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development. Copyright © 2003 Society for International Development (www.sidint.org). 1011-6370 (200306) 46:2; 24–26; 033482. NB When citing this article please use both volume and issue numbers. SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)
Thematic Section
Paradoxes for Gender in Social Movements J O S E FA S . F R A N C I S C O
ABSTRACT Josefa Francisco explores DAWN’s ongoing interrogation of the paradoxes that challenge the women’s movement as they negotiate today’s rapid transformations and increasing inequalities. KEYWORDS autonomy; economic justice; feminist; power; women’s agency
Women’s agency As feminists, women’s autonomy and self-determination are values that are central to our empowerment and to our struggle to break down gender power relations. Our struggle is embedded in power compacts found in institutions and social relations. For DAWN, the women’s movement is not about women per se. Its analysis and advocacy is about freeing women as constructed, disciplined and objectified beings, and nurturing our agency in both private and public spaces. Moreover, gender inequity in power relations cannot be separated from other power inequalities. It is deeply entangled. Thus, it is futile to address gender issues singly, exclusively and in isolation from other struggles against unjust and undemocratic power systems. Power structures Recognition of the multi-centric character of power structures and relations that span various institutional spaces and cut across several issues are critical to feminist responses to the volatile world around us. Contestations are now less straightforward. Struggles are more complex and varied. And structural shifts are made more intractable by the speed or rapidity with which changes are taking place. Women’s equality in one space may matter little, or become altogether meaningless in another space that is itself undergoing a dynamic shift. This multi-centricity challenges the women’s movement’s ability to deploy our energies in different spaces simultaneously, even instantaneously, and also
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Francisco: Paradoxes for Gender in Social Movements stretches our capacity for sustained inter-linkage so as to avoid eventual fragmentation. The genderscape The inter-linking of spaces and issues is never just a purely intellectual exercise. It is at once political, active and transformatory. It demands of us the ability to transport into the frontier of discursive and political spaces women’s perspectives and issues that continue to be sited in or shifted back to the margins. While clearly it is important for this to take place in all sites and spaces that we are able to reach, it is especially critical that it should happen in sites where progressive agendas of critique, resistance and reconstruction are central. Paradoxes Since Beijing, DAWN has been active in interlinking with social movements and male-led NGOs in what we refer to as negotiating gender in the malestream. At the global level, DAWN sits with other groups in the International Council of the World Social Forum and in the network Our World Is Not For Sale. DAWN also maintains close links and continues to collaborate with Social Watch, at the global, regional and national level. In regional and national spheres, various DAWN women are active members of mixed NGOs, broad multisectoral networks, and are participants in a number of regional and national formations. These networks address issues related to economic globalization (in particular, trade and trade-related policy reforms), state power and fundamentalism, and now resurgent unilateralism and militarism. Interconnection In this period, DAWN sees increasing intersections of analysis and actual interconnections and collaboration taking place among the movements for economic justice, people-centred social development, and recently for peace, civil liberties and democracy. These have been heightened by the series of costly contradictions, disasters and crises arising from the various effects and ramifications of the global integration of markets, and the counter-
reactions by states and the multi-lateral system. The domination of societies, communities and peoples by a few transnational corporations symbolically represented by the ‘Davos Men’ and legitimized by parts of the multi-lateral system, serves to unite the various fragments of critique from social movements. This coming together of social movements has been consolidated by the rise of a fundamentalist unilateralism and fundamentalist reactions to globalization. Peoples’ movements are uniting against a heightened threat of wars and virulent attacks on democracy and civil liberties even within societies that the wars purportedly wish to protect. Resistance and transformation This frontier space of resistance and transformation allows women’s critical perspectives on transformation to be located in various resistance movements and progressive forces to end exclusion worldwide. Our feminist critique places us in opposition and resistance to the dogmatic intensification of free trade. It also engages us in a struggle against old and patriarchal notions of statehood and sovereignty in which the citizenship rights of women are severely circumscribed and the control of resources remain in the hands of men. While we are resisting the marking of women’s bodies and agencies by consumerism and the symbolic control by the capitalist market of the notion of multi-culturalism, we are also opposing the marking and disciplining of women’s bodies and agencies by fundamentalist communitarian ideologies and resistance struggles. These, just like the state, turn women into motherhood idols and icons. We critique and oppose packaged westernized notions of good governance in which the concept of democracy is limited to formal procedures of participation. At the same time we are advancing and radicalizing the concept of democracy to include feminist perspectives. These include feminist perspectives on evolving rights, including sexual and reproductive rights, and national and transnational citizenship. As we support the collective right of excluded
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development 46(2): Thematic Section peoples to self-determination that has been guaranteed as part of civil and political rights, we are interrogating the oppression of women within groups claiming the right to self-determination. Feminists are insisting that this ending of women’s oppression is integral to the form self-determination should take. Facing the crisis The struggle of the worldwide women’s movement for piecemeal and issue-focused compensatory
rights and entitlements can no longer be the central political project of the women’s movement. The complexities and paradoxes spawned by globalization have created a crisis of legitimacy for institutions, for states, and even for the women’s movement as currently constituted. The challenge lies in the capacity of feminist interrogation and activism to produce fresh analysis and a critique that accounts for the transboundary paradoxes. We need to situate ourselves within the frontier of a people’s movement for Another Possible World!
Universal Primary Health Care: Health for All – Health for Women 16th International Day of Action for Women’s Health 28 May 2003 “Health is a social, economic and political issue and above all a fundamental human right. Inequality, poverty, exploitation, violence and injustice are at the root of ill health and the deaths of poor and marginalized people . . .” Excerpt from the Charter for People’s Health
This Day of Action is one of the core activities in the three-year campaign for women’s health being coordinated by the Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights (WGNRR) together with the People’s Health Movement. The Campaign is focusing on the specific objectives laid down in the Alma Ata Declaration of 1978 for the implementation of Health for All to highlight the missing themes within that framework vis-a-vis women’s health. It aims not just to highlight the failure of the fulfilment of the Alma Ata Declaration, but also to show solidarity for the concept of primary health care, which is the larger theme taken up by the People’s Health Movement. The core demand of the campaign is that primary health care should be provided for all peoples everywhere, taking into account, in thought, words and action, women’s reproductive and sexual health needs. Specific activities in 2003 will be directed at national governments to urge them to take responsibility for women’s health. Further information from: The People’s Health Movement, 367 Srinivasa Nilaya – Jakkasandra I Main, I Blok, Koramangala, Bangalore 560 034, India. Tel: +91 80 553 1518; Fax: +91 80 552 5372; www.phmovement.org Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights (WGNRR), Vrolikstraat 453-D, 1092 TJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Tel: +31 20 620 9672; Fax: +31 20 622 2450; www.wgnrr.org 26
