Abstract
Vibrant and vital global feminist movements have developed over the past 30 years to address a broad agenda for women's rights. Carol Barton argues that, in many cases these movements have tended to focus on specific issues, and in particular, to prioritize one over another. This is particularly true in a divide between those working on gender justice issues, including sexual and reproductive health, violence, and women's control over their bodies, and women working on a broad development and/or economic justice agenda. Efforts like Cairo and Beijing UN conferences that link these themes have not always changed the fact of specialization among women's organizations. This has had significant political implications, where feminist agendas have been pitted against each other in official venues such as the UN. Barton gives a brief history of this dichotomy and its pitfalls, the implications for the Millennium Development Goals and Millennium Summit process, and important new efforts to integrate feminist agendas, including the Feminist Dialogues, the Feminist Task Force of the Global Call Against Poverty, the Countdown 2015 campaign, and recent collaborations at the UN Beijing+10 review.
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Notes
We differentiate between development and economic justice. Development has multiple definitions, the best of which links sustainability, economic growth, equality and social protection (emerging from UN conferences of the 1990s). However, development is often boiled down to economic development, based on growth. The ‘development’ community is equally diverse, ranging from governments and multilateral agencies to donor agencies to activists, and from state-driven national projects to income generation schemes to broad social change agendas. Here we use ‘economic justice’ to mean an agenda for systemic changes that redistribute power and wealth across inequities of gender, race, class and nation. Note that we refer to the three realms of gender, economics and security, but proceed to look most directly at gender justice and economic justice. This is a reflection of our own limitations in addressing the peace and security realm, symptomatic of our internal fifedoms. Harcourt (Harcourt, 2005: 23–24) makes a strong case for feminists to take the security agenda more seriously. ‘We cannot pretend governments will keep their (MDG) promises if there is international pressure to spend money elsewhere – such as the military, on top of the pressure to enter the world market. Nor can we deliver health and education services if there is on-going conflict which is destroying those services…Gender is about power relations, so in terms of security we are speaking about hierarchical patriarchal relations where masculine orders determine behaviour which condone violence and rape as a weapon of war.’
Since that writing, the US under the Bush Administration has now joined this conservative group on moral issues related to women's rights, but not, of course, on challenges to G-8 hegemony.
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Questions how to balance economic justice and body politics
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Barton, C. Integrating Feminist Agendas: Gender justice and economic justice. Development 48, 75–84 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.development.1100182
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.development.1100182