This document discusses the concept of "performing the rural" and identifies different ways that rural identity and life are performed and represented. It explains that performance refers to routine and ritualized actions that contribute to constructions of rural identities. Different levels of performance are identified, from highly staged events to more everyday and routine practices. Specific examples discussed include rural pubs, country music festivals, and the performance of gender roles on farms, which can reinforce social divisions but also be contested.

1. SOC226 Rural Sociology
Topic 8
Performing the rural – rural identity

2. Topic objectives
• Understand what it means for the rural to be
‘performed’, and why a focus on
‘performance’ is important in examining rural
identity(ies) and inequalities.
• Identify the different practices through which
the rural is performed, and how these
performances portray/represent rural life.
• Explain how performances of the rural
contribute to, and reinforce, social divisions.
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3. Performing the rural
• Refers to routine, ritualised, and staged actions
that contribute to ‘the creation and articulation
of rural identities’ (Woods, 2011, p.201).
• Important in understanding ways of knowing and
living in the rural that cannot be easily
represented textually or visually.
• Provides insights into the ways in which rural
power relations and social divisions are enacted,
maintained and reproduced.
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4. ‘Stages’ of performance
(adapted from Edensor, 2006)
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Highly staged and scripted Staged but more
improvised
Routine and ritualised
Heritage attractions Local shows and festivals Rural pubs
Embodied rural
experiences (e.g.,
adventure tourism, food
tourism)
Farming
Hunting

5. Performing the rural community:
The pub
• Viewed as a quintessential part of rural life.
• The pub as a space of ‘cultural
commodification’ – drinking pubs and gastro-
pubs.
• Producing and reproducing social distinctions:
– Gender
– Class
• National differences? English and
Australian/NZ pubs
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6. Performing the rural community:
The Tamworth Country Music Festival
• An example of commercially constructed place-
marketing aimed at attracting tourists and
visitors.
• Constructed around a normative notion of
country – masculine, white, working class,
nationalist – which forms the basis of imagery for
the festival.
• Highlights how ‘rurality can be distilled into a
simplified media image, and how identities need
to be seen as continually ruralised in various
ways…’ (Gibson and Davidson, 2004, p.402).
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7. Performing the farm:
Gender and farming
• Based predominantly on a gendered division of roles
that are performed through work on the farm.
• The performance of gender identity is informed by
ideologies such as agrarianism, which results in a
‘strong, submissive and traditional’ sense of self for
farm women (Cummins, 2005, p.300).
• While the gender division of farm labour is often
treated ‘as natural and inevitable by farm women as
well as by male farmers’ (Brandth, 2002, in Woods,
2011, p.219), it can be contested or adapted through
performance.
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