Adapting Gender and Development to Local Religious Contexts

A Decolonial Approach to Domestic Violence in Ethiopia

Romina Istratii

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000200881
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia

This book provides a critical and decolonial analysis of gender and development theory and practice in religious societies through the presentation of a detailed ethnographic study of conjugal violence in Ethiopia.

Responding to recent consensus that gender mainstreaming approaches have failed to produce their intended structural changes, Romina Istratii explains that gender and development analytical and theoretical frameworks are often constructed through western Euro-centric lenses ill-equipped to understand gender-related realities and human behaviour in non-western religious contexts and knowledge systems. Instead, Istratii argues for an approach to gender-sensitive research and practice which is embedded in insiders' conceptual understandings as a basis to theorise about gender, assess the possible gendered underpinnings of local issues and design appropriate alleviation strategies. Drawing on a detailed study of conjugal abuse realities and attitudes in two villages and the city of Aksum in Northern Ethiopia, she demonstrates how religious knowledge can be engaged in the design and implementation of remedial interventions.

This book carefully evidences the importance of integrating religious traditions and spirituality in current discussions of sustainable development in Africa, and speaks to researchers and practitioners of gender, religion and development in Africa, scholars of non-western Christianities and Ethiopian studies, and domestic violence researchers and practitioners.

1 Introduction

The metaphysics of gender and development

The concept of ‘gender’ found its way in the field of development studies through Marxist discourse at a time when development practitioners started to preoccupy themselves with the exclusion of women from economic advancement.¹ Steadily, attention was transferred from capitalism and colonialism as forces of human oppression to women’s disadvantaged status in society, biased ideas of femininity and masculinity and women’s inferior social valuation under ‘patriarchal’ systems.² The incorporation of gender concerns within development studies evolved in different phases, with milestones being the well-known Women in Development (WID) and Women and Development (WAD) paradigms.³ These were later criticised for instrumentalising women for the purposes of development and failing to challenge more structural gender inequalities. They were also critiqued by non-western writers for presenting all women as ‘oppressed’ and ‘patriarchy’ as the defining parameter of all women’s social status, ignoring the historical and socio-cultural particularities of different women around the world.⁴

The more recent paradigm of Gender and Development (GAD) was mainstreamed globally following the Fourth World Conference on Women held in 1995 in Beijing, China.⁵ This paradigm has continued to assume that female subordination is universally pertinent and has directly sought to redress unequal gender relations through interventions that aim to ‘empower’ women and other minority groups conceptualised as oppressed, placing more emphasis on masculinities, which were neglected in previous paradigms.⁶ Because gender inequalities have been understood as intrinsic to structures, institutions and relations, advocates have emphasised the need for ‘transformative’ empowerment.⁷ The notion of ‘consciousness-raising’ has been central in these discussions: women should be led to recognise deeply internalised pernicious beliefs and norms and their collective power to reverse them.⁸ In other words, gender relations are assumed to be structurally unequal, established gender norms are viewed suspiciously, and women’s experiences are used as a point of reference for “(re)-imagining” women under a feminist ideal, demonstrating the influence of a feminist standpoint epistemology.

The effectiveness of the gender and development paradigm has been highly debated since its mainstreaming in the 1990s. Many prominent writers have affirmed that ‘gender’ has been extensively depoliticised, misunderstood, or co-opted and have detailed illuminating genealogies on how ‘gender’, ‘gender mainstreaming’ and the associated concept of ‘empowerment’ have been deployed by bureaucrats, organisational staff, and practitioners over time to result in ‘development speak’ stripped of its original theoretical implications.⁹ Two Gender and Development issues in 2005 and 2012 dedicated to gender mainstreaming confirmed these problematic patterns.¹⁰ This extensive analysis on gender discourse at the institutional, organisational and methodological levels¹¹ is striking when compared to the limited discussion of the epistemological implications of transposing mainstream gender discourse to non-western contexts. In parallel to assuming the relevance of promoting gender equality internationally, no serious discussion emerged around how gender practitioners should account for local belief and knowledge systems in gender analysis, theorisation and sensitisation cross-culturally. The political urgency of the gender and development project seems to have overshadowed important ethical and practical questions around pursuing and achieving such an objective in diverse religio-cultural contexts. In most cases, gender inequalities have been assumed on the basis of generic theoretical frameworks, with local cultural or religious institutions being portrayed as loci of female subordination that must be subverted.¹²

Scrutinising gender and development paradigms and current approaches to gender mainstreaming in relation to diverse non-western contexts, but, especially, non-secular societies, is particularly urgent in our times. In the aforementioned Gender and Development issues a few authors suggested a degree of incommensurability between the gender ideals of the Beijing agenda and the gender realities, norms, expectations and constraints of men and women in non-western local societies, most of them religious.¹³ While religious parameters have been increasingly integrated in gender and development studies in many nuanced ways, the relevant studies and their insights do not appear to have caused a shift in mainstream theory and practice.¹⁴ The gender mainstreaming literature includes cases of local women and men who found ‘gender’ to be alien to their language and culture and threatening to their religious beliefs.¹⁵ After assessing the reasons behind the hesitation of some non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Africa to engage with gender equality discourse, Senorina Wendoh and Tina Wallace noted that “[r]eligious faith and traditional cultural values are important in communities” but “these are not easily reconciled with the current concepts of gender equality imported from international agencies and donors”.¹⁶ In their detailed study of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) domestication process in Nigeria, Oluwafunmilayo Para-Mallam and co-authors interviewed men and women who expressed objections to the ideal of gender equality, citing religio-cultural alternatives.¹⁷ Similar objections were recorded in relation to gender trainings in the Francophone world.¹⁸ At a more recent series of conferences organised to examine the engagement of faith actors in the formulation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), at least a few participants noted tensions between the language of SDG 5 and local understandings of normative gender identity, sexuality and gender-related aspects of life.¹⁹

The case of the CEDAW domestication process in Nigeria, which was analysed extensively in a study by the Religions and Development (RaD) programme of the University of Birmingham, offers a closer examination.²⁰ The report makes evident that the language of gender equality in the CEDAW document was perceived to contradict religio-cultural gender norms, such as those related to marriage among Muslim believers, or normative values exemplified in the opposition to abortion among Christian believers. Considerable objections were also raised by women and men who valued theological understandings of gender and believed in the potential of their religious traditions to promote human dignity without resorting to imported concepts or the language of human rights. A participant named Ruth, for example, questioned the need for western ideals of equality on the premise of theology that grounded man-woman equality in the divine creation.²¹ Objections to CEDAW motivated by androcentric or ideological interests to secure the continuation of girls’ and women’s oppression or abuse should never be justified and were rightly contested, but it is important that less hostile reservations citing religio-cultural worldviews be given careful consideration. This is because they may very well point to fundamental incompatibilities between local gender understandings and values and the gender metaphysics assumed in the field.

My use of metaphysics in this book is etymological and pertains to fundamental conceptualisations and aetiologies of gender, agency and other aspects of humanity that remain partially speculative to the human mind and cannot be conclusively known by mere observation. While much gender theory invokes sociological phenomena to justify its premises, there should be no doubt that the conceptualisation and aetiology of gender largely relies on feminist philosophical contemplations. Consequently, gender paradigms have been disproportionately grounded in western metaphysics of human individuality and gender, which evolved together with the secularisation of what were previously western Christian beliefs and knowledge systems dominant in these societies. It is this fundamental epistemological ‘situatedness’ of the concept of gender and its cognate terms that leads me to doubt the relevance of gender theory internationally and which, I believe, explains some of the defensive reactions by communities and individuals who have no historical reasons to espouse the same philosophical thinking. These connections begin to become more visible with a closer look at the genealogical progression of western feminist thinking in relation to the concept of gender.

A brief genealogy of feminist thought around gender

Where an examination of western feminist literature should begin is a debated matter, not least because of a diversity of thought around how ‘feminism’ should be defined.²² Historians have established that female writers in Italy, Spain, France and Britain addressed negative representations about women in scholarship as early as the fifteenth century,²³ long before the feminist movement became politically active in the nineteenth century. While feminist scholarship and praxis throughout the centuries is characterised by a common concern to address social and cultural sexism, the ways in which prominent advocates pursued this goal evolved over time. Hence, while religious beliefs were still potent in western society and human thinking, feminist writers tended to invoke religious idiom to counter what they saw as distorted ideas about women perpetuated in male discourses.²⁴ Similarly, conceptualisations of humanity and gender identity and relations were appraised in relation to theological knowledge, which was steadily opened to critique through intellectual reasoning. An illustrative example is Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she was keen to demonstrate that reason was not reserved only for males, and that women could equally think and develop ‘virtues’ if allowed to be educated. However, she did so not by evading references to religious knowledge, but by questioning conventional biblical understandings as set out by male a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: the metaphysics of gender and development
• 2 Linguistic and cosmological translation
• 3 Intimate partner violence, gender and faith in Ethiopia
• 4 The Ethiopian Orthodox Täwahәdo tradition and the conjugal relationship
• 5 Conjugal abuse conceptualisations and attitudes
• 6 Marriage in the local normative framework
• 7 Responses to conjugal abuse in the local institutional framework
• 8 Faith, culture and social norms
• 9 Faith, marriage and gendered expressions
• 10 The individual, human nature and conjugal abuse
• Conclusion: beyond western ways
• Appendix
• Index