Young Farmers, Masculinities And The Embodiment Of Farming Practices In An Australian Setting

Abstract

In the past decade a growing body of work situated at the intersection of masculinity and agriculture has emerged in the literature of rural sociology and human geography. A number of these studies have examined masculinity through discursive analytical frameworks which focus on the symbolic, cultural and embodied representations of what it is to be masculine in agriculture. It is with the latter that this paper is concerned. Here gender is located in a social constructionist framework and understood as something that is produced as a set of cultural practices which constitute men’s and women’s bodies in different ways. Two focus group discussions were conducted with ten young male dairy farmers in northern Victoria. A comparative analysis of the data suggests that perceptions from the masculine perspective of the non-farm work of women could be changing away from a traditional emphasis of a supportive and administrative role toward one where women’s roles are acknowledged more as managerial in terms of the financial management of dairy farms. What also emerges from the young farmers’ discourses is a degree of doubt and uncertainty about themselves and their own identities as managers. It would appear that they are far more confident in their roles as hands on farmers doing the outdoor physical work.