Masculinity,Gender, and Rural Policy*

Abstract This paper explores the operation of gender relations in the context of rural policy. Framed by debates on new rural governance, it considers how both the content and the culture of recent rural regeneration policy reflect highly masculine values and the maintenance of traditional power relations. New forms of decision making in rural areas promote a style of policy making that values and grants priority to male networks in the construction of elite groups and styles of management, and devalues community participation. We use examples from the United Kingdom to demonstrate the implications of shifts in the mechanisms and practice of policy making and implementation for men's and women's differential involvement and experience with rural regeneration. We go on to show how gender relations are also reflected in the content of contemporary rural regeneration policy. Decisions concerning the most appropriate types of initiative are predicated on a male‐oriented view of previous economic activity and local labor markets, and represent a highly masculinist approach to regeneration.     

A failed graft: Rural sociology in New Zealand

This paper examines the attempt to transfer American-style rural sociology to New Zealand in the years between 1935 and 1957. In the first half of this period the ground was prepared through sponsorship by an influential group of intellectuals, visits by leading American rural sociologists and support from the Carnegie Foundation. Between 1944 and 1957 the attempt at transfer was made in the New Zealand Department of Agriculture, but it failed. Reasons for the failure are shown to turn on the internal institutional structure of the Department, and the way in which it was articulated with powerful interest groups.     

Coming Across: Family Therapy in Australia and New Zealand*

In this Keynote Address I ask where family therapy comes from in Australia and New Zealand, as a way of seeing where it might go. I look at our histories, cultures and traditions and how they are connected. What happened to the old certainties of our field, and where do we take a stand today? How can we come across with courage, imagination and a sense of community? How can we maintain those impulses to justice and to remembering that psychotherapy stands for at its best?     

The Priestly Phallus: A Study in Iconography

This article explores the symbolism that attaches to priests, discusses the particular kind of maleness that priests embody, and suggests similarities between the priest and the analyst.     

Rural restructuring and agriculture-rural economy linkages: A New Zealand study

Rapid rural restructuring in New Zealand has occurred following government policy changes in the mid-1980s. This paper seeks to explore the impact of these events on agriculture-rural economy linkages, with a study of a rural service town in Southland, the southernmost region of the South Island. The findings show that the town experienced recession soon after agricultural deregulation due to cutbacks in farmer expenditure. The responses of a range of agriculturally-related businesses, and also community responses to recession, are explored through documentary research and in-depth interviews. It is concluded that deregulation has altered agricultural-rural economy linkages but has not lessened their importance.     

Rural change and the elderly in rural places: Commentaries from New Zealand

Rural New Zealand has been transformed in the last decade. Policies progressively introduced by the state since 1984 have led to significant changes in the economic and social fabric of rural places. While macro-economic changes have attracted comment, the local impacts on some groups have not been widely documented and are not well understood. This paper seeks to reveal some of the effects of ‘restructuring’ on the rural elderly by reporting comments on individual life experiences. Two intentions underlie this endeavour; to make evident and valorise the lived experience of a group often overlooked in rural places and to comment on the reflection of this lived experience in contemporary approaches to rural studies.     

Making Men: The Construction and Representation of Agriculture‐Based Masculinities in Australia and New Zealand*

Abstract Gender analyses of farming have become well established in rural sociological literature. In recent years, however, increasing attention has been given to the discursive processes influencing gender relations and identities. In the current paper I continue this trend by exploring how a range of key agriculture‐related masculinities are constructed and articulated in Australia and New Zealand. First, a conceptual discussion identifies the need to consider discourse and creation of knowledge and truths about masculinity. An outline of the research is provided. Then I report on two broad fields in which masculinity is constructed, namely the farm arena and industry politics. Finally, I make closing comments in relation to the possibility of alternative genderings of agriculture.     

Redefining the Moral Responsibilities for Food Safety: The Case of Red Meat in New Zealand*

Abstract Food safety governance is shaped by social relationships among the state, the industry, and the public in the food system in a given country. This paper examines the contestation among actors in New Zealand's red meat chain over the implementation of the Animal Product Act of 1999 (APA), which became a cornerstone in the reform of food safety governance. The discussion focuses on the APA's impact on three types of social relations in the red meat chain, those between: (a) the state and the industry; (b) consumers and citizens; and (c) New Zealand and “offshore.” This paper argues that food safety governance is an important element of the moral economy in a given country and poses both policy and ethical challenges in balancing conflicting needs between the global and local agrofood systems.     

The Conflict between and within Genders: An Appraisal of Contemporary American Femininity and Masculinity*

This discussion examines the conflicts inherent in contemporary American formulations of gender and concludes that conflict exists not so much between gender formulations as within each of them. Extending Carol Gilligan's (1982) analysis of sex-differentiated moral development, gender is treated as the distinction between an orientation of care, and one of autonomy. The care/autonomy distinction does not necessarily entail inter-gender conflict. Rather, that is attributable to cultural expectations of reciprocity. However, intra-gender conflict, i.e., the conllict within the formulations of gender, is shown to be extensive. Specifically, masculinity presumes equality and autonomy, yet functions to produce hierarchy and dependence, involves a contradiction between a principle of blanket autonomy and the preservation of self-interest, and requires an asocial stance. Femininity endorses powerlessness but produces power, requires a commitment to care which cannot be realized, and masks the fact that sacrifice is a matter of choice.     

Immigration and the New Racial Diversity in Rural America*

This article highlights the new racial and ethnic diversity in rural America, which may be the most important but least anticipated population shift in recent demographic history. Ethnoracial change is central to virtually every aspect of rural America over the foreseeable future: agro‐food systems, community life, labor force change, economic development, schools and schooling, demographic change, intergroup relations, and politics. The goal here is to plainly illustrate how America's racial and ethnic transformation has emerged as an important dimension of ongoing U.S. urbanization and urbanism, growing cultural and economic heterogeneity, and a putative “decline in community” in rural America. Rural communities provide a natural laboratory for better understanding the implications of uneven settlement and racial diversity, acculturation, and economic and political incorporation among Hispanic newcomers. This article raises the prospect of a new racial balkanization and outlines key impediments to full incorporation of Hispanics into rural and small town community life. Immigration and the new ethnoracial diversity will be at the leading edge of major changes in rural community life as the nation moves toward becoming a majority‐minority society by 2042.     

Breaking New Ground: Diverse Routes to College in Rural America*

Abstract Rural communities pose a challenge to status attainment models that explain children's educational attainment primarily in terms of the parents' education and professional status. Alongside the rural professional class are farmers of similar social status but with less education and other families that lack the status and resources of both professional‐class and farm families. The prolonged agricultural crisis in the American Midwest has turned rural youths toward college and has raised questions about the educational value of resources provided by farm parents and other rural parents. We classified youths from the Iowa Youth and Families Project into three SES groups: professional‐managerial, farm, and lower‐status. We compared these groups on resource levels and on the extent to which the resources predicted enrollment in a four‐year college one year after high school. Findings indicated three distinct routes to four‐year college. Professional‐managerial youths tended to follow the traditional path from parents' educational and other resources and support to their own academic involvement and aspirations for higher education. Successful farm youths, in lieu of parental educational advantages, drew on parents' community ties. Resourceful lower‐status youths, in the absence of family background advantages, generated educational attainment through early educational ambition and varied community and school involvements. Even relatively low levels of involvement were valuable to these youths' educational attainment.     

Farm Boys and Wild Men: Rurality,Masculinity, and Homosexuality*

Abstract In this paper I explore cultural constructions of “rural gay masculinity,” focusing first on the stereotype of the “rustic sodomite” seen in a number of Hollywood movies; second, on the construction of an idyllic Eden in the gay imaginary; and third, on gendered and sexualized performances among members of the men's movement and the “radical fairies.” In doing so, I suggest how the rural/urban divide is meshed, in complex and distinct ways, with homosexual/heterosexual and masculine/feminine dichotomies in cultural texts and practices. Set against these representations, of course, are the lives of homosexual men born and raised in the country: I discuss accounts of the lives of “farm boys” as a way of contextualizing and complexifying the dominant modes of representation outlined. In all of these portrayals, “rural gay masculinity” is figured in distinct ways, especially in relation to urban effeminacy. I end by calling for further exploration of these issues in an effort to more fully theorize the cultural meanings and experiences of “rural gay masculinity.”     

Ethnography and News Production: New(s) Developments in the Field*

Ethnographic studies of news production provide invaluable insights into the nature and determinants of news production and a necessary corrective, therefore, to grand speculative claims and theories about the news media. These more grounded studies have variously examined the daily routines, bureaucratic nature, competitive ethos, professional ideologies, source dependencies and cultural practices of the news media. Today, however, the globalising field of news production and journalist practices is fast changing and ethnographies of news production remain as essential as ever for explaining and understanding the complexities involved. This article overviews the field of news production studies and makes the case for why ethnographic studies need to be conducted in the future. It describes past studies and their findings, reflects on the principal strengths and possible blind spots of ethnography as a research method, and finally considers new developments in the field and the challenges that these pose to academic researchers.     

Coming Back Across the Fence: Masculinity and the Transition to Sustainable Agriculture*

Abstract In this paper we explore the social construction of agricultural masculinity and its role in the transition to sustainable agriculture. We draw our evidence from a participatory qualitative study comparing members of the sustainable agriculture group Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI) with their non‐PFI neighbors. On the non‐PFI farms, men more often represented what we call monologic masculinity, a conventional masculinity with rigid and polarized gender expectations and strictly negotiated performances that make a clear distinction between men's and women's activities. The male farmers belonging to PFI, on the other hand, more often represented what we call dialogic masculinity, characterized by different measures for work and success than in monologic masculinity, less need for control over nature, and greater social openness. Although both are present to some extent in all male participants, we argue that acceptance of a more dialogic masculinity helps promote the transition to sustainable agriculture.     

The peasant within: agrarian life in New Zealand and Canada

Cette communication analyse les tentatives des membres des families ďagriculteurs de vouloir imposer leurs propres modèles sur le processes de production et sur la création et la reproduction de leur existence sociale. Cette communication souligne aussi ľimportance ďune reformulation des approches traditionnelles envers la culture rurale en reconnaissant ľinfluence importante ďune histoire de domination. Les arguents sont basés sur les résultats de recherches entreprises sur place dans le nord de la Nouvelle Zélande et en Alberta central.
This paper examines the concern of the members of farm households to impose their own designs on the productive process, and on the creation and reproduction of their social existence. It also points to the importance of rethinking conventional approaches to rural culture by recognizing the pervasive influence of a history of domination. The arguments draw upon the results of field work conducted in northern New Zealand and central Alberta, Canada.     

(Re)Conceptualising inclusive education in New Zealand: listening to the hidden voices

This article explores the experiences of 14 students with severe and complex behaviour, their caregivers, and teachers/principals as the students transition from a disestablished residential school back to mainstream schools, with support from the Intensive Wraparound Service (IWS). Interviews were the primary source of data collection. Data were collated into 14 cases, and analysed using a general inductive approach. Two broad themes are addressed in the article: education and relationships/communication. The research found that the IWS is not living up to its rhetoric. Suggestions made for improvement are based on approaches that participants found worked for them.     

Environmental protest in New Zealand (1997–2010)

Protest actions are an important indicator of public concern, raising awareness and highlighting perceived failings in administrative practices. With increasing prominence of environmental challenges there has been a move for states to incorporate stakeholders, potentially reducing the need for such confrontational actions. This article uses protest event analysis and case comparison to examine the scale and character of environmental protest actions in New Zealand from 1997–2010. This period was one of relative socio‐economic stability, coupled with growing awareness of environmental challenges. The article considers the relative level of action of grassroots groups and more formalized NGOs, asking which issues generated protest actions and which factors contributed to environmental campaign outcomes. The findings suggest that, although protest actions can strengthen campaigns, the outcomes ultimately remain heavily dependent on the priorities of the state.