Constructing Rural Identities – A Diverse Narrative

Abstract: So far, rural people and communities have not received much consideration within the field of gender studies while urban individuals and their lifestyles have been normalised. I argue that the rural space inhabits a huge variety of people who deserve to be recognised within the field and can contribute to the production of new knowledge. Therefore it is my aim to study people who live in the countryside, whereby I examine and analyse how they construct their rural identities. Also, I want to see how they relate to gender norms within their society and how that might influence them in their rural identities. I have done semi-structured in-depth interviews with five people in a rural area in southwestern Germany, who gave me an account of their rural lives and what living in a rural space means to them. These demonstrate how diverse experiences in one rural space can be and consequently how differently rural identities can be produced. I come to the conclusion that rural identity depends very much on the intersections of time and space, who, in this case, are highly intertwined with age, class, gender, the body and sexuality. Moreover, I can detect that concepts like home, the rural idyll, nature and the binary between rural and urban are involved in constructing and giving meaning to rural identity.