Farming women, distress and drought: Intra-actions and entanglements with matter

Abstract

Farming women have rarely been the focus of scholarly work on drought and/or distress. This article focuses on farming women's lived experience of drought and distress, drawing on a participatory filmmaking project created by a small group of farming women from Southern Australia. Feminist materialism and Barad's (2003) concept of ‘intra-action’ provides a useful lens to examine both the film as an artefact as well as the discussions among the women during its creation. Intra-action enables an exploration of how farming women's bodies come into being as distressed in moments of time through and with drought as a complex constellation of multiple ‘matter’. The film and narratives show distressed bodies emerging with dust, wind, objects and the suffering of non-human animals. For these women, distress emerges from hearing, sensing, seeing and feeling the irritation of dirt splattered against window panes, the emotional pain and economic consequences of topsoil blowing across paddocks and as feed becomes hard to source, the recognition of the suffering of sheep. The power of these animate and inanimate ‘things’—windmills, windows, troughs, work boots, animals and soil—were sensorily entangled with women's bodies. For farming women, distress materialises within their bodies through processes of intra-action in their more-than-human worlds.