Institutionalizing Gender

Institutionalizing Gender analyzes the relationship between class, gender, and psychiatry in France from 1789 to 1900, an era noteworthy for the creation of the psychiatric profession, the development of a national asylum system, and the spread of bourgeois gender values. Asylum doctors in nineteenth-century France promoted the notion that manliness was synonymous with rationality, using this "fact" to pathologize non-normative behaviors and confine people who did not embody mainstream gender expectations to asylums. And yet, this gendering of rationality also had the power to upset prevailing dynamics between men and women. Jessie Hewitt argues that the ways that doctors used dominant gender values to find "cures" for madness inadvertently undermined both medical and masculine power—in large part because the performance of gender, as a pathway to health, had to be taught; it was not inherent. Institutionalizing Gender examines a series of controversies and clinical contexts where doctors' ideas about gender and class simultaneously legitimated authority and revealed unexpected opportunities for resistance. Thanks to generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through The Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellopen.org) and other repositories.

Forty years have passed since the first UN-organized World Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975. In that time, women’s rights, and later gender equality, have become firmly established as an important area of global politics and human rights. What shape have these processes taken in different parts of the world? How do global and internationally designed institutions adapt to local cultural, religious, political, and economic contexts? What are the problems and contradictions embedded in this process when viewed from a global perspective? What effects do grassroots, local, and national actors have on transnational institutions? In answering the questions, the book draws on historical and global perspectives, beginning in the 1960s, an important moment for internationalization during the Cold War, and looking to a global selection of case studies. Providing a series of “snapshots” of historical and contemporary global gender equality politics, the chapters allow for an examination of how local, national, and transnational actors have interacted in ways that affect the dissemination of gender equality institutions, both formal and informal. The case studies demonstrate the relationship between the supranational, regional, national, and sub-national or “local.” They explore the power dynamics, interactions, and mutually constituting nature of two analytic levels of organizations and actors involved in the institutionalization of gender equality–the transnational level as well as the level of activity within specific national political systems (as represented by states, grassroots organizations, and other sub-national actors). The findings reveal that the institutionalization of gender equality is dependent on national and local context, the potential for interactions between gender equality policies and other state agendas, the depth of informal institutions, and the degree to which a given state is integrated into the norms of the international system.

This title reflects increasing interest in the experiences of organizations that have begun to incorporate women and gender considerations into their policies, not only for projects and programs but also within their own organizations. Contributions from an agricultural research organization, a cotton development board, and a rural development organization in Mali, Kenya, and Nepal illustrate approaches and strategies being used to integrate women and gender issues into activities and organizational culture. A final chapter provides an international perspective on the lessons learned and challenges to be met. Material from across the developing world is included in the annotated bibliography and the resources section. Published in association with KIT Publishers.

The book explores the internationalization and institutionalization of gender politics from the late 1960s to the present. It examines the successes, difficulties, and contradictions of this process by taking a global perspective, including case studies on the European Union, Mexico, South Korea, and Egypt, among others.

Published in association with the United Nations, this book builds on the existing body of literature on gender and democratization by looking at the relevance of national machineries for the advancement of women. It considers the appropriate mechanisms through which the mainstreaming of gender can take place, and the levels of governance involved; defines what the interests of women are, and how and by what processes these interests are represented to the state policy making structures. Global strategies for the advancement of women are considered, and how far these have penetrated at national level, illuminated by a series of case studies - gender equality in Sweden and other Nordic countries, the Ugandan ministry of Gender, Culture and Social services, gender awareness in Central and Eastern Europe, and further examples from South Korea, the Lebanon, Beijing and Australia.

An exploration of the ways that multiple inequalities are being addressed in Europe. Using country-based and region-specific case studies it provides an innovative comparative analysis of the multidimensional equality regimes that are emerging in Europe, and reveals the potential that these have for institutionalizing intersectionality.