Identifying the Gender Order within Neoliberal Australian Agricultural Policy

Title
Identifying the Gender Order within Neoliberal Australian Agricultural Policy
Author(s)
Newsome, Lucie
Type of document
Journal Article
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
Routledge
Place of publication
United Kingdom
DOI
10.1080/13545701.2025.2595186
Abstract

Neoliberal states construct gender roles, gender norms, and gender orders in ways that reflect and legitimate the logic of the market. This study examines state interventions within the population of Australian women in agriculture and rural communities from 2013–20. It investigates the rationale, gendered symbolic spatial representation of tasks, types of interventions, and the characteristics promoted by policies and programs. Three ideal subjectivities emerge: the supportive wife holding the farming family together; the entrepreneurial farm partner; and the builder of resilient rural communities. Reconfiguring gendered identities allows for the extraction of greater surplus from this population, whether it be economically through improved farm viability or socially through resilient farm families and rural communities. None of these subjectivities revalue women’s contribution or disrupt unequal access to farm resources such as land. This study demonstrates how traditional gender orders may be re-embedded in neoliberal states, despite discourses of women’s empowerment.

Link
ISSN
1466-4372
1354-5701
Start page
1
End page
28

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