‘How to be a rural man’: Young men's performances and negotiations of rural masculinities

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Abstract

This paper is concerned with young rural men and how they ‘do’ identity politics living in a rural area of Norway. Focusing on how masculinity and rurality are constructed and interrelated in young men's narratives of living in a remote community, it is identified that young rural men reproduce, negotiate and transform local discourses of rural masculinity. First, the article shows that young men living in rural areas believe it is important to express rural masculinity through hunting and outdoor life as well as by exhibiting skills as handymen. Second, it reveals that it is important for young rural men to communicate a particular stance in the ongoing and controversial Norwegian debate over snowmobiles and carnivores, as these topics are related to rural men's sense of loyalty to place. Third, the article shows how rural men negotiate ‘the tough man’ images related to hunting, motors and handyman skills by constructing new and alternative masculinities. The analysis reveals that young rural men enact alternative masculinities, expressed in relation to new working life opportunities in the service sector, through emotional openness and caring, and in relation to traditional ‘masculine spaces’ such as hunting and snowmobiling. It is concluded that, little by little, rural communities are opening up for more flexible masculinities.

Introduction

In Norwegian public discourse, rural man is often portrayed as a marginalized loser. Raised media coverage of ‘the exodus of women from rural communities’ and of young women who escape from ‘tacky’ young men have clearly indicated that the latter are abandoning rural areas and rural men in preference for life in modern towns and cities. The idea has been promoted from several quarters that young women do not want traditional, backwater men who are only preoccupied with hunting and motors. Instead, they want modern men who take women's needs seriously and who are not afraid to lend a hand in the kitchen. Furthermore, as a consequence of ambitious young women's (and young men's) efforts to leave rural areas, concerns have been expressed about a ‘brain drain from rural areas’. For example, in a letter to the newspaper Nationen (2001), Professor of Rural Sociology Ottar Brox, claims that rural districts have developed as place for young men lacking in initiative, and who live on welfare security benefits and their parents. Rather than trying to seek higher education and work elsewhere, boys who have grow weary of school and learning linger on at the place where they grew up, without a permanent job and income. Brox cautions against what he calls hillbilly situations in rural communities, and shows that such boys are mostly preoccupied with fixing cars and driving aimlessly around in their hot rods.1 Thus, many rural communities appear to be very masculine-dominated places which modern women and men abandon. The thinning society, as it has been described by Aasbrenn (1991), has further led Brox to state that the development of a hillbilly identity discourages ‘other’ women and men from settling in the countryside, thereby strengthening the homogenization of rural culture.

The representation of the ‘rural man’ as being under real threat is not a typically Norwegian phenomenon. Many rural communities in the Western world have experienced stagnation, migration and ‘brain drain’ in recent decades, and as a result remote rural districts have been portrayed as profoundly masculine societies, unattractive to contemporary women and unsympathetic to their demands for equality (Campbell et al., 2006, Hauan, 2007, Little and Panelli, 2007). Addressing questions about rurality and masculinity, rural men are often portrayed as ‘bush bachelors’ who advertise for potential partners in magazines and on TV-series, or as indolent ‘rednecks’ holding onto an ‘pre-cultural’ and animalistic ‘wild’ masculinity (Little, 2003, Bell, 2007, Hauan, 2007). The ‘real’ men living in the countryside have, however, received scant attention within research on rural masculinity and given that they often are regarded as people who ‘remain behind’ in traditional identities and gender relations I believe they merit more attention. While a few studies have focused on young men and how they face rural restructuring and economic decline (Ní Laoire, 2001, Ní Laoire, 2004, Stenbacka, 2008) and some studies have given attention to male youths and how they relate to rural and urban places (Magnussen, 1997, Kenway et al., 2006, Ní Laoire and Fielding, 2006), there has not been much focus on young men and how they construct gendered identities in rural communities.

In this article I focus on a remote rural community in Norway and the lives of young rural men who choose either to stay in or return to their home community. The question addressed is how such men can be as ‘men’ and how they construct their identities as rural men. Specifically, I examine the assumption of marginalization in order to identify whether or to what extent the men can be understood as retaining or relinquishing traditional discourses of rural masculinity. Hence, the article is relevant in relation to regional policy as well as the public debates and academic discourses on rurality, gender and migration. In dealing with rural masculinity, the article takes a theoretical perspective that focuses on how gender identities are performed and how identity politics are used to make sense of rural living.

Section snippets

The prospects of ‘staying behind’

Norway is a country in which centralization, rather than counter-urbanization, is a persistent feature. The ways in which ‘the stayers’ are seen as marginalized in rural Norway tend to revolve around this phenomenon. In the national media, dichotomies such as urban/rural, modern/traditional and women/men are used when talking about the ‘exodus of women’ and the problem of the ‘brain drain’ from rural areas (Grimsrud, 2000, Fosso, 2004). While young rural stayers (men) have been regarded as

The politics of identity and place – a theoretical framework

Today, it is widely acknowledged in the Western world that individuals have more opportunities than ever before to choose their identity. People are not ‘born into’ their identities. Moreover, they can choose between a wide range of different identities, lifestyles and social ties. That is not to say that they can choose to do whatever they wish. The performing of an identity brings with it risks. Hetherington, among others, associates identity with processes of inclusion and exclusion, as well

Methodology and research context

This article draws on research that I conducted in a remote rural area in mid-Norway in 2001–2003. The data were largely obtained through in-depth interviews with young rural men, but the project also included some ethnographical research conducted while hunting in the case study area over the course of two hunting seasons. Individual interviews were conducted with ten men in their mid-twenties who had grown up in the area. The respondents were identified with the assistance of the municipal

Performing identity politics and loyalty to place

I will start the discussion on ‘how to be a rural man’, by introducing one of the young men that I interviewed. Brede, who had returned home after an extended period of time away, touched upon the subject of the cultural norms and expectations of how rural men are expected to be and act as men in a rural community, and particularly how men relate to dominant discourses of ‘rural masculinity’ and how men who do not ‘fit’ these constructions may be marginalized. When asked to reflect upon his own

Negotiating hegemonic rural masculinities

Although ideas about hunting, the outdoors and handyman skills, together with debates on snowmobiling and carnivores, must be regarded as rigid demands in the construction of rural masculine identity and may make it difficult for young rural men to develop alternative masculinities, the men in the study area managed to construct new and alternative masculinities. In the next section I will examine the flexible rural masculinities enacted by participants. I will discuss how young rural men

Concluding remarks

This study has shown that young rural men, in contrast to their fathers' generation, do not primarily develop their identity based upon their work. The young men in this study can, to a certain extent, be said to have opened up for a more flexible approach to work as a consequence of the fact that they were generally open to the idea of rural men being able to work within ‘female’ service professions and to a greater extent also accepted men who worked part-time and used academic knowledge.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Nina Gunnerud Berg, Barbara Pini and Bjørn Egil Flø for valuable comments and advice on earlier drafts of this article. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

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