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Agri-culture is a set of practices to cultivate land and keep animals to produce food
and other goods. It is also a socio-cultural practice. It involves norms for who produces
what, when and how that are articulated, among other things, in a gendered division
of work and labour. These govern the tasks that are considered suitable for men and
for women, thus producing masculinity and femininity. Agriculture is hence one of
the domains in which binary gender roles are constructed. The issue of gender and
agriculture has been on the research agenda since the 1970s. This research shifts
the attention from the production of traditional gender roles, or the recognition
of the role of the women-farmer, to an ethnographic exploration of the farming cultures
of queer farmers. I make use of thick description, weak theory and autoethnography
to distance myself from my perception of the world and take the research subject's
perspective(s). Drawing from the approaches of performativity theory and weak theory,
I investigate how the research subjects understand their farming performances and
how these interact and intermingle to create gender and sexual identities that, in
turn, inform farming practices. Through participant and participatory observation
on four queer farms in Switzerland as well as unstructured and semi-structured interviews,
daily and seasonal activities have been recorded and then analysed through grounded
theory. This has afforded new insights into how relationships are formed, identities
are created, and work is shared among farmers when traditional gender roles are challenged.
On queer farms, it emerges, the traditional division of labour between farmer (Landwirt,
Landwirtin, and/or Bauer) and farm wife (Bäuerin) is subverted; tasks are openly and
often discussed and assigned according to embodied knowledge, interests, bodies, time,
farm imperatives and the outside. These are themselves influenced by gender and sexuality,
which, for example, co-determine
the types of knowledge, interests, bodies and farms that are developed. The research
subjects' experience lays bare the heteronormative contexts with which queer people
in agriculture are confronted and the strategies they devise to deal with them, for
example, how they adapt the division of labour and hide their queerness, and how they
rebel and network. Finally, through the informants' performances all work, all traditional
roles are queered: Bauer are queer women that do the work of Bäuerin and vice versa,
Landwirtin are Bäuerin and transwomen, ciswomen, heterosexual, lesbian, and queer.
Based on these findings, I argue that the conventional and traditional production
of binary gender, sex, sexuality, and farming identities is made evident and questioned
alongside the raison d?être of these socially constructed categories for the attribution
of different skills, possibilities, roles and futures. Through their performances,
queer farmers not only redefine male and female and masculinity and femininity but
also challenge the gendered division of labour on the farm. As a result, their subversive
gender performances have the potential to redefine agriculture as gender-neutral.
This insight contributes to a filling of the scholarly gap on how to move agriculture
away from the (re)production of the traditional gender binary and its inequalities.
To conclude, this research makes three main contributions to the literature. First,
it evidences the glaring lack of research around and the invisibility and non-recognition
of queer farmers in Switzerland. This lack that is exposed extends to the mechanisms
through which farmers are turned away from farming as a livelihood on the basis of
their gender, sex and/or sexuality ? for example, through the celebration in Switzerland
of heterosexual cisgender family farms. This thesis further highlights subversive
performances and how these challenge the production of binary gender, sex, sexual,
and farming identities as well as the attribution of skills on the basis of these
socially con structed categories to imply alternative possibilities, roles and futures.
Finally, it is suggested that farming can be an accommodating space where people can
become who they feel they want to be.
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