gender Flashcards
Problems with gender equality movement
- essentialization: a group of people being reduced to one identity. For women and the fight for gender equality has portrayed women as mothers and victims
- Focus on women and children overshadows other gender equality issues, LGBTQ, masculinities.
- charitable programs: deals with the problems of women and children but never gets to the root cause of gender inequality
early approaches to gender
1970s- there is a growing focus on women in development. WID focuses on sexual violence, political participation and equal access to resources in addition to family planning initiatives and they challenged the notion that women would automatically benefit from modernization.
radical feminist
reordering of society by removing all forms of patriarchy beyond the political process.
socialist feminism
focuses on women inequality in the workplace and calls for state involvement to remove patriarchy and discrimination form society
WAD (women and development)
focus on women’s skills, knowledge, and goals
women only projects
sidelining patriarchy
critic of WAD
it focused on the negative effects of capitalist development and created women only projects that tried to shelter women from the capitalist system
GAD (Gender and Development)
- 1980s influenced by social feminism and the limitations of WAD and WID, GAD promoted a gendered perspective to the topic of development
- goal is to show how unequal gender relations affect women social and economic participation and how it hinders development
- show how structures need to be changed
DAWN (development alternatives with Women for a New Era)
Led by women in the Global South, it was a critique on how development treated gender and neoliberal policies in development to solve womens’ problems
critic of GAD
even though its idea is to focus on gender, programs were still geared towards women and especially women in the global south who are affected by male dominated ideas of development, and seeking to improve women’s position in a neoliberal world.
post-colonial feminist scholarship
critic on development it was looking at women’s development through western values. Was not taking into account the experiences of women in the global south i.e ethnicity, class, colonialisms and culture. Even critics of the system are from people in the global south educated in institutions of the global north.
empowerment
capacity of self-development, and self-determination and this happens through increased participation in the socio-economic sphere
gender mainstreaming
integration of gender in all facets of policies in socio-economic sphere
unsuccess of gender mainstreaming
cuts on government spending and reducing the size of bureaucracies has reduced women’s participation etc Beijing, African Development Bank found uneven support of GM
masculinities
masculinity is something socially constructed and can be changed and redefined i.e sexual domination and sexual violence. Addressing issues of men struggling to live up to masculinity expectations; i.e providing for the home and controlling women, which is also affecting women. Example: because of the pressure to be the provider many men will immigrate to other countries to provide for their families.
1980 World Conference of Women in Copenhagen
called for men to be included in development work supporting women and not seen as just an impediment to women’s empowerment, rather as a solution
