Essays On Gender And Governance

The relationship between gender and governance has too often been neglected in both theoretical and empirical work. Until very recently, most influential political thought has been built around a conceptual distinction between the public realm of politics, military affairs, and administration, and the private realm of family and domestic life. Women s role, in a wide range of traditions and in theoretical work influenced by them, has typically been associated with the private realm, and men s role with the public realm. The public/private distinction has been thoroughly criticized as being in many ways misleading and untenable. Nonetheless, it continues to influence both theoretical and empirical work, with the result that women s efforts to gain a voice in governance have often been ignored. The papers in this volume aim to set the record straight. They advance a theoretical structure, both positive and normative, within which the question of gendered governance may usefully be pursued. They also analyze some current developments that indicate many ways in which women are actively participating in governance, in both government and the institutions of civil society, and the obstacles that remain. The essays in this volume are the outcome of a year long collaborative exploration of the multiple factors that influence the process of engendering governance in complex societies, in particular the changing roles of various actors including women s movements, the state and civil society.

In The Gender Politics of Development Shirin Rai provides a comprehensive assessment of how gender politics has emerged and developed in post-colonial states. In chapters on key issues of nationalism and nation-building, the third wave of democratization and globalization and governance, Rai argues that the gendered way in which nationalist statebuilding occured created deep fissures and pressures for development. She goes on to show how women have engaged with institutions of governance in developing countries, looking in particular at political participation, deliberative democracy, representation, leadership and state feminism. Through this engagement, Rai claims, vital new political spaces have been created. Though Rai focuses in-depth on how these debates have played out in India, the book's argument is highly relevant for politics across the developing world. This is a unique and compelling synthesis of gender politics with ideas about development from an authoritative figure in the field.

Though the proportion of women in national assemblies still barely scrapes 16% on average, the striking outliers – Rwanda with 49% of its assembly female, Argentina with 35%, Liberia and Chile with new women presidents this year – have raised expectations that there is an upward trend in women’s representation from which we may expect big changes in the quality of governance. But getting women into public office is just the first step in the challenge of creating governance and accountability systems that respond to women’s needs and protect their rights. Using case studies from around the world, the essays in this volume consider the conditions for effective connections between women in civil society and women in politics, for the evolution of political party platforms responsive to women’s interests, for local government arrangements that enable women to engage effectively, and for accountability mechanisms that answer to women. The book’s argument is that good governance from a gender perspective requires more than more women in politics. It requires fundamental incentive changes to orient public action and policy to support gender equality.

"This book examines the structures of governance as they impact women in five conflict zones in South Asia: Swat in Pakistan, the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh, the Northern Province in Sri Lanka, and Kashmir and Manipur in India. Despite their different historical and political contexts, the five studies included here throw up some common patterns. War and conflict have weakened and eroded existing formal structures and institutions of governance. New formations, whether made up of militant groups, or more ‘secular’ state institutions like armies, do not see women as rights-bearing actors. Further, the authors argue, the impact of war, conflict, settlerism and militancy can make state structures more distant and sometimes incomprehensible to citizens, leaving women’s specific gender concerns unaddressed. Taken together, the essays show that women’s relationship with governance institutions is complex, and combines dependence on such institutions with the challenge of dealing with new forms of patriarchy that take root as structures transform and change. The gendering of governance policy and practice therefore, is of crucial importance."--

Classic radical feminist statement from the woman who shot Andy Warhol “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.” Outrageous and violent, SCUM Manifesto was widely lambasted when it first appeared in 1968. Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, self-published the book just before she became a notorious household name and was confined to a mental institution. But for all its vitriol, it is impossible to dismiss as the mere rantings of a lesbian lunatic. In fact, the work has proved prescient, not only as a radical feminist analysis light years ahead of its time—predicting artificial insemination, ATMs, a feminist uprising against underrepresentation in the arts—but also as a stunning testament to the rage of an abused and destitute woman. In this edition, philosopher Avital Ronell’s introduction reconsiders the evocative exuberance of this infamous text.

The first paper in this compilation is a review of the literature on First Nations women and self-government. It covers the following subject areas: traditional roles of First Nations women, the impact of colonization on those women, male leadership, contemporary First Nations women & sexual equality, and contemporary First Nations women & self-government. It also provides some legislative options, draft policies, recommendations, and general discussion of good governance from a First Nations women's perspective. The second paper addresses two questions: can & should the Indian Act be amended to provide for more equitable governing powers between First Nations women & men, and if amendments are desired, how can new regulations & policy improve the political participation of First Nations women. The questions are approached by investigating the responses of Lake Babine First Nation women to such questions and comparing this information with published analyses of women and First Nations governance. The final paper examines the history & rationale for the section 67 exemption of Indian Act matters from the Canadian Human Rights Act in the context of First Nations women's equality interests in governance. It reviews barriers to full realization of First Nations women's equality rights, particularly issues relating to Indian status & the band membership entitlement system, and decision-making by Indian Act band councils that reflects the arbitrary legal distinctions made in the Act.

Fourteen essays examine the unexpected relationships between government power and intimate life in the last 150 years of United States history. The last few decades have seen a surge of historical scholarship that analyzes state power and expands our understanding of governmental authority and the ways we experience it. At the same time, studies of the history of intimate life—marriage, sexuality, child-rearing, and family—also have blossomed. Yet these two literatures have not been considered together in a sustained way. This book, edited and introduced by three preeminent American historians, aims to close this gap, offering powerful analyses of the relationship between state power and intimate experience in the United States from the Civil War to the present. The fourteen essays that make up Intimate States argue that “intimate governance”—the binding of private daily experience to the apparatus of the state—should be central to our understanding of modern American history. Our personal experiences have been controlled and arranged by the state in ways we often don’t even see, the authors and editors argue; correspondingly, contemporary government has been profoundly shaped by its approaches and responses to the contours of intimate life, and its power has become so deeply embedded into daily social life that it is largely indistinguishable from society itself. Intimate States makes a persuasive case that the state is always with us, even in our most seemingly private moments.

Woman and the Colonial State deals with the ambiguous relationship between women of both the European and the Indonesian population and the colonial state in the former Netherlands Indies in the first half of the twentieth century. Based on new data from a variety of sources: colonial archives, journals, household manuals, children's literature, and press surveys, it analyses the women-state relationship by presenting five empirical studies on subjects, in which women figured prominently at the time: Indonesian labour, Indonesian servants in colonial homes, Dutch colonial fashion and food, the feminist struggle for the vote and the intense debate about monogamy of and by women at the end of the 1930s. An introductory essay combines the outcomes of the case studies and relates those to debates about Orientalism, the construction of whiteness, and to questions of modernity and the colonial state formation.