The policies of the state both reflect and reinforce the gender regime having diverse and distinctive impacts on men, women and the family gender regime. It is well understood in political science, that the state intervenes in and regulates much of our lives. Our births are registered, our incomes taxed, our rights to drive cars are licensed and so on. There is less awareness of the fact that public laws promote gender ideals, that is, influence how we identify and recognize good feminine and good masculine behavior. For example, marriage and divorce laws in Southeast Asia often fail to award equal rights to women and men. Government campaigns against HIV/AID stigmatize prostitutes who fail to persuade their clients to engage in safe sex; does anyone know of a government that campaigns against the presumed masculine right to engage in extra-marital or pre-marital promiscuity? Similarly, family planning and birth control legislation usually assume wives and mothers will do most of the cooperating, husbands and fathers receiving tacit ideological support for their desires for unfettered expression of masculine sexuality.
Labor laws, especially those fixing minimum wages, hours and conditions of service, often fail to protect women workers whose income is often consumed by her family and whose skills are high and are valued not least because they can be purchased cheaply. Feminist research among women workers in rural Java shows that fathers sometimes cooperate with local entrepreneurs to fix wages such that worker-daughters will be economically obliged to continue to live at home. This is an example of the gender regime of the family intersecting nearly with the gender regime of the marketplace as well as that of the state. Ideologies and practices favoring masculine subordination of women within their gendered roles as dutiful daughters or loving wives and mothers make these intersections and possible. As masculine interests are hegemonic in most gender regimes, economically driven intersections of this kind would appear to be especially harmful and exploitative for women. From a feminist perspective, democratization of governing institutions and of state gender regimes is of urgent importance in Southeast Asia. Many questions and issues are raised by this realization. Who will do it? What is to be done? Must (or can?) women acting as a class of citizens, make a difference? Or are the legacies of exclusion, marginalization and conditioning possibly too overwhelming.
The Term Paper on Gender And Theories Of The State
It can be said that 'the state' is a category of abstraction that is too aggregative, too unitary and too unspecific to be of much use in addressing the disaggregated, diverse and specific (or local) sites that must be of most pressing concern to feminists. (Allen 1990) The difficulty of any theory of 'the state' is an obvious one. 'The state' is a generalization that is constantly shifting and ...
It perhaps goes without saying that gender regimes and gender relations are invisible in mainstream debates about democratization. Only a few scholars, primarily feminist ones, have attempted to correct our professional perspectives. Georgina Waylen, who has studied womens movements struggling against military dictatorships in Latin America, stresses that as popular movements in favor of democracy emerge and develop, women participate on the basis of the social roles associated with their gendered identities (for example, as mothers and household providers (Kintanar 49).
The Argentine women, who demonstrated every Thursday in the Plaza de Mayo while carrying photographs of the disappeared, did not demand democracy: they demanded as mothers the release of their missing children, presumed to be political prisoners or dead. By their acts, they brought the gender regime of the family into conflict with that of the state. Adopting a related, but slightly different approach, Jean Bethke Elshtain argues that women who are sisters, daughters, wives or mothers can sometimes find themselves well-placed to assert the primacy of traditional (family) rights and authority (Kintanar 45).
The Essay on Men And Women Gender Sex Cultural
Gender equality aims to achieve a genuine balance between men and women by respecting human rights. A 'gender equal society' is a society in which both men and women are given equal opportunities to participate voluntarily in activities at all levels as equal partners and shall be able to enjoy political, economical, social and cultural benefits as well as to take responsibility equally. 'A ...
Women, more than men, she argues will assert and exercise traditional authority when there is sharp conflict with the machinery of arrogant public power. She cites the example of Antigone, who in ancient Greece defied an edict of the tyrannical Creon, King of Thebes who ordered that her brothers dead body should lie in the fields as food for flesh-eating vultures. At the risk of death and against the warning of her sister that women cannot fight against men or the laws of the state, Antigone insisted upon the necessity of honoring her brother and the immorality of the state daring to deny this. Two things are happening here. First, state violence has brought the gender regime of the family into sharp conflict with the rulers expectation that family regimes are subordinate. Secondly, both daughters in this tale demonstrated through their loyalty and fear their subordination to male kin and both generally accepted their state of powerlessness (or their place in the gender order).
In spite of this, Antigone was enabled in a moment of crisis, to transform her political weakness into moral authority, to mobilize visions of solidarity and to use both of these as a means of chastening public power. The idea that women, as the primacy reproducers and carers of human life might have a special or privileged role in the task of chastening the state in matters of life-supporting moral decency are rather pleasing. This suggests a possible link between peoples power which typically lacks a unifying political ideology and the rise to prominence of female opposition leaders who represent alternative pasts and futures. The active engagement of women in peoples movements is what makes them truly legitimate, morally uplifting and emancipatory as democratic movements. I do not agreed with Rachland, the Indonesian activist cited at the beginning of my remarks, that the leadership of a woman immediately substitutes an entirely different and feminine political culture in place of the macho political habits of male authoritarians. The calming, facilitating role of women students is nevertheless well documented in the film evidence of the 1973 student-led uprising in Thailand and in the 1980 peoples uprising in Gwangju. In the reformasi movement in Indonesia in 1998, young women formed a cordon between armed soldiers and peaceful demonstrators placing flowers in the barrels of upturned rifles. Official gender ideologies continue nevertheless to remain prominent in the thinking of Cory Aquino, Gloria Arroyo, Aung San Suu Kyi and Megawati Sukarnoputri..
The Essay on Woman And Political Status
Woman and Political status According to UN women executive Michelle Bachelet (2012), ‘’Democracy grows stronger with the full and equal participation of women”. Today, as women form half of the world population, their voices are still lacking in politics. According to UN women (2011), worldwide, less than one in five members of most parliaments is a woman. And women make up less than 10 percent ...
