Beyond farming women: queering gender, work and family farms

Abstract

The issue of gender and agriculture has been on the research agendas of civil society organisations, governments, and academia since the 1970s. Starting from the role of women in agriculture, research has mainly focused on the gendered division of work and the normative constitution of the farm as masculine. Although the gendered division of work has been questioned, the idea of binary gender has mostly been taken as a given. This explorative research shifts the attention from the production of (traditional) gender roles to the making and unmaking of binary gender. An ethnographic study of four farms in Switzerland is drawn on to explore queer farming practices and investigate how queer farmers navigate gender normativity and what this tells us about gender in agriculture more broadly. After considering the mechanisms through which queer farmers are discouraged from farming as a livelihood on the basis of their sex, gender or sexuality, this article argues that queer farmers de- and re-construct gender and farming identities differently, which has research and policy implications for a more diverse and resilient rurality.