The gendering of farming and agricultural politics: a matter of discourse and power

Agricultural geography has long been a predominantly economic field of inquiry. Recently, however, wider rural studies have incorporated more cultural approaches, and have considered the notion of discourse as a way of understanding the social construction of spaces and the social relations that are found in rural settings. Discourse is a useful medium for studying how gender is socially constructed within agriculture. Thus, this paper documents how Australian and New Zealand agriculture is gendered through media and organisational discourses. It draws on literature addressing discourse and gender in agriculture, and then documents how different understandings of gender are developed through contrasting narratives of masculinity and femininity. The narratives are shown to be circulating through agriculture at both farm and industry levels. Finally, this set of location-specific readings is outlined to indicate how discourses enable the maintenance or modification of gendered power relations that operate on farms and in agricultural politics.