GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT IN BRIEF

BRIDGE BULLETIN, ISSUE 14, JANUARY 2004

Gender and citizenship

IN THIS ISSUE:

·  Re-framing Citizenship

·  Journey Without Maps: the story of Naripokkho

·  Anti-Violence Organising at the US-Mexico Border

This issue of In Brief looks at the ways in which working with ideas of citizenship can help promote gender equality. An approach to development that starts from the perspective of people as citizens can enable development actors to support struggles for rights and participation in decision-making for those marginalised on the basis of gender. As in the case of Naripokkho, this involves re-framing citizenship rights and responsibilities to include the needs of women and to ensure their access to policy and institutions. People’s understandings of citizenship differ according to context, and change through time. Concepts of membership and belonging are re-negotiated as new alliances are formed in the light of shared interests – as shown by cross-border anti-violence work in the US and Mexico.

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[BOX]

Citizenship means:

membership and belonging

rights and responsibilities

universality

a status and a practice

a process

a relationship with the state

a way of being in the world

participation

decision-making

obligations

entitlements

roles

duty

identity

access to legal protection and justice

nationality

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Re-framing Citizenship

SHAMIM MEER and CHARLIE SEVER

Citizenship is a slippery term. Its abstract nature makes it hard to pin down, to describe what it means in real, lived experience. It can mean all things to all people.

There are those for whom citizenship is a site of achievement, of power and validation of their place in the world – a way of achieving positive change and gaining a better standard of living for all groups. For others it can be a malign concept − exclusive, alienating or threatening − serving only to marginalise and exclude by allowing some in and expelling those who do not fit on the basis of gender, class or race. Some may say citizenship has “no relevance” to their lives, lives that are already too full with the pressures of daily life to consider participating in broader decision-making or struggles over rights.

Yet how can we describe what citizenship is or what it means in the lives of people living in poverty and insecurity? Can we demystify ideas of citizenship and paint these ideas as they appear in real scenarios, campaigns and projects across the globe? Many development workers have argued that using the language and the arguments of citizenship is a powerful way of working in development programmes that seek to bring about gender equality through focusing on people and how they interact with institutions.

Initially though, we must try to understand the different meanings we give to the term, how it may shift depending on who is speaking, and how it is shaped by historical legacies. The box (left) shows a number of ways in which citizenship can be described. From the perspective of gender, several problems immediately become apparent with some of these terms.

Firstly there is a problem with the idea of “universal” rights and responsibilities. In reality people do not all have the same needs or the same position in society – there is no “universal” citizen. This means that rights and responsibilities are in fact constructed on behalf of society’s most powerful groups – powerful through gender, ethnicity, race or class positions – in their interests and to serve their needs.

Secondly, citizenship is generally based on people’s position in society – where they are placed in relations of unequal power and what social roles they are expected to perform. In most societies there are “appropriate” roles for women and men – idealised roles that assign women to the domestic, private arena of home and family and men to the public realm of politics, economics and decision-making. Such a divide may only be an idea of “appropriate behaviour”, but such ideas have material implications. This public/private divide means that it is men who are seen as full citizens – as politically active decision-makers. Women, who are not seen as political agents, are seen as dependants of men who govern society on their behalf. Those who depart from such roles may be stigmatised, excluded, or their actions rendered invisible.

In the light of these problems, feminists and women’s rights activists have sought to reframe citizenship from a gender perspective and to show how struggles for women’s rights must be seen as citizenship struggles that affect everyone in society rather than “minority interests”.

Including the excluded

One direct way of addressing the problem of exclusion from the arenas of decision-making is affirmative action policies and political quotas.

‘Women in our town thought participation in politics was only for men. Now they believe they can become councillors and governors’. In a context where civil liberties for the majority black population were relatively new, Namibian women have campaigned for legal quotas for women in political office. In the process of the campaign a new awareness of women’s rights has been created and perceptions that women are not political actors have been challenged.

A second way is to base rights on the actual needs of women and of men in minority groups and not on the needs of a “universal citizen”. This means ensuring that marginalised groups can voice their needs and that these voices reach and change powerful institutions.

In the late 1990s, activists and researchers in South Africa conducted a campaign to intervene in reform of customary laws concerning marriages where a man was able to take more than one wife (polygyny). At one meeting a researcher noted that a section of women sat silently watching the mass of dancing members chanting ‘one man one woman’. She asked these women why they were silent. They replied that they lived in polygynous marriages and that their livelihoods would be threatened if polygyny was not recognised. Ultimately the intervention made by the campaign in the reform process framed the law in a way that would make polygyny expensive (eventually leading to its disappearance), while safeguarding women’s rights to marital property.

Redefining the public/private divide

The divide that places men and women physically in mutually exclusive spheres also determines the attention given to different interests and needs. Family, domestic and sexual concerns have long been neglected by public and/or political solutions. To counter the view that private concerns are not seen as the stuff of politics, feminists have asserted that issues to do with sexuality and reproduction and “private wrongs” such as domestic violence are matters for public attention. They have also argued that political participation must be defined to include informal politics such as women’s groups, support services and other forms of social mobilisation.

Sex workers in West Bengal, India, challenged their exclusion as full members of society by asserting their rights to organise. They argued that it was important for them to define the problem of trafficking for sex work, and the solutions to this problem, from their own perspective. Through giving voice to their particular needs and demanding rights based on these needs, they challenged ideas that sex is a private issue that should not be talked about in public.

Conclusions

Undertaking struggles to defend, reinterpret and extend rights can therefore help women make clear that they are political beings. Collective struggles allow women to make their voices heard so that these voices influence the institutions that circumscribe women’s lives – the household, market, state, and the international arena. Such a combination of claiming rights, participation and influence can lead to more meaningful forms of citizenship for those who have hitherto been excluded.

In working towards these goals, processes of research and gender analysis are needed in order to better understand what lies behind discrimination and exclusion. Efforts should be made by policy-makers and practitioners to enable people, particularly women, to define their own needs and solutions and to interpret rights and responsibilities from their own perspectives. This will mean addressing so-called “private” issues such as domestic violence and sexuality, alongside economic and political participation, as citizenship rights.

Women’s organisations are powerful expressions of active citizenship, particularly in campaigns that include advocacy, awareness-raising and lobbying. Civil society organising for gender equality must be supported with resources, training and capacity-building to enable effective interaction with, and influence over, policy and institutions.

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Journey Without Maps: the story of Naripokkho

SHIREEN HUQ, Naripokkho

Just as bread is not rice, women are not human beings.

- popular saying

Not as mothers and sisters, as human beings we want our dignity and as citizens we want our rights.

- Naripokkho slogan

Naripokkho is a women’s activist organisation founded in 1983. The story of Naripokkho demonstrates two important ways in which citizenship has been re-defined in the interests of promoting gender equality: firstly by demanding that women’s rights be recognised as the rights of full citizens and secondly by questioning the meaning of “appropriate behaviour” for women.

Women in Bangladesh were of interest to political parties only in so far as we were vote banks. We were of interest to development agencies only in our roles as mothers and carers of families and households. In either case our concerns were subsidiary to the more “important” issues at hand – issues of state power and rule, and of poverty “alleviation”. Fundamental inequalities in the formal rights and freedoms and in the reality of everyday life were not addressed. Above all there was no understanding of the need to alter the embedded meanings of what it is to be a man or a woman in our world.

In its 20-year history Naripokkho has worked on issues from safe contraception to the improvement in services for violence survivors, to struggles for recognition of peasant women as agricultural producers. We have launched campaigns to protest against the dumping of toxic wastes, human rights violations of ethnic and religious minorities, and the introduction of Islam as the state religion. Naripokkho has also fought against the eviction of thousands of women sex workers and their children from brothels in Dhaka and Narayanganj and convened and nurtured an alliance of NGOs in support of the human rights of sex workers.

On International Women’s Day in 1991, for the first time in Bangladesh over two thousand women, coordinated by members of Naripokkho, marched through the streets of Dhaka. They gathered in a rally before the Parliament building to demand Rashtro ebong poribarey, shoman hobo odhikarey (Equality in the state, equality in the family). In 1995, Naripokkho organised the first national conference of women’s organisations, attended by more than 400 women from 240 women’s organisations from all over Bangladesh; a second conference took place in January 2002.

Naripokkho sought to build an alternative to the dogmas of political parties on the one hand and the agenda of development agencies concerning “women’s development” on the other. In the early days we started by focusing on women as development workers rather than development recipients. The fact that women development workers did not conform to the accepted boundaries of being female, particularly in rural Bangladesh, meant that for many there were heavy personal costs. The risks attached to stepping out of line and being punished, and of being alienated or rejected by families and communities, were all real risks facing us. How much risk each of us could afford to take depended on our fallback positions. Did we have families that understood and supported us in our politics and our actions? No, clearly not all of us did.

Naripokkho’s members remain predominantly women working with development agencies at different levels. However, membership is now more mixed than when it started up in the 1980s, and includes teachers, lawyers, doctors and researchers. The strategy has also shifted from its initial emphasis on addressing the concerns of women development workers and we now put our energies into network-building with local women’s groups all over the country.

The organisation has continued to encounter opposition and hostility. We were tainted, and were accused of either being an NGO-driven group (which had connotations of “western and donor-driven”), or as too radical and ugro (vulgar, aggressive). There was apprehension that we were not controllable and that we lacked sufficient respect and reverence for “custom and tradition”. Even so, we were also attractive in another sense. There was something curious about us, about our energy and our apparent “audacity”, our damn care bhaab (couldn’t give a damn attitude).

For us the question of balance between engagement with the policy process and activism in the organisational sense of movement-building remains unresolved, and we find ourselves continuously struggling with how to maintain a critical stance while engaging. In 1990 two key members of Naripokkho were invited by the government to sit on its National Education Advisory Committee. A number of members in the organisation were of the opinion that Naripokkho’s participation in the committee would extend legitimacy to the “autocratic” regime of the time. Ultimately, Naripokkho agreed to join the committee, but suffered the loss of some of its members.

Naripokkho’s journey illustrates some of the complex meanings and expressions of citizenship. It shows how women’s rights are often not accepted as citizen rights in the context of development policies. It involves women stepping outside the “appropriate role” of female citizens and it describes how they have faced exclusion and prejudice. It also paints a picture of active citizenship in the struggles against such exclusions in the form of decisive action, agency and collective struggle.

This article is based on Huq, S., forthcoming 2004, ‘“Bodies as Sites of Struggle”: Naripokkho and Women's Rights in Bangladesh', in Kabeer (ed.).

For more information contact:

Naripokkho

G.P.O. Box 723

Dhaka 1000

Bangladesh

Tel: +880 2 8119917

Email:

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‘Alliances symbolise the creation of spaces for sisterhood and solidarity’.

Cartoon from Equipo de Comunicación Alternativa con Mujeres (ECAM), 2000, ‘Leadership’ (Liderazgo), Local Power (Poder Local) Series, No 3, Tarija: ECAM (page 13)

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Gendered Anti-Violence Organising at the US-Mexico Border