Journal article
Being a woman with the “skills of a man”: negotiating gender in the 21st century US Corn Belt
Agriculture and human values, Vol.41(3), pp.1053-1068
01/25/2024
DOI: 10.1007/s10460-023-10538-z
Abstract
Abstract There has been broad interest in the so-called rise of women farmers in United States (US) agriculture. Researchers have elucidated the diverse ways farmers ‘perform’ gender, while also examining how engaging in a masculine-coded industry like agriculture shapes individuals’ gendered identities as well as their social and mental wellbeing. While illuminating, this work is mostly focused on sustainable or direct-market farmers, with surprisingly little research examining women on conventional row crops operations. This paper works to fill this empirical gap and further theorize gender-agriculture intersections through analyzing interviews with Iowa women row-crop farmers to understand the ways they perceive their gendered identities, and how they see them shaping their farming experience and mental wellbeing. Deploying a conceptual understanding of gender as both discursive and embodied as well as relational and fluid, I find respondents see themselves operating in a somewhat liminal gender identity, where they feel adept at moving between masculinized spaces of agriculture and more feminized domains of homes and office jobs. Critically, while women rarely expressed stress about doing “masculine” coded agricultural labor, they had more complex feelings towards either disliking or imperfectly completing feminized care and reproductive labor. Younger women expressed particular ambivalence about assuming the identity of farmer while also fulfilling gendered norms around (heterosexual) marriage and childbearing. The liminality of women’s gender performance also cut both ways, and while they feel able to access different gendered spaces some feel they are not fully accepted in either. I conclude by reflecting on what these particular forms of gendered subjectivity might mean for women’s mental wellbeing and how agencies might better support gender equity in agriculture.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Being a woman with the “skills of a man”: negotiating gender in the 21st century US Corn Belt
- Creators
- Carly E. Nichols - University of Iowa
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Agriculture and human values, Vol.41(3), pp.1053-1068
- DOI
- 10.1007/s10460-023-10538-z
- ISSN
- 0889-048X
- eISSN
- 1572-8366
- Grant note
- DOI: 10.13039/100000125, name: National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, award: 5 U19 OH008868
- Language
- English
- Electronic publication date
- 01/25/2024
- Academic Unit
- Interdisciplinary Programs; Geographical and Sustainability Sciences
- Record Identifier
- 9984555556102771
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