Publication: The (Non)Performativity of Social Sustainability

Queer Farmworkers in Switzerland

Prisca Pfammatter, Susan Thieme

ABSTRACT

Agricultural social sustainability is often promoted as a solution to agrarian crises, yet we show that, in practice, it operates as (non)performative: it promises justice while reproducing the very exclusions it claims to remedy. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic research with queer farmworkers in Switzerland, this article exposes how sustainability frameworks are anchored in and, in turn, anchor the traditional family farm. This normative grounding stabilizes cisheteropatriarchal, racialized, and nationalist agrarian relations. By tracing the everyday practices through which queer farmworkers sustain agriculture, we demonstrate that justice is not delivered by metrics and documents alone but through ongoing negotiation, care, and subversion on the ground. Rather than treating queer lives as supplemental or exceptional, we show how attending to the everyday negotiations through which queer farmworkers navigate and remake agriculture reframes social sustainability as relational, contested, and world-making—and opens space for plural, joyful, and livable agrarian futures.