GROWTH AND STRUGGLE:
THIRTY YEARS OF GENDER STUDIES WORLDWIDE
Raewyn Connell[1]
Tiene el grado BA Hons
por la Universidad de Melbourne y un PhD por la Universidad de Sydney. Ha sido profesora
investigadora en varias universidades a nivel internacional. Ha dedicado su
carrera a las masculinidades, la estructura de las clases sociales y su
relación con las desigualdades de género.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32870/lv.v0i0.8042
To celebrate this
anniversary, we might start by recalling what was happening in the world thirty
years ago. 1994 was the year of the great election victory of the African
National Congress in South Africa, ending the racist regime that had governed there
for eighty years. The Soviet Union had fallen a few years before, and the
Russian economy was collapsing after it, in a great humanitarian catastrophe – from which the current Putin dictatorship later
emerged. Latin America was emerging, unevenly, from the 'lost decade' of debt
crisis and stalled development. China was returning to capitalism and becoming
a manufacturing super-power, exploiting the labour of vast numbers of women in
expanding factories.
In the early
1990s the HIV/AIDS pandemic was still spreading globally, especially in poor
and marginalized communities. Also spreading was the power of transnational
corporations and international finance, energetically pursuing the
globalisation of their operations –
'globalization', the pursuit of worldwide markets and sourcing, had become a
business buzzword in the 1980s. The ideology of privatization and free markets,
called 'neoliberalism' by its opponents, in the 1990s dominated economic
thinking and practical policy-making in much of the world. The result was
growing wealth among the rich, but not among the poor. The neoliberal
Washington Consensus dominated development strategies; one of its products was
the North American Free Trade Agreement, which came into operation in 1994.
In the
universities of United States, which remained the world centre of gender
studies, the early 1990s saw two notable changes. One was the growing authority
of Black feminist thought, which had recently produced the concept of 'intersectionality'
in the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw. The other was the rise of queer theory, with
its roots in US gay and lesbian activism and European post-structuralist and deconstructionist
thought. Its advent was signalled by the worldwide fame of the feminist
philosopher Judith Butler and her book Gender Trouble, published in
English in 1990 and very soon translated into other languages.
Less
centered in the USA were two other shifts in feminist thought and research. The
first was the growth of interest in questions about men and masculinities, which
rapidly became an international research field through the 1990s. The second
was the revival and growing urgency of environmental feminism, as awareness of the
problem of human-produced climate change spread internationally. The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] issued its first Assessment
Report in 1990, its second in 1995.
In 1994
feminist groups in almost every country were preparing for the 4th World
Conference on Women sponsored by the United Nations, held the following year in
Beijing. This event was remarkable for producing the wide-ranging Beijing
Declaration and the Platform for Action, adopted unanimously by the
participating countries. These documents represented an unprecedented, worldwide
political commitment -at least, an apparent commitment- to the goal of gender
equality.
At the same
time, notable intellectual work on gender questions was appearing from the
global South. In contrast to the turn towards poststructuralism, culture and
'identity' questions in the USA, this work tended to emphasise institutions,
divisions of labour and structures of power. Two ambitious projects illustrate
this. In 1993 Teresita de Barbieri, after decades of empirical and advocacy
work on the situation of women across Latin America, published her classic
conceptual paper "Sobre la categoría de género: una introducción
teórico-metodológica". This traced across the continent the institutionalized
patterns of gender relations, bringing together in a generous synthesis the
nature of patriarchal power, class divisions among women, the politics of
childbirth, issues about men and masculinity, and more. In 1994 Bina Agarwal,
development economist and socialist feminist, published her magnificent book A
Field of One's Own. This traced across rural south Asia the patterns of
women's access to and ownership of land, and explored how this involved the
politics of the family, the state and legal regimes, relations with local
environments, and more. With work like that going on, it was an auspicious time
to be launching a centre for gender studies in Guadalajara.
How has the
worldwide field of gender studies changed, since that auspicious moment? Signs
of trouble were not long in coming. The 1995 meeting turned out to be the last
of the series of World Conferences on Women. Feminists in United Nations
agencies feared that with a growing number of anti-feminist right-wing
governments coming to power, calling another such conference might undo
commitments made at Beijing. Indeed, when the United Nations adopted the
Millennium Development Goals in the year 2000, the provisions for gender
equality and the advancement of women were surprisingly narrow.
Yet in other
ways, feminist influence and agendas have persisted, and trends from the early
1990s have continued. The number of women who are members of parliaments or
heads of government has crept up farther. The numbers of young women completing
secondary school and the numbers going into higher education have continued to
grow; the 2003 UNESCO report Gender and Education for All: the Leap to
Equality is a notable example of international feminist policy work. Gender
equality and gender diversity have become major themes of international 'human
rights' advocacy and aid programmes. A number of countries which formerly
banned abortion and information about contraception have adopted policies that
treat reproductive autonomy as women's right.
In the academic
world, University courses and programmes on gender studies have multiplied in
regions such as Africa and east Asia where they had formerly been rare. The
volume of gender-related research has grown, and the number of journals
specialising in gender studies, or particular areas of gender research, has
increased. For instance, in studies of men and masculinities there are now
about ten journals internationally, whereas in the 1990s there were two. New
feminist and gender-studies journals with a strong local focus have emerged in
regions of the majority world that have been under-represented in global
scholarship. A vigorous example is Feminist Africa, launched in 2002,
available open access at https://feministafrica.net/. The current issue
documents 21st-century activism across the African continent.
Beyond the
academic world, international activist networks working on gender issues have
become more extensive and visible. To give two examples: MenEngage is a
worldwide network claiming five or six hundred pro-feminist organizations
working with men and boys; RedLACTrans is, as it says, regional but also links
groups and movements across multiple countries. Both of these networks have a
Web presence, and this points to an important change in the cultural environment
for gender studies.
The Internet
has grown with remarkable speed in the last generation to be the main channel
of communication among academics, researchers beyond the university, movement
activists, and policymakers. Printed journals are not yet obsolete, but are
likely to be; many journals and magazines now are online-only. With this, and
databanks, and Cloud storage, and other online resources, the Internet has
become the main repository of knowledge about gender, and also a major forum
for debate.
More:
through social media, entertainment channels, news channels, disinformation
campaigns, data mining, surveillance, and 'the Internet of Things', the
Internet has also become a significant part of the gendered world itself. It is
a site where gender is constructed, performed, re-constructed, distorted, and struggled
over. The so-called 'manosphere' is a notable example, a complex of websites disseminating
misogynist and anti-feminist ideas, which serves for numbers of boys and young
men as a source of reactionary definitions of manhood. So as well as
gender-related research (e.g. surveys) conducted via online tools, there is now
a great deal of research about the phenomena of online gender – a research field that did not exist at all thirty
years ago.
In other
ways too, gender studies has changed focus or emphasis. There is now more
emphasis on worldwide differences in gender orders (or gender regimes) and
therefore on specific social and economic situations and the possibilities for action
they contain. Few feminist thinkers now assume that there is a universal
patriarchy, a grand all-encompassing theory, or a master key to gender
inequality which, if we could only find it, would unlock a feminist future. The
task of change seems grittier, more piecemeal, and more prone to reversals than
it did before.
One reason
for this greater sense of complexity –
and greater realism, to tell the truth – is that some groups who were formerly marginal in
feminist scholarship have increasingly gained voice. Indigenous women are among
them, insisting on the historic significance of colonialism as an issue for
feminism. Indigenous movements and scholars have brought out the different
social structures, epistemes and customs that existed before colonial conquest,
and their survival and re-creation in the present. Such voices have denounced the
continuing racism in postcolonial countries, and the complicity of feminist
scholarship coming from settler populations. The Australian indigenous scholar Aileen
Moreton-Robinson's book Talkin' Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and
Feminism (2nd edition 2021) is an influential example.
Another marginalized
group to become more visible is transsexual women, who now have a political
presence that is surprising from the viewpoint of the early 1990s. Trans
women's visibility increased with the rise of queer theory, the invention of
the acronym 'LGBT', and a sudden burst of mass media attention to 'transgender
people'. This all happened in the USA, but produced language that was rapidly
internationalized in human rights advocacy and aid programmes, e.g. those
concerned with HIV/AIDS. Impoverished trans groups around the global South have
benefited from aid money, often by becoming NGOs (non-profits) and
professionalizing. That in itself can be a problem, as Latin American feminism
knows from the long conflict between autonomous and institutional strategies.
Nevertheless organizing and lobbying by trans women and men has influenced
legislation; legal change of gender status is now increasingly provided for, and
its conditions made less onerous. Argentina's 2012 Ley de identidad de género is a notable example.
But this kind of change has not happened everywhere, and
even where it has, the change has met opposition. We are in a time when
the scattered gender backlashes of earlier decades have consolidated into a
coherent campaign against reform of the patriarchal gender order. An early step
was taken at the Beijing conference, when the Vatican and ultra-Catholic
governments objected to use of the term ‘gender’ in UN documents. Around
2011-12 this matured into a deliberate campaign against ‘gender theory’ or
‘gender ideology’, the caricature of feminist thought recently devised by
conservative Catholic intellectuals (well described by Garbagnoli & Prearo,
2017).
Anti-feminist,
anti-gay and now also anti-trans, this agenda has gained support from the
latest two Popes, and has been carefully disseminated through the church's
international organizations. The ideas have surfaced in political campaigns
from France to Colombia, Brasil, Australia and Hungary. Just a little later,
militant Protestant groups and right-wing Republican Party politicians in the
United States took up anti-trans measures, as well as renewing their attacks on
gay marriage equality, and women's rights in relation to contraception and
abortion. Dramatic consequences of neo-conservative mobilizations include the
overturning of the 'Roe v. Wade' precedent after the US Supreme Court was
stacked with right-wing judges, the recent drastic anti-homosexual legislation
in Uganda, and the banning of gender studies from universities in Hungary. The
anti-gender campaigns have been given extra momentum by the rise of
extreme-right electoral politics, and the increased number of authoritarian
governments around the world, almost all of them controlled by men with
reactionary views about gender.
Of course
gender is not the only thing at stake here. Racism is equally important to
mobilizing right-wing movements and consolidating their popular support – witness the importance of 'border protection' and persecution of
refugees and migrants in the global North. Defence of an orthodox religion and
hostility to religious minorities is important for authoritarian movements in
the Islamic world and in India under the anti-Muslim BJP leader Modi. Background
to the new-right movements is the mass precarity and heightened inequality
resulting from two generations of neoliberal policy, as the new-right leaders'
endless denunciation of 'elites' suggests.
Yet through
the shouting, we can hear in all these movements the accents of dying
privilege, the emotion of entitlement that was once secure (or thought to be
secure) and is now slipping into the gulf of the future. That, I think, is a
sign that though anti-gender movements have had important successes recently, in
the long run they are losing. No-one can build lasting hegemony from resentment
and fear.
Gender
studies, the field of research and teaching concerned with this whole arena of
contestation, has a part to play in preparing a different world. Accurate
knowledge and careful thinking about what is, after all, a major part of human
experience, matters for decision-making – whether the decisions are personal, national, or global.
This branch of the human sciences is still young, and I believe it has a rich
and varied future. My congratulations to all who have been involved with the
Centro de Estudios de Género, and my best wishes for the coming years.
References
Agarwal, B. (1994). A Field of One's
Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia. Cambridge University Press.
De Barbieri, T. (1992). 'Sobre la
categoría género. Una introducción teórico-metodológica'. Revista Interamericana de Sociologia, 6, 147-178.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge.
Garbagnoli, S. & Prearo, M. (2017). La croisade
"anti-genre": Du Vatican aux manifs pour tous. Éditions Textuel.
Moreton-Robinson, A. (2021). Talkin’
Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism. 2nd edition.
University of Queensland Press.
UNESCO (2003). Gender and Education
for All: The Leap to Equality. UNESCO. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000132550_spa.
UN Women (2015). Beijing Declaration
and Platform for Action, Beijing +5 Political Declaration and Outcome.
United Nations. https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2015/01/beijing-declaration.