Feminism in water: From targeting women to questioning knowledge Margreet Zwarteveen

Introduction 1980s onwards: “…it is our contention that the unsatisfactory recognition of women’s rights and needs within the Scheme remains one of the greatest weaknesses of the ‘Mwea system’. It is our doubt about this central aspect, so important for the long term welfare of Mwea families that has led us to question (…) whether the Mwea pattern ought to be replicated elsewhere.” (Hanger and Moris, 1973:244)

Introduction

Effects, impacts of feminism in water? Instructive experience: Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture: aimed at identifying existing knowledge and stimulating thought on ways to manage water resources to continue meeting the needs of both humans and ecosystems. The CA critically evaluates the benefits, costs, and impacts of the past 50 years of water development and challenges to water management currently facing communities. It assesses innovative solutions and explores consequences of potential investment and management decisions.

Introduction Set up following the IPCC model 90 institutes 700 scientists and experts Gender expert in SC Explicit gender review of all chapters by 12 gender experts Parallel “gender and water” project

Introduction Conclusion: although gender is recognized on ‘paper’, it remains difficult to meaningfully integrate gender questions in ‘mainstream’ water analyses and discussions. Why is this so? 3 related reasons: politics of the feminist project; tensions between feminist and engineering ways of knowing; (prevailing professional water cultures and identities)

(1) Feminist project in water = making women visible Women are important water actors, too! they have water needs and interests they possess water knowledge they contribute labor to water infrastructure hence they deserve rights to water they deserve a voice in water decision making and recognition as water authorities

(1) feminist project in water = making women visible but…… (1) how/on what/whose terms can women be recognized and who/what are they? (2)(how) can women be known? ((3) does visibility imply emancipation?)

(1) Feminist project in water = making women visible

Maybe the ONLY thing women have in common in relation to water is their INVISIBILITY……. de Beauvoir: women are the Other Irigaray: women are a paradox if not contradiction

(1) Feminist project in water = making women visible the work place the irrigation system public production farmer work reason, logic the home the rest private/intimate consumption farmer’s wife care emotion, affection

(1) Feminist project in water = making women visible If language and systems of thought are themselves deeply ‘masculinist’, it becomes impossible to ‘know’ women, because “the intelligible articulation of ideas can only be done from within and through existing languages and systems of thought”. Political and linguistic-discursive ‘representation’ set out in advance the criterion by which subjects are formed so that representation is only extended to what/who can be acknowledged as subject

(1) Feminist project in water = making women visible

If gender is a context-based, relational construction – a relative point of convergence among shifting and diverse culturally and historically specific sets of relations – it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to talk about ‘women’ or ‘men’ as already existing categories.

(1) Feminist project in water = making women visible yet, “making women visible” assumes and requires a category of women the feminist need for a political subject: to show that women exist and matter, a distinct female identity is required, a shared womanhood or a shared history of oppression and marginalization

(1) Feminist project in water = making women visible “Making women visible” risks becoming a project that itself seeks for a discursive and political formation that represents women as ‘the subject’ of ‘hydro-feminism’, an effect of an enlightened feminist version of representational politics in water.

(1) Feminist project in water = making women visible Feminist knowledge project in water then becomes a project of critical boundary work, questioning how discursive and symbolic boundaries are maintained and what this means for ‘seeing’, understanding and questioning gender relations. Question of who is the ‘real’ women replaced by investigating what is at stake when certain gender definitions are preferred over others.

(2) Knowing women, knowing water If ‘women’ do not exist as a category before analysis and history; If gender is an open site of contestation, a relative point of convergence among shifting and diverse culturally and historically specific sets of relations; If language and systems of thought not simply mirror observable reality but also create it; Then gender cannot be known in a positivist sense

(2) Knowing women, knowing water Subject matter of water knowledge is ‘non-social’ – preferred scientific languages and methods come from natural and engineering sciences. Faith in neutrality of reasoned judgment, scientific objectivity, progressive logic of reason and science; Transcendence – knower can escape limits of body, time and space Denial of importance of power and perspective to knowledge

(2) Knowing women, knowing water The unmediated – objective - access to the truth is an important element of the power and authority of engineers.

(2) Knowing women, knowing water Catherine MacKinnon: “Objectivity is the epistemological stance of which objectification is the social process, of which male dominance is the politics, the acted out social practice” Nicholson: Any discursive move which places itself beyond question is suspicious Flax: Only from the falsely universalizing perspective of those who are, or think they are, in control and command can reality have ‘a’ structure.

Conclusions Three ‘moment’ of feminist activism in water: Make women visible and establish gender as a legitimate water concern; Re-describe and conceptualize water realities to allow recognition of gender as an analytical category, as constitutive; Question the power and politics of knowledge, develop more accountable and democratic ways of knowing

(5) Conclusion  Feminist project becomes part of a larger attempt to recognize how water is always social;  Replace vertical forms of accountability in knowing with more horizontal forms: not how can WE (feminist water knowers) better see THEM (male and female water users) but how can THEY speak for themselves and hold us accountable to what we see;  Visualize not the least but the most powerful: the knowers, planners, managers of water; the mechanisms of power and politics in the construction of water knowledge and in management and planning routines

The end © Wageningen UR