Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Unit 5: Gender and Social Change (Section 1: Agency and Autonomy (1.2…
Unit 5: Gender and Social Change
Section 1: Agency and Autonomy
1.1 Structure vs. Agency
Describes how actors, whom are so much products of their own contexts, can ever come to transform the conditions of their own lives
Determinism - the idea that human events are determined by the interactions with the world
Hard determinism - human history is a series of unavoidable consequences
Free-will - Humans have the capacity to choose and make judgments that affect their lives
Absolute free will - human behavior is completely undetermined by outside forces
1.2 Autonomy vs. Agency
Autonomy refers to people's capacity to make choices; agency refers to the capacity to act on those choices
Feminists reject the idea of autonomy because it implies that women's disadvantage is the result of their own choice
Feminists propose an alternative theory - which argues that women's capacity to choose is constrained or enabled by their relations - interdependence
Neoliberal development and feminism
Feminists criticize neoliberal tendencies to view women as rational and autonomous agents and assume that they are efficient targets for development - this approach is depoliticized and it ignores the power dynamics and structural relations which affects people's capacity to choose and benefit from interventions
Kabeer
- autonomy refers to the ability to make choices, but made between real alternatives - emphasises active agency and transformative change
1.3 Feminist perspectives to the problem of structure and agency
Judith Butler - Iterability
Gender identities are socially constructed; the existence of gender norms implies that people's performativity of these norms is necessarily an imperfect copy - which is the idea of iterability
Hence, through iterability, gender norms can be changed - either deliberately or not --> space for social change
Serene Khader - Adaptive preferences
Khader developed a theory which explain's women's apparent consent to the conditions that oppress them
3 sub-types of adaptive preferences
Selective value distortion
Forced trade-offs
Factual misperction
Pervasive norms - create subjective attitudes that underlie people's judgments about their situation and condition
Section 2 - Power and Empowerment
2.1 Power
Power is not a zero-sum game; it is not a thing that can be held - power is relational, situational and context-specific
Michael Focault
Power is the relations of force that play out in discourse
Different discourse - different forms of power available --> hence, power is available to everyone
People have to mobilize the forms of power that are available to them in order to challenge the conditions that oppress them
Bourdeiu
Theory of capital - economic, symbolic, social and cultural capital --> all provide power to individuals
2.2 Empowerment
Definition by Beijing Platform
Bishop and Bowman
- does this definition describe a state of being or a process? is it externally or internally defined? is it judged against a set of characteristics?
Oxfam - 5 dimensions of empowerment
Self-perception
Access to resources
Ability to make choices
Personal freedom
Social networks
Kabeer
- empowerment refers to the capacity to make choices but made between real alternatives
Key Reading - Kabeer
agency, medium and achievements
Positive effects of education (improved capacity to take care of family in Zimbabwe; reduction in domestic violence in West Bengal; changing power dynamics in Bangladesh; and improved ability to deal with outside world in Nigeria
Negative effects of education - e.g. India - school system reproduces inequalities
Section 3: Achieving social change
3.1 Adaptation and Transformation
Adaptation - changes to social structures; uneven social change; short-duration and unsustainable; externally driven
Transformation - changes in social norms; long-lived; takes time; internally driven
Both are not mutually exclusive
Measuring impact of social change - scale, scope and duration
3.2 NGOs and Social Movement for Change
Grassroots organizations and civil society - role in contributing to social change
NGOs - registered with state, dependent on donor funding, often depolicitized
Criticisms of development
Myth of attributing outcomes to interventions
Fails to describe how policy is reinterpreted during implementation and planning
Escape hatches - development organizations remedy failures through more interventions
Radical views on development organizations
The development industry reproduces social inequalities through its interactions with the people and through its own gendered hierarchies
Social movements and collective action for change - ability to mobilize people
3.3 Case Study: Migrant Rights for OFWs
Tudor
- migratism - normalization of non-migrant status; and marginalization of migrants
NGOs/Activists - criticisms of governments in sending and receiving countries
Description of poor working conditions and lives of OFWs
Migrante International
INTERCEDE in Canada
Key Reading - Lyons
AWARE and TWC2 NGOs in Singapore
Singapore - authoritarian regimes - activists focused on workplace discrimination
Malaysia - human rights as imperialist imposition - activists used media