Agrarian pragmatics: How women on family farms in Queensland, Australia negotiate competing discourses to enact their agrarian ideals

Based on a new ethnographic study in south-western Queensland Australia, we explore the evolving discourses that inform the roles and lives of women in farm family enterprises. We find that agrarianism, as one of those discourses, powerfully motivates the substantial contributions women make to the construction, reproduction and maintenance of family farms, farm families, and land stewardship. The women in the study experience two other main discursive realities in their farm lives: long-standing traditional masculine hegemony and more recently, neo-liberal concepts of farm-as-business. These two narratives however can be leveraged to realize agrarian ideals through a form of agrarian pragmatics that bodes well for gender equity and land stewardship within a more contemporary form of agrarianism. • Three dominant discourses inform the lives and wellbeing of women on family farms. • These discourses are: masculine hegemony, the farm-as-business, and agrarianism. • Our study of women on Queensland farms finds agrarianism the strongest motivation. • Pursuing agrarian ideals, women negotiate the other potentially inimical discourses. • Women may thus achieve resilience and empowerment within the family farm enterprise.