The document discusses an interview with Ramona Scott, a former member of the Growing Circle Food Co-operative on Salt Spring Island, BC. The co-op links local consumers with producers through an organic food store and promotes local food security. Scott discusses issues of gender, leadership, and masculinity in agriculture during the interview.

1. Growing Circle Food
Cooperative Ramona Scott interview on
www.uvic.ca/research/centres/cccbe/resour
ces/galleria/stories/GrowingCircleFoo
gender, leadership, and co-ops
dCooperative.php June 2, 2004 class. Masculinity, science and
agriculture
Saltspring
vineyard
joke

2. Ramona Scott- Growing Circle Food Co-op
• Ramona Scott, was interviewed and took part in a class
discussion at Uvic as a former member of the Growing Circle
Food Co-operative (Incorporated: December, 2001).
• Membership: 500 members (8 workers, 100 producers, 400
consumer members)
• Activity: The Growing Circle Food Cooperative links local
consumers with local producers through an organic food store.
The co-op promotes community self-sufficiency and local
food security by supporting a vibrant local agricultural
economy.
• The Growing Circle Food Cooperative is a multi-stakeholder
co-operative. The three stakeholder classes are workers,
consumers, and producers.
• Area Served: Salt Spring Island, British Columbia
www.uvic.ca/research/centres/cccbe/resources/galleria/stories/GrowingCircleFoodCooperative.php

3. Q 1. I noticed that the “Growing Circles Food
Cooperatives” management team are all female.
1. Underpaid
2. Working long hours
3. No time for partners
4. Used child care space for
storage
5. Making all these sacrifices
to keep the co-op going
but is that good
leadership?

4. Q3. What is your experience with masculinities from the
traditional and sustainable sectors of agriculture ?
• Have more machinery and greenhouses
• - Wants to break their group away from the
main group of COABC because of
philosophical differences
• - Wants to start a SLO movement instead of
working along with the SLOW Food
movement
• -Criticizing the rules on embryo transfers
without admitting he is not following
organic principles
• - Uncomfortable with women asking
questions in livestock meeting

5. Q2. In your opinion, can and should feminists
include a discussion and critique of masculinities in
their work?
1. How could it be
inappropriate- cannot
question the Gods?
2. Gender roles are learnt and
can be unlearnt
3. Can we deal with date rate,
spread of AIDS, sexual
harassment, veiling, honour
killing, fathering practices
or domestic violence
without speaking about
masculinity?

6. Discussion of masculinity
• Skirting the issue, changing the
discussion to land issues and
using up the remaining time.
• Men are allowed to discuss
women [ladyparts &
reproductive health] but are
women not allowed to discuss
men?
• An example of how masculine
power is socially constructed?
• masculine invisibility
• Plural masculinities –
hegemonic, complicit,

7. Ramona Scott: BSE, Avian flu, GMO’s – do mostly
women oppose these?
• Not only women, Do men who oppose
these technologies
but who created the
lose more status
monocultures,
than women who
intensive
oppose them?
agriculture,
technology ?

8. Ramona: Why would women WANT to be in the
boardrooms under the current system?
Gendered Science: A
• Anne Ferguson – Gendered science: A Critique of Agricultural
critique of development. Women’s Development
Anne E. Ferguson
perspectives, especially those of poor American Anthropologist
women regularly fail to meet the research New Series, Vol. 96, No. 3
and policy agenda. (Sep., 1994), pp. 540-552
• If women are not in the boardrooms or
doing research why would men change?
• Why did she think that women should stay
at the community level? So they would not
get polluted and corrupted?
• Why value having many children in an
over-populated world?

9. Ramona: Can globalization be good?
Do we HAVE to participate?
• Ramona’s
discussio Abstract The alternative agriculture paradigm has been a useful
n fit the device to both define and direct a social movement toward a
example more sustainable agriculture. But because that paradigm was
defined by male movement leaders, it reflects their gendered
given in
perspective and may be lacking elements that make it more
Chiappe useful for both women and men. In-depth interviews of women
and involved in sustainable farming organizations and on family
Butler farms experimenting with new practices validated the elements
Flora of the Beus and Dunlap paradigm: independence,
Gendered Elements of decentralization, community, harmony with nature, diversity,
the Alternative and restraint, but also suggested the addition of two other
elements that the women identified as part of an alternative
Agriculture Paradigm
agriculture vision: quality family life and spirituality. The
•Marta B. Chiappe1, highly gendered nature of agriculture in the V.S. and Canada,
•Comelia Butler Flora2 where male identity is highly conflated with the role of farmer
online: 17 MAR 2011 in the conventional paradigm, may make it more difficult for
Rural Sociology men who have just joined the' movement to articulate the
Volume 63, Issue 3, pages aspects of quality family life and spirituality which the women
372–393, September 1998 saw as critical.

10. Corporations
• When corporatization takes
over gender disparities can
change for better or worse.
Consider that there is a
continuum of human traits –
NOT gendered traits –
greed, competitiveness,
motivations of profits,
power, and control, distance
from the personal/human
scale/ are the characteristics
of large corporations.

11. beyond the dichotomy of
gender
• Cosmology class (God trick-Haraway? Beyond all
that--- post feminist) refers to the "God-trick" as
an un-thinking flight from responsible discourse.
By postulating the ability to see like a God or
interpret for a God from a position transcendent
and outside of lived experience, certain humans
flee from the messy responsibilities of
argumentation and decision making… an
avoidance of accountability
• Mary Daly went beyond patriarchal
religion and created a non-patriarchal
English – but she left behind all those
women who have to struggle under
increasingly fundamentalist religious
structures without her immense
knowledge and training – to fend for

12. Ramona: How locked into the stereotype do we want
to be? Is it no longer useful to explain that agriculture
is GENDERED because “girls are not taught to drive
tractors?”
• How does this address XX’s experience.
Her family lost the farm because it was left
to her brother who lost it in a divorce. She
was not considered a suitable heir yet she is
the one who is still farming, her father
acknowledged that eventually.
• The experience of Mary Alice Johnson and
Rebecca Jehn about being taken seriously in
their knowledge of their machines.

13. Evelyn Fox Keller
• Until we begin to envisage the
possibility of alternative
arrangements, the symbolic work
of gender remains both silent and
inaccessible. And as long as gender
is thought to pertain only to
women, any question about its role
can only be understood as a
question about the presence or
absence of biologically female
persons.