Discussing Gender and International Cultural Relations
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Discussing gender and international cultural relations A collection of interviews with women working in international cultural relations, exploring perceptions of gender and diversity Contents Page Foreword 3 Gender and international cultural relations, Rosemary Bechler Introduction: gender equality 4 ‘Hegemonic masculinity’ 6 Gender difference 9 Global differences 14 Beyond dichotomies 16 Talking gender • Lesley Abdela Using the whole gamut of colours to get the picture right 20 • Zeinab Badawi Holding elites to account 34 • Srilatha Batliwala Empowerment can work in unpredictable ways 44 • Charlotte Bunch ‘Our life experience has been left out of this picture!’ No more! 54 • Baroness Helena Kennedy QC All of our human interconnections 66 • Oona King Things should be fairer 76 • Zohra Moosa Going into a different room 87 • Linda Tarr-Whelan Equality doesn’t mean ‘the same’ 98 2 | Page Foreword International Women’s Day marked its centenary in 2011. One hundred years of any celebration gives cause to reflect on the path towards gender equality which International Women’s Day highlights. For us at the British Council, issues of equality and diversity are an important part of our work in international cultural relations, and we have adopted a strategy of embedding them in everything we do. We give attention to gender equality within our own management of an international workforce, and externally in our programmes and services. But over time our awareness of gender as it affects cultural relations has developed and we are keen to explore its implications further. This led us to engage Rosemary Bechler, a writer immersed in thinking about the relationship between human and political rights. Here she tackles the interplay of gender in this relationship, outlining challenging, illuminating and relatively under-explored ideas. She talked to eight women who have made notable contributions in their fields, including diversity, human rights, journalism and international relations. These interviews, held between December 2009 and December 2010, offer widely differing perspectives and experiences. Women are far from a homogenous group, and the rich variety that exists when thinking about gender across diverse cultures and its different impact on women depends on all those characteristics that make each one of us unique. We hope that reading this collection of interviews will help you reflect on the role of gender in international cultural relations. We hope at times you will pause because your views have been challenged or because you are learning something new and need to let it sink in – this was certainly our experience. Most of us would be quick to point out that there is still huge inequality – wherever we live. The reasons may be complex and diverse, but acknowledging the impact of gender, and reflecting on the implications, must be a good place to start. Our challenge is to work out what this means in practice. As Rosemary Bechler points out, gender equality seeks equal rights and entitlements for both women and men, with an equal voice in civil and political life. This does not mean that women and men should be the same: the opposite of gender equality is inequality, not difference. We believe there is a need for us all to understand our differences and the opportunities they bring to meet our goals. Fiona Bartels-Ellis and Jane Franklin, Diversity Unit 3 | Page Gender and international cultural relations Introduction: gender equality Gender equality calls for women and men to have equal rights and entitlements to human, social, economic and cultural development, and an equal voice in civil and political life. This does not mean that women and men will become the same, but that women’s and men’s rights, responsibilities and opportunities do not depend on whether they are born male or female. The pursuit of gender equality has a long history. Especially in the West, it can be seen as an extension of the ongoing claims for liberty and equality unleashed by the French Revolution, when equality before the law became newly established as the basis of the social order. Well into the 20th century, the extended struggle for the franchise has stood as the symbol of a much wider struggle by women playing a central role in extending, defending or giving substance to social citizenship rights. The call for equal rights for women resurfaced in the 1960s and 1970s alongside movements for civil and human rights, peace, the environment, and gay liberation. One of the major triumphs of this stage was the UN adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1979, the first international human-rights instrument to explicitly define all forms of discrimination against women as fundamental human-rights violations. CEDAW emphasised women's individual rights in opposition to those traditionalists who defend major inequalities in the status quo as the ‘complementary’ roles for men and women that nature intended. It called for the equality of men and women in public and political life, before the law and with respect to nationality rights, in education, employment, the provision of healthcare (including access to family planning services), and in marriage and family matters. Another high point was the constitution of the new South Africa (1996 – built on the Women’s Charter for Effective Equality and the ANC’s 1993 Bill of Rights), which emphasises the equal citizenship of women and men and people of all races, by making provision for equal protection under the law, equal rights in the family, and in all areas of public life. In the last three to four decades, this pursuit of gender equality has brought successive challenges to many major areas of social, economic and political life, beginning with a quest for equal representation in the corridors of power, but developing into a broader critique of masculine bias and ‘power politics’, and the search for forms of mutual empowerment. Democratic advances have always occurred, either as new groups have claimed access to rights already declared, or new rights have been demanded in social relations hitherto considered ‘naturally’ hierarchical, such as those concerned with race and gender. In recent years, a new element has entered the quest for gender equality – the appreciation of the different 4 | Page perspectives that are brought into this process by non-western experiences and voices. So, this is now a truly global challenge. Meanwhile, women’s engagement with politics and the law has had an impact on public policy across the world. Thanks to the efforts of women’s organisations in the United Nations Decade for Women (1975–85), the UN began to disaggregate data by sex, first introducing its gender development index (GDI) in its Human Development Report for 1995 based on gender differences in life expectancy, earned income, illiteracy and enrolment in education. It also introduced the gender empowerment measure (GEM), based on the proportion of women in parliament and in economic leadership positions. By the end of the 20th century, the majority of the world’s nations had pledged to eradicate gender discrimination through instruments such as CEDAW, the Beijing Platform for Action and the UN’s Security Council Resolution 1325. As a result, gender discrimination in employment has been outlawed in many countries; gender quotas for election candidates and ministerial appointments are widespread in Europe; rape has been classified for the first time as a war crime; the phrase ‘gender violence’ has entered global vocabulary; and development organisations have ensured that issues of world poverty are now formulated in gender terms, with a clear realisation that it is women who bear a disproportionate share of the costs. Most of the legal, economic and social reforms in western liberal democracies that have benefited women can be attributed to the struggle for equal rights and equal treatment, and the challenge to modern states to become sufficiently neutral arbiters to ensure women’s equality. However, campaigners who had hoped that incorporating a critical mass of women into leading positions in existing institutional structures on an equal basis with men might transform the nature of power and the practice of politics were to be disappointed. Critics of the liberal perspective began to point out that deep structures of gender inequality have kept women unequal in both public and private life, long after they have received the vote and other formal rights. All too often, to gain political power and acceptance in political, business, scientific or academic elites, women are still trapped in a double bind between adopting the dominant values or reinforcing a gender stereotype. Either way, it seemed, the issue of masculine bias was far from being fully addressed. How could one, for example, set about enabling women to participate as the equals of men in the public sphere, without continuing to undervalue the contribution that women make in the private sphere? This dilemma, sometimes summed up as the ‘equality vs difference’ dilemma, and elsewhere described as the competing claims of an ‘ethic of care’ in caring relationships and an ‘ethic of justice’ which defends our rights as equal individual citizens, has been one of the main drivers of the national debate ever since. But it has also informed a broader exploration that took place in the academic discipline of International Relations (IR) – one that has a potentially transformative effect on how we might approach international cultural relations. 5 | Page ‘Hegemonic masculinity’ In the 1980s, gender analysts in a range of academic disciplines were investigating how gender – notions of what ‘women’ and ‘men’ are and the unequal relationship between them – is subtly enmeshed in the economic, cultural and social structures of society. Feminists studying male ‘sex roles’ in war, diplomacy and high-level state negotiations in the field of International Relations (IR) shared the early hopes that change would come about if sufficient numbers of women were absorbed into international politics as soldiers, diplomats or academics.