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Gender and Global Policy, Key: GREEN = course themes, PINK = key arguments…

- - - - In Here’s What We Know about Trump’s Expanded Mexico City Policy, Elissa Miolene clarifies that this policy bars any organization receiving U.S. aid from engaging in work regarding “abortion, diversity or ‘gender ideology’”.
        
        Trump uses the excuse of not wanting to export pro-abortion ideology to these countries, echoing the calls of the anti-rights movement to not impose women’s rights ideas upon other countries.
        
        As detailed in reporting by Miolene in US seeks to scrap UN efforts to expand women’s rights, delegats from the Trump administration claimed they’d chosen not to support UN efforts for women’s rights so as not to engage in this “new form of colonialism.”
- - - - Both approaches highlight a growing interest in integrating women into development projects in order to meet benchmarks of what development should look like.
    - - This feminist cover story is essential to understanding globalization at the current moment.
        
        In Introduction: Gender Panics in the Global South, authors Jennifer Cole and Erin Moore identify how even a generation later, episodes of what seems to be violent backlash to women’s rights initiatives can be traced to how the economic opportunities available to women are perceived by those who feel threatened by them.
  - - - Freeman writes, though, that a pattern has emerged in studies of globalization in terms of “the erasure of gender as integral to social and economic dimensions of globalization” (1008)
- - - - Horton’s work on queerness in Mumbai proves why studying policy with this category of analysis is essential -- otherwise, the reasoning behind why queer people in Mumbai are staying silent about their queerness and how this can actually be a positive means of navigating their queerness within their community would be entirely missed and an intervention might push queer people in Mumbai to come out.
    - - In the Politics of Gender After Socialism, Gal and Kligman make this importance further clear through their identification of fractal recursion, the notion that patterns of gender distinctions repeat over and over no matter the scale. They, too, identify this public/private distinction and how it has become gendered.
        
        Freeman suggests in Is Local: Global as Feminine: Masculine? Rethinking the Gender of Globalization, that globalization has intensified the gendered distinction between public and private and global and local. She writes that globalization has been gendered as masculine.
  - - - Understanding the deep ties between global policy and gender through this close analysis utilizing gender as a lens leads to the conclusion which Hilary Clinton comes to in her essay, Women’s Rights Are Democratic Rights: The Global Authoritarian Backlash to Gender Equality, that the removal of women’s rights is actually the downfall of democracy, as she’s examined how intertwined gender is with policy and democracy.
- - - - Dr. Julia Kowalski’s work in Rebalancing Himmat: Affect and Vernacular Approaches to Inequality in North India proves that taking the time to sit with and understand local contexts is incredibly helpful to understanding how/if international aid can make a strong impact on a community.
        
        Through her study of himmat, Kowalski draws ties between this societal understanding of courage and women’s rights which otherwise might not have ever been connected. This understanding, she proves, is actually essential to any hope of coming to understand how social norms operate in North India and whether or not gender relations could be shifted.
    - - Shenila Khoja-Moolji critiques former efforts of these organizations to amplify girls’ voices in Doing the ‘Work of Hearing’: Girls’ Voices in Transnational Educational Development Campaigns, suggesting instead that the effort needs to be on hearing the girls.
        
        Though not using this direct vocabulary of hearing, Lila Abu-Lughod makes a similar plea in The Active Social Life of ‘Muslim Women’s Rights’: A Plea for Ethnography, Not Polemic, with Cases from Egypt and Palestine, that rather than debating what women’s rights look like in the Middle East, policymakers and international aid organizations need to dig deeper to do the work of understanding how gender operates in the Middle East and what women’s rights means within that local context.
      - As highlighted in The “Pañuelo Verde” Across Latin America: A Symbol of Transnational and Local Feminist (Re)Volution by Pheobe Martin, though, AID organizations are proving to not be necessary in the global south to start these conversations about women’s rights. Rather than waiting for international aid organizations to do this work of hearing, Martin documents how local feminist movements took off in Latin America to advocate for abortion access.
    - - The creators of the zine Until Everybody Is Free: Young Feminists Resisting the Anti Rights Tide, further highlight how religious institutions, specifically the Mormon church, have leapt at this opportunity to spread their faith and ideology through AID.
  - - - Similarily proving the necessity of context, Brian Horton’s work What’s so ‘Queer’ about Coming out? Silent Queers and Theorizing Kinship Agonistically in Mumbai proves that failing to consider how gender is operating in a place means risking applying an understanding of human rights incompatible with the needs of a community, this time queer people in Mumbai and the reasons why many opt to stay silent about their queerness.
- - - - The socially constructed nature of gender means that it understandings of gender will always be deeply rooted in the local contexts in which gender operates, proving the importance that policymakers work to understand what gender means in a given place in order for interventions to have any hope of being successful.
      - In her work, The Invention of Women, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí pushes back against what she views as a Western ideal that there exists a universal category of women.
        
        This understanding has typically been the backbone of development efforts aimed at improving women’s rights, and the assumptions Oyěwùmí details have become the root of pushback against these aid efforts which fail to take into account what the communities recieving the aid might actually want and how they conceptualize women’s rights and gender in their communities,
      - Emma Ulvin details in Justice for Women and Girls: An Assessment of the 70th UN Commission on the Status of Women that the United States took issue at the most recent commission with the very definition of gender itself, highlighting tension surrounding how gender can be defined and applied.