Creating and consuming the heartland: Symbolic boundaries in representations of femininity and rurality in U.S. Magazines

Abstract

Scholars of rural studies have investigated a range of places and subcultures to identify varieties of rural masculinity—both new and old—and to understand how they shape social relations (e.g., Bell, 2004; Campbell, 2000; Hennen, 2008). Yet a similarly energetic effort to understand rural femininity and its consequences on social life is lacking. Simultaneously, while cultural studies of boundary-making processes have intensified in recent years, more work is needed to understand how “cultural narratives” shape gendered boundary-making processes (Lamont and Molnar, 2002). In this article we ask: how do representations of rural femininities vary across different media sources? And, how do symbolic boundaries in these representations work to valorize specific rural femininities? Drawing in part on the recent emergence of a hip, countryside consumerism, we analyze gender on the symbolic and cultural level, making use of images and language to understand how representations of rurality and femininity intersect. Analyzing content from two magazines in different genres, Successful Farmer and Country Living, our findings revealed that rural femininities are contextual and depend on multiple and often shifting understandings of both rurality and femininity. We specifically identified two distinct forms of rural femininity, which we refer to as productivist rural femininity and transformative country chic. Further, we found that in both magazines symbolic boundary-making relied on the gendered division of labor to construct rural femininities, but that Country Living tended to use symbols of social class to portray desirable rural femininity, more so than Successful Farming. The article concludes with a discussion of further directions for the study of rural femininities and symbolic boundaries.