The Gendering of Hope

The Gendering of Hope reveals how hope and gender are relational and mediated in power in Australian rural and farming women’s lives. Through conversational interviews and memory work, Lia Bryant explores key moments of hope across the life trajectories of a group of intersectionally diverse women.

This rich narrative illuminates how hope emerges as an affective, sensory and embodied force in women’s human and more-than-human worlds. Work and family come into view, as do farmer suicide, family violence, climate crises, entanglements with soil and the depth and shape of loneliness. For rural and farming women, ‘hope as gendered’ manifests through practices of care, acts of imagination and forms of resistance.

A valuable resource for those interested in biographical life history research and qualitative research methods, this book draws out new dimensions of hope, gender and rurality. It is an essential reading for scholars and students interested in biographical research, sociology, sociology of hope, feminist studies, rural studies, social and cultural geography, cultural studies and social anthropology.