ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we analyze key themes and empirical shifts in existing literature on the relationships between health, gender, and farming, demonstrating how this work provides important insights into how these variables restructure interactions with agrarian environments and among farming households. Yet, our review also reveals that this literature has not yet fully grappled with how health risks in agrarian settings are refracted by multiple and shifting dimensions of difference and routinely rework distinctions between archetypal spaces of health risk. Instead, most of this literature tends to work within narrow man-women and productive-reproductive binaries, without fully accounting for both the malleability and fluidity of identities and spaces in producing uneven health risks for farming households. We agree that gendered differences in health outcomes are critically important but suggest that we must also engage with broader feminist approaches to avoid essentializing particular patterns of gendered disadvantage and privilege. As a consequence, the chapter asks what happens if we look beyond analyses of gender relations to also consider how recent feminist scholarship on intersectionality and social reproduction can extend debates about gender and health in agrarian environments. We conclude that in order to develop a richer topography of the relationships between gender, farming, and health we need to simultaneously challenge simplistic understandings of gender divisions and pluralize the spaces that count in producing both health and harm for farming households.
