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Association for Women's Rights in Development

Feminist Movement Building: The Challenges

A summary of the challenges discussed by Srilatha Batliwala in her paper
'Building Feminist Organizations and Movements: Clarifying our Concepts.' *
Srilatha is Scholar Associate with AWID, and Honorary Research Fellow,
Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, Harvard University. We also draw
from some case studies done by AWID's Building Feminist Movements and
Organizations Strategic Initiative.

By Kathambi Kinoti - AWID

Over past decades, feminist and women's movements have made tremendous
advances in securing women's rights. Today, however, these movements face
challenges that have a significant impact on what they are able to achieve.
Srilatha Batliwala says that 'our movements seem to have lost much of the
momentum, coherence and impact that they seemed to have even a decade ago,
and there is much more concentration on running projects, programs, and
campaigns than on movement-building.' There are factors that are internal
to movements as well as external to them that have influenced this state of
affairs.

CO-OPTION OF FEMINIST AGENDAS

Governments, multilateral donors, the media and other mainstream
institutions have often co-opted or distorted feminist ideology, discourse
and agendas. As Batliwala says, 'the term "empowerment" for instance, which
was claimed by feminists to signify the challenging task of shifting gender
and social power relations in favour of women, and especially poor women,
have been taken over and virtually divested of meaning and political
content.' The term has been appropriated by all manner of interests from
management gurus to the media and private businesses.

RISE OF FUNDAMENTALISMS

Economic, religious, ethnic and other fundamentalisms have presented what
Batliwala says could be the biggest threat to feminist agendas. Economic
fundamentalism, which imposes one particular economic order on the world,
has had complex impacts on women and gender relations. Religious and ethnic
fundamentalisms have also attacked feminist agendas such as equal rights and
sexual and reproductive rights for women. They have also tried and sometimes
succeeded in rescinding the social and political gains for women secured
over the past decades.

SHIFTING DONOR PRIORITIES

Donor priorities have been shifting gradually away from movement building
approaches towards projects that show more 'visible' and 'measurable'
returns. According to Batliwala 'This de-funding is... a product of more
serious and subterranean political trends in many developed countries: a
backlash against feminist ideology, politics and power; a growing tide of
political and social conservatism; pandering to the sexist and conservative
elites in developing countries; and above all, a growing suspicion of
approaches that do not somehow return benefit to the investing countries.'
Movement building strategies are unattractive to donors because they are
too political and threaten the interests of developed countries and their
elite allies in developing countries. In Mexico the indigenous women's
movement has found it difficult to raise resources to train its members in
political participation because the donors will not fund a course that they
have not had a hand in designing and running.

MAGIC BULLET SYNDROME

Feminist activists have always asserted that fundamental, transformative
processes are the only way to change the status of women in society. These
processes may be slow and painful but are the only way that real progress
will be achieved. Although there appears to be an increase in global
commitment to eradicate poverty, there seems to be the belief that the
eradication of poverty can be achieved by quick fixes. As an example of
this kind of thinking, Batliwala points to the 'great fanfare surrounding
the MDGs and their centrality to the new aid architecture.' She says that
feminists, on the other hand, understand that lasting change can only be
brought about by tackling the basic structures of power and privilege.
Feminist organizations are not adequately funded for work that addresses
the fundamental societal structures and imbalances of power, 'but the money
will come streaming in if we offer to implement some of the magic bullets
that are currently popular shortcuts to women's empowerment and gender
equality; gender mainstreaming, women-focused micro-finance projects and
quotas for women in politics.' These may have their basis in feminist
ideas, but have been divested of the transformative strategies upon which
they were originally based.

'NGOIZATION'

Feminist activists have founded organizations in order to secure resources
and some form of sustainability for their activism. These organizations
which were originally founded to support movement-building work tend to be
pushed into service delivery and project work. Through 'NGOization'
processes the dynamism of feminist movements has been diluted. Power has
often shifted away from constituencies to organizations that have become
depoliticized. A case study of a domestic workers' organization in the
United States shows that NGOs 'resisted a deep analysis of the political
economic system that they were fighting to change, organizing groups were
narrowly focused on issue-specific campaigns, rarely making connections
with one another across communities and issue areas.'

SPECIALIZATION AND DIVERSIFICATION

The multiple issues and multiple dimensions of those issues that feminists
have addressed have led to specialization and diversification. Some people
consider this to have fragmented and splintered feminist movements.
According to Batliwala, the fact that there is a diversity of agendas,
priorities and strategies is not a problem. The challenge is in creating an
overarching and shared political agenda so that on at least some set of
issues feminist movements are speaking with a unified voice.

LOSS OF THEORETICAL CLARITY

Batliwala says that feminist movements have lost some of their earlier
clarity on their theory of change. The theory has been tested over the
years with success on some fronts and defeat on others, but feminists have
not re-created the theory of change. Experience has shown that structures
of power are resilient. They can also find ways of overtly accommodating
feminist demands such as signing the Beijing Platform for Action or
creating national women's commissions, while covertly marginalizing or
subverting feminist agendas 'through the travesty, for instance that gender
mainstreaming has become, or by making micro-credit programs stand in for
women's empowerment.' Batliwala says that feminist movements have not yet
synthesized the lessons learnt to create a new theory of change and that
there are few spaces to do this. She asserts the need to re-articulate a
theory of change for our times which would then be the basis for building
the weak or missing common agenda.

Although there has been significant weakening and fragmentation of feminist
movements Batliwala is emphatic that our movements can be re-energized and
rebuilt. In an upcoming Friday File we shall be examining some of the
strategies to renew our movements.

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*The full paper will soon be available for download from the AWID website.

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