Gender and Organic Agriculture: A Local and Partisan Position

Martha McMahon

One can approach the study of gender and organic farming in a variety of ways. One is to use gender as a variable and to compare and contrast organic and conventional farming with respect to gender and such other variables as the division of labor, decision making, participation, land or farm ownership, capitalization, ideology and so on. Another is to use women organic farmers' experiences as sites of engagement, a place from which to start making visible the gendered and complex social relationships that organize both the production and distribution of food but also to explore the culturally inscribed embodied selves of post/high modernity whose "consumer preferences" and concerns with health, risk and body regulation and modification have provided much of the market for organic produce.

Whereas the modern/post-modern subject has been the subject of a great deal of sophisticated sociological theorizing on consumption and identity, it has been little applied to organic food or farming. Such a strategy implies neither a uniform nor essentialized notion of women organic farmers but conceptualizes gender as offering unique opportunities for critical examination of workings of power rather than an occasion for representation. This, therefore, is to depart from the more conventional use of gender as a variable or as a characteristic of individuals in much sociological research to one drawn more directly from feminist theorizing of gender.

The data for this paper come from my own experience as a farmer and from interviews with women organic farmers in Ireland and in British Columbia. By working from the different experiences of particular women farmers in two separate localities, my paper will seek to explore the potential of organic farming to organize agriculture and food production in new ways that are both ecologically and socially just, and hopefully make a contribution to the current debates over conventionalization and capitalization in organic farming.

Full Paper

Source
Presented at the First Annual Conference for Social Research in Organic Agriculture. Guelph, Ontario. January 2004


Author Location and Affiliation
Department of Sociology, University of Victoria,mcmahon@uvic.ca


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