From farmer’s wife to FarmHer: representing agrarian feminism in the twenty-first century

ABSTRACT

FarmHer—a weekly documentary-reality show that airs on RFD-TV (a network run by the Rural Media Group)—is one of the latest television series that attempts to capture the lives of farm women across the United States. Drawing on close readings of FarmHer episodes, this essay extends existing work on feminisms in “untraditional” places by Jenny Barker Devine, Julie Haynes, and others. Specifically, I explore the themes that characterize FarmHer’s representation of twenty-first century agrarian feminism, which I argue include advocating a “can-do” attitude, foregrounding the blurred boundaries between work and family, displaying various expressions of femininity, emphasizing the role of community, and rejecting the “feminist” label. However, while the series promotes more “empowering” aspects of agrarian womanhood, it overemphasizes the role of visibility in achieving social change. Nevertheless, I insist on the value of situating FarmHer as feminist television to not only examine how the informal, familiar infrastructures of rural life allow women to forge feminism from untraditional places, but also to disrupt the epistemological, political, and cultural narratives that insist upon the necessity of the metropolitan for the existence of feminist consciousness, praxis, and inquiry.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminism
• farm
• rural
• gender
• television

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Pamela Fox, Sherry Lee Linkon, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback in crafting this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lillian Nagengast

Lillian Nagengast is a PhD student in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research explores gender, sexuality, and feminism in the rural United States. Her work has appeared in The Journal of Working-Class Studies.