ABSTRACT
Gender as a social category continues to play a key role in determining the allocation of power and privilege in society. Despite this fact, gender has gone relatively unexamined in agri-food scholarship, including research examining resistance in the agri-food system and the transformative potential of alternative agri-food. While some scholarship has focused on gender in the public sphere, which encompasses social life outside of the home (i.e. women as farmers, women as farmworkers, women as restaurant workers), little research has been attentive to gender dynamics in the private sphere, which encompasses social life in the home, as it relates to agri-food system resistance. This is particularly problematic given recent concerns about the economization of the individual within alternative agri-food.
This chapter draws from a research project that examined the ways in which traditional gender norms are perpetuated within and by households that engage in alternative agri-food practices, in order to examine the relationship between alternative agri-food engagement and the mental labor of food provisioning for women. Qualitative methods are employed in the analysis using data gathered from residents in the state of Ohio, in the United States. Findings suggest that engaging in alternative agri-food is more mentally laborious for women, particularly women with lower incomes, women with children, women with partners, and women who are employed. The chapter concludes by considering how the failure to consider the legacy of patriarchy and contemporary practices related to gender inequality in the private sphere not only limits market-based approaches to agri-food system change, but also the ways in which we must move beyond the focus on individuals when considering resistance to corporate agri-food.
