Inside the black box: dimensions of gender, generation and scale in the Australian rural restructuring process.

摘要

Using a case study of the South Australian farm crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the article seeks to sympathetically engage with Whatmore's [Journal of Rural Studies (1991) 7(1/2), pp.71-76) feminist reconstruction of simple commodity production (SCP). It explores the extent to which Whatmore's reformulation of the SCP concept offers a scale- and agency-sensitive framework through which contemporary processes of agrarian change, including changing gender roles in many facets of rural andfarming life, can be seen. Using Whatmore's adaptation of Connell's 'gender order' and 'gender regime' to examine the survival strategies of Kangaroo Island farm families from 1984 to 1993, the article reveals that while Island farm women have played fundamental and diverse roles in the defence of the family farm and the farm family through their on- and off-farm and household labour, farm men's roles have changed little. Nevertheless, the established gender order is undergoing gradual and uneven changeas a familial ideology, where the maintenance of family living standards is considered more important than the preservation of the family's ties with the land, assumes importance in some young families' adjustment responses. It is concluded that Whatmore's 'domestic political economy' provides an important advance in understanding how farm families, and individual farm women and men, negotiate global, national, regional and local pressures for economic and social change.