Reshaping Gender and Class in Rural Spaces

Leach and Pini bring together empirical and theoretical studies that consider the intersections of class, gender and rurality. Each chapter engages with current debates on these concepts to explore them in the context of contemporary social and economic transformations in which global processes that reconstitute gender and class interconnect with and take shape in a particular form of locality - the rural. This book is innovative in that it: responds to calls for more critical work on the rural 'other'; and, contributes to scholarship on gender and rurality, but does so through the lens of class. This book places the question of gender, rurality and difference at its centre through its focus on class. It addresses the urban bias of much class scholarship as well as the lack of gender analysis in much rural and class academic work. It focuses on the ways that class mediates the construction and practices of rural men/masculinities and rural women/femininities. This book challenges prevalent (and divergent) assumptions with chapters utilising contemporary theorisations of class. With the empirical strongly grounded in theory, this book will appeal to scholars working in the fields of gender, rurality, identity, and class studies.