Reshaping Gender and Class in Rural Spaces

Belinda Leach, Barbara Pini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409402916
• eBook ISBN: 9781317065432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Leach and Pini bring together empirical and theoretical studies that consider the intersections of class, gender and rurality. Each chapter engages with current debates on these concepts to explore them in the context of contemporary social and economic transformations in which global processes that reconstitute gender and class interconnect with and take shape in a particular form of locality - the rural. The book is innovative in that it: - responds to calls for more critical work on the rural 'other' - contributes to scholarship on gender and rurality, but does so through the lens of class. This book places the question of gender, rurality and difference at its centre through its focus on class - addresses the urban bias of much class scholarship as well as the lack of gender analysis in much rural and class academic work - focuses on the ways that class mediates the construction and practices of rural men/masculinities and rural women/femininities - challenges prevalent (and divergent) assumptions with chapters utilising contemporary theorisations of class With the empirical strongly grounded in theory, this book will appeal to scholars working in the fields of gender, rurality, identity, and class studies.

1 Transformations of Class and Gender in the Globalized Countryside: An Introduction

Barbara Pini and Belinda Leach

DOI: 10.4324/9781315605630-1

As the title suggests, this book addresses how regimes of gender and class intersect, change and ramify in the context of rurality. The premise for such a book is multilayered. Primarily our concern is with a term that today is so little used in academic discourse, that is, social justice. Indeed, its virtual disappearance from the vocabularies of academics and policy makers mirrors the erasure of the nomenclature of class in favour of what may be seen as more politically palatable notions such as ‘social inclusion’ or ‘social wellbeing’. Yet class matters. It is a key determining factor in terms of poverty as well as mediates material access to all aspects of life from housing and education to transport and health. Thus, to talk of the growing income disparities between urban and rural areas, the lower levels of education, the higher mortality rates or the increasing unemployment in non-metropolitan communities is to talk about class. This is, however, an increasingly uncommon link for scholars and governments to make.

The disconnect between ruminations about social disadvantage and the notion of class in contemporary times is, as we explain in more detail below, related to a number of factors, but has particular implications in terms of social justice in rural areas. As any student of rurality will know, rural spaces have typically been imagined and constructed as classless. This perspective has been evident in scholarly as well as popular knowledges, practices and discourses. What is important to those of us concerned with contributing to more equitable rural communities is that it has been politically advantageous for particular groups to claim rural environments as classless so that they could position their interests and experiences as legitimate, imperative and, ultimately, shared by all. To give prominence to class based differences in rural areas disrupts this hegemony and suggests that aspects of one’s class position such as financial status, employment status or ownership of property will render the claims you make on the state quite distinct. The category ‘rural woman’, for example, has been mobilized for political gain in recent decades across a range of western industrial nations, yet it has rarely been named as a classed position whether it be in terms of the possession of capital or the involvement in specific forms of agricultural produce (Bryant and Pini 2011). Muting the very distinct middle-class location of this identity category has meant that it is middle-class concerns which have been addressed by government as part of the so-called ‘rural women’s movement’, such as, for example, a concern with women’s leadership on agricultural organizations and a concern with state funding for farmers as a result of factors like drought or restructuring. We are not, of course, suggesting that these are unimportant issues, but merely emphasizing that they are unlikely to be the central concerns of the larger population of ‘rural women’ who are not property owning agriculturalists involved in higher status commodities. To identify agendas around ‘rural women’ as narrowly classed, is to open up space for other non-metropolitan women with different class biographies to have their voices heard. This, as we explore more fully below, is of increasing importance given the radical changes occurring in rural spaces.

Change and Rurality

Rural areas reshape themselves, and are reshaped, through the vagaries of the global economy, layering on to existing social and economic relations and cultural meanings that have particular contours and tenacity in the rural. Rural areas have been seriously affected by global shifts over the past several decades. Economic change, as capital more deeply penetrates some rural areas and withdraws to a greater or lesser extent from others, has, we argue, major implications for how class and gender are lived and experienced in those areas. These dynamics are considerably different from their manifestations in urban places, leading the contributors to this book to begin from the premise that ‘place matters;’ in this case that the reshaping taking place in rural regions deserves specific attention.

Globally, rural areas have been subjected in recent decades to change taking place at an unprecedented pace and with dramatic consequences for reshaping the rural. These changes are important in two ways. First, they alter rural economies in material ways that eliminate historically entrenched aspects of rural life while introducing new ones. Second, they challenge rural myths and meanings in ways that destabilize but also potentially reconstitute rural ideologies.

The agriculture sector has been restructured through growing capitalization and commercialization, throwing many farms that adhere to a family owned and operated model into tailspins of debt (Gray and Lawrence 2002, Lobao 1990, Ghorayshi 2008) and leading them to consider new ways to address their sustainability. As smaller farms have become increasingly difficult to maintain, farmers have turned to new ways to generate income, from farm gate sales to bed and breakfast, to off farm work; what analysts have termed pluriactivity (Fuller 1990, Salmi 2005, Evans and Ilbery1993). Attention to pluriactivity, dating from the 1980s, raised new and challenging questions for both gender and class analysts (Whatmore 1991), as farm household divisions of labour stretched beyond the farm enterprise and into wage labour and new forms of commodity production. The inverse of farmers move out from the farm towards alternative sources of income is their strategy of attempting to put the family farm on a firmer footing by pulling in lower cost labour from new sources, most especially low wage countries. In a more immediate way than other industries, agriculture is also held hostage by the uncertainty of climate change, with differential effects on men’s and women’s lives (Yocogan-Diano and Kashiwazaki 2009).

The other major economic activity that in the past has shaped rural regions globally is resource extraction. Wood, fish and minerals found in specific places have generated communities dedicated to removing and sometimes processing them. There is a well established literature that has examined the ways in which single resource communities are driven by class (e.g., Lucas 1971, Williamson 1982, Williams 1981) in ways starkly demonstrated by the social relations of these communities. More recently attention to gender (Luxton 1980, Mayes and Pini 2010) has been prompted by the fact that most resource related jobs in these communities have been intended only for men. Fishing dependent communities in the global North have been devastated by declining fish stocks and bans on fishing, while in the global South fish farming expands (Neis et al. 2005). These related trends undermine the cultural significance of locally embedded ways of life, with classed and gendered consequences in particular communities.

International economic shifts have made these activities in rural communities more significant than ever. Global trade has established minerals as one of the more ‘safe’ commodities for investment, leading to expanded exploration in many parts of the world. The international crisis in oil production has intensified the stakes for energy extraction in resource rich regions. Environmentally dangerous practices such as tar sands development and pipeline routes through sensitive ecosystems and the search for alternative energy sources such as wind farms, all provide new contexts for reshaping the social dynamics of rural areas.

These two major sectors of activity driving rural economies have in some regions also generated manufacturing activity, as food products are processed and the implements needed, especially for agriculture, are made close by (Winson and Leach 2002). In other places, rural workers have been employed by urban manufacturers, working around agricultural cycles (Rayside 1991). Global shifts have affected rural manufacturing through the concentration of capital and consolidation of production in a more limited numbers of sites. As a result, it is in the service sector that most rural job growth is occurring (Green 2007, Goe, Noonan and Thurston 2003). In rural areas this has taken the form of an expanded tourist industry, but it is also associated with the service requirements of migrants to rural communities from cities (Woods 2007). These changes have buffeted rural economies, with particular implications for working-class women who had found work in these sectors when they were unable to do so in resources. The rise in service sector jobs in rural communities has been associated more with those at the lower end of the wage scale, largely in the retail sector than, for example, at the higher end in financial services. Exacerbating the slow growth of better paid service sector jobs has been the effects of government services restructuring, which has reduced the numbers of public sector jobs (teaching, nursing, government officials), jobs that had formerly been among the best jobs that women were able to hold in rural areas (Leach 1999). Related has been the dramatic reconfiguration of the welfare state in Western industrial nations which has had critical implications for already disadvantaged rural groups such as the poor, people with a disability, the unemployed and the aged (White et al. 2003, Milbourne 2004, 2010).

What emerges from this discussion is a picture of rural spaces as dynamic and varied, both of these affected by capital’s particular interest in those spaces that are rich in resources or agricultural potential, and a parallel disinterest in those deemed to be of no value. All of these areas then struggle through distributing and redistributing resources and reframing cultural meanings where relations of gender, class and racializations intersect with the particularities of the rural. In all of these processes, power is a critical consideration, as it is invested in property, but also as relational and mobilized through institutional processes (Panelli 2006: 78).

In order to understand the ways in which rural spaces are being reshaped, the contributors to this volume engage with theoretical frameworks for analysing class and gender that have developed both within the field of rural studies and outside of it. It is to developments in the latter, that is, theoretical understandings of class, to which we now turn.

Theorizing Class

The very limited attention to class in contemporary rural studies reflects a wider retreat from class analyses across the social sciences in recent decades. This is in contrast to the fundamental place class had traditionally enjoyed in rural social studies and broader disciplinary fields. As a result those who have continued to argue for the importance of class have been counselled to ‘get over it’ (Hey 2006: 295) and/or positioned as intellectually archaic (Savage 2002). The scholarly recoiling from class analyses was afforded considerable currency in the latter part of the twentieth century, with commentaries from Giddens (1991), Beck (1992) and Bauman (2000) arguing that as a result of changes in fields such as employment relations and technology, class was no longer a relevant identity or political category. They promulgated instead notions of ‘individualization’, ‘reflexive modernization’ and ‘liquid modernity’. Such claims have subsequently been subject to detailed critiques in the literature. Nominated conceptual weaknesses and ambivalences of the ‘death of class’ thesis have included that it lacks empirical grounding, relies upon narrow and contested definitions of class, and generalizes the experiences of the middle class to the world at large (e.g., Atkinson 2007). The latter issue has been extrapolated in feminist critiques which have pointed to the gendered assumptions upon which they are based as well as gendered disparities in the new economic orders of globalization, neo-liberalism and twenty-first century capitalism. Adkins (1998, 2001, 2002, 2004), for example, argues that due to continuing inequality in the domestic division of labour and ongoing gendered occupational segregation, including in new knowledge industries, men and women are not equally placed to take up the biography of the ‘individualized’ worker of postmodern times. Rather, she contends that it is men who are the ‘reflexivity gainers’ and women who are the ‘reflexivity losers’ in the current economic realm. McDowell (2006: 828) takes up this argument about the ongoing importance of structural inequalities but takes it further chiding feminists for continuing to privilege only gender when there is significant evidence to suggest that it is the intersections between gender and class which may be most critical ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Routledge Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Transformations of Class and Gender in the Globalized Countryside: An Introduction
• 2 Material, Cultural, Moral and Emotional Inscriptions of Class and Gender: Impressions from Gentrified Rural Britain
• 3 Articulating Social Class: Farm Women’s Competing Visions of the Family Farm
• 4 ‘Picking Blueberries and Indian Women Go Hand in Hand’: The Role of Gender and Ethnicity in the Division of Agricultural Labour in Woolgoolga, New South Wales, Australia
• 5 Re-examining the Social Relations of the Canadian ‘Family Farm’: Migrant Women Farm Workers in Rural Canada
• 6 Configurations of Gender, Class and Rurality in Resource Affected Rural Australia
• 7 Jobs for Women? Gender and Class in Ontario’s Ruralized Automotive Manufacturing Industry
• 8 Digging Deeper: Rural Appalachian Women Miners’ Reconstruction of Gender in a Class Based Community
• 9 Class, Rurality and Lone Parents’ Connections with Waged Labour: The Mediating Influences of Relational Assets and Human Capital
• 10 Not all Bright Lights, Big City? Classed Intersections in Urban and Rural Sexual Geographies
• 11 Terms of Engagement: The Intersections Among Gender, Class and Race in Canadian Sustainable Forest Management
• 12 The ‘Hidden Injuries’ of Class and Gender among Rural Teenagers
• Index