Identifying the Gender Order within Neoliberal Australian Agricultural Policy

Neoliberal states construct gender roles, gender norms, and gender orders in ways that reflect and legitimate the logic of the market. This study examines state interventions within the population of Australian women in agriculture and rural communities from 2013–20. It investigates the rationale, gendered symbolic spatial representation of tasks, types of interventions, and the characteristics promoted by policies and programs. Three ideal subjectivities emerge: the supportive wife holding the farming family together; the entrepreneurial farm partner; and the builder of resilient rural communities. Reconfiguring gendered identities allows for the extraction of greater surplus from this population, whether it be economically through improved farm viability or socially through resilient farm families and rural communities. None of these subjectivities revalue women’s contribution or disrupt unequal access to farm resources such as land. This study demonstrates how traditional gender orders may be re-embedded in neoliberal states, despite discourses of women’s empowerment.HIGHLIGHTSIn Australia, government programs promoted rural women’s roles that support neoliberal restructuring.These identities reinforce rather than disrupt traditional gender orders in rural communities.The policies risk deepening inequality by undervaluing women’s labor.Real change may arise from women’s own activism, rather than state action.