Becoming Red Thread Women: Alternative Visions of Gendered Politics in Post-independence Guyana

This essay argues that the rise of Guyana's Red Thread Women's Development Organisation in the mid-1980s was precipitated by the establishment of a hegemonic political culture through the regime of President Forbes Burnham. Utilizing both Aldon Morris's (1992, 2001) notion of 'opppositional consciousness' and Raka Ray's (1999) typology of 'political fields' the author finds that the founding members of Red Thread were engaged in a struggle to redefine the political culture in Guyana. Through its mobilization of women across the divides of race/ethnicity, class, religion, and geography, Red Thread was a key site for rethinking the nature of the political structure for women's politics and women's empowerment. The essay places the emergence of Red Thread within a critical review of Guyanese women's mobilization and organization in trade union movements and women's auxiliaries to established political parties through the Colonial and post-Colonial eras.     

Survivors of Woman Abuse

Abstract

The feminist social work and related literature on abused women has focused on women's processes of empowerment but has overlooked the question of women's movement from individual survival to collective resistance. In this feminist qualitative study, I explore the processes through which survivors of abuse by male partners become involved in collective action for social change. Using story telling as a research method, I interviewed 11 women about the processes, factors, insights, and events that prompted them to act collectively to address violence against women. I found that women's movement from individual survival to collective action entails significant changes in consciousness and subjectivity. Women's processes of conscientization are complex, contradictory and often painful because they involve political and psychic dimensions of subjectivity, protracted struggles with contradictions and conflict, and resistance to knowledge that threatens to unsettle relatively stable notions of identity. I suggest that feminist social work theory and practice must take into account three interrelated elements of women's transformative journeys: the discursive and material conditions that facilitate women's movement to collective action; the social, material and psychic costs of women's growth; and the multifaceted and difficult nature of women's journey in recognizing and naming abuse, making sense of their experiences, and acting on this knowledge to work for change. I recommend that feminist social work practice with survivors recognize that survivors can and do contribute to social change, and develop new, more inclusive liberatory models of working with survivors of abuse.     

Western Donor Assistance and Gender Empowerment in the Palestinian Territories and Beyond

Since the end of the Cold War, the quest to spread democracy has become the rallying call of many Western donor agencies. Reflecting this new agenda, new program priorities prevailed that placed greater emphasis on civil society development, civic engagement and gender empowerment. Contrary to expectations, however, many of these programs have often adversely affected existing social movements. Most scholars attempting to explain these unintended outcomes have focused on the impact of NGO professionalization. Examining the Palestinian women's movement, this article addresses the inadequacy of this explanation and focuses on the political dimension of this discussion by illustrating how Western donors' lack of understanding of the Palestinian women's movement and its “embeddedness” in the broader political context served to weaken and undermine this movement. The influx of Western donor assistance in the post-Madrid, post-Oslo era, along with the greater emphasis on Western promoted gender empowerment, undermined the cohesiveness of the women's movement by exacerbating existing political polarization (that went beyond Islamist and secular divisions) and disempowering many grassroots activists. Effectively, many of these activists were transformed from active political participants involved in their organizations to the recipients of skills and services in need of awareness raising. Findings in this article also speak to current regional developments, especially in light of the current Arab uprisings and the promise of greater Western involvement to empower women in the region.     

Challenges in framing women's rights as human rights at the domestic level: A case study of NGOs in the post-Soviet countries

This case study examines framing as an essential communication strategy used by women's rights NGOs at international and domestic levels. The article uses a theoretical framework of transnational advocacy networks, originally developed by political scientists Keck and Sikkink (1998), to demonstrate the importance of public relations’ efforts in political communication campaigns of women's rights NGOs around the world. Supported by the United Nations, these NGOs play an important role in democracy building and contribute to women's empowerment efforts. However, an examination of communication strategies used by these NGOs to help implement the Platform for Action—the UN-promoted agenda for women's empowerment—showed that the existing frame of women's rights as human rights may not be successful in all contexts. This study argues that at the domestic level the issue of women's rights needs to be presented in greater detail than the current human rights frame allows it to be.     

Farm Women and the Empowerment Potential in Value‐Added Agriculture

While the number of women in farming has risen in the United States, less clear is whether increasing participation in agriculture translates into empowerment. Are invisibility and disempowerment lingering expressions of farm women's experience? Using qualitative data drawn from 32 interviews with Michigan value‐added farmers, we examine the extent to which women have been able to experience empowerment, and the ways in which value‐added agriculture specifically fosters an empowering context. We adopt a conceptualization of empowerment from the development scholarship in order to establish a baseline for scrutiny, viewing empowerment as a multidimensional process constituting the “power to” realize one's goals, the opportunity to exercise “power with” others, and the ability to find and nurture “power within” the self. Our findings indicate that value‐added agriculture provides a unique context for women's empowerment. At the same time, the extent to which value added‐agriculture constitutes a venue for women's empowerment is complex, is multifaceted, and requires constant negotiation. It can be organized and performed in such a way as to subvert the empowerment process by confining women to specific social locations that may reproduce oppressive structures.     

Exploring gender approach to climate change and agroecology: Women farmer's search for agency in India

Employing the frame of gender and political ecology, this paper analyses the synergies of indigenous knowledge, agroecological farming and local conservation as a sustainable mitigation and adaptation strategy for climate change in Tehri Garhwal in the state of Uttarakhand, India. The study is based on field research conducted between 2017 and 2018 exploring how women's roles in regenerative agriculture provide them with agency. the nature of which has not been explored. While there is a need to mainstream such practices to sustain the commons and women's empowerment through structural, institutional and financial support, it is crucial to analyze the scope of this empowerment. This paper highlights the predicament of women farmers as their ability to exercise agency in the agricultural space does not necessarily translate into overall empowerment or a transformation of existing gender- and caste- based hierarchical power relations in society, as the latter will require interventions along multiple fronts.     

'Woman,Speak with a Loud Voice!'

This paper seeks to contribute to the critique of mainstream development discourse by conveying the ideas and issues raised by rural South African women. Building upon feminist and post-colonial discourses, this paper shifts the epistemological location of knowing to the women affected by development programmes and policies. Based upon interviews and discussions with over 600 women in rural communities, we offer a brief characterization of the South African context of rural women's lives, followed by rural women's comments about development, their daily struggles, and empowerment. Rural women's comments reveal a conception of development that is tied to their localized problem-solving skills and opportunities. Their response to the absence of development opportunities within their communities is to forge a space where they can negotiate between institutional spheres of power in order to address their needs. We argue that traditional development approaches overlook the space, or interstice, rural African women occupy between the modern state and traditional authority. For persons interested in development issues, rural women's experiences direct our attention to the in-between spaces as potential sites of empowerment.     

Women's rights in Peru: insights from two organizations

In this article we explore the appropriation of ideas about women's rights in Lima, Peru through an ethnographic study of two non‐governmental organizations. SEA is a local NGO grounded in the Catholic Church's liberation theology movement, which seeks to promote integrated human development, and is linked to the worldwide Catholic Church. DEMUS, the second NGO, with feminist roots, actively fights gender discrimination and belongs to networks of international women's human rights movements and UN organizations. We argue that the struggle for women's rights is part of a broader struggle for recognition and equality for the poor, shaped by changing notions of national identity, citizenship and diversity. Our research revealed clear examples of vernacularization, whereby local context, values and culture played a decisive role in the adoption of women rights ideas. Encounters with other concepts and movements, including social justice, family violence and women's mobilization, intimately shaped the vernacularization of women's rights. Ultimately, the adoption of rights ideas involved changes in women's individual and collective empowerment.     

And roses too: How “Better Work” facilitates gender empowerment in global supply chains

Women's increasing entry into paid work has not been accompanied by a corresponding change in the gender division of unpaid labor in the household and community. Though women participate in the labor market, the expectation is that they will also take responsibility for the household. To what degree does women's waged work in the garment industry transform gender norms and dynamics in their home lives? To what extent do the choices they make translate to their household-level empowerment? This practice-focused article examines these questions by looking at data collected on gender dynamics at work and at home in the clothing industries of Bangladesh, Cambodia, Kenya, Lesotho, and Vietnam. While women's empowerment through garment sector employment remains circumscribed by low wages, financial insecurity, and gendered expectations, we find that international interventions, namely the International Labor Organization's Better Work program, has expanded women's abilities to exert agency over their earnings within the context of household resource allocation and has decreased the negative effects of ongoing and systemic financial precarity.     

Women's self‐defense and sexual assault resistance: The state of the field

Public attention to sexual assault has increased dramatically over the last decade, spurring questions about how it can be prevented. One approach that has received scant attention is women's self‐defense training (sometimes known as sexual assault resistance training). This neglect is curious because empowerment‐based women's self‐defense (ESD) training is so far the only approach that has produced substantively significant decreases in victimization rates. In this article, I review the research evidence on women's self‐defense training. Does resisting a sexual assault affect the outcome of sexual violence? Does self‐defense training further reduce women's risk of violence? What are the other consequences of self‐defense training? How does self‐defense work for different groups of women—for example, those who have survived prior victimizations? Are the critiques of women's self‐defense training valid? Finally, what do we still need to learn about women's self‐defense? Overall, I argue that this evidence presents a compelling case that women's self‐defense training should be central to any efforts to prevent sexual violence.     

Addressing multiple dimensions of gender inequality: the experience of the BRAC Gender Quality Action Learning (GQAL) programme in Bangladesh

Recent analyses have highlighted that poverty reduction in Bangladesh has been accompanied by growing inequality in society, measured by household income. This article considers what the implications are for development actors who are concerned with empowering the poor in society, and who understand poverty from a gender and women's rights perspective. We draw on experience from BRAC's work to address these issues, focusing on the Gender Quality Action Learning (GQAL) programme. A focus on women's self-employment alone does not result in challenging the structures of patriarchal inequalities. Gender inequality and its link to economic inequality needs to be much more centrally positioned than it currently is in development discourse. Currently economic empowerment is widely seen as a potential route to gender equality, but the GQAL programme shows work to challenge gender inequality is necessary as an entry-point to ensure effective economic empowerment.     

Gender Inequality,Processes of Adaptation,and Female Local Initiatives in Cash Crop Production in Northern Tanzania

This article contributes to development research, as well as research studying inequality in agricultural systems. We use empirical data from an ethnographic study in the village of Mamba, in northern Tanzania (2006–2009). This study analyzes the question of changing gender relations and the patriarchal constraints to collective action under market liberalization of cash crops. Our findings demonstrate that the shift to a market economy has influenced the nature of production relations, deepening inequalities in gender relations and the position of women. However, some women circumvent their disadvantaged situations through their association with various types of collective action groups or networks. In order to investigate the different impacts on women's lives, we analyze women's interest and motivations for these collective actions. We also identify the processes of adaptation to the new production relations through the coffee trade network and tomato cultivation groups, two local initiatives. We analyze the differences between these two forms of collective action and theorize on their different impacts on women's empowerment.     

Women in Politics in Post-Transitional Democracies: the chilean case

This article looks at women's participation in formal political institutions in posttransition politics. Employing the case of post-dictatorship Chile, it outlines the barriers to women's participation in the formal political arena; discusses the various strategies that Chilean women are currently employing to overcome their exclusion; and finally, examines the challenges that political women confront in promoting 'women's interests' in political institutions. Throughout the article two main arguments are advanced. First, where women's movements do not demand institutional reforms during the transition period - a time when movements enjoy influence and parties are in flux - then the barriers to women in political institutions re-emerge. In Chile, the fact that women did not demand institutional reforms, such as quotas for women in decision-making positions, is linked tothe broader strategy of the movement tomake citizenship demands based on women's 'difference'. This strategy inhibited women from demanding power (i.e. access to institutions as individuals) because this conformed to a masculine-defined notion of politics inconsistent with women's 'different' style of practising politics. A second,related argument is that a strategy based on women's 'difference' hinders women in politics frompromoting feminist goals,especially in the climate ofsocial conservatism that characterizes post-transition Chilean politics. Despite these constraints and the many challenges Chilean women in politics confront, gains are being made, as women recognize the need for, and begin to demand, institutional reforms to expand their presence in formal politics.     

Employment Conditions in the Senegalese Horticultural Export Industry: A Worker Perspective

The rapid transformation of the agri‐food sector in developing countries has created rural off‐farm employment opportunities, especially for women. There is growing concern about worker welfare and employment conditions in agri‐food and export sectors, but empirical evidence on this issue is scant. We analyse contractual preferences of female workers in the horticultural export sector in Senegal. We use a discrete choice experiment to assess women's preferences for a labour contract and employ a latent class model to capture preference heterogeneity. We find that women have a high willingness to accept a labour contract in the horticultural export industry, and that differences in preferences for contract attributes can be explained by women's empowerment status.     

The use of ‘empowerment’ among organisations supporting victims of domestic violence in Sweden

The aim of this paper is to investigate the prevalence and character of ‘empowerment’ as an approach used by women's shelters, crime victim support groups and municipal crisis centres that provide support for battered women in Sweden. The study was based on a mail survey distributed among representatives of local crime victim support groups and women's shelters run by non-governmental organisations and the public sector (N = 207). The survey showed that empowerment was perceived as similar to the already established ‘help to self-help’ approach. Empowerment was described as a tool for individual change rather than collective action, although links to power-sensitivity and social change did appear in some answers. Contrary to expectations, the use of empowerment was not accompanied by comments on problematic power relations and difficulties in merging a non-directive approach with professional responsibilities. Using neo-institutional theory, results were interpreted in relation to established work-patterns and problems that empowerment was perceived to solve.     

Upsetting ‘Others’ in the Netherlands: Narratives of Muslim Turkish Migrant Businesswomen at the Crossroads of Ethnicity,Gender and Religion

In this paper we use insights from postcolonial feminism to explore the identity narratives of three Muslim businesswomen of Turkish descent in the Netherlands. We identify some of the ways in which contemporary political discourse in the Netherlands constructs Muslim ‘Others’ and discuss how this discursive positioning impacts on the multiple identities these women create for themselves in response. Postcolonial feminism challenges the discursive and material relations of both patriarchy and Eurocentric feminisms, which work together to obscure the rich diversity of women's lived experiences, their agency and identities. By exploring how Othering impacts on these women's multiple identities, we aim to enrich understandings of women's migrant entrepreneurship. These identity narratives, shared by women who each describe quite different ways of experiencing, interpreting and responding to marginalization, shed light on the West's relationship to the Other and reveal some of the underlying relations of power that shape identity.     

Gendering (Trans)National Advocacy

Whether lauded or deplored, transnational organizing among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) generally, and women's NGOs specifically, is recognized as an active player in debates about international economic policy. In this article, I turn attention toward one consequence of women's transnational NGO organizing that has been under-analyzed: the impact that transnational activism has on domestic political organizations and opportunities. The recent increase in activism on gender and policies of free trade in the USA is the product of women's transnational political organizingover the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In the case of NAFTA, theoretical insights about the ways that gendered categories undergird the economy were made visible by and through the transnational advocacy in which feminists engaged.And, this article indicates, these transnational advocacy efforts have helped to shift the domestic political terrain of women's organizing in the United States. I argue that as women's rights advocates in the United States were confronted with the realization that the nexus between gender and trade policy was important to many women's rights and feminist activists around the world, they began to question why the gendered implication of trade policy did not hold a comparable place in the US feminist arena. Thus, changes in the domestic political landscape of non-governmentalactivismmay be one of the longest lasting (and most overlooked) consequences of transnational political engagement.     

Analyzing Politics and Change in Women's Organizations

Research on women's political action too often passes over women's organizations that do not officially adopt a feminist ideology and do not explicitly set out to change gender power relations. Based on implicit notions that such women's organizations are nonpolitical (or less interesting), the research often supports a false dichotomy between feminist and nonfeminist organizations rather than illuminates women's common political ground. This study addresses women's collective action, politics and change by focusing on the case of Nicaraguan Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs - women who lost a son or daughter in the revolution or Contra War. Although some members in Matagalpa critiqued male domination, the organization itself did not set out to challenge the gendered division of labor; indeed, their collective demands relied upon and in many ways reinforced traditional gender identities. I argue that such movements are important to feminist political analysis. As I demonstrate in this article, an organization's lack of an official feminist ideology does not mean that individual members do not express interests, identities and ideals that challenge the gendered status quo. Such research, however, requires a nuanced approach, recognizing women as both accommodating and resisting gendered social structures. Thus, this study challenges the dominant feminist-feminine dichotomy by demonstrating that women's collective action is not only per se political (and politically important) but may also challenge as well as reinforce gendered power structures.     

Effects of ‘women empowerment’ on household food security in rural KwaZulu‐Natal province

Understanding the dimensions of ‘women's empowerment’ that influence food security among rural households is crucial to inform policy. This study uses the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS) to identify the food security status of 300 primary female‐headed households in Msinga, South Africa. Principal Component Analysis was then used to identify the various dimensions along which the rural women sampled were empowered. Finally, the Ordered Logit model was used to identify the dimensions of women's empowerment that influence their household food security status. It was found that households headed by women with higher levels of economic agency, physical capital empowerment, psychological empowerment and farm financial management skills empowerment were more likely to be food secure.     

Governability and Women's Citizenship

SUMMARY

The fragility of Latin American democracies places the subject of gendered citizenship as an important issue in the context of a most needed democratic governability. This article first develops a proposed nexus between democratic governability and gender equality and assumes the need to place women within a universe of citizenship, as an inherently inclusive democratic perspective would require. We emphasize what we see as women's citizenship deficit according to a traditional definition of the political. The second part of the article analyzes the insertion of Mexican women in the construction of citizenship on the basis of empirical material drawn from the second National Survey on Political Culture and Practice of Citizenship. We then present some conclusions, with an eye on what Victoria Camps has called the public virtues, such as solidarity, responsibility and tolerance, as democratic values of the first order and as characteristics of a gendered citizenship within new political spaces. We believe the fragile democracies of Latin America and the important quality of democratic governability can be strengthened if a new form of gendered citizenship, more inclusive of women's concerns and practices, is recognized and nurtured.