by: Lia Bryant

She stares at yellow fields of wheat flicking past her. The long stretch of road ahead. Feeling the rhythm and dip of the car as she manoeuvres around corners, she notices the size and shape of trees dotted along the open spaces. She holds a conversation with herself; it’s almost a game identifying crops by their growth and colour.

For a qualitative researcher like me, rural research is very much emplaced and sensory. COVID-19 physically removes me from the communities and rural people I partner with and I am increasingly on my mobile phone. On days when the internet is good (it often isn’t in rural Australia), I am on Zoom. My work now involves listening carefully to voices. However, so much of what I have learned about rurality and gender has emerged from being in place and a lot of the time, it’s from being there but feeling out of place.

I have felt ‘out of place’ in rural communities as a city person and/or as a woman in rooms or paddocks where all I can see is a sea of farming men. I dedicated a chapter ‘Sites/sights of exclusion’ in my book Water and Rural Communities to the colonial structure of the water governance building and the white masculinised board room where large heavy portraits of chairmen of the board hang (Bryant, 2016).

I have a vivid memory of my first visit: I was ushered in to sit in high dark wooden chairs along a table that was equally heavy and ornate. I remember thinking this room was reminiscent of a dining hall in an English castle. The furniture was obviously imported when the town was settled – erasing the presence of Indigenous Australians and the waves of non-British migration since 1950. I note the sensations of discomfort growing as my body is forced upright in this formal setting. It is hard to make eye contact with the men who sit up and down the length of this table. I am here to talk about gender and water governance during drought.

At one point in the discussion I ask, “Are there women on the board of the water trust?”

I am met with throaty laughter. “In our 120 years, we haven’t had a woman on the board.”

My body in this space is foreign and I feel it and wonder how a woman (or eventually women) might feel if they are able to navigate a seat at this table.

I enjoy thinking about how the spaces I enter hold histories and take shape materially in bricks and mortar. I think of the Greek Orthodox church in the same small rural town where the colonial building of the water trust resides. I am curious about how spaces come alive through language but also our senses as people enter a local grocery shop in a rural town, a farm house, a shearing shed, vineyards and paddocks. Particularly, I am interested in how we affect one another and how we are affected by the human and more-than-human – objects, land and waterscapes and animals. I often wonder “how do we leave our mark?”

I know that for some people, especially rural and farming women, their impact is sometimes erased – while strong in the fabric of history – their mark is often grainy like the layered and discernible strands of stringy bark on the trunk of a gumtree. By entering the rural as a researcher residing in a city, it has afforded me the opportunity of grappling with the textures of gender politics in place alongside my own gender politics. This memory work exercise I wrote in relation to reflecting on my research practice reveals rurality and gender, that is, body politics in place or the gendering of space in the act of becoming:

She had to go to Mudamuckla. There were no maps and she relied on directions taken from a telephone call. She drove the government car down dirt roads where no buildings or humans were in sight. In the vastness she felt vulnerable and uncertain. Too much space. She saw a shed – could this be the landmark where she was told she must turn right? Again isolation and uncertainty. Deciding to turn right she drove down a narrow dirt path seemingly leading nowhere. Go on or turn back? Well she did go on and found herself in a paddock surrounded by cows. She waved her arms furiously upward trying to catch the male farmer’s attention. He smiled at her…[foolishness] and gave her yet more directions. Arriving at her destination the reliable government sedan seemed to be swerving – Oh God, she thought, I have a flat tyre. Anxiety rose. She attempted to fight back feelings of inadequacy. She must now interview a woman a similar age to herself who works on the local council, runs a farm and has a child. The interview proceeds and the woman generously tells her story. In this space, the woman’s home, she feels awkward but must present as knowledgeable and confident. She feels the difference in their lives, not simply difference about urban or rural lifestyle, but also difference around privilege. She is paid well and lives in a home, the woman lives in a shed. One room is where the family eats and sleeps. There is no bathroom in sight. The time came to leave. How to tell the women the tyre is flat and she can’t change it? She feebly says, ‘I am not used to this type of car and can’t change the tyre.’ The woman hands her the screaming child. She holds it at arm’s length not knowing how to quieten it, not knowing how to hold it. The woman proceeds to change the tyre and pacify the child. She feels inadequate as a woman.  (Bryant and Livholts 2007, 34-35)

In the memory above, I recall how on this day I feel vulnerable in the vastness of the countryside and I feel my body diminished and exposed. I feel ‘out of place’ and stripped of competence (Bryant and Livholts, 2015:169). In this moment, I am being forced to acknowledge my gendered and classed academic body and the both the traditional and non-traditional gendered norms that I am unable to fulfil.

Being ‘in place’ in this memory brings forth embodiment and the embodied nature of vision or how we see rural places from our situated knowledges (Harraway, 1998). As Haraway (1988, 581) so eloquently suggests, being in place ‘reclaim[s] the sensory systems that have been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gazefrom nowhere’.  For me, being in place brings forth a reflexive confrontation with my situated knowledge as a feminist academic shaped by multiple discourses and practices of gender (Bryant and Pini, 2011, 142). Moral judgements also come into place drawn from my situated gaze. Whilst these may come to the fore over the phone, in this instant it is the experience of the visuality of place, the moral middle class judgement of where the woman lives and the sensory and embodied response to how to quieten a crying baby (Bryant and Livholts, 2015). What I understood through abstract knowledge became an experiential lesson. I learned that my moral judgements shaped my emotional, cognitive and sensory responses to feeling out of place. My body, like all bodies is politically, culturally and historically specific, shaped by the politics of the body and is among other things gendered, raced, classed and sexualized (Anderson and Smith, 2001; Probyn, 2005; Bryant and Pini, 2011). As I have argued elsewhere:

‘For Beverley Skeggs (1999, 124) these moral judgements emerge from ‘structures of feeling’, and in this instance the association of femininity with knowing how to provide care and being caring. These “structures of feeling” provide the basis from which women and others interpret and recognize themselves (Skeggs 2004). Hence, feelings of inadequacy are translated as self-blame rather than collective experiences of gendered essentialism and inequality – in which in abstract terms she understands. What we wish to underscore is that emotions are intrinsically political as are the evaluative judgments, which work as “loaded moral signifier[s]” (Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst 2001, 889) of gender and other key social categories’. (Bryant and Livholts, 2015, 169-170).

Looking back at this memory of myself as a younger woman in my 20s, I also learn that the embodied gaze of the woman I interviewed is missing. I wonder what the experience of my visit was like for her? Did I disrupt, reinforce or in any way shape her sense of place and gender?

Here I am 32 years later at a time most of us could not have imagined. As a rural researcher, I have always taken for granted that I can get into a car and a few hours later be outside of the city. I have always taken for granted that I have access to being in place to experience and be challenged. Simply put, to feel place. It is important to me as a rural researcher to shape my praxis through attempting to understand the people I research with, the communities I collaborate with and in and out of this context to attempt to understand myself. Recently, I had a telephone interview with a male farmer about co-designing resources for the prevention of male farmer suicide. I have been working on this topic for some years and I advocate for a place-based approach to tailoring suicide prevention that is community driven and state supported. I now need to undertake this research by phone.

I have always liked the rhythm and the nonsensical feeling to the word discombobulate. In the first instance, telephone-based research discombobulates me. At the time, I write:

She got the time wrong. Of course there is a time difference across the states in Australia. She knows this. She rings people all the time in other states. But today she rings at the appointed 1 pm. 1 pm in New South Wales not her home town. She receives an email, “hey Lia did we get mixed up with our time zones? ..I am available at 4 if you can ring”. The farmer is so gracious.

Time is disrupted through the virtual especially crossing time zones. But as I have been arguing, so are other things. I learn from the virtual some important lessons. The first, and most obvious – check the time in places other than your own! Secondly, a telephone interview requires me to listen differently. I am transfixed, I hold the phone tight as though this might bring me closer to where he is. I only have the voice in which to determine how he is feeling, how interested he is in the topic, how to build a relationship with him and put him at ease. I have to think about how I would hear gendered cues, how I would hear if a farming man is comfortable talking to me about male farmer suicide. Thirdly, and most importantly, will the phone make this easier or harder for him to communicate his emotions, experiences and ideas?

Sarah Ahmed’s (2004) argument that voices suppress and express emotions reshapes the way I hear. I attempt to determine what is being suppressed as well as expressed. I hear the pauses in how he speaks. The pauses I feel deep in my body. I think he pauses to garner space, to tentatively consider what is to be said next and how to expresses his emotions. I think I hear him more clearly than if we were face-to-face sitting across a kitchen table or walking across paddocks.

Literature focused on the telephone suggests that one of the first questions people ask when calling mobile phones is ‘Where are you?’ (Garcia-Montes et al., 2006). It is interesting how we wish to place people. However, a phone conversation is anything but ‘unlocated’ and people may be in multiple spaces within place as conversations unfold. As Bryant and Livholts (2013, 12) suggest:

when receiving and making telephone calls in the home it cannot be assumed that the individual is in one physical space during the course of the conversation…nor can it be assumed that there is one cognitive space as there is the possibility that the person is distracted, multitasking or indeed even having more than one conversation at the same time.

Despite COVID restricting public movements, it is movements that happen in private spaces during moments of a telephone interview that cannot really be known. Face-to-face (and Zoom) interviews, more often than not, fix people in place. During this time of restriction, perhaps there is more to be learned about how farming women and men move through private spaces and how this may shape how they narrate their lives and express emotions during telephone interviews.

I am suggesting a sensory engagement with place provides a stream of memories. It also enables a reflexive engagement with places and spaces which enables rural researchers to learn about the texture and complexity of how gendering occurs in time and place. It provides us with a location in which to examine how farmers negotiate social relations and our situatedness that disrupts time and place as we enter the rural.

I think of the yellow fields of wheat and wonder how long it will be until I see them flickering past once again. I look out the window of my own home. Paved garden, trimmed roses. Whilst I am away from the rural by necessity, I remain engaged with places and people and continue to seek understanding about the multiplicities of gender in place.

Sources:

Ahmed, S. (2004) Declarations of whiteness: The non-performativity of antiracism. Borderlands e-journal 3(2).

Anderson, K. and Smith, S.J. (2001) Editorial, Emotional Geographies, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 27, 7-10.

Bryant, L. with George, J. (2016). Water and Rural Communities. Oxon: Routledge.

Bryant, L. and Livholts, M. 2013 Location and Unlocation: Examining Gender and Telephony Through Autoethnographic Textual and Visual Methods, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 12, (1): 403-419.

Bryant, L. and Livholts, M. (2015) Memory Work and Reflexive Gendered Bodies: Examining Rural Landscapes in the Making, in eds Pini, B., Brandth, B.and Little, J., Rural Feminisms, Lanham: Lexington Books, 181-194

Bryant, L. and Pini, B., (2011) Gender and Rurality, NY and UK, Routledge.

Garcia-Montes, J.M., Caballero-Munõ,  D. and Pérez-Álvarez, M. (2006) Changes in the Self Resulting from the use of Mobile Phones. Media, Culture & Society, 28(1): 67–82.

Haraway, D. (1988) Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–599.

Probyn, E. (2005) Blush: Faces of Shame, Sydney: University of New South Wales.

Professor Lia Bryant is a rural sociologist and her work focuses on gender and rurality. She has published a series of articles and books including Gender and Rurality, 2011 co-authored with Barbara Pini and Water and Rural Communities published in 2016. Her work focuses on intersectionality, farmer suicide and distress and water politics, affect and gendered embodiment.