The Drum Beat 273 - Valuing Women

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This Drum Beat is one of a series of commentary and analysis pieces. Karin Wilkins, Graduate Adviser & Associate Professor in the Department of Radio, Television and Film at the University of Texas at Austin, analyses what she identifies as the sexualisation, commodification and victimisation of women by development organisations. What follows is her perspective - NOT that of the Partners collectively or individually.

We are interested in featuring a range of critical analysis commentaries of the communication for change field. These will appear regularly on the first Monday of each month and are meant to inspire dialogue throughout the month. Though we cannot guarantee to feature your commentary, as we have a limited number of issues to be published each year, if you wish to contribute please contact Deborah Heimann dheimann@comminit.com Many thanks!

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Valuing women

Women. What are we good for? Absolutely everything. But you would never know it from development work. Within development rhetoric, we have value in terms of our capacities to reproduce and to nurture children, families, communities and nations, our propensity to consume, and our victimisation in violent confrontations. In essence, we breed and feed; we buy and cry. But we do so much more. We create; we console; we connect.

In this discussion, I address briefly a few key arguments concerning the passive and monolithic characterisation of women through development discourse. Specifically, I comment on the sexualisation of women through reproductive health and population programmes, the commodification of women as consumers through communication campaigns, and the victimisation of women through emergency aid and military intervention. Women, often the subject and target for development intervention, embody more than the sexual, reproductive, consumption, and victim functions typically portrayed in this discourse. I hope to open debate on how we might engage respectful strategies that recognise the complexity of gender as well as of the processes of social change.

In much of development discourse, particularly in the Women in Development (WID) tradition, women's roles tend to be conceived through their bodies, as maternal or sexual creatures. It is particularly worth noting that in many donor organisations financial resources devoted to "women's" issues tend to be channeled through children's health, nutrition, and population programmes. The sense that women are passively suffering from the burdens of their sexuality and reproductive capacities, as a result of their "traditional" cultures, becomes more pronounced in those regions that are culturally distant from the homes of prominent bilateral donors. An Orientalist approach to development incorporates patriarchal assumptions, which envision "other" women in passive roles requiring "our" assistance. "Helping" women in these culturally distant spaces focuses on women's sexuality, through development programmes focusing on attempts to control women's bodies.

Although reproductive health may be an important issue, development programmes should be faulted for concentrating on this at the expense of a broad range of concerns, and for constructing women as passively responding to interventions instead of actively engaging in decision making about their own sexuality. But it is not just that development agencies create roles for women as passive victims requiring assistance: these visions of women vary across cultural space, such that cultural "others" are more easily justified as targets for development intervention.

Development communication campaigns also rely on passive characterisations of women, conceived as "targets" for intervention. The underlying model of social marketing assumes that individuals (not policies or structures) are the appropriate targets for change, and that behavior change is an appropriate focus for intervention. While the "product" advocated through social marketing campaigns need not pertain to a material artifact but might also refer to an idea, often the suggested practice, particularly in health and nutrition programmes, involves consumption, such as of ORS packets, vitamins, or other material goods. This is not to discount other campaign issues that do not target tangible products for purchase, such as breastfeeding and exercise, but to draw attention instead to the commercial foundations upon which social marketing campaigns are created. As an extension of a commercial model, social marketing targets individual consumers as passive recipients just waiting to be activated into purchasing the right product, which will somehow improve their lives, as well as the lives of their children and families. Consumption then becomes the appropriate way for individual women to engage in social change.

One of the reasons for the popularity of social marketing in communication projects directed toward women is that this very framework of social change does not question, but instead reinforces a global power structure that privileges global corporations, which require us to engage in practices of consumption. Focusing on individuals as the locus of change also distracts us from recognising the power of a collective group in resisting dominant groups such as corporations. Thus, the potential for women to organise and engage critical social issues is marginalised in favor of women's consumption patterns.

Another model for using media to promote social change, entertainment-education, may be subject to similar critiques. But whereas women may not necessarily be targeted as consumers per se as in social marketing, the privatisation of this public interest strategy means that commercial interests compete with socially beneficial purposes. Women become subject to communication strategies attempting to convince them to "role model" themselves after characters in scripts, rather than encouraged to see broader systems of gender dynamics or to engage in collective acts of resistance, to consumer culture, or to oppressive political systems. The very structure of many of these programmes involves the "partnership" of private industry with development institutions ostensibly acting in the public interest. This "partnership" limits the potential for communication messages to engage in more controversial subjects and strategies. The integration of commercial products, in the name of the "public good" in these projects, draws attention away from potentially more environmentally sound and politically responsive solutions.

Women are often used as a justification for development assistance in conflict situations, particularly in discussions of humanitarian and emergency aid. In textual as well as visual references, women crying over death and destruction are used to explain why resources need to be diverted to particular territories. The point here is not that women do not suffer; women do. But so do others. So do men. But women are compelling as victims, largely due to our broader sense of women's subservient role in our society. Playing on these stereotypes, we lose a sense of the humanity of pain and suffering. Instead, women's rights have the potential to become a pretense for development, as well as military intervention. US rhetoric explaining military intervention in Afghanistan, along with justifications among many development institutions recently investing in this territory, foreground women's concerns as both target and justification.

Development and other government institutions exploit women's issues to pursue their own agendas. But within this hierarchical structure there is potential for resistance. We tend to polarise development processes as either hierarchical or participatory, either dominating communities of passive individuals or engaging active participants in key decisions. Critiques of the dominant approach to development as well as the history of the field do justice in recognising the patriarchal assumptions embedded in creating interventions within powerful institutions that are then imposed on groups with less power. Advocates of participation also offer an important contribution by arguing for contexts of implementation that are respectful and informed, on grounds of ethics and effectiveness. In many ways our attempts to understand women's roles in the development process resonate with these broader interpretations of the field. In some approaches, women serve as the passive targets for campaigns, while in others, women are sought as active participants, though usually as members of recipient communities rather than engaged as paid, authoritative officials in development organisations.

However, all too often this discussion becomes polarised, simplifying complicated dynamics into the very types of dichotomies that have been the subject of critique: modernity vs. tradition; active vs. passive; top-down vs. bottom-up; dominant vs. participatory approach to development. The processes of creating, implementing, and evaluating development policies and programmes are much more complex than these simplified categories allow. Yet, understanding the broader power dynamics is still a critical component of this process. In this regard, feminist theory offers insight into the structures of power that operate in transnational, institutional, as well as social contexts. Moving beyond token strategies for "participation" of women at the community level, how can development programmes more seriously incorporate principles of global feminism, respecting diversity across culture, class, race and more while building on the shared experiences of oppression?

Karin Gwinn Wilkins
Graduate Adviser & Associate Professor
University of Texas at Austin
kwilkins@mail.utexas.edu

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Please participate in a Pulse Poll on this same theme -

Development institutions rely on gender stereotypes rather than foster resistance to them.

Do you agree or disagree?

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This issue of The Drum Beat is meant to inspire dialogue and conversation among the Drum Beat network.

To read contributions please click here.

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RESULTS of past Pulse Poll:
as of October 29, 2004

If you are journalist then you are a development communicator.

[For context, please see The Drum Beat 265]

Agree: 42.35%
Disagree: 55.29%
Unsure: 2.35%
Total number of participants = 85

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This issue of The Drum Beat is an opinion piece and has been written and signed by the individual writer. The views expressed herein are the perspective of the writer and are not necessarily reflective of the views or opinions of The Communication Initiative or any of The Communication Initiative Partners.

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The Drum Beat seeks to cover the full range of communication for development activities. Inclusion of an item does not imply endorsement or support by The Partners.

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