Paper short abstract:

Queer farmer activists contest and reimagine the values of the U.S. 'family farm.' What horizons of hope are visible through queer ruptures in the heteropatriarchal agrarian imaginary? What lessons and limitations are evident in the pre-figurative work of queer farming?

Paper long abstract:

Advocates of localizing food systems in the U.S. idealize the 'family farm' as an independent economic unit whose survival and proliferation is necessary to transformation from a global, centralized food system to a decentralized, local food system. Originating in the colonial imagination, the 'family farm' presumes a yeoman farmer at the head of a heteronormative family. Social scientists have contested the obfuscation of farming women in the narrowly imagined 'family farm.' (Sachs 1983, Lobao and Meyer 1995, Adams 1991) Recently, attention to LGBTQ+ farmers demonstrates the challenges they face in navigating agrarian heteropatriarchy. (Wypler 2019, Black 2022) Utilizing multi-year ethnographic research, this paper shows how the heightened visibility of queer farmers in local food system activism contests and reimagines the 'family farm.' Following Muñoz' assertion that queerness is essentially future-oriented, my research asks in what ways the future of agriculture itself is being queered by the grassroots network of queer Hudson Valley farmers. (Muñoz 2009) It explores social and environmental landscapes of queer-safe rural spaces, cooperative business models espoused by farms rejecting the heteronormative family as the irreducible economic unit, and the leakage of queer ways of thinking and doing, such as queer botany, into food and farming spaces previously presumed to be neutral to gender and sexuality. What horizons of hope are visible through queer ruptures in the agrarian imaginary? And, building on Bloch's theorization of concrete utopias, what lessons and limitations are evident in the pre-figurative work of queer farming?