Farming Women's Experience of Isolation: Creating Affective Connections Through Material Entanglements

ABSTRACT This article contributes new insights into farming women's experiences of isolation and how they imagine and create socio‐spatial formations for affective connections in their socio‐cultural and material environments. We draw on in‐depth interviews with farming women and participatory co‐design research in a sparsely populated region of South Australia to explore gendered experience of isolation. We show that women experienced ‘the farm’ as generating disconnection from sites of community connection, family of origin and established social relationships, including their husbands. Opportunities for meaningful connection between women seeking engagement with creative and non‐human materiality were also limited. Women's narratives offered insights into the entanglements of intra‐action in which they experienced themeselves, the company of other rural women, the natural environments and creative practice. Our conceptualisation of isolation expands current policy to suggest that initiatives should attend to place‐based entanglements that farming women desire to ameliorate social isolation.