Presentation short abstract

The UK agroecological movement romanticises unpaid, precarious work as ‘love’, under a hetero-patriarchal ideology of the ‘family farm’. Applying a feminist-Marxist and queer lens, I challenge how this ideology excuses exploitation and I chart the emerging workers’ movement as a queer resistance.

Presentation long abstract

Whilst the British agroecological movement is committed to principles of social and ecological justice, worker mistreatment and underpayment are common in the sector. I have identified that a hetero-patriarchal ideology underpins these systemic poor protections, with unpaid work romanticised as family-like relationships between employers and employees, workers donating their labour out of their love for the movement. By positioning the small family farmer as the revolutionary subject of agroecology, precarity and non-payment for an often feminised workforce is ignored, or justified as necessary for the movement's survival. As such, the British agroecological sector promotes small-scale capitalism, upheld through heteronormative patriarchal values. Using a feminist-Marxist and queer perspective, I seek to unsettle this narrative, disrupting the values in British agroecology that protect the interests of capital and stymy the movement's radicalism. Using family abolitionist theory, I document how the ‘family farm’ obscures the material realities of exploited labourers and reinforces race, class, and gender marginalisation. Through my activist engagement in the emerging workers’ movement, I chart how our work is a queer resistance, working to trouble the hegemonic hetero-patriarchal values of British agroecology. I follow Gibson-Graham’s (1999) use of ‘queer(y)ing’ as a methodological tool that looks beyond sexuality and gender, a way to disrupt hegemony and create new alternate worlds with fluid, open, borderless opportunities for queer futures. I use ‘queering’ to mean not the insertion of queer bodies into the movement and sector, but to disrupt, to challenge and to deviate, to unsettle pre-existing normative assumptions.