WUNRN
Women's Feature Service
India - New Delhi
South
Asia - Challenges for Rights - Conference - Link Gender Agendas
By Rajashri Dasgupta
Kolkata (Women's Feature Service) - For over a decade, the terms 'women's
empowerment' and 'gender development' have been widely brandished.
Government ministries and commissions in the South Asia region proclaim the
urgency for women's development, academic institutions boast of gender units,
policy makers voice concerns about the "feminine face" of poverty,
trainers master lessons on gender sensitivity and smart kits are created to
"empower" women.
This new visibility of women is showcased as a benchmark of success, the result
of innumerable struggles of women throughout the world. But among a broad
section of feminists, women's activists, academics and development
practitioners, there is a sense of disappointment. They believe that 'success'
in terms of gender empowerment is a somewhat mixed bag. The notions of justice
and equality they had fought for over the years are now in danger of being
misrepresented and misused.
This year, International Women's Day celebrated the hundredth year of its
existence and activists wanted to reclaim that memorable event.
It was in 1909 that more than 15,000 women marched through the streets of New
York City demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights. They were
women workers of garment companies, plying their needles in sweatshops under
appalling conditions.
Today, the issues those faceless women raised a hundred years ago remain as
relevant as ever in South Asia. The only difference is that there is now also a
great deal of toasting to the spirit of the New Woman. As workers face pay cuts
and retrenchments, the big corporates use Women's Day as a marketing opportunity.
Simultaneously, gender issues are now pared down to "development
projects", hijacked by the governments and NGOs and compartmentalised into
stand-alone issues without the critical gender perspective.
Women have become a "development category", treated as passive
objects of change rather than active political agents bringing about social
transformation. "The State has co-opted, fragmented and corrupted our
ideas. In the momentum to bring about change, gender has been reduced to
mechanistic modules and kits to be imparted on women to empower them,"
says Shireen Huq. Huq is the founder member of a women's rights group, Nari
Pokho, who for more than 30 years has been at the forefront of the women's
movement in Bangladesh.
Huq was simply voicing the collective frustration of women gathered together
from all over South Asia at a conference on Gender Knowledge Production and
Dissemination in Development Work held in Kathmandu earlier this year.
The meeting was the third in the series of conferences organised by SAHAYOG, an
organisation working on gender rights and health, and the Royal Tropical
Institute (KIT, Amsterdam), with support from the International Development
Research Centre (IDRC), to assess the experiences of producing and communicating
knowledge on gender in both research institutions and development practice over
the last 20 years.
In 1995, participants at the Beijing Conference had adopted a strategy to
mainstream gender so that gender equality could emerge on the centre stage of
governmental and organisational agendas. The idea was to integrate gender in
policies, programmes and institutions. "But from being tools for raising
awareness, developing analysis and challenging power structures, gender
knowledge has been marginalised in the hands of the bureaucracies," notes
economist Navashran Singh of IDRC.
As a result, smart manuals, checklists, and self-help kits have become the key
tools to attain gender equality rather than substantive activism.
"Undoubtedly, notions on gender and feminism have created an impact in
policy forums and development institutions," says Maitrayee Mukhopadhya,
head of the gender unit at KIT, "But the challenges ahead are even more
daunting."
While programmes on women do have positive spin-off effects, they are limited,
do not challenge basic power inequalities and don't bring about deep change.
There is also a growing concern that the political sharpness of gender issues
has been compromised to make it comfortable and acceptable for the powers that
be.
For instance, issues like child marriage are seldom viewed as the right of a
girl's autonomy and choice of 'when' to marry. The focus is on how delayed
marriage can bring down birth rate in a country. The education of girl children
is promoted as an instrument to defer child marriage, not as a fundamental
right. Similarly, reproductive rights, couched in development rhetoric, have
attained importance only as a health issue and to bring down fertility rates.
In the process other concerns, including those related to women's sexual needs,
are marginalised. In fact, it is only when the HIV/AIDs campaign gathered
momentum and when lesbian and gay groups struggled for their rights that the
issue of sexuality gained prominence.
It is not just State and NGOs who have played spoilers, feminists and social
activists, too, have been divided and confused in dealing with issues like
sexuality. The women's movement has often seen sexuality as diversionary,
trivial and elitist. Activists admit that when they did get around to
addressing issues of sexuality, it was done from the limited perspective of
violence against women.
Another problem is that each issue, whether of gender or caste, had been left
to individual groups to be dealt with separately. There has been a general
failure to link gender agendas with radical struggles in South Asia that aim to
change women's lives substantively.
The good news though is that women activists in South Asia are not about to
give up. Farzana Bari, from the Centre of Excellence of Gender Studies,
Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, argues that radical change is possible not
just by bridging the unequal gender number gap whether in Parliament or in
institutions, but by resuming the struggles of challenging social and political
structures and cultures that shackle women. Observes Bari, "Women
activists in Pakistan succeeded in changing the Hudood Ordinance for rape and
adultery against right-wing opposition only through meticulous research and
sustained activism."
Among the several strategies, activists are convinced that the movement for
gender equality and justice must forge links with other people's struggles such
as those for peace, land rights and the rights of minorities and caste groups.
Research too will get the impetus, feel academics, when it links up again with
the concerns of the women's movement. It is only then that debates in academic
and development institutions on gender, at present so subdued and formal, will
once again regain their vitality.
The one thing on which most academics and activists agree is that there can be
no shortcuts to putting gender back on track.
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