Gender mainstreaming and water development projects: analyzing unexpected enviro-social impacts in Bolivia,India, and Lesotho

Gender mainstreaming policies and programs, meant to be gender-sensitive or to target gender issues, are increasingly implemented by both governmental and non-governmental actors. However, these projects seem set to continually aim solely at women, despite more than a decade of work encouraging broader scope. Using recent case studies from Bolivia, Lesotho, and India, we address the tensions laden in three major questions about water, gender, and development: (1) Is mandatory inclusion of women in water governance and decision-making effective?, (2) Do water development projects provide equal benefits and burdens for women and men?, and (3) In what ways are water projects and their policies impacting and impacted by gendered enviro-social spaces? By providing triangulated data from ethnographic studies in three distinct local contexts, we are able to pinpoint major cross-cutting themes that serve to highlight and interrogate the gendered impacts of water development projects’ policies: public and private lives, women’s labor expectations, and managing participation. We find that gender mainstreaming endeavors continue to fall short in their aim to equitably include women in their programming and that geographic, environmental, and socio-cultural spaces are intimately related to how these equitability issues play out. We provide practical recommendations on how to address these issues.     

Work,Gender & History in the 1990s and Beyond

By the end of the 1980s, having amply demonstrated that the study of class could no longer be separated from the study of gender, feminist historians were advocating a new gendered history of work. At the beginning of the 1990s, American historian Ava Baron identified four problems that women's labour history had left unresolved: the need to move women's labour history out of its ghetto; an explanation for the mechanisms of sexual difference in labour relations; the theorisation of women's and men's ‘consent’ to oppression; and an understanding of the differences among women. The quest for a gendered labour history required new conceptual tools and new theoretical approaches. This paper tests this agenda against research on work and gender in the last decade of Gender & History. The moves toward the interrelation of public and private, work and family, as well as toward the construction of identities calls into question whether work remains a distinctive historical field.     

Bringing the ‘invisible farmer’ into sharper focus: gender relations and agricultural practices in the Peak District (UK)

Women's farm work and the gendered nature of the farm space and farm practices have been important intersecting themes within feminist enquiry over the last 30 years. Much research has tended to underplay the wider evolution of these gender relations – leaving under-explored the longer-term formation and contestation of the gendered activities, spaces and identities observed in the present. This article draws on research on 64 farms in the Peak District (UK) to take a wider temporal view of farm gender relations. Utilising a farm life history approach the article considers three key moments within farming histories to explore the active role(s) played by women in shaping farms and farming practices. In doing so the article adds complexity and nuance to understandings of both processes, such as the ‘masculinisation’ of agriculture, and to the gendered geographies of the farm space.     

(Re)Producing and challenging gender in and through urban space: women bicyclists’ experiences in Chicago

This research, which uses an intersectional feminist methodological approach, explores the relationships and intersections among women, public urban space, and bicycling, and the gendered processes through which the use of space is claimed, negotiated, and constrained. It builds on the existing scholarship on the gendered nature of public space, and uniquely uses bicycling as the site of inquiry. Drawing primarily from interviews with women cyclists in Chicago, this article explores how gender and other social identities are constructed, challenged, and constituted through an interaction with public space, urban processes and structures, and societal expectations and attitudes. It brings to the forefront and centers these narratives and empirically contextualizes them by linking the scholarship on the gendered (and raced, classed, and sexualized) nature of public space with the scholarship on women’s participation rates and barriers to bicycling. This research examines, through the everyday lived experiences of bicyclists and their multiple subject positions and privileges, how the gendered nature of public space affects the participation and experiences of women cyclists; how public space is negotiated and constrained; and how gender can be both (re)produced and challenged in and through urban space via women bicyclists’ actions. In particular, the research findings explore how women bicyclists must demand and negotiate public space; how their movement and activities are constrained in public space; how gender roles and social reproduction issues intersect with bicycling; and how social, quasi-advocacy group bicycle rides are used as a strategy, with mixed results, to address barriers to women bicyclists’ mobility.     

Frank Cass THE JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES

Much environment and development discourse assumes that women are the ‘natural’ constituency for conservation interventions. This article attempts to illuminate this assumption with the lens of a gendered critique of environmentalisms (technocentric, ecocentric and non-western). How do the intellectual roots of Western environmentalisms influence the positions, or non-positions, of contemporary environmentalism with regard to gender? What does research on environmental perceptions in non-Western societies imply about gender differentiation in environmental relations? The article concludes that there are no grounds for assuming an affinity between women's gender interests and those of environments and that such a view is symptomatic of the gender blind, ethnocentric and populist character of western environmentalisms. By contrast the application of gender analysis to environmental relations involves seeing women in relation to men, the disaggregation of the category of ‘women’, and an understanding of gender roles as socially and historically constructed, materially grounded and continually reformulated. The issue of how far women's gender interests and environmental interests go hand in hand leads us to pose a broader question of the degree to which environmental conservation is premissed upon social inequality.     

The unavoidable salience of gender: notes from Australian childcare work

This article explores the gendering of work in Australian childcare settings from a post-gender perspective. Much early childhood research focuses on encouraging men into the field, seeing their presence as beneficial to the perceived worth of childcare work. Such research ignores how women’s gendered experiences, as the overwhelming majority of the workforce, are already shaping the field, creating an image of this work apparently unpalatable to most men. I show how gendered relations have a profound impact, even in mono-gendered spaces like childcare, to the continuing disadvantage of women. Workers caught within binary understandings of gender appear to draw on normative gendered discourses to understand the social and economic positioning of the field, rather than more emancipatory framings. This article argues that perspectives that actively question biomedical understandings of gender can be useful in understanding and challenging the gendering of particular societal spaces, such as childcare services.     

Do local needs matter?: the relevance of women’s NGOs in sub-Saharan Africa

This article focuses on the potential of women’s non-governmental organizations (WNGOs) for effectively addressing gender inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa. As the mainstreaming of gender and women’s issues continues to pervade global governance, scholars, and practitioners have questioned whether local WNGOs are capable of formulating projects that are relevant to the communities in which they work. One important challenge is local WNGOs’ dependence on external funding and agendas. The extensive literature on women and development indicates that there is a critical need to develop a more radical, transformative feminist agenda for women’s empowerment. The objective of this quantitative study is to test the association between WNGOs’ emergence and measures of gender inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that while there is evidence that WNGOs’ formation represents a legitimate response to African countries’ challenges in terms of gender inequality, the institutionalization of gender within NGOs does not automatically translate into greater gender equality and women’s empowerment. This article identifies some of the gaps and limitations of gender mainstreaming initiatives within African WNGOs. Examining the heterogeneity of women’s organizing and WNGO formation in the region and gaps in development activities, this study highlights the importance of place and space in developing a progressive feminist agenda. The quantitative analysis used in this study, which highlights the uneven geographies and scales of WNGO intervention in Sub-Saharan Africa, contributes to, and calls for more geographic studies on development and gendered activism.     

‘A Still Ecstasy of Freedom and Enjoyment’: Walking the City in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

This article situates Charlotte Brontë’s writing within the context of mid-nineteenth-century discourses of gender and travel, and posits that Brontë contributes to the discursive construct of the flâneuse through her writing about women walking the city in her letters from Belgium and in the novel Villette (1853). Through a critical framework drawing together literary historicism on women in the Victorian city and mobility theories of embodied and sensory movement, the analysis reveals how Brontë foregrounds the experience of the body in her writing of women walking, and uses this as a mode through which to explore gendered discourses of mobility, and especially women’s urban walking. It argues that Brontë offers a new model of female urban spectatorship which privileges the body of the flâneuse as the prime site of knowing the city; this positively reconfigures the possibilities for autonomy and agency that urban walking affords, while at the same time making the body a site through which ambivalence about women’s mobility is expressed. The article reveals Charlotte Brontë to be a writer actively engaged with discourses of mobility and modernity that have been overlooked in her work, and situates Brontë as a significant contributor to debates about women and the city. It advances literary histories of city walking by locating Villette as a key participant within the field, and contributes to Brontë studies by revealing new perspectives on the significance of women’s travel in her works.     

Gender Binary and the Limits of Poststructuralist Method

In contemporary gender history, the story about the making of the gender category is inseparable from the concept of ‘gender binary’. It at once signifies a research agenda and constitutes a persistent problem pervading feminist analysis itself. On the one hand, it points to the massive historical record of persistent inequality between the sexes. On the other hand, the concept of ‘gender binary’ undergirds gender history's analytics, which empowers historians to pursue, expose and deconstruct the binary organisation of gendered – woman/man – identities as well as social relations and discursive formations that produce them. In both capacities, the concept carries a rich repertoire of connotations, which informs and influences the gender category: those of radical distinction, opposition, mutually exclusive and exhaustive differentiation, hierarchy, domination, oppression – in all their myriad historical forms. As a result, it captures the entanglement of gender – in theory, an open‐ended category – in binary, that is, negatively and positively determined connotations of feminine and masculine and, consequently, in a particular, historical form of heterosexual subjectivity, the one structured like a binary system. The entanglement of gender history's foundational category – gender – in the binary systems of assigning difference has had many critics. What has been left unexamined however and what gives this article its focus is the poverty of gender as a binary device to analyse those gendered identities that constitute heterosexual relations but do not fit the binary matrix. The goal in this article is to enable the conditions for the continuous development – not abandonment – of the gender category and our theoretical framework. To do that, I explore how the gender category became a binary category, tightly identified with connotations of asymmetry and hierarchy, by undertaking a deconstructive rereading of a foundational work by one of the discipline's most influential poststructuralist theorists – Joan Scott. I conclude by arguing that in order to address the problem of gendered, heterosexual identities that do not fit the binary matrix we need to revisit the concept of dichotomy and differentiate it from binary connotations of difference found in heteronormative gender systems.     

Gendered mobilities and immobilities: Women’s and men’s capacities for agricultural innovation in Kenya and Nigeria

Abstract

Social norms surrounding women’s and men’s mobility in public spaces often differ. Here we discuss how gendered mobilities and immobilities influence women’s and men’s capacities to innovate in agriculture. We analyze four case studies from Western Kenya and Southwestern Nigeria that draw on 28 focus group discussions and 32 individual interviews with a total of 225 rural and peri-urban women, men and youth. Findings show that women in both sites are less mobile than men due to norms that delimit the spaces where they can go, the purpose, length of time and time of day of their travels. Overall, Kenyan women and Nigerian men have better access to agricultural services and farmer groups than their gendered counterparts. In Southwestern Nigeria this is linked to masculine roles of heading and providing for the household and in Western Kenya to the construction of women as the ‘developers’ of their households. Access and group participation may reflect norms and expectations to fulfill gender roles rather than an individual’s agency. This may (re)produce mobility pressures on time constrained gendered subjects. Frameworks to analyze factors that support women’s and men’s agency should be used to understand how gendered mobilities and immobilities are embedded in community contexts and affect engagement in agricultural innovation. This can inform the design of interventions to consider the ways in which norms and agency intersect and influence women’s and men’s mobilities, hence capacity to innovate in agriculture, thus supporting more gender transformative approaches.     

Gendered mobilities and border-crossings: from Elbasan to Athens

The study of migratory movements, with all their changing features in the context of post-1989 political, economic and geographical restructurings, offers a prime site for reflection on the gendered meaning/s and content of mobilities and borders. Particularly in human geography, new questions and different approaches to established themes in migration research are elaborated in this ‘era of globalisation’. Negotiations of geographical and social borders and boundaries, the speed and ease of movement, but also gender inequalities in choice and cases of immobility and/or enclosure, emphasis on agency and the importance of space and place are some such themes and questions. This article is based on research with migrant women in Athens; it follows the trajectories of an Albanian woman from Elbasan to Athens as a starting point for the discussion of gendered practices and perceptions of migration, (im)mobility and border-crossings. In these trajectories, space is involved, in its material aspects but also in terms of representations and codings. Notions of place, local/global relations and gender identities are re-worked in the efforts to set up bearable everyday lives ‘here’, while maintaining links ‘there’. At the same time, ‘here’ (in Athens) and ‘there’ (in Elbasan) come out as open and temporary while borders are (re)produced, negotiated and challenged in multiple ways and at various spatial scales.     

Providing fun in the ‘world of tourism’: servicing backpackers in Indonesia

Service sector work is a special arena for the formation of gendered subjects because its workers are both service providers and part of the consumed product in the sense that they have to deliver a ‘quality’ product and have the ‘right attitude’ toward customers. Based on repeated qualitative fieldwork, including in-depth interviews with tourism workers in a backpacker tourism enclave in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, this article explores the ways in which tourism work and tourism workers are constructed as gendered subjects. Although women and men might have the same work tasks within tourism, they are positioned differently, and it is not unusual for women to be seen as having a hidden agenda that is assumed to involve sex work. Men are constructed as the norm to which women are compared and consequently perceived as deviating from. Between men and women working in tourism and the western backpackers on which tourism workers depend in order to sustain their livelihoods, relations of class, gender and colonial stereotypes come into play. Tourism workers consider themselves to be seen as providers of fun, which means that they are able to meet the needs of the tourists, whatever those needs might be.     

Young women and public leisure spaces in contemporary Beijing: recreating (with) gender,tradition, and place

Feminist geographers and leisure scholars have long argued that one critical way to understand gendered norms and expectations is through examining women's access to and experiences of leisure activities. Set in the context of the rapid economic, political, and social changes that have taken place in Beijing over the past half century, this article draws on in-depth interviews and extensive participant observation to explore the role of newly available public leisure spaces in the lives and leisure of young women in Beijing, in particular by examining the way that these spaces provide an opportunity for the negotiation of new gender norms and identities. Through an analysis of the interaction of gender norms and practices with women's use of and behavior in public leisure spaces, we argue that women's behavior in public leisure spaces in contemporary Beijing remains strongly circumscribed by gendered norms. Rather than their presence itself constituting a challenge to gender expectations, in many cases their leisure behavior and experiences serve to reinforce the social norms that masculinize public leisure spaces. In spite of this, however, the findings of this research suggest that public leisure spaces may, in some cases, provide women with a place from which to challenge gender norms.     

Men who ‘Marry Out’: unsettling masculinity,kinship, and nation through migration across the Taiwan Strait

Family reunification has become a widely recognized means to move across borders in the contemporary world. As a migration strategy, family reunification redefines the relationship of kinship to nation, diversifying the ‘national family’ and its gendered role expectations. This article uses cross-border marriages between Chinese and Taiwanese to interrogate how immigration affects the experiences of men who migrate through or in conjunction with marriage, integrating scales of family, citizenship, and nation in an analysis of migrant masculinity. Migrant husbands describe their disempowerment as male providers and citizens through the patrilineal and patrilocal kinship language of having ‘married out.’ The article examines the salience of this kinship model for immigrant husbands seeking to redefine their relationship to patrilineal gender privileges and secure citizenship status. How do men who migrate through marriage negotiate gendered kinship principles that may work to their benefit in their home country but undermine their status once they migrate? How does the experience of migrating as a kin-dependent threaten men’s self-image as family providers? By investigating these challenges to hegemonic masculinity, the article asks how migration reconfigures the gendered foundations of family formation by undermining kinship-based models of normative masculinity and creating a gender crisis for some migrant husbands.     

Empowered spaces? Management articulations of gendered spaces in apparel factories in Karachi,Pakistan

Feminist scholarship has often focused on gendered workspaces within the apparel sector, where it is taken for granted that it is work conventionally attracting neophyte women. Within it, the task of managers is to discipline these young women to become docile and malleable workers. While this may have held to be the case temporally and regionally, South Asia’s experience has exhibited country-specific facets. This article focuses on these gendered workspaces in three factories in Karachi, Pakistan, in which we undertook research. In this context, there was a deliberate change in place facilitated by a United Nations Development Program’s Gender Promotion (GENPROM) initiative – to recruit and retain women workers, even though they acknowledged skilled workers were men. The factory managers we interviewed and spoke with used discursive tropes of gender equality and culturally appropriate women’s-only spaces as ways of justifying their labor recruitment strategy. However, digging deeper through interviews with managers at various levels suggested that their recruitment tactic had similar undertones to that revealed by early feminist research – although articulated via different mechanisms. We argue that this creation of empowerment spaces in particular Pakistani apparel sector factories requires careful tracing because it suggests how management interpellations reconfigure worker subjectivities. We also want to suggest that attentiveness to these practices is important because they may have specific bearings on temporal and spatial realities faced by Pakistan.     

Struggling with ‘this gender relations thing’ in the Papua New Guinea Church Partnership Program

Gender equality and women's empowerment has become a cornerstone for successful development. Religious teachings and practices, like ‘traditional culture’, are often viewed as contributing to gender inequality and oppression. The increased engagement by donor agencies with religious organisations prompts questions about how religion, gender and development intersect in particular places, and the implications this intersection has for the transnational ‘gender agenda’ of development agencies. This article focuses on the dialogue about gender in the Papua New Guinea Church Partnership Program. Analysing the struggles taking place, it argues that the processes that shaped local Christianities are also at work in the churches' translations of the ‘gender agenda’. These churches are gradually emerging as agents for gender justice as they develop their own approaches to gender work that support the churches' mission to ‘live the Gospel’ in their practice of holistic integral human development. However, to progress further, in recognising the necessity for men to lead the struggle for gender justice, the dialogue must focus on the personal transformation of men in relation to their understanding of masculinities and gendered power dynamics. From this foundation, structural and political change can be advanced.     

Gender equality and economic empowerment in the Solomon Islands and Fiji: a place-based approach

The economic empowerment of women is emerging as a core focus of both economic development and gender equality programmes internationally. At the same time, there is increasing importance placed on measuring outcomes and quantifying progress towards gender and development goals. These trends raise significant questions around how well gender differences are understood, especially in economies dominated by the informal sector and characterised by a highly gendered division of labour, as is the case in many Pacific countries. How well do existing international and national indicators of gender equality reflect the experiences and aspirations of Pacific women and men? What do concepts such as gender equality and economic empowerment mean in this geographical context? How might local attitudes and practices be identified and measured? In this paper, we draw on Boaventura De Sousa Santos’ call to recognise and value knowledges of the majority world that have been rendered either largely invisible or non-credible by mainstream development and human rights policy agendas. Reflecting on an action research project conducted with partner organisations in Fiji and the Solomon islands, we explore a more nuanced place-based approach to understanding and measuring gender equality and economic empowerment. This approach takes account of diverse economic practices, such as non-market transactions, and forms of non-cash exchange and unpaid labour, and recognises the imbalance in women’s and men’s household and care work.     

Queering women,peace and security

The aim of the eight Women, Peace and Security (WPS) United Nations Security Council resolutions, beginning with UNSCR 1325 in 2000, is to involve women in peacebuilding, reconstruction and gender mainstreaming efforts for gendered equality in international peace and security work. However, the resolutions make no mention of masculinity, femininity or the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) population. Throughout the WPS architecture the terms ‘gender’ and ‘women’ are often used interchangeably. As a result, sexual and gender‐based violence (SGBV) tracking and monitoring fail to account for individuals who fall outside a heteronormative construction of who qualifies as ‘women’. Those vulnerable to insecurity and violence because of their sexual orientation or gender identity remain largely neglected by the international peace and security community. Feminist security studies and emerging queer theory in international relations provide a framework to incorporate a gender perspective in WPS work that moves beyond a narrow, binary understanding of gender to begin to capture violence targeted at the LGBTQ population, particularly in efforts to address SGBV in conflict‐related environments. The article also explores the ways in which a queer security analysis reveals the part heteronormativity and cisprivilege play in sustaining the current gap in analysis of gendered violence.