What is Gender?
I am the Editor in chief of Development, a journal that was begun 52 years ago. I have always used the journal for gender ends. I am saying that there is not necessarily an expertise called gender, but rather that we should strive to understanding gender as a cross-cutting topic, that covers everything. Gender is related to power relations in our every-day lives. It's how we perceive ourselves, how we work with other people, and so on. Gender is an important political dimension to everything we talk about.
When we say “what is gender?”, what do we really mean? We could say: "What is gender in livelihoods? Hw do you perceive gender relations?" If someone identifies as a woman or as a man, how are they going to maintain their livelihoods and what are the differences in their livelihoods? How does the individual (male or female) perceive themselves in the community?
If you talk about gender, sexuality is a key issue. What are some terms we use when discussing sexuality?
I mention sexuality because I just published a paper on sexuality and development. I want to come back to that. When we talk abut sexuality, I do not mean the sense of if you are a man or a a woman you must behave in a certain way. I mean: how does society perceive your sexuality, and what is sexually attractive? How are you perceived as a partner? Sexuality from a gender point of view is defined by the community and expectations of how you behave.
That makes this a very political thing. In terms of the sexuality of American teenagers, the expectations are essentially that if you are in, say, “High School Musical,” you’ve got the boys sexuality expressed through basketball, being active, asking girls out. Girls, for their part, are either fighting among themselves or being very beautiful and getting the right boy. These are definitions of our sexuality, and our concepts of what is masculine and what is feminine.
In another society, like a rural village in Pakistan, it’s a system very different from that in High School Musical. In Pakistan, a girl and boy would be defined by their sexuality in a different way. The girl is in purdah and hides herself from all men, even in her family, by staying in her house. The boy is expected to go out and do what his father does. It is a different picture of masculinity and femininity.
In Brazil, there’s the phenom of transgender people. They are people who define themselves as something other, people who are living with a body in one sex and living as another. Gender, masculinity, femininity, and sexuality are important in communities, and how one sees themselves.
There is the culture of gender. This could be like the middle class represented in High School Musical. A particular culture, identity, and form of gendered selves, but we look at it in relation to Pakistan. That's a rural, closed community with a very different way of understanding sexuality. If you look at Lahore, a cultured city in Pakistan, women would be not under purdah, but would instead be driving cars. It's a different culture related to class. I think it’s important to see that there is culture and class in how you perceive gender.
In Brazil (or in India), there are groups of people who live as transgenders, who often do sex work or music/entertainment industry, or doing rites. These people are marginalized due to their sexuality, but are accepted in Brazil perhaps more so then in the USA. Transgender doesn’t appear in Highschool Musical!
When discussing identity , community, and society, we must ask: what is gender, masculinity, femininity, what is in between?
The body is clearly important in terms of the reproductive and productive body. There are other ways in which gender defines people’s lives and selves. This is where it is important to think about – when talking about women – the reproductive definition of women’s gender. Reproduction is a major defining factor of women's gender. In a sense, women’s work is in many ways at the crossroads of production and reproduction.
Within that reproduction/production role, the development discourse is placed. Care work is important. It's something people often forget, and is important in terms of masculinity and femininity. When you are talking about food, caring for people is key, and there is lots of interesting work out there on notions of care.
What I am not talking about is issues of repression, exploitation, and the violent side of how people have interpreted gender. I don't want to dwell on that, as it is maybe talked about too much. In many ways, we’ve had an iconic use of gender in the media and the academic world. For example, in the Iraq war post-2001, with all the ideas you’ve got out there – e axis of evil, veiled women, violent angry young Islamic men threatening civilization, and so forth. These are iconic, violent uses of gender that we are familiar with but I don’t need to talk about. There's a whole literature on the violence of gender.
There is a real violence used against women’s and men’s bodies, but there is also an iconic use of gender. I think this iconic use of gender is something that, when we talk about media and ideas of who the “other” is, is an important consideration. This is a fascinating area, but I feel that when discussing food and agriculture, I’ll leave it aside.
Three things: What is gender?
One is what I’ve been developing with a group of researchers: the politics of place.
Second: The use of gender in development discourse, which I personally know most about.
And contrast that in a sense with the use of gender in transnational feminism. These are two parallel tracks I have been involved in. What tools can you use in gender analysis?
The Politics of Place
This is a theoretical approach to gender which comes down to globalization and local group’s resistance to it. It’s basically a project started around 2000, when people were feeling that globalization was overwhelming certain groups. 20 years ago, people didn’t have the same concept of globalization that we do today. There was no internet, no connections that were so fast that you felt people could connect across time, across space, and in various languages. There was a sense that the whole world was moving very fast towards a global world, and lots of debates occurred about local and global. how do you hold onto the local place? How do you protect a place from the global invasion? How do you retain your place, food, culture? Many people saw the USA as leading this globalization, and there was acceptance and resistance to it.
Particularly in the global south, there was ambivalence. People were often forced to join the global ecnomy, and thus to join the Coca-Colaization of the world. Young people were feeling that the world they were born into wasn’t the world they wanted to be in. People wanted to move away from locality and notions of such into the global world. At the same time, they said, we want to retain what is ours. A lot of contestation of the policies of globalization occured. Within the place, there was a lot of resistance around environment, community,and local governments. They were trying not to reject but work out how to lift this globalization. Within that, there were many women’s governments looking at the impact of globalization.
How did women defend place and shape globalization while they were doing this governance? I am not trying to say local living is bad or good, but to look at how women in particular do it. In many places in the global south, the men areleaving to find work and the women were left behind in communities, were being forced to reshape their lives. This changed gender and power relations. We found there are places here that one can defend and change as a result of globalization.
One of the important things we said in our publications is that we need to understand the body as one of the places women are defending. Through the body and women's role as mothers, sisters, wives, through their own care work with farms, families –women were bearing the brunt of globalization on their bodies. If you go back to Brazil, many landless women were kicked off their property by big companies. Women are left with caring for the family. We look at how women are defending place with their body, environment, and family.
A framework then exists for saying globalization is not all bad, but how do we work with it? People coming from the USA often find it difficult to see that the USA was often perceived as a very negative force. The USA was seen as coming in, destroying people’s lives and people’s lands with a lot of might. Often Americans, for their part, were coming into locales overseas with a sense that they wanted to help.
We were trying to say that globalization is not all good or bad. It's more something that must be negotiated with women’s voices and women's knowledge of their own bodies, in a place where people are actually living. This convent, here in Bolsena, is a good example of how women are running things in the modern world. It is symbolic of how women are working with and valuing the place, culture, and religion. It also symbolizes how women are working with men in a negotiable way. They are working with globalization while retaining place. This is a good example of the politics of place.
Our work tries to illustrate that there are alternatives to big development. We did that project in those lines, and continue to work in small places. To some extent why I am interested in the convento is that it’s part of the same sort of project. At this moment, in an economic crisis, there are ways to connect projects and politics. We can maintain ourselves in the face of the turmoil.
Gender and Development
The notion of gender in development has been seen, since the 1970’s, as very important, especially in areas of agriculture. I emphasize these are political projecs. When you’re talking about development, you are talking about a big project of modernizing economies. A northern led agenda needs to exist, to bring Southern countries on board and into a global economy, and to improve and modernize cultures and societies along the way. As an example, there is the Food Aid Organization of the UN. They have excellent worldwide experts, who are introducing agricultural techniques, and suggesting to people the world over how to use their land, and the many ways they can modernize to make their economy profitable.
I’m talking about big projects, but I am also saying that, the surprising thing is that it was not until 1970 that people realized that there is a gender component to development and agriculture. The assumption often is that, you come in with a modern technologically sophisticated approach to agriculture, and then you give it to the government. The government comes in with a bunch of big projects, and, boom: you are in the modern economy. The USA, Europe, and other countries would come into these developing nations– they had colonial interests – and moved into these countries, produced different ways of running these countries. They did not notice that there were women and men involved in seperate tasks. They were gender neutral projects.
A Swedish economist noted that in Africa, 80 percent of farmers were women, and tech was being introduced as gender neutral. People produced techniques and technologies, and spoke to men only, ignoring the women. Many studies show the mistakes that were made because women as farmers were not taken into account. Also, these efforts at development didn’t take into account that as you change societies and change culture, it is the women’s lives will be changed most. There was little awareness of what it meant to be female in relation to family and communities. There was a lack of awareness. As in the 70’s and 80’s, women in those countries and women and development experts talked about these problems. In the 80s, gender's role in development gained importance as a cultural and health issue, a specific women’s problem. It was seen that women were often not able to join in modernization because they had children, health issues, or cultural impediments.
Many impediments to having women on board in development are due to men, who often did not see women’s roles as important. A women in development enterprise, and my society for International Development, USA, was first formed in 1957. It was the first group with a women in development program. It focused pn “soft issues” of development, not the hard issues of trade and finance. The group discussed agriculture and microprojects, not big money. In the 80s and 90, these women experts and women in the South started to say, “Well, we need to talk about rights,women’s rights specifically. We need to talk about how women can they have the right to land, the right to move in some countries. How can we give women the right to work and to find decent work, how can we give them the right to choose whether they will have children?”
In the 90’s, there was a strong push through big organizations, produced by the UN, on these topics. There were a series of conferences where women from north and south met to discuss these rights. You can see here that gender was emerging as a key issue both in soft and hard issues. Trade issues and finance issues are relevant here. In terms of development: who does the work, and who does the care work in a community? Without these programs supporting them, the very poor will never have work. You will see big projects done by elites, projects not taking into account the lives of people on the ground.
In 1990’s and into 2000, women advocates were trying to change the issues of development. Gender is a political project, and we are trying to bring women into modernity and development. We want to look at specific issues for women in a traditional development approach.
It is important when you talk about gender to look at the bigger picture and not just at the tools of "doing" gender. I'd like to bring up two key events. First was the Vienna 1994 meeting on human rights. Second was an important convention established in 1979, a convention for theelimination of all forms of discrimination against women. It was an important tool for the rights of women, particularly regarding discrimination, work, and cultural discrimination, as well as bodily discrimination. In 1979, the convention was ratified by 141 countries in Beijing. It was a huge conference, a UN conference, and the fourth conference on women. It was a platform drawn up for action, setting up 12 areas where people felt that women’s development could continue. I still ask why there was never a conference on men in development, but the answer is clear. They were basically setting the agenda.
This created a political moment for women to say: What are our issues that are not being heard in traditional development? The Beijing conference is still very important and is the basis of most material on gender and development. It is also a legal instrument. People sign to it, and you can use the Beijing conference to fight discrimination. Beijing is, however, not legally binding. The government signs to it, but you must push nations to adhere to it.
In the last 10 years, we've seen the rise of transnational feminism. Development usually means talking about governments, aid agencies, and what supports those. In relation to gender important things, we're talking about stuff like microcredit, supporting women farmers, bringing health care and reproductive care, and other important rights. Charitable organizations are often doing crucial things for poor communities, which is done as a service delivery and not as empowerment. That's a problem. Let’s say that it's more important to build the capacity for people to lead their own lives. As I said earlier, development is in many ways a very disruptive process. In a sense, these aid agencies are simply helping people with a disruption of economic development. We're not perceiving it as a political process, but rather as knowledge to be delivered, or as a tool. It's seen in a technical way that can be useful, but not always politically aware.
In relation to women’s issues, they often work at very local, small level. Small grants, little microcredit schemes, and hospitals are ways organizations can help women. These issues don't generally go to the global network.
Transnational feminism, operating alongside these organizations, points out political issues that people in small projects aren’t connecting to. The World Food Project is about making people survive day to day, but the reason why they don’t have the food in the first place is because they can’t provide their own food, for many complicated reasons. TN feminism is writing about why people need food programs. TN feminism is organizing in parallel to UN food agencies, and World Food Day/ TN feminists are leading from the global south to point out the bigger, macro economic and social picture.
It's mportant to know about TN feminism as a movement and as aresource of knowledge. It often challenges methodologies in books and often overlaps. I have just written a book called Body Politics and Development, exploring connections between TN feminism and world food groups, and the UN. It's about helping women develop power, as well as transgender people, and coming at the issues from different angles. One is politically oriented, and one is much more about technical/direct service support. Within that these are the things that TN feminists develop on different issues then those looked at in traditional women/gender in development.
We are looking at: trade in gender, finance in gender, the financial crises impact on women, changing current economic way of working, alternatives to capitalism (what development is all about), changing women’s care roles, and revaluing how women are living their lives. We are making lives more liveable by working with women and people on the ground, and working with globalization. We want to make transformation, rather then make development.
For me these things are more exciting and important. How can we face world food crisis, climate crisis, financial crisis? This approach takes into account communities and people’s knowledge.
Tools for Gender Analysis
I’m a writer and editor, not someone who goes around doing gender analysis methodologies. I wanted to create these tools, because in any of these courses, you need to understand the bigger picture as you go. A lot of this came out of this 1995 conference in Beijing where there was a platform for action, and 12 ways to empower women were put forth, women's empowerment being the aim of the event. The decision was, what we should do is gender mainstreaming. This is the most important strategy in development. What I’ve been trying to talk about is this: you don’t look at gender or women as a separate thing. You instead look at how gender links into issues in development and agriculture. You look at gender deliberately in the concept of a development project.
Asking questions in communities lets you tease out the different concerns and activities of men and women, what are the limits of gender roles. We find out what men do, what women do traditionally, and can then try to change that. How do you respect cultural differences between women and men, and how do you change traditional decision making? Most culture have some sort of scheme wherein the man makes the call, and the woman does the work.
People often go into a village, talk, and work gets done. Reality is:if you’re talking about a kind of work, it could be women’s work and you might be talking to a man who didn’t know about it. In developing a gender analysis, on must look at different gender roles practically ad strategically. We need to look at leadership, and how communities operate together. We develop this in a participatory way. It's not say, "This is what men do and women do", but an effort to understand what the villagers seem and see from your point of view how women and men need to shift their ways of doing things. This shift will empower the women, and produce another type of product, for the betterment of the whole community.
A lot of gender mainstreaming manuals have been done for development projects. I wrote one, whhich was done in 1999. It was an early manual, but brings together gender and social policy. This was done by a Canadian association called IDAC, bringing in enviromental issues aw well. The manual defines the concepts of gender and asks: How you can do gender analysis, and gender mainstreaming? How do you bring gender into any project? The manual gives a tool kit. It explains hoow you can do it, how does a team work, what sort of questions you should ask. It's very interesting reading about how people in communities received women, development, and gender issues.
Now we have a Gender in Agriculture source book. The book is very relevant to food and agriculture issues. It shows you all the different issues – food security, agriculture livelihoods, land policy – and shows you the gender dimension within them. People are starting to recognize that you have to have gender in every area of FAO’s and Efad’s work. The question is now political. You have the resources to look at gender, and people say they are doing it, but are they really?
We now have a solid knowledge of how gender impacts food aid and food security, and , a complex and interesting set of tools to bring into projects. Do we have the political will to bring about these changes?
At the moment I am putting together a European book on development. The European commission has asked where gender and development is in Europe. I have been asked along in this effort as the "gender person." Even though people are aware that you must bring in gender when discussing these issue when I talk about what the issues are, many are doing their own work as if gender just happens in the corner. I have been asked to do boxes that fit into each of the chapters of my book on gender issues. We are still at the point where there is lots of knowledge and interest about gender, but questions about: how do you bring it into reports, technical approaches, and so on.
The Transnational Feminist approach is that you work both inside major development industry (big stuff) , which has billions of dollars around it and all sorts of lives hinged on it, and also work with people outside of it, trying not to just latch into development process but work in communities and locally – support each other and not go down sink with the financial crisis.
It is important to know both about the tools and the political context in which they are being produced.
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