ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades we have witnessed an incredible growth in scholarship on the subject of gender and rurality. Testament to this is the recent publication of a range of edited collections detailing the experiences of men and women living in rural areas of the industrialized West (Bock and Shortall 2006; Buller and Hoggart 2004; Campbell, Bell and Finney 2006; Goverde et al. 2004; Little and Morris 2005). Paralleling this expansion in knowledge has been an increasing interest in questions of inclusion, belonging, and ‘otherness’ in the fi eld of rural social science more generally (e.g. Cloke 1997a, 2006a, b; Cloke and Little 1997). As feminist scholars, we have been delighted and energized by these developments, but we have also experienced a contradictory sense of discomfort and discontent as we refl ected upon them. We experienced this early in 2008 when Australia’s newly elected Rudd Labor Government announced a ‘2020’ summit to which one thousand of the nation’s ‘best minds’ were invited to map a policy future for the country. Half of the group responsible for ‘rural Australia’ was women. Clearly, it was no longer accurate to claim, as academics had done merely a decade ago, that ‘rural women are invisible’ (e.g. Alston 1995; Sachs 1996). Again, we rejoiced in this visibility, but our commitment to inclusion meant we also queried, ‘Which rural women are visible?’ When we noted that the women selected to speak on and behalf of rural Australia were, in the main, older, white, able-bodied, married landholders, a sense of unease emerged.
