Sexuality and small-scale farmers
摘要
While gender has been a focal point of discussion in prominent international organizations such as the United Nations, sexuality has been insufficiently researched, leading to policies that do not or only superficially address sexualities, often only within the context of sexual violence (e.g. UNDROP, 2018; Agriculture Development, Food Security and Nutrition: Resolution, 2022). Furthermore, research has played a role in upholding the discriminatory nature of the dominant agricultural model. By failing to recognize how sexuality shapes agrifood systems, research has failed to address heteronormativity, thus perpetuating heterosexual, cisgender biases (Leslie, 2017). Research, in turn, translates into policies and programs that fail to recognize queer individuals as potential farmers and actors in building sustainable and just agrifood systems (Leslie, 2017, 2019). We raise the question of how policies and programs can be truly gender-sensitive, -inclusive, or even -transformative if they rarely, if at all, acknowledge and understand the full range of genders, sexualities, and sexual relations. We further consider how sexuality-mainstreaming might contribute to queer-inclusion in agriculture and gender-mainstreaming policies, research, programs, and activism.