There’s so much we still have to do to address gender injustices once and for all

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Today we celebrate International Women’s Day, but as always, there are some positive developments we can commend and others that we should be horrified about. The COVID-19 pandemic has strongly exacerbated gender injustices and created new gender inequalities. At the same time we can fortunately witness the strengthening of discussions on gender relations and things we’re still doing wrong (and those things we’re setting right). We’ve reached the tip of the iceberg and the rest – the assumptions and silences that perpetuate gender injustices – lurk beneath the surface, a silent colossus standing between us and real progress. In this post, we celebrate attempts to chip away at those parts of gender relations that are less visible, but just as crucial to address.

It’s International Women’s Day again! Who could’ve thought that we’d have gone through so much in just one year’s time? Last year on 8 March, they were still considering whether borders and public spaces should be closed and measures imposed. And here we are. All of us suffered the COVID-19 pandemic. No-one remained unaffected. And I think especially women had a hard time as schools closed, remained closed, and they had to balance jobs with childrearing and other tasks traditionally assigned to them. I take my hat off to each and every woman who has faced adverse circumstances over the past year and who has somehow managed to conquer them.

Bliss has received many contributions over the past year about the pandemic from our academics, who have diverse research interests. We’ve seen discussions about things we hadn’t considered. The vast array of articles on different dimensions of the pandemic helped us make sense of what’s happening and take stock of the bigger picture beyond our unhappiness with lockdown measures and the inconvenience they were causing. Inequalities were and still are worsening, and new injustices emerging as the pandemic rages on globally.

One of the articles that grabbed my attention was an article by ISS alumna María Gabriela Palacio, who flagged the rising inequality in academia due to the pandemic as gendered and racialised. In her article she described how women were struggling to fulfill their academic obligations due to the burden of unpaid work they had to shoulder in addition to their work as academics, which is known to be precarious and demanding. She quoted “a sizeable social gradient in the extent to which families feel able to support their children and provide home schooling”.

This growing inequality in academia, which is already highly unequal, needs to remain a topic of discussion. It shouldn’t be normalised or dismissed. Women who manage to do so much and remain standing are superheroes in my eyes, but that doesn’t mean that we should assume that they want to be superheroes.

Another regular author on Bliss, Professor Thea Hilhorst, is also talking about gender relations. But she has a somewhat different focus: the plight of men. At least in the article published today in Dutch newspaper Trouw, where she turned the notion of toxic masculinity ever so slightly on its head by arguing that men have feelings, too, and that we also need them to be involved in reconstructing societies ravaged by conflicts.

Hilhorst, Professor in Humanitarian Aid and Reconstruction at ISS, argues that men need to be included in post-conflict reconstruction efforts because conflict gives rise to new or perhaps worse forms of toxic masculinity that remain long after conflicts are over. New perceptions of masculinity may emerge as women’s role is strengthened during conflicts or wars when they assume duties typically considered those of men. And during wars, men also resort to sexual violence and the torturing of civilians – something that remains in their conscience and perceptions of masculinity once the war or conflict has passed.

Men need to find themselves in the post-war reconstruction, as they’ve lost their identity twice – when the conflict started, and when it ended. Neglecting them can lead to greater toxic masculinity as they feel worthless and invisibilised. Thus, not losing sight of men is necessary to strengthen the position of women in society – it’s a dual process in which toxic masculinity is addressed and men given the room to explore alternative identities while women are supported. “A bird needs both its wings to fly,” goes a saying from the DRC that Hilhorst quotes.

Linking to this discussion, in 2018 on Bliss, Hilhorst, Holly Porter and Rachel Gordon in an article titled ‘Challenging humanitarianism beyond gender as women and women as victims’ called on aid organisations to tread carefully in programming gender relations. Echoing Hilhorst’ argument above, they argued that forgetting about men could lead to problems “ranging from mental health problems […] to the (violent) re-assertion of men and masculinities”. And, they argued, by seeing women as primary victims and primarily as victims, “other realities in which men and women assume different and more complex roles” are obscured.

Just over a year ago Christo Gorpudolo also argued on Bliss for the need to move beyond the notion of women as victims of war. She focused on a transitional justice mechanism in Liberia following the country’s long period of civil war and how framing women as victims was not helping the process. Importantly, she highlighted the need to equalize men and women in the peacebuilding process. “A way of approaching peacebuilding in Liberia in order to achieve a gender-just peacebuilding process would be to incorporate both men and women in the peacebuilding process based on their lived experiences—as equals and not necessarily according to a victim-perpetrator dichotomy,” she commented.

And besides reconsidering those who remain women throughout their lives are framed in gender programs and other interventions, we also need to consider the particular problems that queer women face. Back in November 2017, Heather Tucker on Bliss discussed the need to focus on the needs of queer women in Ghana in their own right. Tucker’s ethnographic study in Accra revealed that broader approaches to tackling issues affecting LBGTI+ communities fail to adequately recognise the particularity of problems affecting queer women.

Labeling is just one problematic aspect of the experiences of queer women. For example, the term ‘lesbian’ as it has come to be understood does not adequately reflect the dynamics of same-sex relationships in Ghana, where the term supi is used (she writes how it describes a relationship, not an identity, and how this relationship is defined as one between two women that is intimate and might or might not be sexual in nature). “It is therefore critically important,” Tucker argued, “that donors who are involved in funding queer projects pay attention to the specific nuances, needs, and desires of those they are trying to support.”

This small selection of articles on Bliss (there are many others that are just as interesting – see here and here and here, for example), shows just how much we still need to discuss about gender, and how much we still have to do to change it.

But we are starting to make the change ourselves – and this is crucial. The sentence above (‘how much we still have to do to change it’) is an invitation not to sit back and think of ‘what needs to be changed’, but for each and every one of us to get involved in redressing gender injustices.

Lastly, I want to particularly thank the female academics who have written for Bliss on gender-related, but also on other issues. It’s inspiring to know that the conversation on gender is continuing, but also that women are driving conversations in academia. Chapeau! And happy International Womens’ Day to all women!

About the author:

Lize Swartz

Lize Swartz is the editor-in-chief of ISS Blog Bliss and a PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam, where she researches political dynamics of socio-hydrological systems. She is part of the newly formed Transformative Methodologies Working Group situated in the Civic Innovation Research Group

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Women’s Month 2019 | Sex selection: an ordinary or violent act? by Christo Gorpudolo

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According to the United Nations Population Fund, there is a variation in the ratio of male to female birth—since the 1990s, 25% more male births than female have been recorded in different areas. Prenatal sex selection reflects a subtle act of violence rooted in social, political, economic, and cultural factors that re-enforces the persistent low economic status of women and value of girls in some communities. This could lead to an overall impact on the mental and physical health of women as well as the creation of a gender imbalance within the population.

Prenatal sex selection is a practice that involves the use of medical techniques to choose the sex of an offspring. Although it has been linked to medical practices that help balance the family, it also leads to sex-selective abortion, where predominantly the lives of girls are halted before birth. It is a form of violence against women that systematically discriminates against girls before birth and at conception, limiting women’s agency in matters relating to their reproductive health rightsplace women at an unequal hierarchical position within the family as decision makers on the sex of a child as well as family size.

This form of gender-based violence (GBV) as with many other forms of GBV is complex. It is rooted in cultural preferences for sons, societal ideas of the roles and responsibilities of women and men, and unmerited privileges for or the rights of men over those of women. In some places, continuity of family lineage and care for ageing parents, as well as wage-earning capacity are all factors that contribute to this form of discrimination. Generally, sex selection results from social, economic and cultural biases that favour men over women.

These cultural, economic and social biases raise the yet unanswered question: ‘are we collectively doing enough and investing in a society free of all forms of violence and befitting women?’

It has been nearly 40 years since The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Violence against Women (CEDAW) was adopted by the United Nations—a convention that has been ratified by 187 countries. However, sex selection, deeply rooted in economic and social biases, still exists in majority of these 187 countries, including Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and India.

The practice of sex selection also affects girls after birth. Studies have shown that unwanted girls may endure neglect or be deprived of opportunities, creating a further disincentive for mothers to have daughters, since they don’t want to see their children suffer. UNPF (2018, no Page) provides the rationale.

In some agrarian economies, girls are at risk of being in poor health, lack of care or malnourished, to keep their brothers strong and healthy as a source of protection or an assurance for a bigger farmland or harvest and or to continue the family linage.

Sex preference also affects women’s mental health within the family.  Studies have shown that in some instances, women who give birth to only girls may be under huge societal pressure to produce a male child.

To combat this form of violence against women and girls, we have to begin a discussion on identifying and eliminating harmful gender stereotypes and roles that have given rise to the overt act of selective birth. We need to look more closely at the economic market systems that support higher-earning value of a particular sex and the social structures that link specific traits or attributes to power and success, as these are the subtle but yet violent act that hinders the birth of many girls.

References:
United Nations Population Fund (2018) ‘Gender biased sex selection’ Accessed March 23, 2019 https://www.unfpa.org
NCBI (2011) ‘The consequences of son preferences and sex selective abortion in China and other Asian countries’ Accessed March 23, 2019 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3168620/

This article is part of the series `Women´s Month 2019´, in which members of the ISS gender committee reflect on women´s issues on Bliss. Other articles of this series can be read here and here.

christo

About the authors:

Christo Z. Gorpudolo is a student of MA in Development Studies, Social Justice Perspectives (SJP).

 

Women’s Month 2019 | ‘Empty’ laws and Peruvian women’s ongoing struggle for therapeutic abortion by Zoya Waheed and Romina Manga Cambria

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Laws and regulations are policy tools that are seen as strong and effective in securing rights, but should we assume that this is always the case? Looking at therapeutic abortion, evidence from Peru leads us to believe otherwise. Legislation of protection laws often fails to be translated into practice.

In 1924, a therapeutic abortion law was passed in Peru. Ninety-five years later, this law, which allows for legal abortions when the physical or mental health of the mother is at stake, only exists on paper. There are many reasons why this law has not been implemented, ranging from a lack of awareness of the existence of the law to ambiguity when it comes to the law’s contents. While progress of some sort has been made over the last five years with the introduction of guidelines for abortion providers, it is important to understand that much more progress is needed for these women in Peru and elsewhere, as access to safe therapeutic abortion is still limited.

K.L and L.C: Keystone cases in the struggle for safe therapeutic abortions

The Human Rights Watch indicates that women across the world often opt for unsafe procedures because legal abortions are seldom provided in public healthcare facilities. Additionally, due to the uncertainties in the circumstances under which abortion is legal, healthcare providers fear punishment if they were to carry out a therapeutic abortion. Women are also often unaware of their right to therapeutic abortion, and in the cases they are, they’re refused the abortion due to the fear carried by healthcare providers. In other cases, women are refused legal abortions due to the bias carried by some healthcare professionals, who may not always agree that the mother’s life is in danger, and would thus see the abortion as unnecessary. Additionally, due to the social stigma attached to abortions, women may not want to get an abortion due to the fear of being judged.

Two cases were particularly relevant for discussion in Peru. In 2001, K.L., a 17-year-old Peruvian girl, was forced to carry an anencephalic fetus to term, a condition that made unviable the life of the fetus after being born. She gave birth and was forced to breastfeed the baby for four days until it finally died. These events caused her severe depression that required psychiatric help.

In another case in 2006, L.C. was a 14-year-old girl that fell pregnant after being raped repeatedly, which led her to attempt suicide. She survived, but woke up quadriplegic. Her mother requested a therapeutic abortion in order for her spinal column to be operated on to try and regain mobility of her body, but it was denied. Doctors claimed it was prohibited because the pregnancy no longer posed a threat to her physical health, so she was forced to continue the pregnancy.

After the cases of the K.L. and L.C., the Peruvian state was internationally condemned by the ONU´s Human Rights Committee for denying therapeutic abortion to these teenagers. As a response, in June 2014, the Peruvian Ministry of Health published the “Guía Técnica Nacional para la interrupción del embarazo por indicación terapéutica”, or the National Technical Guide for the Pregnancy Interruption by Therapeutic Indication, approved by a Ministerial Resolution Nº 486-2014/MINSA. This guide was looking to standardise the procedure and give more information to the health practitioners about it.

Despite its approval, there are still a lot of medical practitioners that refuse to implement it. As an example of this, in 2017 the Committee on Consumer Protection had to sanction a private healthcare facility with a fine for not approving a therapeutic abortion request, despite the evidence of mental health damage.

Persisting barriers (read: failures)

Despite the clarity of the law, it has not been implemented to the extent it should have. Often, people assume that passing a law and putting it in the penal code is enough to implement it. But when those responsible for implementing it don’t know enough about it, how is it supposed to protect those it aims to safeguard?

Even after the introduction of the guidelines, it is evident that the application of the law is scarce. Additionally, there isn’t much knowledge to be found on the application after the guidelines were created. The state is not taking the responsibility it should by ensuring medical facilities fully implement the law. Even though the discussion has been opened again, it’s clear that it’s not enough. A transformation in the norms and values that surround the topic of abortion must be addressed if the application of such laws is to be successful.

This article is part of the series `Women´s Month 2019´, in which members of the ISS gender committee reflect on women´s issues on Bliss. Other articles of this series can be read here.

Image Credit: openDemocracy. The image has been cropped.

zoyaAbout the authors:

Zoya Waheed is a Pakistani SJP student at ISS. She is the secretary of the Gender committee and is committed to women empowerment.

 

Romina

Romina Manga Cambria is a Peruvian GDP student at ISS. She’s inherited her feminism from her mother. She’s part of the Gender committee.

Women’s Month 2019 | Seed keepers, memory keepers: native women and food sovereignty by Leila Rezvani

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When North America was colonised, the relationship of indigenous people with food was also colonised. But a group of women acting as seed keepers for their communities are fighting back, practicing decolonisation in their daily work and addressing the legacy of food colonisation through the reclamation of seeds and the traditions, practices, and affective relations that nurture human-plant-environment relationships and keep Native communities thriving, healthy, and connected.

Understanding the colonisation of North America begins with understanding food. Europeans thought that Natives could be ‘civilized’ through their stomachs. Targeting Native diets and methods of food provisioning was a way to control and disempower. Native populations of humans, non-human animals, and plants were decimated due to disease and violence. In what is now called the United States, native groups were forced onto individual allotments, often marginal land away from ancestral homes. Sedentary farming was viewed as the rational form of land use, shaping the native in the white yeoman farmer’s image.

And in residential schools, Native languages, dress and diets were forcefully repressed and replaced with English, European clothing and foods like wheat and dairy, which were largely absent from Native diets previously (Vernon 2015).

The legacy of this physical and cultural violence is clear: today, at least 60 Native reservations struggle with food insecurity, and Native families are four times as likely as other US families to report having not enough to eat (PWNA 2017). This places many Native communities in a relationship of dependence with the US Government: the USDA provides canned goods, powdered milk, processed cheese and white sugar, contributing directly to high rates of diabetes, heart disease, and obesity (Vernon 2015).

Fighting back

Native women are addressing the legacy of food colonisation by asserting their communities’ right to grow food for themselves—food that nourishes human bodies, cultural tradition, and the wider web of non-human species and environments. These women and the groups they work with not only promote food sovereignty but practice it: Winona La Duke of the Anishinnaabe founded the White Earth Land Recovery Project, which bought back 1,200 acres of tribal land that had been appropriated by the US government and began a project to revive the collection of wild rice, an important traditional food.

Rowen White of the Mohawk Nation founded Sierra Seeds, a company selling locally adapted and heritage varieties, and directs the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network (ISKN). In the winter of 2018, the ISKN came to an agreement with Seed Savers Exchange, a public access seedbank of rare and heritage varieties, to identify and rematriate[1] varieties of corn, beans and squash that originated in Native communities (White, n.d.).

Rufina Juarez, a Chicana Indigenous woman, helped organise the 14-acere South Central Farm, maintained by 350 primarily Central American families as a space to grow culturally appropriate, nourishing food in 20-by-30-foot plots. The farm was a haven for immigrants to grow food that connected them to the places they left behind: nopales, corn, squash, tlapanche and papalo greens, lettuces, strawberries, cabbages (Mark 2006). The farm was bulldozed in 2006 even after farm advocates were able to raise money to meet the $16 million asking price. (Juarez 2010, Gordon 2006).

And still, new challenges constantly arise: climate change alters traditional migratory routes of important game animals like caribou, land grabbing for industrial monocropping or extraction removes land from indigenous stewardship, and biopiracy[2] and corporate consolidation of the seed industry deteriorates crop biodiversity (Cultural Survival 2013). Native women continue to organise in the face of these challenges, recognising that colonisation is an ongoing, evolving process, deeply tied to the machinations of globalised capital.

Enduring practices

The work of seed keeping and the maintenance of community tradition it entails is often, but not exclusively, spearheaded by women. Collaboration between many stakeholders, Native or not, young and old, male, female, or otherwise, is key. I chose to highlight these initiatives because women are central and powerful, but are not burdened with speaking for ‘nature’, from an essentialised, gender-based position. Rather, their work builds on traditions of care, affectivity, and community network building that women and others have performed for generations, throughout the trauma of colonisation and the attempted, but unsuccessful, erasure of native foodways.

[1] “Rematriate” means returning the seeds to their place of origin. “Repatriate” is more commonly used, but here I chose to retain the word used in White’s article, which consciously imputes a feminine quality to the seed and the land to which it is returning.

[2] Biopiracy describes the process by which biological or genetic material (commonly from medicinal or crop plant or animal species) is obtained and exploited for commercial use without the knowledge or consent of the original ‘owners’ or stewards of the material. The most common situation is multinational pharmaceutical or agrochemical/seed companies using indigenous plant knowledge to locate commercially valuable species, stela them, and then patent them so they become exclusive property of the corporation. The term was originally coined by Pat Mooney of the ETC Group and popularized by Vandana Shiva of Navdanya.

References
‘Combating Food Insecurity on Native American Reservations'(2017) , pp. 1-4Partnership with Native Americans and Northern Plains Reservation Aid.
‘Maintaining the Ways of our Ancestors: Indigenous Women Address Food Sovereignty’ (Last updated 13 October 2013) (a webpage of Cultural Survival). Accessed 16 February 2019 <https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/maintaining-ways-our-ancestors-indigenous-women-address-food-sovereignty>.
Alvarez, L. (Last updated 2019) ‘Colonization, Food, and the Practice of Eating’ (a webpage of The Food Empowerment Project). Accessed 13 February 2019 <http://www.foodispower.org/colonization-food-and-the-practice-of-eating/>.
Gordon (14 June 2006) ‘LA’s South Central Farm Shut Down and Bulldozed’ Tree Hugger. Accessed 16 February 2019 <https://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/las-south-central-farm-shut-down-and-bulldozed.html>.
Mark (9 June 2006) ‘Could the battle for South Central Farm be coming to a close?’ Grist. Accessed 25 February 2019 <https://grist.org/article/mark2/>.
Juarez, R. (2010) ‘Indigenous Women in the Food Justice and Sovereignty Movement: Lessons from the South Central Farm’, NACCS Annual Conference: Chicana/o Environmental Justice Struggles for a Post-Neoliberal Age, 1 April 2010. San Jose State University pp1-10.
Vernon, R.V. (2015) ‘A Native Perspective: Food is More than Consumption’, Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 5(4): 137-142.
White, R. ‘Indigenous Seed Keepers Network: The Long Way Home; Seed Rematriation at Taos Pueblo’ (a webpage of Native Food Alliance). Accessed 13 February 2019 <https://nativefoodalliance.org/indigenous-seedkeepers-network/>.

This article is part of the series `Women´s Month 2019´, in which members of the ISS gender committee reflect on women´s issues on Bliss.

Image Credit: https://www.stopthewall.org/apartheid-wrong

About the author:

leilaLeila Rezvani is a Master’s student in the AFES major. She comes from Southern Vermont, USA, and is interested in the politics of scientific knowledge production, seed systems, plant breeding and thinking about how the agro-food system could be more just for plants, people and non-human animals. She misses the mountains and hopes to work for a small seed company or farm someday (soon).  

 

Women’s Week | Feminist political ecology in research and action by Wendy Harcourt

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On 8 March 2018, Professor Wendy Harcourt will be inaugurated at the International Institute of Social Studies, becoming one of the few female professors at the Erasmus University. This blog is a reflection of her personal journey to professorship and on the ‘Well-being, Ecology, Gender and Community’ (WEGO-ITN) project that she heads, which will be launched on the same day at the ISS.

 

The road to a personal feminist political ecology research agenda

I was awarded my PhD in 1987 from the Australian National University but I had long decided that I was not going to be an academic. I wanted to be part of the real world of social movements and on the ground politics as a feminist and environmentalist. Most of my PhD days were spent juggling my time between the need to get on with the PhD and the many commitments to different political causes—ranging from making sure the campus was safe for women at night to protests to stop uranium mining and the logging of wild rivers. Once I had completed the PhD, instead of taking up a lectureship in Australia, I went to Rome, Italy (I confess for romantic reasons) and after a year of looking for jobs became a programme coordinator and editor at the international secretariat of the Society for International Development.

IMG_1693
Professor Wendy Harcourt walking through a forest in Nepal during a research trip in 2012.

In the 23 years I worked in Rome, I continued my juggling act as an advocate at the UN level and as a social movement activist. My passion for feminism and environmentalism remained. As well as my on the ground community work, I became part of transnational feminism establishing a wide network of people and most importantly writing—and editing a journal called Development. The networking, publications and advocacy all stood me in good stead when I decided that, after all, I was an academic at heart. And after a visiting fellowship at Clare Hall at Cambridge University where I wrote an academically recognised book Body Politics in Development, I was lucky enough to get a position at the ISS.

A move towards feminist political ecology

At the ISS I have continued to focus on feminism and environment, joining forces with other feminist political ecologists, many of whom I had met as an advocate in my NGO days. Feminist political ecology is a subfield of political ecology (Harcourt and Nelson 2015). It is the study of the conflicts and convergences between development, conservation, cultural survival, body politics, gender equality, and political autonomy. At the core of feminist political ecology is learning about how people in different places are living in, and engaging with their natural and cultural environment (Rocheleau 2008).

By exploring what is happening in specific places where people are negotiating life and livelihoods in human damaged environments, feminist political ecology calls attention to emotions, feelings, the spiritual, non-scientific knowledges and interactions with non-humans, with technologies, life and death (Elmhirst 2011). The research is mostly based on case studies and is embedded in an understanding of broader political, economic and social issues (Nightingale 2011). It aims to explore the nexus of gender, diversity and the environment. Importantly, feminist political ecology invites us to step out of the bounds of modern science and economic thinking to look at political ecology as a relational and fluid social process.

So, to take an example, from a feminist political ecology perspective the Sustainable Development Goals can be studied on a variety of scales (Hawkins and Ojeda 2011, Resurrección 2017). Going beyond the obvious need to study agricultural practices, waste, water and forest management, we can examine forms of networked and rooted interactions in institutional development practices. We can record at the grounded level the lived experiences of the villagers who receive funds for a green road project. And at an embodied level we can register the emotions and concerns of women who are obliged to take contraception when they receive funds for a startup micro enterprise by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Harcourt et al. 2016).

The Well-being, Ecology, Gender and Community (WEGO-ITN) project

The EU Horizon 2020 Marie Curie Innovation Training Network Grant for the project ‘Well-being, Ecology, Gender and Community Innovative Training Network’ (WEGO-ITN) (www.iss.nl/wego-itn) will provide an important space for European-based feminist political ecology to come to the fore with well-positioned and engaging research that asks these sorts of questions.

WEGO-INT in a nutshell
  • Grant value: €4 million (€4.000.000)
  • 10 partner universities in 5 countries across Europe
    • Freie Universität Berlin (FUB);
    • Humboldt University Berlin (HUB);
    • Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Sussex University;
    • Pangea Foundation (PF);
    • Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU);
    • International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam;
    • University of Brighton (UofB);
    • University of Passau (UPAS);
    • IHE Institute for Water Education, Delft (IHE); and
    • Wageningen University & Research (WUR)
  • 8 training laboratories at
    • University of Auckland (UoA);
    • University of Vermont (UVM);
    • University of Western Sydney (UWS);
    • Defensoria del Vecino de Montevideo (DVM);
    • Island Institute (II);
    • Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM);
    • Associazione Culturale ‘Punti di Vista’ (PDV); and
    • Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)
  • Yielding 15 PhD positions
  • 3 interconnecting research themes
    • Climate change, economic development and extractivism;
    • Commoning, community economies and the politics of care; and
    • Nature/culture/embodiment and technologies

In its research, WEGO will build from local engagement and knowledge of peoples’ practices and visions of how to live on this planet under climatic conditions never before experienced. WEGO will co-produce knowledge with people in both the Global North and South on how hybrid and emergent ecologies are creating new forms of livelihoods or life-worlds, in response to growing lack of resilience of the economy and ecosystem.

With that knowledge WEGO will then engage in the debates now being opened up by the Sustainable Development Goals in order to bring the stories of peoples’ changing historical and current experiences of care for the environment into the policy arena. Such grounded and engaged research will not only be about collecting data and evidence, but also about understanding political processes including the contradictions, the emotions and embodied reactions of people to economic, social and environmental change.

As the first international feminist political ecology research network of its kind, WEGO aspires to tackle socio-ecological challenges linked to policy agendas. This innovative and path-breaking project I hope will help to build resilient, equitable and sustainable futures. Ultimately, WEGO aims to provide important guides to strategies of resilience and sustainability that are required for meeting the SDGs.

WEGO thematic diagram
The three interconnected research themes of the WEGO-ITN project. Source: https://www.iss.nl/en/research/research-projects/well-being-ecology-gender-and-community

My vision is that WEGO, by providing a gendered knowledge of every day experiences of environmental practices, will make a difference, not only to the academe but also to the lives of the people with whom we co-produce knowledge. At the political level, I hope that WEGO can open up questions around scientific truth and the mistaken story of systemic coherence of unsustainable economic growth.

I am confident that Feminist Political Ecology can help to guide us along new tracks as we engage in encounters of different life-worlds, form connections among communities, and link exciting academic research to effective policy crucial for today’s sustainable development agenda.

Introducing WEGO-INT through visual media
A group of ISS students were asked to create a video for the WEGO project. Victoria Simpson, an intern from Erasmus University who participated in the making of the video, explains that

 

the trick was to produce something that addressed activists, students and academics all at once. Since many written explanations seem to be designed for experts in the field of social sciences, we wanted to create audience-flexible knowledge through the help of animations, visuals and narrations. With this idea in mind, we shot a film that shows the relevance of the WEGO project in the face of the ecological and social crises we are dealing with today. Specifically, we wanted to show how difficult it is to solve these overwhelmingly large issues on a basis of a €4 million research grant. We had the idea to asked people of different groups how they would use this grant to make a positive impact. The notion behind this was to show that even when the problem of gaining financial resources is solved, it is challenging to come up with a way to use them effectively.

 

The video can be viewed at xxx
Main picture: Picture by Emma Claire Sardoni representing the life worlds of Lago Di Bolsena in Lazio, Italy.
References
Elmhirst, R. (2011) ‘Introducing new feminist political ecologies’, Geoforum 42: 129–132.
Hawkins, R. and D. Ojeda (2011) ‘Gender and Environment: Critical Tradition and New Challenges’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29(2): 237–253.
Harcourt, W. and I.L. Nelson (eds) (2015) Practicing Feminist Political Ecology: Beyond the Green Economy, London: Zed Books.
Harcourt, W., R. Icaza and V. Vargas (2016) ‘Exploring embodiment and intersectionality in transnational feminist activist research,’ in Biekart, K. , W. Harcourt and P. Knorringa (eds) Exploring Civic Innovation for Social and Economic Transformation, 148–167. London: Routledge.
Nightingale, A.J. (2011) ’Bounding difference: Intersectionality and the material production of gender, caste, class and environment in Nepal’, Geoforum 42: 153–162.
Resurrección, B. P. (2017) ‘Gender and environment from “women, environment and development” to feminist political ecology,’ in MacGregor, S. (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment, 471–485. London: Routledge.
Rocheleau, D.E. (2008) ‘Political ecology in the key of policy: From chains of explanation to webs of relation’, Geoforum 39: 716–727.

Image result for wendy harcourt

 

Wendy Harcourt is Professor of Gender, Diversity and Sustainable Development at the ISS. She is currently Chair of the ISS Institute Council, member of the ISS Research Committee, CI Research Group Coordinator, and Coordinator of the Marie Curie ITN ‘WEGO’ project.

Women’s Week | Challenging humanitarianism beyond gender as women and women as victims by Dorothea Hilhorst, Holly Porter and Rachel Gordon

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Problematic assumptions related to women’s position and role in humanitarian crises are unpacked in a special issue of the journal Disasters on gender, sexuality and violence. The main lesson drawn from the special issue is that aid actors should tread carefully and seriously invest in their capacity to carefully monitor the intended and unintended effects of programming on gender relations.

At the United Nations (UN) World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) in May 2016, ‘achieving greater gender equality and greater inclusivity’ was identified as one of the five key areas of humanitarian action. The WHS wanted this to be a watershed moment that would spark a shift toward systematically meeting the needs of women and girls and promoting their role as active decision-makers and leaders.

After more than four decades of discourses on ‘gender in development’ and a substantive history of evolving international law and practice on women, peace, and security, the WHS marked an important declaration that the humanitarian aid field takes gender seriously. ‘Gender’ too often has been understood as synonymous with ‘women and girls,’ neglecting questions of agency, vulnerability, and the dynamic and changing realities of gendered power relations.

The focus on sexual violence has brought significant attention to some of the challenges that many women face, but has also reproduced a generalised image of women as victims. That idea was already well-embedded in classic views of conflict that see men as aggressors and combatants and women as non-combatant victims. While this depiction is grounded in sad empirical realities, it leads to a kind of tunnel vision that only centres on the suffering of women, viewing them as the primary victims and primarily as victims. The victim discourse furnishes a rationale for providing women with direly needed assistance, and in fact, women themselves are often keen to play the role of victim to become eligible for aid, backgrounding other aspects of their identity, including their (political) agency. Nonetheless, this focus is problematic in obscuring other realities in which men and women assume different and more complex roles.

Humanitarian programmes often seek the participation of women because they (we) are considered the more caring gender. Women are often targeted for aid as a proven means to improve the wellbeing of children, foster more peaceful conditions, and prevent the misdirection of resources. In the process, international aid often aims to also structurally improve the position of women. This is why UNICEF considers engaging women in service delivery as a positive step towards promoting women’s rights, and describes it as the ‘double dividend of gender equality’.

While well-intentioned, all of these assumptions pertaining to women’s position and role in humanitarian responses have problematic aspects. These dimensions are what we aimed to unearth and explore in our new special issue of the journal Disasters on gender, sexuality and violence in humanitarian crises.[1]

What about men?

The attention on women as aid recipients drowns out the voices that are asking: ‘What about men?’ (not to mention other marginalised gender categories like LGBT communities). Men also cope with specific vulnerabilities, often related to their gender. They are much more often at the receiving end of lethal violence than women, and are frequently victims of sexual violence. When aid is channelled through women, it can lead to a situation where men’s vulnerability is forgotten, or where men feel emasculated or disenfranchised from their traditional social roles (see, for example, the contribution by Holly Ritchie to the special issue).  Such situations can have a variety of consequences, ranging from mental health problems among men to the (violent) re-assertion of men and masculinities.

Gender as relations of power

The articles in the special issue bring another layer to this discussion that all too often boxes men and women into stagnant categories. By prioritising these categorical issues that ascribe and assume particular traits as specific to men and women, debates may miss the mark regarding gender as relations of power that, like everything else, are cast into disarray during humanitarian crises. It is well-established that gender roles are interwoven with other social identity markers, and that these intersectional gender relations are, moreover, deeply ingrained in and reproduced by the working of all institutions in society, ranging from the personal between men and women to the working of cultural values, geopolitics, governance practices, and religion. In creating the special issue, we asked: how do humanitarian responses interact with these myriad aspects of gender and other interrelated social identities? And how do humanitarian responses thus affect gender relations?

Persistence and change

The special issue testifies both to the persistence of gender relations as well as their propensity to change. Julian Hopwood, Holly Porter, and Nangiro Saum found a drastic reported change in everyday gender relations in Karamoja, Northern Uganda, especially where women’s material resource bases were enhanced, but they raise questions about whether such change is enduring. The economic empowerment of women may spill over positively into other domains of life, or contrarily may undermine goodwill towards women’s positions and bring about a violent backlash against them (and against humanitarians)—or both. Likewise, well-meaning interventions can have adverse effects, as Luedke and Logan found in South Sudan, where a narrow focus on conflict-related sexual violence and recycled (although well-intentioned) responses thereto by international organisations were not only unhelpful, but also ran counter to and undermined local norms that might have protected women.

The instrumentalisation of gender

A final layer that complicates the analysis of and interventions in gender relations is that gender as an issue is often instrumentalised for different purposes. Gender has firmly become part of the high politics of international relations. More locally, an interest in the position of women can, for example, obscure attempts of a government to firm up its grip over local authorities, as Rebecca Tapscott found in another contribution to the special issue on Northern Uganda. Likewise, Hilhorst and Douma found that the responses to sexual violence in the DRC were instrumentalised for various purposes by a large range of actors.

Treading carefully

What do these different layers mean for humanitarian action, apart from standing as a reminder that paying attention to women should not result in turning a blind eye to vulnerability and agency of other gender categories? The special issue highlights the dynamic and entangled nature of gender relations, and how humanitarian and political attention to gender adds additional layers to the complexities of gender relations in crisis environments. Aid can often do lots of harm. This does not mean that gender objectives should be abandoned, but that aid actors need to tread carefully and seriously invest in their capacity to carefully monitor the intended and unintended effects of programming on gender relations.

[1] The issue is open access for the duration of 2018.

Picture credit: Kate Holt/Africa Practice

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Dorothea Hilhorst is Professor of Humanitarian Aid and Reconstruction at the ISS. Her blog article ‘Emergency sexwork: should NGOs recognise transactional sex as livelihood strategy?‘ further touches on the topics discussed in this article.

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Holly Porter is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Institute of Development Policy and Management (University of Antwerp) and Conflict Research Group (Ghent University). She is also Research Fellow at the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Rachel Gordon is an independent research consultant on gender and humanitarian aid, and was formerly an SLRC Researcher and the SLRC Gender Team Leader, Feinstein International Center (Tufts University)/Overseas Development Institute.

 

Women’s Week | The power and limits of women’s collective agency in fragile contexts: from pastoralist communities to refugee environments by Holly A Ritchie

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Women’s groups and networks have been cited as key instruments for fostering women’s pathways of social and economic empowerment. Yet, with limits to collective agency, Holly Ritchie argues that the emergence of broader women’s movements and struggles remains cautious and constrained in a context of fragility.

The need for empowerment in fragile contexts

In rising above the #MeToo Movement and championing change, women’s groups and networks have been cited as key instruments for fostering women’s ‘individual and collective journeys of empowerment’ (Cornwall 2016), and opening up critical space for cultural transformation and development. Such strategies may be particularly vital in fragile environments where strong patriarchal norms and attitudes persist.

For women in such contexts, ‘gender-transformative approaches’ are urged to appreciate both evolving gender norms, as well as power relations that underpin gender inequalities. Williams et al. (1994) indicated that understanding different types of power was crucial to unwrapping women’s empowerment. At an individual level, ‘power-to’ is the capacity to act, permitting agency and creativity. ‘Power-within’ relates to inner strength, referring to self-confidence, self-awareness and assertiveness. Meanwhile, ‘power-with’ involves collective power, such as through women’s groups and networks that may provide strength to their members through solidarity and support.

Collective action promoting pathways of empowerment

Beyond an activity or intervention that is carried out on women, or for women, traditional feminists and recent empowerment researchers highlight the importance of women’s recognition of their own power alongside women’s active collaboration in promoting pathways of empowerment (Cornwall 2016). In particular, women’s collective action and organisations is emphasised as a ‘force for positive change’, at both a local level, and through their influence on laws and policies that can promote gender equality (Htun and Weldon 2010).

At a grassroots level, women’s organisation through savings groups, such as Self Help Groups (SHGs) and Village Savings and Lending Associations (VSLAs), are viewed as fundamental tools for stimulating women’s empowerment and market development. Beyond facilitating access to assets, they are described to be ‘gender-transformative’ in opening up opportunities to challenge discriminatory gender norms and barriers, for example domestic labour inequities, sexual violence, and unequal access to education and health services, reinforcing gender inequalities, and inhibiting inclusive growth, and development.

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Somali women attending a ’16 days of Activism’ event in Eastleigh, Nairobi, Kenya. Photo: Holly A Ritchie

In marginalised rural communities in East Africa, NGOs such as CARE have established VSLAs, predominantly with women (20-25 per group). In my research in remote parts of Somaliland[1], pastoralist women’s social organisation in VSLAs was shown to boost women’s skills and financial literacy, as well as enhance women’s confidence to be household contributors. This has both encouraged petty trading activities and business initiatives, and triggered women’s greater involvement in household and community decision-making.

For pastoralist women that have often missed education, participation in such groups was described to be the ‘largest driver of change’ in women’s lives, influencing control over their livelihoods, changing perceptions of women, and even fostering new self-beliefs amongst women that they could be community leaders: “Before women’s roles were confined to the household but now we are outside of the house, in public, creating role models for other women…there is a big change in community attitudes”.

Women’s empowerment in fragile settings

In practice in fragile settings, women’s empowerment may often be more subtle and gradual however, and one dimension of empowerment (e.g. participation in decision-making) may have knock-on effects to other dimensions of women’s lives over time (e.g. access to resources and markets) (Mahmud 2003), particularly if there is contextual receptivity and space for individual and collective agency. Yet with instability and a lack of trust, there may also be structural setbacks to individual achievements and collaborative endeavours, and non-linear pathways of change.

Meanwhile, insights from my refugee research have illuminated tentative trends of women’s ‘forced’ empowerment in displacement contexts, and links to collective action (Ritchie 2018). Prompted by circumstance, refugee women elaborated various cultural challenges as they endeavoured to support their families through forging new social and economic norms. Yet such new practices – including women’s increased public mobility, and new work norms in enterprise – remained uncertain, without a process of negotiation and agreement with male family members, and with little environmental support.

My research looked at the precarious nature of changing gender roles and relations for refugee groups, particularly as men remain excluded with little access to acceptable work, and struggled for their own identity and authority (Kleist 2010). In protracted refugee environments however—such as Somali refugees in urban Kenya—the research highlighted women’s own cooperative strategies boosting solidarity and support for new practices through the development of organised groups, and even engagement in social activism.

The need for a ‘critical consciousness’

Yet with situational fluidity, my recent refugee research in Kenya indicates that women’s refugee groups may be vulnerable to a loss of leadership and momentum, as group heads are granted asylum in the US and elsewhere, curtailing the development of refugee groups, women’s cooperation and a broader movement for social change. Ultimately, for women’s own growth and development, Kabeer (2011) highlights the importance of a ‘critical consciousness’ amongst women that may unleash women’s greater struggles for ‘gender justice’. But arguably with limits to collective agency, the emergence of such movements and struggles remains cautious and constrained in a context of fragility.

[1] Ritchie (forthcoming)  ‘Trends in Gender and Pastoralism in the Horn of Africa’.Synthesis paper. CARE International.

References

Cornwall, A. (2016) ‘Women’s empowerment: what works?’ Journal of International Development 28 (3): 342–359.

Htun M, Weldon L. (2010) ‘When do governments promote women’s rights? A framework for the comparative analysis of sex equality policy’, Perspectives on Politics 8: 207–216.

Mahmud, S. (2003) ‘Actually How Empowering is Micro-credit?’, Development and Change, 34: (4): 577-‐605.

Kabeer, N. (2011) ‘Between Affiliation and Autonomy: Navigating Pathways of Women’s Empowerment and Gender Justice in Rural Bangladesh’, Development and Change 42(2): 499–528.

Kleist, N. (2010) ‘Negotiating respectable masculinity: gender and recognition in the Somali diaspora’, African Diaspora. 3(2): 185–206.

Ritchie (2018) ‘Gender and enterprise in fragile refugee settings: female empowerment amidst male emasculation—a challenge to local integration?’, Disasters, 42(S1): S40−S60

Williams, S., Seed, J. & Mwau, A. (1994) Oxfam Gender Training Manual. Oxford: Oxfam.

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Holly A Ritchie is a (post doc) research fellow at the ISS, with a strong interest in gender, norms and social change in economic development in fragile environments. Her work has spanned Afghanistan, East Africa and the Middle East. Ritchie’s blog article titled  Hyper-masculinity: a threat to inclusive community development in fragile environments can also be viewed on the ISS Blog.

Women’s Week| Menstruation: from concealed topic to part of the public agenda by Jacqueline Gaybor

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Menstruation and its multiple social, economic, environmental, health and technological dimensions surprisingly is starting to be discussed globally, in multiple arenas and under very different and sometimes opposing frameworks. But how is this issue positioned at this early stage of an emerging research agenda? Which actions have been implemented? This blog is a reflection on the importance of thinking outside the box.

The UN and INGOs: Menstruation in the development sector

Within the UN development agenda, menstrual hygiene management (not called menstruation) has come to be seen as an important human rights issue and part of women’s rights discourse (OHCHR 2014). While mainly addressed within the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector, discussions around menstruation have mainly focused on the Global South and suggest an emphasis on medicalised understandings of menstruation, stressing the importance of hygiene.

UN agencies (UNICEF 2006, UNESCO 2014), various scholars (Sommer 2010, Wilson et al. 2012), INGOs (e.g. SIMAVI and Wash United), and civil society actors and groups (such as Rubycup, LenaCup and BeGirl that promote sustainable menstrual products) contend that there is a causal relation between menstruation and girls’ school dropout rates in countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia due to the lack of menstrual products and the lack of water and sanitation facilities (e.g. separate toilets for boys and girls, toilets with doors, or sanitary bins). However, to date little empirical research concretely substantiates the proposed link between the two factors, and criticisms to this assumption have begun to emerge (e.g. Crofts and Fisher 2012, Birdthistle et al. 2011).

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Menstrual hygiene management campaign focusing on Afghanistan “Poor sanitation equals poor education”. Flyer collected at De Haagse Hogeschool, Den Haag.

Following the example of INGOs and other development-related organisations, some governments have started to place attention to the subject, leading to the approval of national policies and regulations emphasising the importance of providing products to manage menstruation. A clear example is Kenya, where the government since 2017 is legally obliged to provide free menstrual products to schoolgirls.

Burgeoning menstrual activism

Menstrual activism, a growing and very heterogeneous movement whose practices and narratives either conflates or fully opposes those in the development sector, is also helping to place menstruation on the public agenda. In general terms, the movement has focused on valuing women’s bodies, as well as questioning and fighting the stigma associated with menstruation.

But at the same time this movement speaks of the importance of body literacy: knowing about the functioning of our own bodies. Multiple examples of menstrual education initiatives can be found across the globe which mobilise alternative understandings to the biomedical discourses about menstruation. These initiatives are found on online platforms, in theatre plays, comic books, fanzines, YouTube videos, and also in ‘hands-on’ workshops on sexuality.

The movement has also focused on campaigning against menstrual shaming or against the imposition of taxes on menstrual products, and on the innovation and redesign of reusable menstrual products. As an evolving movement, there are also increasing efforts to achieve more structural changes at the level of influencing policy and legal changes needed to address the multiple issues of menstruation and to move beyond the provision of products as the one and only way in which to address a very complex subject.

The need for more empirical research

Popular statements that cannot be traced to any empirical study, such as that “African girls[1] do not attend school during their menstruation”, have become a sort of universalised truth. Over the last three years, for my PhD research I have interviewed a number of different actors based on different continents and directly involved in topics of menstruation. Interestingly, the statement resonated with many of them and was considered an urgent matter needing attention despite the lack of empirical evidence.

In Argentina for example, some menstrual activists talk about this issue and even reflect on possible strategies to provide a solution. The statement is replicated even on websites of multinational corporations (e.g. Procter & Gamble[2] 2007). More specifically, a Google search of this term yielded 807 unique results—a number that indicates how easily this broad yet scientifically unsubstantiated claim has traveled around the world, to the point of acquiring the status of a fact.

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Menstrual activism through a menstrual cup stencil in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Photo: Jacqueline Gaybor

Menstruation: An ISS research topic

The ISS has been home to several studies on the topic of menstruation. Over the past year, both Kenyan and Colombian Masters students have written thought-provoking research papers on the topic. The first paper focused on menstrual experiences of adolescent girls in Kibera, the biggest slum in Kenya, and the second on menstrual cultures in Barcelona.

As part of the 2016 ISS Development Research Seminar (DRS) series, the ISS hosted a session titled ‘Technologies for Civic Innovation’, where menstrual activists from Argentina and a representative of Dutch INGO SIMAVI were invited to engage in dialogue. Since 2015, for my PhD research I have been reflecting on the aforementioned global dynamics and their relations with menstrual activism in Argentina, where the menstrual movement has gained a lot of strength in the last decade.

Conclusion

Some time ago I read an article by Ole Redkal, in which he speaks about the discussion around the myth of the spinach as a good source of iron. Redkal (2014) describes ‘the decimal point mistake’ discussion and how it misled millions in and outside academia into believing that there is no high composition of iron in this edible plant. He questions how this statement was born in academia and how it became an urban legend.

What roles do scholars and development agencies play in the ‘making of realities’? The call to make menstruation a topic on the public agenda is out, which signifies an advance toward change, but also implies big challenges. The ways in which this call is put to action invites us to think out of the box, questioning our own assumptions and debating and advancing research in new directions.

[1] In using this statement, no reference is ever made to a specific geographical area inside the African continent, showing the lack of sensitivity to how the understanding and management of menstruation varies depending on socio-cultural context, class, age or ethnicity.
[2] Based on the ‘missing school’ argument, Procter & Gamble has developed the project ‘Protecting Futures’ which consists of providing access to menstrual products and building sanitation facilities.

References

Birdthistle, I., K. Dickson, M. Freeman and L. Javidi (2011) ‘What impact does the provision of separate toilets for girls at schools have on their primary and secondary school enrolment, attendance and completion?: A systematic review of the evidence’. London: EPPI-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education.

Crofts, T. and J. Fisher (2012) ‘Menstrual hygiene in Ugandan schools: an investigation of low-cost sanitary pads,’ Journal of Water Sanitation and Hygiene for Development, 2(1), 50-58.

OHCHR (2014) ‘Every woman’s right to water, sanitation and hygiene.’ Retrieved from United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Comissioner: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/Everywomansrighttowatersanitationandhygiene.aspx

Procter & Gamble (2007) ‘Tampax and Always Launch Protecting Futures Program Dedicated to Helping African Girls Stay in School.’ Retrieved from: http://news.pg.com/press-release/pg-corporate-announcements/tampax-and-always-launch-protecting-futures-program-dedicat

Rekdal, O. B. (2014) ‘Academic urban legends,’ Social Studies of Science, 44(4), 638-654.

Sommer, M. (2010) ‘Where the education system and women’s bodies collide: The social and health impact of girls’ experiences of menstruation and schooling in Tanzania,’ Journal of Adolescence, 33(4), 521-529.

UNESCO (2014) ‘Puberty Education & Menstrual Hygiene Management. Good Policy and Practice in Health Education.’

UNICEF. (2006) ‘Progress for Children: A Report Card on Water and Sanitation.’

Wilson, E., J. Reeve, A. Pitt, B. Sully and S. Julious (2012) ‘INSPIRES: Investigating a reusable sanitary pad intervention in a rural educational setting.’ School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR). University of Sheffield.

Bio_JGJacqueline Gaybor is an environmental justice lawyer. She holds a Master in Development Studies from the ISS. In her Ph.D. research project she explores the relationships of technological and social innovations in the construction of a sustainable menstrual management in Argentina.