not just talking here about the publication of a chapter but the opportunity for knowledge development and growth, and an appreciation for what Elspeth Probyn (2005, 106) has described as ‘the shameful ways in which feminism seems at times to lack interest in those who are considered outsiders, outside the cause.’ The second of the questions we asked was, ‘How do we learn from Indigenous people but not appropriate their knowledge?’ This was particularly pertinent in light of the critiques Indigenous feminist researchers have made of the way in which normalized academic modes of production have often objectified Indigenous people and appropriated, de-legitimized, or obscured their knowledge. For this reason we worked diligently at circumventing textual (mis)representations through a number of strategies informed by the metaphor of ‘conversation’ (Watson and Huntington 2008). We began by having discussions with Bebe about her involvement in the study relating to the nature of the research process, authorship, and data analysis. We then undertook a comparatively informal interview with Bebe, guided by a

Gender, Rurality, and Indigeneity

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small number of open-ended questions. A further strategy we employed as a means of minimizing our textual authority was to collaborate on analysis. As we responded to Bebe’s narrative, we continued to ask ourselves what we were learning from her as an Indigenous author/ity. Finally, while engaging collaboratively in the research, we have placed Bebe’s narrative in italics to render visible any potentially mediating influences of positionality in the text. The fi nal question we posed to each other before we began this chapter concerned the (il)legitimacy of white subjects researching Indigenous issues. In responding to this question, we gained a great deal by attending to writing on Indigenous research methodologies, and using the type of strategies outlined previously to respect Bebe’s voice and de-center our own. We were also assisted by utilizing the scholarship on ‘whiteness’ studies, and turning the racial lens on ourselves and our work, as well as rurality and knowledge about rurality. Indeed, as we were confronted with the latter we came to see the importance and urgency of white rural social scientists engaging in Indigenous research, but clearly doing so in a manner that is consistent with the principles, values, and practices articulated in the rich Indigenous methodological literature.18 We are not claiming to have resolved the tensions or complexities of being white women writing and researching with an Indigenous woman. As we conclude this chapter we are continuing to grapple with the dilemmas posed by this collaboration. As we do so, we return to the advice of feminist scholars Jane Haggis and Susanne Schech (2000, 397), who write that we cannot ‘wish away,’ and therefore must acknowledge our power and privilege, and recognize that the knowledge we produce as white academic feminists will always be situated and partial. The fact that this has seldom been recognized within the burgeoning feminist rural social science literature highlights the critical importance of further work with Indigenous rural women and men, and of increased attention to naming and interrogating our own whiteness. Throughout her narrative, and most explicitly in her fi nal comments, Bebe offers insights into feminist theorizing about difference, reminding us that one of the key strengths of intersectionality is that it ‘changes the relationship between the categories of investigation from one that is determined a priori to one of empirical investigation’ (Hancock 2007, 67). This is particularly pertinent given the historical proclivity of white feminist academics to theorize the lives and experiences of Indigenous women from their own standpoint (Wirf et al. 2008). Outside of the interview, when Bebe talked about her caring responsibilities or community work, she gave emphasis to her gendered self. However, this identity was largely minimized throughout the interview. For example, in discussing mechanical aptitude, physical capacity, and strength, Bebe sees a gendered identity as immaterial and discards it. In this context, an Indigenous identity is similarly dismissed while a rural self is given salience.

38 Gender and Rurality In contrast, in discussions about the Homelands and ‘country,’ Bebe’s Indigenous identity assumes prominence; and while talking about farming and her sense of community, Bebe asserts her rural identity. Ultimately, by affording lesser significance to her gendered social location than that of her rural social location and her Indigenous social location, Bebe not only disturbs whiteness and the urban-centric category ‘woman,’ but also the whiteness of the category ‘rural woman.’ In the following chapter, we continue to unsettle and muddy the homogenizing potential of identities such as ‘rural woman’ and ‘rural man’ by turning our attention to the interstices between gender, ethnicities, and rurality.

3

Gender, Rurality, and Ethnicities

INTRODUCTION In this chapter we return to whiteness studies as introduced in Chapter 2. We use this lens to explore the narratives of twelve members of an Australian farming women’s organization. The group, established in the early 1990s, is part of a broader ‘rural women’s movement’ that occurred in the late twentieth century in nations such as Australia, Canada, the United States of America, Norway, and Ireland (Liepins 1998a). The emergence of such a movement has been attributed to a range of coalescing factors, including the impact of the second wave women’s movement, the downturn in agriculture, and women’s frustration with the continued male dominance of agri-political spaces. This organization, like its international counterparts, is quite distinct from the more traditional rural and farm women’s groups that have typically focused on women’s domestic and familial roles. Its intent, instead, is to increase women’s participation in the public sphere of agriculture (Teather 1996). To date, the organization, along with others throughout western nations, has been the subject of significant academic attention. Writers have noted the differences between the contemporary and more established farm women’s groups (Teather 1995, 1998); observed the new gender and farming discourses emerging from the groups (Fincher and Panelli 2001; Grace and Lennie 1998; Panelli 2007); explored the relationship between these groups and the state (Panelli and Pini 2005; Pini, Panelli, and Sawer 2008); questioned how such groups could be classified (Shortall 1994); and described the backlash against such groups by male members of farming bodies (Pini 2008; Wells 1998). In one commentary, Liepins (1998b, 135) notes that one of the characteristic features of the ‘women in agriculture movement’ is that the majority are ‘AngloAustralian women from owner-operator farm units.’ This holds true for the organization being studied. Like the ‘older’ style, well-established farm women’s group in Australia (Country Women’s Association), its six hundred members are typically Anglo-Saxon. It is this whiteness we scrutinize in this chapter.

40 Gender and Rurality As discussed in Chapter 2, one of the great strengths of interrogating whiteness is that it focuses attention on the often un-named privileges a white identity may bestow. While this is a key theme emerging from the interview data, this chapter also takes up the arguments outlined in Chapter 4 about the equally ‘unacknowledged normality of the middleclass(es)’ (Savage 2003, 536). We argue that it is not just the participants’ position as white, but also their position as middle-class that is critical to their membership of the farm women’s group; yet both these social locations and the power they command are unstated and/or minimized. Moreover, we argue that these women construct the term ‘ethnicity’ to represent specific ethnicities. In their narratives, words like “difference,” “race,” and “minority” refer to Indigenous peoples and certain migrant communities they label as “non-white.” Their discursive constructions of ethnicity in Australia follows public discourse and a history of settlement that has ‘othered’ Indigenous peoples, as Bebe’s reflections indicate in Chapter 2, and in which certain immigrant communities have also been rendered as ‘other.’ In the context of migrant communities, the labeling of these as white or non-white has its roots in the White Australia Policy (Dunn et al. 2004). This policy existed in varying forms from federation in 1901 until 1973. It aimed to exclude non-European migrants (Asian communities in particular) while giving priority to immigrants from some European countries like the Netherlands and Germany. Thus, in our review of the scholarship on rurality and ethnicities, we note that most of the literature emanates from the United States of America or the United Kingdom, where ethnicity has specific and localized meanings. On the whole, in the United States of America the term ‘ethnicity’ is often equated with Black and Latina peoples, and in the United Kingdom it is constructed to refer to Blacks, including African and West Indian migrants, and Asian and Romany peoples. In contemporary Australia, the most prevalent divide is between those of Anglo-Saxon or AngloCeltic heritage (considered normative) and Indigenous Australians, Muslim and Arab Australians, and Asian-Australians (Ang et al. 2002; Ang et al. 2006; Dunn et al. 2004). Ang and others (2002, 40) sum up Australian identity as remaining driven by ‘mainstream defi nitions of Australian cultural identity that still ignore or overlook the social diversity of the overall population.’ Thus, social belonging for many racialized groups in Australia is predicated on Anglo-privilege. Dunn et al. (2004, 409) use the terms ‘new’ and ‘old’ racisms to give clarity to contemporary expressions of racism in Australia. Those who believe in racial hierarchy and separatism (old racisms) are in a minority and are largely the same people who self-identify as being prejudiced. The ‘new racisms’ of cultural intolerance, denial of Anglo-privilege, and narrow constructions of nation, have a much stronger hold. Nonetheless, socio-biological-related understandings of race and nation remain linked to these new racisms.

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The chapter begins with an overview of the scant literature on the subject of gender, rurality, and ethnicities. In terms of work on the wider subject of rurality and ethnicities, Snipp (1996, 125) says that scholars ‘have made important and unique contributions.’ This is a US perspective. The vast majority of the work cited is strongly positivist. Crucially, it is written without reference to the dynamic field of critical race studies and the burgeoning field of whiteness studies. Writing from a largely British perspective, Cloke (2006b, 382) is much more cautious, observing that ‘explorations of racialized otherness in the countryside have been relatively few and far between.’ This has begun to change with the publication of two edited collections (Chakraborti and Garland 2004; Neal and Agyeman 2006b), and a special edition of Ethnic and Racial Studies in 2007 on the subject of ethnicities in non-metropolitan spaces. However, as the following discussion highlights, little of this work has considered the intersecting influences of gender, ethnicities, and rurality.

GENDER, RURALITY, AND ETHNICITIES In one of the earliest commentaries on the subject of ethnicities and rurality, Agyeman (1989) explains that the rural has been symbolically constructed as quintessentially British. The countryside is seen in static terms; a repository of the best of what is (was) English in that it is good, pure, and untouched. However, obscured and marginalized within this representation of rurality is ‘the racialized other’.1 Studies from the United States of America reveal a similar privileging of whiteness in dominant imaginings of the ‘rural community’ (Allensworth and Rochin 1998; Nelson and Hiemstra 2008). It is this fictionalized whiteness that may keep Black 2 people out of the countryside, along with economic factors such as cost and time, cultural factors such as the association of the countryside with backwardness, and racism (Agyeman 1989; see also Malik 1992). Askins (2006) adds to this contention from a gender perspective, explaining that city-based women she interviewed from Afro-Caribbean and Asian backgrounds said for them a lack of transport, limited confidence, and fear of safety were critical factors that limited their trips to rural areas. Agyeman’s (1989) observations regarding the dominance of discourses that associate national identity and rurality, and privilege whiteness whereby ‘non-whites’ come to be ‘the other’ in rural spaces, have now been well demonstrated in the literature (Agyeman and Spooner 1997; Halfacree 1996; Neal and Agyeman 2006a).3 Illustrative of this is Hubbard’s (2005) textual reading of protest letters from those opposed to the establishment of reception centers for asylum seekers in Nottinghamshire and Oxfordshire in the United Kingdom. In the analyzed media, asylum seekers are situated within censorious and damaging discourses, labeled as ‘non-productive,’ ‘illegal,’ ‘potentially violent,’ and ‘burdensome.’ While writers investigating

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the deployment of discourses of ‘racial othering’ have not specifically investigated gender, gendered themes emerge from the data. Klocker’s (2004) survey of attitudes towards asylum seekers in Port Augusta, South Australia, and Norman’s (2004) exploration of resistance to asylum camps in rural Sweden reveal that ‘racial othering’ is also gendered. Klocker (2004), drawing on Dunn’s (2004) examination of dominant negative constructions of Muslims in western discourse, reports the ways in which survey respondents categorized asylum seekers as ‘misogynists,’ and how, in Sweden, young women protesters argue that male asylum seekers harass, oppress, and mistreat women. Agyeman and Spooner (1997, 197) argue that one of the outcomes of the imagined whiteness of the countryside is that it has licensed a view that race is not a concern for rural areas. This has meant that one of the early tasks of the literature has been to simply record the presence of racism in rural areas (e.g. Jay 1992). It has also meant that a ‘no problem here’ attitude to racism is dominant in rural spaces (Neal 2002, 452). In his ethnographic study of a rural Southern Illinois community, Sizemore (2004) heard this repeatedly from community members who maintained that ‘the problem,’ if indeed there was one, only emerged when (urban) outsiders came and advocated for what was seen as unwarranted entitlements, such as language and outreach programs. In a similar respect, the authors of a large-scale study of the multicultural policies of local governments in Australia found that a common refrain from rural councils was that they had no policy because there ‘is no problem here’ (Dunn, Hanna, and Thompson 2001, 1577). Unsurprisingly, the literature has countered the claim that racism is an urban phenomenon (Connolly 2006; de Lima 2004, 2006). Indeed, a series of sobering papers based on studies of rural English counties has demonstrated that rural racism may manifest itself in a variety of forms, including verbal abuse and physical violence (Chakraborti and Garland 2004; Garland and Chakraborti 2004b, 2006a, b, 2007). Unfortunately, despite recognizing that gender, along with other social locations, can profoundly shape the racism experienced by racialized ‘others,’ Garland and Chakraborti (2004a, 133) do not subject their data to a gender analysis. Cloke (2006b), however, reports on an earlier study of rural racism by Esuantsiwa Goldsmith and Makris (1994) entitled Staring at Invisible Women: Black and Minority Ethnic Women in Rural Areas. Cloke (2006b, 383) explains that the writers ‘concluded that women of colour suffered from a double dose of othering practices’ because of the patriarchal nature of rural communities, and the invisibility of issues connected with “race” in rural areas. As studies of rural racism have emerged, Williams (2007) warns against reifying the ‘ethnic subject’ as an outsider in rural areas. She argues for explorations of the ways immigrants and refugees may experience rural living as positive. Neal (2002, 456) also counsels avoidance of conceptualizing

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rural racism in singular and monolithic terms because of its contextual and shifting nature. In her research on the multicultural policy interventions undertaken by two rural local governments, she found significant differences between the sites. Similarly, Smith (1993) identifies the significance of site differences. Her reading of the controversy over having golliwogs in the festival of a rural town on the Scottish borders further demonstrates the importance of a nuanced reading of racism in rural areas. She argues, and demonstrates with her data, that resistance to the banning of the golliwogs should not ‘be read only as an expression of racism’ (Smith 1993, 301). It should also be read against the marginal position of border towns in relation to Scotland and its peripheral place within the United Kingdom, and as a form of rural resistance against the urban. She concludes that the story she has told is not a simplistic picture of marginal/marginalized or oppressed/oppressor, but one in which such positions shift and change. Writing about the dynamic place of Gypsy-Travelers in rural post-war England, Holloway (2004), like Smith (1993), argues for the need to resist simplistic and static accounts of the ‘racialized rural other.’ While arguing for the need to consider the dominant discourses that position people as ‘in or out of place in different spaces,’ she says ‘it is also essential that we add texture to this’ by exploring the complexities and fragilities of categorizations (Holloway 2004, 155). Among the growing literature on rural ethnicities is a body of work in which writers have turned to critical whiteness studies. Nelson (2008), for example, draws on the whiteness literature to analyze resistance to the construction of subsidized farm worker housing in Woodburn, Oregon. In claims about what housing is appropriate, and for whom, Nelson (2008, 56) reads ‘unspoken assumptions about the spatiality of whiteness and difference.’ In another study of whiteness and rural ethnicities, Tyler (2003, 2006) reports on ethnographic data from a study of an English village she refers to as ‘Greenville.’ Her aim was to understand white people’s perceptions of Asians in their area. Interviews reveal the ways in which terms such as ‘neighborly,’ ‘caring,’ and ‘friendly’ are mobilized in everyday discourse to create and re-create an imagined white English village, and to negate or marginalize the participation of ‘racialized others.’ Despite these and other contributions to the literature (e.g. Connolly 2006; Ray and Reed 2005; Winders 2003), the study of gender, whiteness, and rurality has been limited. As the following section explains, this is perhaps related to the ongoing failure of feminists to ‘recognise that they/we are raced in addition to being gendered’ (Bhavnani and Coulson 2007, 78).

Feminist Studies of Ethnicities As part of a discussion of the concerns she has with ‘whiteness studies,’ Sara Ahmed (2004a, 1) explains that ‘any critical genealogy of whiteness studies, for me, must begin with the direct political address of Black

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feminists such as Lorde,’ rather than the more recent work on whiteness by white academics. She argues that if whiteness studies ‘is to be more than “about” whiteness,’ it needs to begin ‘with the Black critique of how whiteness works as a form of racial privilege, as well as the effects of that privilege on the bodies of those who are recognised as black.’ We concur with Ahmed’s (2004a) contention. Indeed, together with Ferber’s (2007, 271) observation that ‘with a few notable exceptions, theory and research on whiteness has largely ignored gender,’ it provides a powerful reason to revisit the early writings of Black feminist scholars whose critiques opened up the space for whiteness studies. As Ahmed (2004a) acknowledges, African-American poet, author, and scholar Audre Lorde (1983, 1984) was one of the earliest and most influential of the Black feminist writers who provided a powerful interruption to second-wave feminism’s universalizing of womanhood. Lorde (1983, 1984) positioned herself as a ‘sister outsider,’ for while she identified as a ‘feminist,’ her ethnicity, class, and sexuality marked her as different. She dismissed feminism’s lack of concern with difference as arrogance, and challenged white women to educate themselves about Black women. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, a range of Black feminist writing strengthened and amplified Lorde’s (1983, 1984) arguments. Illustrative of this work was Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith’s (1982) collation, All the Women are White, All the Men are Black, But Some of Us are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. In the introduction to this widely cited text, the editors explain their intention to provide a theoretical and methodological correction to racist and sexist scholarship, as well as to engage in an ‘ongoing and essential dialogue between/about Black and white women’ (Hull et al. 1982, xxx). Barbara Smith’s (1983, xxxi) collection, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, was also indicative of the foundational Black feminist scholarship of the period. Contributors to this collection enunciated their difference/s from ‘white feminists/ism,’ and the editor claimed ‘we have a movement of our own.’ Embedded in Smith’s (1983) contention is the belief that there is a singular ‘Black feminism’ or a ‘Black feminist standpoint’ (Hamer and Neville 1998; Collins 1990). This nomenclature encapsulates the view that, despite the differences between Black women, they have a connection based on their shared experiences of the mediating influences of gender, race, and class, and that these shape a very specific view of the world—a view which has traditionally been subjugated. This has been strongly contested within the literature on a number of grounds. Hazel Carby (1987), for example, argues against a notion which she said reduces all Black women’s experiences to a ‘common denominator.’ Reynolds (2002, 600) also posits that that promulgations of a ‘Black feminist standpoint’ are reductionist and essentialist. She further warns that such a conceptualization means only some stories of Black women are given recognition and visibility, explaining that ‘the “authenticized” and “valorized” Black women’s experience is

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based on notions of suffering, dysfunction and marginalization.’ Another criticism of the notion has been that it may be more rightly named the ‘American Black woman’s standpoint,’ given that it has been largely theorized and developed by United States-based writers. Amos and Parmar (2005), for example, along with Mirza (1997), highlight the specificity of being Black women in Britain. Black women scholars from developing countries have furthered this argument, contending that postulations of a singular ‘Black woman’s standpoint’ privilege the voices of fi rst-world women, and ignore the specificities of their own contexts (Bar On 1993; Mohanty 1992; Narayan 1997; Sandoval 1991). Broader shifts in theorizing about gender, including the turn to culture that ‘Black feminist’ scholars have seen as both disabling and enabling, have informed and shaped the debates about ‘Black feminism.’ hooks (1991, 28), for example, raises concerns about the obfuscation of much postmodern theorizing, and worries that an emphasis on deconstructing identity surfaces ‘at a historical moment when many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the fi rst time’ (see also Collins 2000). At the same time, hooks (1991) sees potential in a theoretical framework for Black women that emphasizes agency, the multiplicity of experience, and resistance. The literature on feminism and ethnicities that has been informed by postmodernism has also been influenced by the emergence of whiteness studies (Afshar and Maynard 2000; Cuomo and Hall 1999). However, feminist scholarship that brings together a dual focus on whiteness and gender remains limited (Ferber 2007). Nayak (2007, 741) notes that much of the literature on whiteness has examined the ‘masculine world of work,’ and left more feminized sites such as the family, school, and home comparatively un-interrogated. This is undoubtedly true, but it is salutary to remember the progress that feminist scholars have made in redressing masculine biases in other fields of knowledge production. The dearth of contemporary feminist literature drawing on critical whiteness studies, however, is especially concerning, given that powerful critiques of whiteness were offered in the early 1980s by white feminist scholars such as Marilyn Frye (1983) and Adrienne Rich (1984). Frye (1983) named what she called ‘whiteliness’ as a social construction that can be wielded to bestow authority and power. She called on white feminists to be ‘disloyal to whiteness’ and its political entitlements. In a much cited article soon after Frye’s (1983) call, feminist academic and writer Adrienne Rich (1984) enunciated the need for a ‘politics of location.’ This, she said, meant examining her own location/s through which her feminist knowledge had been produced. She located herself as ‘white,’ ‘woman,’ and ‘feminist.’ She recalls that she was born in a white hospital that separated Black and white women, and thus it was her whiteness, not her gender, that fi rst defi ned who she was. The still limited feminist literature on whiteness is addressed by Adams (2006, xi) in introducing his critique of the whiteness of American feminist ‘manifestos.’ He writes that he has been ‘dismayed by the apparent

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reluctance of feminists, especially white feminists, to address whiteness and white privilege with the same vengeance that we have attacked sexist issues.’ This is notwithstanding the important contributions cited in Chapter 2 (Hall 1992; Frankenberg 1993; Moreton-Robinson 2000a, b), as well as other key interventions. In this latter category is Vron Ware’s (1991) historical study of British women missionaries in colonial India at the time of the British Raj. In many respects, the women at the center of Ware’s (1991) analysis hold progressive attitudes and values, but these are circumscribed by their racialized constructions of Indian women as requiring ‘civilization.’ As such, she writes that ‘the construction of white femininity—that is, the different ideas about what it means to be a white female can play a pivotal role in negotiating and maintaining concepts of racial and cultural difference’ (Ware 1991, 4). Also significant to feminist scholarship has been a more personal critique by Peggy McIntosh (2005, 111) in which she reflects on the fact that as a feminist academic she has often noticed ‘men’s unwillingness to grant that they are over-privileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged.’ The considerable advantages men may gain through women’s disadvantage are equally seen as taboo. McIntosh (2005) uses this observation to name fifty of the daily privileges she keeps in her ‘invisible knapsack’ as a white woman, from seeing her face in the media and fi nding a publisher for her writing, to arranging her activities so she will never have to experience rejection because of her race, and being welcomed in all walks of public life. McIntosh’s (2005) reflections provide a useful entry point to present the empirical material for this chapter because they reveal the very mundane and normal ways in which whiteness is produced and reproduced. This is why Bonnett and Nayak (2003, 308) assert that unless we critique whiteness, we risk ‘normalising the spatial dominance of the racialised majority.’ Before detailing the themes that emerged from our interview narratives, the next section briefly outlines the methodology that informed the study.

METHODOLOGY As stated previously, the chapter utilizes data from interviews with twelve members of an Australian rural women’s organization to explore the ways in which gender and ethnicities intersect. The organization, formed in 1993, is Australia-wide and focuses on women involved in agriculture rather than a broader rurality. An annual conference and localized gatherings provide forums for networking, as does an online discussion list. The network has limited funds. It relies on government and industry sponsorship. A Board of ten members from different states, as well as an Executive of four, provides leadership for the organization. Interviews began with participants providing background information on how they fi rst became involved in the network. They were asked what

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attracted them to the organization, why they have continued their membership, and whether they have encouraged new members into the group. Participants were also asked to describe the membership of the group and those who were involved with the forums they attended as representative members of the network. More explicit questions were then asked about the diversity of the membership. The fact that the group is largely populated by women from Anglo-Saxon backgrounds was noted. Participants were asked to explain why they thought that was so, whether they believed it to be an issue of concern for the group, why or why not, and what, if anything, they thought could be done to include a greater diversity of women in the group. In Chapter 2 we situated ourselves in the context of conversations with Bebe and reflected upon our own understandings of Indigeneity. In this chapter, the question of situatedness, subjectivity, and response to the data also arose, as we both acknowledged our Southern European ancestry and the emotional response this produced in listening to discussions that excluded and rendered invisible farming women from non-Anglo-Saxon backgrounds.

REFLECTING ON THE WHITENESS OF THE FARM WOMEN’S NETWORK Like participants in the Women’s Institute and Young Farmers’ Clubs interviewed by Neal and Walters (2008), those involved in our research argued that membership of the rural women’s group was available to all, and that local and national gatherings were widely and publicly advertised. One interviewee, for example, stated that “being a member is open to everyone,” therefore participation is a matter of personal choice and does not have “anything to do with color or race.” However, none of the Australian women we interviewed had become involved in the network through this process. Rather, membership of the farm women’s networks was precipitated for interviewees by involvement in other networks. These networks themselves are, as one participant explained, largely homogenous. She commented upon how the older and more traditional rural women’s group in Australia, the Country Women’s Association (CWA), was not just white but also class-based, and that this was similar in the newer rural women’s organizations: Julia: Perhaps there’s a class hangover from several generations back. In the CWA it tended to be women who come from the grazing families. It’s the same in the new rural women’s groups. The old established families. Most of the Italians are in the apple growing and the wine, not the grazing. And even though they’ve been here for a while now, they’re still not part of that old establishment.

48 Gender and Rurality This explanation reveals the combined effects of the intersections between gender, ethnicities, and class as forces for either inclusion in, or exclusion from, the rural women’s networks. As Chapter 4 reveals, in the Australian farming landscape those who graze sheep and cattle are symbolically seen as occupying a higher class position due to their longevity in farming via inheritance, succession, and large-scale of enterprise than those involved in agricultural pursuits such as horticulture. Non-grazing agricultural pursuits, and in particular industries like horticulture and sugar, are also those where there has been a more marked involvement by ‘the racialized other,’ including migrants from South-East Asia, Southern Europe, Turkey, Malta, Italy, and India, while grazing has remained a predominantly Anglo rural industry. Families who in the most part have migrated to Australia post1950 are represented in horticulture and sugar due to the affordability of smaller holdings. In terms of horticulture, some migrants have histories of engagement in fruit and vegetable production in their communities of origin, while in the sugar industry participation was mediated for migrants by their original involvement in harvesting cane—a task that was viewed as inappropriate for Anglo-Saxons. This hierarchy of status in Australia accorded to agricultural industries is classed and racialized, and women who are constructed as ‘non-white’ are most likely to be excluded from farming women’s networks. While Julia saw some connections between the CWA and the newer farm women’s group in their membership base, it was more typical for interviewees to stress the differences between the membership of their organization and more established rural women’s groups. Generally, their own group was seen as more inclusive and contemporary, as well as less bureaucratic and restrictive: Genevieve: I think there were a lot of women like me that had professional backgrounds who wanted something more than what the CWA had to offer. And at the time there was appalling representation of women in all the farm committees. . . . People were wanting something less hierarchical and more open, and which had a role with industry and government. Also to have a group that was respectful of people for their skills and abilities, and what they brought to the table. In Genevieve’s reckoning, the newer farm women’s groups are more welcoming and open than their older sister organization. At the same time, she places a boundary around the network as a space for “professional” women, and as one where particular “skills” and “attributes” would be afforded value, such as those associated with working with government and industry. She highlights aspects of her urbanity, higher education, and career prior to marriage, explaining that this background provided the impetus for membership in the rural women’s network. The network enabled her

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to be part of a community of women with similar backgrounds, as well as part of a community where this background would be valued and prized. In terms of the latter, network participation had resulted in her receiving a prestigious scholarship for leadership training, attending international conferences, and participating in leading government and industry advisory bodies. What is evident from the quotation is that while the network is presented as a neutral space, accessible to all and welcoming of all, it is discursively constructed as being for a very particular group of women. Genevieve’s rationale for network involvement was reaffi rmed across the interviews. As one participant commented when asked about what attracted her to the organization and why she had continued to participate over a period of more than a decade: Matilda: It’s the friendships first and foremost. . . . Women in the same situation as you. I have made life-long friends. Some of them live half way across the country, but it doesn’t matter. We chat online and get together at least once a year. You care about the same things. . . . Life can be very isolating for women coming into farming. I felt that, and the frustration when you have all of this capacity and are blocked. Matilda’s reflections resonate with Phoenix’s (2006, 187) claim that intersectionality makes visible ‘the multiple positionings that constitute everyday life and the power relations that are central to it.’ Like other interviewees, Matilda’s positioning as a ‘woman’ may render her powerless in patriarchal rural spaces, particularly spaces such as mainstream farming groups that have traditionally been the preserve of men, and where feminine knowledge, discourse, and practices have been subjugated (Panelli 2002, 2007; Pini 2005a). At the same time, the identity of ‘woman’ is inflected with other positionings—those of class and whiteness—which simultaneously provide Matilda with discursive and material power in the rural landscape. Two participants raised the issue of material barriers to membership for rural women who were migrants or refugees. Both had been on the network’s executive. They explained that this was particularly costly as there was no remuneration for any expenses incurred in network business. As one noted, “Ninety dollars Australian may not seem much to some people but might be an inordinate amount for others.” Her other concerns were resource constraints such as access to the internet and a mailing address, without which it was difficult to become a member. Lack of economic capital, they hypothesized, was likely to be a critical factor in explaining the whiteness of the farm women’s network. In sharing this view, one returned to comments made on the network’s online discussion list regarding the payment of travel costs for attendees at the 2008 Rural Women’s Summit and the 2020 Future Forum. Both events were held in the nation’s capital, Canberra. The federal government stated that funding would be available to those who could not

50 Gender and Rurality afford travel costs, but it was generally expected that people would pay for themselves. When discussed on the network’s list, this was seen as positive. Paying one’s way was viewed as a gesture of commitment to the cause of rural Australia. The interviewee reflected that this demonstrated little understanding of the limited financial resources of many living in rural Australia, but that she had not expressed this opinion on the list. Over half of those interviewed had been involved in the types of national and state forums described previously, representing ‘rural’ women as members of the farm women’s group. Interviews therefore canvassed the extent to which they saw such events as representative of the many ethnicities in rural Australia. Two participants who had attended the 2020 Future Forum and the Rural Women’s Summit commented: Alison: You need to take this back to two things. The first is the criteria they were looking at when they selected people. It wasn’t about having so many people from this group or that group. It wasn’t a matter of what race you are. They wanted people who were active in their communities, who had a record of involvement, and could go back to people. The second thing is what was achieved. It’s still early, I know, but we were really pleased with what we put together as a group. We all worked really well together, and if they don’t let us down and take things up it will be good for rural Australia. Helen: There was a real effort to get different women together. On the national steering committee there was Kim from the Torres Strait Islands and Louise 4 from disabilities. One of the problems we faced is, there was such a short turn-around time to get it organized, and I think if you look at what was achieved there in a couple of days—really less than two days—you’d have to be impressed. I think everyone there was certainly deserving of their place. You had a lot of grass roots women who have been working hard for years for rural women and in their communities for little reward. Of course you can always do better. We had a representative from each state on the steering committee, and we relied on them to suggest groups and names. These quotations highlight a number of key themes in terms of the intersecting discourses of gender, class, and whiteness in imaginings of the rural community. Like the rural women’s groups themselves, entry to other forums, such as the 2020 Future Forum and National Rural Women’s Summit, rely on classed and racialized connections. However, these go largely unrecognized. Alison strongly asserts that selection for attendance was “not about race,” failing to appreciate that her own whiteness and the whiteness of the majority of other attendees tells us that ‘race’ is a critical factor in determining

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attendees at such forums. For Alison, “race equals minority,” and thus her whiteness and the whiteness of her Forum counterparts is invisible (McGuinness 2000, 229). Helen explains there was some concern with ‘difference’ at the steering committee level, but this appears to be easily erased when it proves a problematic task. In this we see evidence of Reay et al.’s (2007, 1042) argument that despite ‘rhetorical flourishes around difference and diversity, it is sameness that routinely gets valued.’ Furthermore, as stated earlier on in the chapter, ‘difference,’ and ‘minority,’ and ‘race’ have very specific meanings in these dialogues, focusing on specific ethnicities, and in particular Indigenous peoples and migrant communities labeled as ‘non-white.’ Alison presents inclusion as being decided on benign neutral criteria such as community involvement. Yet, as numerous studies of ethnicities in rural communities have demonstrated, such involvement is highly circumscribed for non-whites. The earlier discussion on membership of the farm women’s network, for example, demonstrated that participation would require not just knowledge of the group’s existence and confidence, but also, as Neal and Walters (2008, 293) write in relation to membership of the Women’s Institute and Young Farmers’ Group, ‘the “maps” through which to find a way in.’ It may be that non-whites are not comfortable or find it difficult to penetrate the types of spaces where rural community is enacted, such as the village hall, local pub, or church (Garland and Chakraborti 2006a, 2007). In an illuminating study of community in a small town in California’s Central Valley, Chávez (2005, 332) explains that the white population’s control of community-based resources allows them to construct non-whites such as Mexicans as ‘uncaring’ while ascribing themselves as ‘neighborly,’ ‘caring,’ and ‘actively engaged citizens.’ Further, Chávez (2005) reveals that the numerous community-building practices of the Mexican population are marginalized or absented in white people’s discussions of community. Like Chávez’s (2005) white residents, Alison and Helen lay claim to similar descriptors in talking about their counterparts at the 2020 Future Forum and National Rural Women’s Summit. There is a similar morality attached to these labels. All the attendees at the National Rural Women’s Summit and the 2020 Future Forum are constructed as ‘deserving.’ There may have been others who could have been invited, but those in attendance, we are told, are industrious and philanthropic. Morality is further asserted in terms of the outcomes of the meetings. Regardless of who was in attendance, we are told that the two groups achieved considerable outcomes, and that these will be for the betterment of rural Australia.

CONSTRUCTING THE RACIALIZED OTHER RURAL WOMAN Kobayashi and Peake (2000, 394) write that ‘whiteness is a standpoint’ from which, among other things, one can ‘construct a landscape of what is same and what is different.’ Identifying and deconstructing this standpoint,

52 Gender and Rurality and, moreover, revealing the ways in which particular racialized identities come to be included, celebrated, and privileged while others are excluded, discounted, or discredited is a key task of critical whiteness studies (Jackson 1998). Thus, in this section, we name and assess the dominant constructions of the rural woman as ‘racialized other’ in the narratives of the network members interviewed. Such constructions were offered in interviews and legitimized as interviewees stressed their knowledge of this ‘other’ through experiences from their own local community, extended family or friends, employment, or travel. For three of the interviewees, a central feature of the configuration of the ‘racialized other’ was that she is unlikely to be involved in agriculture. These women suggested that membership of the rural women’s groups was largely white because farming was historically an Anglo-Saxon occupation and, for the most part, remains so. These representations again highlight the classed assumptions embedded in network member narratives. To some extent they suggest that for interviewees, farming is equated with sheep and cattle production rather than vegetable or sugar growing, which have involved greater numbers of non-Anglos and been of lesser status. It also suggests that farming is seen as primarily the concern of the property-owning-class, so the many migrant and refugee agricultural employees in rural Australia would be invisible to network members. In contrast to the women cited previously, other interviewees did see the ‘racialized other’ woman as someone who was involved in agriculture. However, she was also seen as someone who largely focused on the domestic sphere, with a keen commitment to her family, and to traditional and conservative values. Positive ascriptions included being ‘industrious,’ ‘upright,’ ‘moral,’ ‘good-natured,’ and ‘tenacious.’ Less positive depictions included being ‘passive,’ ‘culturally oppressed,’ ‘confi ned to the domestic sphere,’ ‘unskilled,’ ‘lacking confidence,’ and ‘isolated.’ Consequently there was both a correspondence and a disjuncture between how members characterized themselves and ‘the racialized other’ women who were not network members. This is of particular interest given that scholars of rural ethnicities have often highlighted the way in which ‘the racialized other’ in rural spaces is discursively constructed in oppositional terms to those discourses used to represent the imagined rural. For example, the white residents in the small British village studied by Tyler (2006, 398) depict Asian people in the area as ‘self-involved,’ ‘private,’ ‘unsociable,’ and ‘potentially untrustworthy,’ while they present their village as ‘communitarian,’ ‘supportive,’ ‘neighborly,’ and ‘friendly.’ In another British study by Holloway (2005, 360), white village residents labeled Gypsy-Travellers as ‘unproductive,’ ‘troublesome,’ and ‘idle,’ while villagers are named as ‘hard-working,’ ‘law-abiding,’ and ‘self-sufficient.’ In the following quotation, we clearly hear the simultaneous identification and dis-identification with the ‘immigrant woman’ who lives in rural Australia and is involved in agriculture:

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Olive: It’s hard to find the time to be involved in something like this. I really struggle. You’re working hard on your farm and for your family like a lot of migrant women, certainly women around here, you just probably don’t have the time. And of course, language is crucial. If women aren’t able to speak English, you wouldn’t expect them to participate. Olive emphasizes that all farming women–white and non-white—are overburdened with work and commitments to family and farm. However, there is a critical difference between the two groups because Olive and other white members make/fi nd the time for activities beyond their farm and family, and ‘immigrant women’ do not. In this comment, and Olive’s observations about English language skills, spatial differentiation is further reinforced. That is, Olive (re)locates the ‘immigrant woman’ within the home/private space while implicitly claiming the public space for white, Anglo women. This dichotomizing of the spaces of private/home and public/(white) community, and the claiming of these spaces for ‘immigrant women’ and ‘white women’ could be heard across the interviews. In the following quotation, for example, Joan explains that the ‘immigrant woman’ is devoted to ‘her’ community. However, this is not the broader imagined (white) rural community of which the network is part, and from which representatives are chosen to attend national meetings and speak on behalf of rural women: Joan: I don’t think we can assume that all women have the same expectations; that all would want to join a group like this. It might be that women from migrant groups would have many demands on their time and energy. They may be more involved with organizations which have a direct benefit to their family, their group, and community. You don’t want to patronize the token immigrant woman by involving her just because she is an immigrant. In Joan’s static and singular representation, all immigrant women are insecure, submissive, unqualified, and subjugated. These women occupy the spaces of the private and home, which are dichotomized against the spaces of the public and the (white) community. In these types of essentialized and fixed ascriptions of the ‘immigrant woman,’ agency, resistance, and multiplicity are negated, and the identity of ‘the non-white other’ is re-inscribed and reproduced (Pini 2003b; Ray 2003). This is further highlighted in the following quotation in which Susan explains why she believes the rural women’s network has a largely all-white membership. In her comments, Susan reiterates the positioning of the ‘immigrant woman’ as conservative and stifled while representing the ‘network’ women as progressive and contemporary: Susan: The network has had a fairly high profile in the media at different times, giving women visibility, saying that farm women should be

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Gender and Rurality more involved in leadership and that sort of thing. I don’t know if it may be seen to be too radical in that respect for some migrant women who might have traditional views. Or even if they wanted to, it may be that husbands are not keen on them, if it is not their culture, to have women doing this type of thing.

In the observations of Joan, Olive, and Susan, and the many interviewees who expressed similar observations, we can see the rhetorical work of whiteness. We see, for example, the way that whiteness claims space and legitimizes this claiming, asserts its epistemic authority, conveys its normativity and naturalness, and absolves itself of any need for critique (see Frankenberg 2001).

AN AGENDA FOR CHANGE? In the fi nal part of the interviews, participants were asked if they thought the farm women’s group should address the limited diversity among its membership. Some longer-term members mentioned that, in the early years of the network, there had been concern with encouraging an ethnically diverse membership and that, at one stage, there had been three Indigenous women members (see Liepins 1998b, 135). The fact that these Indigenous women were no longer involved, and there was no longer a particular focus on attracting a broad ethnic membership, was viewed as resulting from various factors, including individual choice, transitions in the organization, changes to network leadership, and funding challenges. In responding to questions about whether the network should adopt an agenda to change, interviewees largely returned to the view that the network’s membership is open and non-discriminatory, and thus claimed the issue of involvement is an individual rather than a network issue. Associated with these responses were claims about the accepting, tolerant, and multicultural nature of the contemporary Australian state. A number of participants related stories of racism and exclusion between the white majority of rural towns and migrants when they were young, but emphasized that this was purely historical. For example, one interviewee had experienced growing up with/around families from Italian backgrounds, and explained that fraternization with Italians5 would have been met with disapproval when she was young, but that this was not the case today: Mildred: When I was a young girl you weren’t allowed to speak to them (the Italians), and if you did, the other boys, Australian boys, didn’t talk to you. [Laugh]. But that’s all changed. In Mildred’s assertions, racial discrimination is located as a phenomenon of a distant historical past that bears little resemblance to contemporary

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Australia. Further, when such discrimination did exist, it was largely trivial and humorous rather than ‘devastating,’ as has been reported in the literature (Chakraborti and Garland 2004, 397). Four participants talked about the network having a role in assisting non-Anglo women, especially as they said such women may have “trouble fitting in” or “have difficulty integrating.” In doing so, they repeated the claims made earlier; that is, that the network had introduced them to new friends, provided rich learning opportunities, and given them a strong sense of community and belonging. They were, however, reluctant to state that the challenges for rural ‘others’ were not because of racism: Beryl: Well, it’s not really so much racism, it’s just, I think many rural people don’t have a lot of experience of people who are different. You just don’t get that type of exposure when you’re in the country as you might in the middle of Melbourne or Sydney. You’re used to people looking different, wearing different types of clothing and things. And I think that means they don’t know how to deal with them or they feel intimidated by them, and then might express that wrongly. This and similar responses echo Robinson and Gardner’s (2006) fi nding from qualitative interviews undertaken with Black and Minority Ethnic residents in rural Wales, in which some interviewees, who had been victims of racial violence, attempted to minimize and excuse rural racism, naming it as ‘naivety’ or ‘innocence.’ Such a construction of racism also works to reinforce notions of rurality as essentially good, pure, and unsullied by the ‘ethnic other,’ as well as reproduces representations of rural people as unsophisticated but ultimately kindly and welcoming. Racism thus becomes disconnected from rural spaces. While Beryl and others like her focused on what the network could do for the ‘non-white’ rural woman, other participants argued that there would be potential benefits for the network and its membership in increasing the group’s diversity. Participants used examples of knowledge and experiences gained through overseas travel, as well as enjoyment of visits to ethnically diverse city locations, to illustrate the potentially positive outcomes of a less white rural women’s network. However, such comments were typically made with qualifiers. For example, one claimed “it (multiculturalism) is a very wholesome thing provided everyone gets on well. It gives a lot of vibrancy,” and “I think we (the network members) could learn a lot, and it would bring something extra as long as there was integration.” Inherent in such promulgations that privilege integration and assimilation is Hage’s (1998) argument that in ‘multicultural’ Australia, the dominant white culture picks and chooses what it wants from the culture of the ‘ethnic other’ while remaining uncontested. In this respect, ‘the white core’ of the Australian national identity remains intact (Schech and Haggis 2001). There is

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no sense of the need to unsettle the hegemony of whiteness, its values, or motifs in the network.

CONCLUSION The discussion of the farm women’s network in this chapter has highlighted the strengths of an intersectional approach to understanding gendered rural identities. Morris (2007, 491) asserts that ‘a key insight of intersectional theory holds that modes of inequality, such as race, class, and gender, can combine in ways that alter the meaning and effects of one another.’ Thus, for example, whiteness may ‘create myriad advantages for white women, even as gender produces certain disadvantages’ Morris (2007, 491). Such a claim resonates strongly with the data presented in this chapter. It was women’s secondary position in rural institutions and discourses that provided a key impetus for the establishment of the network. Today, even after nearly two decades of political agitation through such networks, women occupy just 13 percent of leadership positions in agricultural organizations in Australia. A similar picture of gender inequity exists across industrialized agricultural nations (Pini 2008). Thus, it is evident that in rural spaces, the subject position ‘woman’ often renders those interviewed subordinate and excluded. At the same time, this chapter has demonstrated that the farm women’s whiteness and their class status marks them as privileged and included. Being white and middle-class has provided them with the ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu 1984) to take action against the patriarchal dominance of rural farming groups and, in the early 1990s, to successfully access government and industry resources to establish a new farm women’s group. Further, the group has been able to mobilize the social locations of whiteness and class to construct its membership as key rural protagonists so that government and industry often seek representatives from the organization to be the voice of ‘rural women.’ However, this ‘voice’ is narrow and exclusive (Cloke 2006b, 384). While membership of the group has been nominally ‘open’ to all, discursive and material barriers exist to limit the participation of women who are ‘not white.’ Thus, working-class women or women from migrant or refugee backgrounds would potentially have difficulty in negotiating the terrain to become a member. However, the differential access white rural women have to such a network, and the social advantages it precipitates, are veiled by a range of discursive constructions of the ‘racialized woman’ as ‘other.’ In detailing the everyday processes and discourses by which whiteness is produced and reproduced in the rural, we do not just follow the lead of other writers on rurality and ethnicities cited earlier in this chapter. We also follow the advice of those who have written more broadly on the ‘rural other.’ As revealed in the introductory discussion, such writers (e.g. Cloke and Little 1997; Murdoch and Pratt 1993, 1994; Neal and Walters 2008;

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Philo 1992, 1993) have cautioned that work on the ‘everyday’ and ‘ordinary’ should be alongside studies of the ‘hidden’ or ‘marginalized’ in rural spaces. They also posit that attention should be afforded to the power relations embedded in being the normative or mainstream in the rural. In the following chapter, we continue to heed this advice, turning our attention to class, and in particular the performance of middle-class Australian farming identities among families with long histories in agriculture.

4

Gender, Rurality, and Class

INTRODUCTION Unlike Indigeneity and ethnicities, class has a long history of investigation in rural social science. However, the notion of class has often been conflated with concepts such as poverty, property ownership, occupational ranking, and social location, or referred to obliquely through these concepts. As a consequence, we know little about how class is lived and experienced in rural settings. More recent theorizations of class have argued for the importance of its cultural and symbolic dimensions, as well as the material. As Abram (1998, 372) argues, ‘class is not a position on a scale,’ but a ‘symbolic reference, a multiple-layered sign whose meaning is encapsulated in encounters and significant tastes and attributes.’ This is not to deny the material importance of class and the multiple inequalities that may be associated with a particular class position. It is, however, important to understand that class, in its material and cultural forms, is made or inscribed over the course of an individual’s life; ‘class cannot be made alone’ (Skeggs 2004, 3). While we have limited knowledge about gender and its intersection or co-existence with class in rural communities, what we do know is that both gender and class are strongly internalized. They are simultaneously experienced and performed across spaces, and intricately embedded in social structures and power relations. This chapter is principally concerned with the inter-relationships between class and gender in rural spaces. It begins with a chronological overview of the literature that has considered questions of gender, class, and rurality. It highlights that while class analysis in rural social science began with the work of Newby (1972), it was not until decades later, in the early 1990s, that a critical body of scholarship emerged which placed gender together with class as critical foci. There has been enormous growth in work on gender and rurality since then. However, following broader trends in social science, the question of class in rural studies has, on the whole, received less attention than in the past. This has resulted in a lack of contemporary theorizations and empirical investigations of gender, class, and rurality.

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Following the discussion of the rural social science literature, the chapter outlines recent feminist perspectives on class and gender. Particular attention is given to the work of Beverley Skeggs (1997, 2004), who has been critically important to the reinvigoration of class in feminist studies. She has challenged feminist writers to understand class as inscribed and associated with the attribution of value and moral worth. In order to explore this conceptualization of class further, this section draws examples from empirical studies of gender and class. In concluding this section, we argue for the development of theory in tandem with empirical studies to explore gender and class as lived. Having taken up this argument, we outline the methodology used in our studies of class and gender in different rural communities in Australia. We begin an analysis of gender and class, and how it intersects, blurs, or melds in the rural, by focusing on farming women and men. Data from the studies are presented as three themes: the slipperiness and ambiguity of class; rural spaces as gendered and classed; and moral value and worth. The fi nal section of the chapter examines what is unique about rurality, class, and gender.

CLASS AND GENDER IN RURAL STUDIES In the following sections we take a chronological view of the rural social science literature that has considered class and gender, tracing developments from the earliest work in the 1970s through to the present. Some of the work examined has given little or no attention to gender, but is important for what it has to tell us about class in rural communities.

Early Rural Studies of Class, 1970s: The Absence of Gender In Australia, Ron Wild’s Bradstow (1974), and in Britain, Howard Newby’s The Deferential Worker (1977), represented significant interventions in the discipline of rural sociology in that they challenged nostalgic orthodoxies about the countryside as a space devoid of power, and particularly power as manifest in class relations. Wild (1974), using a Weberian analysis of class, status, and power, undertook an ethnography of an Australian country town. He found that status was ordered. Those afforded the most status owned land as well as had a generational history in the rural community (the landed gentry). In contrast, waged workers had the least status. They were viewed as deviant because their behavior did not conform to conservative community norms, for example they were seen as noisy or untidy. Wild’s (1974) study remains intriguing as it shows a multiplicity of subject positions in rural contexts and the power accorded to those positions. Newby (1977), coming from a Marxist political economy perspective, focused on the working conditions and rights of people whose experiences had been largely overlooked by rural sociologists. His study demonstrated

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that agricultural workers were not deferential to the middle- and upperclasses, nor did they aspire to belong to those classes. In subsequent work, the author and his co-writers (e.g. Newby 1980; Newby et al. 1978) looked at how class is sustained and reproduced in the countryside. Newby (1980) directed attention to differences between urban and rural contexts. He argued that while occupations create stratification in industrial urban environments, in rural communities stratification is a consequence of property ownership (Newby 1980). We gain from Wild (1974) and Newby (1977, 1980) the notion of class as dynamic and lived. This is interesting in the present theoretical climate, which seeks to understand the everyday, diversity, and multiplicity. However, Wild’s (1974) and Newby’s (1977, 1980) work remains mono-dimensional in that it ignores or obscures gender by conflating class and status with kin. As Newby (1980) developed more complex theorizations of class in the early 1980s, feminist theories of patriarchy and class emerged that critiqued Marxist political economy perspectives for equating the class position of the male with that of the household. This feminist theory became influential in later studies of rurality and class, as the following section demonstrates.

The Rural Restructuring Literature of the 1980s and 1990s: Gender or Class Following on from the work of Newby in the mid 1980s, rural studies of class explained changes in class compositions in the context of rural restructuring due to factors such as the shift from manufacturing to service-centered economies, changes to the agricultural sector, and the gentrification of rural areas. This section considers each of these broad aspects of social change, and discusses how, in much of this literature, class has been privileged over gender as a focus for analysis. It also explores rural feminist literature of this period that examined rural communities, and explains how, in this scholarship, the dynamics of class and/or gender were brought together. In terms of rural restructuring, one sub-theme of the literature of the 1980s and 1990s was the consequence of factory closures for class relations (e.g. Perucci 1994; Winson 1993). This literature emphasized that a decrease in manufacturing limits occupational mobility, increases political polarization in mining towns and rural communities where labor has often been non-unionized, and results in poor outcomes for rural workers. A well-rehearsed critique of this literature was that the type of approach used leads to economic determinism (Phillips 1998), leaving class as lived and gendered unexplored. A second key theme in the rural restructuring literature of the 1980s and 1990s that dealt with class focused on changes in the agricultural sector. At the heart of this literature was the questioning of the changing autonomy of self-employment as labor and property became more organized in processes of production and labor arrangements via contracts to large multinational

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companies like McDonaldsTM (e.g. Goodman and Redclift 1985; Lawrence 1987). Scholars revealed that as a result of the centralization and concentration of capital, medium-sized farms disappeared, the number of large farms grew, and farmers with small farms remained in farming through off-farm employment (e.g. Buttel 1982; Sivini 1976). Some writers suggested that these changes represented the proletarianization of the family farm, while others argued that as farmers do not tend to enter into capital relations in the farm sector, they continue to be ‘propertied laborers’ (e.g. Buttel 1982; Davis 1980). Much of this early political economy research was criticized for being teleological and driven by unilinear assumptions, and for its inability to conceptualize internal family dynamics (Marsden 1990). By the mid 1990s, studies of rural restructuring began to recognize the importance of culture, consumption, and lifestyle preferences in addition to economic structures and production (e.g. Cloke et al. 1995; Marsden 1996). This was particularly evident in work that explored gentrification, a third theme of the literature on rural restructuring. Partly, the notion of gentrification involves buying a country lifestyle (see Cloke and Thrift 1990), and presupposes that middle-class residents replace working-class residents (Phillips 1998; Shucksmith 1990). It has been argued that these population changes alter rural places, resulting in growing polarity between classes combined with a regeneration of desirable rural spaces (Chaney and Sherwood 2000). Phillips (1998) critiqued the term ‘gentrification’ for its assumption that one class group does not necessarily replace another. Social confl ict, he argued, does not necessarily conflate across a working- and middle-class divide, but may occur as inter- as well as intra-class confl ict. Phillips (1998, 124) aptly stated that ‘in many more instances it is probably more valid to talk in terms of one middle class faction replacing another.’ Further critiques of theories of gentrification of the rural include homogenizing assumptions made about the types of people purchasing rural properties. That is, for example, they exclude fi rst-time buyers purchasing rural land, which is often more affordable than city and suburban land. As Rose (1989) has argued, the concept of gentrification requires analyses of heterogeneous peoples and diverse reasons for movement into rural areas. Agg and Phillips (1998, 275) furthered this argument by suggesting that gender, as well as class, may be influencing the gentrification of the countryside. However, despite the burgeoning feminist rural literature that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, gender issues have received little attention in the gentrification literature as well as in the broader literature on rural restructuring.

The Rural Feminist Literature of the 1980s and 1990s: Gender and Class Four important developments in feminist rural studies at this time furthered knowledge about gender, class, and rurality. The fi rst was work that

62 Gender and Rurality was highly influential in changing the unit of analysis from the male farmer to the household (Kada 1980). This scholarship raised the visibility of women as farmers. It acknowledged their contributions to paid and unpaid work within the family, on farms, and in volunteer capacities in their communities (e.g. Alston 1995; Shortall 1999; Whatmore 1991). Importantly, this body of work also highlighted women’s limited access to farm capital through inheritance and family partnership. In a second development, feminist scholars drew attention to gender divisions within rural labor markets, demonstrating that there were lower proportions of women to men with permanent and skilled positions (e.g. Little 1994, 1997b; Little and Austin 1996). Consideration was also given to the gendered nature of occupational identities in rural workplaces (Little 1994; Tigges, Ziebarth and Farnham 1998). A third development occurred as a result of studies of pluriactivity. These studies identified the complexities associated with reasons for engaging in pluriactivity, and examined how pluriactivity may challenge occupational identities and gender identities in farming (e.g. Bryant 1999). This work revealed that pluriactivity has the potential to change class and gender positions by increasing or decreasing fi nance and property ownership, and social status in the community. The fi nal critical development in the rural feminist literature of the 1980s and 1990s that was integral to growing knowledge about gender and class was work on rural communities. This literature is particularly noteworthy as it gave emphasis to the intersections of gender and class (e.g. Dempsey 1992; Gibson-Graham 1996; Poiner 1990; Williams 1981). Poiner’s (1991) study of gender and class in an Australian rural community was influenced by the work of feminist writing in the 1980s that challenged our ways of understanding systems of patriarchy and capitalism as separate, overarching structures. Drawing on dialectical systems of patriarchy and capital, she demonstrated that the material basis of class and gender in farming and the rural labor market is driven by gender divisions of labor and men’s access to, and control over, resources. What stands out in her work is the complexity of gender and capital in rural communities, and how they work in cohort with ideologies of community to reproduce power relations. Gibson-Graham (1996, 209) indicated somewhat different ideologies at work in the way academics constituted mining families as clearly classed, without showing gender as significant in shaping social relations. This was done by depicting working class men as politically aware and strident, and their wives as being either excluded from political life or as unpredictable political subjects. Consequently, men and women become located in capitalist class processes, but are distinguished from domestic class struggles around gender divisions of labor, domestic fi nances, and children’s needs (see also Williams 1981). While not working from an explicitly feminist perspective, Michael Mayerfeld Bell (1994) charts similar territory to Poiner (1991) and Gibson-Graham (1996) in his exploration of the ways in which class

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and gender come together in an English village he titles ‘Childerley.’ The author was particularly interested in the ways in which over 100 interviewees related to nature. He demonstrated that this varied according to class and gender. The examples drawn from Poiner (1990), Gibson-Graham (1996), and Bell (1994) illustrate how social interaction in rural communities is informed by class and gender, without privileging one over the other. Interestingly, the importance of theorizing gender and class as dynamic and intersecting, or co-existing, not only continues but also remains a plea in contemporary feminist work.

Recent Analyses of Rurality and Class: Arguing for Theoretical and Methodological Diversity In recent analyses of rurality and class, the focus has shifted to questions of epistemology and methodology. In terms of the epistemology, Phillips (2002) emphasizes that contemporary rural studies of class have often juxtaposed post-structural and Marxist political economy perspectives. He suggests the value of engaging with both perspectives while exploring interrelationships and divergences. In terms of methodological approaches to the study of class and rurality, Phillips (2007) and Hoggart (2007) argue for the usefulness of both quantitative and qualitative methods. Hoggart (2007) reveals the potential of using official data by drawing on British census data to reveal that while rates and gender dimensions of social mobility differ across rural regions in the United Kingdom, there has been a marked increase in the social mobility of the rural working-classes, but little gender difference in rates of social mobility. While arguing for the value of quantitative methodologies to study rurality and class, Hoggart (2007) and Phillips (2007) also note the importance of interpretive data as a means of providing insight into the nuances, differentiated character, and varied meanings of class, class resistance, and class experience. In one of his many significant contributions to scholarship on rurality and class, Phillips (2002) adds weight to this thesis through a discourse analysis of class in British television programs set in a rural community. The interpretive approach he uses uncovers multiple understandings of class on the basis of narratives about length of residency and community engagement. It also highlights the importance of cultural and symbolic markers of class in rural areas. Interpretive approaches have been used in other recent work on class and rurality emanating from the United States of America. This literature explores the lived experiences of class for Mexican workers who have migrated to rural areas (e.g. Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Naples 1994). Again, gender is rarely examined in such ethnographic studies of rurality and class. For example, while Chávez’ (2005, 330) study of class, or ‘life chances,’ of Mexican farm workers in rural California is critical in illustrating that workers lack

64 Gender and Rurality access to housing, transportation, food, and community infrastructure, the fact that access may be further differentiated through gender is not acknowledged (see Chapter 3). One important exception is the work of Yodanis (2002, 2006), who understands gendered class relations as performative. She documents the way in which involvement in paid and unpaid work and leisure activities is used to signal one’s class position in a small Canadian rural community. In everyday interactions, she reveals how women of all classes express their differences from, and similarities to, each other, thereby maintaining hierarchical relations. For example, she notes that working-class women talk about the hours they work and their work ethic. They use their values about working hard to distinguish themselves from the middle-class women in the community who have time to undertake voluntary activities. In contrast, middle-class women draw boundaries between themselves and working-class women by emphasizing their civic and progressive political activities as well as their attendance at cultural events such as music performances. Yodanis’ (2002, 2006) work is critical in that it signals what may be gained by engaging feminist theory to study gender, class, and rurality. This theory is elaborated in the following section.

Inscribing Class: Feminist Perspectives Skeggs’ (1997, 2004) highly influential theorizing about class has shown that while class is ubiquitous, it is also slippery—difficult to define and classify. Further complications arise when we consider the inter-relationships between gender and class, a subject examined by Bryant and Hoon (2006). They argue that, despite significant theorizing on the subject, empirical illustrations of the inter-relationship of these categories remain scant. They identify different conceptualizations of how gender and class may be connected. These include E.O. Wright’s (2001) argument that gender and class are causally distinct categories, although empirically inter-related, whereby some of what is consequential about class depends on gender and vice versa. The conclusion is that the interconnections between gender and class can be studied by class analysis. Another of the theoretical positions on gender and its relation to class nominated by Bryant and Hoon (2006) is that offered by stratification theorist Anthias (2001). Traditional stratification theory is founded on the notion that social classes are universal and gender is additive. Stratification theory has traditionally understood class as material inequality, and gender as cultural and symbolic, for example identity and difference. Anthias (2001) challenges these notions, arguing that class and gender each have material and symbolic value, and scholars need to attend to the interplay between the symbolic and the material without giving primacy to one or the other. A further theoretical framework for exploring gender and class noted by Bryant and Hoon (2006) is Bourdieu’s (1984) concepts of capital, habitus, and field. As Bryant and Hoon (2006) explain, Bourdieu’s (1984) work has revitalized feminist work on class, which, like mainstream scholarship

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on the subject, had been somewhat neglected as scholars grappled with new social theory that challenged the salience of class. For example, Beck’s (1992, 1994) highly influential work on reflexive modernity characterized contemporary society as one where individuals are increasingly able to make multiple and individual choices about how to live their lives. Beck argued that, as a consequence, pre-modern collective identities have been eroded. In enunciating this position, Beck and Willms (2004, 107) assert that ‘society can no longer look in the mirror and see classes. The mirror has been smashed and all we have left are the individualized fragments.’ Scholars concerned with gender and class have maintained that class remains critical, although class-consciousness and collectivity may be less virulent (e.g. Reay 1997; Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst 2001; Skeggs 1997). They have asserted that the nomenclature of class may not be commonly engaged in lay narratives. However, while individuals are not likely to talk about themselves as belonging to a particular class, this does not indicate the demise of class. Indeed, writers such as Reay (1997, 230) have suggested ‘that notions of classlessness, no less than identification of their working or middle class, inform us about how class is both lived in contemporary society and regulated by discursive orthodoxies.’ Empirical work on gender and class has demonstrated the veracity of this claim. Reay (1997), drawing from her study of mothers’ engagement with their primary-schoolaged children’s schools, found that women were unable to defi ne class in the context of their own class position. However, their narratives indicated a class identity and class tension in interacting with the education system. Resisting class labels also occurs because individuals, particularly working class individuals, refrain from claiming a class identity they may see as undervalued (e.g. Savage et al. 2001; Skeggs 1997). The work of Beverley Skeggs (2005, 969) reveals how class is inscribed; how it is made, perceived, and practiced in, and through, cultural values ‘premised on morality, embodied in personhood and realised (or not) as a property value in symbolic systems of exchange.’ In this respect, Skeggs (2004, 3) writes that ‘there are strong and intimate parallels between the generation of classifications of social class and the production of sexuality and gender.’ Just as Foucault (1978) argued that specific discourses have come together at particular historical moments to produce sexuality, so too do particular discourses made over time, and inscribed on the body, produce gendered and classed subjects. McDowell (2006) has taken up the theme of the dynamic nature of class and its relation to gender by identifying the increasing hegemony of constructions of the ‘good mother’ as one who is not tied to the home, but who enthusiastically participates in paid work and consumption. She notes that this new subject position is classed. That is, it is professional women who are more likely to be facilitating their participation in paid employment by purchasing the labor of working-class women for domestic services. In an earlier study, Pocock (2003) examines the changing gendered and classed positions between women. She shows the varying

66 Gender and Rurality discourses of worth and value, and lack thereof, attached to motherhood which have given rise to ‘mother wars’, that is, defending and giving value to motherhood via involvement or non-involvement in paid work. In an analysis of other contemporary discourses of class and gender, Skeggs (2005) draws on a range of media. She reveals the way in which white working-class women are typically portrayed as brassy, loud, tough, and displaying an excessive heterosexuality. Importantly, Skeggs (2005) demonstrates that it is not just that the working-class woman is ‘made’, but that value is attributed in this process. The moral worth of working-class women is in question as their personhood is deemed lacking against media portrayals of middle-class standards. Skeggs (2005), along with other key class theorists such as Savage (2000) and Sayer (2005), have made morality and worth implicit in their analyses of class. They have shown that emotions such as pride, respect, envy, passion, and resentment are evaluative judgements; they are ‘loaded moral signifier[s]’ of class (Savage et al. 2001, 889). Shame has been shown to be a particularly critical emotion mobilized around class. As with other emotions, shame is referential. It gives rise to feelings of failure. As Sayer (2005, 954) aptly explains, ‘the person who through no fault of their own has a despised body shape or who cannot afford fashionable clothing, has done nothing shameful, but might still feel shame.’ He continues this argument, noting that shame is, in many ways, the opposite of self-respect and pride. Thus, the counter to shame is a sense of self-worth; of value of one’s self and one’s life. However, it is difficult to maintain that our life and actions are worthwhile if we are being criticized or not given value by others. This is demonstrated well in Woods and Skeggs’ (2004) critique of the reality television program What Not to Wear (BBC). The program involves working class women being shamed about their lack of appropriate displays of femininity in dress, deportment, and body shape, and then instructed in the norms of middle-class femininities. The premise of the program is that women will gain increased worth through altering their appearance. Reay (2003, 2005) also argues for the need to explore the affective aspects of gender and class, and, through empirical studies, to identify how memory contributes to the living of social class. In a 2003 study, she draws on data from interviews with twelve working-class women attending a bridging course to university in inner-city London. The women in her sample recall their experience of higher education as being one of trying to measure up to the educational standard. They share stories of self-blame, infused with feelings of inadequacy related to their intellectual ability and their work ethic while at school. Their experiences at university are fused with similar emotions. As Reay (2003) explains, these are individualized stories of self-blame and not accounts of collective inequalities related to a lack of access or constrained choice. From Reay’s (2003) work we gain an understanding of the interaction of structure and subject, and subjective meanings located in one’s past (life history) and social identity.

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While a rich theoretical trajectory has emerged on the subject of gender and class in recent years, following Crompton (1993), we agree that the gender/class debate will be progressed and developed by empirical examination. The question of understanding how rurality, gender, and class come to be inscribed on rural people is multifaceted and diverse, and depends on the population studied. The next section briefly overviews the methodological approach and design of our study of specific populations of farming men and women in several different rural localities in Australia, before we present our analysis of gender and class, and how it intersects, blurs, or melds in the rural.

METHODOLOGY Data for this chapter were gathered from two Australian studies. The fi rst study examined young married farming couples’ understanding of community expectations of farming and participation in four local communities. Eighty face-to-face semi-structured interviews were held with women and men separately to allow each partner to describe and discuss their own experiences and expectations. The total sample consisted of forty couples aged between eighteen and thirty, with and without children. Ten couples from each area were interviewed. The areas included beef and sheep properties in the Rockhampton region of Queensland, viticultural properties in the Wagga Wagga region of New South Wales, mixed beef/sheep and cropping properties in the upper south-east region of South Australia, and horticultural and viticultural properties from the Riverland of South Australia (see Figure 2.1). As there were no official or direct means of reaching younger farming couples, the initial sample was drawn via advertisements in printed and radio media, and via farming organizations. The initial sample consisted of couples who volunteered for interviews. Snowballing techniques were used to build the sample size. The population of the sample was ethnically homogenous, with the majority of participants holding Anglo-Australian heritage. The second study focused on a rural Queensland town with a population of approximately 10,000. This population is less ethnically diverse than the broader population of Queensland. There is no Indigenous population in the town. Only 14.5 percent of people in the community are overseas-born compared with 24.8 percent state wide. Of the 14.5 percent of overseasborn residents, the majority emanate from the United Kingdom and New Zealand. The research explored community involvement and leadership, particularly the factors that either facilitated or constrained participation. The town provided a particularly rich environment for investigation as it has a diverse farming base (vegetable, wool, cattle, and wine), a comparatively recent mining economy, and a developing tourism industry. Both the growing mining and tourism industries have led to in-migration. The availability

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of seasonal, casual farm work also means that the town hosts an itinerant population for parts of the year. In total, 50 interviews of approximately one hour each were recorded. The sample included men and women, longterm residents and recent arrivals, younger and older members of the community, and representatives from different industry and service sectors. In both studies, interviews were audio-taped and transcribed in full. A process of coding and indexing themes emerging from the data was used, but we returned to the full transcripts throughout the analytic process to ensure the integrity of the narrative whole (Coffey and Atkinson 1996). While both of the studies had an explicit focus on gender, this was not the case for class. However, class has emerged as an important theme in the narratives, that is, in men and women’s descriptions of participation in agricultural, service, and sporting organizations, in their discussions of the history of their families in the districts, and in their experiences of paid and unpaid work in their rural communities. We now discuss our analysis under the three major emerging themes of the slipperiness of class; rural spaces as gendered and classed; and self-worth—the moral value of gender and class.

THE SLIPPERINESS OF CLASS The slipperiness and ambiguity of class encompasses an examination of participants’ unwillingness to defi ne themselves in terms of class, given the hegemonic discourses of communitarianism in rural communities. It is perhaps not surprising that a clear theme to emerge from the data is the notion of classlessness. Rural scholarship has highlighted the ways in which rurality is constructed as communitarian. Communitarianism suggests shared ways of living; it does not negate difference, but assumes it is accommodated. At the same time, the literature on class suggests that people are unwilling to defi ne themselves by class. While this literature is based on urban studies, it highlights dominant discourses of classlessness or, as Skeggs (2004, 59) labels it, ‘the disidentification of class.’ In a rural context it is arguable that this discourse will become more pronounced as it coalesces with dominant discourses of communitarianism. Some participants in the studies observed differences between people in their communities according to wealth and property ownership, but they did not necessarily relate this to traditional notions of class. Others, such as the female participant cited below, suggested that these differences were irrelevant: Clare: There’s certainly some people that have got a bit more than others, but on the whole that really doesn’t come into things. (Study 2) In the main, there was ambivalence about asserting that there is a defi ned social structure in rural communities. Instead, participants drew on a

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language of equal opportunity to describe their environments. The following are illustrative of this type of perspective: Sam:

You find that in a small town like this people are pretty much all on the same level. So it’s very friendly and welcoming. (Study 2)

Lucy: I think the festival every year really shows the town as it is. You have everyone pitching in helping—all working together for the good of the town. No airs and graces. Everyone just all together. (Study 2) One participant who repeatedly used the word ‘class’, was a female who participated in Study 2 and whose husband is a bee-keeper. She described her own city upbringing as privileged in contrast to her present position. She explained that, as a bee-keeper, her husband occupied a distinct position in the rural social landscape compared with other farmers who were involved in wool and cattle. In elaborating on why there was a difference, she said: Jenny: They own land. And land is very, very highly valued. I think if we owned more land it would be different. More than fi ve acres. If we owned a couple of thousand or hundred thousand we’d be higher, or it would be different. Bee-keepers are sort of a bit weird because we don’t own land. We’re not landowning farming people, but sometimes we can make quite a bit of money out of bee-keeping, which means that you might own other sort of capital, like [a] truck, you might own a lot of expensive equipment, trucks and utes. They’re valuable. So we’re low down on the pecking order. We’re not at the bottom because we can make money out of it sometimes. (Study 2) As the interview progressed, it became clear that Jenny’s description of her rural community as highly organized around class was in contrast to the views offered by the majority of other participants. The fact that her position was different from other respondents’ was explained to her, and she was asked to comment on why this might be the case. She replied: Jenny: People don’t see it because it’s unwritten. It’s not based on income. It’s based on something else. It’s subtle but it makes a big difference to things, who would get invited to parties or who would get invited to social functions. (Study 2) Jenny’s quotation is particularly rich because while she nominates traditional markers of class such as land, capital, income, and occupation as important in explaining her family’s current position, she also recognizes that class is more complex and intangible than the material. Jenny claimed

70 Gender and Rurality her own class position as being originally one of privilege, and this gave her a point of reference to highlight differences and make comparisons within the community. As Savage (2001) would argue, it is her cultural capital that allows this kind of reflexivity. The complexity of how gender and class come together for married farming women is also prominent in Jenny’s narrative. Her reflections show how her class position has been subsumed by her husband’s.

RURAL SPACES: GENDERED AND CLASSED This second theme, identifying rural spaces as gendered and classed, reveals gendered and classed social activities and hierarchies of belonging. It has been well-established that rural spaces are gendered. That is, on farms, in voluntary groups, sporting organizations, agricultural bodies, local government, economic development boards, and natural resource management authorities, men and women have different tasks and hold different positions (e.g. Pini 2005a, 2006).1 The data from the two studies showed similar gendered patterns of spatial occupation. Importantly, it also demonstrated that class is critical to the gendering of rural space. This was particularly vivid when participants described membership of service clubs. Three major service clubs operated in the community that was the focus of the second study. One was an all-female club, while the other two allowed joint membership, although this had only recently been granted. Membership was by invitation and nomination. This means that the opportunity to join requires a social network encompassing current member(s), and results in some degree of homogeneity in membership. This was recognized by participants who observed that the all-female service club is largely made up of property-owning farming women. Those women involved in agriculture as employees, and those whose husbands manage properties are not members of the group: Iris: The women’s group, I think, is mostly composed of farming families and there’s certainly a bit of a hierarchy there. But that might only come down to the fact that they do things together. You know, ‘cause they all go to the races and stuff like that. Whereas I don’t know. I don’t go to the races. (Study 2) Iris’ comments are again reflective of the ambivalence surrounding class. There is recognition of class, while simultaneously a retreat from using class to explain community relationships and opportunities to belong. Her recognition of class is evident in her understanding that there is a hierarchy driven by women from farming families who are also in the women-only service club. Her retreat from class occurs as she seeks an alternative explanation for the composition of the group. Iris also draws attention to the fact

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that the service clubs in the town, such as the women’s group, are involved in very different types of activities. Importantly, all three groups are dedicated to fundraising, but decisions about what activities will be undertaken are informed by gendered and classed understandings of social activity. For example, one of the predominantly male clubs relies upon weekly meat raffles, and had held a car rally as its main source of revenue in the year of the study. In contrast, in the same year the women’s service group held a black-tie ball as its major fundraising activity. The President commented: Trina: We wanted to have something different, let people get dressed up. We thought about how much we liked getting dressed up ourselves, and how few opportunities we had for dressing up. So it was blacktie. Really elegant. We had a string quartet playing when people arrived, as well as an opera singer. All the tables were beautifully set, and the food and wine was wonderful—all local. We had young people from the high school in waiting outfits serving the meals and drinks. It was really special. (Study 2) It is clear that the fundraising activities provide an important means of performing femininity for women in the service club. However, it is a very distinctive version of femininity, that is, a middle-class femininity. So, for example, the women describe using the fundraising event as a means of displaying both their gendered and classed status through dress, and via their affi nity for, and knowledge of, high culture such as classical music and opera, and in their appreciation of quality food and wine.

RURAL COMMUNITY NARRATIVES OF SELF-WORTH: THE MORAL VALUE OF GENDER AND CLASS This fi nal theme examines questions of moral value and worth given to long-established farming families, and the gendered nature and implications of assignations of value and worth. Farming is a central social signifier for rural communities. Moral value has been associated with what it is to be a ‘good farmer’ and a ‘good community member’ (e.g. Bryant 1999; Chávez 2005). The gendered nature of such values has been internationally recognized and critiqued by feminist rural scholars (e.g. Liepins 2000b; Saugeres 2002). However, as we have argued, how these values are inscribed on individuals via gender and class has received less attention. The data in our studies demonstrate how important social inscription is for understanding how gender and class come together over time. Time is an important dimension to gendered and classed moral values in rural communities. The data show dominant community narratives in the interviews built around male farmers, their fathers, and their grandfathers. Women and their contributions are either obscured or ignored in these narratives.

72 Gender and Rurality In the fi rst study, a key recurring feature of class and its relation to both social location and belonging in rural communities was identified by young men in their expression of pride in their fathers’ and grandfathers’ achievements in the community and on the family farm. However, more often the word ‘respect’ was used when referring to patriarchal history. Participants repeatedly expressed how their family name encapsulated worth, and thereby provided opportunities for community engagement that might not exist for others: Tom: History certainly comes into it. I think more often that it would be viewed as ‘The Fisher Family.’ So when you deal with local business or with agricultural networks, they see it as the Fishers, for sure. (Study 1) Having a family history, and therefore a recognized name, contributes to the social reproduction of male hierarchy because access is given to spaces that may be classed, such as agri-political networks, fi nance, and agribusinesses. They are, of course, at the same time gendered due to patriarchal lineage and the succession of farming properties that occurs across industrialized agriculture (Shortall 1999). Similarly, women recognized the importance of their husband’s family name, and also used the word ‘respect’ when discussing community narratives of the acceptance of their husbands as community members and farmers. Critical to this respect is length of time in the district. Again, this is gendered simply because, like the majority of farming women, those in our studies had come to farming through marriage, often having moved from an urban locale (Pini 2007). Women were not typically ‘locals.’ The importance of longevity in an area and the gendered nature of this as an indicator of value is emphasized in the following quotation. Like others in the horticulture and viticulture industries, where farming properties are generally smaller and require less capital investment, this woman explained that owning property was not sufficient to be afforded respect: Julie: It’s been a lifetime for my husband, he was born here, he’s been raised here, he’s lived here, people do respect his views ‘cause they know that he’s got the knowledge of his father that’s been passed on generation after generation. I think some new people, um yeah, I don’t know whether it’s such an age thing, probably more if you are a first-timer or not. (Study 1) For Julie, respect is accorded due to her husband’s family history. She was a relatively recent migrant to the district, having moved nine years ago when she married. Julie informed us that she was neither a business partner in the farm nor a co-owner of any of the farming land owned by her husband and his parents. On a daily basis she is involved in physical work on the

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farm. She also does the book-keeping for the farm business, drawing on her expertise as a trained fi nancial advisor. She explained why she works on the farm, even though she is neither paid nor owns land: Julie: I’m prepared to do it as a contribution to the property as I can see the benefits in future years. Obviously I’ll benefit from my husband’s inheritance, so that’s my way of contributing, and, um, yeah, it’s stacking up this year. Obviously I keep track of the time I’ve been doing it, and the money I’ve saved them in the last twelve months has been quite substantial with all the work I do. (Study 1) Traditional notions of class are inscribed on Julie through marriage, even though she does not own land, and has her own occupational role and identity as a trained fi nancial advisor. However, Julie is very aware of the inscription of worth on her husband through property ownership and family history. At the same time, she understands that the values attributed to succession and history will provide future rewards to herself and her children. Interestingly, Julie also recognizes that the moral worth, and in particular the knowledge of being a farmer, is ascribed through background rather than practice: Julie: I know a . . . [family] that moved here when they were in their late thirties, and bought a property and worked the property, and I think what my husband has on him, well what he [the new property owner] needs is a little bit more knowledge, a little bit more background knowledge . . . I think once you hit twenty-five you generally have a reasonable level of respect in the farming community, as long as you’ve got that background generation; it’s expected that you’ve got a good knowledge of it all. (Study 1) Another example of a husband’s family background and the respect accorded to him because of it was offered by Jane: Jane: I think they expect him to be like his father. John is very wellrespected I know in terms that he works hard and he produces good produce um, and he’s straight down the line you know. If he doesn’t like what you’re doing, he’ll tell you . . . I think they expect all of the boys to be like that, and I think that’s one of their strengths because they are like that. They’re pretty straight down the line and honest and hard working, all of the boys actually are. (Study 1) Jane also married into farming and moved to the district when married. Like Julie, Jane has professional qualifications and is not a fi nancial partner in the farm business. However, she does not see herself holding similar value in the community to her husband as a consequence of her marriage:

74 Gender and Rurality Jane: This community doesn’t include people who aren’t locals very well, and by locals I mean people that have been living here for longer than say fifteen to twenty years. They don’t consider me a local even though I live here and I will be here for the rest of my life. . . . You can easily be invisible here, I guess, if you don’t have much to do with anybody else, and ‘cause you’re so far away they can’t actually physically see you. (Study 1) Thus, for male farmers, class is inscribed by moral worth because they are male farmers. These moral dimensions of worth are hard work, honesty, forthrightness, longevity in the community, and generational knowledge of agriculture. Some women are ascribed similar status because of their marriage. Others have to actively engage in the community to construct and reconstruct a positive narrative about worth and community participation to obtain value within the community. The distinction between the value ascribed to the occupation of farmer and other occupations common in rural communities was clearly articulated by a male participant in the second study. When asked what he thought would be the experience of someone new to the community, he replied: George: You’ll find that the fellows that move into new properties, they’re more accepted into the town than a new mining family moving in simply because the thinking is, “You mining guys just get paid to turn up.” But you know that people on properties are much more hard working and so because of that they get more accepted. They’re more down to earth. (Study 2) George was engaging in what Sayer (2005, 952) refers to as ‘moral boundary drawing.’ George made an implicit distinction between old and new farming families as well as an explicit distinction between farming families and mining families. As he did so, he indicated moral differences between each category. There is a hierarchy of acceptance among the three groups. The keys to the hierarchy and the boundaries of worth are two-fold. The fi rst is longevity in the district and generational history. The second is merely being a farmer. This occupational identity is associated with the notion of hard work. In turn, the value of hard work is correlated with the understanding of farm families as self-employed. 2 Employees are considered lacking in the virtue of industry because they are waged workers. The moral significance given to hard work makes it the vehicle for acceptance in this rural community. With acceptance comes the attribution of other value laden qualities, such as being honest and down-to-earth. Once again, what becomes apparent is the way class becomes inscribed and socially reproduced through community narratives that give prestige to farming.

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Similar stories of community narratives giving prominence to farming families in rural communities were told by farming women. Women explained that their acceptance and expectations for participation in the community and in farming were informed by the moral worth attached to their husband’s family name. For example: Rosie: We both play tennis and I think I’ve got big shoes to fill because now I’m a Smith. All the Smith women were good tennis players, so I think the community might think maybe I have to be as well. . . . They hold Jeff and his father in very high regard in the community. They’re quite well-respected. And it’s them that’s got that far, not me, so I think I’m just Jeff’s wife when it comes to it. (Study 1) Rosie lives in a wealthy grazing district in South Australia. As graziers, her husband’s family are attributed moral worth and are an established part of specific classed social activities. As a young woman, she acknowledges the expectations the community may have of her as a Smith and expresses some anxiety about living up to the family name. For example, she observed: “I think I have to do better or try harder or something to get respect like they’ve already got.” Rosie met her husband at agricultural college, where they both completed degrees. She moved to the district upon her marriage three years ago. While Jeff is automatically afforded respect in the community due to his background, Rosie is aware that firstly she has to become visible in the community. As she notes, “A lot of people wouldn’t know much about me or anything.” The gaining of respect for Rosie is contingent on her performance of a particular, middle-class femininity. This was a common experience of the farming women interviewed in both studies. Another farming woman, for example, noted that she was the “first grazier’s wife in the district to go out to work,” and this had led to questioning by her peers as her behavior unsettled common gendered and classed norms. Such questioning suggests an anxiety in the grazing community, as her behavior may be interpreted as devaluing and undermining versions of middle-class femininity. She commented: Laura: There’s all that stuff where you should help your husband in the sheep yard, or get your satisfaction from having dinner parties and that sort of stuff. I’m constantly having to explain . . . I don’t ever talk about my work, and I don’t ever get asked about my work. (Study 2) Despite her resistance to prescriptive norms and being called to account, Laura still retained acceptance within the grazing community. Further, her behavioral deviation did not appear to have a negative affect on the status or respect afforded to her husband. He holds a number of leadership positions in the community and was spoken of as a person of knowledge, authority,

76 Gender and Rurality and influence. Importantly, Laura’s husband is one of the largest property holders in the area, and can trace his lineage in the district back over a century. This privileged class position obviously gives Laura and her husband currency so that Laura’s involvement in outside paid work is accommodated, and they retain acceptance within the grazing community.

CONCLUSION In recent years, both rural and feminist scholars of class have witnessed an academic retreat from the subject. There have been different explanations for this declining interest in class. However, one position has been that the rise of individualization has rendered class redundant. This view has been challenged by some rural writers who have used a range of texts, from census data to media, to claim the continued salience of class. The data presented here provide further evidence for this assertion, and take us further. They demonstrate that class is gendered. Thus, it is not merely class that is of continued relevance in rural studies, but also class as a gendered phenomenon. Gender and class are intricately connected in rural spaces. They are actively constructed and reconstructed through daily interactions, the nature of one’s work, volunteer activities, leisure choices, and memories. While the intersection of gender and class is likely to operate through a similar range of practices in urban settings, this chapter has demonstrated that there are some unique material and discursive aspects of rurality which inform how class and gender come together in non-metropolitan spaces. These include the predominance of family farming in rural areas, the fact that such farming is typically inter-generational, the prevalence of discourses of communitarianism, and the hegemony of traditional gender discourses in rural environments. The absence of the naming of class is a concept that has been widely discussed in the mainstream sociological literature on class (e.g. Savage 2000) and more specific feminist work on class (e.g. Skeggs 1997). These scholars explain that there are two inter-related reasons why class is rarely invoked in everyday discourses. First, it is unlikely that someone would claim to be working-class when it is ascribed as being lesser or ‘othered.’ Second, the middle-class is normalized because of its hegemony and thereby does not need to be named. What our data show as being unique to rural settings is that class may become more oblique and unspeakable in a context with dominant discourses of communitarianism and localism; class narratives of equality and inclusivity. Overall, our participants, like the Hampshire villagers studied by Bell (1994), demonstrated a deep ambivalence about class, with one notable exception. Jenny, who came to bee-keeping through marriage and lives in a farming district, views the community through a lens inscribed by her middle-class urban background. Jenny’s story may echo the experiences of other rural women who have migrated to rural areas.

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Thus, to understand the complexity of class and gender in rural areas, we need to consider these women’s experiences in the context of the changing nature of rural communities. This is particularly important because, while the feminist literature has explored the shifting of class over an individual’s life course, its focus has been largely a movement from working-class to middle-class (Hey 2003, 2006; Mahony and Zmroczek 1997). In-migration, restructuring, gentrification, and pluriactivity in rural areas bring into question the lived experience of the transitory and potentially shifting nature of class for rural women and men. The assertion that rural spaces are both gendered and classed has been widely acknowledged in studies of rural communities (e.g. Gibson-Graham 1996; Poiner 1990). However, it is notable that more specific work on gender in rural areas has often overlooked or obscured class. As recent reviews of the literature have attested, there has been a significant growth in rural gender studies in the past decades (Little 2006; Little and Panelli 2003). This work has been important in highlighting the invisibility and disadvantage of rural women, but it has largely failed to address the way in which class may connect with gender to render some women more invisible and disadvantaged than others. In discussing the notion of the moral value of class, the third major theme to emerge from our data, we reveal that participation in the social life of the community is an important way for women to establish themselves as being worthy of belonging in rural communities. If they are precluded from joining groups that orchestrate this social life, how will they ever belong? This issue demonstrates the more abstract and affective dynamics at work, mediated by gendered and classed community narratives, in mobilizing class relations in a rural community. While property ownership has been central to studies of class, and is mentioned by our study participants, their interviews reveal that land ownership, in and of, itself does not designate class or social capital. What is most highly valued is farming, and farming over generations, but only for men, not women. Farming men are afforded respect because of this narrative. Women who enter farming via marriage have to actively engage in the construction and reconstruction of their self in the community to gain respect. They are cognizant of the community narrative that requires them to become visible through involvement in social activities or volunteer work. Thus, they are required to perform a version of femininity to be afforded moral worth and respect. It is possible, of course, for women to challenge this narrative. For example, Laura went out to paid work and thus avoided the traditional tasks associated with being a grazier’s wife. Laura’s resistance is a reminder that while there is a growing and compelling literature on shifting femininities in rural communities and the agency of farm and rural women, this work has not extended to an analysis of how class may intersect with gender to either open up, or limit, opportunities for resistance and change.

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The value of the qualitative approach used in our study of gender and class is that it raises the potential to identify economic, moral, symbolic, and cultural narratives of self and others, and to explore questions of belonging in rural communities. Such an exploration uncovers how community memory sustains emotive descriptors of farming families. It is this emotive aspect of belonging that has received little attention in rural studies. This rich area of enquiry may provide insights about conformity and resistance in the making of gender and class. Hey (2003) has noted how feminist writers have engaged with the sociology of emotions to explore gender and class. She explains that this has given primacy to the domestic sphere, which, she says, ‘is the site par excellence where they show us learning an initial gendered class consciousness. It is the paradoxical site of personal labour and love’ (Hey 2003, 322). This observation has clear resonance for rural social science, given the continued profl igacy of family farming in rural areas where home, family, and business intertwine. It is clear that gender and class are mutually constitutive and intersect in rural settings. Importantly, gender, class, and rurality will also blur and be mediated by other social locations. We are cognizant of the limitations of our theorizing in that our sample populations were culturally homogenous, that is, white middle-class women and men in specific Australian rural communities. In Australia, many of the occupational, commodity, and community groups that represent agriculture in political and social settings are drawn from the dominant hegemonic culture. Despite these limitations of our study, we feel justified in asking: ‘Why, within rural social science, do studies of gender and class typically operate in parallel rather than in unison?’ The next chapter explores the power of heteronormativity, and examines how white heterosexual and middle-class values underpin gendered and sexualized relationships in agricultural communities.

5

Gender, Rurality, and Heterosexuality

INTRODUCTION Chapter 4 illustrated the significance of historical patrilineal connections to the land in inscribing and shaping gender and class in farming. Specifically, Chapter 4 renders visible white heterosexual middle-class norms in constituting relations within farming families and among farming community members. These pervasive norms operate as ‘natural,’ thereby largely resisting interrogation. This chapter specifically attends to heterosexuality as it functions in a similar way to whiteness (see Chapters 2 and 3); that is, as natural, unquestioned, and permeating everyday practice and the institutional and structural dimensions of rural communities. Heterosexual relations are key organizing principles of rural societies, particularly agricultural societies, as these provide the foundation for reproducing the family farm and rural community (Little 2007; Little and Panelli 2007). In enunciating this position, authors have drawn on the work of feminist writers who have interrogated heterosexuality as gendered, socially produced, given meaning, institutionalized and performed in multiple ways in different places at different times. Theorists such as Stevi Jackson (2005a, b) and Dianne Richardson (2007) have challenged notions of a monolithic, compulsory heterosexuality, and visualized the concept of ‘heteronormativity’ to draw attention to the ways heterosexual norms are woven into institutional structures and everyday practices. In the last decade, rural scholarship has focused primarily on gay and lesbian identities, particularly because previously these had not been spoken of or explored in the rural context. While feminist rural scholarship has a long history of exploring heterosexual relations and marriage, particularly in examining gender hierarchies, roles, and feminine and masculine identities, unpacking heterosexuality and exploring the ways in which gender and sexuality intersect in everyday practice requires attention. Consequently, in this chapter we turn to rural scholarship on gender and sexuality to uncover the significance of how multiple rural spaces are given gendered and sexualized meanings. We draw upon feminist theorizing to trace sociological understandings of gender and heterosexuality, and the intersections between them.

80 Gender and Rurality We then examine the narratives obtained from interviews with younger married farming couples to identify the nuanced intersections of gender and heterosexuality in constituting the farming business, family, intimacy, and marital relationships. Younger farming couples comprise the empirical exploration of gender and sexuality, as little is known about how young people give meaning to, and perform gender and sexuality in their work, business, and marriage. The narratives give primacy to patrilineal power relations in the way young women and men ‘do gender’ and give meaning to self, work, marriage, reproduction, and family. Four key themes are pursued. The fi rst is the everyday tensions women and men experience as a consequence of intermeshing boundaries of family, business, and marriage, and the material inequalities that arise from the blurring of these boundaries for young women. The second is the ideological and discursive construction of a ‘good marriage,’ based on equity, unity, companionability, and complementary gender roles. Younger women in particular invoke this discourse to distance themselves from the inequities associated with the subject position of daughter-in-law, and from their perception of the inequitable and traditional marriages of their parents or parents-in-law. The third theme is the presence of gender and sexuality. We explore how these are enacted and experienced in multiple spaces, both cognitive and physical, which give meaning to self, heterosexual marriage, intimacy, work, and family. The fi nal theme of imagined futures focuses on the expectations of young women and men. These expectations are both gendered and sexualized, and give primacy to women’s reproductive bodies.

THEORIZING GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN RURAL CONTEXTS In rurality studies, homosexual and lesbian bodies have received more attention than expressions of heterosexuality, partly due to an interest in identities beyond the hegemonic, and partly because heterosexuality, given its hegemonic status, has been visible, pervasive, and accepted as normative. Studies of homosexuality have tended to place greater emphasis on gay men living in large cities (e.g. Bell et al. 1994; Binnie 1995; Castells 1983; Lauria and Knopp 1985; Valentine 1993), with some writers broadening their foci beyond the urban to include the suburban (e.g. Knopp 1982; Lynch 1987) and rural spaces (Bell 2000, 2003; Bell and Valentine 1995; Kramer 1995; Little 2006; Little and Leyshon 2003). In turn, the rural literature has been more concerned with gay men than with lesbian women. Reviewing the literature on masculinity, rurality, and sexuality, Pini (2008) notes that rural scholarship has often examined expressions of sexuality and acceptance in rural communities, concluding that these communities are either a liberating green utopia, or harsh and non-accepting of gays and lesbians. There is a body of literature, for example, that suggests gay and lesbian migration to rural areas is an escape from homophobic

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urban environments to a sparsely populated, physically remote, but ultimately safe rural idyll (Binnie and Valentine 1999; Smith and Holt 2005). Closely associated with this literature is a body of work that has considered the gentrification of rural space through the consumption patterns of gay and lesbian households (e.g. Bell and Valentine 1995; Smith and Phillips 2001). In a further analysis of the literature, Bell (2003) argues that there are dangers of essentializing gay and lesbian identities when examining the relationships between expressions and symbolic representations of both the rural and homosexual identities. Indeed, the question of acceptance or non-acceptance of gay men and lesbian women in rural communities may be mediated by other differences. For example, Kirkey and Forsyth (2001, 423), in their study of gay men living in the Connecticut River Valley region, found that a sharing of dominant class-inscribed community values among the largely university-employed population resulted in a strong discourse of ‘tolerance of difference’ among residents. Kirkey and Forsyth (2001) also remind us that there is a difference between homosexual people who move to rural areas, and those individuals whose sexuality has formed within rural spaces and who have lived for all, or a substantial part of, their lives in rural areas. Importantly, as Bell and Valentine (1995) explain in Queer Country, their early article on sexuality and rurality, there is a difference between ‘identity’ and ‘identification.’ Thus, while people may feel attracted to others of the same sex, and may construct their sexual identity as homosexual or bisexual, they may choose not to be identified as homosexual or bisexual within their communities. They tend to express their sexual identities, and/or have gay or lesbian relationships, away from their home communities. Many of these men and women are in marriages due to the ‘intense heteronormative pressures of rural life’ (Bell and Valentine 1995, 116). This is because marriage and reproduction underpin the continuation and succession of agricultural and rural communities (Brandth and Haugen 2000; Bryant 1999, 2006; Liepins 2000b; Little 2003). Consequently, women who are not married, and in particular women who are separated or divorced from farming men, are acutely aware of how embedded marriage is within rural life. There is minimal research to date which examines the lives of separated, divorced, widowed, and single women (see Pini 2003a).1 Rural spaces are entrenched, defi ned, and performed as heterosexual spaces. As Jo Little (2003, 2007) suggests, marriage is the identifying symbol of normalcy in rural areas. She reveals that moral codes in rural communities regulate sexual behaviors, and that heterosexual relationships are maintained through community sanction, surveillance, and discipline: . . . the “natural” surveillance that is applauded as part of the maintenance of the caring rural community acts as a powerful disciplinary tactic in relation to sexual behaviour and relationships. Not only is sexual behaviour policed on an ongoing basis, but, by marginalizing

82 Gender and Rurality relationships that do not conform to the model of the heterosexual family, the rural community ensures its continuing and unchanging reproduction. (Little 2007, 853) Little (2003, 2007), and Little and Panelli (2007), provide empirical evidence of the normalizing of heterosexuality in rural spaces through an analysis of media campaigns aimed at finding wives for single farming men. The rationale and motivation for such campaigns is to find wives to ostensibly sustain and reproduce farming, and thereby rural communities. Both the campaigns and the discourse of single farmers require ‘potential wives’ to be ‘suitable’ women who would be able to live the country life and place the farms’ needs above their own. Farmers participating in the campaigns seek practical, no-nonsense women. These prerequisites rule out sexy women, intellectual women, or sociable women. In analyzing the media texts, Little and Panelli (2007)) reveal how the Australian outback is deployed to represent and reproduce notions of heterosexuality. They also demonstrate the way in which the rural landscape is engaged to reinforce stereotypical versions of rural masculinity and sexual identity as connected to the mastery of nature. They conclude that ultimately, ‘sexuality and space cannot be viewed separately but need to be seen as intimately bound together’ (Little and Panelli 2007, 185). The theme of the intersections between space and sexuality in non-metropolitan areas has also been addressed in studies of the surveillance of young rural men and women’s leisure activities. Studies of rural pubs in Ireland (Leyshon 2005) and New Zealand (Campbell 2000), for example, have demonstrated that the pub is a key site where particular forms of heterosexual masculinities are expressed and become a raison d’être for manhood. On the other hand, young women who enter such spaces are labeled ‘promiscuous’ and ‘unladylike.’ Hillier, Harrison and Bowditch (1999), in their Australian study of rural youth and sexuality, found that for young people aged fi fteen to seventeen years, sexuality is synonymous with heterosexuality; and heterosexuality is constructed as heterosexual penetration. Hegemonic norms associated with gendered roles and performance shape experiences and expressions of heterosexuality (see Bryant 2006). For example, young rural women are charged with responsibility for contraception, and expressions of heterosex are commonly described using active verbs to represent male sexuality, with an absence of verbs to describe active female sexuality. This literature makes it clear that the intersectionality of gender and sexuality, particularly heterosexuality, come to the fore for young people in rural areas. In order to theorize these intersections in an analysis of our own data, we fi rst turn to the feminist theorizing on heterosexuality.

Theorizing Gender and Heterosexuality Feminists have scrutinized the concept of heterosexuality in the context of marriage, family, work, and other social institutions for some time (e.g.

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Jackson 1996, 1999; Jackson and Scott 1996; Rich 1980; Segal 1999; Wittig 1992). These analyses have destabilized the essentialist sex/gender distinction by challenging the notion of heterosexuality as ‘natural’ and ‘normal’. Adrienne Rich’s (1980) concept of ‘compulsory heterosexuality,’ which she adopted to convey the notion of heterosexuality as socially produced and institutionalized in social practices, norms, and laws, is critical to this body of work. The ultimate result is that heterosexuality is reproduced as ‘given,’ while those who resist or challenge its norms are marginalized. Jackson (2005a, b) has added considerably to the debate on compulsory heterosexuality by introducing the notion of heteronormativity. While some claim this term contests the notion of compulsory heterosexuality (Bell and Binnie 2004), Jackson (2005a, b) argues that heteronormativity differs from compulsory heterosexuality in that the former is not synonymous with institutionalized heterosexuality. Instead, heteronormativity focuses our attention on how heterosexual norms are implicitly woven into everyday practices through institutional structures. While Jackson’s (2005a, b) intervention in feminist debates on heterosexuality has been welcomed, she acknowledges that the term ‘heteronormativity’ is slippery; if used glibly, it can disallow complex, contradictory, messy, and nuanced workings of heterosexuality, and in particular ‘what it is that is subject to regulation on both sides of the normatively prescribed boundaries of heterosexuality: both sexuality and gender’ (Jackson 2005a, 3). Jackson (2005a) warns that if we lose the complexity of heteronormativity, and therefore the intersections between gender and sexuality, we run the risk of assuming heteronormativity as ‘so entrenched as to be unassailable . . . or as easily destabilised’ (Jackson 2005a, 1). Clearly there is a need to incorporate an analysis of gender with heterosexuality, but this is problematic when the terms are often used differently and/or their relationship is conceptualized as causal (Richardson 2007). For example, in a recent review of relationships between gender and sexuality, Richardson (2007, 464) identifies feminist theorizing in which gender constitutes sexuality or sexuality constitutes gender. Where gender and sexuality are understood as separate but interrelated or causal, priority is given to one or the other, or gender and sexuality are understood as categories that intersect inextricably. Consequently, we need to look at theoretical conceptualizations of gender and sexuality—heterosexuality in particular—and the interrelationships between them.

Intersections of Gender and Heterosexuality Feminists note that seeking to conceptualize the intersection of gender and heterosexuality may result in these categories being indistinguishable from each other, thus limiting and delimiting theoretical exploration. Consequently, when considering how to conceptualize gender and heterosexuality without conflating them, feminists draw on the notion of gender and sexuality as ‘interweaving’ strands (e.g. Alsop et al. 2000; Hennessy 2006; Jackson

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2005a, b; McLaughlin, Casey and Richardson 2006; Richardson 2007). These writers argue that although these strands are not universal, they come together culturally and materially in different ways, in different places, and at different historic times. They also suggest that grappling with sexuality and gender as fluid concepts enables identification of how these categories intersect in potentially different ways within varied aspects of social life. Feminist writers have turned to theories and methodologies influenced by Foucauldian perspectives to explore this fluidity, and the ‘making’ or ‘becoming’ of heterosexuality and gender. In this work, the aim has been to uncover discursive and performative constructions of gender and sexuality, and the use of space in such constructions (Browne 2007; Butler, Beck-Gernsheim and Puigvert 2003; Rose 1993). While a Foucauldian perspective provides a useful theoretical prism for feminist work, this conceptual lens has not been accepted uncritically by feminists (e.g. Jackson and Scott 1996). Empirical explorations have examined complex and contradictory constructions of sexual identities, and the operation of power in constituting and reproducing sexualities. This has opened up the opportunity for exploring both gender and sexuality (e.g. Acker 1990; Wilton 1996; Witz et al. 1996). Specifically, Foucault’s (1988) notion of ‘practices of the self’ has been engaged to interrogate how sexuality is regulated, controlled, and prescribed, particularly through discursive practice (Grosz 1995; Jackson and Scott 1996). Judith Butler (1990, 1993) has been influential in using discursive practice to question the interconnections between gender and sex (see also Delphy 1993; Wittig 1992), which she views as constructed through both discursive and non-discursive practices. She suggests that bodies become gendered and sexed through the continued performance of gender; women routinely perform particular brands of femininity and men routinely perform particular brands of masculinity. Jackson’s (2005a, b) theorizing about gender and its interrelationship with heterosexuality has been instrumental for feminist scholars. She clarifies her meaning of gender as a site of social division in which the social categories it produces are heterogeneous in the lived experiences of femininity and masculinity. She understands gender as a hierarchical social division between women and men, which is ingrained in social institutions and practices, but is also cultural and lived through meanings by ‘embodied individuals who “do gender” in their daily lives, constantly producing and reproducing it through habitual, everyday interaction’ (Jackson 2005a, 4). Here Jackson refers not to Butler’s (1990, 1993) performative forms of masculinity and femininity, produced discursively and routinely, but to earlier symbolic interactionist understandings of gender (see Goffman 1976; West and Zimmerman 1987). She understands sexuality as a part of social life that pertains to the erotic, and is more than a binary between heterosexuality and homosexuality, encompassing multiple identities, relationships, practices, desires, and their opposite—disgust.

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Jackson (1999, 2005a, b) illustrates the intersections of gender and heterosexuality at four specific levels of ‘the social’: the structural and institutional; social and cultural meanings; everyday interactions and practices; and subjectivities. However, she clarifies that there is flow between different aspects of the social, such as social structures like law, and everyday meanings and interactions. What is important for understanding gender and sexuality in this way is that relationships between the two are likely to differ at any of these intersecting levels. Linkages are more defined at some points than others, and are not necessarily unidirectional. Given this chapter’s focus on meanings and the practice of heterosexuality in the rural, we illustrate Jackson’s (1999, 2005a) conceptualization of gender and heterosexuality in the way meanings are produced through interaction and practice.

METHODOLOGY The data used in this chapter stem from an Australian Research Council grant which explored body politics, intimacy, and work among younger farming couples who were in marital, de facto, gay, and lesbian relationships. A number of techniques were employed to invite gay and lesbian couples to participate. These included radio interviews on gay programs, advertisements in gay and lesbian newsletters, advertisements in farming newspapers, and liaising with gay and lesbian associations. The only method that provided a result was snowballing via gay and lesbian associations. This resulted in one interview with a gay farming couple. Other rural scholars have noted the difficulties in accessing gay and lesbian people to participate in research as rural residents seem bemused that there are gay and lesbian couples in their community (Pini 2002), or, as Bell and Valentine (1995) suggest, gay and lesbian couples choose to remain hidden. Hence, they are unlikely to self-identify for interviews in rural areas. Thus, our sample consisted overwhelmingly of married couples, plus one de facto heterosexual couple, and one gay couple. To protect anonymity, the data from the defacto and gay couple have not been used here. Face-to-face semi-structured interviews were undertaken with a sample of thirty-eight married couples between the ages of eighteen and thirtythree years. Men and women in marital relationships were interviewed separately for approximately two hours to give individuals an opportunity to fully describe their own experiences and expectations. The sample was drawn from two regions in each of the Australian states of South Australia, Queensland, and New South Wales (see Figure 2.1). Agricultural industries represented in the study include beef and sheep properties, and grain and viticultural properties. The sample was accessed using snowballing techniques, beginning with self-identification via farmers’ groups and networks. It was then built from these initial contacts through young farming couples who were not associated with agricultural organizations and networks.

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Women and men were asked to talk about their farming and work histories; explain their family composition, including extended family; discuss paid and unpaid work, divisions of labor, attitudes to land and nature, and how decisions about family, farm, and fi nance are made; and provide examples of negotiation over specific decisions. After transcription of audio-tapes, narratives were stored, retrieved, and analyzed using The Non-numerical Unstructured Data Indexing, Searching and Theorising (NUDIST) system. Data were coded by identification of key themes, sub-themes, and relationships between themes, and verified through NUDIST (Minichiello, Aroni and Hays 2008). Four key themes were identified: family, business, or a marriage? the good marriage; spatial intersections—marriage, intimacy, and farming; and heterosexuality, reproduction, and future work.

FAMILY, BUSINESS, OR A MARRIAGE? Over many decades, rural scholars have noted the interweaving and often lack of distinction between family, business, and marriage (Sachs 1983; Whatmore 1991). A substantial international body of literature has demonstrated that women rarely inherit farming properties, and those who marry into farming are rarely involved in farm decision-making (Alston 1995; Garcia-Ramon 1989; Haney and Knowles 1988). The tension between these entities is vivid in the narratives of younger farming women for whom gender hierarchies create confl icting meanings of work, business, and family. Feminist theorizing, and in particular the work of Stevi Jackson (2005a, 7), which suggests that heterosexuality ‘is by defi nition, a gender relationship, governing relations between women and men, ordering not only sexual life but also domestic and extra-domestic divisions of labour and resources,’ is explicitly at the heart of such tensions. As Chapter 4 indicated, for younger farming women, their account of heterosexual marriage is not governed only by gender hierarchy in their relationship, but also by inter-generational gender hierarchies, particularly those of her husband’s family. In contrast to the burgeoning literature on gendered roles and power relations within farming families, few studies have examined the inter-generational gendered patterns of interaction and power (Gill 2008; Pini 2007; Punch 2000). In an Australian context, Pini (2007) and Gill (2008) contend that the subject position of daughter-in-law has been discursively constructed by drawing on essentialist understandings of women, thereby constituting these young women as emotional and lacking in appropriate knowledge and skill to engage in farm decision-making. The narratives in this chapter echo similar understandings, perceptions, and practices associated with younger women who marry into farming families. For example, one participant, Linda, articulated how she grappled with a range of complexities surrounding the boundaries of business,

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marriage, and extended family. Linda was in her mid-twenties, had been married for two months, and lived on a grape-growing property in South Australia. She noted that her husband had segmented the farm from his relationship and his future children: Linda: It’s really hard to decide, whether we mean the family business means raising children and raising grapes, or whether the family business means growing grapes. And if it’s just growing grapes there’s no way I’m staying in the house, but he (husband) needs to see it that way. We were planning to have children, and I want to stay home and raise them. So would that be part of the family business, raising children, or isn’t it? Linda suggests that for her, family and business intertwine, but what she is experiencing is a spatial, gendered, and sexual segregation of home and farm. One of the dominant themes in feminist work on the production of social space has been an interrogation of how heterosexual meanings shape access to, and use of specific spaces (Ardener 1993; Bondi 1993; Bryant and Livholts 2007; Domosh and Seager 2001; Grosz 1995; Massey 1994, 1999; Rose 1993; Valentine 1989, 1996). Further, as Koskela (1997) argues, women are reminded there are certain spaces they are not supposed to be in. Indeed, Linda’s husband’s expectation that she remain in the home and not take paid work clearly indicates that the farm business is not a space that is open to Linda. She is willing to meet these expectations because she sees that reproduction is associated with the continuation and growth of the business. However, she wants this acknowledged by her husband who has, through discourse and practice, separated the farm and family. Currently, her gender gives her limited currency on the farm, but currency may come because of the intersection between her gender and her sexuality; her potential and ability to procreate. In her narrative, Linda used her experience growing up in a city-based, small-business family to challenge her structural location in the farming family. She explained that “I was raised where there was not a lot of difference between what you do at home and what you do at work.” However, for Linda, and commonly for other young women, the tensions afforded by the intermeshing of family and business were associated with working and living with generations of their husbands’ families. In Linda’s case, marrying into a patriarchal enterprise where four brothers and their father live and work together makes it difficult to provide space for her to engage, and be heard, in their grape-growing business. Linda can see the homes of her three brothers-in-law from her house, while a little further down the same road is the home of her parents-in-law. The physical proximity of her house to the homes of other family members establishes heterosexual normative practices that are difficult to intercept. These private spaces take on heteronormative and hegemonic meanings of masculinity, thereby affording prevalence to gender and sexual hierarchies (Browne 2007).

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Linda was not alone in expressing concern about the ways in which the physical and emotional spatial constraints limited her opportunity to participate in the family business. As another female participant explained, “I didn’t just marry Peter, I married his family”; and, “it’s a bit like renting a house as opposed to owning a house.” The material inequalities that have emerged for farming women as a consequence of gendered intergenerational hierarchies have been well documented in rural studies over the past thirty years (e.g. Alston 1995; Blanc and MacKinnon 1990; Sachs 1983; Symes and Marsden 1983). Similarly, women explained how the intergenerational gendered hierarchy associated with fi nance impacts on meanings of marriage, reinforcing, as Brickell (2006, 98) aptly concludes, that ‘heterosexuality . . . [has] no meaning without . . . gendered underpinnings, and [that] we always bring our genders to sexual interactions.’ As a young woman from a cropping property in New South Wales contends: Kimba: It’s just the little things. Like when we fi rst got married, just for an example, our groceries were paid for by the farm. Our basic groceries. We have a Woolworths account, but what I found hard was I didn’t have authorization to sign cheques. Robert did and his brother did, obviously, and his mum. I didn’t ask questions about this because there is a lot of emotion involved in being part of a family business. Kimba uses the word “our” to make explicit that the heterosexual marriage is separate from the extended family, but at the same time she shows how her daily married life is regulated by a gendered hierarchy of interaction and practice that provides power to her brother-in-law and mother in-law. This type of regulation of younger women’s daily activities occurs due to a combination of their gender and youth, compounded by them not having had children. This renders their femininity immature and suspect in their in-laws’ perception. Jane, who is twenty-nine years old, has been married for four years, and lives on a sheep and cattle property in New South Wales, explains how her in-laws hover over their relationship and their work: Jane: You could see it that Geoff and Mary are protecting their boys, particularly as we don’t have children. I’m not very thrilled about it but I have no choice. Little (2003, 2007) has demonstrated the surveillance that sanctions heterosexuality in rural communities. This is echoed in the women’s comments from our study, which also illustrate another layer of surveillance of heterosexual relationships; the generational surveillance and regulation of women’s heterosexual futures. There is surveillance of young women’s femininity through expectations about their community involvement, as

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seen in Chapter 4, and, as seen here, through their sexuality. In terms of the latter, power and acceptance into the farm business are often withheld until the birth of children. Younger men were also aware of generational and gender hierarchies. They were awaiting their fathers’ retirement so they could claim their position as ‘farmer,’ and their wives’ involvement in the property. Comments like, “I guess as my father moves out of it, she’ll sort of move into it,” were common. For the most part, young men colluded in the exclusion of women from the business by accepting inter-generational surveillance and the regulation of their wives. Primarily, men separated their marital relationship from the farm business, including the business and working relationship they had with their parents and/or brothers. Katie, who lives on a large beef cattle breeding property in North Queensland and has been married for two years, explains: Katie: Jack’s parents talk on the phone every night (to him). And it’s very full. They communicate really well. And I don’t hear those conversations. I hear them from Jack second hand. John, a crop farmer from South Australia who works on his family’s property and has been married for three years, articulates this most clearly: John: From May’s point of view, that’s not so crucial to her because she doesn’t really care about their interests, she cares about her and us, and her and me, sort of thing. I’m quite often making decisions in Dad’s best interest, perhaps over my own at times. It’s not huge, but I can see what she’s getting at. Yeah, I’ve got to be careful in that, that sort of thing, that I’m not pushing his point of view too far at our expense.

THE GOOD MARRIAGE A dominant discourse in the young women’s narratives was one of ‘good marriage.’ In this framing, husbands and wives are equal, have joint involvement, work in separate spheres but as a co-operative unit, and share mutual respect. This discourse of the good marriage can be traced to the ‘ideal marriage’ encapsulated in the latter half of the twentieth century, which is based on sustaining and maintaining companionship and intimacy (Askham 1984; Giddens 1991). In engaging this discourse, young women drew comparisons with the marriages of their parents and/or parents-in-law. They did not refer to the latter as ‘bad marriages,’ but clearly differentiated their own, selfdefi ned good marriage as apart from this earlier generation. Typically, they

90 Gender and Rurality described how they sought a level of involvement in the farm that their mothers and/or mothers-in-law did not have; a situation they understood as indicative of a more unfair and unequal past. At the same time, it was clear that the ‘equal treatment,’ ‘equity,’ and ‘fairness’ they desired or imagined was not necessarily the reality because young farming husbands sought to curtail their involvement. A statement from twenty-three-year-old Claire, recently married and living on her husband’s small wine grape-growing property in South Australia, illustrates a common view: Claire: I offer to help him now, but he sits there and does his number crunching and what not, and I don’t get involved because I know I’m just going to get in the way, because I don’t know the way he’s structured everything. I’m not going to end up like my mum’s generation. I’m not going to end up like that where she has no idea about the paperwork . . . I want to know . . . I think it’s only fair that I know what our financial situation is. Jackson (2005a, 15) maintains that women continue to undertake the majority of domestic work, including the emotional labor required to maintain and sustain heterosexual relationships, ‘despite the late modern emphasis on togetherness and equity in hetero-relations.’ Consequently, as Wittig (1992) argues, the heterosexual contract is also a labor relationship; a class-like relationship between men and women, where gender and heterosexuality are sustained through labor practices. As these feminist scholars make clear, material inequality occurs in the constitution of heterosexual marital or de facto relations, and as a consequence of gender divisions and hierarchies reproduced within those relationships. However, while younger women translate the articulation and reproduction of gendered norms to the success of their marriage in maintaining heteronormative practices, these same meanings and practices produce confl ict. As Anna, who is twenty-six years old, lives on a crop producing property, and has been married for three years, tells us: Anna: I had so much to learn and I just love it. I mean, I love being outside and I love cattle. I love the whole lot which helps. I just haven’t had any experience really. I had a go at stacking hay this year, ‘cause I thought, “Oh, I’ll do that because I can do that with the tractor because of my shoulder [injury].” It’s pretty nerve wracking having that much equipment around you that’s worth so much money. I wanted to drive the tractor, but Joseph’s made me really paranoid about tractors. While Anna perceives herself as willing to learn—participating in, and sharing—the business of farming, her husband Joseph believes he “[carries] the full responsibility of what happens,” and regulates her involvement in

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business activities and farm labor. However, as Adkins (2004, 206) reminds us, subjects do not entirely occupy specific subject positions or entirely identify with norms. She argues that there is a ‘temporality of action [and that] . . . identification as well as social positions are subject to iteration (and not simply a singular process of adaption or accommodation).’ This suggests that part of Anna’s learning about farm labor is also learning over time about the heterosexual contract of farm marriage, and the implicit gendered norms articulated within each of these. Jenny, however, who is twenty-eight years old, has a young child and has married into a farming family, accepts the gendered division of labor as allowing the marriage to run more smoothly as a partnership. At the same time, she acknowledges her position of partner in the farm business and the contingencies placed upon that position: Jenny: When Jeremy and his dad are involved with the day-to-day, we get it and sort of take their word for it because they are there every day seeing all the operations, but since Jeremy and I have been married, I have been included in all the decision-making, you know, accepted as a partner in the business, it’s a mutual thing, we are married. Jeremy does all the labor side of things and I keep things managing at home, and we find that works really well for us. If I can keep things going here and not put pressure on Jeremy . . . Jeremy doesn’t cook—if he had the time he would love to I guess— washing, ironing, cleaning, cooking, and all those sorts of things, I do that simply so that life can run a little smoothly. I think that’s a good balance. We see again a patrilineal process of decision-making that shows gender hierarchies extending beyond the marital relationship. Thus, the discourse of the good marriage meant separate farm and domestic roles for some, and at times was given meaning as complementary gendered roles. This understanding of heterosexuality as a form of gender complementarity has been well recognized by feminist scholars (e.g. Delphy 1993). Further, as Adkins (1995) argues, women’s emotional and sexual labor power becomes institutionalized in the marriage contract and extended to the workplace. This interconnection of gender and heterosexuality is evident in the ideology of a good marriage, which is underpinned by working together in unity for the future of the business, family, and marriage. Larisa, a twenty-five-year-old woman from a cattle and cropping family-owned property, explains: Larisa: You have to be as one, even though you have little arguments; you have to ultimately decide to follow the same path. Similarly, twenty-five-year-old Melissa, also from a cattle and cropping property, explains that while her husband managed the day-to-day work on the farm, they were unified in important decisions about the property:

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Melissa: We are always heading in a really strong and definite direction. I think that really helps the business and that really helps the marriage. I think the best part of our private life is we have so much control over it—over our working lives and how we can meet during the day when I take lunch down to him, and our work influences what we do together in our private time. We are not suggesting that heterosexual relations for farm women are purely exploitative, or that all farm women experience heterosexuality and gender in the same way. What is common among these young women is an investment in a unified marriage and business, and, importantly, recognition of risk to livelihood and marriage if either the working relationship or intimate relationship fails. Indeed, men and women used terms like “risk,” “obligations,” and “threat” to indicate the emotional work required to balance the relationship with work and vice versa. Gillies (2003) draws attention to the interdependency of subjects to indicate how frameworks of obligation and relational morality give insight into the balances and checks of emotional work in relationships. Jennifer, aged 31 years, who jointly owns a citrus and horticultural property with her husband, reports that because they both rely on the farm for income, the relationship has to work for the business to work: Jennifer: I always joke that there’s no point divorcing because I get half a loan. It’s very, very [financially] close. Because of that, we rely on each other to make a go of the business, but to make the business work we really have to rely on each other in our personal lives. To trust, even though not always knowing what the other’s going to do or think, but being comfortable that they’re not going to act in some outlandish way that’s going to threaten either side, it’s trust in the business and a tie in your personal life, so they become one I think. We live and breathe work, and because of that, each other. . . . I see the obligations here are great because we have got a risk with a large loan to pay the place off, and I suppose I wish there was more discussion about us. Jennifer indicates that the risk and threat become greater when men put more time into the business than the marriage; that is, when men do not engage in emotional labor or do not reciprocate with giving time to their partners. Julian, a twenty-nine-year-old male citrus grower from South Australia who has been married for two years, talks about the importance of having time to spend together to maintain the relationship: Julian: We can’t just walk away from work and forget about it. The issues are always there, you know; how are you going to pay the tax, how are you going to pay this? In years like this [drought] . . . those

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worries are always there. There is never a time when you haven’t got a number of jobs that are sort of on your mind that you want to do. . . . I guess it can be positive and it can be negative. Currently, how we are doing it [farming], I don’t think it’s positive really, we’re not getting the time to discuss things, it’s not giving us any time together. . . . If there wasn’t so much to do, I think it would be fine for our relationship. What is unique to farming couples is the spatial intertwining of work, intimacy, and home, which requires emotional labor to suppress, exert, or manage the way power is used, expressed, and experienced by men and women.

SPATIAL INTERSECTIONS: MARRIAGE, INTIMACY, AND FARMING Feminist geographer Gillian Rose (1993) has revealed how intimate relationships between women and men take on specific meanings within specific sites in the home. The spatial separation of inside/outside, the separation of rooms and their functions within the home, and, at the same time, the lack of spatial segregation between business and marriage, sexualizes and genders space for farming women and men. Connected to this lack of spatial segregation of business and marriage are issues around sexuality and emotions. Rural scholars have yet to examine the everyday emotions that constitute work and heterosexual relations. Studies about sexuality and emotion have predominantly focused on censorious emotions directed at gay and lesbian couples (Valentine 1996). This study goes some way towards addressing this gap in the literature. The relationship between business and marriage is ever present for the farming couples in our study, as illustrated by Brian, a twenty-seven-yearold South Australian crop farmer who uses spatial metaphors when talking about the conflation of his relationship with his wife and farming: Brian: We go through patches where, for instance, you get too involved in what’s going on around the farm, and that’s all you think about and that’s all you talk about . . . there’s a big world out there and you’re sort of stuck within your own boundaries. The arguments we have are based upon that all you’ve talked about for ages is the same thing: the farm. Similarly, twenty-eight-year-old Jessica from far North Queensland, who has been married to a sheep farmer for five years, reveals how she is spatially-bound when there is conflict in the working and marital relationship: Jessica: You can work all day with the bloody, grumpy bugger and then you’ve got to come home and sleep with him. The thing that

94 Gender and Rurality frustrates me is that if you have a fight, there’s nowhere to go except going out the back paddock and that gets a bit cold after a while, I mean that’s difficult. And also if you disagree strongly on a business decision it is very hard because you’ve then got to go to bed with that person. You have to resolve that issue pretty quick smart or it just festers. Jessica’s narrative brings to the fore the inherently emotional aspects of living and working with an intimate partner, particularly in a heterosexual context. What is confronting about Jessica’s comments is the blatant acknowledgement that sex and work are indistinguishable. Further, emotional reconciliation is an imperative for everyday living and working relations. This makes stark the potential consequences of not resolving confl ict, which may result in violence to women (Panelli, Little and Kraack 2004; Wendt and Cheers 2004). Gerald, Jessica’s husband, explains that disagreements about the farm business are personalized in different ways when they occur with your marital partner. He shows how marriage and work are mediated by feelings: Gerald: If you have an argument about the business, it’s with someone you have a relationship with. Your partner but also your job. It’s hard not to make a criticism personal or not take it personally. Gerald inextricably links his job with his intimate relationship, and acknowledges the ongoing emotional tension that remains constant in his daily life. Further, Steve, a third generation beef and grain farmer, married for four years, and living in Queensland, also understands that emotion enters the business of farming. He states: Steve: I feel frustrated about it a lot of the time. It’s that the personal life comes into some of the decisions that you make and therefore you can’t make it on a rational basis. And so you’ve got to make a decision sometimes based on emotions, which is a bit dangerous in business. Steve links decision-making to rationality and “personal life” to emotions, thereby ‘excluding emotion from the domains of rationality and masculinity’ (Bondi 2005, 436). Additionally, ‘given the power of binary framings that construe femininity as “not rational”‘ (Bondi 2005, 436), it is implicit that, as Steve suggests, heterosexual marriage will disrupt the business and create danger to it. Both women and men found difficulty in obtaining space—privacy for oneself within the relationship, and room for privacy with each other in the relationship. This was either because they were spatially bound by working and living together, or, as illustrated in the following statement from Jessie,

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employed workers and contractors were present on the property and in the home. As Jessie, a twenty-nine-year-old woman from South Australia, who has been married for three years, comments: Jessie: The stockmen are here at lunch time. The house is full of men eating. They are all over the house, sleeping. And privacy is an issue I think. Isn’t it funny, right in the middle of nowhere? But I can tell you my neighbors know more about what goes on here than you would in a town. You are exposed all the time to new people, and that puts more pressure on, and stress on your marriage. Peter, aged 30 years, married for one year and living on a cropping property in South Australia, also stresses the need for privacy: Peter: I like going fi shing at the weekends and Astrid doesn’t like staying by herself, but that’s what I say to her, “I’ve really got to get out of here. It feels like a prison sometimes.” There is spatial contradiction for these men and women. On the one hand, the Australian rural idyll equates with large open spaces denoting freedom; on the other, emotionally constricted space is depicted in the interweaving of marriage and work. The preceding statements highlight the friction between self-identities, marital identities, work, and space. Spaces become gendered and sexualized for farming women and men, predominantly at the intersections of work, business, intimacy, and marriage. We have shown how combining work and home in farming impacts on identity and privacy, and how spatial contexts shape married women and men’s interactions. Interestingly, unlike Little and Panelli’s (2007) fi nding that women and men seeking a marital partner adopt the discursive imagery of the Australian outback as romantic, the young couples in our study rarely discussed ‘the outside’—land, nature, animals, and vistas—in anything other than pragmatic terms. These couples spoke of the land as “property,” “the business,” and “the farm,” related to income and work. For example, Alex, a South Australian male farmer in his early 30s and married for four years, reports: Alex: The farm is everything. You’re relying on the weather, watching the weather, and you’re doing this, and you’re hearing the grain prices, and worrying about the Aussie dollar. We all go through that, and you’re home, and you’re looking out the window, and I’m still working. The farm was also constructed as an investment in a lifestyle, unlike discourses of farming associated with previous generations that privileged lifestyle over business (e.g. Bryant 1999). Tessa, who is twenty-nine years old,

96 Gender and Rurality has been married for five years and lives on a cropping property in New South Wales, comments: Tessa: You must run as a business and just try and think of it like this. If you want the lifestyle then you make the business work. Perhaps this discursive construction of the land as pragmatic rather than romantic is to be expected, given the complexity of generational relationships, the economic imperative, and the seeking of personal space for both women and men.

HETEROSEXUALITY, REPRODUCTION, AND FUTURE WORK Women’s reproductive bodies have been used to naturalize and normalize the heterosexual marriage. A history of feminist scholarship has shown how the category of ‘woman,’ her opportunities, and potentials have been defi ned by her reproductive biology. Further, it has been well established that this constitution of womanhood is a discursive construction occurring in specific socio-historic contexts (Malson and Swann 2003). Butler (1993), through her problematizing of the sex/gender distinction, has argued that an essentialist understanding of woman, as defi ned through reproduction, functions as ‘an ideal construct which is forcibly materialised through time’ (Butler 1993, 2). Feminists interested in the rural have argued that, for farming women, this ideology materializes in the intersections between sex and gender in constituting a ‘business,’ which is centered on marriage and the reproduction of children (e.g. Alston 1995; Little and Panelli 2007). Ingraham (2005, 7) clearly articulates that marriage, as a ‘historically variant social arrangement, was originally established to secure ownership of women and children and thereby guarantee the inheritance of property. Its early history is linked to state control over private property.’ Additionally, theorists have demonstrated the role of Christian religions in shaping the marriage contract, sexuality, and norms about women’s reproductive bodies (Ingraham 1994; Richardson 1996). There is, however, little research exploring the spiritual and religious beliefs of farming couples, and how these beliefs are incorporated into gender performance, experience, practice, and norms about marriage and reproduction. Younger farming couples in our study articulated the significance of property being contingent upon remaining married. The centrality of property in relation to reproduction in no way suggests that religions are not significant in shaping marriage and decisions about reproduction in farming families. The narratives of the younger men and women suggest a continuation of ‘traditional’ reproduction and ‘naturalized’ heterosexual femininity and masculinity, at least in its most obvious forms. Indeed, in all narratives,

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the future is perceived as one with children. However, while discursive and performative constructions of heterosexuality are evident in women’s imagined futures, there are multiple and varied expectations about marriage and work that begin to contest or alter ‘traditional heterosexual femininities.’ This is most explicit in the way some women told us how their imagined futures with children would create new working opportunities on or off the farm, that is, it would allow them to give up off-farm work and further participate in farm labor, or to remain in paid work with childcare assistance from their in-laws, or to develop their own business. Antonia’s expectations exemplify this re-shaping of traditional motherhood and femininity. She is twenty-six years old, has been married for two years, and lives on a South Australian crop farm: Antonia: Once I have kids I plan to go back to work. You know, you live together, you work together. You’re together 24 hours a day. And I think, it’s not that I don’t love my husband or anything like that, but I think that it would get a bit much after a while. I think you’d start to take each other a little bit too much for granted. It would just be too much; you need a little bit of space. You need to do your own thing a little bit I think. Interestingly, there was some disjuncture in the future plans of married young farming men and women. In particular, husbands’ expectations of how they visualized their wives’ future working lives and family arrangements confl icted with those expressed by the women. Men assumed more often than women that after having children, women would take on more farm work, in particular administrative work. Refl ections from Jim and Paula, a young couple from South Australia, illustrate this differing marital perspective. At the time of the study, they had no children. While Jim believed his wife Paula would give up full-time, off-farm work and be more involved in farm work in the future, Paula saw her future differently: Paula: The farm doesn’t really interest me too much. I’ll probably start to do more like the bookwork when I have children, but my real aim is to own my own business—a coffee shop—that’s what I’d like. In the men’s narratives, the farm remained central as a site of work for both themselves and their wives, both now and into the future. Men expected women to engage in off-farm work, but typically only as an aside or addendum to the central enterprise of the farm. This is demonstrated in the following quotation from John, a grain farmer from New South Wales, who acknowledges that his wife would like paid employment but dismisses any possibility for at least the fi rst two years of the life of any child they may have. After that, paid work may be something she can “do a bit” if she can

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“slip away,” but the onus is on her. Ultimately, he claims that it is “better” if she is spatially bound to the farm: John: I guess she (wife) would really like paid employment. I think she shows enough interest in the farm books. Like when she’s a mother and that, she won’t be able to go into work as regularly, anyway, like for the fi rst two years. She probably won’t be able to really go at all, but after that, I think she’d be able to slip away and do a bit, if she wanted to. But I think that the more time that she spends here is better, and if she’s got to do the books, well, she’ll have no choice but to be well and truly involved. Yeah. That makes sense. Young women’s understanding that they would have to conform to aspects of traditional heterosexual femininity in rural communities is exemplified in Jackson’s (2005b) thesis that gender and heterosexuality are implicit in social and cultural meanings. Specifically, women perceived that as they aged, and as they became mothers, kin and other community members would expect them to increase their input into community service (see Chapter 4). Josie and Stacy both illustrate this point. Josie, aged twentyfive years, married for three years, and living on a horticultural and grape property in South Australia, suggests that expectations of community involvement increase with marriage, and further increase with having children: Josie: In the future, when we get older, you know the next generation on are expected to do things like Meals on Wheels, and put in a lot of time in the netball club, and things like that. They expect you to put in, which is fair enough, and I think that’s good. So it’s almost an unwritten law that you do your bit. [This] will all come later down the track when I’m a bit older. Stacy, who is twenty-seven years old, married for four years, and living in New South Wales on a cropping property, has a similar understanding: Stacy: But when I’ve finished (paid work) and I’m home, and start a family and whatnot, I think things might be different then. I don’t know whether that’s because of what the community is going to expect from me or what I think is going to happen myself. In many ways, having children establishes these women’s maturity in the eyes of the extended family and their rural communities. This is when they are expected to become involved with the business and the community. Thus, gender and heterosexuality intersect in the ways in which husbands and other community members give meaning to women’s paid and unpaid

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work, including expectations of emotional labor as children’s carers and volunteer workers. What is interesting is the story yet to be told: how these younger women may resist conforming to their husbands’ and their husbands’ families’ expectations in carving out their own future work.

CONCLUSION Gender and heterosexuality intersect for young farming couples in ways we have come to understand in rural feminist scholarship. They intersect in the gendered delineation of responsibilities for farm labor and domestic roles, and patriarchal generational gender hierarchies that constrict and limit women’s involvement on the property and access to fi nancial resources. Thus, younger farming women and men face material consequences of gender and heterosexuality similar to those their parents faced. Further, the contingent necessity of procreation gives women some currency. Until the birth of children, young women remain almost suspect in terms of their acceptance into the farm business. The normalcy of heterosexual relations in the rural remains dominant and expected in farming because growing the business and the family remains one and the same over generations. Farm women commonly practice or ‘do gender’ in a variety of ways. These may shift over time (for example with the birth of children or as women age), and occur either simultaneously or as contradictions that are difficult to encapsulate when talking and writing about farming women’s gendered and sexual experiences. While we identify women challenging their outsider status, constructing discourses of a good marriage, engaging in traditional and conservative heterosexual marriages, and doing the contrary by destabilizing gendered norms and traditional relationships, these experiences and practices are not confi ned and separate. Some women challenge their outsider status, and use the discourse of a good marriage to articulate their meanings of marriage and farming. Others accept the generational gender hierarchies that shape their involvement in their farming business, but they resist traditional gendered norms in their marital relationship. A good marriage is framed within discourses about heterosexual equality, while at the same time heterosexual domestic tasks and participation in decisions about resources remain unequal. In some cases, however, women resist exclusionary practices emanating from generational patriarchal hierarchies, and destabilize traditional gendered norms about their future working life and motherhood. Working and personal space combine to become the key dimension in the intersection of space and sexuality for married farming couples. Working space, outside spaces, and the home as inside space are imbued with similar tensions and emotions; emotions that carry over from one spatial

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context to another. Ironically, in the rural context, and in particular in an Australian rural context, it is the lack of space—the lack of privacy among couples and between couples—that helps blur home and work space. This conflation of business and relationship is evident in the language used about the farm as “property” and as “business,” which shows pragmatic understandings of nature and landscape. In particular, the language reveals a construction of marital relationships built on the submerged emotion that is required for stability and trust, in contrast to the implacable weather or economy. Feminist theorizing on heteronormativity provides a lens through which to identify how power is used in constituting, and reproducing, both gender and sexuality in rural spaces. It indicates how material power is manifest in the spatial restrictions between business and marriage for farm women, and alternatively how the conflation of working and marital space is woven into everyday interactions, practices, constructions, and reconstructions of subjectivities. These insights provide opportunities for rural feminist scholarship to revisit or expand its explorations of masculine and feminine identities in farming: to explore the constitution of subjectivities in the context of the conflation of business and relationships, work, intimacy, and marriage for farming women and men. These inter-relationships are further considered in the next chapter, which explores heteronormative practices, performances, and understandings that occur in the daily lives of a young married farming couple after a farm accident which leaves the young woman with a permanent disability.

6

Gender, Rurality, and Disability

INTRODUCTION Noting the limited corpus of work on gender, rurality, and difference has been a constant refrain throughout this book. Nowhere does this seem to be as pronounced as in relation to disability. As feminist disability scholars1 argue, feminists’ preoccupation with difference rarely extends to disability (Chouinard and Grant 1995; De Pauw 1996; Ferri and Gregg 1998; Garland-Thomson 1994, 1997, 2002, 2005; Lloyd 1992, 2001; Meekosha and Jakubowicz 1999; Morris 1992; Schriempf 2001; Sheldon 1999, 2005; Wendell 1989). They assert that while feminists regularly include categories such as class, ethnicity, and sexuality in taxonomies of identities that may intersect with that of gender, they rarely include disability. Collectively, they have provided stark evidence of the omission of disability as a topic for analysis in feminist journals, at feminist conferences, and across feminist activist groups.2 Some critics suggest that, like aged women, women with disabilities are written out of the feminist script because their experiences may sit uneasily with a narrative of celebrating female power, competence, and strength (Fine and Asch 1988; Thomas 2006). Others posit that this has been aggravated as tensions between the agendas of mainstream feminism and women with disabilities have come to the fore, particularly around questions of reproductive rights, abortion, mothering, and care (Sheldon 1999). Despite mainstream feminist writers’ continued limited attention to disability, a small but prolific and resolute group of women has articulated a scholarship that Garland-Thomson (1994, 583) labels ‘feminist disability studies.’ This scholarship intends to enliven, broaden, and challenge feminist theory through the integration of disability as a modality of difference. In this chapter, we use the rubric of ‘feminist disability studies’ to explore the intersections between gender, disability, and rurality through a textual analysis of an episode of a weekly Australian Broadcasting Commission documentary program entitled Australian Story. The selected episode, entitled ‘With this Ring,’ tells the story of Gayle and Mac Shann, a young married couple living on a property in rural Australia. It focuses on the

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impact of a farming accident which has left Gayle with a physical disability. In order to contextualize our critique, we precede it with an overview of the literature on gender, disability, and rurality.

GENDER, RURALITY, AND DISABILITY In their comprehensive review of the rural mental health literature, Philo, Parr and Burns (2003, 263) report that medical approaches dominate much of the writing on the subject, and that while there is considerable knowledge about the incidence of rural mental ill-health and rural services, there is much less on ‘accessing, observing, describing and interpreting the lifeworlds of rural “mad” people.’ Unfortunately, there has been little change in the literature on rurality and mental health since Philo et al.’s (2003) review (see, for example, Goldney, Taylor and Bain 2007; Henderson, Andrews and Hall 2000; Kikkinen et al. 2007; Turpin et al. 2007). Further, an examination of the literature on physical, intellectual, and developmental disabilities reveals similar preoccupations with the prevalence of disabilities and disability service provision as described by Philo et al. (2003). Like the mental health literature, it usefully identifies the prevalence of different disabilities in rural areas, and elucidates the types of constraints that may exist for rural people with a physical disability. Iezzoni, Killeen and O’Day (2006), for example, report on the barriers to obtaining primary care for rural people with sensory, physical, or psychiatric disabilities, with interviewees from rural Massachusetts and Virginia explaining that they often have to educate local health professionals about their condition, and travel considerable distances to obtain health care. In another study, Booth and Kendall (2007) identify specific rehabilitation challenges living in a rural area may create for individuals who have sustained a spinal cord injury. Such challenges may include the availability of local care givers and these care givers’ knowledge. However, the voices of people with disabilities, and a sense of their lived everyday experiences as rural people, are absent from much of the literature on disabilities and rurality. This is exemplified in Rapley and Hopgood’s (1997) assessment of the ‘quality of life’ of thirty-four adults with intellectual disabilities living in a community-based service in rural Australia, in which the participants’ subjective knowledge is subsumed under a series of positivist scales and measures. A number of studies in the literature focus specifically on rural women’s experiences of disability (Hauenstein and Boyd 1994; Hemard et al. 1998; Turner 2006), or compare and contrast aspects of the lives of people with disabilities living in non-metropolitan areas, but these are largely quantitative studies that conceptualize gender as a singular and static variable (Gammon 2000; Kawamura et al. 2005; Klepac et al. 2007). It is not just that the voices of rural residents with a disability are absent in much of the literature. It is also a sense of ‘the rural’ as contested and

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constructed. In terms of scholarship on rural mental health, Philo et al. (2003, 266) observe: Much of the existing literature conveys an impression of the rural as something quite straightforward: a material reality that is simply ‘out there’, existing as a unitary, coherent and internally homogenous entity whose fundamental parameters can, in principle, be specified with some precision. In their own substantial contribution to the literature on disability and rurality, Chris Philo, Hester Parr, and Nicola Burns counter any simplistic construction of rurality by demonstrating that inclusion and exclusion in a rural community is contradictory and shifting for mental health users (Parr, Philo and Burns 2004; Parr and Philo 2003; Philo and Parr 2004). As with more recent work on the experiences of dementia in rural and remote Scotland (Blackstock et al. 2006, Innes et al. 2005; Innes and McCabe 2007; Innes, Sherlock and Cox 2003a, b), rather than imposing any predetermined construction of the term ‘dementia’ on their data, Parr, Philo and Burns (2004) explore how rural people with a disability understand rurality subjectively. They utilize a large body of qualitative data drawn from over one hundred users of psychiatric services in the Scottish Highlands, affording specific attention to gender, and, moreover, to the ways in which socially-constructed notions of masculinity and femininity intersect with discourses about rurality and disability. Interviewees suggest that women’s naturally occurring higher levels of emotional intelligence render them more competent than men in dealing with mental health problems. Consequently, women are viewed as more likely to acknowledge psychological issues and be open to treatment, whereas Highland men may seek to mask mental health concerns via excessive alcohol consumption. This may be compounded by the fact that it has been traditionally acceptable for Highland men to engage in high levels of drinking. In summary, the literature on the subject of gender, disability, and rurality has generally utilized very limited, deterministic understandings of these terms. While there has been little exploration of these as nuanced sociocultural constructs, the more recent work on mental health and dementia in rural Scotland is notable for its engagement with theoretical work on the social construction of rurality. Scholarship such as this is critically important to our theoretical framework, as is the literature on feminist disability studies.

FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON DISABILITY Together with a range of mainstream scholars (Barnes 1998; Oliver 1996), feminist disability writers were at the forefront of challenging and

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dismantling the hegemony of the medical model of disability that dominated theorizing about disability until the latter decades of the twentieth century (Morris 1996; Wendell 1989). In this conceptualization, disability is understood as a personal tragedy; an individual problem that has as its cause some impairment that may be addressed via medical treatment and/or individual adjustment. In contrast, the social model3 of disability severs the connection between impairment and disability, contending that social and cultural environments, not impairment, lead to disability. British scholar Michael Oliver (1996, 35), a leading proponent of the social model, states that ‘disability is wholly and exclusively social . . . disability [has] nothing to do with the body. It is a consequence of social oppression.’ Feminist scholars have found much to be positive about in the social model of disability. In a particularly compelling account, disabled feminist scholar4 Liz Crow (1996, 206) begins a chapter about the subject with the statement, ‘My life has two phases: before the social model of disability and after it.’ Despite detailing the liberating impact of the social model for externalizing the cause of her disability, forging a connection for a shared political identity between herself and other disabled people, and providing a focus for action and social change for the disabled people’s movement, Crow (1996) identifies what she claims to be key limitations in the social model of disability. Other feminists have made similar claims. In the earliest critiques of the social model, feminist disability scholars such as Begum (1992) and Lloyd (1992) drew attention to its androcentrism. Lloyd (1992) says that while social model theorists have highlighted the material disadvantages which people with a disability face as a result of ableism, they need to recognize that this is exacerbated for women because they have higher levels of unemployment and underemployment than their male counterparts. Similarly, she asserts that arguments highlighting the negative impact of medicalization on people with disabilities need to be viewed through the purview of feminism. This would mean recognizing that the issues of power and control in dealing with the medical profession are those often experienced by women in general. Thus, we need to acknowledge, critique, and understand experiences of medicalization not only through a disability lens, but also through a gender lens. Begum (1992) traverses a similar path, focusing attention on the fact that disability is differentially experienced by women and men. She discusses the difficulties a woman with a disability may experience with family, body image, and sexuality; an argument now well evidenced by empirical material (e.g. Grue and Laerum 2002; Kallianes and Rubenfeld 1997; Thomas and Curtis 1997). Implicit in the feminist critique of the social model offered by writers such as Lloyd (1992) and Begum (1992) is the need to understand women’s subjective experiences of disability. Morris (1993, 69) makes this point more explicitly in claiming that at times the social model has ‘tended to deny the personal experience of disability.’ This argument is taken up by Shakespeare (1998, 55) in introducing his study of disability, masculinity,

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and sexuality. He argues that because Marxist and other structuralist thinking have traditionally dominated disability studies, the discipline has had a skewed ‘focus on the public at the cost of the private.’ Feminist writers have been particularly adept at addressing the omission of work on ‘life-worlds’ of women (Davidson 2000; Dyck 1995). Illustrative of this work is Hillyer’s (1993) Feminism and Disability, in which she interweaves her own experiences of raising a daughter with disabilities, the stories of women with disabilities she interviews, and the scholarly literature from gender and disability studies. Susan Wendell (1996) also uses the personal to further theorize the intersections between gender and disability in The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Refl ections on Disability. Drawing on autobiographies, interviews with disability activists, disability rights journals, and her personal narrative, Wendell (1996) makes a significant contribution to broadening the social model of disability. While she traces various ways in which disability and gender are socially constructed, she pays particular attention to ‘the pace of life’ and the ways in which people with disabilities are potentially marginalized by the increased speed of modern life. She also notes that physical vigor and health are increasingly afforded moral value and worth. As personal accounts such as Hillyer’s (1993) and Wendell’s (1996) have emerged, so have feminist critiques of such accounts. Alison Sheldon (1999, 646) condemns personal narratives, which she claims often ‘preclude any reference to economic structures.’ She contends that a materialist framework is the most useful for analyzing disability, and advises that those who advocate elevating the subjective, cultural, and social are not representative of all feminist perspectives (see also Sheldon 2005). These arguments can be mapped onto wider debates within disability studies between what are broadly referred to as ‘materialists’ and ‘post-structuralists’ (Corker 1999; Corker and Shakespeare 2002; Thomas 2006; Tremain 2005). 5 Sheldon (1999, 648) is particularly contemptuous of Wendell’s (1996) book, which she says ‘does not offer us a way forward as a movement, but does feed into hegemonic notions of disability as personal tragedy.’ It is not just Wendell’s (1996) personal stance that rankles Sheldon (1999), but her insistence on detailing the pain and suffering of her impaired body. This is a largely suppressed subject in the social model, which has maintained a conceptual distinction between impairment and disability. Increasingly, however, feminists and other commentators are expressing discomfort with this position and arguing that perspectives on impairment, such as that offered by Wendell (1996), need to be incorporated into disability studies. While Crow (1996, 207) was one of the early advocates of this position, at the same time she argues that ‘for all its strengths and relevance, the social model doesn’t seem so water-tight any more.’ This is a difficult stance for Crow (1996). She worries that her criticisms may be seen to legitimate the medical model. She explains that her tempered enthusiasm for the social model, and her calls for a ‘renewed social model

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of disability’ are based on her view that the social model has been diminished by its refusal to incorporate subjective and embodied understandings of impairment (Crow, 1996, 207). What Crow (1996) is suggesting, of course, is that the body cannot be separated from conceptualizations of disability, which is contrary to Oliver’s (1996) claim. Crow’s (1996) discomfort with the binaries of impairment/disability and nature/culture, and her concern with embodiment are themes taken up by a number of writers in disability studies, particularly those working from a post-structural perspective (e.g. Corker 1998; Corker and Shakespeare 2002; Hughes and Paterson 1997; Shakespeare and Watson 2001). Subsequent work, such as that undertaken by Goodley and Tregaskis (2006, 644), on how the parents of babies with a disability experience post-natal care, reveals that impairment is not simply a biological phenomenon but a ‘social phenomenon storied, negotiated, and constructed in different ways.’ Some contemporary disability theorists have suggested that the social model’s failure to recognize impairment as socially- and culturally-constructed is indicative of the fact that the model is redundant and not useful (e.g. Shakespeare and Watson 2001). Feminist geographers Ruth Butler and Sophia Bowlby (1997) have offered a way forward by drawing on recent feminist theorizing about the body and society being inseparable. They do not agree that acknowledging the embodied experience of impairment for people with a disability is akin to returning to the medical model. In many respects, they contend that the debate about dichotomizing impairment/ disability mirrors the feminist debate over the sex/gender binary. They cite Robyn Longhurst (1995, 101), who claims that bodies can be simultaneously ‘constructed and real.’ In applying this notion to disability studies, they claim to retain a politically imperative focus on the social practices and discourses that construct disability (the social model), while also recognizing bodily differences and experiences of impairment.

METHODOLOGY Australian Story is a half-hour television program telecast on the nation’s public national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Since the fi rst program was aired in May 1996, the show has received eleven journalism and broadcasting awards. It features a mix of ‘ordinary’ and well-known Australians whose stories are often highly emotive tales of determination, and ultimately triumph, in the face of adversity. Australian Story is depicted as providing a space where people share their stories, untainted by journalistic intervention, as we see and hear only the voices of the subject and people closely associated with their narrative. This representation of the program is, of course, largely erroneous, given that so many aspects of it—from the questions asked of participants, to the editing of shots, and ordering of material—establish a particular version of ‘a

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story’ for viewers’ consumption. This seeming deception renders the program particularly useful for critical analysis. ‘With this Ring,’ the episode selected for examination, was fi rst broadcast in April 2003. It resonated so strongly with viewers that it was rescreened in 2006 as one of three stories viewers voted as their favorites. This follow-up was an updated version of the original program, and was nominated as the all-time favourite by more than two hundred guests at a celebration event to mark Australian Story’s tenth year in production. Hence, it appears to be a construction that strikes an identifying chord with the Australian population. While textual analysis of visual sources has been widely engaged as a means of uncovering and interrogating dominant social and cultural constructions of gender, this type of critique has only recently been engaged in examining disability (e.g. Darke 1998; Fox 2004; Greeley 2004) and rurality (e.g. Phillips 2002). We began by following the advice of Rose (2001, 150), who argues for immersion in the text through repeated reading and viewing, followed by a coding process nominating key themes, such as recurring images or key words, followed by a more detailed analysis identifying associations across dominant themes, and highlighting complexities, contradictions, and invisibilities in the text. Given that our overall interest was in representations of gender, disability, and rurality in the text, we used these terms in the initial coding process. In the following analysis, however, we discuss three themes that demonstrate the interconnections between these representations. The fi rst theme considers the way in which nature is engaged; the second explores the representation of Mac and the rural community; and the third examines the depiction of Gayle as a rural woman with a disability.

ROMANTIC, DANGEROUS, AND NURTURING: NATURE IN THE TEXT Mac and Gayle Shann live on a cattle property in the west of the central part of the Australian state of Queensland. Their story is about a farming accident involving Gayle, which severed her right arm and rendered her left arm paralyzed. The title, ‘With this Ring,’ frames the story as one of romance, and, in particular, despite the couple’s youthfulness, a romance embedded in commitment, morality, loyalty, and reliability. Importantly, this is a romance not only of heterosexuality but of a particular version of heterosexuality, somewhat old-fashioned but ultimately morally superior for it is stable, lasting, and real. As Mac and Gayle describe what they initially found attractive about each other, they smile shyly, giggle, and look bashfully away from the camera. These are people who are not comfortable with overt or brash displays of sexuality that may be accommodated or even celebrated in

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urban settings. Instead, like ‘the rural’ and nature itself, they are innocent and unsullied. These multiple representations of nature—as romantic and innocent—are conveyed and reinforced via a range of images interspersed throughout the text, including pictures of green pastures, kangaroos grazing, dazzling sunsets, flowing rivers, frolicking horses, and singing birds. It is clear that the milieu in which Gayle and Mac live is far removed from metropolitan spaces, not only in terms of nature but also in terms of a specific set of values, as enunciated by Mac: Mac Shann: When you get married, you go through all the marriage vows and that, and I mean, I certainly took mine very, very seriously. I was only sort of just twenty-one when we got married, but I pretty much had a fair idea of what I was getting myself into. I was there for the long haul, that’s for sure. When you get married you take them in sickness and in health, so this is the hand that I’ve been dealt, and that’s how I’m going to play it, yeah. Mac espouses a traditional moral code, arguing for the permanence and durability of marriage vows. As he talks, we see footage of Gayle and Mac’s wedding, highlighting the conventional nature of their ceremony, as well as their youth. There is a shot of the bride in a long, white gown walking down the aisle towards her soon-to-be husband before he lifts the veil from her face; then a later shot of the groom responding to a toast to the couple. The message is that tradition is superior, particularly the tradition of marriage, for this is what informs Mac’s care of Gayle after the accident. Implicit in this message is the privileging of heterosexuality. Mac explains that one of Gayle’s greatest fears after the accident was whether he was going to “hang around.” Her fear was aggravated because “she’d heard stories from people in hospital that the day of accidents the boyfriend floats or the husband floats.” The text tells us that Mac is clearly different from these men who “float,” largely because of his rural location. Again, nature is engaged as a potent visual indicator of Mac’s stability, simplicity, trustworthiness, and strength. We see him expertly working with horses, capably riding through a paddock, and competently drafting cattle. The couple’s remoteness from the outside world is also emphasized through visual devices. An aerial shot of the property, where nothing can be seen but the single homestead, and panning shots of paddocks that seem to go on forever highlight that in this rural landscape there are no diversions or intrusions on Mac and Gayle’s relationship. As Gayle explains in recalling how she felt when fi rst moving to the property, “It was just Mac and I. That was the beauty of the whole set-up. It was us. We did everything together.” These representations of rurality and nature as being associated with romance echo fi ndings from the studies by Little (2007), and Little and Panelli (2007), which were introduced in the previous chapter on heterosexuality. For example, Little and Panelli (2007) note the use of beautiful

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sunsets and refreshing water as visual devices to frame the rural as romantic stories of ‘bush bachelors’ and their partners unfold. Similarly, Little (2007) shows how the rural/romantic conflation is sustained in the campaigns by discourses that distance the rural from the urban, such as the Country Living campaign. In a reverberation of ‘With this Ring,’ Little (2007) fi nds that those involved in the Country Living campaign, which aims to fi nd single farming men wives, present the countryside as healthy, fertile, and, because of its slow pace, peaceful and simple; an enhancement to romance. In contrast, the city is referred to as a place where couples are so over-burdened by commitments that external and artificial interventions are required for romantic sustainability and ultimately procreation. Thus, nature is not presented as a space for romantic love per se, but for romantic heterosexual love. As Johnston (2006) writes in her insightful analysis of wedding tourism in New Zealand, natural landscapes are presented as expressions of pure, naturalized, unspoiled, and moral heterosexuality. This is not to suggest that there is a singular meaning of nature in the texts analyzed by the above writers, or in ‘With this Ring.’ Little and Panelli (2007, 180) explain that ‘nature is not a uniform or static canvas across which the story lines are spread,’ but is dynamic and a co-constituent of multiple spaces and identities. This is also evidenced in ‘With this Ring,’ in which a further recurring motif focuses on the notion of landscape as dangerous. For example, Mac tells us that he has had to fight against the elements in terms of long-term drought that has badly affected the Shanns’s property, and this fight is presented as a prelude to a larger battle. As a voice-over from Mac recounts the events of the accident, shots are shown of rich pink and purple flowering bougainvilleas, hay stacks, a bright blue sky, kookaburras singing, and chickens wandering. The message is that beneath this veneer of the rural idyll lurks a dangerous and unforgiving outback. The landscape is deployed in a similar way during description of the aftermath of Gayle’s accident. The twin themes of vastness and remoteness are highlighted as we see images of a speeding ambulance driving on a red dirt road, with dust streaming alongside, and a helicopter hovering over land that is seemingly empty of life. Bound up with this depiction of rurality as dangerous, is, of course, the more central image in the program; that of the rural as romantic—unpredictable, exotic, and exciting. Indeed, against the visual backdrop of the emergency vehicles and aircraft speeding towards their isolated destination, we hear Mac’s desperate message to the Flying Doctors,6 an organization which itself is an integral part of the symbolism of the isolation, fighting spirit, and drama of the Australian bush. Above all, the dominant representation of nature in the program is recuperative. Nature’s restorative power is highlighted at the beginning of the program when Mac tells us about the impact of the drought, before Gayle interjects, saying, “The rain came about four weeks ago, and it’s amazing what a bit of Mother Nature can do. The transformation is just unbelievable.” Images of lushness and abundance mirror Gayle’s description of the

110 Gender and Rurality property before and after the rain. Towards the end of the program, Gayle is placed in the rich, post-drought landscape, standing in fields of tall, green grass as she reflects on the ongoing pain she experiences in her arm and neck. Later, as she says she thinks the horses “sense that something’s different about me,” a triumphant music score is played and images are shown of the horses nuzzling her face. Nature is not only nurturing and curative; it is also accepting. Again, this motif is part of the wider narrative of the rural as romantic, for Mac is also critical to Gayle’s recuperation and healing. Further, Mac, like nature itself, has accepted what is seen in the cultural imagination as the disfigured and damaged body of Gayle. This issue—the positioning of Mac as the romantic hero in the drama—is developed further in the following section.

MAC: REPRESENTATIONS OF GENDER AND RURALITY IN THE TEXT Gayle and Mac Shann are part of a wider community of rural people depicted in ‘With this Ring,’ who, through their demeanor and activities, encapsulate a particular version of rural Australia as composed, inventive, noble, self-reliant, generous, and understated. There is, for example, the Shanns’s neighbor, Robyn Newbury, who, despite not practicing nursing for over twenty years, and with no artery forceps, locates and pinches off blood vessels in Gayle’s arm. There is also Adam Griffin who was helping the Shanns the day of the accident. It is Adam who takes the phone from Mac and gives clear directions to the Flying Doctors. It is also Adam who takes Gayle out of the drilling shaft and carries her inside the house, only realizing halfway there that her arm is missing. Finally, it is Adam who retrieves the arm, takes it out of its clothing, and puts it in the freezer. A further figure in this rural environment is the broader rural community to which Gayle and Mac belong, which, we are told, has raised 200,000 dollars to assist the couple. Collectively, the minor characters play an important role in rendering a very specific portrait of rurality that has enjoyed privileged status in many cultural representations of the Australian nation (Coad 2002; Connell 2006; Lucas 2006). Traditional hegemonic notions of masculinity have played a central role in these representations of rurality. Centre stage is the ‘man on the land;’ physical, strong, aggressive, and resilient (Liepins 1998c, 2000). Like all discourses of hegemonic masculinity, this currently dominant configuration of agricultural masculinity is temporal and shifting, existing alongside other competing and potentially conflicting gendered discourses of what it means to be a male farmer (Connell 1995, 2000). While in many respects Mac is represented in terms of the archetypal farming man, there is simultaneously a variation or addendum to his performance of masculinity that renders him atypical of the normative male farmer. This is certainly the case in relation to his struggles and battles with nature. Despite

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these battles with the landscape, it is clear that the most central of battles in Mac’s life has surrounded Gayle. Thus, like farming men depicted in the mainstream media, Mac is determined, tenacious, and steadfast, but quite unlike these farming men, his determination, tenacity, and steadfastness are directed at very personal, intimate aspirations. Similarly, the representation of Mac further conforms to dominant constructions of agricultural masculinity in that it highlights his physicality. We see him assuredly riding horses and competing in camp drafting events. This corporeality is visually emphasized rather than stated explicitly through narration throughout the program as different aspects of Gayle and Mac’s story are depicted. This reinforces the message that the rural is a milieu where men’s physical activity and competence are natural and given. However, Mac departs from this conformity to traditional notions of agricultural masculinity as we see him physically active and physically proficient in a range of normatively feminine tasks. Indeed, the program opens with shots of a hand making up a woman’s face with eyeshadow and blusher. The camera then draws back to show a male hand opening a lipstick and applying it, and the next shot reveals that the hand belongs to Mac. We see this while the following conversation ensues: Gayle Shann: Oh, Mac’s amazing for such a . . . bloke. It’s very difficult to explain to someone where to put something without pointing. But . . . maybe one semi-disaster, but other than that, pretty good really. Mac Shann: Learning to do all the girly things for Gayle, like, all the things that us boys sit there and sort of wait for and that—yeah, I mean, they’re not as hard as they look, I don’t think. . . . Gayle sort of ran me through a few points and that with the mirrors and all those sorts of things, and now it’s getting fairly easy to do, yeah. It is made clear that Mac initially lacked knowledge and competence about what are presented as feminine rituals. They were a mystery to him— something that happened in another room while he and other men sat and waited. Gayle tells us that it is not just that Mac is skilled at make-up application, but that this skill needs to be understood in terms of his identity as a man, and particularly an agricultural man or ‘bloke.’ With Gayle’s assistance, Mac has now been initiated into some of the grooming practices of conventional femininity and become quite skilled in the process. Mac demonstrates a similar adeptness in undertaking other physical tasks for Gayle, including massaging her and feeding her. As we witness Mac undertaking such tasks or listen to him describing them, it is clear he is as highly connected to Gayle’s emotional needs as to her physical needs. For example, we can see that he acutely feels her pain at no longer being able to be involved in camp drafting, and he encourages her to become a judge. He

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also comments sadly that if they had children Gayle may never “be able to feel her own child with her hands like so many people can.” In displaying such emotional sensitivity, Mac may be seen as departing from normative images of rural masculinity, but we know Mac is a man of the bush. He is connected and attuned to nature and nurturing of his surroundings, so, from a different perspective, one can understand Mac’s compassion being just as critical as his physicality to his rural identity.

GAYLE: REPRESENTATIONS OF GENDER, DISABILITY, AND RURALITY IN THE TEXT In both narrative and visual text, the early part of ‘With this Ring’ emphasizes Gayle’s physicality prior to the accident. Viewers are told she is a “young woman who excelled at physical tasks,” and undertook a wide range of on-farm physical work alongside her husband. In doing so, Gayle embodied a different version of agricultural femininity from the norm. While farm women typically engage in a multiple array of tasks, including domestic work, ‘gophering,’ financial management, and information gathering, on-farm physical work is largely viewed as the domain of men (Alston 1995; Sachs 1996). Like the women farmers of Norway studied by Brandth (1994), and those in Australia investigated by Pini (2005b), Gayle would not have been a recognizable, traditional ‘farm wife’ because of her involvement in physical on-farm work. In investigating these women farmers, Brandth (1994) and Pini (2005b) note that while they depart significantly from normative definitions of ‘farming women,’ they construct their subjectivity in such a way as to maintain not just a separation between masculinity and femininity, but a gendered hierarchy between the two. For example, Brandth (1994) and Pini’s (2005b) women farmers give particular emphasis to symbolic indicators of femininity, such as dress and speech, when in the public domain, and name their on-farm physical work as secondary to domestic work, which is their primary responsibility. ‘With this Ring’ echoes these findings, mentioning Gayle’s domestic responsibilities prior to the accident, and the high level of importance she gives to her physical appearance. In their fi rst words in the program, Mac and Gayle are heard saying: Mac Shann: Gayle’s overall appearance has always been one of her main things. She doesn’t want to be seen anywhere, even by me, without looking as good as she can. Gayle Shann: I think it’s difficult to go from being a person that some people might find attractive to being a person that you think no-one could find attractive. Thus, we learn of Gayle’s physical beauty, as well as her being physically active and able prior to the accident. Mac tells us a little later that when

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he fi rst met Gayle, she “was by far the most beautiful person around the area at the time.” His sisters also reminisce about how he would join Gayle to fold laundry or cut up vegetables just to be near her, as he “idolized” her. As these voices are heard, a series of black and white photographs of Gayle and Mac before the accident fi ll the screen, presenting a physically attractive young couple. In vocalizing her concern that having a disability renders her body unattractive, Gayle is acknowledging the disjuncture between dominant discourses of femininity in which cultural norms mobilize around attractiveness, sexuality, caring, and motherhood, and dominant discourses of disability with their common representations of women with a disability as asexual, unattractive, inferior, and unsuitable for parenting (Fine and Asch 1988; Garland-Thomson 2005). Just as the literature on men and disability has demonstrated that disability marks a ‘failure’ to perform hegemonic masculinity in its current cultural form (Gerschick and Miller 1994, 1995; McIllvenny 2003), so too have studies of women and disabilities revealed that disability may mean ‘banishment from femininity’ (Garland-Thomson 2002, 18). Beyond the initial scene, Gayle’s embodied status, and the differences in her bodily status before and after the accident, further permeate the text. For example, footage is shown of Gayle swimming, with the camera lingering on each of her limbs as she moves through the pool. Gayle is heard saying: Gayle Shann: I guess what I’ve learnt overall is the power of the mind, and how you can overcome problems and pains that you’re feeling by just telling yourself that they’re not happening, and putting yourself in a different place where you’re not really having the pain. When I’m in the pool and my arm’s out and I’m floating, the pains really do go as much as they possibly can, and I can feel as normal as possible, and feel as pain-free as I ever have since the accident. The above quotation from Gayle raises a number of themes that reinforce feminist disability scholars’ arguments about the critical need to understand more about how women with disabilities experience their bodies, including the experience of bodily pain (e.g. Corker and French 1999; Tremain 2002). In Gayle’s words we hear ‘an alternative to the biomedical model of pain,’ which Paterson and Hughes (1999, 602) argue is sadly missing from disability studies. This alternative is socially and culturally contextualized, and inclusive of feelings and emotions. We learn from Gayle that impairment has caused bodily pain and suffering, which, while shifting and fluid, is intimately connected to emotions such as sadness and shame. As she describes the pain that wakes her at night, sometimes more than a dozen times, Gayle says, “I can’t let it get on top of me. Once I start to let it really affect me and I just lie there and start grimacing, it makes it so much worse and it gets stronger.” In making this claim, and in the earlier extract, Gayle

114 Gender and Rurality talks about her body and mind as separate entities whereby the latter can be invoked to control and regulate the former. Feminist disability scholars have highlighted the fact that being able to control the body (for example, in the pursuit of fitness or health) is today highly prized and valued, and that the converse—an uncontrolled body, such as the body of a person with a disability—is thus the failed, abject body. Wendell (1989, 114) writes that the dominance of the cultural assumption that the body can be controlled burdens people with disabilities ‘with self-doubt and self-blame.’ She notes that the myth that the body is fi xable, curable, and ultimately controllable has been reified through medical discourses, as does Stone (1995). This is evident in ‘With this Ring’ as Gayle tells us that one means of disciplining her bodily impairment is through medical intervention, or what she describes as “future discoveries of technologies.” This medical imperative is accentuated in the middle part of the text during which a doctor provides the most extensive description of Gayle’s injuries from the accident and subsequent medical intervention. At the same time, footage is shown of Gayle in consultation with a doctor, walking in a hospital ward, in a wheelchair gazing out a hospital window, and lying on a hospital bed in various stages of treatment. Images of a surgical procedure involving Gayle are also used. These images, and the centrality given to the medical practitioner’s voice, act to produce and reproduce the notion that disability is a medical issue, the belief that medical practitioners know the disabled body best, and the contention that medical intervention is the best hope for the disabled. Despite her pain, Gayle’s ‘inspirational’ status as a young farming woman with a disability requires a particular performance from her. In the fi rst instance, she needs to be positive, not angry, doubtful, fearful, or selfpitying. The medical staff for example, “are amazed” by her. They describe her as “extraordinary” because of her optimism. We get no sense from the story of any discrimination Gayle has faced, of the barriers and stereotypes she may have encountered, or of how her disability has affected her relationships with people apart from Mac. She mentions that when she initially found that her attached arm did not work, she wondered if she would be “better off dead.” However, this frustration, rage, and despondency are fi rmly located in the past and associated only with an initial sense of shock. Gayle is expected to demonstrate a willingness and ability to “overcome” her disability. Postings on the Australian Story guest book refer to her as ‘inspirational,’ and, because of this performance, people invite her to be an ‘inspirational speaker’ at events. In showing Gayle using her feet to open kitchen drawers, type on a keyboard, and drive an off-road vehicle around the property, the Australian Story’s 10 th Anniversary Program places particular emphasis on this discourse of normalizing one’s disability and denying difference. The program tells us about the volunteer work by builders and trades-people to renovate the house, and their objective to ensure that it does not look like “a disabled person lives here.” Mac also stresses the

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importance of the notion of normalcy, talking about the couple’s desire to return to camp drafting competitions as a means of obtaining a “degree of normality in our lives,” and observing that “the way Gayle looks now is just . . . it’s almost normal to me now.”

CONCLUSION Intersectionality theorists have advocated for particular methodologies, from surveys (e.g. Steinbugler, Press and Dias 2006) to narrative approaches (Prins 2006). In this chapter, we have adopted textual analysis, a method of analyzing intersectionality that is not reported in the literature. What is useful about such a method is that by examining which identities related to gender, disability, and rurality are made salient, and how and why this is achieved in a widely-viewed and highly-celebrated television program, we gain insight into prevailing and normalized discourses about these identities, and, moreover, into the intersections between them. When Mac appears during the 10th Anniversary Program, speaking to the audience of past guests about ‘With this Ring’s’ nomination as the favourite Australian Story, he says, “We’re two people living out in the bush doing nothing special.” However, discourses of gender, disability, and rurality are mobilized in the text in a manner which suggests that Gayle, and particularly Mac, are indeed special. Intertwined with discourses of gender, disability, and rurality in ‘With this Ring’ is a discourse around the ‘morality of heterosexuality’ (Hubbard 2000, 198). Indeed, it is this latter discourse that is highly privileged. The rural is important for its connection with this good, natural, and normal heterosexuality. So Mac’s decision to stay with Gayle is not just because of their marital commitment; it is intricately connected with his identity as a ‘rural’ man, for such men are not only strong, fighters, and hard-working, they are also reliable, decent, and sincere. ‘Other’ (urban) men are likely to leave a partner who becomes disabled, but this ‘special’ rural man will not. Gayle is also presented as ‘special’ in the text. Absent or minimized is any notion of discrimination or stigmatization, or the emotional and material hardship that a disability may cause. Instead, emphasis is given to Gayle’s capacity and motivation to ‘overcome’ her disability. This depiction of Gayle is entwined with her identity as ‘rural woman,’ for this ascription conveys resilience, hardiness, and toughness. Of course, the construction of Gayle as ‘heroic’ may be empowering for her and other people with disabilities, but it may also marginalize those whose experiences and beliefs differ (Hutchinson and Kleiber 2000). While Gayle worries about corporeal flaws in light of the accident, her attractiveness continues to be highlighted. From the opening moments we learn that she is committed to her appearance. Gayle’s body is thus represented somewhat differently from the commonly imagined body of a woman with a disability, which is abject

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and undesirable (Garland-Thomson 2005). This, along with her ‘courage’ and refusal to be ‘defeated’ by her disability, no doubt render her what Parr (1997, 445) calls the ‘acceptable face’ of disability, and make her ‘special’ to a television audience. Overall, in ‘With this Ring,’ Gayle’s identity as a person with a disability is not ‘the story.’ Rather, her disability is used as a vehicle to tell a story about rurality, strongly fused with a story of heterosexuality, and to different degrees stories about gender, whiteness, and class. Further, as the program series title, Australian Story, attests, this is a narrative about Australia as a nation and its dominant socio-cultural imaginings of rurality (Gorman-Murray, Darian-Smith and Gibson 2008). We have argued that such notions of rurality are central to determining who belongs in rural spaces and who does not belong. It would seem from our reading of ‘With this Ring’ that belonging in rural areas is highly circumscribed and contingent for a person with a disability.

7

Gender, Rurality, and Aging

INTRODUCTION The question of age and bodily ability became a focus in the previous chapter, which revealed how media representations afford primacy to attractive and young bodies, minimalizing Gayle Shan’s disability. This chapter brings attention to aging bodies, as the demographic profi le of rural communities in advanced economies is shaped by an aging population. Moreover, rural scholarship concerned with aging has shown less interest in the aged than youth (e.g. Jentsch and Shucksmith 2004; Jones 2000; Kraak and Kenway 2002; Matthews et al. 1999; Rye 2006). Thus, we wish to explore narratives of aging and its interstices with gender and rurality, given the profoundly gendered nature of aging. As we have suggested, little empirical or theoretical attention has been given to aging in rural areas despite the proportionally larger numbers of aged people who live outside metropolitan spaces. Before turning to a discussion of aging profi les in rural communities, aging as a concept requires discussion because its meanings shift with increased life expectancy. In advanced economies, life expectancy for men has increased over the last two decades to sixteen years on average, with men expected to live to eighty years of age (Laslett 1989). Women’s life expectancy has increased twenty years on average, resulting in women living to the age of eightyfive years (Laslett 1989). It is projected that a sixty-five-year-old man in 2015 is likely to live to ninety years (Lowe and Speakman 2006). Increasingly, life expectancy has altered what we refer to as ‘old,’ ‘aging,’ and ‘elderly,’ leading social gerontologists to consider aging as occurring in two phases: the ‘third age,’ which refers broadly to sixty to seventy-year-olds; and the ‘fourth age,’ capturing those over seventy years. It is the fourth age which most commonly speaks to the contemporary notion of what it is to be elderly (Calasanti and Slevin 2006). The common catch phrase that ‘the population is aging’ refers to a decrease in fertility rates in the later decades of the twentieth century, and a proportionally larger aging population of post-war baby boomers who will reach sixty years of age in the early part of this century, resulting in decreasing numbers of working adults. Social

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commentators suggest that while the age structure of the populations for advanced economies changes, so too do the experiences and expectations of aging, marked by a generation of people who are more affluent and influenced by consumerism, choice, and individualism. The question of how changes to demographic aging affect rural populations is now receiving some attention. It is argued that rural populations have a larger proportion of aged residents than urban populations due to out-migration of youth, in-migration of retirees, and of farmers over the age of fifty-five years remaining in agriculture (Foskey 2005; Hugo 2001; Joseph and Cloutier 1991; Lowe and Speakman 2006; Wenger 1982, 2001). In this chapter we begin by reviewing rural scholarship on aging and gender, exploring the key themes evident in this literature on the aged’s social participation in rural communities, and ‘in-place’ aging and its relation to rural service infrastructure. Given the largely atheoretical literature on aging and rurality, we turn to feminist gerontology to identify theoretical lenses that give insight into aging bodies and associated power relations (e.g. Gullette 2004; Jones and Pugh 2005; Kontos 1999; Kunneman 1997). We draw on the narratives obtained from personal interviews of eight women and men to examine perceptions, practices, and experiences of living and aging in a country town in northern Queensland. We identify and analyze three key themes from these narratives about aging in place: gendered meanings and experiences of social belonging; caring, social capital, and gender identities; and the aging body in relation to place.

RURAL LITERATURE ON GENDER AND AGING There is a paucity of literature on gendered experiences of aging in rural areas. The scholarship on aging in the context of rurality, has emphasized health issues, exploring the implications of the lack of access to infrastructure, and questions of social support and belonging (e.g. Chalmers and Joseph 1998; Joseph and Chalmers 1995; Rowles 1988; Wenger 1982). Internationally, in the mid-1990s, the plea for a focus on the rural emerged in response to government policies and empirical studies that fi rmly placed aging in an urban context (Krout 1998). As Milne, Hatzidmitriadou and Wiseman (2007, 477) remind us, ‘ageing is “emplaced” with a house, community and wider socioeconomic context.’ While a policy trend in advanced economies has come to recognize these intersections—policy responses to ‘emplaced’ or ‘in-place’ aging, assumed that ‘place’ implies urban settlement, despite the proportionally larger and growing aged population in rural areas. The rural aging literature makes clear that distance from specialist services, and lack of local health care and residential facilities create a different experience of aging for women and men living in these areas. Internationally government policies and spending, and therefore access to service provision in many rural communities, are dependent on population size and urban or

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regional proximity (Joseph and Martin-Matthews 1993; Milne et al. 2007). It has also been argued that a particular set of health issues occurring due to heavy physical farm labor, farm accidents, and use of chemicals is specific to the rural aged (British Medical Association 2005; Byles et al. 2006; Ziembroski and Breiding 2006). Furthermore, geographical distance to services results in poorer health outcomes for aging people with chronic conditions (Hauenstein 2003; Haynes and Gale 2000), while the higher rates of poverty that generally tend to be experienced in rural areas, exacerbate health risks (Blakely and Woodward 2000), and specifically the health of women (Bevan 2000; Kinsella 2001).1 Within the literature there is a recurrent theme in the context of aging, rurality, and policy of the lack of “explicit policy accommodation of the additional costs of providing local rural services, an issue of key importance to older people as the population most acutely affected by their erosion” (Milne et al. 2007, 485). Quite apart from differences in service provision in rural areas, experiences of aging in a rural community are influenced by the features commonly associated with rurality, that is, agriculture as a dominant economic and occupational activity, and interdependencies among residents as a consequence of sparse populations and geographical isolation (Bull 1998; Dorfman et al. 2004). As Chapter 1 indicated, values inherent in variations of the ‘rural idyll’ shape people’s perceptions and experience of place. The sociological scholarship on rural aging addresses the importance of values about place, including emotional ties to land and community that give meaning to aging (e.g. Gullifer and Thompson 2006; Gattuso 1996). A notable example is the work of Shenk and colleagues (Shenk 1991; Shenk et al. 2002), who examine the life history narratives of two American rural women aged seventy-two and ninety-two, focusing on how their gendered and rural values inform self-identity. The authors explain that hegemonic American rural values associated with prescribed gender roles, the importance of family, hard work, ties to the land, and religious faith are woven throughout these women’s memories of aging. Using a similar methodology, Dorfman et al. (2004) found comparable rural values and attachment to place in their study of thirty-seven midwestern American aged. This work (2004) is unique because they introduce the concept of time and key historical events into our understanding of the shaping of identity and aging in the rural. Both studies elucidate the importance of place; however, they largely leave unexamined how rural identities of the aging are shaped by gender, class, race, and other key social categories, and how rural values are expressed differently according to these multiple dimensions of subjectivity (Davis and Bartlett 2008). For example, in an Australian context, little is known about the meanings rural Indigenous peoples (and diverse Indigenous communities) give to aging (Ranzijn and Bin-Sallik 2001). Internationally, in recent years we have seen explorations of ethnicities and aging in white hegemonic Western societies such as the United States of America, the United Kingdom or Australia (see Chapter 3). This literature has identified

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experiences of exclusion from community leading to social isolation (Rao, Warburton and Bartlett 2006; Ward, Anderson and Sheldon 2005) and unmet heath needs for the aged from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds (Averill 2002, 2003; Borders et al. 2002; Magilvy et al. 2000). Over a decade ago, Krout (1998) reminded us that while a focus on statistically-based rural/urban comparisons of health and wellbeing indicators was imperative, explorations of lived experience and personal narratives of aging in rural places were also needed. This absence of empirical data is explained in part by a stereotypical, albeit contradictory perception of rural aging as one where individuals are supported by family and community, but at the same time are isolated and dependent, requiring services that are not there (Scharf et al. 2005). Available empirical data challenges the presumption of social isolation of the rural elderly, in particular those who represent the hegemonic ideal of the white Western rural aged (Hoggart, Buller and Black 1995; Lowe and Speakman 2006; Quandt et al. 2001; Wenger 2001). For example, Hink (2004) who interviewed older (over eighty-five years) rural women and men living in smaller rural communities in south Missouri reported that individuals did not indicate feelings of loneliness, outsider status, or isolation. Chalmers and Joseph (1998) also explored the question of belonging and found little evidence for social isolation among residents aged sixty to seventy-four years and those over seventy-five years in Tirau, New Zealand. Indeed: . . . the rural elderly do in fact have higher levels of contact with neighbours, are more likely to belong to voluntary associations, are more likely to belong to a religious group and to be visited by the clergy, are more likely to become involved in spare time activities which enhance the likelihood for social contact. (Wenger 1982, 211) Further, inherent in the notion of social isolation and aging is the assumption of individuals needing to be cared for, leaving little space for examining the social activity in aging, in particular of the aged caring for spouses and grandchildren (Chalmers and Joseph 1998). Studies which explore the lived experience of aging and social belonging reveal that the rural aged actively construct a ‘space’ for participating in their communities (Wenger 1995, 2001). Thus, the explanation that rural people are less likely to be socially isolated than their urban counterparts because of rural community cohesion and inclusivity ignores the social capital that older rural residents have built over time through their voluntary work and other forms of participation within their communities (Le Mesurier 2006).2 Recognizing the need for more complex interpretations of rural aging, in then next section we turn to feminist studies in gerontology to provide contextual bases in which to explore questions of subjectivity and power inherent in what are likely to be multiple experiences of rural aging.

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Feminist Studies of Aging Feminist researchers have seldom addressed questions of age and aging (Calasanti, Slevin and King 2006; King 2006; Marshall 2006; Pearsall 1997; Silver 2003). Commentators have suggested that this lack of interest may be because feminists are influenced by broader societal discourses that privilege youth or women of reproductive age. It is also possible that the issue of age may only become relevant for feminist scholars upon retirement from the academy. At the same time, gerontologists have rarely engaged with feminist theorizing (Garner 1999; Laws 1995). There is no doubt that there have been innumerable gerontological studies of older women, but feminist gerontologists have pointed out that these are problematic on a number of counts. First, they have typically presented women simply as objects of research and absented women’s own voices. Gender has been understood as a simple variable. Questions of power, agency, and resistance have been left untouched. This has occurred largely as a consequence of the positivist epistemological and methodological imperative in gerontology. In an editorial for a special edition of the Journal of Aging Studies dedicated to feminist gerontology, Toni Calasanti (2004, 3) argues that her disciplinary colleagues have ‘much “unlearning” to do of methods and knowledge’ in terms of their androcentric focus and other biases. A second problematic feature of much of the work on older women is that it has mostly equated the study of gender with the study of women alone (Calasanti 1999; Thompson 1994). As Fennell and Davidson (2003, 316) assert, there is some irony in the fact that ‘the discipline of gerontology derives its roots from the Greek geron-ontos, meaning ‘old man’ when in fact, ‘older men have been neglected in social research on ageing.’ Thus while men’s aging has become the standard from which to analyze and compare aging for women, the research has left unquestioned men’s aging in the context of multiple masculinities and experiences of aging. As Canadian feminist scholar Deborah K. van den Hoonaard (2007, 3) posits, this has meant that subjects such as widowhood, care giving and friendship have been explored in detail from women’s perspectives, yet we have little understanding of how these may be experienced by men. The fi nal concern feminists have raised in relation to gerontology surrounds questions of differences between women. They have been concerned that the research has obscured the diversity and richness of older women’s experiences. Further, they have suggested that when difference has been explored in this work, much has been in the vein of what Krekula (2007, 161) refers to as the ‘double jeopardy thesis.’ This presumes that being older is problematic and that being an older woman is more so. Such work has been dominated by political economy perspectives, documenting older women’s disadvantage in terms of factors such as income, transport, care, and services. When gerontological researchers have considered other social

122 Gender and Rurality categories such as disability or ethnicities, these categories have been conceived as further marginalizing older women. What feminists have argued is that this approach produces a stigmatizing identity for the ‘older woman,’ leading to a ‘competitive suffering paradigm’ (Russell 2007, 174). In recent years, influenced by postmodern theorizing, feminist gerontologists have contributed to the development of their discipline by drawing on theories of the body, intersectionality, and power (Gullette 2004; Jones and Pugh 2005; Kontos 1999; Kunneman 1997). They recognize the reluctance of social gerontologists to use theories of the body and this stems from the preoccupation with the ‘natural’ body evident in the work of medical gerontologists (Twigg 2004). Medicine and science have been dominant paradigms for examining questions of aging, with understandings of the aging body as the ‘degeneration’ of the natural body as critical to these disciplines. Feminist gerontologists, however, have used a number of perspectives to understand how the aging body is socially inscribed. The fi rst accentuates how discourses about the aged body mark it as unattractive, asexual, weak, and inactive (Comeau and Kemp 2007; Grenier and Hanley 2007; Twigg 2004). At the same time, there are counter discourses of ‘successful aging,’ focusing on delaying, overcoming, and controlling physiological changes to, and on, the body through drugs such as Viagra and hormone replacements, as well as beauty treatments, interventions, and surgery (Clarke and Griffi n 2007; Marshall and Katz 2002). Katz (2000) has critiqued advertising campaigns that discursively construct ‘successful aging’ for men. He argues that such campaigns emphasize a version of white middle-class heterosexuality mobilizing around a discourse of busyness and activity, with advertising promoting the consumption of travel and sport. The second way in which feminist gerontologists have theorized the body is through Foucault’s notion of discipline and regulation (Twigg 2007). The regulation and its constitutive elements of power and control of the aging body are exemplified in Twigg’s (2000) study of the bathing of individuals in institutions, where she reveals the body as a site of power under surveillance by professionals. As we have argued in previous chapters, the body is also marked and inscribed by multiple social categories like class and sexuality. Recognizing this, feminist gerontologists have argued for the importance of understanding the inter-related nature of gender and aging (Arber, Anderssen and Hoff 2007; Krekula 2007) as is evident in the emerging studies of masculinities and aging. For example, studies have attended to difference in terms of older men’s marital status (Bennett et al. 2003), socio-economic wellbeing (Sixsmith and Boneham 2003), levels of physical capacity (Moss et al. 2007), and sexuality (Jones and Pugh 2005). A similar concern with difference has permeated recent feminist studies of older lesbian women (Heaphy 2007), women with disabilities (Grenier 2005), and women from various socio-economic backgrounds (Krekula 2007). Slevin (2006), for example, focusing on multiple aspects of subjectivity but on sexuality in

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particular, has explored experiences of aging for white middle-class lesbian women. She demonstrates that older lesbian women share similar perceptions and practices to heterosexual women in striving for youthful, slim bodies. For Slevin (2006), class and wealth, as opposed to sexuality, proved more significant in explaining ageism and bodily practices that attempt to delay aging, for example by attending gyms, having cosmetic surgery, and/ or using expensive facial creams. A further feature of postmodern thought adopted in more recent feminist gerontological studies has been the concern with the ways in which power relations operate in the context of gender and aged bodies. McMullin and Berger (2006) draw our attention to the structural inequities that arise from the intersectionality of ageism and sexism for older workers seeking paid work. They point out that age, in the same way as gender, has been understood as a relational concept based on different ages holding different power in relation to each other (McMullin 2004). Age is also a fluid concept in that people tend to experience changes to privilege and disadvantage in different stages of their life course. Following studies of gender relations, studies of age, gender, and power have been understood as dynamic and revealed through personal narratives, experiences, and discourses (Krekula 2007; Russell 2007). As part of their study, McMullin and Berger (2006), through interviews with women and men aged sixty-five years who had become unemployed within the last year, examined aging people’s experience of searching for paid work. The fi ndings showed the structural disadvantage these women and men experienced when seeking new employment, and how the rejection of interviewees was legitimated by discourses suggesting they were ‘too experienced’ or ‘over qualified’ (McMullin and Berger 2006, 212). The study also revealed that as time went on in the search for work, individuals became increasingly aware of their aged bodies. For example, women considered altering their appearance through dying their hair or other cosmetic treatments to help them look younger for job interviews, while men considered toupees or shaving their beards. What is particularly interesting about this study is women and men’s initial understandings of themselves as workers rather than ‘aged’ workers, and how these meanings of self change as they attempt to re-enter the labor market. As Grenier and Hanley (2007) inform us, older women’s resistance to discourses of gender and aging are rarely explored in gerontology. Central to these authors’ work is a critique of the deficit model of aging whereby older women are depicted as burdens on family and the health system, and their lives are constructed as double jeopardy—gender combining with aging to foreground a life of misery. Ultimately, Grenier and Hanley (2007, 217) demonstrate that women refute the concept of ‘frailty’ as core to identity and describe themselves as ‘still in charge of me,’ but at times may use the social construction of frailty to subvert systems at a personal level to receive aid, or use ‘the frailty card’ as a strategy for resistance:

124 Gender and Rurality Consider the example of a Montreal social rights organization for local residents of all ages, where older women often occupy the ‘frontlines’ of protest. Younger protesters have noted how older women’s involvement as leaders offers legitimacy, helping to thwart state repression and violence. Social norms discouraging politicians from being publicly rude to older women also allow older women greater access, as in their participation in a three-day occupation of the Quebec premier’s office (Montreal, August 1997). (Grenier and Hanley 2007, 221–222) Regardless of whether it has dealt with the body, power, or agency, intrinsic to all feminist work on older men and women has been a commitment to challenging the methodological norms of the discipline of gerontology. This has meant embracing qualitative approaches that attempt to give emphasis to the subjective meanings and life experiences of the aged. Ribeiro, Paul and Nogueira’s (2007) study of older men caring for their ill partners is indicative of such an approach. This study focuses attention on the carers’ own understandings of their gendered selves and their sense of how their experiences of caring shape their gendered identities. A similar methodological and epistemic focus on participants’ own words, perceptions, and lives is evident in other studies of aging men, with researchers emphasizing their approaches as ‘open-ended’ (Russell and Porter 2003, 362) and ‘guided by the discussion of participants’ (Smith et al. 2007, 5). Cherry Russell (2007, 173) has encapsulated both the approach advocated by feminist scholars and the more traditional approach to studies of aging that continues to dominate in social gerontology, noting ‘there are two kinds of stories in the sociology of ageing: stories told by other people about “the aged” and their needs, and stories older people tell about themselves.’ Like Russell (2007), our emphasis is on listening to the voices of older men and women and the meanings they give to their lives, as detailed further in the next section.

METHODOLOGY We conducted interviews with eight aged people in a rural community in northern Queensland (see Figure 2.1). The community is one of two towns in a larger district: one is twenty kilometres inland and largely associated with agriculture; the other is coastal and focused on tourism. All the participants resided in the inland town, which we selected for investigation because a key focus was on understanding ‘in-place’ aging (Jones and Pugh 2005). We anticipated that residents of the inland community would be more likely to have resided in their town for longer periods of time and therefore be able to describe the potential importance of memory, family, history, and belonging to how they experience aging in a rural community. The coastal town, like many other coastal communities in rural Australia, had undergone dramatic change in recent years as a result of a significant level of in-migration of people from city locations.3

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Four participants were interviewed separately, two of whom were widowed and two divorced. The remaining four participants were two married couples. In these instances, husbands and wives were interviewed together. All interviews were undertaken in participants’ homes and lasted for an hour to an hour and a half. One of the participants lived on a farm with her daughter’s family. This woman intended to buy her own home. The remainder of the participants lived in the local township in close proximity to amenities, and apart from the previously mentioned woman and a widowed male, all lived in accommodation they owned. Participants involved in the interviews were all Anglo-Australian and over the age of sixty years. Apart from one, all were in their early seventies at the time of the interviews. Sugar cane farming is the main industry in the community in which the participants live. Two of the male participants had been long-term employees at the local sugar mill. Both of these men were born in the town and had lived there all of their lives, and both of their wives had also been born and raised in the community. Of the remaining two males in the study, one had been an employee in a local small business while the other had had a variety of employment experiences ranging from working in an abattoir to managing a caravan park. While one of these men had been born in the community, he had left in his late teens to join the navy. Although he returned intermittently over the years, he had only come to reside permanently in the community again in his fifties. His fellow participant had moved to the community from a southern city location thirty-five years previously. The widowed woman interviewed had moved to the community from a capital city due to marriage, as her late husband was a local resident. In contrast, the single divorced woman interviewed had come to live in the community three years ago from Manchester in the United Kingdom. Her daughter had married a local farmer ten years previously, and she resided in the district with her husband and two children. Similarly, other participants had at least one child who lived locally. Only one interviewee had no children. Interviews began with participants being asked about their background in the district. This opened up conversations about their family backgrounds, relationships, and previous work. Participants were then asked to describe a typical day and/or week. This led into discussions about social participation, volunteer work, paid work, caring work, and leisure and recreational activities. A range of more specific questions were asked about aging, including questions such as what participants enjoyed and disliked about getting older, what they felt was different about their life as an older person, and whether being older was as they imagined it would be.

GENDERED MEANINGS AND EXPERIENCES OF SOCIAL BELONGING The urban concept of ‘aging in-place’ has come to mean aging at home with services being delivered rather than individuals having to move to some form

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of residential care. The same concept in a rural context may mean moving from a farming property to a regional center, or from home to live with relatives or movement to a nursing home. For the participants in this study, ‘aging in-place’ had specific meanings and experiences associated with social belonging. In particular, meanings of aging and rurality were closely tied to meanings of ‘community,’ which was further understood as a dynamic for social belonging. Participants experienced social belonging in concrete ways, such as being spoken to when walking down the street and participation in local clubs and sport, and also in less tangible ways like feeling part of a community. Feelings of community were often reinforced by sharing a history with others, having gone to the same school, knowing each other’s families, and being able to reflect on, and discuss, changes in the community. Men and women shared similar meanings of social belonging. Both identified the importance of shared histories and long-term friendships. However, they differed in how they actively constructed their sense of belonging. Men tended to refer to friendships forged through sport and the importance of sharing sporting memories. Women did not reflect on sporting activities but spoke about friendships in the context of their longevity in the district. These gendered understandings of belonging did not derive from nostalgia for a past community, as identified in studies of the urban elderly (e.g. Savage et al. 2005), but were grounded in daily practice. For example, a male participant explained his sense of belonging through friendships developed over time with other men in the community and sharing of masculine community identities constructed around sport: Larry: It’s relationships that you build up with people over a period of well over thirty years. And they, you feel, I don’t know, as if you’re a part of a big community, but a very close community. I feel like I’m part of it. Only a little bit, but I feel like this is where I belong. You know there’s blokes here I’ve played sport with for years; golf and football friends and that. Another male participant added: Jack: In 1955 we played Lion Junior football, the last year that I played Lion Junior we won the Premiership for the North Queensland equivalent of the Foley Shield. We were B grade and they were A grade see. But we won the Premiership there. And the next year I joined the Navy in ’56, I joined the Navy, and in ’56 the ones I played Lion Junior with went up to Junior and they won it again. In this community, like many other rural communities, sport is an important way for men to engage socially. Further, the types of sport men engage in are gendered, for example football and activities like golf, which requires payment of membership and access through membership criteria,

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are classed. As Matthew Tonts (2005) suggests in his study of competitive sport in rural Australian communities, while sport increases a sense of belonging for some, it also excludes others. He gives examples of women’s inability to gain full membership of golf clubs, and the lack of profile of women’s sporting activities in rural communities. In Australian rural communities it is men’s sporting clubs, particularly football clubs, which are keenly associated with community identity and cohesion. As one of Tonts’ (2005, 144) participants reports, “ . . . when we’re playing we’re more than a footy team—we’re the whole town.” However, narratives also revealed that for men, community and belonging equate to more than sporting memories. They are also a part of family history and a pride in, and ownership of, place (see also Chapter 4). As Jack explained: Jack: But for me to come back here, there’s two things that I often think about, coming back here is, this is my stamping ground and I know it. And there’s people here that have lived here all their lives. And the other one is that a little bit of ancestry, nostalgia type of thing. As I said, my great grandfathers came here in about 1887 or 1878 or something, and I’m the fourth generation. Women did not refer to sport, or indeed any social activity, as a key mechanism for building friendships over time, even though all except one of the women in the sample were actively involved in community clubs, sport, and volunteering. Further, although some women were born in the community, few directly raised the importance of family background as key to social belonging. They did, however, acknowledge that a family history and length of time in the district were important signifiers of social belonging (see Chapter 4). As stated earlier, women tended to speak about friendships in relation to their longevity in the community. For example: Emily: But if you’ve got to make a whole new set of friends I think it’d be very difficult to do. . . . You see a lot of these friends I went to school with, you know, and the friendships are pretty big; they go back a long time. As well as sport, the most striking gender difference in experiences of social participation is in the social spaces from which women are excluded, most commonly the pub in the evening, unless a woman is accompanied by a man. A single woman explained that she was unable to go anywhere in town to have dinner on her own. Social norms precluded women from dining at the pub without male partners or friends. For women and men, a sharing of history involved not only a sharing of activities like sport or childhood memories, but also community knowledge

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of personal life histories, tragedies, and family relations. Interestingly, even a woman newly arrived in the district from the United Kingdom understood that her acceptance in the community occurred as a consequence of her daughter’s marriage to a long-term farming family. A married couple told how they could not imagine leaving their home community because people understood the pain they had suffered as a consequence of their grandchild’s death and the circumstances of the death. This couple did contemplate the possibility of relocating to live near their adult daughter, but were connected to place by friends and other community members who had known them their whole lives, and understood their experience and their grief without verbal reference to it. The narratives reveal that while there are gender differences associated with how women and men develop meanings of social belonging, they both share similar understandings of what it is to belong to the community. They depict communitarianism and its positive relation to aging in its most idyllic form (see Chapter 1). This is also reflected in participants’ understandings of different ruralities, particularly settled communities and those with shifting populations due to tourism and/or seasonal work, as one male explains: Larry: I’m not including [name of place] and that because it’s an entirely different area, there’s no comparison. They are all transits and tenanted people down there for sure; you don’t need that you know. But up here, you can go into town and they say, “Hey Larry.” And you are treated like a person. You’re still a person. Particularly when you get older you’re still a person, you know. You don’t become invisible. People still talk to you, I think that’s it. Meanings of social belonging and ways of participating in the community are not static (Savage et al. 2005), and indeed are constructed and reconstructed over time according to life cycle, age, and changes to the body. Emily explains how, over time, she gives up some and takes on other social activities, and so maintains her sense of social belonging: Emily: I used to play tennis, but then I had a sore hip and had to give that away. And I’ve played golf for years. . . . But I don’t do that anymore . . . we do charity work and work at the local theatre . . . and that involves quite a bit of time and baking and ushering. The participants’ narratives indicate that both women and men continue to create and recreate spaces for social belonging. Theirs are not stories of isolation, emotional hardship, and bodily dissatisfaction. Nor are they stories of ‘the aged’ being cared for by a rural community as a consequence of generations of family living and working together, or an active caring by neighbors. The narratives show that the rural aged in the third and fourth

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cycles of aging make agentic choices for how they will engage in their communities and create their own social belonging.

CARING, SOCIAL CAPITAL, AND GENDERED IDENTITY Examination of aging women’s and men’s caring activities in their community reveals a disjunction in traditional masculine rural identities. The minimal scholarship on rural aging shows aging identities as continuous and developing along a similar trajectory throughout the life course. Indeed, the rural values that have been shown to be of critical importance in the construction of gendered identities of farming women and men (see Chapter 5) similarly have been argued as remaining pertinent to the identities of the rural aging. This point is elaborated in the work of Gullifer and Thompson (2006), who interviewed Australian male farmers aged sixty-five to eighty years and argued that agrarian ideologies, which are indeed masculine ideologies, are manifest in narratives of the self-perceptions of aging farmers. Their fi ndings reveal: . . . the complex nature of aging, in a world where masculinity and agrarian values have been socially constructed and identity is regulated accordingly . . . Findings imply that for many aged farmers, their lifestyle has engendered particular perspectives that are integral to their adaptations of aging. (Gullifer and Thompson 2006, 80) The dominance of traditional heterosexual masculinities is also evident in much of the aging and masculinity literature concerned with the aging identities of non-rural men (Arber et al. 2007; Thompson 1994; van den Hoonaard 2007). Van den Hoonaard (2007, 278) gives an example of widowers’ explanations for cooking: Many widowers, while admitting to knowing how to cook, felt the need to point out that their cooking was limited in some way. At the most basic level is the insistence that they cooked out of need rather than out of enjoyment. Similarly, Moss et al. (2007) found that frail men likened their bodies to machines, and food as necessary fuel. However, Silver (2003, 379) has argued that ‘in the third and fourth stages of ages, gendered identities become altered in ways that diminish gender difference and clear-cut gender representations’ as men and women experience a similar loss of power with bodily decline. This position has been debated. Ribeiro et al. (2007) show, instead, negotiations with dominant constructions of masculinity and the legitimation of men undertaking traditional feminine roles of caring for their spouses. They reveal a reframing of the subject position of man to

130 Gender and Rurality ‘retain varying degrees of power over the caregiving relationship’ (Ribeiro, et al. 2007, 306). In the narratives of aging women and men interviewed for this study, we see points of departure from traditional gender practices and identities, and concurrently traditional gendered patterns of engagement. The most common way gender identities depart from the traditional are in the way older men and women engage in service provision in their communities. Both men and women cooked and delivered food for the voluntary organization Meals on Wheels. As Larry explains: Larry: You go in and you cook the main meal, sweets, a soup, and a juice. And they can please themselves when they want to have it. [I have been doing it] for six years. I like it. It’s good you know. Well when I first started I just used to deliver the meals. And then I was talking to Mavis, who was running the place, and she said, “Can you cook?” And I said, “Well love, let me show you.” In urban areas in Australia, Meals on Wheels is a service where it is mostly women who do the cooking and the food delivery. In this rural community, however, Larry is not unusual; as many men as women are involved with this service, and there are not sharp gender divisions in activities undertaken within it. This suggests that there are multiple layers of identity construction with the aging identities of rural and agrarian men which are open to change over time. Additionally, these examples suggest there is much more to know about aging rural identities. What other values beside rural and agrarian values inform identity construction for aging rural men? How do rural men navigate their masculinity as they age? How are aging gendered identities negotiated between women and men in the rural? These questions, which enable further exploration of rural identities, by no means deny the existence of identities or practices informed by rural values. Indeed, care work in the community provides a way for women and men to perform identities based on rural values of communitarianism and cohesion while creating opportunity for reciprocal care. For example, Larry explains: Larry: Oh, I like to think there’d be at least somebody here if something happens. You know that there would be somebody who would take an interest. I cooked for Meals on Wheels for many years and I would like to think that I’d have the same service given to me that I gave to those people. However, reciprocity in this community was not a balanced and measurable give-and-take, and involved having to overcome resistance to offers of help. Spontaneous acts of kindness were often resisted initially, as illustrated by Hilary recalling her response to accepting the loan of a scooter:

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Hilary: Got really good friends with this man, he’d had a stroke and lost his wife to cancer, and he had a scooter. So I just happened to be down at the Centre one day and he was going away and he said, “I’ll lend you mine, I’ll lend you my scooter while I’m away and that’ll be for nearly three months.” And I said, “I don’t want your scooter,” and he said, “Well.”. He brought it down anyway, and his son picked him up and he left it. And I really thought, “Oh this scooter.” Anyway, I had to go up town, so I thought, “Well I’ll try it.” So away I went, it’s a ripper that old scooter. And I am so used to it now. Social participation and the aged providing services to the aged in rural communities builds social capital and capacity in those communities. The concept of social capital suggests social networks have value in establishing reciprocity and co-operation in communities, organizations, groups, and societies (Putnam 1995). Ray (2006, 285) further elucidates the meanings of this concept: In a very general sense, the term refers to the resources and socioeconomic dynamic (including resistance to change) that result from, and recreate social ties. It is social in that it concerns trust which leads to associativeness and describes therefore both a certain type of behavior and a set of ethical principles. It is capital because, as Bourdieu explains, it accumulates over time as a function of being invested. Putnam (1995) argues that participation in voluntary organizations promotes the reproduction of trust and reciprocity among community members. The concept of social capital has been used in rural studies to examine the role of voluntary associations in rural communities and the role of governments in community growth (e.g. Brooks 2007; Mitchell 2007; Onyx, Edwards and Bullen 2007). Social scientists have argued that little theoretical and empirical attention has been given to the ways in which social capital is gendered (Lowndes 2003; Norris and Inglehart 2003). They note the well-known tendency of gender segregation in membership of community organizations and gender differences in belonging to informal networks. Consequently, Lowndes (2003, 3) argues the need for analysis of the gendered ‘stock of an individual’s social capital,’ taking into account gendered differences in type and quality of social capital, and its consequences for participation and belonging. The way in which social capital is gendered among participants is most evident in the outcomes of the accrual of social capital built up over years in the community. For men, social capital often amasses before they enter the third stage of aging, and assists them in fi nding accommodation and part-time work in their sixties. Jack observes how his networks through the golf club led to his current accommodation:

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Jack: He said, “Come over one day and I’ll show you round the place and everything.” And he just showed me in. I said, “What do you want for rent?” and he said, “Oh, give me six months to work it out.” So he went away for six months and I just mowed the lawns, looked after the gardens and things like that and, um, I’ve been here ever since. Yeah, three years I’ve been here. None of the women participants was able to recall a similar experience. However, the material consequences of aging in this rural community did not significantly differ for men and women. Each had reduced material security as a consequence of aging. Half the participants in this study were receiving government pensions and all but two owned their homes freehold. Their fi nancial circumstances were further curtailed by higher food and fuel costs compared with urban centres, and public transport, which was minimal or non-existent. For the rural aged, prevention from driving through inability to maintain a car, or cessation of driving due to ill health severely limits independence and social engagements (Adler and Rottunda 2006; Kotsyniuk and Shope 2003). Adler and Rottunda (2006) explain that, despite health risks, many rural elderly will continue to drive due to lack of transportation alternatives. Women are more likely to cease driving earlier, while aging rural men are reluctant to cease driving despite age or illness (Barr and Russell 2007; Bauer et al. 2003). Thus, the social networks of rural communities are compromized by the material context of rural aging, which reduces the elderly’s ability to participate socially in their communities and indeed to continue engaging in volunteer work (Gray, Shaw and Farrington 2006). Many Western studies have clearly shown that, through volunteer work, the rural aged actively contribute to the wellbeing of rural communities by offering services not provided by governments (Le Mesurier 2006; Lowe and Speakman 2006). In our study, one woman Lisa, explained to us how she was saddened that her volunteer work had been curtailed by lack of income, and that she could not meet the expectations of women’s service groups related to baking for fundraising and sewing for fetes. Jack, also on a government aged pension and with limited assets, explains that he is not able to attend meetings and social events regularly due to the decrease in his pension allocation after his wife’s death: Jack: Oh it does, it stops you from going. See when Susan and I were together we had the combined pension, which you lose about seventy dollars a fortnight [when it is a single pension]. Because they reckon it’s cheaper to live by two than it is for one I guess. But that’s their logic. Despite economic hardships, important outcomes of the developed social capital held by the aging in this rural community are feelings of acceptance

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and inclusion. Both women and men talked about “being treated like a person despite your age,” and “it is a great town. It’s one place where you can walk down the bloody street and people say ‘Gidday’.”

EMBODIED PERCEPTIONS AND EXPERIENCES OF AGING While there are proportionally increasing numbers of aged people living in rural areas in Western economies who share similar disadvantages associated with the infrastructure limitations and financial disadvantage of higher living costs, the aged in rural communities are also affected by hegemonic discourses of aging that give predominance to a decline in bodily activity and health. What is unique to the experiences and emotions associated with rural residents’ aging bodies is the spatial proximity of family, friends, community leaders, and neighbors who have aged or are aging. In the narratives of aging people in this study, it is the almost daily confrontation of other’s aging that engenders fear and concern. Emily notes that in a rural community, when you visit someone in the nursing home you see, and are struck by, the aging of people you know. Emily’s concern about seeing people she knows in the fourth stage of aging is about meanings of aging that coincide with bodily decline. Feminist gerontologist Julia Twigg (2004, 61) tells us that ‘narratives of decline have replaced all other forms of meaning and interpretation of the body in later years, so that other more humanistic or plural readings become impossible.’ However, Twigg (2004, 63) makes clear that the aging body is not simply socially-constructed, as ‘aging forces us to engage with physiology’ and this engagement is evident in the way the nursing home looms large in Emily’s mind as a place synonymous with loss of bodily control. She explains: Emily: Yeah, I just worry about you know um, what will happen to you as you get older, you’ll end up in a nursing home, you think about it, you do. You think, well I go up to the nursing home and visit the people and I think, “Oh I hope I’ll never end up like this,” but you don’t know. I’ve had a friend who was my bridesmaid, um, Clare Smith, she had a massive stroke and she’s a bit younger than me, and I look at her and she can’t speak and I sit there trying to talk to her and she smiles and nods her head though. And I think, “Oh, that would be really, really sad, I wouldn’t ever like to be like that you know.” [If you could] bath yourself and all that, that would be fine, and go down for your meals to the dining room. That would be livable, but the other, I think the hospice section would be okay but not the intensive care, you know. Dependency, compliance, and docile bodies are called to mind by Emily’s concern about being in intensive care. Intensive care for her is not

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“livable,” suggesting preference for death rather than lack of bodily autonomy. Twigg (2000), in her study of bathing in nursing homes, talks about bathing as subjugating the body by creating, in Foucauldian terms, ‘docile bodies,’ where shame and or unease decrease autonomy and increase compliance. However, also evident in the narratives of participants is that changes in bodily ability and the ways of using the body often occur slowly and almost imperceptibly. The narratives indicate a rejection of the notion of the body as a ‘passive carrier of cultural capital’ (Wolkowitz 2006, 172) that takes on different discourses such as ‘active aging’ or its opposite, ‘the frail’ body. Participants move across different discourses of the body and aging that take into account the importance of the active body, but also bodily decline. For example, one participant, Phillip, reflected on the physical changes to his body that now disallow him to continue to go “crabbing.” However, this activity was gradually forsaken, and he has chosen to engage instead in the local theatre and voluntary services. Consequently, identity may be reconstructed to incorporate both loss and new bodily performance. An important aspect of embodiment and aging evident in the narratives is the prospect of who will care for one’s own body as it continues to age, lose mobility, or become ill. The notion of generations of rural families living and working together does not mean rural people are more likely than urban people to age at home with family or die in the family home. Hilary makes clear that her daughter, who lives in the same district, is unable to assist her by providing transport and social contact due to her own workload: Hilary: Well, you know I’ve got a daughter who lives half way to Bowen. She has six daughters. I only ever see her about three or four times a year. Whenever she rings me up I get a surprise. She’s busy, as you can imagine with all those kids. And she’s got a farm yard, and it’s a business, and she runs everything. She rang me up last night, and I went, “Oh what’s happened?” because I don’t hear from her. It didn’t really matter before so much. Well she used to come around more anyway. But before I had my licence and I could drive. And I wasn’t so sick. And now if they don’t come to see me, I don’t see them. She came to visit before Christmas to give me a present. I said, “Well it could be a present for her just to walk in the door.” Women were concerned about burdening family members if they become unable to take care of themselves. Emily, for example, who talked a lot about her fears associated with the nursing home, still maintained that it was important to use the facility rather than burden family. She told us:

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Emily: Because you don’t want to burden the family you know, we’d never do that, never do that. But I don’t think it’s fair to do that really, you know, when you’ve got the facilities like the nursing home. While we have discussed emotions associated with aging, particularly in the fourth stage, which have been associated with fear and sadness, participants also made clear that they were enjoying life, and at times were liberated from the day-to-day pressures of working life. As Larry states, “I don’t mind it. I’m enjoying life. I’ve been able to enjoy life more now than I ever did.”

CONCLUSION The formative, ‘reproductive,’ and ‘productive’ years of the life cycle have been given greater attention in studies of aging. Feminist theorizing has tended to focus on reproductive and working bodies, and aging theorists have been influenced until recent times by medical models of aging. Thus, gender as an important dimension of aging has been typically understood as a variable for measurement in relation to health and wellbeing. Feminist gerontologists have challenged positivist epistemological and methodological frames for examining aging. Drawing on postmodern theories, they have explored the aging body as socially-inscribed and marked by multiple social categories such as class and ethnicities. This work has identified the importance of examining the question of aging from women and men’s lived experiences, words, and practices. At the same time, it has investigated the power relations and structural inequalities that arise from the intersectionality of aging and gender, and indeed other important categories. In this chapter, we have explored a further under-theorized and underexplored dimension to aging: questions of gender and aging in a rural context. Using narratives of women and men who were mostly in the fourth stage of aging allowed examination of what is uniquely rural about gender and aging. Historical connections to place, and memories of events and people, are important dimensions of aging in-place. For rural people, aging and belonging are tied to meanings and emotions associated with what it feels like to be part of a community. Shared memories of place, school, youth, and knowing each other’s families reinforce emotions associated with belonging to a community. While men and women had similar experiences and feelings of belonging, men were more likely to identify a sense of belonging with present and past participation in community sport. In Australian rural communities, sport, in particular men’s sport such as Australian football, is tied closely to community identity. Consequently, while sport is a mechanism for inclusion, it also excludes. In particular, it excludes women as active participants.

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Men also explained a sense of belonging connected to family history in the community and pride in place. While aging women participated socially in community clubs, sporting clubs, and volunteer work, and some had lived in the community their whole lives, few raised the importance of sport or family networks as signifiers of belonging. Importantly, gender differences were associated with ‘mechanisms’ of belonging rather than ‘meanings’ of belonging, which were based on communitarianism in its most idyllic form. Social participation of the rural aging in voluntary organizations enables the building of social capital and social services for other people who are less physically mobile or unwell and aged. As other social commentators have noted, the material context of aging in a rural community erodes people’s capacity to continue to provide community service. Restricted incomes, higher costs of living, and a lack of public transport reduce, and will continue to reduce, community engagement and service delivery for the aged in rural areas. This threatens the multiple forms of reciprocity that can be a by-product of developed social networks. Particular to the rural is the spatial proximity of aged bodies, and almost daily contact with the aging and changing bodies of community leaders, friends, and neighbors are frequent reminders of one’s own bodily potential for loss of mobility and ill health. While participants were confronted with the aging process and its associated fears, their narratives indicated a movement across, and within, discourses of embodied aging associated with both the frail body and the active body. The rural aging were reflexive about their own bodies, and made choices about ways of participating and belonging in their communities. The following chapter further explores the themes of embodiment and emotions that have been central to this book. This concluding chapter also examines the strength and weakness of intersectionality as a methodological and epistemological device for examining gender, rurality, and the social categories we have chosen to explore.

8

Conclusion

The impetus for writing this book has come from a desire to gain greater understanding of the shifting and multiple identities of rural women and men. This was fuelled by our awareness of the limited rural social science literature on gender, and, moreover, on the intersections between gender, rurality, and other social locations. In recent years, postmodernism has resulted in the absenting or marginalization of key social categories in research agendas due to arguments claiming identity as deeply fragmented and unassailable, or even less important in an age where individuality and multiple choice reigned. Certainly, some specific identities received attention from rural studies scholars, such as those of gender, sexuality, and youth, but others such as class, ethnicities, disability, and aging elicited little interest in the literature. This book makes a contribution toward filling this gap. It has done so by drawing on feminist theorizing, given our political and epistemological belief that gender is a key organizing principle of space (Massey 1994). This fi nal chapter begins by drawing together two inter-related themes that reverberate across the chapters. These are the embodied experience, practice, expression, and performance of gendered and rural subjectivities; and the relationships between gender, rurality, and emotions. Following this, we return to the notion of intersectionality that has been engaged in this book as a methodological lens for exploring gender, rurality, and the social locations of Indigeneity, ethnicities, class, sexuality, disability, and age. In this section of the chapter, we return to the discussion of intersectionality in the introduction, and draw on our own experience in researching and writing this book to delineate the strengths and weaknesses of intersectionality as a framing device for understanding multiple rural gendered subjectivities. Further, we draw attention to the limitations of this book, noting in particular that while we wanted to hear and detail voices which have largely been absent or only partially heard in rural social science, we recognize that the chapters provide only a glimpse of fragments of experience, practice, and understandings of how gender and rurality intersect with Indigeneity, ethnicities, class, heterosexuality, disability, and age in a moment in time and place.

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EMBODIED SUBJECTS Many scholars have argued that, in colloquial terms, the body has been evident in classical social science, but ‘not fleshed out’ (Narvaez 2006; Shilling 1993; Wolkowitz 2006). This is certainly the case in rural social science. As Little and Leyshon (2003) note, there has been limited research showing the nuanced meanings of the body and its relation to gender identities and performativity in rural spaces (Little and Leyshon 2003). At the same time, the data we have presented in this book highlight the centrality of the body to the study of rural spaces, and particularly the critical importance of embodiment to understanding gender and intersectionality in the rural. In this section, we revisit the empirical fi ndings, drawing out what each tells us about embodiment, gender, and rurality, and suggesting how further research may be developed around these topics. In Chapter 2, Bebe points out that Indigenous bodies are both absent and present in the rural. They are absent in hegemonic discourses of the rural that only count white bodies as farming bodies. Discourses of need for rural infrastructure and services render white bodies as resilient, hardworking, with farming bodies in need, and worthy, of social infrastructure and services. Requirements for rural infrastructure in Indigenous communities sustain a different discourse. This is one where Indigenous rural bodies are classified as dysfunctional, problematic, and incapable of caring for themselves. As Lisa Slater (2008) writes in a special issue of the journal borderlands, which focuses on corporeality and Indigeneity in Australia, hegemonic media representations portray rural and remote Indigenous bodies as ‘deviant and brutal’. Slater (2008), like Bebe, explains that dominant within the Australian nation and international press are stories of Indigenous communities in crisis, which require government intervention to establish order and regulate Indigenous bodies that are violent, unclean, drunk, and out of control. Also recalling Bebe’s articulation of the lack of policy makers’ recognition of the agency and self-knowledge of Indigenous peoples, Knoishi, Lui-Chivizhe and Slater (2008, 5) argue that those who are ‘the inherently embodied’ are denied the space to articulate their selfknowledge. In Chapter 2, and arguably in all chapters, our own white middle-class academic bodies come into focus. These are bodies that are racialized as white privileged subjects, and which have produced academic work on gender that has substantially been unmarked by recognition of our whiteness. In working to begin to redress this, we engaged with the scholarship of Indigenous feminists such as Moreton-Robinson (2004) and Lillian Holt (1999), who have argued that Indigenous people have rarely been recognized as holders of knowledge. This is exemplified in the arguments of Nakata (2003), Slater (2008), and Knoishi et al. (2008), who demonstrate how Western knowledge is used to defi ne and solve Indigenous problems through social policies that inscribe Indigenous bodies as ‘lacking,’ thereby

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ignoring Indigenous cultural knowledge and agency. Centering the Indigenous body as knowledgable is essential for rural research to move forward, as is an engagement in researcher self-reflexivity about the processes and practices of work with rural Indigenous people. Chapter 3, which examined the interstices between gender, ethnicities, and rurality in a farm women’s group revealed that often the white middleclass female body is seen as synonymous with the body of ‘farm woman.’ This subject position is naturalized, masking the absence of women involved in diverse farming industries such as horticulture, many of whom have migrated from southern Europe, south-east Asia, and India. While Chapter 4 indicated that length of time farming also marks class boundaries, Chapter 3 identifies that for women without Anglo heritage who may have been farming for several generations, their bodies remain marked as the ‘racialized other’ whose class position is accorded less value. Othering the bodies of ‘non-white’ women results in practices of exclusion from rural women’s networks based on constructions of difference that are constituted as sameness (Riggs 2008). As postcolonial scholar Hook (2005, 13) argues, ‘“recognizing” racial differences actually has little to do with “seeing” difference, and more to do with incorporating a range of bodily forms into a cartography of racialized embodiment that is organized through a logic of sameness.’ Chapter 3 revealed that ‘sameness’ discourses attributed to these women’s embodiment situate them in the domestic sphere as familyoriented, and, as a consequence, both passive and oppressed. Like the bodies of Indigenous women, these women’s bodies are constructed as lacking in knowledge. Thus, in this way, the power of white hegemony remains unchallenged as a ‘site of power in the materialization of race’ (Riggs 2008, Riggs and Augoustinos 2005), resulting in the reproduction of farm networks that only include and recognize white women’s bodies. In a discussion of gender, class, and rurality in Chapter 4, the theme of how morality comes to inform which bodies belong and which do not in rural spaces again came to the fore. This chapter illustrated that distinctions are made between values given to ‘farmer’ and those of other occupations in the rural community. A farmer’s body is explicitly identified as a male body, accorded with strength, hard-work, and honesty. For waged workers, contrary discourses are associated with their rural gendered and classed bodies, which emphasized a ‘lack of worth.’ Specifically, waged working bodies are inscribed as less hard-working, and not as crucial to the constitution of rural community which is founded on agricultural enterprise. Thus, privileged classed bodies are male bodies marked by generational agricultural histories. Importantly, these histories are remembered and reconstituted in community narratives based on patrilineal performance in farming and contributions to the community made over time. Chapter 4 argued that these community narratives are equally important in shaping women’s classed bodies in agriculture. Farm women’s bodies are constructed as an appendage of their husbands’ bodies. It is a husband’s participation in the

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community and familial farming lineage that determines the value of a farming woman’s body. Chapter 5 illustrated how young farming couples privilege the unification of bodies in work and life as a means of securing the future farm business. They ‘do gender,’ and ‘do heterosexuality’ by ‘interpreting and applying 20th century cultural inscriptions of marriage on the “lived body” . . . [it being] the materiality of both gender and sexuality’ (Witz et al. 1996, 174). The discursive construction of a ‘good marriage’ is employed as a means of resistance to the unequal gender patterns evident in the ways earlier generations of farming couples enact gender in marriage. Nevertheless, narratives of these younger couples demonstrate that the embodied practices and performance at home and on the farm places women’s bodies as secondary to men’s. As Witz (2000, 2) argues, traditionally ‘women have been undersocialized and overwhelmingly corporealized in accounts of the social.’ This gender hierarchy of bodies is somewhat reversed in the context of reproduction and succession, which gives an importance to women’s ‘biological’ bodies. The complexity, and indeed friction, for many younger farming couples is in fi nding emotional separation between my body, your body, and our bodies in a spatial context where work and family intertwine. Similarly, these interconnections between home and farm are played out in Gayle’s story in the documentary television program ‘With this Ring,’ which is detailed in Chapter 6. Here, Gayle’s healing but injured body is constantly brought back visually and discursively as important in terms of her identity as ‘wife.’ Indeed, throughout Gayle’s body is located within the heterosexual construct of marriage and the relationship between her marriage and farm work. The construction of the gendered rural disabled body described in Chapter 6 and aging bodies in Chapter 7 often accords more, or less, social capital on the basis of physical appearance, resilience, and activity. For Gayle, a number of factors about her embodied self beyond her injury gain currency with the viewing audience. Representation of her disability in the documentary is secondary to the way she is represented as a woman. The fact that her body is young, and her husband’s even younger, gives them status and value. This is coupled with their moral commitment to marriage, and performed in the embodied practices that her husband engages in to care for Gayle and her attempts to overcome or override her injuries. Additionally, her beauty and embodiment of rural middle class femininity afford her with further respect and worth. The media’s portrayal of Gayle’s body as disabled is constituted ‘through an anticipation of our desire to “know” the secret labyrinths of difference, without significantly challenging our investment in the construction of difference’ (Mitchell and Snyder 1997, 15). Thus, emphasis is given to the ‘sameness’ paradigm of the body in the fi lm to decrease our investment in disability by depicting hegemonic ideals of hetero-gendered subjectivities and the moral sanctity of marriage.

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Chapter 7 reveals that meanings of rurality are inscribed on aging bodies in similar ways to classed bodies (Chapter 4) and heterosexual bodies (Chapter 5). For the rural aged, communitarianism, family history, and length of time living in a rural locale give meaning to place and one’s place in a rural community. For the rural aged, memory is central to social belonging. Participants’ memories give meaning to rural community. They recognize that their subjectivities are shaped as ‘a community member’ by the memories held by others and memories embedded within social and physical spaces (e.g. town hall, sporting club, war memorials, and school). Importantly, Chapter 7 has demonstrated that as the body changes, rural women and men alter their community engagements. This indicates an awareness of the body and its abilities, and ‘fi nding ways to feel at home’ with the changing body (Bullington 2006, 25). In addition, it exemplifies that meanings about what constitutes an active lifestyle vary over time (Bullington 2006). However, ways of belonging are gendered, with men’s bodies more visible in certain spaces such as the pub, golf, or football club. In contrast, women of all ages appear to be absent from these spaces. While consumption, personal development, and social engagement mark rural aging bodies, they are at the same time also marked as frail, experiencing loss, and in decline (Gilleard and Higgs 2000; Twigg 2007). Experiences of decline and loss are most obvious when favored activities have to be stopped. This book is a manifestation of the importance of embodiment in the context of place. Dyck’s (2002) articulation of the importance of place to the embodied researcher and research participants particularly resonates when researching the rural and its intersections with gender, race, ethnicities, class, sexuality and disability. She argues that ‘it is from location that we experience our worlds, our gender, our class, our “race.” This is also bodily experience, our body being the medium through which place is lived, with its layer of relations of power’ (Dyck 2002, 237). Feminists have given much attention to the subject position of the researcher, and the hierarchical power relations between researchers and participants. They have questioned the valuing of academic knowledges over local knowledges (e.g. Haraway 1991; Harding 1991; Oakley 1981). Rural feminist scholars have engaged in similar reflexivity. Our own bodily experience of the places we visited and the participants we spoke to has given meaning to the way we have interpreted and presented our research in this book. Further, in Chapter 3, our own southern European bodies made it difficult to hear of the exclusion of women from southern European and Asian cultures who were either spoken of with hostility, or ‘not seen’ as farm women and excluded from women’s networks. In quite obvious ways, the researcher’s body ‘takes up space,’ it changes spatial settings and inter-personal dynamics (Nairn 2002). When we interviewed farming women and men to understand heterosexuality and intimacy, we noted that the interviews frequently took place around the farmer’s kitchen table. We were aware of claiming space by placing the

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audio-recorder and research notes on the table, and thereby transforming what is a domestic and social space into an interview room (Nairn 2002). We observed how, as researchers, our embodiment and spatial setting around the kitchen table physically situated our bodies in a place of ‘authority’, as holders of knowledge in the interview process. Further, personal dynamics and embodied power relations altered as farm women and men invited us to the paddocks or sheds. Conversations became more spontaneous, and new dimensions were explored as physical constructs like tractors or sheds came into view as we walked and talked, taking the interview in unanticipated directions. On the property, away from recorders and papers, farm women and men were more clearly ‘knowers.’ These arguments take us back to the point made earlier in this chapter, and also made by other scholars (Brandth 2006; Brandth and Haugen 2005; Little 2003), that there is more work to be done in understanding gendered, embodied subjectivities both in agriculture and in rural settings per se. What has become evident in the chapters in this book is that gendered bodies are described, read, and lived differently according to whose body is in question.

EMOTIONS It is perhaps not surprising to fi nd that emotions resonated strongly throughout this book. Bondi et al. (2005, 7) note that studies of emotions offer a ‘promising avenue through which to advance understandings of dynamic geographies of difference, exclusion and oppression.’ They explain that emotions are as intricately connected to explorations of ‘the other’ as they are to studies of sameness and inclusion. Thus, our efforts to map how gender and rurality intersect with other social locations to render some bodies as not belonging to/in the rural necessarily meant mapping out a geography of emotions. In seeking to understand the emotionally rich landscape emerging from the data in this book, we are guided by feminist scholars who assert that emotions are engendered. That is, how we defi ne, convey, evaluate, and respond to emotions is shaped by dominant discourses and practices of gender (Ahmed 2000; Brody 1999; Lupton 1998; Petersen 2004; Shields 2002). Our understandings are also informed by the still nascent rural social science literature on emotions. With some important exceptions (e.g. (e.g. Bartlett 2006; Convery et al. 2005; Little, Panelli and Kraack 2005; Price and Evans 2005, 2006; Ramirez-Ferrero 2005), emotions have been largely a peripheral rather than integral focus for analysis in this field. As Panelli et al. (2004, 446) comment in introducing their study of rural women’s feelings of safety and fear in New Zealand, the rural literatures ‘understate emotional dimensions.’ In writing Chapter 2 we had two aims. That is, to critique our own positionality as white Australian feminists and to understand how gender,

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Indigeneity, and rurality intersect in the life of Bebe Ramzan. The affective dimensions of the fi rst of these aims mobilized most potently around a sense of shame. This is an emotion that writers such as Probyn (2005) and Waitt et al. (2007) suggest can be productively marshaled for political purposes in the Australian context, as it may open up possibilities for reevaluating and challenging both self and society. Such a claim highlights Anderson and Smith’s (2001, 9) assertion that ‘emotions are an intensely political issue.’ The political dimensions of emotions are also evident in Bebe’s story. Bebe communicates a deep, affective connection to the Homelands where she resides, and fi nds many pleasures in rural life. However, she expresses frustration and sadness that in government and media discourse, remote Indigenous communities are constructed as repositories of mineral resources and/or ‘notorious and unruly’ (Lawrence and Gibson 2007, 665). At the same time, as Bebe explains, Indigenous people have been commodified to make particular emotional appeals to international tourist markets. In the exploration of gender, ethnicities, and rurality in Chapter 3, we revisited the lens of critical whiteness studies to examine the narratives of twelve members of an Australian rural women’s group. In the narratives, we do not hear expressed the intense emotions of exclusion enunciated in similar studies of rural whiteness—emotions such as hate, fear, and revulsion (e.g. Garland and Chakraborti 2004b; Holloway 2005). Instead, we hear the oppositional, but equally intense emotions of inclusion–feelings of pride, fulfillment, and camaraderie. The women’s network members describe emotionally powerful reactions to mainstream agricultural organizations which, despite their male dominance, have purported to be the legitimate voice of rural Australia. At the same time, our research participants demonstrate little reflexivity about their privileged racialized and classed position. Their social location has given their network political capital and afforded them moral authority to speak for rural women, and to be heard. Also obscured or minimized are the emotions that may be experienced by ‘the racialized other’ rural woman through exclusion, because this woman is positioned as understandably and legitimately outside the boundaries of the rural (white) community. Given that the affective is often difficult to name, describe, or observe (Bondi et al. 2005), it is significant that it emerged as such a strong theme in Chapter 4. At the same time, more recent cultural theorizing on class, which we canvassed in this chapter, argues for the importance of affect to class differentiations. It seeks to identify ‘how different classes are differentially attributed with value,’ and how these value judgments form boundaries and exclusions (Reay 2006, 290). In Chapter 4, we took up this challenge in an exploration of data from two studies of Australian farming communities. While feminist work has demonstrated that emotions are connected to specific gendered identities, such as that of ‘mother’ and ‘wife’ (Gabb 2004; Rose 2004), the analysis in Chapter 4 reveals that the emotionality

144 Gender and Rurality of these subject positions is also bound up with class. For example, women described the positive emotions imbued in the ‘good’ reputation of their ‘husband’ and his extended family, and in their participation as a ‘wife’ involved in social and leisure activities, and community groups. Importantly, the gendered identity of farmer is also inflected with a potent sense of morality and worth in the narratives. However, this was not a simple story, for there were also emotional costs in the community’s surveillance of the behavior, actions, and values of particular men and women. In Chapter 5, the emotional dimensions of the farming home came to prominence. As Price and Evans (2008) demonstrate through a study of farming stress, a range of coalescing factors render the farmhouse emotionally fraught. These factors include the biographies of farming people and their potentially historical connections to home—the ongoing involvement of intergenerational family members within the farming business and family—in addition to working from home with one’s spouse. Despite the dominance of discourses around ‘unity,’ ‘equality,’ and ‘a good marriage,’ the home is a site of emotional tension and struggle (see Petersen 2004). In the interviews, couples differentiated their relationship from that of their farming parents/parents-in-law, revealing that, to some extent, the conventions surrounding intimate relations in rural areas are shifting, just as they are elsewhere (Peterson 2004). At the same time, the discourse of a ‘good marriage’ was underpinned by a gendered division of labor, as well as, on occasions, the exclusion of the female partner from farm business decisionmaking. Thus, it appears that very conventional and patriarchal norms still inform marital relationships on family farms. For some couples, intimacy is enhanced by the proximity of their work/home lives. However, for others, this spatial overlap is problematic, particularly when extended family is involved. As Thien (2005) found in studying emotions in rural areas, visibility as well as gender and moral assumptions may limit the potential for intimacy and emotional freedom in rural communities. One area of social science inquiry that has been more open to emotions has been disability studies (e.g. Chouinard 1999a, b; Dyck 1999; Moss 1999). In terms of the literature on disability and rurality, Parr, Philo and Burns (2005) make a substantial contribution in a sensitively rendered study of mental health in the Scottish highlands. This study, introduced in Chapter 6, provides a powerful illustration of how a focus on emotions could enrich further analyses of gender, disability, and rurality, because the authors focus not just on the emotional life of people, but also the emotional terrain in which people are placed. Similarly, in the analysis of ‘With this Ring,’ we noted the ways in which the landscape is afforded often paradoxical emotional dimensions—tough/caring, harsh/romantic, terrifying/loving, close/isolated, contained/expansive—and the ways in which these are entwined with discourses of rurality, heterosexuality, gender, and disability. In short, the Australian outback is, like the Scottish Highlands, imagined as an emotionally-charged landscape, which has both material

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and discursive implications for those who live in it. As constructed by the text, there is harmony between Gayle’s emotionality and the emotionality of the landscape. In part, this explains the popularity of the program, as does the fact that Gayle’s emotionality conforms to Hochschild’s (1979; 1985, 563) concept of ‘feeling rules,’ that is, ‘socially shared, albeit often latent rules’ about acceptable emotions. For disabled people, the acceptable emotions are inspirational, heroic, motivated, noble, and gracious (Garland-Thomson 2005). The intersections between gender, aging, and rurality examined in Chapter 7 were shown to impact on the study participants’ emotions; these participants experienced space as ‘emotionally textured’ (Milligan, Bingley and Gatrell 2005, 57). While some expressed sadness and regret at no longer being able to undertake certain activities, this was tempered by the fact that they all still had access to some form of individual transport, all continued to enjoy some leisure, and all were relatively healthy. There were, however, negative emotions expressed by participants around anxieties about debilitations of mind and body, and ending up “in the nursing home.” Loss of a partner and problems with familial relationships were also a source of emotional pain for some participants. Despite this, interviewees typically emphasized positive emotions associated with inclusion, embedded in long-term ‘memories’ of inclusion (see Jones 2005). Importantly, however, because opportunities for inclusion in the town are gendered, and further limited or enhanced by one’s class position, the emotional wellbeing of rural people is likely to vary by gender and class. A fi nal way in which emotions permeated this book was in terms of our own relationship to the research. While feminist scholars have mounted a successful challenge against the notion of the dispassionate and disconnected researcher, and given emphasis to the need for subjective and reflective research accounts, the emotional dimensions of undertaking research are yet to be fully explored in rural social science. This is, no doubt, related to the historical privileging of positivism in rural social science and, further, the continued marginal place of feminism in the discipline. For us, the emotional journey of the research reached across the full affective spectrum, moving constantly between and across joy and frustration, despondency and pleasure, fatigue and excitement, anxiety and curiosity, and insecurity and confidence. In large part, this emotionality was informed and shaped by our own emotional relationship to feminism and its concerns with justice and equality (Ahmed 2004b, 179; Smith, Jamison and Dwyer 2008, 539). We were invigorated, but similarly challenged and discomfited, by immersing ourselves in the feminist literature on Indigeneity, ethnicities, class, heterosexuality, disability, and aging, and reflecting on our ontological and epistemological limitations and narrowness. Relatedly, we were animated by the prospect of presenting some different versions of rurality from the mainstream, but we were anxious and apprehensive about the responsibilities of such a task. This was amplified as we gathered data and

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immersed ourselves in the emotional lives of the people whose experiences we have documented in this book. As these ruminations suggest, and as Bondi (2005, 231) observes, emotions are ‘an inevitable and necessary part of doing research,’ and, we would suggest, a potentially critical part of any respectful, sensitive, and ethical attempt to research intersectionality.

INTERSECTIONALITY In this book, we have engaged feminist theories and approaches to intersectionality as a prism through which to explore multiple subjectivities, experiences, and practices of rural women and men. We have demonstrated the efficacy of intersectionality in two key respects. The fi rst advantage revealed by an intersectional approach is that it is a lens which allows researchers to capture multiple axes of social divisions and categorization. This was illustrated in Chapter 4, which focused on gender, class, and rurality. While this chapter illustrates that these identities are inextricably linked over time in day-to-day practices, memories, and narratives, it also shows that at different times and in particular moments one or more of these categories becomes salient. For example, class recedes in narratives when women and men speak about their engagement in the community; they are clearly ambivalent about asserting that rural communities are classed. This ambivalence is fuelled by discourses of communitarianism, which prioritize values that denote strong, resilient, rural communities where members work together for the good of all. Such a discourse discourages the articulation of hierarchy, difference, and privilege, as these undermine meanings of ‘rural community.’ The question of hierarchies, differences, and privilege brings us to the second advantage of using an intersectional approach in that intersectional methodologies assist in enabling the theorizing and understanding of power. Brah (1996, 248) has commented that the lens of intersectionality opens up opportunities to explore how ‘fields of power collide, enmesh and configure and with what effects,’ as well as to examine ‘what kinds of inclusions or exclusions a specific articulation of power’ produces. Chapter 3 has demonstrated that class as a field of power coalesces with gender and ethnicities in rendering rural spaces white. Gender, class, and whiteness enmesh to disrupt communitarian discourses and make hierarchy visible within rural communities, particularly in established farming networks. Similarly, Chapter 5 depicts the merging of gender and heterosexuality in reproducing hetero norms via male farm succession, and gendered and sexualized work for women, evident in the emotional labor of caring for children and community volunteer work. As Brah (1996) suggests, articulations of power point to exclusions and inclusions. Exclusions and absences were glaringly apparent in analyses of gender, Indigeneity, and rurality. In Chapter 2, we saw how the hegemonic

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notions of the ‘rural idyll’ are largely absent in Bebe’s meanings of rurality. Indigenous Australians are absented from white configurations of the imagined space of ‘country’ (Gill 2005), as are women from southern European, and Asian backgrounds (Chapter 3). A most notable outcome of using multi-categorical analyses across the chapters of the book is that while there are multiple experiences, practices, and subjectivities associated with the intersections of gender and rurality, there are also discernible and consistent hegemonic discourses aiding exclusions and inclusions in rural communities. Principally, these are gendered and rural discourses about belonging, which derive from the materialization of value to patrilineal, inter-generational history associated with the economic and essentially farm property ownership; and the moral worth accorded to the occupation of farming, and to the character and identity of farming men. These discourses of belonging are reproduced over time in community narratives. The interweaving of memory and its relation to subjectivity has received much attention from philosophers who examine the constitution of community and, implicitly, belonging (Hinchman and Hinchman 2001). For example, McIntyre (2001) suggests that one’s individual narrative depends on the larger stories of the community to which one belongs, and the community crystallizes around memories conjoined into stories. By and large, the stories of farm men and their forefathers implicit in discourses of belonging tend to be stories of positive engagement in farming and within their rural communities, which equate with ethical conduct through hard work and contributions to developing the community. Thus, as Chapters 4 and 5 indicate, farming families are co-constructors or co-writers of meanings about community and belonging (Currie 1998), as they actively take up these positive stories about previous generations and work them into personal narratives. However, what is unknown are other narratives associated with community belonging, particularly those that may be antagonistic to positive portrayals and refuted by individuals and families. While the discourses of belonging suggest a stable linear structure of narratives over time, that is, a simple reproduction of stories of contribution (Kraus 2006), the chapters in this book clearly suggest that some narratives are obscured. Although we have found intersectionality beneficial, our empirical explorations have also highlighted some of the key concerns about the approach outlined in the literature, such as, will intersectional analyses allow us to open up categories for reconceptualization and problematization? And can intersectionality provide a methodological lens for feminists to think about gender, race, ethnicities, class, sexuality, disability and age differently? There has been active debate in feminist scholarship regarding these questions in relation to the limits of intersectional approaches in understanding intricacies within, and across, social categories. Common to the deliberations are three recurring themes. Firstly, how do explorations of categories interrelate, and therefore what is the potential of categories to

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call up difference (Lykke 2005; McCall 2005)? Secondly, do routinely-used constructionist approaches to intersectionality provide a means of deconstructing categories and give voice to everyday practice and experience (Jones 2009; Prins 2006; Staunaes 2003)? Thirdly, does intersectionality leave the most salient categories under-theorized (Davis 2008)? Beginning with analyses of categorization, McCall’s (2005) notable article referred to in Chapter 1 clarifies the theorization of relationships among categories. Ostensibly, she suggests there are anti-categorical, intra-categorical, and inter-categorical or categorical approaches. The anti-categorical approach, as the term suggests, negates the reflection of social life in named categories, as these diminish complexity, and thus, by definition, prohibit intersectional analyses. We accept the limitations of words but reiterate that as feminists, the naming of social categories like ‘woman’ or ‘race ‘allows for collective activism and categorization, while creating social divisions also allows for debate and empowerment through the pushing and opening-up of boundaries within, and across, categories. This brings us to intra-categorical analyses, which, while questioning categories, also critiques social groups at neglected points of intersection. The inter-categorical or categorical approach, like the intra-categorical position, is premised upon relationships of inequality among social groups that can be ‘revealed and explored by provisional employment of categories’ (Egeland and Gressgard 2007, 215). This approach, by recognizing that complex structural relationships are critical in analysis of power, results in the inevitability of categorization, albeit provisional. Hence, following McCall (2005), we have used inter-categorical analyses to make visible complexity and mutually constitutive relations between categories. We have consciously and provisionally named categories such as ‘farming woman,’ while recognizing the uneasiness of such categorization and attempting to fill, extend, and break boundaries within categories. For example, through analyses of empirical data, the category ‘farming woman’ becomes ‘white farming woman,’ ‘young farming woman,’ or ‘working-class farming woman’ (Chapters 2–7). A further cause for debate around intersectionality, and one we have grappled with, is the extent to which it is possible to extend or deconstruct boundaries within categories using social constructionist approaches. Specifically, scholars have argued that a key limitation of constructionist analyses using intersectionality is that it ‘is restricted to the deconstruction of the dominant order but exempts the unprivileged others’ (Egeland and Gressgard 2007, 213), and conversely, that its strength is that it allows for everyday practices to emerge (Brah and Phoenix 2004). We suggest that uncovering and naming the dominant hegemonic order is both a strength and a limitation of using constructionist approaches to intersectionality. Its strength lies in enabling the tracing of historical developments to highlight particular patterns of inequality. For example, taking a constructionist perspective to intersectionality has enabled us to reveal how heteronormativity provides a foundation for social engagement in farming communities, and

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is fundamental in constituting a number of social categories such as gender, ethnicities, class, and disability, and marks the ways in which they interact. This was especially evident in how gender, disability, and rurality were separately, and together, given meaning as a consequence of the marital status of Gayle Shann, whose body is injured. However, we need to be cautious in privileging the dominant order, as we may be distracted from identifying the many life stories that exist in tandem and/or in opposition to dominant ideologies. For example, while Chapter 5 revealed dominant discursive constructions of heterosexuality in marriage among young farming couples, further research is required to examine potentially different narratives about gender and sexuality that may occur among farming women who have never married, and those who have been widowed, divorced, or remarried. Feminists argue that a further limitation of intersectional approaches is that they may result in under-theorizing core social categories (gender, race, and class) (Davis 2008; Skeggs 1997). They have argued that different inequalities are differently framed. In this book, we have used intersectionality as a methodological approach, at the same time drawing on rich theoretical feminist scholarship that examines gender, race, and class as separate social categories. We have used the lens of intersectionality, as have others, to argue for a contextualized approach that explores the theoretical depths within social categories in addition to the ways in which they are mutually constitutive. Indeed, we argue that using intersectionality as a methodology makes it possible to think about core social categories differently, thereby contributing to theoretical scholarship on gender, race, and class. Feminists turn to intersectional analyses to gain greater depth and knowledge about gender; that is, to explore the category of gender by identifying how it may relate, interlock, enmesh, or be subdued by additional aspects of self that constitute subjectivities. Andersen (2005, 447) argues, ‘Indeed, the whole logic of intersectional studies is that race, gender, and class are relational and reinforcing—and in emergent ways.’ Thus, intersectionality gives a richer understanding of how gender is lived and ‘facilitates a form of feminist enquiry that aims to and is capable of, capturing the complexity and multiplicity of axes of oppression’ (Lewis 2009, 205). However, as the chapters in this book illustrate, the gendered story is partial, temporal, and geographically-bound. Thus, the complexity captured by intersectional analysis is not static, nor can it be universalized. Time and place are imperative contextualizations (Denis 2008; Hulko 2009). Further, as Adib and Guerrier (2003) remind us, one social category is not simply added to another, nor is each separate and fi xed, and while social categories exist simultaneously, some will appear more dominant than others in specific contexts and situations. In Chapter 7 on aging for example, in some contexts meanings about what it is to be a rural person are given precedence over age and gender. The data demonstrate that men

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and women in the third and fourth stages of aging share common understandings and experiences of rural communitarianism, which they translate to social belonging through being known, recognized, and spoken to in public places. However, within experiences of social belonging but in a different context, gender and rurality intersect to open spaces for men and close others for women when it comes to social engagement in sporting clubs and recreational activities. What this chapter and the book as a whole demonstrates is that if intersectionality is to be useful as an approach and develop as a theory, it needs to be grounded empirically to enable the illustration of relational and mutually-reinforcing categories.

Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1. However, these are not necessarily three discrete areas of enquiry. For example the cultural, political, and economic have been studied in the context of identities (Bryant 1999; Little 2002; Panelli 2002). 2. Our aim is to further work begun in this book through more detailed and engaged research via external funding. However, this is a process that can take years.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 1. We recognize that the term ‘Aboriginal/Indigenous feminist/ism’ is contested but use the label here to describe authors if they have used the term to describe themselves (see Green 2007). 2. Commonly, Australian rural and remote Indigenous communities or partIndigenous communities are culturally and linguistically varied. Approximately 145 Indigenous languages are spoken across Australia. 3. Fee and Russell (2007) note that until recently, ‘whiteness studies’ centered on American concerns, but that in Australia Hage (1998) and Stratton (1998) drew on whiteness studies in their respective books White Nation and Race Daze. However, they argue that ‘the most prominent Australian proponent and critic of whiteness theory and studies is Aileen Moreton-Robinson’ (Fee and Russell 2007, 202). 4. Ahmed (2004a, 1) argues for a genealogy of whiteness studies that recognizes, and begins with, the work of Black feminists rather than later work such as Frankenberg’s (1993), in which white academics focus on constructions and experiences of whiteness. Moreton-Robinson (2000a), too, draws on this important scholarship (e.g. Collins 1991; hooks 1981; Lorde 1983) to situate her study. However, in both the study design and analysis of data she draws heavily on Frankenberg (1993). 5. The book had approximately thirty reviews, most of which were extremely positive. The book has been shortlisted for a number of prestigious awards and remains on the curriculum of numerous international university courses. 6. As we discussed our work over this time we did so in a context in which Indigenous issues were receiving a high level of media and political attention in Australia. This was a result of the implementation of numerous highly controversial policy decisions relating to Indigenous Australians by the Howard Coalition government (1996–2007). This included abolishing the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, refusing to apologize formally to Indigenous Australians for the stolen generation, amending Native Title

152

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

Notes legislation, and declaring a ‘state of emergency’ in the Northern Territory in response to allegations of child sexual abuse in Indigenous communities (see Altman and Hinkson 2007 and Robbins 2007 for a discussion of Indigenous policy under the Howard Government). Of these, the most well documented remains what is often referred to as the ‘Bell-Huggins debate,’ which centers on a 1989 article on rape in Indigenous communities written by white anthropologist Dianne Bell and co-author Topsy Napurrla Nelson. The article, published in Women’s Studies International Forum, declared that sexual violence was ‘everyone’s business’ (Bell and Nelson 1989). In a letter to the editor, a number of Indigenous women outlined their strong opposition to the article (Huggins et al. 1991). Their principal concern was with the issue of authenticity to speak for, and about, Indigenous people. See Moreton-Robinson (1999, 111–125) and Moreton-Robinson (2003b) for an illuminating critique of the entire episode. A parallel debate has also occurred in relation to white feminist author/editor Margaret Somerville’s Life (Hi)Story Writing: The Relationship Between Talk and Text (1991), in which the writer explores her role in relation to the production of a number of books with Indigenous Australian women (see Fee and Russell 2007, and Grossman 1998, 2001 for an elaboration on this debate). See Fitzgerald (2004) for a discussion of the connections between feminist and Indigenous research methodologies. This is not to suggest that the chapter presents a simply binary ‘Western-Indigenous’ knowledge. Indeed, one of its key insights is that the events of the moose hunt cannot be explained by dichotomizing knowledge production in this way. This was a matter of Bebe’s personal situation changing so that she had much less time available than she had when we fi rst talked to her twelve months before writing this chapter. Bebe’s mother was born at Alpanyinta (near Mintabie) on the APY Lands. Bebe is referring to the diverse cultural and linguistic family groups of Indigenous peoples living in the APY Lands. ‘Crook’ is an Australian colloquial term meaning ‘sick’ or ‘angry’. The Australian media has been repeatedly shown to ignore Indigenous people and to also caricature, judge, and demonize them (Meadows 2000; Selby 1999). In Northern and inland Australia, some regions which have been returned to Indigenous ownership are used for pastoralism. Gill (2005, 699) writes that in the southern Northern Territory, 20 percent of former or current pastoral properties are owned by Indigenous people. ‘Carbie’ is an Australian colloquial term for a carburator. Most recently, we were able to send a copy of the chapter to the group undertaking a Drought Policy Review on behalf of the Australian federal government. No Indigenous representatives are on the seven-member ‘Expert Social Panel’ and their issues paper included no mention of Indigenous concerns (see Drought Policy Review Expert Social Panel 2008). As a reviewer pointed out, until Indigenous scholars are in a position to contribute more directly to rural studies, collaborations between Indigenous people and white people remain important conduits for investigating Indigenous perspectives/issues.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 1. While such representations of the rural are deployed in a range of contexts for various reasons, they have enjoyed particular prominence in right wing militia groups (Iganski and Levin 2004; Kimmel and Ferber 2000).

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2. Agyeman (1989) uses the term ‘Black’ with the capitalization of the letter ‘b.’ This terminology has also been used in the feminist literature, as discussed later in the chapter, again with a capital ‘b.’ We have followed this lead in this chapter. For arguments against the use of the label ‘Black,’ see Brah (1996). 3. This is not to suggest that resistance and/or change are non-existent. See, for example, Taylor (1993), who has documented the activities of ethnic minority environmental groups, and Askins (2006), who has detailed the use of British National Parks by people with Asian and African-Caribbean backgrounds. 4. These are pseudonyms. 5. As Shaw (2006, 865) astutely observes, ‘whiteness is a process that not only racializes and excludes, but de-ethnicizes and includes otherwise ethnicized groups, as required.’ Commentators have suggested that typically ‘the Italians’ in Australia are viewed as ‘white enough’ (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2003, 73). However, as the comments from Julia earlier in the chapter indicate, this is not always the case. They may ‘not be white enough,’ for example, to join the more established and traditional farm women’s groups.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 1. See Panelli (2006) for a recent review of the literature on gender and rural communities. 2. What is interesting in George’s narrative is the absence of other self-employed people in his rural community, despite his own background as a small business person.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 1. However, feminist historians in particular have made visible single women’s contributions in accounts of rural development (e.g. Hunter 2001; Sommestad and McMurray 1998).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6 1. Disability terminology debates add to the tension. Rohrer (2005, 38) notes, ‘Within disability studies, debate over language is complicated and dynamic. Morris (1993) writes that the term ‘disabled people’ is politically important as it gives ‘emphasis to how society oppresses people with a whole range of impairments’ (see also Gleeson 1999). However, generally disability activists have struggled for language that focuses on the person rather than the disability (‘person with a disability’ rather than ‘suffers from’, ‘victim of,’ or ‘the disabled’)’ (Wendell 1989). We have adopted this perspective in using language in this chapter. We use the term ‘feminist disability scholars’ when that is how writers have referred to themselves. 2. See, however, the special editions of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2003); Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy (2001, 2002); National Women’s Studies Association Journal (2002); and Signs (2005). 3. We do not suggest that there is a unitary social model. As made clear throughout this chapter, there are many variants on the social model as demonstrated by the increasingly used notion ‘social models’ (Sheldon 2005, 118).

154 Notes 4. Given the critical importance of naming and language in disability studies, and the disparate views on the issue, whenever we use descriptors of a writer we draw upon their own language. 5. Illustrative of the heated nature of these debates is the exchange between Golledge (1996), Imrie (1996), Gleeson (1996), and Butler (1994) in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 6. The Flying Doctors is short for The Royal Flying Doctor Service, an aerial service providing medical support (‘flying doctors’) to remote parts of Australia.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7 1. Caution is required in assuming the rural is synonymous with poverty and poor social infrastructure, as some rural communities are experiencing greater average wealth than their urban counterparts (Ziembroski and Breiding 2006). 2. This chapter focuses on questions of aging for rural women and men living in towns. It does not specifically address aging for those engaged in agriculture or who have retired from agriculture—see the Australian study conducted by Foskey (2005) for further discussions on aging and farming women and men. 3. This is not to suggest that the experiences of aging of those who move to a rural location later in life are of less relevance or less worthy of research, but just to highlight the necessity for focusing this project, given the paucity of work on rurality and aging.

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Index

Page numbers in bold refer to figures.

A Aboriginal Australians see Indigenous Australians Abram, S. 58 absence of gender 59–60 Adams, E. C. 45–6 Adelaide 25, 27, 28 Adib, A. 149 Adkins, L. 91 Adler, G. 132 Afro-Caribbeans 41, 153 Agg, J. 61 aging 19, 117–36, 141, 145, 149: caring and social capital 129–33; embodied perceptions 133–5; feminist studies 121–4; literature 118–24; research methodology 124–5; social belonging 125–9 Agyeman, J. 41, 42, 153 Ahmed, Sara 43–4, 145, 151 Alice Springs 27, 32 Alsop, R. 2, 83 ambivalence toward rurality 1, 70 Amos, V. 45 Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands 17, 21, 25, 26–8, 27, 152 Andersen, M. L. 149 Anderson, K. 143 Ang, I. 40 Anglo-Saxons 39, 40, 47, 48, 52, 125 Anthias, F. 11, 64 anti-categorical complexity 12 Arab Australians 40 Archer, L. 10 Asian Australians 40, 141, 147 Askins, K. 153 asylum seekers 41–2

Australian Broadcasting Corporation 19, 101, 106 Australian Research Council 85 Australian Story 19, 101, 106–16

B Beck, U. 65 Begum, M. 104 Bell, Dianne 81, 85, 152 Bell, Michael Mayerfield 62, 63, 76 benign whiteness 24 Berger, E. D. 123 bisexuality 81 black feminism 43–5, 151, 153 bodily perceptions of aging 133–5 body and emotions, importance of 19–20 Bola, M. 11 Bondi, L. 94, 143 Bonnett, A. 46 Booth, S. 102 Bourdieu, P. 64 Bowditch, K. 82 Bowlby, Sophia 106 Brah, A. 146, 148 Brandth, B. 112, 142 Brewster, A. 23 Brickell, C. 88 Britain see United Kingdom Bryant, Lia 25ff., 64, 71 Bullington, J. 141 Burman, E. 10 Burns, Nicola 102, 103, 144 Butler, Ruth 106 Butler, T. 2

C Campbell, A. 32 Campbell, H. 82

190 Index Canada 3, 39, 64 Canberra 49 capitalism 62 Carby, Hazel 44 Casalanti, Toni 117, 121 Chakraborti, N. 41, 42, 55, 143 Chalmers, A. I. 118, 120 Chávez, S. 63, 71 class 18, 47, 58–78, 139, 143ff.: in early rural studies 59–60; in feminist literature 61–3, 64–7; in rural restructuring literature 60–61; recent analyses 63–4; research methodology 67–8; selfworth and moral values 71–6; slipperiness 68–70 Cloke, Paul 4ff., 15, 41, 42, 56, 61 Colebrook Home 28 Collins, P. H. 11, 29 community 4 competitive suffering paradigm 122 conclusion 137–50: embodied subjects 138–42; emotions 142–6; intersectionality 146–50 country kids 7 Country Living campaign 109 country woman 16 Country Women’s Association 39, 47–8 Crenshaw, Kimberle 11, 13 Crompton, R. 67 Crow, Liz 104, 105–6 Cunliffe, E. 29 Cuomo, C. J. 23

D Davidson, K. 121 Davis, K. 11–12, 15, 149 Deridda, Jacques 10–11 difference 10–11, 21, 40, 51 disability 16, 19, 50, 101–16, 140, 144–5: Australian Story 106–16; background 102–3; feminist perspective 103–6; research methodology 106–7 Dorfman, L. T. 119 double jeopardy thesis 121 Drought Policy Review 152 Dunn, K. M. 40, 42 Dyck, I. 141, 144

E Eden Hills 28 embodied subjects 133–5, 138–42 emotions 142–6

employment and aging 123 Esuantsiwa Goldsmith, J. 42 ethnicities 17–18, 39–57, 139, 143, 146: agenda for change? 54–6; background 41–6; feminist studies 43–6; racialized other rural women 51–4; research methodology 46–7; whiteness of the farm women’s network 47–51 European colonization 22 Evans, N. 144

F factory closures and class 60 family, business and marriage 86–9 family history: and aging 127–8; and class 72–4 farming 31–3, 62, 139, 143–4, 147: and marriage 91, 93–6; and moral worth 71–6 Fee, M. 151, 152 feminist studies 141: aging 121–4, 135; black 43–5; class 61–3, 64–7; disability 101, 103–6; ethnicities 43–6; heterosexuality 82–5; white 45–6 Fennell, G. 121 Fenstermaker, S. 11 Ferber, A. L. 44, 45 Fitzgerald, T. 152 Fitzsimmons, A. 2 Flying Doctors 109, 110, 153 Forsyth, A. 81 Foskey, R. 154 Foucault, Michel 65, 122 fourth age 117 frailty card 123 Frankenberg, Ruth 23, 54, 151 Frye, Marilyn 45 functional approach to rurality 4

G Gardner, H. 55 Garland, J. 41, 42, 55 Garland-Thomson, R. 101, 113, 115, 145 Gemeinshaft 4 gentrification 61 gerontology 121; see also aging Gesellschaft 4 Gibson, Chris 6, 35–6, 143 Gibson-Graham, J. 3, 62, 63, 77 Gill, F. 86 Gill, N. 33, 35, 147

Index Gillies, V. 92 good marriage 80, 89–93, 144 Goodley, D. 106 Gorman-Murray, A. 6 Grace, M. 35, 39 Grenier, A. 123–4 Guerrier, Y. 149 Gullifer, J. 129 Gypsy-Travelers 43, 52

H Hage, G. 55, 151 Haggis, Jane 37, 55 Hall, K. Q. 23 Hanley, J. 123–4 Haraway, Donna 25 Harrison, L. 82 Hatzidmitriadou, E. 118 Hennesy, R. 83 heteronormativity 16, 19, 83, 100 heterosexuality 18–19, 79–100, 108, 109, 115, 140, 141, 146, 149: family, business and marriage 86–9; gender and heterosexuality 82–3; good marriage 89–93; intersections of gender and sexuality 83–5; research methodology 85–6; spatial intersections 93–6; theorizing gender and sexuality 80–85 Hey, V. 78 Highlands of Scotland 103, 144 Hillier, L. 82 Hillyer, B. 105 Hochschild, A. R. 145 Hoggart, K. 63 Holland, J. 24, 25 Holloway, S. L. 43, 52, 143 Holt, Lillian 23, 138 homelands 27, 28–9, 33, 143 homosexuality 80–81 Hook, D. 139 hooks, bell 45 Hoon, E. 64 Hopgood, L. 102 Hubbard, P. 41 Huggins, J. 22, 35 Hughes, A. 7 Hughes, B. 113 Hull, Gloria T. 44 Huntington, Orville 25

191

imperialism 31 India 46, 48 indigeneity 15, 17, 21–38, 138, 147: farming 31–3; feminist theorizing 22–3; gender and rurality 34–5; home, place, and space 26–34; homelands 28–9; land issues 33–4; reproduction and future work 96–9; research methodology 23–6; rural communities 29–31 Indigenous Australians 15, 17, 21ff., 40, 54, 67, 147, 151, 152 Ingraham, C. 96 in-place aging 124, 125–6 inscribing class 64–7 inter-categorical complexity 13, 148 intersectionality 2, 4, 10–14, 49, 115, 146–50 intersections: gender and sexuality 83–5; spatial 93–6 intimacy, marriage and farming 93–6 intra-categorical complexity 12, 148 introduction 1–20: intersectionality 10–14; overview 17–20; research methodology 14–17; rural idyll 6–8; the other 8–9; what is rurality? 4–5 Ireland 39, 82 Italians 47, 54

J Jackson, Stevi 19, 79, 83ff., 90, 98 Japan 3 Johnston, L. 109 Joseph, A. E. 118, 120

K Kendall, M. 102 Killean, M. B. 102 King, N. 19 Kirkey, K. 81 Knapp, A. 10 Knoishi, S. 138 Kobayashi, A. 51 Koskela, H. 87 Krekula, C. 121ff. Krout, J. A. 118, 120

L

I

land issues 33–4

ideal marriage 89 Iezzoni, L. I. 102

Langton, Marcia 22, 35 Laslett, P. 117

192 Index Lawson, Henry 6 Lennie, J. 35, 39 Lennon, K. 2 lesbian women and aging 122–3 Leyshon, M. 82 liberal feminism 10 Liepins, R. 39, 71 Little, Jo 7–8, 9, 15, 56, 62, 79, 81–2, 88, 95, 108–9, 142 Lloyd, M. 104 lone parents 7 Longhurst, Robyn 106 Lorde, Audre 44 Lowe, P. 117, 118, 120, 132 Lowndes, V. 131

M McCall, L. 12–13, 148 McDowell, L. 13, 28, 65 McIntosh, Peggy 46 McIntyre, A. 147 McMullin, J. A. 123 Makris, M. 42 Malta 48 marriage: family and business 86–9; good 80, 89–93; intimacy and farming 93–6 Marxist political economy 59, 60, 63 Massey, Doreen 5 Meals on Wheels 130 Melbourne 27, 55 Mexicans 63 Milbourne, P. 7, 8 Milne, A. 118, 119 Mirza, H. 45 moral boundary drawing 74 moral values and self-worth 71–6 Moreton-Robinson, Aileen 22ff., 35, 138, 151, 152 Morris, E. W. 56 Morris, J. 104, 153 Moss, S. Z. and M. S. 129 multinationals 60–61 Murdoch, J. 8, 56 Muslims 42

N Nairn, K. 141 Nakata, M. 31, 138 Native Title 29, 151 Nayak, A. 45, 46 Neal, S. 41, 47, 51, 56 Nelson, L. 43 Nelson, Topsy Napurrla 152

Netherlands 40 new racisms 40 New South Wales 27, 67, 85, 88, 96ff. New Zealand 3, 67, 82, 109, 120 Newby, Howard 58, 59–60 Ngaanyatjarra language and people 26 Nicoll, P. 23, 24 Nogueira, C. 124 Norman, K. 42 Northern Territory 26, 27, 152 Norway 39, 112 NUDIST system 86

O O’Day, B. L. 102 old racisms 40 Oliver, Michael 104, 106 orientalism 9 other, the 7, 8–9, 21, 31, 139 overview of book 17–20

P Panelli, R. 35, 39, 49, 77, 79, 82, 95, 108–9, 153 Parmar, P. 45 Parr, Hester 102, 103, 144 Paterson, A. 33 Paterson, Banjo 6 Paterson, K. 113 patriarchy 62 patrilineal connections 71–6, 68, 91, 147 Paul, C. 124 Peake, L. 51 Phillips, M. 60, 61, 63 Philo, Chris 8, 57, 102, 103, 144 Phoenix, A. 49, 148 Pini, Barbara 7, 25ff., 39, 49, 53, 56, 80, 85, 86, 112 Pit Lands 32 I is best put under Pitjantiatjara lands, language and people Pitjantjatjara Land Rights Act 1981 27, 28 Pitjantjatjara language and people 26, 27, 28 Pocock, B. 65 Poiner, G. 62, 63, 77 political economy approach to rurality 4–5 Port Augusta 42 postmodern feminism 2, 45 Pratt, A. 8, 56 Price, L. 144

Index privacy 95 privileges of whiteness 40 Probyn, Elspeth 36, 143 Pukatja 28 Putnam, R. D. 131

Q Queensland 3, 19, 27, 67, 85, 89, 93, 94, 107, 118, 124, 126

R racialized other 48, 51–4, 139 racism 40ff., 55 radical feminism 10 RamazanoZlu, C. 2, 24, 25 Ramzan, Bebe 16, 17, 21, 22, 25–35, 40, 143, 147, 152 Rapley, M. 102 Ray, C. 131 Rea, N. 32 Reay, D. 51, 65, 143 reproduction and future work 96–9 Reynolds, T. 44 Ribeiro, O. 124, 129, 130 Rich, Adrienne 45 Richardson, Dianne 79, 83, 96 Riggs, D. W. 24, 139 Riverland 27, 67 Roberts, Tom 6 Robinson, V. 55 Rockhampton 67 Rohrer, J. 153 Rose, D. 61, 143 Rose, Gillian 93 Rottunda, S. 132 Rudd, Steele 6 rural communities 29–31 rural idyll 4, 6–8, 20, 147 rural restructuring literature 60–61 Rural Women’s Summit 2008 49, 50 Russell, Cherry 122ff. Russell, L. 151, 152

S Said, Edward 9 St Pierre, E. A. 2 Savage, M. 40, 66, 126, 128 Sayer, M. 66, 75, 76 Schech, Susanne 37, 55 Scotland 43, 103, 144 Scott, J. 2 Scott, Patricia Bell 44 self-worth and moral values 71–6 Shakespeare, T. 104–5, 106

193

shame and class 66 Shann, Gayle and Mac 19, 107–16, 117, 140, 145, 149 Shaw, W. S. 29, 153 Sheldon, Alison 105 Shenk, D. B. 119 Short, B. 6–7 Silver, C. B. 129 Sizemore, D. S. 42 Skeggs, Beverley 58, 59, 65, 66, 68, 76, 149 Slater, Lisa 138 Slevin, K. 117, 121, 122 slipperiness of class 68–70 Smith, Barbara 44 Smith, S. J. 43, 143 Snipp, C. M. 41 social belonging and aging 125–9 social constructionism 5, 6–8 socialist feminism 10 society 4 Somerville, Margaret 152 South Australia 21, 26, 27, 27, 42, 67, 75, 89ff. Southern Europeans 47, 48, 141, 147 The series editors told us to not use a capital for southern European spatial intersections 93–6 Speakman, L. 117, 118, 120, 132 Spooner, R. 41, 42 sport 126–7 Standfield, R. S. 24 Stone, S. D. 114 stratification theory 64 Stratton, H. 151 Sweden 42 Sydney 27, 29, 55

T Taylor, D. E. 153 Teariki, C. 24 Teather, E. 39 Tedmanson, Deirdre 25 terra nullius 22, 34 Thien, D. 144 third age 117 third-wave feminism 2 Thompson, A. P. 129 Tönnies, F. 4 Tonts, Matthew 127 Torres Strait Islanders 15, 50, 151 Tregaskis, C. 106 Turkey 48 2020 Future Forum 49ff.

194

Index

Twigg, Julia 122, 133–4, 141 Tyler, K. 43

U United Kingdom 3, 6, 13, 41, 43, 67, 119, 125, 128 United States 3, 39, 41ff., 63, 119

V Valentine, G. 11, 13, 82, 85 values associated with rurality 6–7 van den Hoonaard, Deborah K. 121, 129

W Wagga Wagga 27, 67 Waitt, G. R. 6, 29, 34, 143 Walters, S. 47, 51, 56 Ware, Vron 46 Watson, N. 106 Weberian analysis of class 59 Wendell, Susan 105, 114 Wenger, C. 118, 120 West, C. 11 Western Australia 3, 26, 27 what is rurality? 4 I would put this just under rural as rurality

perhaps with a—and meanings as I don’t think people will find it heere What not to Wear (BBC) 66 whiteness 16, 22–3, 32, 33, 37ff.: feminist studies 45–6 Widdowfield, R. 7 Wild, Ron 59–60 Williams, C. 42, 62 Willms, J. 65 Wirf, L. 32 Wiseman, J, 118 ‘With this Ring’ 101, 107–16, 140, 144 Wittig, M. 90 Witz, A. 140 women as category 10 women of color 17 Women’s Institute 47, 51 Wright, E. O. 64

Y Yankunytjatjara language and people 26, 27, 28 Yodanis, C. 64 Young Farmers’ Group 47, 51 Yuval-Davies, N. 11, 13