Gender and accountability is important – but don’t mention the war

UNIFEM have put out two reports in the last few weeks. The first is ‘Voicing the needs of Women and Men in Gaza’, the gender needs survey for the Gaza strip, and the second is ‘Who Answers to Women?: Gender and Accountability’. These two reports highlight the problems that a UN agency has in dealing with contentious issues which involve member governments: that is, they cannot be criticised even obliquely.

UN Agency for Women – Bargaining with Patriarchy

The idea of a multi-tasking UN women’s agency that is long in teeth (being able to push for women’s rights and gender equality effectively) and well-sourced to deliver programs has been much discussed under the rubric of UN reform. The UN Reform itself came into being after years of the UN system being charged by critics as overly bureaucratic and inefficient. Listed along with sustainable development and human rights, gender was identified as one of those cross-cutting issues which must be an integral part of the UN system.

Addressing HIV/AIDS and gender-based violence

The Research School of Humanities presented the Work-in-Progress Seminar Series on 3rd April. Professor Rosemary Jolly, Department of English, IPPH & SARC, Queen’s University spoke on “Implicit Lies, Stigma, and Silence: the humanities’ crucial contribution to addressing HIV/AIDS and gender-based violence effectively’.

Professor Jolly says, “This paper developed out of my work on highly stigmatized issues, such as gender-based violence and STI co-infection, within the context of deeply impoverished communities affected by histories of compounded trauma and structural oppression in the form of colonialism and racism. It attempts to outline what critical theory drawn from the humanities can bring to our understanding of the stigmatized subject of HIV/GBV.”
A recording of the audio can be be downloaded here.

Wu’s seminar on “From ‘Fallen Blossoms’ to ‘Army Latrines’

In this seminar, I highlighted some of the discourses at hand surrounding the issue of sexual- and gender-based violence (SGBV) in conflict situation, and the influence they have upon aid agencies.

In particular, I wanted to explore how the prevailing understanding and distinction of the private vs. public understanding about violence against women during the so-called peacetime is carried into discussions about violence against women in conflict and post-conflict situation. This distinction is played out in the prioritisation of different forms of sexual violence, where military-perpetrated forms of sexual violence takes precedence, as demonstrated in wider media attention as well as the rhetoric of aid agencies and donors.

Men, Masculinity and Development in the Pacific

A new briefing note from Richard Eves and the State Society and Governance program at the ANU addresses Men, Masculinity, and Development in the Pacific. This is an important and accessible piece on the issue of looking at gender beyond the lens of the woman, and also away from the concept of mainstreaming gender so that it loses all meaning. The paper is an accessible summary of the key issues that need to be addressed in programming and complements Eves’ earlier work for Caritas, Exploring the Role off Men and Masculinities in PNG.

While it is important to have gender programming aimed at men and these programs should be looking at different ‘masculinities’ (if this is the best term), which are less related to power and aggression, and more related to what is common between men and women, the question still remains: what is the relationship with gender programs that address the specific needs of women? Eves is a little critical of gender programs aimed at women suggesting they imply an oppositionist approach, and that the empowerment is in relation to men. There is an element of that in many women’s empowerment programs, but most are about increasing women’s agency in number of domains of which the domestic domain is but one. The argument being that improving agency in broader domains may improve the domestic one. Of course the jury is out on this with as many empowerment stories increasing domestic violence as reducing it.

Gender and Security Sector Reform

Without a feminist understanding of what is gender and why promoting gender equality is important in development, a risk with these manuals and guides is the danger of assuming gender is a “fix it” tool, something one whips out of the development kit to solve operational issues, streamline programmatic responses, or donor compliance. The integration of gender into security sector reform may also risk taking certain things for granted, such as the assumption that by reforming the security sector, women will benefit from the trickle-down effect, as opposed to asking the harder questions which feminists have been raising: whether an institution (i.e. the military) which legitimises the use of violence can be made user-friendly? [...]