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.     

Women bargaining with patriarchy in coastal Kenya: contradictions,creative agency and food provisioning

Gender analysts have long recognised that challenging existing patriarchal structures involves risks for women, who may lose both long-term support and protection from kin. However, understanding the specific ways in which they ‘bargain with patriarchy’ in particular contexts is relatively poorly understood. We focus on a Mijikenda fishing community in coastal Kenya to explore contradictions in gendered power relations and how women deploy these to reinterpret gendered practices without directly challenging local patriarchal structures. We argue that a more complex understanding of women’s creative agency can reveal both the value to women of culturally-specific gendered roles and responsibilities and the importance of subtle changes that they are able to negotiate in these. With reference to food provisioning, the analysis contributes to more nuanced understandings of gendered household food security and women’s creative approaches to maintaining long-term security in their lives.     

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.     

Knowing “Good Food”: Immigrant Knowledge and the Racial Politics of Farmworker Food Insecurity

Abstract: This article explores the ways that farmworkers, many of whom come from a culture deeply rooted in food and agricultural practices, cope with food insecurity by utilizing their agricultural and nutritional knowledge. Food assistance providers in the USA often treat farmworkers' inability to afford healthy food as a lack of knowledge about healthy eating, reinforcing racialized assumptions that people of color don't know “good” food. I argue that in contrast to food banks and low‐income nutrition programs, home and community gardens provide spaces for retaining and highlighting agricultural, cultural, and dietary practices and knowledge. This paper investigates the linkages between workers' place in the food system as both producers and consumers, simultaneously exploited for their labor, and creating coping strategies utilizing agrarian and culinary knowledge. I argue that food security and healthy eating, rather than being a matter of consumers making healthy “choices”, is a matter of class‐based and racial differences in the food system.     

Women's Cotton and the Spaces of Gender Politics in Northern Cote d'Ivoire

This article seeks to contribute to the gender and 'development' literature by showing how gender struggles over women's economic autonomy from cotton growing are played out at multiple geographical scales. The main argument is that 'men' and 'women' do not simply negotiate over cash cropping within the household. Women in particular find it necessary to 'jump' the scale of the household in order to secure productive resources for cash cropping. Drawing upon the notion of 'scalar politics,' this article illuminates the multiple processes and scaled spaces in which women's economic autonomy expands and contracts around the cultivation of cotton. It is inspired by feminist political ecological approaches to examine how the micro-politics of gender interact with meso- and macro-level agroecological and political economic processes affecting women's poverty and empowerment. Based on longitudinal research in northern Côte d'Ivoire, it shows how women of different sociocultural and economic standing negotiate access to productive resources at multiple scales, and how some men seek to restrict these initiatives. As women search for solutions to contradictions in gendered social relations of production, at different geographical scales, they have simultaneously dispersed the site of gender struggles to other locations (the marketplace and women's personal fields). Male household heads now find it necessary to contest women's cotton growing in these gendered spaces in their attempt to control their wives' labor.     

The Gender of the Gold: an Ethnographic and Historical Account of Women's Involvement in Artisanal and Small‐scale Mining in Mount Kaindi,Papua New Guinea

The Kaindi area of Papua New Guinea is home to a large community of Anga small‐scale miners. While they constitute nearly half of the local population, women do not participate in mining to the same extent as the men. Drawing on ethnographic data this paper shows that this is not just due to personal choice but also to a series of limiting factors that include pollution beliefs, land tenure practices, the unequal control of household resources, and the gendered division of labour. Far from being simply intrinsic to Anga culture, these impediments also relate to the gendered history of the colonial goldfields and to contemporary national law and company practice in the extractive sector. Similarly, they are neither unambiguous nor resistant to change. Indeed, since the Anga first entered the mines their women have engaged in resource extraction in ever increasing numbers, both independently and alongside male relatives and partners. Through an analysis of this historical trend, my paper will show that historically conscious ethnography can help specify not only the main obstacles women face in entering artisanal and small‐scale mining (ASM), but also the conditions that lead to their strengthening or weakening through time, thus identifying factors to be stimulated or countered in policies and strategies for equitable development within the sector.     

‘The Dining Room Should Be the Man's Paradise,as the Drawing Room Is the Woman's’: Gender and Middle‐Class Domestic Space in England, 1850–1910

In the middle‐class home in late nineteenth‐century England, drawing rooms, morning rooms and boudoirs became increasingly associated with women, while dining rooms, studies and smoking rooms were viewed as male spaces. Historians have linked this to the exclusion of women from social power and a male ‘flight from domesticity’. This article questions these interpretations and explores gendered space through advice manuals, inventories and sale catalogues, and autobiographies. While the notion that domestic space should be divided between men and women had considerable cultural purchase, the ways in which this should occur were subject to dispute and limited by the practical contingencies of everyday living. In homes where gendered material culture was present, it exerted a powerful influence on childhood experience and the formation of adult identities.     

Spaces of protest: gendered migration,social networks,and labor activism in West Java,Indonesia

This article examines the gender geography of labor activism through a comparative investigation of two communities in West Java, Indonesia. Based on in-depth interviews and a survey of workers carried out in 1995, 1998, and 2000 in the two sites, it explores the place-specific meanings attached to migrants’ social networks and gender relations, and their roles in mediating the gendered patterns of labor protest in the two villages. Previous analyses of labor protest in Indonesia have occluded scales and processes that are critical to understanding how gender dynamics are linked to the geography of protest. By contrast, attention to the gender- and place-based contexts of women’s activism illustrates the complex interactions between migrants’ local interpretations of gender norms, social network relations, household roles, state gender ideology, and global neo-liberal restructuring. Through examining these interactions, gender is conceptualized as ontologically inseparable from the production of specific activist spaces, rethinking the uni-directional spatial logic and deterministic views of gender and place put forth in theories of the New International Division of Labor.     

‘A Remarkably Patterned Life’: Domestic and Public in the Aztec Household City

This article argues that the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan should be understood as a ‘household’, a structure that gave powerful significance to binary gendered ideologies at every level of city organisation. Male and female roles were configured around ‘public’ and ‘domestic’ spheres, but these concepts were perceived in a broader and more flexible way than traditional public/private dichotomies suggest and might helpfully be understood in political terms as distinguishing between exterior/foreign and interior/domestic realms. Building on understandings of parallelism and complementarity, the article demonstrates that gendered pairings, based on distinctive masculine/public and feminine/domestic spheres, mirrored the household not only in social, economic and political contexts, but also in religious settings, providing space for both male and female power at every level of urban life. Just as a married couple provided the basis to a successful and productive home, so the parallel responsibilities of men and women, structured according to concepts of ‘household’ and reflected throughout the institutions and activities of the city, were believed to form the foundations of a thriving Aztec city.     

Who does the work in sustainable households? A time and gender analysis in New South Wales,Australia

Households in the affluent West have become an important target of government and NGO campaigns to encourage more environmentally sustainable behaviours, but there has been little research into the gender implications of such policies. This article investigates the role of gender and time in the sustainability practices of six heterosexual households with young children, committed participants in the Sustainable Illawarra Super Challenge programme in 2009. Women spent more total time on sustainable practices, and did so more often. Men's contributions related mostly to gardening and transport, in longer blocks of time. In these households, sustainability became a highly gendered practice because of the different roles in homemaking. Women resisted constructions of themselves as being closer to nature, and shouldered expectations of sustainability as part of their roles as mothers and household managers. They experienced time as overlapping and fragmented, with no distinction between work and leisure. Men contributed to sustainable practices mainly through activities understood as leisure, in longer blocks of time. Our temporality lens also illustrates the gendered ways that old practices become deroutinised and new practices reroutinised. While men were often responsible for the labour and upfront time required to start or research a project, the responsibility of everyday implementation and habit-changing commonly fell to women. These findings illustrate how gendered analyses help identify both opportunities for, and constraints against, change towards sustainability. Opportunities include the strong connections between both mothers' and fathers' understanding of good parenting and the importance they attach to household sustainability. Constraints include the temporal challenges faced by households, and how these interact with wider structural and labour roles.     

Kitchenspace: Gendered territory in central Mexico

Drawing on extensive ethnographic field research with multiple women and kitchens in two central Mexico communities, this article argues for kitchenspace—indoor and outdoor spaces where food preparation takes place—as gendered territory. Using a feminist political ecology approach, it explores private and semi-public space in the everyday, household kitchen and the fiesta or ‘smoke’ kitchen at the center of community celebrations. Marked as gendered territory by distinct social boundaries and gendered, discursive strategies, kitchenspace is vital to the maintenance of traditional forms of organization and generational transmission of cultural and embodied knowledge. This article questions assumptions about ‘the kitchen’ as a site of social isolation and women's oppression that often characterize feminist approaches. It considers embeddedness in local social and spatial contexts and the importance of everyday life in private and public spaces.     

From home to city: gender segregation,homosociality and publicness in Istanbul

This article examines the complex and tangled relationships between home, city, and gender in Bagcilar, a municipality in Istanbul governed by Islamist-oriented political parties since 1992. Focusing on women’s spatial experiences at the intersection of the private and the public, the traditional and the modern, the secular and the religious, this article argues that home provides a medium through which gendered forms of governance and publicness are produced in the city. Home as a domestic sphere confines women’s roles to those of motherhood and wifehood, but also functions as a place of sociability for women. The municipality’s Islamic political discourse, combined with secular urban practices, mobilizes women through familial norms, gender-segregated events, and women-only sites in Bagcilar, where home and urban space are mutually constructed, regulated, and legitimized. Thus, women’s publicness, which derives from but goes beyond domesticity, also enables intimate same-sex sociality in urban spaces. Although this creates only conditional access to the city for women, their agency and engagement with the city emanate from such publicness.     

Not everyone has ‘maids’: class differentials in the elusive quest for work-life balance

Work–life balance has come to the fore in Singapore as in other countries. Debates have focused on uneven gendered burdens. Less attention has been paid to the ways in which class matters in shaping outcomes for women. In this article, I argue that the work-care regime in Singapore is one that generates uneven consequences for women along class lines. The historical legacy of eugenics-influenced pronatalism, the pursuit of a corporation-centric development, the persistent reticence toward universal provisions and corresponding preference for ‘private’ solutions to care create a context in which women in low-income households have an especially hard time balancing wage work and familial responsibilities. The individualization and marketization of household needs, in Singapore and elsewhere, obscure the circumstances, needs, and well-being of women in lower class circumstances, and undermine the value of housework and care labor.     

The effects of microfinance programs on women members in traditional societies

One of the stated goals of microfinance programs is to increase the bargaining power of women within the household. However, little is known about other ways women in patriarchal communities may be affected by these programs. This study assessed the effects of the membership in a microfinance joint liability group (MJLG) on the lives and social networks of its women members by focusing on the interplay of MJLG practices and gendered cultural practices such as ‘purdah’ (veiling of the face). Using in-depth interviews of 35 women in Lucknow, a city in northern India, the study found that, overall, respondents who were members of an MJLG reported developing new and stronger relationships with other members of the group. These social interactions were found to be deeper among women who were using the microloans for self-employment than among women who were redirecting their loan funds to other family members. The study also found that the adaptability of microfinance organizations to the local culture appeared to enable women to join MJLGs with ease and to contribute economically to their families.     

Playing with Infrastructure like a Carishina: Feminist Cycling in an Era of Democratic Politics

This article discusses transit infrastructure as a site of radical possibility and limitation in an age of participatory democracy across Latin America. I focus on multiple spaces of participation in Quito, Ecuador to elucidate how citizenship and infrastructure are co‐produced through gendered processes. I first analyse city space of Quito from a gendered and infrastructural lens to consider how urban environments are dictated by violence and insecurity. Then, against this backdrop, I explore the spatial strategies of the feminist bicycle collective, Carishina en Bici, which translates from Quechua to “bad housewives that cycle”. Here, I draw on the concept of “deep play” to reveal how public practices in Quito question the equitable impacts of local democratic experimentation. To examine Carishinas’ spatial practices, I focus on an urban alleycat race, the Carishina Race, to show how strategic practices of solidarity reinsert feminist possibilities in urban space.     

‘We Help our Husbands!’ Negotiating the Household Budget in Rural Burkina Faso

This article addresses the intra‐household division of responsibilities among the Bisa and Mossi in south‐eastern Burkina Faso. Based on a detailed village study of the land use which revealed that women cultivated 31 per cent of all the land in 1997, gendered practices in household budgeting are investigated. Although the proportion of women’s own‐account agriculture suggests that they contribute substantially to household consumption, the majority of women maintain that they only help their husbands when contributing in areas that, ideologically, are his responsibility, for example by providing food and by paying school fees and materials. In this way, women keep within the norms of showing respect for the husband but, at the same time, they may press him to fulfil his obligations.     

Negotiating mobility in gendered spaces: case of Pakistani women doctors

Through their gendered spatial practices, women in Pakistan re-negotiate and contest the multiple social and material restrictions in their daily mobility to reclaim the urban transit spaces, specifically, roads. Ethnographic research on the automobile use and driving with the women doctors in Lahore, Pakistan reveal the relationship between these strategic practices and the educational and occupational choices of women. These spatially embedded, intentional practices of women doctors, contingent on their social and economic positions, are directly linked to the emerging gendered identities and changing social and material gendered boundaries in Pakistani society. Moreover, these changing spaces are part of on-going flux of shifting power relations between traditional patriarchy and capitalism.     

Women's ecological oral histories of recycling and development in coastal Yucatán

This article addresses the formation of the Chen Kole ‘Lob women's recycling cooperative and its relationship to urbanization, plastics consumption, and the exclusionary spaces of conservation-as-development in coastal Yucatán, Mexico. Increasing amounts of plastic containers and other nonorganic garbage contaminate backyards, protected wetlands and marine areas, and individual homes located in low-lying floodable areas. However, in this region, the majority of sponsored economic development programs are directed at managing men's activities in sustainable fishing and ecotourism within natural protected areas. Both women's work and urban issues such as recycling and waste management have frequently been excluded from state policies and development practice. I draw from oral histories of women's experience in the home, in conservation space, and as participants in grassroots plastics recycling to underscore what motivated women to become involved in recycling and garbage cleanup, and how women came to be considered local professionals who maintain clean spaces. These histories underscore the links between gendered work, urban practices, and conservation-as-development, and how women's urban recycling work affects social differences and ecological decline within vulnerable coastal areas.     

Gendered Taskscapes: Food,Farming, and Craft Production in Banda,Ghana in the Eighteenth to Twenty-first Centuries

This article blends insights from gender, technology, and development studies with Ingold’s concept of taskscape to examine the interrelated nature of farming, food, and craft manufacture practices in Banda, Ghana during the last three centuries. We begin by comparing two ethnoarchaeological studies that were conducted separately by the authors, one that focused on food, and the other on ceramic production, preparation, and consumption. We use these data to analyze gendered taskscapes and how they have changed in recent decades with the introduction of new technologies and major economic and environmental shifts. Building on such insights, we analyze how taskscapes shifted in earlier centuries in Banda through archaeological remains of food and craft practice at the eighteenth- to twentieth-century site of Makala Kataa. Craft production cannot be fully understood without reference to food production, preparation, and consumption; thus, viewing these practices as interrelated tasks in a gendered taskscape yields insight into the rhythms of everyday life and highlights women’s often undervalued skills.     

‘Lived bodies’ and the neoliberal city – a case study of vulnerability in London

This article explores the ‘more-than-work’ aspects of the lives of vulnerable women who street-sex work. Particularly, we are interested in the differences between the women’s experiences, within the broader context of power structures as manifested in neoliberal cities. Few studies have explored this aspect of street-sex workers’ lives and theorisations of the co-creation of environments tend to elide the experiences of the most vulnerable people. Specifically, we explore the relationships that these women have with two environments: the quotidian (where they undertake routine everyday activities), and the gentrified (relating to changes in the spaces in which they live and work). We find that their experiences are extremely local, and heavily contingent on the services made available to them (or not) by the statutory and third sectors, and the emotional contacts they make, particularly in third sector support services. This challenges some of the literature which suggests a separation of ‘home’ and ‘work’, and which finds close associations between women who street-sex work. While places designed by the third sector are more responsive to these women, they are also more vulnerable to closure through lack of funding. This contributes to a significant degree of ontological non-linearity and ontological insecurity in these women’s lives.