Rural masculinity in transition: Gender images in tractor advertisements

The article investigates stability and change in images of masculinity in a technologically well-developed agriculture. By analysing tractor advertisements, it is shown how agricultural machinery is a male arena, and how tractors represent many qualities important to rural men and their masculine identity. The article also shows how technology and masculinity are mutually and simultaneously constructed. The users, the men farmers, give the tractor gender, and the tractor makes the farmers into real men. As the tractor is becoming computerized and more comfortable, new images of masculinity are in the process of evolving. The ideal of the farmer as a strong, dirty, manual mechanic is giving way to a more business-like masculinity. A question is whether the traditional, hegemonic type is being replaced, reconstructed or whether the two types will coexist peacefully, as variation in the meaning of gender is a general feature of late-modern culture.