Feminist UBI Aff
1AC
1ac – Advantage
Status quo economic models and welfare programs reflect gender neutrality at best
and masculinity at worst.
Marco Cedro et al 23 [Marco Cedro is researcher of Tax Law at LUMSA, authored Sect. 11.4, Sect. 11.2
is written by Eleonor Kristoffersson. Teresa Pontón Aricha wrote Sect. 11.1, Lidija Živković Sect. 11.3 and
the conclusion is authored by Teresa Pontón Aricha and Lidija Živković, “Gender Equitable Taxation”, p.
393-394 of “Gender-Competent Legal Education”, Springer, Accessed: 7/17/23] HZaidi
Economic policies (both macroeconomic and microeconomic policies) are often thought of as gender neutral.
Budgeting is generally considered a gender-neutral policy instrument. But that is a mistake: the budget is not
gender neutral, but rather gender blind. Some examples of gender biases in taxation, both explicit and implicit, have been
analysed in the previous section. Moreover, budgeting policies can hide gender biases too. Public accounting policies are not
gender sensitive and have a negative impact on women compared to men. It must be understood that by maintaining gender
inequality, these policies also have a negative impact from an economic point of view, making it
difficult for all categories to access work or business. It is clear that governmental budgets reflect political priorities. If we
neglect this distinct impact on people, we perpetuate economic disparities and disable the improvement of social roles various groups
individuals hold. National or local budgets do not affect individuals directly, but the choices contained in the national or local budget, impacting
the market demand or public services, influence employment, family life, healthcare, price level and so on. Individuals in general have different
economic roles and, consequently, different economic and social power. In most cases, women and minorities are at a disadvantage. The
apparent neutrality of the public budget hides the fact that, often, women and third-gender persons
do not have the same variety of choices (political, social, economic) in relation to others . If we consider
gender inequality as inefficient, both from the point of view of access to work and business, and as a lack of participation in political life, it
becomes clear that the government (and parliament) can use the money raised through taxes to reduce inequality. By orienting public finances,
it is possible to redistribute wealth and fight against women’s poverty and gender inequality. Public
spending encompasses
gender bias and produces gender-disparate effects on distribution of public services and wealth. Usually,
government budget is considered as a monetary quantification of political objectives,86 but we must understand that the public budget is the
result of political negotiations and it is influenced by political and social contests and values. Public
budget is the reflection of the
government’s interpretation of these values through the use of public expenditures. Very often public policies
do not consider the unpaid work of women enough, especially during economic crises.87 Women become the last resort of
families, compensating for insufficient public healthcare or social services. Public budgets do not
recognise the role of women (nor individuals of third-gender and non-binary individuals) in the
economy and society. To achieve equity and redistribution of wealth, considering the limited public resources, it is necessary to set the
objectives of public finance taking into account these needs.88 Recently, UN statements (Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable
Development Goals, especially action n. 5) reiterated the
need to adopt and strengthen sound policies and enforceable
legislation for the promotion of gender equality. Fiscal policies determine the composition of
expenditure, and expenditures can consent investments and benefits to influence private behaviours
in a gender responsive way. A high level of taxation and a similar level of public expenditures can contribute to an inclusive
growth,89sustaining investments that reduce gender gap. Moreover, austerity measures after the financial crisis were executed without regard
to gender bias. By cutting public expenditures or reducing taxation, governments
cannot drive budget priorities towards
improving the opportunities for minorities, boosting welcoming culture towards gender equality and
avoiding the lack of integration into social life.
Gendered violence is the defining feature of economic rationality – this perpetuates a
paradigm of economic utility, environmental disaster, and inevitable extinction.
Westra ‘17 [Richard, Designated Professor in the Graduate School of Law, Nagoya University, Japan,
“Varieties of Alternative Economic Systems Practical Utopias for an Age of Global Crisis and Austerity”,
Routledge, p. 208-210, Accessed: 7/10/23] HZaidi
Next to questions of androcentric conceptualizations of value and the gendered
division of labor, feminist economics has
for a long time been struggling with the ideas on the “free” individual. In mainstream economics the
free individual constitutes itself in the concept of the Homo oeconomicus. That economic agent is seen
as an autonomous identity, a separate self, “fully sprung from the earth” (Hobbes 1966 [1651]) and not dependent
on the care of others, not even a mother to give himself birth. In the Hobbesian metaphor, economic agents are envisioned as mushrooms;
more recently, the
economic agent is seen as an independent adventurer, a Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked on a lonely
island (see Grapard 1995). In this metaphor the Homo oeconomicus is envisioned as a rational individual (whose mind
rules over his body); he is utility-maximizing, and fully informed by the signals of the market. Feminist
economics is also deeply concerned with the consequences of establishing the “free” individual, the
Homo oeconomicus as the economic subject, and with the placing the foremost value on the utilization
of private property. Feminist economics clarifies that such a paradigm constitutes an economic system
resting on invisibilized, un(der)valued, un(der)paid reproductive labor and the priceless exploitation
of commons such as clean air and water. The dominant economic system “cannot respond to values it
refuses to recognize. It is the cause of massive poverty, illness and the death of millions of women and
children, and it is encouraging environmental disaster. This is an economic system that can eventually
kill us all”1 . Feminists, (proto-)feminist utopian thinkers, and feminist economists ranging from Christine de Pizan ([1405], 1999), Mary
Wollstonecraft (1792), Charlotte Perkins Gilman ([1911], 1971), Marge Piercy 1997 [1976], Marilyn Waring (1988, 1995 and 1999), Marianne
Ferber and Julie Nelson (1993) and Nancy Folbre (1991 and 1995) to countless others have for a long time criticized those core ideas of the
current economics paradigm. Not only their manifestation in accounting practices, the distribution of labor, and incomes and wealth, but also
the destruction of livelihoods, the environment and the planet as a habitat. They have called for a reconsideration of the current
conceptions of value, care, and labor which are the foundations of androcentric and anthropocentric
economics (see Schönpflug 2008). Still, a shortcoming of feminist economics is that, while the dominant paradigms have been assessed and
deconstructed at lengths, and while the category woman has been added to mainstream models and concepts such as GDP accounting and the
evaluation of reproductive labor and welfare indexes have been expanded2 , truly alternative programs have – with some exceptions (see
below) – largely been missing and/or have not been largely established (see Habermann 2010). Feminist economists are aware of this
shortcoming. Marilyn Waring, one of the second wave’s more prominent feminist economists, originally argued for a (monetary) imputation of
values generated by unpaid work or the environment. In her 1988 core book If Women Counted. A New Feminist
Economics, she urged
policy makers to bring to light “the invisibility of unpaid work and the ecosystem in the unidimensional
growth paradigm” in national income accounting (Waring 1999, xx). Interestingly, in her book’s second edition called
Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth, Waring reconsiders her strategy of the first edition. She explains
that because she was striving to save ecosystems and prevent environmental destruction, she was
originally “prepared to use whatever tools could immediately empower my argument in the short term.
Since economics was all powerful, the way in which I would empower our ecosystem was to give it a
monetary value, to quantify it, to make of it a commodity. I desperately had to prove that the natural
environment […] had a value comparable with the alternative proposed exploitation. There was no time to
battle the pathology of the economic mode” (Waring 1999, xx). Therefore Waring’s primary strategy was to align goods of a common nature or
items of the nature-state (in the sense of Locke), which were not yet a private property, with commodities (e.g., objects exhibiting utility). But
in 1999 Waring reflects on that strategy:
“My underlying agenda was to disable the system. I saw a mechanism for
this in taking economics on at its own game. […] I thought that the models would then be so
overwhelmed, conceptually and statistically, that they would become inoperable, and even greater
nonsense than they are. […] I underestimated the willingness of the ideologues and practitioners to
construct even more abstractions, regardless of the model’s relationship to human experience. I
underestimated their capacity for unreality” (Waring 1999, xxi). Waring had in that sense originally planned to implode
economic models by adding monetary value to non-commodities such as women’s unpaid labor,
environmental degradation and so forth, hoping the complexity would collapse the system. In this paper’s
final section, we are proposing this exercise again but in an even more systematic and explicitly posthumanist way.
Specifically, domestic violence increasing now – covid put strain on the economy and
led more women to be financially dependent on their abuser
Hallett 21 – [Hamish Hallett, “UBI and Domestic Violence,” UBI Lab Network, 02-06-2021,
https://www.ubilabnetwork.org/blog/ubi-and-domestic-violence] /jsam
Domestic violence is a global problem that persists across all levels of society. Despite attempts by governments and NGOs to
address it through legislation and activism, abusive relationships and traumatic experiences continue. The same reasons why
people cannot leave come up again and again. These include shame, denial, lack of self-confidence, and fear for safety. But
the most common reason why victims of domestic abuse do not leave these relationships is because
of their economic dependency on an abusive partner.
Victims of domestic abuse are often so tied up financially with their partner they’ll stay within a
relationship to make sure necessities are covered. These necessities include clothing, food, and
transportation. Some survivors cannot get treatment for their injuries as they do not have the necessary
funds to go to a hospital.
Grace Accra, who spoke to ActionAid, an international charity that works with women and girls living in poverty, said that her
partner used to assault her in public and private. Still, she could not leave the relationship because she relied on
her partner financially. Grace's experience is far too common worldwide, but especially prevalent
among those who live in poverty.
According to Women's Aid, an organisation that tackles domestic abuse, one in five women have been unable to
leave an abusive relationship at some point in their life because they had no money. The same
proportion of people also said that financial abuse left them unable to manage their money. Shelter,
which tackles homelessness, found that almost half of homeless women were homeless because of
domestic violence. This data shows that the lack of financial independence traps people in abusive
relationships, and has broader effects such as making it difficult for victims to manage money and
creating homelessness.
The pandemic has only made this issue of domestic violence more urgent. Incidents of femicide have
doubled in the UK from one every four days to one every two days. In June Refuge, which helps women
and children who experience domestic abuse, reported an 80% surge in calls. These patterns have emerged
across the world, with the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterre highlighting a "horrifying global surge" in
domestic violence.
Domestic violence is a key form of Structural Violence – it is a form of torture.
Prioritizing it makes it visible.
Mazurana and McKay, 2001 - Research Director of Gender, Youth, and Community at Tufts Univ. and
contributor to The Irish Times [Dyan and Susan “Women, Girls, and Structural Violence: A Global
Analysis”, http://u.osu.edu/christie/files/2014/10/Chapter-11-Women-Girls-Structural-ViolenceMazurana-McKay-xu91z1.pdf TA]
The male bias inherent in (patriarchal)
democracy has led to forms of patriarchal structural violence that relegate
“women’s issues” to the “private” realm where they become “private matters” that the state does not address. This bias is perhaps nowhere
clearer than in the issue of domestic violence, where male bias greatly impairs the ability of police,
judges, and lawmakers from recognizing the violent behavior in the family. “The view that ‘as a family
matter’ battery is less important, is based on men’s, not women’s perceptions” (Murray & O’Regan, 1991, p. 45). The
multiple forms of domestic violence that women suffer have profound physical and psychological effects
(Herman, 1992; Kelly, 1993), prompting international calls for domestic violence to be recognized as a form of
torture (Copelon, 1994). Governmental support of patriarchal structural violence through its inattention to
“private” matters is apparent throughout the world. Until 1991, the murder of a wife in Brazil was legal—it was considered an honor
killing and was done to preserve the family’s honor because of a woman’s transgression. In many areas of the world, men are free to rape their wives with no threat
of legal repercussions (Mertus, 1995). Other examples of government-sponsored patriarchal structural violence include laws and systems that condone particular
forms of violence against women, deny women control over their bodies, provide no assistance with child care and maternity leave, make no attempt to remedy
child support defaults, and fail to provide unemployment protection to women who work within the “private” realm in domestic service or farm work (Waring,
1988; Murray & O’Regan, 1991). Because
governments rarely address patriarchal structural violence or fight for
women’s rights, progress for women is largely made by women working for the recognition and
enforcement of women’s rights. As a result, in countries such as Australia, Brazil, Britain, Columbia, India, Sri Lanka, and the United States,
violence against women in the home has been identified and some forms of it criminalized (Fineman & Mykitiuk, 1994).
Gendered norms in the labor market subordinate women by reinforcing the
“breadwinner” model, where men work to support their families. This portrays
women as dependent on their husbands and devalues domestic work, which
reinforces the patriarchy
Pateman, 2004 – prof of Political Science at UCLA [Carole, Democratizing Citizenship: Some Advantages
of a Basic Income. Politics and Society on March 1,
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0032329203261100]
The freedom not to be employed runs counter to the direction of much recent public policy and political rhetoric (especially in Anglo-American countries, though
the policies are international), and this makes stakeholding more palatable than basic income in the current political climate. The effect of such policies and rhetoric
is to draw even tighter the long-standing link between employment and citizenship, at the very time when a reassessment has been made possible by changing
circumstances. The institution of employment is a barrier to democratic freedom and citizenship in two ways. First, economic enterprises have an undemocratic
structure, a point that I shall not pursue here.23 Second, as feminist scholars have demonstrated, the
relationship between the institutions
of marriage, employment, and citizenship has meant that the standing of wives as citizens has always
been, and remains, problematic. The Anglo-American social insurance system was constructed on the
assumption that wives not only were their husbands’economic dependents but lesser citizens whose
entitlement to benefits depended on their private status, not on their citizenship. Male “breadwinners,”
who made a contribution from their earnings to “insure” that they received benefits in the event of
unemployment or sickness, and in their old age, were the primary citizens. Their employment was
treated as the contribution that a citizen could make to the well-being of the community. Ackerman and Alstott
acknowledge this in their criticism of “workplace justice,”24 and their recognition that unconditional retirement pensions would be particularly important for the
many older women whose benefits still largely derive from their husbands’ employment record.25 That is to say, only
paid employment has been
seen as “work,” as involving the tasks that are the mark of a productive citizen and contributor to the
polity. Other contributions, notably all the work required to reproduce and maintain a healthy population and care
for infants, the elderly, the sick, and infirm—the caring tasks, most of which are not paid for and are
undertaken by women—have been seen as irrelevant to citizenship.
Current welfare policies Labels women as “Welfare Queens” for raising children – that
locks in stigma and segregation in work places.
Danaher, 2014 - a lecturer at the National University of Ireland, [John July 14, Feminism and the Basic
Income (Part One) http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.ie/2014/07/feminism-and-basic-incomepart-one.html TA]
The second argument holds that feminists
should embrace the UBI because of its potential to reduce the sexual
division of labour. The traditional division of labour is that of the male breadwinner and the female
caregiver. If UBI has the potential to raise the status of non-waged work, then it could also, potentially,
encourage more men to engage in that type of work. This might allow for some de-gendering of work
roles. The mechanisms for this are likely to be indirect. The UBI wouldn’t actively reward unpaid work, it would simply make it a more viable option. I’ll be talking
about this more in part two. The third argument holds that feminists should embrace the UBI because it could reduce existing
labour market segregation. This is essentially just the flip-side of the previous argument. One of the problems with the sexual
division of labour is that it impairs women’s access to paid employment. If women are forced,
demanded or expected to engage in unpaid work within the home — and if men are not — then the opportunities
for women to access paid employment are limited. So if the UBI can reduce the sexual division of labour,
it could also increase the access to paid employment. This would also represent an improvement over
existing welfare systems where entitlements are dependent on total household income. In support of this,
Fitzpatrick gives the example of systems in which the benefits payable to an unemployed man are actually reduced if his spouse/partner is working. This can
encourage women in low-pay work to give up that work. The fourth argument holds that feminists
should embrace the UBI because it
will reduce the burden placed upon women by the welfare state. The idea here is that women are often
the chief “victims” of the bureaucracy of the traditional welfare system. Due to social panics about
“welfare queens” and the like, women often experience intrusive means-testing and enquiries into their
personal lives in order to prove eligibility for welfare. The unconditional nature of the basic income cuts
out those intrusions.
Patriarchy lead to war, prolif, environmental destruction, and eventually extinction
Warren and Cady ‘94—Warren is the Chair of the Philosophy Department at Macalester College and
Cady is Professor of Philosophy at Hamline University (Karen and Duane, “Feminism and Peace: Seeing
Connections”, p. 16, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3810167.pdf, JB)
Operationalized, the evidence of patriarchy as a dysfunctional system is found in the behaviors to which it gives rise, (c), and the
unmanageability, (d), which results. For example,
in the United States, current estimates are that one out of every three or
four women will be raped by someone she knows; globally, rape, sexual harassment, spouse-beating,
and sado-masochistic pornography are examples of behaviors practiced, sanctioned, or tolerated within
patriarchy. In the realm of environmentally destructive behaviors, strip-mining, factory farming, and pollution of the air,
water, and soil are instances of behaviors maintained and sanctioned within patriarchy. They, too, rest
on the faulty beliefs that it is okay to "rape the earth," that it is "man's God-given right" to have
dominion (that is, domination) over the earth, that nature has only instrumental value, that environmental destruction is the
acceptable price we pay for "progress."And the presumption of warism, that war is a natural, righteous, and ordinary way to impose dominion
on a people or nation, goes hand in hand with patriarchy and leads to dysfunctional behaviors of nations and ultimately to international
unmanageability. Much
of the current" unmanageability" of contemporary life in patriarchal societies, (d), is
then viewed as a consequence of a patriarchal preoccupation with activities, events, and experiences
that reflect historically male-gender identified beliefs, values, attitudes, and assumptions. Included
among these real-life consequences are precisely those concerns with nuclear proliferation, war,
environmental destruction, and violence toward women, which many feminists see as the logical
outgrowth of patriarchal thinking. In fact, it is often only through observing these dysfunctional behaviors-the symptoms of
dysfunctionality that one can truly see that and how patriarchy serves to maintain and perpetuate them. When patriarchy is understood as a
dysfunctional system, this "unmanageability" can be seen for what it is-as a predictable and thus logical consequence of patriarchy.'1 The
theme that global environmental crises, war, and violence generally are predictable and logical consequences of sexism and patriarchal culture
is pervasive in ecofeminist literature (see Russell 1989, 2). Ecofeminist Charlene Spretnak, for instance, argues that "militarism
and
warfare are continual features of a patriarchal society because they reflect and instill patriarchal values
and fulfill needs of such a system. Acknowledging the context of patriarchal conceptualizations that feed militarism is a first step
toward reducing their impact and preserving life on Earth" (Spretnak 1989, 54). Stated in terms of the foregoing model of patriarchy as a
dysfunctional social system, the claims by Spretnak and other feminists take on a clearer meaning:
Patriarchal conceptual
frameworks legitimate impaired thinking (about women, national and regional conflict, the
environment) which is manifested in behaviors which, if continued, will make life on earth difficult, if
not impossible. It is a stark message, but it is plausible. Its plausibility lies in understanding the conceptual roots of various womannature-peace connections in regional, national, and global contexts.
1ac – Plan
The United States federal government should substantially increase fiscal
redistribution in the United States by providing a basic income.
1ac – Solvency
The plan is fundamentally feminist.
Nick Srnicek, 2015, lecturer in Digital Economy in the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College
London, Alex Williams, "Post-Work Imaginaries", Chapter 6, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a
World Without Work, Verso Books, ISBN: 9781784780968, KL
Finally, a
basic income is a fundamentally feminist proposal. Its disregard for the gendered division of
labour overcomes some of the biases of the traditional welfare state predicated upon a male
breadwinner.118 Equally, it recognises the contributions of unwaged domestic labourers to the reproduction of
society and provides them with an income accordingly. The financial independence that comes with a basic income is
also crucial to developing the synthetic freedom of women. It enables experimentation with different
forms of family and community structure that are no longer bound to the model of the privatised
nuclear family.119 And financial independence can reconfigure intimate relationships as well: one of the more unexpected findings
of experiments with UBI has been that the divorce rate tended to rise.120 Conservative commentators jumped on
this as proof of the demand’s immorality, but higher divorce rates are easily explained as women gaining the financial means to
leave dysfunctional relationships.121 A basic income can therefore enable easier experimentation with the family structure, more
possibilities for the provision of childcare and an easier transformation of the gendered division of labour. Moreover, unlike the demand for
‘wages for housework’ in the 1970s, the
demand for UBI promises to break out of the wage relation rather than
reinforce it.
BI would transform gender relationships and empower women
Beth Goldblatt ‘20, University of Oxford, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney;
Visiting Professor, School of Law, University of the Witwatersrand. “Basic Income, Gender and Human
Rights,” University of Oxford Human Rights Hub Journal, 3.1 https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2021/04/U-of-OxHRH-J-Basic-Income-Gender-and-Human-Rights-1.pdf - Annie
Economic inequality has profound gender dimensions. As Oxfam’s 2020 report notes, the global ‘economic system is built
on sexism’.77 The major burden of caring in all societies falls on women who largely provide this work
without pay. This work impacts on women’s access to paid work and other economic opportunities and contributes to the gender pay gap
found across the world. 78 Oxfam estimates the value of women’s unpaid care work at $10.8 trillion annually which
is three times the size of the world’s tech industry.79 Sexism is a key driver of wealth inequality and also
impacts directly on women’s income. Women are likely to fill the most precarious and poorest paid
positions in society and to earn significantly lower wages than men.80 Technological and other drivers of un- and
under employment are thus likely to impact harshly on women workers. At the same time, austerity policies and service cuts disadvantage
women and girls more than men as the burden shifts from the state to the household.81 Feminists have long recognised that the capitalist
system profits from the unpaid labour of women through the social and biological reproduction of society.82 It is this fault
line, premised on women’s biological difference but deeply embedded in social structures, that hampers women’s progression in
the job market and economy. The challenging global context and long-standing impact of sexism have important implications for the
forms of social protection that can both mitigate the effects of gender inequality and contribute to its
eradication. There is an emerging acknowledgment of the need for such measures. The UN’s Sustainable
Development Goals, one of which is aimed at achieving gender equality (Goal 5) targets the recognition and valuing of ‘unpaid care and
domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility
within the household and the family as nationally appropriate.’83 Which social protection policies will best address gender divisions of work
and care alongside the broader challenges of poverty and inequality facing the world is a key question. Basic
income, posited by
many as a solution to the challenges of inequality and work, has been of interest to feminists grappling with the sexual
division of labour in the home and workplace and its dire consequences for women. Proponents of a basic income suggest it
has value for women in delinking social security from work given the disadvantages faced by women in
the job market.84 Work interruptions to have children and fulfil care roles result in shorter careers, lower
wages and smaller accumulation of retirement savings for women, making them more dependent on
men and vulnerable in old age. A basic income could enhance women’s freedom to make life choices,
including allowing them to live independently of men at different stages of their lives. 85 This is an important
consideration given the economic vulnerability facing single mothers and single older women in many
countries, worsened by austerity and economic crisis. A basic income would enable women to leave
violent relationships if they were assured of income for themselves and their children.86 A basic income has also been
supported as a necessary means of enhancing women’s democratic citizenship. 87 By focusing on reciprocity
across the society, the debate about a basic income can open up conversations about reciprocity within the household. 88 A basic income
recognises unpaid and affiliative work as socially valuable and thus has the potential to change
understandings of social citizenship. 89 The shift from work to citizenship as the source of income thus increases the
possibility of transformed gender relations. Nancy Fraser’s transformative model of citizenship, ‘the universal caregiver model’, sees all members of society participating in paid work and unpaid care with social
institutions restructured to support this.90 A basic income, or some variant of it, might enable this change
leading to a more equal division of care and work.91 Cox suggests reframing basic income as a ‘universal
social dividend’ since this would ‘redefine such income as produced by valuing wide-ranging unpaid
contributions to collective social well-being and counter some of the materialist gender inequities of
economic models’.92 The challenge to decommodify human activity so that ‘affiliative’ work is valued
must be built into policies aimed at achieving gender equality.93 Pateman points out that a feminist lens
reorients the basic income debate away from economic questions to ones related to democratisation
since it focuses on issues of citizenship and institutions including the workplace and marriage.94 While the debate is often concerned with
‘free-riding’, those who choose not to work while depending on the income of others, a feminist understanding shifts the examination of freeriding to men who continue to expect women to perform the bulk of social reproductive work within their households even when both partners
are in paid employment. The
idea of a basic income paid to individual women as a citizenship entitlement
rather than to the household where it may not be shared equally is important for feminism and democratisation.95
Basic income reduces gendered violence in relationships by reducing dependence on
abusive partners and freeing women from exploitative jobs.
Clark ’21 (Rebecca L Clark, doctoral candidate in political theory at Nuffield College, University of
Oxford, “Should Feminists Endorse a Universal Basic Income?”, University of Oxford, 3/18/2021,
http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2021/03/oxford-uehiro-prize-in-practical-ethics-should-feministsendorse-a-universal-basic-income/#_ftn2)- CSC
I now turn to a second criterion for gender justice enhancement, which I deem to be highly plausible: Anti-Exploitation Criterion: all
else
being equal, a reduction in gendered exploitation is gender-justice enhancing. I consider a form of
exploitation to be gendered if it is systematically the case that, in a given type of exploitable dependency
relationship, the subordinate agent is a woman[11]. Fraser identifies three common types of exploitable dependencies: on a
family member, on a boss, and on a state official.[12] A UBI would mitigate the exploitation of each of these types of
dependencies, which are plausibly construed as gendered, and hence is prima facie gender-justice
enhancing. Firstly, consider the exploitable dependence of wives on their husbands in many traditional heterosexual marriages. Their
relative lack of economic independence renders these women exploitable by their husbands with respect to
the allocation of unpaid housework, the satisfaction of sexual desires, the provision of emotional labour, and more. A key advantage of
a UBI is that it is given to individuals rather than households; this reduces the exploitable dependence
of women on their partners in two ways. First, it gives women a credible means to leave emotionally or
physically abusive relationships, thereby directly lessening their exploitation. Second, even if this exit option is not
its mere existence lessens the asymmetric vulnerability of women within a marriage. Secondly,
a UBI would reduce gendered exploitation in the market for intimate labour, defined as “work that is done
primarily by women with intimate parts of their bodies or their intimate physical capacities in exchange for money,
favours, or goods” [13] such as sex work or commercial surrogacy. Many women undertake intimate labour
solely due to economic deprivation, a concern which a UBI would alleviate. Moreover, even a UBI set below a
in fact utilised,
livable wage would meaningfully improve the negotiating power of women who perform intimate labour, giving them greater freedom to turn
down more dangerous clients such as those who insist on having unprotected sex. Thirdly, the undemocratic discretion of state officials opens
the door to the exploitation of welfare recipients. Due to its unconditional nature, a
UBI would protect individuals from lowincome households from being as vulnerable to the whim of bureaucrats. To the extent that welfare
recipients are disproportionately women, this would mitigate gendered exploitation.
BI addresses gender-biased discrimination, breaks dependency, challenges social
norms, and is an essential part of in the workforce without economic risks.
Flanigan ’18, Jessica is an assistant professor of leadership studies and philosophy, politics, economics,
and law at the University of Richmond, “The Feminist Case for a Universal Basic Income,” SLATE, Jan 25,
2018, https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/01/the-feminist-case-for-universal-basic-income.html -EC
The case for a basic income, a policy that would give all citizens cash payments at regular intervals throughout their lives, is gaining
traction. Prominent tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, academics across the ideological spectrum from Philippe Van Parijs to Charles Murray,
labor organizers like Andy Stern, and policymakers such as Michael Tubbs, the 27-year-old mayor of Stockton, California, support basic income
policies as a way of reducing poverty and mitigating the negative impact of unemployment due to automation. But they understate the
feminist case for giving people cash. Proponents of the UBI would do well to acknowledge the gender
implications of the policy, and feminists, in turn, should throw their support behind the movement.
Here are the top three reasons UBI is a feminist cause:
1. Women
Are More Likely to Be Poor
Globally, women are more likely to live in extreme poverty than men. In the United States, women
as a group are poorer than
men due to the economic burdens associated with caregiving and the segregation of women into “pinkcollar” industries that typically pay less than male-dominated industries. One of the main benefits of implementing a
UBI in the U.S. and elsewhere is that giving people cash is a relatively direct and effective way to fight poverty.
The basic income is also a matter of economic justice for women as a whole. While capitalism has been beneficial
to women on balance, the current system reflects historical patterns of female exclusion from labor markets and policies that denied property
rights to women. For example, throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century, married women lacked legal protections for their
property rights under the legal doctrine of coverture. And until the 1980s, husbands retained unilateral control over marital property in some
jurisdictions. As I have argued elsewhere, a UBI would make capitalism more just by compensating those who live with the legacy of historical
and enduring economic injustices.
And because a basic income would make the decision to work more voluntary, women would no longer
choose to remain in toxic jobs solely because they can’t afford not to. In this way, a UBI could address
gender-based mistreatment in workplaces. By freeing women of their economic dependence on
employers, a UBI would also improve women’s bargaining positions, enabling them to negotiate for more flexible
hours or better conditions.
But a UBI would not discourage work to an extent that would undermine the economy. People would still need to work to afford most
consumer goods and luxuries. And unlike minimum wage requirements, touted by Fight for $15 activists, a UBI neither raises the cost of
employing low-income workers relative to other workers nor disproportionately burdens employers to provide a decent standard of living for
people in their communities. With an even starting ground, the opportunities to move beyond the lowest-paying work could be more readily
available to marginalized workers who’ve been left out for too long.
2. Women
Could Make Unfettered Decisions About How to Structure Their Families and Lives
Child care is extraordinarily expensive, and women, especially single moms, end up shouldering an enormous
burden for this cost. Some parents who would prefer to work are unable to because they cannot afford quality child care for their kids.
Women are more likely to leave the workforce for this reason than men. A UBI for mothers and children would enable
women who want to work to pay for child care.
In addition, a
UBI (including child benefits) would formally recognize and reward socially valuable labor that
people currently perform outside of the paid economy, such as caregiving for children, disabled people, and elderly
relatives. The UBI could amount to “wages for housework,” something feminists in the 1970s pushed for.
Furthermore, because
a UBI aims to pay all individuals and not households, it allows people to make
decisions about marriage and cohabitation based their intrinsic desires, not based on tax policies such as
the “marriage penalty” that working couples currently face or means-tested welfare programs that withhold
benefits from women when their household income increases after marriage.
A further benefit for families? With an added, guaranteed boost to their income, women
in abusive relationships would have
the financial security to leave, even if they lack qualifications or credentials that would enable them to support themselves and their
families. UBI would do more than almost any other economic policy imaginable to make women less
susceptible to abuse both in the workplace and at home.
3. Respect:
Universal, Rather Than Targeted Assistance, Will Defy Stereotypes
Historically,
feminists not only critiqued outright sexism but also the paternalism of efforts to protect
women from the world by robbing them of their autonomy. Paternalism has long been used to justify policies that limit
women’s and other marginalized people’s choices, like bans on abortion, or sex work, or women working in dangerous industries, on the
grounds that they are incapable of deciding for themselves how to live their lives. Today, many social
policies in the U.S. are
influenced by extremely paternalistic thinking that perpetuates discriminatory stereotypes about
women’s abilities to make informed and reasonable decisions for themselves.
Conservative complaints about welfare recipients spending benefits on junk food and luxuries have been part of a more general racialized
narrative, which has informed existing welfare policy and also perpetuated offensive and stigmatizing stereotypes about members of
marginalized groups, especially women of color. But liberals who support limiting the provision of benefits to housing, food, and health care are
subject to the same charges of paternalism when they advocate for in-kind benefit policies (such as food transfers and food vouchers) that
perpetuate a politics of suspicion and mistrust, instead of supporting cash benefit programs.
Most of the arguments against UBI also ring of paternalism. How could we trust that low-income women would use the
money to do the things I’ve detailed here? Low-income people, like the rest of their fellow citizens, are generally the best judges of whether a
profession or purchase is in their overall interest, and the evidence suggests that recipients of cash transfers generally spend their income on
necessities. Trusting
women and all people with the right to spend their money how they see fit, as UBI allows,
would push back against decades of paternalistic social policy.
UBI activists still disagree about whether UBI is a right or a benefit, whether it should be provided in addition to or instead of other benefits,
and about how large the UBI should be. But the
core case in favor of the UBI—that it has the potential to significantly alleviate
a case that all feminists
poverty and liberate all citizens from many of the injustices associated with the current economic order—is
should get behind.
1ac – Framing
The aff is a tactical reduction in patriarchy – policymaking is good when gender is
prioritized. A basic income would benefit the most vulnerable women.
Juliana Uhuru Bidadanure, 2019, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and, by courtesy, of Political
Science, at Stanford University as well as the founder and faculty director of the Stanford Basic Income
Lab, "The Political Theory of Universal Basic Income," Annual Reviews, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurevpolisci-050317-070954, KL
There is no clear way to settle those discussions, but I offer three comments to conclude this conversation on
gender and UBI. First, it
seems that the outcome of this debate now largely depends more on empirics than on values (Robeyns 2008).
The feminists discussed in this section roughly agree that gendered social norms must be challenged and that
care work must be revalued, but they disagree in their hypotheses about what would happen under
UBI. This disagreement sets a research agenda for those experimenting with UBI throughout the world. They must find out, for instance, what
the precise combined gender and labor effects of UBI would be in different institutional contexts. Since many jobs are alienating and
precarious, it is not clear that finding a drop in employment rate among women would necessarily be regrettable, all things considered. We
would need to find out more than just how many women are likely to drop out of the labor market. As Weeks (2011, p. 124) points out,
“slavery to an assembly line is not a liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink.” We would need to know precisely which women are likely to give
up which jobs, and to do what. To help move this conversation forward, empiricists must also look at the concern that UBI would contribute to
the defunding of public goods and find out how reasonable it really is. This would require also studying the framing of various UBI proposals
and their reception (to find out whether progressive proposals are more popular than regressive ones, for instance).
A second comment has to do with heterogeneity among women. It is important for this debate to start
from an assessment of the situation of the most vulnerable women and whether UBI would benefit
them, rather than focusing the debate on whether UBI can further the more abstract goal of gender
justice. For many women, lack of formal employment is actually not the main problem. The problem is
rather the inability to perform the care work they want to perform without being stigmatized or
condemned to a life of poverty or dependence. For some women, the problem is overwork—that they
are combining several low-paying jobs to support their children and end up left with too little time to
spend with them. Too often socially invisible, many domestic workers are bound to abusive employers
by a lack of exit options. Lacking the economic security needed to have exit options also makes sex workers more vulnerable to abuse.
The Sex Workers Open University (2017) in fact demands UBI on the basis that “[i]f every person in the UK was entitled to a
universal basic income, no one would be pushed by absolute poverty into selling sex.” The conversation
on whether UBI should be endorsed on grounds of gender justice should be dependent, at least to some
extent, on what UBI would do to empower the women who are currently most economically insecure
and most vulnerable to domination.
Framework is key to this debate – advocating a basic income by incorporating a
feminist perspective is critical to changing patriarchal norms and avoiding the negative
solvency turns.
Pateman, 2004 – prof of Political Science at UCLA [Carole, Democratizing Citizenship: Some Advantages
of a Basic Income. Politics and Society on March 1,
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0032329203261100]
Thus feminists might be expected strongly to support the introduction of a basic income.34 Yet this is not the case. Some feminists are critical of the idea
because they fear
a basic income would reinforce the existing sexual division of labor and women’s lesser
citizenship. They argue that the provision of an income without having to engage in paid employment would, in light of women’s position in the labor market
combined with lingering beliefs about the proper place and tasks of women and men, give women an even greater incentive to undertake more unpaid caring work
in the household, and, conversely, men would have another incentive to freeride. A
basic income, that is, would reinforce existing
limitations on women’s freedom.35 This objection illustrates the importance of the reasons advanced
for supporting a basic income. The probability of feminist fears being borne out is higher, for example, when
the argument is made that to avoid weakening the “incentive to work” a basic income should be below subsistence level. This
“incentive” is promoted with men and paid employment in mind. A basic income at this level provides no incentive
for wives to “work” (i.e., enter paid employment); rather, it would encourage them to do more unpaid caring
work. Again, to support basic income on the grounds that it would improve the living standards of the
poorest sectors of the population does not promote consideration of the structural connections
between marriage, employment, and citizenship, and the private and public sexual division of labor. Without
the debates about basic income being informed by feminist arguments, and a concern for democratization (and genuine
democratization necessarily includes women’s freedom and standing as citizens), the discussion will revolve around ways of tinkering
with the existing system rather than encouraging thinking about how it might be made more
democratic. Putting democratization at the center requires attention to institutional structures,
especially the institutions of marriage and employment. For instance, Ackerman and Alstott remark in The Stakeholder Society that
the “case for stakeholding does not ultimately rest on its effects on employment, marriage, or crime. It rests on each American’s claim to respect as a free and equal
citizen.”36 However (leaving crime aside), the
respect accorded to women and men as free and equal citizens has a
great deal to do with the institutions of marriage and employment. It is not possible to understand
women’s lesser citizenship, as Ackerman and Alstott show in their discussion of social security, without understanding the
relationship between their position as wives and men’s position as workers.
Gender analysis informs decision-making – our method come prior to plan.
Hearn, et al. 22 (Jeffery Richard is a British sociologist, and Research Professor at the University of
Huddersfield, and Professor at the Hanken School of Economics. Sofia Strid is Associate Professor of
Gender Studies at Örebro University. Anne Laure Humbert, PhD, is a Reader in Gender. and Diversity and
Director of the Centre for Diversity. Dag Balkmar is Associate Professor (Docent) and Senior Lecturer in
Gender Studies at Örebro University. “Violence Regimes: A Useful Concept for Social Politics, Social
Analysis, and Social Theory.” Theory and Society, vol. 51, no. 4, Feb. 2022, pp. 565–94,
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-022-09474-4. Accessed 14 July 2023. //dre)
Violence, and gendered and intersectional forms of violence,
are an extensive global problem connected to power,
inequalities, health, economy, crime and security, impacting all societies (Krug et al., 2002). Violence can also
be a point of departure to examine and intervene in social life, whether the focus is on social
politics,Footnote1 social analysis or theoretical development (Hearn et al., 2016). Indeed, as a driving principle,
analyzing and understanding violence is key for its reduction, as a fundamental link between theory and
society. The range and depth of both violence and research on violence are immense. Within this range, there is considerable
research that examines the co-variationFootnote2 of and interconnections both amongst and between forms of violence (for example,
homicide, child abuse, civil conflict) and further aspects of violence (political organizing, policy development against violence, knowledge
production, measurement, definitions/inclusions/exclusions). However, much research on violence remains fragmented in different disciplinary
and with substantive focuses on different forms or aspects of violence. This paper addresses two linked questions: the extent to which research
literature reports on how different forms and aspects of violence co-vary and interconnect, or not; and the
need to work towards a
more inclusive, more comprehensive conceptualization of violence than more partial approaches.
Specifically, the paper addresses two key research questions: How can the extent to which specific forms and aspects of violence co-vary and
interconnect, as reported in research literature, be usefully conceptualized and theorized in a more inclusive, more comprehensive way? What
difference would a more inclusive, more comprehensive conceptualization of violence make to social politics, social analysis, and social
theorizing on and against violence? We address these questions by arguing that the concept of violence regime (Hearn et al., 2020; Strid et al.,
2021) – that is, the governance and production of forms and aspects of violence – constitutes a more inclusive and more comprehensive
approach to such interconnections (or lack thereof), and a way of dealing with tensions and limitations in more partial frameworks. We also
hypothesize that forms and aspects of violence co-vary with each other to constitute a violence regime. Furthermore, we hypothesize that such
co-variance is likely to be greater than with other inequalities and measures that are often assumed to ‘cause’ violence: in this view, a violence
regime is relatively autonomous rather than merely a subset of other inequalities. In line with Davenport’s (2021) recent call for “integral
violence studies”, this paper aims to contribute to overcoming the fragmentation of policy and politics, empirical research and theoretical
development on violence, and its different forms and aspects, and to further interdisciplinary research on violence. These are important issues
for social politics, social analysis, and social theory. Accordingly, we see violence regimes as a policy concept, an empirical concept, and a
theoretical concept. But, there
is an immediate problem: namely and simply, what is violence? There are multiple
violence, assault, sexual violence, coercive control, homicide,
genocide, as well as less directly physical violences, such as cultural, symbolic, epistemic and systemic
violence (Bourdieu, 1998; Žižek, 2008). Violence includes, but is not limited to, state violence, economic violence,
terrorism, interpersonal violence, gender-based violence (GBV), violence against women, anti-lesbian,
gay and transgender violence, intimate partner violence, gang violence, hate crime, cyberviolence, and
stalking. So, is violence a set of material bodily actions and effects? A range of discursive constructions? Is violence more structural in
contestations of what violences are – physical
character, as, for example, through institutions or structural inequalities? Or all of these, intersectionally gendered? In this paper, we use
illustrative examples from GBV, whilst not restricting discussion to gendered violence regimes.Footnote3 In this text, violence and violence
regimes are understood as material-discursive, including how violence is defined, what is included and
excluded as violence, in knowledge production on violence, and as operating across
micro/interpersonal, meso/institutional, and macro/(trans)societal scales. Theoretically, we locate
ourselves in debates on the close relations of materiality and discourse, such that recognitions and
contestations of violence are part of the problem of violence. Indeed, the problem of what violence ‘is’,
and how violence is named, defined, limited, understood and explained, is a key question across many
realms: everyday life, social politics, social analysis, and social theory more broadly, albeit unevenly.
Knowledge production on violence, who gets to define violence, contestations on definitions, are part of
violence regimes, thus engaging with wider theoretical debates, such as on regimes of truth (Foucault, 1980).
Violence as an open-ended, but not relativist, concept that refers to multiple ways in which
humansFootnote4 can be attacked, transgressed, harmed, destroyed, materially-discursively. Violence
certainly involves direct physicality, but it is more than that, as with physical harms without direct
physical violence. The violence regime approach brings a focus on violence, and re-centres violence – that
it is not only concerned with specific ‘types’ of violence but sees violence as both cause and consequence of social realities. As such, this paper
draws on and develops the very long tradition of feminist theory, practice and research on violence (for example, Brownmiller, 1975; Hanmer
and Maynard, 1997; Hester et al., 1996; Kelly, 1988; MacKinnon, 1982; Moran and Sharpe, 2004; Gordon and Meyer, 2007). We consider uses
of violence regimes as a heuristic analytical tool for social politics, social analysis, and social theory. Building on earlier empirical, policy and
conceptual work (Hearn et al., 2020; Humbert et al., 2021; Strid et al., 2021), the concept of violence regime forces consideration of different
understandings of what is to count as violence, from direct killing to forms of violence often not recognized as violence at all, such as violence
to non-humans, colonial violence, slow and environmental violence. Following this introduction, we continue by examining how studies on
violence are subject to disciplinary fragmentation, as a precursor to examining five inspirations and ways of moving towards a broadened, more
inclusive conceptualization: violence regime. The following section focuses on the notion of regime more directly, building on earlier work, and
spells out the violence regime concept. The latter parts of the paper consider three applications of violence regimes – in social politics, social
analysis, and social theory. In the first case, violence regimes address and inform politics, policy and policy development, labeled here as social
politics, around violence, such as gender-based violence, violence against women (VAW), intimate partner violence (IPV), anti-lesbian, gay and
transgender violence. Extending
understandings of violence is important for policy formulation, development
and implementation, whether working at the UN scale, regionally as in, say, the Council of Europe, nationally or
locally. More comprehensive analysis of the complexities of violence is likely to demand transcending both disciplinary and policy area
boundaries, with policy responses often depending on where within state (or parastate) machinery violence policy is located, for example, war
and militarism in ministries of defence, violent crime in ministries of justice. Second, violence regimes, and indeed intersectional gender
violence regimes, are part and parcel of social analysis, including the analysis of the place and relation of
violence to societal contexts, broadly based structures of inequality, governance, welfare state regimes,
gender regimes, and social movements, and empirical data thereon. Third, violence regimes engage with social theory. One may
ask: what assumptions on the construction of the subject, for example, ‘rational’ or individualist, pertain in different social theories, in relation
to violence, and the experience of being violated? Specifically, social theory is partly constructed by, through and in relation to violence,
including the frequent exclusion of the knowledges of the violated, sometimes but not only through killing. The concluding section discusses
further implications of the conceptualization of violence regimes.
Advantage Extensions
Structural Barriers
Squo Governments fail to respond to patriarchal structural violence
Mazurana and McKay ‘01 (Dyan Mazurana, Susan Mckay, Daniel J. Christine, Deborah DuNann
Winter, Richard V. Wagner, Mazurana, PhD, is a Research Professor at the Fletcher School of Law and
Diplomacy where she co-directs the Gender Analysis and Women's Leadership Program, “Peace,
conflict, and violence: Peace psychology for the 21st century”, Prentice Hall, Chapter 11, 2001,
https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/u.osu.edu/dist/b/7538/files/2014/10/Chapter-11-Women-GirlsStructural-Violence-Mazurana-McKay-xu91z1.pdf l)-CSC
The male bias inherent in (patriarchal) democracy has led to forms of patriarchal structural violence that
relegate “women’s issues” to the “private” realm where they become “private matters” that the state
does not address. This bias is perhaps nowhere clearer than in the issue of domestic violence, where
male bias greatly impairs the ability of police, judges, and lawmakers from recognizing the violent
behavior in the family. “The view that ‘as a family matter’ battery is less important, is based on men’s, not women’s perceptions”
(Murray & O’Regan, 1991, p. 45). The multiple forms of domestic violence that women suffer have profound
physical and psychological effects (Herman, 1992; Kelly, 1993), prompting international calls for domestic violence to be
recognized as a form of torture (Copelon, 1994). Governmental support of patriarchal structural violence through its inattention to “private”
matters is apparent throughout the world. Until 1991, the murder of a wife in Brazil was legal—it was considered an honor killing and was done
to preserve the family’s honor because of a woman’s transgression. In
many areas of the world, men are free to rape their
wives with no threat of legal repercussions (Mertus, 1995). Other examples of government-sponsored
patriarchal structural violence include laws and systems that condone particular forms of violence
against women, deny women control over their bodies, provide no assistance with child care and
maternity leave, make no attempt to remedy child support defaults, and fail to provide unemployment
protection to women who work within the “private” realm in domestic service or farm work (Waring, 1988;
Murray & O’Regan, 1991). Because governments rarely address patriarchal structural violence or fight for
women’s rights, progress for women is largely made by women working for the recognition and
enforcement of women’s rights. As a result, in countries such as Australia, Brazil, Britain, Columbia, India, Sri Lanka, and the United
States, violence against women in the home has been identified and some forms of it criminalized (Fineman & Mykitiuk, 1994).
DV Increasing
Assault against women is only increasing
Wright 22 (Andrew Wright, December 8, 2022, “U.S. domestic and sexual violence crisis only getting
worse”, https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/u-s-domestic-and-sexual-violence-crisis-only-gettingworse/) - Myra
According to a recent study on emergency department visits for sexual assault, visits were 15 times
higher (1,533%) in 2019 than in 2006 in the U.S. According to CNN, the total emergency department
visits increased only 1.2 times over the same period. These findings drastically outpace the growth in
law enforcement reports of sexual violence. Although reports to law enforcement did go up, they were
merely a fraction of those seeking treatment. The recently published study, which was conducted by researchers at the
University of Michigan, found the cause for this increase to be a combination of population growth, the rise in social justice movements, and a
change to the International Classification of Diseases (or ICD) code. Before 2015, the ninth revision of the code (ICD-9), there existed only one
code for adult sexual assault. However, ICD-10, which was adopted at the end of 2015, includes codes for suspected sexual assault, confirmed
sexual assault, and forced penetration. It was also found that hospital admissions have been on the decline: Roughly 95% of those survivors are
discharged from the department without hospital admission. Although it’s still unclear why that is, it’s all the more concerning considering the
fraction of those who seek out care and treatment after an assault. One
study published in 2012 found that only 21% of
rape victims would seek care afterwards. Likewise, only 40% of assaults and rape were reported to law
enforcement in 2017, which dropped to 25% in 2018. Rape incidents have also been increasing by 2.9%
annually.
Overturn of Roe v Wave increased reports of sexual DV
Santhanam 6 28, Health Reporter and Coordinating Producer for Polling for the PBS NewsHour, Data
Producer
“Why post-Roe abortion restrictions worry domestic violence experts,” PBS, June 28, 2023
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/why-post-roe-abortion-restrictions-worry-domestic-violenceexperts - EC
In the past year since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling reversed Roe’s protections,
calls about reproductive coercion have nearly doubled, Justice said, and more than 27,000 people overall
reported non-consensual sex with an intimate partner. “Denying the individual the right to control their own body is now a tool,” she
said. “And now, because of these laws and what wound up being the Dobbs decision, [abusive partners] have even more
power and control, because survivors have even less options and increased barriers to obtain that care.” For
years, a majority of Americans have opposed the elimination of Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court’s decision to remove federal protections for abortion rights did not
change those attitudes, according to the latest PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll. Another poll from April found that people were more likely to oppose laws against
abortion when they lived in states where heightened restrictions are in place, compared to people who have not yet lived under those measures. Even before the
Supreme Court handed down its decision a year ago, states were already restricting access to abortion, making it more difficult for pregnant people to get the
services they needed, and for providers to offer those services. After Dobbs, trigger bans went into effect, leading to more restrictions on abortion-related services.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research and policy organization, laws in 13 states have banned abortion. In nearly a dozen more, the
institute reports that abortion access is ensnared in legal turmoil or only available during such a narrow window of pregnancy to be functionally off-limits for most
people. In Aurora,
Colorado, Dr. Michael Belmonte has noticed a 50-percent uptick in patients coming to his OB/GYN clinic
because they have nowhere else to turn after the Dobbs decision was finalized. Some of them are arriving later in their
pregnancies and with more complications. One patient had crossed state lines, driving while hemorrhaging after she had been told she could not receive care,
Belmonte said. Some experts, like Jacquelyn Campbell, a professor of nursing at Johns Hopkins University, are
concerned that states with
abortion restrictions will see a rise in maternal mortality and deaths among pregnant and postpartum
people due to homicide, suicide and overdose. “They’re all connected with domestic violence,” she said.
COVID worsened domestic violence due to economic risks and lockdown
Council on Criminal Justice, February 24, 2021, “New Analysis Shows 8% Increase in U.S.
Domestic Violence Incidents Following Pandemic Stay-At-Home Orders”,
https://counciloncj.org/new-analysis-shows-8-increase-in-u-s-domestic-violence-incidentsfollowing-pandemic-stay-at-home-orders/ - Myra
A report released today by the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice shows that domestic
violence incidents in the U.S.
increased by 8.1% following the imposition of lockdown orders during the 2020 pandemic. The findings are based on a systematic
review of multiple U.S. and international studies that compared changes in the number of domestic violence incidents before and after jurisdictions began imposing
stay-at-home restrictions early last year. The studies draw on a wide range of data, from logs of police calls for service to domestic violence crime reports,
emergency hotline registries, health records, and other administrative documents. While describing the evidence of an increase as strong, the authors say the
precise dynamics driving the trend are less clear. They believe that lockdowns
and pandemic-related economic impacts likely exacerbated
factors typically associated with domestic violence, such as increased unemployment, stress associated with childcare and
homeschooling, and increased financial insecurity, and that the increased use of alcohol and other substances as a coping strategy also may have elevated the
threat. In addition, the authors note that by isolating parents and children in their homes ,
the pandemic separated potential victims
from the network of friends, neighbors, teachers, and other individuals capable of reporting signs of abuse and helping those at
risk escape a dangerous environment. “
COVID worsened domestic violence due to economic risks and lockdown
Council on Criminal Justice, February 24, 2021, “New Analysis Shows 8% Increase in U.S.
Domestic Violence Incidents Following Pandemic Stay-At-Home Orders”,
https://counciloncj.org/new-analysis-shows-8-increase-in-u-s-domestic-violence-incidentsfollowing-pandemic-stay-at-home-orders/ - Myra
A report released today by the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice shows that domestic
violence incidents in the U.S.
increased by 8.1% following the imposition of lockdown orders during the 2020 pandemic. The findings are based on a systematic
review of multiple U.S. and international studies that compared changes in the number of domestic violence incidents before and after jurisdictions began imposing
stay-at-home restrictions early last year. The studies draw on a wide range of data, from logs of police calls for service to domestic violence crime reports,
emergency hotline registries, health records, and other administrative documents. While describing the evidence of an increase as strong, the authors say the
precise dynamics driving the trend are less clear. They believe that lockdowns
and pandemic-related economic impacts likely exacerbated
factors typically associated with domestic violence, such as increased unemployment, stress associated with childcare and
homeschooling, and increased financial insecurity, and that the increased use of alcohol and other substances as a coping strategy also may have elevated the
threat. In addition, the authors note that by isolating parents and children in their homes,
the pandemic separated potential victims
from the network of friends, neighbors, teachers, and other individuals capable of reporting signs of abuse and helping those at
risk escape a dangerous environment. “
DV Impact
DV feeds into the patriarchy
Shore ’19, Executive Director, Focus for Health
“The Role of Patriarchy in Domestic Violence,” Oct 2, 2019, https://www.focusforhealth.org/the-role-ofpatriarchy-in-domestic-violence/ - EC
Gender inequality and reinforcement of patriarchal ideology is demonstrated with the treatment of
domestic violence victims by the police, the family and criminal courts, and child protective services. Often
women who seek protection from their abusers are at risk for losing their children. Many states have policies that punish women for failing to protect their children
when they live in homes with domestic violence. The women
can be held responsible by Child Protective Services (CPS) for
subjecting their children to witnessing domestic abuse, even when they are the victims of the abuse.
This extreme scenario of victim blaming accepts the notion that women are equally responsible for the violence
because of the fact they are not leaving their abusers. To add further insult to injury, though CPS guidelines vary by state, parents can be charged with neglect when
children are living in poverty. A mother’s decision to leave an abusive spouse, which results in her child living in homelessness and poverty, puts her at risk for
having her children taken from her. Many women stay in abusive relationships to protect their children from abuse. An estimated overlap of 30-50% between
spousal abuse and child abuse (men who abuse their partners are more likely to abuse their children), yet despite this, many abusers are successful in getting
unsupervised access and unrestricted custody of their children. A 2012 report by the American Judges Association states that, “batterers have been able to convince
authorities that the victim is unfit or undeserving of sole custody in approximately 70% of challenged cases.” Researchers speculate that men who are abusive to
their partners typically have parenting styles that have detrimental impact on children as well. Family courts tend to downplay or ignore the abuser tendencies of
the father and accept the believe that the domestic violence is an unhealthy pattern between both parents. Courts tend to overlook a father’s history of spousal
abuse and will applaud what they see as a positive attribute- their interest in being a part of the child’s life. Abuse survivors recognize this interest for what it is; an
attempt to retain control over their victim by using their children. The conversation about Domestic Violence must be elevated from “why doesn’t she leave” to
“what are we doing to perpetuate and tolerate objectification and subordination of women?” It
has been consistently demonstrated that
men who accept very patriarchal beliefs about gender roles have a higher likelihood of engaging in
violence against women. To resist patriarchal ideology we all, men and women, need to explore our beliefs and
actions to bring consciousness to what we are doing to condone toxic masculinity, male privilege, and
gender inequality. Toxic masculinity is what can come of teaching boys that they can’t express emotion openly, that they must be tough and can gain
power through physical strength, that being like a “girl” means they are weak and inferior. Gender violence has its roots in the socialization of men to be more
powerful than women and that they are taught to gain power by dominating others. Toxic masculinity hurts everyone, including boys. Rigid traditional gender
stereotypes prevent male victims of sexual assault to come forward, men who are in domestically abusive situations to seek help (1 in 7 men have experienced
physical violence from a male or female partner) and has been linked to adult male depression and substance abuse. The
perpetrator and the
victim are both a symptom of the larger problem, patriarchy and gender inequality.
Abuse entrenches patriarchal systems of control
Hill 20 (Jess Hill, reporter, “Patriarchy and power: how socialisation underpins abusive behaviour”, The
Guardian, 3/7/2020, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/mar/08/patriarchy-and-power-howgender-inequality-underpins-abusive-behaviour) - CSC
Coercive control is a very particular kind of domestic abuse. It’s not a “reaction” to stress, nor is it triggered by alcohol or
drugs. It’s an ongoing system of control, in which the abusive partner seeks to override their partner’s
autonomy and destroy their sense of self. The end game – whether the perpetrator knowingly sets out
to achieve it – is to make their partner entirely subordinate; a “willing slave”. To do this, they isolate, micromanage, humiliate, degrade, surveil, gaslight and create an environment of confusion, contradiction and extreme threat. The feeling victims
have, as the British survivor-advocate Min Grob tweeted the other day, is that the rug has been pulled from under your feet. “You become
disoriented, hyper vigilant, confused and most likely sleep-deprived. You are walking on eggshells. Afraid you’re going mad. Afraid to make
them mad. Afraid. All the time. Sometimes not even knowing why you’re in fear but the panic is there. Always.” This abuse can also be
incredibly hard for the victim to detect, because it happens slowly, bit by bit. It’s the total mental dislocation of coercive control – which
Amnesty International has classified as torture – that is the hardest thing to recover from. Coercive
controllers may use extreme
physical or sexual violence; or, as was reportedly the case with Rowan Baxter, no physical violence at all. For more than 40 years,
women and children have been saying that except for extreme violence, the coercive control is the worst part. In fact, one of the most common
refrains from victims of coercive control is “I wish he’d just hit me”. So many reasons, but in cases of coercive control, I think it boils down to
this. Many
women don’t know they are experiencing abuse until they are already in situations that are
incredibly dangerous – partly because coercive control is so poorly understood, but also because the
perpetrator makes it invisible. By the time victims realise the danger they’re in, many believe no system will ever be powerful
enough to keep them safe. If they do report to police – if something reportable actually occurs – they are making a terrifying gamble. Will they
get an officer who’s sympathetic and proactive? Will reporting their partner make him more dangerous? What if child protection gets involved?
What if he contests for custody? There are absolutely no guarantees that they (or their children) will be protected. Their suspicion that the
system is not powerful enough to protect them is too often correct. The justice system is not only full of holes; too often it actively colludes
with the perpetrator (especially the family law system). So they stay, even after they want to leave, and know it’s dangerous. They
stay
because it may be even more dangerous to leave. Until the justice system properly assesses and responds to risk, and as long
as women are made to be responsible for their own safety, we will continue to see an intractable domestic homicide rate. How do some men
come to feel so entitled to their power over women? Thousands
of years of patriarchy has laid pretty good
groundwork for this – and it’s not so long since a wife was considered her husband’s property, and had
no legal rights whatsoever. It was only in the 1980s that new laws against marital rape recognised that men didn’t have the right to
demand sex with their wives anytime they wanted; prior to that, consent was considered to have been given on the wedding day and never
revoked. Today, we still live in a society that entrenches women’s subordination at every level – from the home, to
the boardroom, to our parliament. Even in the courtroom, as we see so often. As the Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman writes: “The legal
system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of
men.” I’m sure any survivor reading this will know exactly what she’s talking about. Men
don’t abuse women because society
tells them it’s OK. Men abuse women because society tells them they are entitled to be in control. In fact,
society says that if they are not in control, they won’t succeed – they won’t get the girl, they won’t get the money, and they will be vulnerable
to the violence and control of other men. It says that if they fail to assert themselves like “real men”, they will end up poor and alone. But we
don’t just see men being entitled to power over their partners; some women identify with this, too. That’s
because “having power
over” is valued within patriarchy – much more for men than it is for women – but nevertheless, it is
regarded generally as a sign of strength to claim power over others. To add more complication, in many perpetrators
who have had trauma or attachment disruption in their childhoods, you get another layer of entitlement: as one perpetrator told me “I never
had any control over anything as a child, and I vowed that I would never let that happen to me again. I would always be in control.”
Domestic Violence is a product of the Patriarchy, not a cause
Shore 19
(Jennifer Shore, October 2, 2019, “The Role of Patriarchy in Domestic Violence”,
https://www.focusforhealth.org/the-role-of-patriarchy-in-domestic-violence/) Myra
Many professionals explore the dynamics of interpersonal violence and speculate the reasons abusers abuse their partners. The theory is that abusers may feel a
need to control their partner because of low self-esteem, extreme jealousy, use of drugs or alcohol, difficulties in regulating anger, or feeling inferior to their partner
in education and socioeconomic standing (their female partner is smarter and/or more successful than they are). Conversely, women stay with abusers because
they have low self-esteem, have been raised or conditioned to tolerate abuse, naively believe their partner will change, or are caught up in the cycle of relationship
violence. Violence against woman has been present in society since times immemorial. Calling it “domestic” violence perpetuates the notion that the violence is an
interpersonal issue between two dysfunctional people .
Reframing domestic abuse and intimate partner violence as
patriarchal violence more accurately explains the roles of sexist ideology and male domination in the
pervasiveness of violence against woman. Structural gender inequality imposes too many barriers for
women when they try to leave abusive relationships. Despite the general sentiment that women should leave their abusers, they are
actually at an increased risk for violence after they leave or attempt to leave. Women are 70 times more likely to be killed in the two weeks after leaving than at any
other time during the relationship. Nearly half of all women who are murdered die at the hands of their current or former partners. In 70-80% of intimate partner
homicides, no matter which partner was killed, the man physically abused the woman before the murder. The courts and the police offer little protection. The most
common response to domestic violence by the police and the courts is a restraining order, or a protective order; a document that identifies the perpetrator as a
potential threat to one victim (not to society in general) and instructs the abuser to have no physical or verbal contact with the victim Though the information is
inconclusive, 11% -25% of woman (depending on the study) had active restraining orders at the time of their murder. Though there is some evidence of long-term
benefit to a restraining order, initially there is a 21% chance of an escalation in violent behavior after an order of protection is issued. What we do know conclusively
about restraining orders is that they can’t guarantee safety as much as putting the perpetrator in jail. Less than 2% of abusers ever receive any jail time. In many
cases, there are very few places women can go that ensure family safety. Single women with children are more likely to live in poverty under normal circumstances
but add the complications that domestic abuse may bring (lack of access to bank accounts, inconsistent work histories, fear of requesting child support, complex
post-traumatic stress disorder) make the realities of leaving almost impossible. Half of all homeless women and children in the US are fleeing domestic violence.
Though domestic abuse shelters are a temporary option for many women and children, women still fear retaliation from their abusers and consequences from the
system; a system heavily steeped in patriarchy (a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it).
Gender inequality and reinforcement of patriarchal ideology is demonstrated with the treatment of
domestic violence victims by the police, the family and criminal courts, and child protective services. Often women who seek protection from their
abusers are at risk for losing their children. Many states have policies that punish women for failing to protect their children when they live in homes with domestic
violence. The women can be held responsible by Child Protective Services (CPS) for subjecting their children to witnessing domestic abuse, even when they are the
victims of the abuse. This extreme scenario of victim blaming accepts the notion that women are equally responsible for the violence because of the fact they are
not leaving their abusers. To add further insult to injury, though CPS guidelines vary by state, parents can be charged with neglect when children are living in
poverty. A mother’s decision to leave an abusive spouse, which results in her child living in homelessness and poverty, puts her at risk for having her children taken
from her. Many women stay in abusive relationships to protect their children from abuse. An estimated overlap of 30-50% between spousal abuse and child abuse
(men who abuse their partners are more likely to abuse their children), yet despite this, many abusers are successful in getting unsupervised access and unrestricted
custody of their children. A 2012 report by the American Judges Association states that, “batterers have been able to convince authorities that the victim is unfit or
undeserving of sole custody in approximately 70% of challenged cases.” Researchers speculate that men who are abusive to their partners typically have parenting
styles that have detrimental impact on children as well. Family courts tend to downplay or ignore the abuser tendencies of the father and accept the believe that
the domestic violence is an unhealthy pattern between both parents. Courts tend to overlook a father’s history of spousal abuse and will applaud what they see as a
positive attribute- their interest in being a part of the child’s life. Abuse survivors recognize this interest for what it is; an attempt to retain control over their victim
by using their children. The conversation about Domestic Violence must be elevated from “why doesn’t she leave” to “what are we doing to perpetuate and tolerate
objectification and subordination of women?” It
has been consistently demonstrated that men who accept very
patriarchal beliefs about gender roles have a higher likelihood of engaging in violence against women. To
resist patriarchal ideology we all, men and women, need to explore our beliefs and actions to bring consciousness to what we are doing to condone toxic
masculinity, male privilege, and gender inequality. Toxic masculinity is what can come of teaching boys that they can’t express emotion openly, that they must be
tough and can gain power through physical strength, that being like a “girl” means they are weak and inferior. Gender
violence has its roots in
the socialization of men to be more powerful than women and that they are taught to gain power by
dominating others. Toxic masculinity hurts everyone, including boys. Rigid traditional gender stereotypes prevent male victims of sexual assault to come
forward, men who are in domestically abusive situations to seek help (1 in 7 men have experienced physical violence from a male or female partner) and has been
linked to adult male depression and substance abuse. The perpetrator and the victim are both a symptom of the larger problem, patriarchy and gender inequality.
Dependence
Economic dependence increases domestic violence against women
Asha DuMonthier and Malore Dusenbery, October 2016, "," institute for women’s policy reserch,
https://iwpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/B362-Domestic-Violence-and-Economic-Security.pdf Annie
Violence affects survivors’ economic security in many ways (Shoener and Sussman 2013). Abuse can force survivors to
take time off from school (Breiding et al. 2014) and decrease survivors’ longterm educational attainment, creating a
disadvantage for future earnings and stability (Adams et al. 2013). It can also negatively influence survivors’ ability to obtain or
maintain employment, leaving them at risk of unemployment and financial insecurity across the lifespan
(Borchers et al. 2016; Crowne et al. 2011; Lindhorst, Oxford, and Gillmore 2007). Many domestic violence perpetrators use
economic abuse to limit partners’ options and make them financially dependent on the abuser.
Research indicates that economic abuse is highly prevalent. One study of 120 IPV survivors found that 94
percent had experienced some form of economic abuse, including employment sabotage (88 percent) and
economic exploitation (79 percent; Postmus, Plummer, and Stylianou 2015). Common tactics include: withholding access to
or information about finances, generating credit card debt, destroying property, committing identity
theft, or purposefully ruining credit scores (Adams et al. 2008; Postmus et al. 2012). Some perpetrators prohibit
survivors from working, interfere with their jobs, manipulate vital resources like child care and
transportation, or increase abuse in response to survivors’ employment (Borchers et al. 2016; Brush 2003).
Economic abuse is correlated strongly with other forms of IPV and is associated with a decrease in
survivors’ economic self-sufficiency (Postmus et al. 2012). IPV also affects survivors’ economic security by leading to negative
health outcomes and housing instability. One in five (20.0 percent) female survivors report one or more PTSD symptoms due to abuse (Breiding
et al. 2014), which can affect their ability to maintain employment or complete an education. In addition,
survivors may have to
relocate to establish safety, be unable to pay other bills after paying rent, or face eviction due to the
abuse or lack of economic resources (Baker, Cook, and Norris 2003; Pavao et al. 2007), and 38 percent of all survivors become
homeless at some point in their lifetime (Baker, Cook, and Norris 2003). Survivors may also face significant out-of-pocket costs from having
damaged or destroyed property, obtaining security equipment, and securing new technology, accounts, and routines
Work
The status quo does not recognize labor traditionally done by women as work
Mazurana and McKay ‘01 (Dyan Mazurana, Susan Mckay, Daniel J. Christine, Deborah DuNann
Winter, Richard V. Wagner, Mazurana, PhD, is a Research Professor at the Fletcher School of Law and
Diplomacy where she co-directs the Gender Analysis and Women's Leadership Program, “Peace,
conflict, and violence: Peace psychology for the 21st century”, Prentice Hall, Chapter 11, 2001,
https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/u.osu.edu/dist/b/7538/files/2014/10/Chapter-11-Women-GirlsStructural-Violence-Mazurana-McKay-xu91z1.pdf l)-CSC
Structural patriarchal violence is apparent in economic and labor systems worldwide. Women make up
more than half of the world’s population, and perform 66 percent of the world’s work, often in jobs more
physically demanding and time-consuming than jobs held by men. However, women “earn only 10% of the world’s income
and own 1% of the world’s property” (Elliott, 1996, p. 17), and they account for “70% of the world’s 1.3 billion absolute poor”
(United Nations Development Fund for Women [UNIFEM], 1995, p. 1). Why? Women’s (Invisible) Work One of the primary reasons women are
poor is that the
majority of women’s work literally counts for nothing. Feminist economist Marilyn Waring (1988) has
demonstrated how most governmental accounting systems do not recognize the majority of women’s labor
because the rules of the 8 United Nations System of National Accounts (UNSNA) only count that which
passes through the marketplace, i.e., anything that has currency-generating capacity. All countries wishing to be
members of the United Nations, or borrow money from the World Bank, or acquire a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), must
adhere to rules set down in the UNSNA. Yet
these systems’ economic policies place no value on peace, the
preservation of natural resources, or unpaid labor, including that of reproducing and nurturing human
life. Important decisions are made using figures generated from the UNSNA about whose needs are met,
how to allocate taxes, which programs receive support and which do not. Some of these decisions
literally determine who will live and who will die (Waring, 1988). While states may not publicly acknowledge
women’s labor in informal economies, they nevertheless rely upon it. For example, the Philippine’s 2000 plan, a joint
project of the Filipino government, the IMF, and the World Bank, relies on Filipino women staying in their jobs in the garment and electronic
industries, sending home foreign currency from their jobs overseas as domestic and contract workers, and working as prostitutes or exotic
dancers. For example, with the closure of U.S. military bases, the Filipino government is now counting on Filipino prostitutes and exotic dancers
to switch their client base from soldiers to tourists and international businessmen, in order to continue the flow of foreign currency (LargozaMaza, 1995). Thus, we
can see that governments are often reluctant to challenge patriarchal structures of
violence against women because economic and political systems rely on them.
Poverty
Poverty makes domestic violence worse
Barbara Niess-May,, 10-22-2019, SafeHouse Center Executive Director "The Intersection of Domestic
Violence and Poverty," Safe House Center, https://www.safehousecenter.org/the-intersection-ofdomestic-violence-and-poverty/
We do know that poverty disproportionately affects women and single mothers. What many do not know is how the
intersection of
poverty and domestic violence can 1) exacerbate the impact of the abuse, 2) cause an exceptional loss of
resources for the survivor and 3) lessen positive outcomes for a survivor. In short, being poor further
entraps the survivor in the abuse, and often lengthens any process she may go through to escape—as
well lengthens entrapment in poverty. The intersection of poverty and domestic violence further endangers survivors,
their children and our communities as a whole. Outcomes for women of color and immigrants are even
more grave because safety net systems often ignore their unique needs. And programs like SafeHouse Center see a
disproportionate amount of survivors from these populations.
Prostitution
Poverty forces many women into prostitution. Economic structures present women
with No Choice – its prostitution or starvation. Sex without true consent is Rape. A UBI
prevents the sexual exploitation of women.
Story, 2017 – writer for Basic Income.org [Rae, Breaking the Vicious Circle: Basic Income and Sexual Exploitation March 18,
http://basicincome.org/news/2017/03/breaking-the-vicious-circle-basic-income-and-sexual-exploitation/ TA]
I had an abusive boyfriend once. He lured me in with promises of provision and vindication. But he was a perfidious son of a gun, because the initial half of his Janus
face was insidiously torn aside, to reveal his deft capacity for creating insecurity, isolation and intellectual dissonance. My boyfriend, my great, devastating,
intoxicating love, was prostitution. Yes, like any other lover of an abuser, I was hooked in by his exaggerated claims of support and potential for actualisation — “I
will empower you! I will make you free!” — smoke screening an undercurrent of exploitative tendencies. For me, for others, by the time we understand this, we
have become trapped. Some people
may wince at my comparing prostitution to abuse. I have been usefully informed, on a number
of occasions, that it is a simply a job as any other. That it is not sexual exploitation, because women choose to enter into it freely. But even if that were so, what
if the same women can’t manage to leave when they decide they have had enough? How many times,
after that point, must they be utilised for sex effectively against their true will, before it becomes a
violation? Being trapped in prostitution, relationship violence and cycles of survival sex can indeed be
crushing to a person’s sense of capacity and the “outside” world can look increasingly hostile and difficult to negotiate. Coercive
control, which often operates in these situations, is manipulative and extremely sophisticated. It tells you that you are not capable of
surviving — let alone thriving — in any other way, just as it depletes you. It is like living with a blade at your throat, but being told it is for your own protection.
What does all this have to do with Universal Basic Income (UBI)? Because as with all of the most effective manipulations, it contains a kernel of truth. If
a
woman is told by her abuser or her pimp — or by the propaganda of living in prostitution — that she could not survive without
them, that voice is solidified by the material experience of structural inequality that poor women suffer.
The crossroads between class and sex-based oppression is, indeed, best exemplified by a woman having
to make a daily decision between sexual or domestic abuse, and poverty. So if our toxic situation has been
the source of our “income” — in exchange for domestic, reproductive or sexual labour — what do we do if we
want to leave? Refuge recommends that women escaping abusive or exploitative situations should seek out emergency accommodation from friends or family, but
often abuse victims have been systematically disenfranchised from such social support and, as with high numbers of women in prostitution, have come through the
care system, many didn’t have it in the first place. Women’s refuges are suffering from closures and on average 155 women are turned away each day, according to
Women’s Aid. Shockingly, women
escaping domestic violence are not automatically considered in priority need
for social housing. That is even before you even get to prostitutes; an even less likely group to be considered a “worthy” cause.
Indeed, our current welfare system is based on nebulous arbitrations of “need” and “worthiness,” which are
often further gunned through the dubious prism of abstract bureaucracy. The Conservative government has seemingly decided that it cannot trust the word of
doctors in assessing someone’s capacity for work and so subject often extremely vulnerable people to further “assessments.” Women who have been in prostitution
or domestic violence often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other psychological fragilities. For them these processes can be intimidating, due
to the fear of being judged, blamed and dismissed as “undeserving.” This is even before we even get to the trials of unemployment benefit, not available to anyone
whose partner works more than 24 hours per week — not much good if said partner has a predilection for controlling every aspect of your life. And if you’re under
35 and have no children you cannot suddenly decide to no longer submit to unwanted sex with men you don’t know, because you are not eligible for housing
benefit contributions for your apartment. Or because you cannot find another job, due to your lack of experience or your anxiety, or both. Yes, I’ve seen many a
woman make her Great Escape from abuse only to find her road blocked at every turn. Back she goes, to her hard fisted boyfriend or her brothel pimp — now more
vulnerable and more convinced of the absolutenesses of her “destiny.” What
is the first thing a woman escaping violence needs?
To not have to “explain herself” to society — to beg even — to get the ticket out of her situation. Because
asking such people to make the case for their right to freedom from abuse is an extension of that abuse.
She has already had to try to explain to her “lover” why he should allow her to sleep safe that night, or to her pimp why she cannot work because her vagina has
become torn and bruised. The
idea behind UBI is that every member of society gets a basic monthly amount,
irrespective of their social circumstances or their assumed worthiness. I am not going to make a more general case for
UBI, as those arguments can be found elsewhere. However, it has instigated the twitching of my feminist ear because as a policy it has, under the right
conditions, the potential to give victims of domestic violence and sexual exploitation a slightly easier out. In
the 1970s there were a lot of debates about whether or not women should receive wages for housework, but many feminists felt that this would crystallise the idea
that domesticity was women’s work. UBI
on the other hand is a basic economic sustenance that is paid to a woman by
virtue of her humanity, not her femininity, which is in any case a social imposition demanding of her
submissive agreeableness. Of course UBI is not the full answer to the question of women’s exploitation. But because it does not require women to
be the perfect victims, it is at least starting to ask the right questions.
Patriarchy Impacts
The patriarchy enforces structural violence against women in myriad ways
Mazurana and McKay ‘01 (Dyan Mazurana, Susan Mckay, Daniel J. Christine, Deborah DuNann
Winter, Richard V. Wagner, Mazurana, PhD, is a Research Professor at the Fletcher School of Law and
Diplomacy where she co-directs the Gender Analysis and Women's Leadership Program, “Peace,
conflict, and violence: Peace psychology for the 21st century”, Prentice Hall, Chapter 11, 2001,
https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/u.osu.edu/dist/b/7538/files/2014/10/Chapter-11-Women-GirlsStructural-Violence-Mazurana-McKay-xu91z1.pdf l)-CSC
The denial of girls’ and women’s right to food, health care, education, and life, as well as the
undermining of their political, economic, and social rights are some of the most damaging and egregious
forms of direct and structural patriarchal violence. Women and girls deserve to have their human rights
recognized and enforced. The global community must reject all efforts to justify abuse on the basis of culture. While global women’s
movements have had some effect in confronting violence and reducing inequality, structural violence against women and girls
remains pandemic (Basu, 1997). Peace cannot be achieved until both indirect and direct forms of violence
are dismantled. As we have seen throughout this chapter, patriarchal systems that discriminate against women and
girls contribute to the eventual expression of direct violence. If we are serious about achieving peace,
then we must be committed to women’s empowerment. As a result, research and activism on women’s issues are key
elements of any serious peace agenda.
Patriarchal norms threaten society
Vince ’19 , author, journalist and broadcaster for The Guardian
“Smashing the patriarchy: why there's nothing natural about male supremacy,” The Guardian, Nov 2,
2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/02/smashing-the-patriarchy-why-theres-nothingnatural-about-male-supremacy - EC
That’s not to say that just because a cultural trait has emerged it is necessarily “good”. Patriarchal
norms, for instance, are damaging to our
health and our societies, increasing death and suffering, and limiting humanity’s creative potential. We are,
though, neither slaves to our biology nor our social norms – even if it can feel that way.
Patriarchy justifies gender-based injustices
Evans ’23 , Writer, Associate Editor for Simply Psychology, management positions within healthcare
“Patriarchal Society According To Feminism, ”Simply Sociology, April 20, 2023
https://simplysociology.com/patriarchal-society-feminism-definition.html
Patriarchal ideology is the idea that men have more power, dominance, and privilege than women. Patriarchy
is a social system in which
men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political authority. It occurs in both one”s personal life and within the
workplace. Sexism, meanwhile, is prejudice or discrimination based on sex; typically directed against women and girls. It manifests in subtle ways, such as through
jokes or comments, as well as more overt forms of discrimination, such as denying women equal opportunities in education or employment. Combined, patriarchy
and sexism create a system in which women are oppressed both socially and economically. Patriarchy
reinforces sexist attitudes and
beliefs, and provides men with the power to act on them. This can result in women being denied equal
rights and opportunities, or experiencing violence and abuse. Sexism, on its own, can also lead to discrimination and oppression.
For example, women may be paid less than men for doing the same job, or be passed over for promotions because of their gender (Lerner, 1986).
Solvency Extensions
S – Leave Abuse
UBI helps women enduring DV
Womack ‘20
“How universal basic income could help women in abusive relationships” , SLATE, August 4, 2020.
https://basicincometoday.com/how-universal-basic-income-could-help-women-in-abusiverelationships/ - Myra
Ensuring all women have a safe place to go when they leave an abusive relationship is, quite literally, a matter of life and death. But there are other things our
Government could do to support women to leave an abusive relationship – and reduce the chances they will return. The
Green Party has long championed a UBI, which is a non-means tested payment for every citizen, providing the essential financial support we all need. The benefits
of UBI have been well discussed; from rewarding
unpaid work to giving people opportunity and options in a fast changing world, it
also transform life for women. By giving everyone financial independence, UBI would ensure
no woman is ever dependent on her partner to meet her basic needs. And for those in abusive relationships, one of the
barriers against leaving would be removed. Unlike benefits or wages, UBI payments would be attached to and
follow individuals, irrespective of life circumstances or employment status. For women leaving an abusive relationship , there would be no
endless forms or waiting for benefit payments in order to access financial help. The UBI payments would still be there,
as they always had been. As well as being practically liberating, this would psychologically free women to even think about
leaving in the first place.
would transform society. But UBI would
S – Self-Sufficiency
Ubi solves – eliminates need for financial dependence and allows women to afford
basic necessities
Hallett 21 – [Hamish Hallett, “UBI and Domestic Violence,” UBI Lab Network, 02-06-2021,
https://www.ubilabnetwork.org/blog/ubi-and-domestic-violence] /jsam
For far too long we have seen universal basic income through a single lens, which is that this policy can only reduce economic
inequality. Yet it is an idea that goes beyond any single issue. There is a lot of research that points towards the lack
of economic independence as a core reason people do not leave abusive relationships. However, what is
not being discussed by governments and NGOs is the relationship between universal basic income and domestic violence.
What universal basic income can do is provide a way out for those suffering from abuse. Victims of
violence will no longer rely on abusive partners for their basic needs as they can provide for
themselves with their UBI.
Not only that, a universal basic income destroys financial barriers that domestic abuse victims have
experienced for a very long time. Introducing this policy creates a gateway for the likes of Grace and many others who
have suffered in traumatic relationships. Survivors can create a new life for themselves using the money. They
can spend their UBI on services such as counseling, a new house or take time to recover from their
experiences rather than going straight into work. It can also have a potential broader effect in reducing
women's homelessness.
Critics of universal basic income may suggest that there are already resources out there for those suffering from domestic
abuse. However, these schemes, such as Universal Credit, have failed too many individuals, including domestic violence victims.
The Trussell Trust began the #5WeeksToolong campaign to highlight how long it takes for those in abusive relationships to
receive their first Universal Credit payment. What this shows is that existing schemes are not fit for purpose and
take far too long to provide funds to those who require them. Furthermore, these schemes do not
provide enough money for people to leave abusive relationships. We need a system that provides
funds to those in need quickly, and a design that covers an extensive range of circumstances.
It's hard for women suffering from domestic violence to become economically self
sufficient
Adrienne E. Adams,, 2011, ","Michigan State University Department of Psychology Center for financial
security , https://centerforfinancialsecurity.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/adams2011.pdf
Economic self-sufficiency can be defined as having the income necessary to meet basic needs (e.g., food, housing, child care, health care,
transportation, taxes) without relying on public or private/informal assistance.1 Achieving
self-sufficiency requires earning a
steady living wage, which can be a significant challenge for DV survivors. Batterers may forbid their
partners from having a job or engage in disruptive behaviors in an attempt to sabotage their
employment (Adams, et. al. 2008). The result is often lost hours, lost work days, and lost jobs (Swanberg, Macke, & Logan, 2006;
Wettersten, et al., 2004). Further, batterers’ interference can contribute to an inconsistent employment record or
weakened job skills, which can compromise a woman’s future employability and earning potential
(Tolman, Danziger, & Rosen, 2001). A great deal of research has examined the effects of DV on women’s employment. Early on, researchers
focused on employment status (employed vs. not employed) as the central employment outcome; however, it quickly became evident that at
any point in time a woman with an abusive partner is as likely to have a job as any other woman (Browne, Salomon, & Bassuk, 1999; Lloyd &
Taluc, 1999; Tolman & Rosen, 2001). Instead, what
distinguished women with abusive partners from their non-
abused counterparts were their higher levels of job instability (Browne, Salomon, & Bassuk, 1999; Tolman & Wang,
2005). To date, job stability has been measured in several ways. One method is to examine how DV affects the amount of time a woman spends
employed. For example, research has shown that DV
is linked to working fewer weeks and months in a given period,
as well as with working fewer hours annually (Staggs & Riger, 2005; Tolman & Wang, 2005). A second approach to measuring
job stability requires not only taking into account the amount of time a woman spends working, but also examining job loss (Adams, et al., in
press). It is important to consider job loss as a dimension of job stability because cycling between many jobs likely
affects women’s economic well-being differently than having one sustained job. For example, working nine months out of the year at one job
likely relates to different economic outcomes than working for a total of nine months at four or five different jobs. Thus, considering
job
loss as a dimension of job stability more fully captures the complex ways that DV may affect women’s
employment. Related to job instability, DV can also compromise women’s ability to gain selfsufficiency
through employment by negatively affecting their employability and earning potential. Factors related to
employability that are important in the context of DV are human capital and work-supporting resources. Three commonly used measures of
human capital are education, job skills, and work history (Staggs & Riger, 2005; Tolman & Wang, 2005). Education can be assessed by asking
about the number of years of formal schooling or the highest level of education completed; job skills are often measured using Holtzer’s (1996)
9-item index of entry-level job skills; and work history has been captured through the number of months or years a woman has worked for pay
in a given timeframe.
S – Norms
UBI can uproot systemic patriarchal views on women
UN Women ‘21
“Universal Basic Income: Potential and Limitaitons from a Gender Perspective,” United Nations Entity for
Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), 21 April 2021, chromeextension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/Headqua
rters/Attachments/Sections/Library/Publications/2021/Policy-brief-Universal-basic-income-en.pdf - EC
Feminists supporters argue that an individual income such as UBI could help guarantee women’s economic
autonomy in the face of ongoing discrimination in employment and increase their bargaining power in
(and beyond) families and communities. UBI would remove the exclusionary pitfalls and stigma attached to means-tested schemes, as well as
avoid the paternalistic and sometimes coercive implementation practices documented for some conditional
cash transfers.14 It may also avoid the ‘unemployment traps’ sometimes experienced by welfare recipients who risk losing their benefits should they
increase their labour force participation— with particular detriment to single parents and people with disabilities.15 A secure and reliable income on an individual
rather than household level could be especially important for those seeking to leave violent partners or unhappy relationships, by cushioning the financial shocks of
partnership dissolution that tend to leave women and transgender and gender-diverse people worse-off than men.16 Research on cash transfers also suggests that
a regular inflow of cash can in some cases mitigate intimate partner violence, including by improving emotional and mental wellbeing through reduced economic
stress.17 In the context of employment, UBI may provide the necessary safety net to exit exploitative working conditions or buffer income instability for those
unable to access waged work. Employment discrimination can make it especially difficult for transgender and gender-diverse people to access safe and secure
employment. For example, in the European Union alone at least nine member States do not protect against discrimination in employment on grounds of gender
identity.18 Some feminist
proponents of UBI also celebrate its potential to reshape patriarchal gender norms
around paid work and unpaid care, since no person is relegated to being a masculinized ‘breadwinner’ or
feminized ‘caretaker’ in order to have income security. If combined with the provision of affordable quality care services, UBI
could potentially encourage a more equitable distribution of care among genders.19 Indeed, some argue that UBI
could lead to higher valuation of a range of non-commodified activities, including voluntary, emotional/affective and creative pursuits.20 Given that UBI is paid to
individuals regardless of kinship relations, it could also support a range of diverse family forms, including cohabiting and extended families and ‘families of choice’
formed by many LGBTIQ people.21 Whether and to what extent these positive effects materialize will depend to a large degree on specific design features,
including whether the UBI’s benefit level allows for maintaining an adequate standard of living.
A UBI would increase respect for traditionally feminine labor and empower women in
the home
Robeyns ’01 (Ingrid Robeyns, PhD, Chair in Ethics of Institutions at the Ethics Institute of Utrecht
University, “Will a Basic Income Do Justice to Women?”, Analyse & Kritik, 22, 5/1/2001,
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/auk-2001-0108/html?lang=en)
Which second order effects can we expect? First, we might expect that a
basic income will lead to a revaluation of unpaid
work. In Western societies there is a societal tendency to undervalue unpaid work, especially household
work and care labour. European societies value the job one has often as the most important source of status and integration into
society. A basic income will in an indirect way contribute to a financial revaluation of unpaid work, which
might also help to increase the respect people show for this kind of work. One can expect that a basic
income, even when it is small, will be positively valued by housewives (or househusbands). It gives those women a
feeling of contributing to the incomes of the family, and to get more recognition for the care and
household work they do. Pahl (1989) notices that for British housewives the child allowances they receive are psychologically very
important, even when they are very small. In principle, all family members gain by the formation of a household, but the share of those gains
that different individuals get can differ considerably from one arrangement to another. Therefore, households can best be seen as "cooperative conflicts" (Sen 1990). How the gains from the co-operation are divided depends, among other things, on the bargaining position of
the individuals. There is evidence on the existence of links between money and power in the household. Power is then conceptualised by the
ability to take (part in) decisions. It appears that the partner with the highest income is more dominant in decision making, and women with
paid employment have on average more power than women working unpaid at home (Pahl1989). Ott (1995) shows that specialisation
in
unpaid labour weakens the bargaining position of housewives. Her empirical tests confirmed that
education and non labour income increase the power of housewives in the household. The higher the income
of the husband, the less power the wife has. Although these studies are limited in number and most of them are small scale and thus difficult to
generalise from, there is growing evidence that personal income increases power. This implies that the
introduction of a basic
income will increase the bargaining power of housewives, but that for women working on the labour market, everything
depends on the effects of the labour supply and total net income change.
S – Work
Women’s work is traditionally unappreciated and underpaid – a UBI would solve for
these structural issues.
Patricia Schulz 2017 – Masters in Law, University of Geneva
“Universal Basic Income in a feminist perspective and gender analysis”, Global Social Policy, 01/31/2017,
https://socialprotection-humanrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/UBI-Feminist-Analysis.pdf - A.K.
The UBI, if unconditional and at a level covering basic needs, would help tackle the structural
inequalities inherited from the past, due to the sexual divide between the public and private sphere.
Although the normative framework has improved in many countries of the North and South, and
women’s education is now higher than men’s in a number of countries, in average, women still face de
facto unequal chances of political, economic and social participation. Their educational efforts are not
rewarded the same: the higher their education, the greater the gender pay gap – one of the most
depressing statistics one can consider. A recent study on the discrimination experienced by women due
to pregnancy and maternity in the United Kingdom shows how deeply discrimination is embedded in
society and how it prevents an equal access to the world of work and equal chances in this world, even
after decades of efforts, legal and practical, in one of the most advanced economies, to implement
gender equality in this field. Feminist economists have for decades criticized mainstream economic theory for considering only
remunerated work in the so-called production sector, and gross domestic product (GDP) still considers only this sector. Change occurs, there
are now numerous publications and data in economic and social sciences addressing unpaid, care work and its relation to the various
disadvantages women face. But
even with this new approach and the almost general recognition that gender
equality is key to economic development, care work remains mainly female. Even though satellite
accounts give information on the value of reproductive work, it is still either not really considered as
work if provided for free in the private sphere or, if it is provided against pay, in a work relationship, it is
often poorly paid and considered. Reproductive work, mainly accomplished by women the world over,
for free or very little money, thus remains steadfastly insufficiently addressed in practice in the labour
market and legislation, as well as the homes of people. Women pay a high price for providing the largest
part of care work in the home, as this limits the access or choices of girls to education and the access of
women to paid work, deprives them of the autonomy that goes with an income and the protection of
social security systems when one is in place, and thus exposes them to the risk of poverty and
dependence.
S – Engagement
A UBI recontextualizes feminine labor and enables democratization
Pateman ’4 (Carole Pateman, important feminist and political theorist, “Democratizing Citizenship:
Some Advantages of a Basic Income”, POLITICS & SOCIETY, Vol. 32, March 2004,
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/pateman/Democratizing.pdf) - CSC
Now is the time to ask the second question.
The conditions under which the institution of employment and the
Anglo-American social insurance system were constructed have now crumbled. “Old economy” male breadwinner
jobs are being swept away in global economic restructuring and “downsizing.” New jobs have been created but many are low paid, lacking
benefits, and temporary, and economic insecurity is widespread. Views
about femininity, masculinity, and marriage are
changing too, but since we are still in the midst of all these changes it is hard to know what the eventual outcome will be. Still, times of
rapid change provide opportunities to investigate new ideas and look critically at old arrangements—including the moral hazard of institutions
that give incentives to men to avoid their fair share of the unpaid work of caring for others. It
has now become possible to rethink
the connections between income and paid employment; between marriage, employment, and
citizenship; between the private and public division of labor; and between caring work and other work—
and to reconsider the meaning of “work.” But such rethinking requires a different approach from that taken by many
participants in the debate about stakeholding and basic income. This is crucial if proper account is to be taken of women’s freedom, which has
received rather short shrift in discussions of a basic income. As early as 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft argued in A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman that rights,
citizenship, and full standing for women required economic independence, whether a
woman was married or single.33 As Ackerman and Alstott emphasize, a capital grant would be a step in this direction, but a basic
income would for the first time provide all women with lifelong economic independence. Thus feminists
might be expected strongly to support the introduction of a basic income.34 Yet this is not the case. Some
feminists are critical of the idea because they fear a basic income would reinforce the existing sexual division of labor and women’s lesser
citizenship. They argue that the provision of an income without having to engage in paid employment would, in light of women’s position in the
labor market combined with lingering beliefs about the proper place and tasks of women and men, give women an even greater incentive to
undertake more unpaid caring work in the household, and, conversely, men would have another incentive to free ride. A basic income, that is,
would reinforce existing limitations on women’s freedom.3 This objection illustrates the importance of the reasons advanced for supporting a
basic income. The probability of feminist fears being borne out is higher, for example, when the argument is made that to avoid weakening the
“incentive to work” a basic income should be below subsistence level. This “incentive” is promoted with men and paid employment in mind. A
basic income at this level provides no incentive for wives to “work” (i.e., enter paid employment); rather, it would encourage them to do more
unpaid caring work. Again, to support basic income on the grounds that it would improve the living standards of the poorest sectors of the
population does not promote consideration of the structural connections between marriage, employment, and citizenship, and the private and
public sexual division of labor. Without
the debates about basic income being informed by feminist arguments,
and a concern for democratization (and genuine democratization necessarily includes women’s freedom and standing as citizens),
the discussion will revolve around ways of tinkering with the existing system rather than encouraging
thinking about how it might be made more democratic. Putting democratization at the center requires
attention to institutional structures, especially the institutions of marriage and employment. For instance,
Ackerman and Alstott remark in The Stakeholder Society that the “case for stakeholding does not ultimately rest on its effects on employment,
marriage, or crime. It rests on each American’s claim to respect as a free and equal citizen.” However (leaving crime aside), the
respect
accorded to women and men as free and equal citizens has a great deal to do with the institutions of
marriage and employment. It is not possible to understand women’s lesser citizenship, as Ackerman and Alstott
show in their discussion of social security, without understanding the relationship between their position as wives
and men’s position as workers. Similarly, Van Parijs argues that while “a defensible long-term vision” of an unconditional basic
income at the highest sustainable level is vital, nevertheless more limited and politically feasible proposals are also essential. He states that a
household-based guaranteed minimum income “would definitely be a major change in the right direction”—but the right direction according to
which reasons? Household-based schemes disregard not only all the problems about the sexual division of labor, and the fact that women earn
less than men, but also income distribution within households. Can it be confidently assumed that income would be distributed equally
between husband and wife? A
basic income is important for feminism and democratization precisely because it
is paid not to households but individuals as citizens. A focus on individuals does not imply resort to the atomistic
individualism of neo-classical economics. The
problem of women’s self-government and full standing as citizens is
visible only when individuals are conceptualized within the context of social relations and institutions. A
household-based basic income allows the problem of marriage, employment, and citizenship to be avoided since wives (women) disappear into
the category of “the family” or “household.” To treat a basic income as a payment to households rather than individuals ignores the question of
who performs the work of caring for household members. That is, it is tacitly assumed that reciprocity exists and that free-riding is only a
problem about men avoiding employment. This assumption is nicely illustrated by the picture of a male surfer on the cover of Real Freedom for
All. In academic discussions the surfer is used to represent non-contributors. But in the popular political imagination and the media other
symbols of free-riding are present, such as the African American “welfare queen”or, more recently, the “illegal immigrant” or the “asylum
seeker.”38 The figure of the surfer not only obscures the problem for democratization of popular attitudes embodied in these other symbols
but also obliterates the systematic avoidance of one form of contribution, the vital caring work, by men who are in employment. Nor do the
numerous suggestions for conditions to be placed on payment of a basic income as a solution to free-riding—Atkinson’s “participation income”
is a well-known example—get to grips with free-riding by men in the household. While
the notion of a “contribution” may be
broadened to include, for example, the work of caring for others, as in Atkinson’s proposal, this is insufficient to focus
attention on the structural problem of the connections between marriage, employment, and free-riding by husbands. While payment of a
basic income to a husband for his “contribution” through employment and to his wife for her
“contribution” in the home is to recognize that she does indeed make a socially valuable contribution,
this does little to calm the fears of some feminists that a basic income will merely reinforce women’s lesser standing and the idleness of
husbands in the household. An adequate discussion of free-riding and reciprocity in debates about basic income is hampered by, on the one
hand, the prevalence of an economistic or contractual sense of “reciprocity.” In this interpretation of the term the recipient must make a
contribution directly in return for every benefit received, a view that magnifies the problem of free-riding. On the other hand, by ignoring the
household, participants in the debate tacitly presuppose that “reciprocity” in another sense, that is, mutual aid, characterizes domestic
interactions.40 To
refocus the debate about basic income around its significance for democratization would
mean replacing the preoccupation with one kind of free-riding with an examination of how to reinforce
reciprocity in the sense of mutual aid across the social order. And that, in turn, would require widening
the terms of debate, engaging with the large body of feminist analysis, moving away from the
assumptions of neo-classical economics, and developing a political argument. In conclusion I want to make two
further points. First, schemes for a conditional basic income raise another problem. In effect, these proposals declare irrelevant the comparison
of basic income with universal suffrage as a democratic right. The criteria for eligibility for a conditional income may be very generously
interpreted, but there are always likely to be individuals who fail, or refuse, to meet the conditions. What, then, is their status? Are they, like
individuals who lack the franchise, to become second-class citizens? All the time that a basic income is conditional, a privilege not a right, the
problem of second-class and lesser citizenship cannot be avoided. The use that citizens make of their freedom is open to no guarantees.
Democratic self-government entails that they decide for themselves how and when they will contribute, or whether they will contribute at all. If
the cost of improving democratic freedom for all citizens is the existence of some drones, then, I submit, it is a cost worth paying. Second, let
me emphasize that a basic income is not a panacea. In itself, a basic income would not, for instance, provide an adequate stock of affordable
housing, sufficient good quality education, adequate health care, an end to racism, or violence-free neighborhoods.
Yet if a genuinely
democratic society in which the freedom of women is as important as that of men remains an
aspiration, it is hard to see that there is a substitute for an unconditional basic income.
A basic income is key to ending the patriarchy because reducing women’s poverty
promotes democratic engagement.
Pateman, 2018 – Prof of Political Science at UCLA [Carole, Aug 15, Feminist Current “Why feminists need to take up a basic
income in their fight for women’s liberation: An interview with Carole Pateman” Interviewed by Jacqueline Gullion,
https://www.feministcurrent.com/2018/08/15/feminists-need-take-basic-income-fight-womens-liberation-interview-carole-pateman/ Acc 3/23/23 TA]
JG: Can you describe how you came to understand basic income as in the interests of the advancement of women and a more democratic society? CP: One of the
first things that attracted me to basic income is that, if
the income was set at a sufficient level, it would not just relieve
poverty, but it would be the end of poverty. For women it is actually very important because women’s
income tends to be less than men’s. I mean if you think about a few decades ago [in the global North], it was not seen as altogether seemly for
married women to be employed. They were reliant on their husband’s income, and his generosity (or not) for their own standard of living. Now, women’s
wages still tend to be less than men’s, so we still don’t have a situation where women and men have
equally high standards of living. With something like a basic income, women could be assured of a
reasonable standard of living in the same way men are. Finally, we’d really start talking about equal
citizenship. JG: That certainly supports the argument of why it would be better for individuals to be entitled to the basic income rather than a household to
have a set amount. CP: You know what happens historically when money goes to the household? Men tend to spend it on things other than the necessities of life
for their wives and children. One good thing about family allowances in Britain is that they were always paid to the mother, so there was a really good chance that
the children benefited. JG: Could you say a bit more about the ways in which a basic income enables women (or anyone) to participate fully as a citizen in a
democracy? CP: A
certain level of subsistence is required if you’re going to have the time and energy and
possibility of getting the knowledge required to participate fully in your society. If all your time and energy goes toward
trying to make enough money to keep body and soul together, or to providing for a family, then you are going to have to make pretty heroic efforts to actually
participate. If
you are actually interested in having a democratic citizenry — that is where citizens have the
opportunity, in some way or another, to govern themselves and not just be governed by others — then
there has to be a material basis for it.
S - Feminist Economics
The aff is an example of feminist economic governance – this alternative model of
economics promotes environmental sustainability, reduces inequality, and solves
gendered violence.
Gill ‘15 [Stephen, Research Professor of Political Science, York University, “Critical Perspectives on the
Crisis of Global Governance”, Palgrave Macmillan, p. 144-149, Accessed: 7/10/23] HZaidi
What would a different system of global economic governance look like that might better fulfil
commitments to gender equality and human rights? A gendered analysis of global economic governance
would begin from the premise that the social forces engaged in global capitalism and its economic
governance are not only structured along the lines of class, race and ethnicity but also are gendered in
terms of their prevailing ideas, institutions and power potentials. Some guiding questions might include those listed
in Box 7.2. Each of these components of social forces that could reshape global economic governance will now be considered in turn. These
consist principally of two broad types: ideologies that justify or legitimate a given political order, and the commonly held predispositions or
assumptions that lead people to treat the economic and social world and its interactions as if they are selfevident or part of the ‘common [figure 7.2 OMITTED] sense,’ which structures what is conceived of as
possible in the realm of policy/politics. From a gender perspective it is crucial to underline how both the
ideology of disciplinary neoliberalism as well as the ‘common sense’ that governs the prevailing
concepts of global economic governance does not take into account the economy of daily life: how people
exist on a daily and intergenerational basis through the interaction of paid and unpaid work. The dominant perspective ignores
the way in which economies are not only a set of financial transactions but also a collection of work and
labour processes, some of which are paid and others unpaid, and how each of these processes involves distinct sets of
social relations as well as economic inputs and outputs. To understand why this is the case we need to think through the way
that production for the market place is related to how families and communities provide the very
conditions for production to occur. Thus, productive activities in a capitalist system normally refer to the processes of creating
goods and services that can directly create profit. By contrast, the reproductive economy consists of people, and it
involves activities and processes that are not merely associated with biological reproduction but also
the feeding, caring, replenishing, and daily maintenance and socialization of family, household and
community members. Reproductive work and voluntary community work could in principle, be done by men or women – but
provisioning has been socially constituted as mainly the responsibility of women rather than men in most societies (Elson 1998). However, it is
impossible to conceive of production in the absence of the reproductive economy since it encompasses
work carried out by human beings for direct support of the productive sector through for example the
produced input of labour. Indeed, US researchers have estimated that accounting for all unpaid domestic work would add 80 per cent
to GDP (Zuckerman 2014). However, at best, in the perspectives that prevail in the governing discourses of global economic
governance, provisioning remains largely invisible and thus outside of the scope of public policy. At worst it
is a lacunae or ‘strategic silence’ in the generic frameworks of knowledge that constitute orthodox economics. By contrast a key focus and
purpose of feminist economics is to make this unpaid work visible and thus to reconstitute our
understanding of the ‘economic’ in order to restructure the provision of resources (including time) and care in
a more equal fashion between women and men, in both private and public institutions. A feminist perspective
therefore suggests a wider vision of the economy that sees national output as a product of the interaction of the domestic sector alongside the
public, private and financial sectors, producing services that include the reproduction of the labour force on a daily and generational basis.
Whilst outside the formal production boundary, this
work affects the quantity and quality of labour supplied to
production; it also affects ‘the stability of the social framework in which market and state are
embedded’ (Elson 2002). Such a vision of the economy, if integrated into the institutions of global economic
governance, would transform economic analysis and policy prescriptions. For example, policy makers would
include social reproduction (including the ‘care economy’) in considerations of labour market, social, monetary
and fiscal decisions since social reproduction normally depends on some form of income support. This
can happen through wages, transfers by governments or access to arable land and informal sector activities. Conversely, many of the
insecurities that are inherent in the labour market and other forms of access to money are absorbed and mediated at the household level. The
degree to which households can respond to market downturns and crises – the
extent to which women’s unpaid labour can
act as a shock absorber – in turn affects the way economic growth occurs. Whilst many economists recognize
gender relations as a factor of analysis at the microeconomic level, macroeconomics remains focused on aggregates and policy objectives such
as price stability. The traditional
policy instruments of macroeconomics such as fiscal, monetary and
exchange rate policies are constructed as if they are gender-neutral (Cagatay and Erturk 2004). If by contrast, there
is a recognition that macroeconomic policies rest upon a set of distributive relations across different
sectors of the economy and involve distributive choices across various social groups (Elson and Cagatay 2000),
then gender relations (along with class, race and ethnicity) should be incorporated into the analysis of those
distributive social relations. This would mean integrating an analysis of the gendered divisions of labour and decision making in the
different spheres of economic activity. This ‘bottom up’ approach whereby economic policy would be steered by
the daily realities of women and men as they experience the intersections of social reproduction,
production and finance would go a long way towards ‘re-embedding’ economics in society. Such an
approach would ask how people meet their daily needs, what the requirements are for human wellbeing, how they are being met, what constraints exist to meet such needs, and what economic
policies support or undermine daily needs and well-being. Such a focus on the unpaid economy requires a commitment
of public investment in basic infrastructure such as access to fuel and fresh drinking water as well as social infrastructure such as health and
care services.
It will also require some redistribution in the remaining unpaid work between women and
men, boys and girls. This would require reconsidering what is meant by progress, efficiency, growth
and development. Women’s movements and other civil society groups have argued that we cannot go back to the model of
economic development that existed before the crisis as this signalled growing inequalities,
environmental destruction and, a growing global domestic crisis witnessed in the huge shifts in social
and family arrangements. Restoring growth – a return to normalcy – is insufficient if the goal is a more
just, equitable (in terms of class, race/ethnicity, caste and region) and sustainable (conserving natural resources) development (Jain and
Elson 2010: 19). This does not mean ‘anti-growth’.8 Economic growth – if it is defined as the increase in the real use-value of
economic activity – can mean many different things with different environmental and social implications. If it is simply measured according to
conventional national income accounts premised upon exchange-value it can mean more private automobiles or better public transport; more
strip mining or child care centres. Thus
thinking about organizing the economy in a different way to avoid
environmental degradation and to focus on needed social investments and ‘decent’ work which
provides sufficient income and recognizes workers’ rights would be part of a new common sense and
growth strategy premised upon human needs. For example an element that would be central to a new growth
strategy would be food sovereignty, that is, local and democratic control over the provisioning of
food, something that has not been delivered by the liberalization of international trade in food.
Recognizing that women make over half of the agricultural work force in developing countries, better land rights for women and more
equitable public investment and regulation of markets to support women farmers would undergird this
new approach (Jain and Elson 2010). In economics, students are demanding a more real world-based curriculum of
study that moves away from the neoclassical free market theories and abstractions that dominate
teaching and modelling.9 Reform of the educational curriculum more generally and particularly in the
field of economics, is a key aspect of creating a new ‘common sense’ of economic literacy that can underpin new
frameworks of global economic governance. This will require a revolution in the way in which economics is both
taught in schools and universities and discussed in political discourse and particularly in the media, in
ways that encourage a variety of different viewpoints and policy prescriptions. It will also require greater
representation of heterodox (including feminist) economics in the policy community to realize a more encompassing, democratic model of
global economic governance. This
means that what is considered a crisis and how winners and losers are
identified will also depend on the type of knowledge at the heart of governance: educational efforts of
transnational feminist advocacy networks have been important for challenging orthodox economic
understandings of global economic governance. They have played a particularly important role in issue creation and agenda
setting and influencing policy discourses towards the acceptance of a more heterodox, socially embedded economics (for example, the
International Gender and Trade Network, the Working Group on Gender, Macroeconomics and International Economics, the Development
Alternatives Network for Women (DAWN) and Women in Development Europe (WIDE).10
Framing Extensions
Ethic of Care
Adopting a feminist lens is crucial to avoid solvency problems – the justifications for a
Basic Income are key to the Type of UBI we adopt – framework will shape the details
Zelleke, 2011 - The New School for General Studies, New York [Almaz, Policy & Politics vol 39 no 1, “Feminist political
theory and the argument for an unconditional basic income” https://almazzelleke.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/zelleke-feminist-political-theory-and-
ubi.pdf Acc 1/28/23 TA]
The liberal egalitarian tradition suggests a different foundation for a gender egalitarian society: an
unconditional basic income, which, I argue,
supports care work in accordance with the principles of a feminist theory of distributive justice and the
universal caregiver model of citizenship. First, a basic income derived from a feminist theory of justice would provide
every child and adult a guaranteed minimum income sufficient for basic needs, fulfilling the feminist
reciprocity principle; this is in contrast to basic income proposals justified on other grounds, which often
limit the basic income to adults, or tie the amount of the benefit to reductions in inequality rather than
provision of basic needs. Second, basic income provides caregivers with resources to use as they prefer: as a personal caregiving stipend, to pay for
care provided by others, or indeed, for any other purpose, thereby supporting care and supporting the autonomy of caregivers. Third, by redistributing
income to those with the least, basic income redistributes power to society’s most vulnerable members.
For those in need of care, it reduces the power imbalance between care recipients and caregivers by guaranteeing
recipients of care at least minimal resources, thereby fostering equality of respect. It reduces power
imbalances within the family, where it provides a caregiver financial resources and a citizenship status
independent of paid employment, and it provides a wage supplement and some bargaining power to
low-paid workers. Finally, an unconditional and universal basic income triggered by no condition other than low income, and recouped through the tax
system from recipients with higher incomes, has the potential to eliminate poverty more effectively than any other scheme of redistribution.
A feminist framework requires a universal basic income – it problematizes the
breadwinner model and prevents the punishment of women who go against the
model.
Zelleke 2011 - prof of political science at The New School [Almaz, January Policy and Politics, “Feminist political theory
and the argument for an unconditional basic income” http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/tpp/pap/2011/00000039/00000001/art00004 TA]
Conclusion Feminist political theory has in many ways moved on from critiques of theories of justice, by moving beyond the focus on questions of economic
inequality to questioning the value or legitimacy of such comprehensive theories altogether. While much recent work has indeed extended feminism’s critical
project into important new areas, it is crucial that our attention not shift entirely before the insights gained in the realm of economic inequality are institutionalised
in policy. The Scandinavian version of the universal breadwinner model of citizenship – a generous welfare state with policies designed to induce men to take
caregiving leaves from paid employment – offers one model of a gender-egalitarian society, but one that continues the prioritisation of the male-dominated public
sphere of paid employment over the sphere of care. The
feminist version of the liberal egalitarian tradition that has as its
foundation a universal, unconditional basic income at a level to meet basic needs, on the other hand
prioritises the emerging norm of combined care work and paid employment throughout adulthood. The
latter attempts not so much to mould individual behaviour to a socially dominant norm, but to allow for the emergence of alternative
norms of behaviour beyond the dominant universal breadwinner norm. By socialising the cost of
supporting care – not only among fathers, but also among all those whose high earnings suggest protection from the burdens of care – a basic
income promotes reciprocity not only within families but also between those with care responsibilities
and those without. Finally, by providing an unconditional floor of income to low-skilled workers, basic
income provides bargaining power for those who might prefer to stay home and take care of their own
children or parents over working as low-paid caregivers for higher-paid women and men, or for women and men
of all classes to demand workplaces more accommodating of universal care responsibilities. A
universal, unconditional basic income does
not promise a gender-symmetrical society – an unreachable goal anyway, until men can bear and breastfeed babies. But it may lead
to a society in which remaining, and perhaps essential gender differences do not penalise women (or men)
who choose not to pursue androcentric ideals of citizenship by relegating them to poverty, dependence on their spouses or
employers, and second-class citizenship.
Structural Violence First
You should refuse debate’s constant urge to prevent incalculable future threats and
recognize the urgency of gendered violence.
Olson ‘15
(Elizabeth, professor of geography and global studies at UNC Chapel Hill, ‘Geography and Ethics I:
Waiting and Urgency,’ Progress in Human Geography, vol. 39 no. 4, pp. 517-526)
Though toileting might be thought of as a special case of bodily urgency, geographic research suggests that the
body is increasingly set at odds with
larger scale ethical concerns, especially large-scale future events of forecasted suffering. Emergency planning is a particularly
good example in which the large-scale threats of future suffering can distort moral reasoning. Žižek (2006) lightly develops this point in the context of the war on
terror, where in the presence of fictitious and real ticking clocks and warning systems, the
urgent body must be bypassed because there
are bigger scales to worry about: What does this all-pervasive sense of urgency mean ethically? The pressure of
events is so overbearing, the stakes are so high, that they necessitate a suspension of ordinary ethical
concerns. After all, displaying moral qualms when the lives of millions are at stake plays into the hands
of the enemy. (Žižek, 2006)¶ In the presence of large-scale future emergency, the urgency to secure the state,
the citizenry, the economy, or the climate creates new scales and new temporal orders of response (see
Anderson, 2010; Baldwin, 2012; Dalby, 2013; Morrissey, 2012), many of which treat the urgent body as impulsive and thus
requiring management. McDonald’s (2013) analysis of three interconnected discourses of ‘climate security’ illustrates how bodily urgency in climate
change is also recast as a menacing impulse that might require exclusion from moral reckoning. The logics of climate security, especially those related to national
security, ‘can encourage perverse political responses that not only fail to respond effectively to climate change but may present victims of it as a threat’ (McDonald,
2013: 49). Bodies
that are currently suffering cannot be urgent, because they are excluded from the
potential collectivity that could be suffering everywhere in some future time. Similar bypassing of
existing bodily urgency is echoed in writing about violent securitization, such as drone warfare (Shaw and
Akhter, 2012), and also in intimate scales like the street and the school, especially in relation to race (Mitchell,
2009; Young et al., 2014).¶ As large-scale urgent concerns are institutionalized, the urgent body is increasingly
obscured through technical planning and coordination (Anderson and Adey, 2012). The predominant characteristic
of this institutionalization of large-scale emergency is a ‘built-in bias for action’ (Wuthnow, 2010: 212) that
circumvents contingencies. The urgent body is at best an assumed eventuality, one that will likely
require another state of waiting, such as triage (e.g. Greatbach et al., 2005). Amin (2013) cautions that in much of the West, governmental need
to provide evidence of laissez-faire governing on the one hand, and assurance of strength in facing a threatening future on the other, produces ‘just-in-case
preparedness’ (Amin, 2013: 151) of neoliberal risk management policies. In the US, ‘personal ingenuity’ is built into emergency response at the expense of the poor
and vulnerable for whom ‘[t]he difference between abjection and bearable survival’ (Amin, 2013: 153) will not be determined by emergency planning, but in the
material infrastructure of the city.¶ In short, the
urgencies of the body provide justifications for social exclusion of the
most marginalized based on impulse and perceived threat, while large-scale future emergencies
effectively absorb the deliberative power of urgency into the institutions of preparedness and risk
avoidance. Žižek references Arendt’s (2006) analysis of the banality of evil to explain the current state of ethical reasoning under the war on terror, noting
that people who perform morally reprehensible actions under the conditions of urgency assume a ‘tragic-ethic grandeur’ (Žižek, 2006) by sacrificing their own
morality for the good of the state. But his analysis fails to note that bodies are
today so rarely legitimate sites for claiming urgency.
In the context of the assumed priority of the large-scale future emergency, the urgent body becomes
literally nonsense, a non sequitur within societies, states and worlds that will always be more urgent.¶ If the
important ethical work of urgency has been to identify that which must not wait, then the capture of the
power and persuasiveness of urgency by large-scale future emergencies has consequences for the kinds
of normative arguments we can raise on behalf of urgent bodies. How, then, might waiting compare as a normative description
and critique in our own urgent time? Waiting can be categorized according to its purpose or outcome (see Corbridge, 2004; Gray, 2011), but it also
modifies the place of the individual in society and her importance. As Ramdas (2012: 834) writes, ‘waiting …
produces hierarchies which segregate people and places into those which matter and those which do
not’. The segregation of waiting might produce effects that counteract suffering, however, and Jeffery (2008: 957) explains that though the ‘politics of waiting’
can be repressive, it can also engender creative political engagement. In his research with educated unemployed Jat youth who spend days and years waiting for
desired employment, Jeffery finds that ‘the temporal suffering and sense of ambivalence experienced by young men can generate cultural and political experiments
that, in turn, have marked social and spatial effects’ (Jeffery, 2010: 186). Though this is not the same as claiming normative neutrality for waiting, it does suggest
that waiting is more ethically ambivalent and open than urgency. ¶ In other contexts, however, our descriptions of waiting indicate a strong condemnation of its
effects upon the subjects of study. Waiting can demobilize radical reform, depoliticizing ‘the insurrectionary possibilities of the present by delaying the
revolutionary imperative to a future moment that is forever drifting towards infinity’ (Springer, 2014: 407). Yonucu’s (2011) analysis of the self-destructive activities
of disrespected working-class youth in Istanbul suggests that this sense of infinite waiting can lead not only to depoliticization, but also to a disbelief in the
possibility of a future self of any value. Waiting, like urgency, can undermine the possibility of self-care two-fold, first by making people wait for essential needs, and
again by reinforcing that waiting is ‘[s]omething to be ashamed of because it may be noted or taken as evidence of indolence or low status, seen as a symptom of
rejection or a signal to exclude’ (Bauman, 2004: 109). This is why Auyero (2012) suggests that waiting creates an ideal state subject, providing ‘temporal processes in
and through which political subordination is produced’ (Auyero, 2012: loc. 90; see also Secor, 2007). Furthermore, Auyero notes, it is not only political
subordination, but the subjective effect of waiting that secures domination, as citizens and non-citizens find themselves ‘waiting hopefully and then frustratedly for
others to make decisions, and in effect surrendering to the authority of others’ (Auyero, 2012: loc. 123). ¶ Waiting can therefore function as a potentially important
spatial technology of the elite and powerful, mobilized not only for the purpose of governing individuals, but also to retain claims over moral urgency. But there is
growing resistance to the capture of claims of urgency by the elite, and it is important to note that even in cases where the material conditions of containment are
currently impenetrable, arguments based on human value are at the forefront of reclaiming urgency for the body. In detention centers, clandestine prisons, state
borders and refugee camps, geographers point to ongoing struggles against the ethical impossibility of bodily urgency and a rejection of states of waiting (see
Conlon, 2011; Darling, 2009, 2011; Garmany, 2012; Mountz et al., 2013; Schuster, 2011). Ramakrishnan’s (2014) analysis of a Delhi resettlement colony and
Shewly’s (2013) discussion of the enclave between India and Bangladesh describe people who refuse to give up their own status as legitimately urgent, even in the
context of larger scale politics. Similarly, Tyler’s (2013) account of desperate female detainees stripping off their clothes to expose their humanness and suffering in
the Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in the UK suggests that demands for recognition are not just about politics, but also about the acknowledgement of
humanness and the irrevocable possibility of being that which cannot wait. The continued existence of places like Yarl’s Wood and similar institutions in the USA
nonetheless points to the challenge of exposing the urgent body as a moral priority when it is so easily hidden from view, and also reminds us that our research can
help to explain the relationships between normative dimensions and the political and social conditions of struggle. ¶ In closing, geographic depictions of waiting do
seem to evocatively describe otherwise obscured suffering (e.g. Bennett, 2011), but it is striking how rarely these descriptions also use the language of urgency.
Given the discussion above, what might be accomplished – and risked – by incorporating urgency more overtly and deliberately into our discussions of waiting,
surplus and abandoned bodies? Urgency can clarify the implicit but understated ethical consequences and normativity associated with waiting, and encourage
explicit discussion about harmful suffering. Waiting can be productive or unproductive for radical praxis, but urgency compels and requires response. Geographers
could be instrumental in reclaiming the ethical work of urgency in ways that leave it open for critique, clarifying common spatial misunderstandings and
representations. There is good reason to be thoughtful in this process, since moral outrage towards inhumanity can itself obscure differentiated experiences of
being human, dividing up ‘those for whom we feel urgent unreasoned concern and those whose lives and deaths simply do not touch us, or do not appear as lives at
all’ (Butler, 2009: 50). But when the
urgent body is rendered as only waiting, both materially and discursively, it is
just as easily cast as impulsive, disgusting, animalistic (see also McKittrick, 2006). Feminist theory insists that the
urgent body, whose encounters of violence are ‘usually framed as private, apolitical and mundane’ (Pain, 2014:
8), are as deeply political, public, and exceptional as other forms of violence (Phillips, 2008; Pratt, 2005). Insisting that a
suffering body, now, is that which cannot wait, has the ethical effect of drawing it into consideration alongside the political, public and exceptional scope of largescale futures. It may help us insist on the body, both as a single unit and a plurality, as a legitimate scale of normative priority and social care.¶ In this report, I have
explored old and new reflections on the ethical work of urgency and waiting. Geographic research suggests a contemporary popular bias towards the urgency of
large-scale futures, institutionalized in ways that further obscure and discredit the urgencies of the body. This bias also justifies the production of new waiting places
in our material landscape, places like the detention center and the waiting room. In some cases, waiting is normatively neutral, even providing opportunities for
alternative politics. In others, the technologies of waiting serve to manage potentially problematic bodies, leading to suspended suffering and even to extermination
(e.g. Wright, 2013). One of my aims has been to suggest that moral reasoning is important both because it exposes normative biases against subjugated people, and
because it potentially provides routes toward struggle where claims to urgency seem to foreclose the possibilities of alleviation of suffering. Saving
the
world still should require a debate about whose world is being saved, when, and at what cost – and this
requires a debate about what really cannot wait. My next report will extend some of these concerns by reviewing how feelings of
urgency, as well as hope, fear, and other emotions, have played a role in geography and ethical reasoning. ¶ I conclude, however, by pulling together past and
present. In 1972, Gilbert White asked why geographers were not engaging ‘the truly urgent questions’ (1972: 101) such as racial repression, decaying cities,
economic inequality, and global environmental destruction. His question highlights just how much the discipline has changed, but it is also unnerving in its echoes of
our contemporary problems. Since White’s writing, our moral reasoning has been stretched to consider the future body and the more-than-human, alongside the
presently urgent body – topics and concerns that I have not taken up in this review but which will provide their own new possibilities for urgent concerns. My own
hope presently is drawn from an acknowledgement that the temporal characteristics of contemporary capitalism can be interrupted in creative ways (Sharma,
2014), with the possibility of squaring the urgent body with our large-scale future concerns. Temporal alternatives already exist in ongoing and emerging revolutions
and the disruption of claims of cycles and circular political processes (e.g. Lombard, 2013; Reyes, 2012). Though calls for urgency will certainly be used to obscure
evasion of responsibility (e.g. Gilmore, 2008: 56, fn 6), they may also serve as fertile ground for radical critique, a truly fierce urgency for now.
Extinction Focus Bad
The drive to prevent extinction is a form of masculine survivalism where gendered
bodies become the unwilling tools to sustain humanity. You should refuse the
obsession with patriarchal reproduction.
Mitchell ‘15
(Audra Mitchell, Audra Mitchell is a settler scholar who lives and works on the Ancestral and treaty lands of the
Neutral (Attawandaron), Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas of the New Credit (please see Honouring the Land). She
currently holds the the Canada Research Chair in Global Political Ecology at Wilfrid Laurier University. From 201518 she held the CIGI Chair in Global Governance and Ethics at the Balsillie School of International Affairs Audra is
an Associate Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada, 8-3-2015, "Gendering extinction," Worldly,
https://worldlyir.wordpress.com/2015/08/03/gendering-extinction/, JKS)
The reproduction of survival/ the survival of reproduction
Extinction is almost always understood against the horizon of survival and the imperative to sustain it –
at least for life forms deemed to be of value to humans. In many cases, this imperative takes the form of deliberate
strategies for enforcing existence. Donna Haraway’s influential book When Species Meet devotes considerable attention to the logics, practices
and politics of Species Survival Plans. These plans monitor and enforce reproduction amongst ‘endangered’ species, not least by collecting data
on populations, genetic profiles and genetic materials to enable selective breeding. This
strategy assumes that all organisms
can, should, and can be made to exercise their reproductive capacities in order to resist extinction, and
it actively mobilizes members of ‘endangered species’ into this project. In so doing, it helps to entrench norms
regarding gender, sexuality and reproductive labour that are deeply entrenched in modern, Western human cultures.
Attention to these programmes highlights an important way in which extinction is gendered in dominant
scientific and policy frameworks. Specifically, strategic breeding programmes share in the belief that
reproduction is an imperative for those capable of reproducing if ‘the species’ is at risk’. This belief is
directly related to Western norms of the reproductive imperative for women. Indeed, Haraway points out that it
is precisely “‘woman’s’ putative self-defining responsibility to ‘the species’ as this singular and
typological female is reduced to her reproductive function”. In a similar sense, within SSPs and other strategies of
enforced survival, entire life forms are reduced to their reproductive capacities. Moreover, programmes of enforced survival can, in the context
of sexual reproduction, disproportionately burden female organisms with the task of avoiding extinction. This
logic is particularly
fraught in discussions of the possibility of human extinction, in which female fertility (captured in the
standard policy language of ‘births per woman’) is framed simultaneously as a threat to survival, and the
only hope for escaping extinction (see, for instance, Alan Weisman’s comments on this). In these ways, the securitization
of survival entrenches the intersectional categories of gender, species and race discussed above. Dominant
discourses of extinction and conservation also entrench and privilege sexual reproduction, in ways that
entrench heteronormative assumptions and norms. This is reflected in the way that the subjects of extinction and
conservation are framed. The standard object of conservation is the biological ‘species’, a term which is defined by the ability of organisms to
reproduce sexually. As Myra Hird has pointed out, this conception of ‘species’ makes it appear as if sexual reproduction is the ‘best’ means of
sustaining the existence of a life form. However, Hird’s work demonstrates that Earthly life forms actually engage in myriad forms of
reproduction, from the free exchange of DNA between bacteria to the hermaphroditic practices of some fish. The upshot of these arguments is
that Earthly life is sustained through a huge variety of reproductive activities that do not conform to biological understandings of life processes
or species. Crucially, Hird argues that there is no necessary hierarchy between forms of reproduction. In Darwinian terms, all species that
manage to survive are equally successful. However, by
conflating survival with sexual reproduction, existing
discourses of extinction embed hetero-normative frameworks that devalue other forms of
reproduction. They also reduce reproduction to the imperative to survive, ignoring the myriad cultural,
political, aesthetic, sensual and other dimensions of reproduction.
Risk Analysis Bad
The metrics and justifications for feminist policies matter just as much as the ends.
Moves to resolve problems by using masculine forms of risk calculus are antithetical –
prefer a radical demand for change.
Verloo ‘5
(Mieke, Senior Lecturer in Political Sciences and Gender Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen and
Research Director of an EU-funded comparative research facility, “Displacement and Empowerment:
Reflections on the Concept and Practice of the Council of Europe Approach to Gender Mainstreaming
and Gender Equality”, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society 12.3 (2005) 344365)
Some studies that focus on assessing the success of gender mainstreaming practices at the level of the European Union point to a similar phenomenon of "adding other goals," as happened in the Message to the Committee
of Ministers to Steering Committees of the Council of Europe on Gender Mainstreaming. In Hafner-Burton and Pollack's analysis (2000) of five areas (structural funds, employment and social affairs, development,
competition and science, research and development), the accent is on explaining cross-sectional variety within the European Commission in the start and the implementation of gender mainstreaming. They show how
important it has been that political opportunities in Europe have widened and increased over the course of the last decade, for instance as a result of the entrance of the Nordic countries. They also show how important
lobbying and modernization have been, for instance the lobbying of WISE (the European organization for women's studies) in the case of gender mainstreaming in science, research, and development. In assessing the
success of gender mainstreaming, they refer to classical power mechanisms that are at the heart of social movement theory: political opportunities and mobilizing. In the context of this article, the most interesting part of
different
actors adapt existing policy frames to pursue their prospective goals. Strategical framing is defined as attempting to construct a fit between existing frames, or
networks of meaning, and the frames of a change agent. Hafner-Burton and Pollack show that gender mainstreaming is "sold" as an effective means to the ends pursued by the
European Commission, rather than as an overt challenge to those ends. They argue that the gender mainstreaming efforts, because
of this strategical framing, might turn into an integrationist approach, integrating women and gender issues into specific
regular policies rather than rethinking the fundamental aims of the European Union from a gender perspective. Especially since the
European Union is one of the most successful implementers of gender mainstreaming so far, this threatens the transformative potential of gender mainstreaming, they say. [End Page
358] Mary Braithwaite's work on gender mainstreaming in the structural funds (1999) corroborates these findings. She finds that because of the absence of precise objectives on reducing gender inequalities, gender
is easily located within and has been subjected to other goals, such as employment creation, economic growth, or
poverty reduction. This is not to say that these are abject goals, just to stress that they are not synonymous with gender equality. Braithwaite concludes that gender equity suffers from the dominance of efficiency
their analysis is their use of the concept of strategical framing, another power mechanism conceptualized in social movement theory. Strategical framing is a dynamic concept that enables us to see how
and effectiveness in gender mainstreaming practices in the structural funds. Strategical Framing and Power The studies presented point out that "success," in the sense of starting a process of gender mainstreaming, seems
to be connected to the "stretching" of the goal of gender equality, to strategical framing, and they also show that the actual goal of gender mainstreaming is not articulated clearly. In the last section of this article, I will
therefore take a closer look at framing processes, at the politics of framing. What happens in processes of strategical framing? Why would it be that integration rather than transformation is the inevitable result of strategical
framing processes? Strategical framing refers to a process of linking a feminist goal, such as gender equality, to some major goal of an organization that should engage or is engaging in gender mainstreaming, thereby
securing the allegiance of these organizations to gender mainstreaming. In technical terms, this means that until now strategical framing in gender mainstreaming practices has usually involved framing bridging or frame
the dual
agenda that is mostly present in gender mainstreaming (of the feminist goal and some other goal) is presented as the possibility of a win-win
situation. In such conceptualizations, power seems to evaporate; it is put between brackets. Gender mainstreaming is presented as a
extension6 (Benford and Snow 2000). The strategies chosen do not challenge the other, mainstream goals of policy makers, but provide for a link by "stretching" the gender equality goal. This means that
harmonious process, certainly in the Council of Europe report. The state is also mostly conceptualized as "friendly," probably connected to the fact that Sweden and the Netherlands have been among its pioneers, countries
that to some extent have been "friendly" states in the past. Yet, if gender inequality is about power and privileges, then gender mainstreaming should be about abolishing privileges, and if gender mainstreaming is about
eliminating gender bias in policy making, then the state should be problematized. Why then is a process of abolishing privileges and gender
bias conceptualized as harmony? The answer provided in the studies discussed earlier is that it helps in organizing acceptance of gender mainstreaming, by making it less [End Page 359] threatening. The consequence of this
"Beyond Armchair Feminism" volume of Organization (2000) is
one of the few studies analyzing the bad results of such a dual agenda: the disappearance of a gender focus
altogether. Coleman and Rippin (2000) conclude, after having tried such a process of harmonious change, that there needs to be more challenge and less
agreement in such change processes, even if trust is a crucial component. The presentation of harmony, used to help smooth the process of change, is counterproductive in the end. In Hearn's
avoidance of struggle is the exclusion of opposing voices, including radical feminist voices. The
(2000) reflection on the project, not only organizations are gendered (in the Acker 1990 definition), but also models of organizational or societal change are gendered, as well as embodying other forms of social division and
change processes and hence gender mainstreaming processes and activities should be conceptualized as necessarily riddled with
power, subject to mechanisms of power, and best understood in terms of power. Looking at processes of strategical framing as connected to power relations through a Foucauldian lens shows the logic of the dual
domination. Following this analysis,
agenda as a mix of enabling and constraining processes. The main enabling part is the opening generated by the bridging of frames. Yet, in this logic that juxtaposes two sets of goals, some options are repressed. Exposing
the "organization" goal as not neutral, but already gendered, or positioning the "feminist" goal as an organization goal in its own right, will be difficult. As organizations tend to have a self-image of gender neutrality, the
both goals will hardly ever be backed by equal power resources, the feminist
goal will be watered down much more, or much more easily than the organization goal. Moreover, in the process of convincing organizations
or people to start a process of gender mainstreaming, there will already be a tendency to select more "acceptable"
feminist goals. Also, the feminists or femocrats involved in these efforts will necessarily have some kind of acceptance by the (gender-biased) organization, leading to further selection and
exclusion of radical or marginalized voices. The logic of the dual agenda therefore leads first to an opening for a feminist
agenda, and then to a narrowing down of the feminist focus and feminist voices, to eventually losing the focus on gender and
gender equality altogether. This logic functions through mechanisms of power. Both goals are not equally powerful, as they have unequal support and resources within the regular organizations
gender bias in their existing goals will not easily be recognized. And as
that are the relevant context of gender mainstreaming. Especially when gender mainstreaming is conceptualized in a technocratic way, less external pressure or mobilization of feminist groups is to be expected. [End Page
360] Moreover, this inequality of support and resources hinders a clear articulation of a feminist goal, or the expression of particular feminist goals that are seen as more radical, while such radical goals would be needed in
view of the watering-down mechanisms.
Mainstream liberal feminism hence has an advantage, while a goal that is articulated as a
need to displace gender will meet resistance. Finally, within feminism there are hegemonic processes as well that
are not recognized and that lead to the exclusion of certain feminist voices.
Our impact outweighs on probability and magnitude – risk assessment is
epistemologically biased towards white masculine elites who discount the severity of
everyday localized violence in destroying marginalized populations.
Verchick 96 [Robert, Assistant Professor, University of Missouri -- Kansas City School of Law. J.D.,
Harvard Law School, 1989, “IN A GREENER VOICE: FEMINIST THEORY AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE” 19
Harv. Women's L.J. 23]
Because risk assessment is based on statistical measures of risk, policymakers view it as an accurate and
objective tool in establishing environmental standards. n275 The scientific process used to assess risk purports to focus single-mindedly on only
one feature of a potential injury: the objective probability of its occurrence. n276 Risk assessors, who consider most value judgments irrelevant in determining statistical risk, seek to banish
them at every stage. n277 As a result,
the language of risk assessment -- and of related environmental safety standards -- often carry an air of irrebuttable
precision and certainty. The EPA, for example, defines the standard acceptable level of risk under Superfund as "10<-6>" -- that is, the probability that one person in a million would develop
cancer due to exposure to site contamination. n278 [*76] Feminism challenges this model of scientific risk assessment on at least three levels. First, feminism questions the assumption that
scientific inquiry is value-neutral, that is, free of societal bias or prejudice. n279 Indeed, as many have pointed out, one's perspective unavoidably influences the practice of science. n280
Western science may be infused with its own ideology, perpetuating, in the view of the ecofeminists, cycles of discrimination, domination, and exploitation. n281 Second, even if scientific
inquiry by itself were value-neutral, environmental regulation based on such inquiry would still contain subjective elements. Environmental regulation, like any other product of democracy,
serves only to "mask, not eliminate,
political and social considerations." n282 We have already seen how the subjective decision to prefer white men as
subjects for epidemiological study can skew risk assessments against the interests of women and people
of color. The focus of many assessments on the risk of cancer deaths, but not, say, the risks of birth defects or miscarriages, is
yet another example of how a policymaker's subjective decision of what to look for can influence what is
ultimately seen. n283 Once risk data are collected and placed in a statistical form, the ultimate translation of that information into rules and standards of conduct once again
inevitably reflects elements of subjectivity, compromise, and self-interest. The technocratic language of regulation
reflects value judgments. A safety threshold of one in a million or a preference for "best conventional technology" does not spring from the periodic table, but rather evolves from the
Whose experience? Whose judgment? Which information?
These are the questions that feminism prompts, and they will be discussed shortly. Finally, feminists would argue that questions involving the risk of death
and disease should not even aspire to value neutrality. Such decisions -- which affect not only today's
generations, but those of the future -- should be made with all related political and moral considerations
plainly on the table. n284 In addition, policymakers should look to all perspectives, especially those of society's
most vulnerable members, to develop as complete a picture of the moral issues as possible. Debates about
application [*77] of human experience and judgment to scientific information.
scientific risk assessment and public values often appear as a tug of war between the "technicians," who would apply only value-neutral criteria to set regulatory standards, and the "public,"
who demand that psychological perceptions and contextual factors also be considered. n285 Environmental justice advocates, strongly concerned with the practical experiences of threatened
communities, argue convincingly for the latter position. n286 A feminist critique of the issue, however, suggests that the debate is much richer and more complicated than a bipolar view
allows. For feminists, the notion of value neutrality simply does not exist. The debate between technicians and the public, according to feminists, is not merely a contest between science and
feelings, but a broader discussion about the sets of methods, values, and attitudes to which each group subscribes. Furthermore, feminists might argue, the parties to this discussion divide into
more than two categories. Because one's world view is premised on many things, including personal experience, one might expect that subgroups within either category might differ in
significant ways from other subgroups. Therefore, feminists would anticipate a broad spectrum of views concerning scientific risk assessment and public values. Intuitively, this makes sense.
Certainly scientists disagree among themselves about the hazards of nuclear waste, ozone depletion, and global warming. n287 Many critics have argued that scientists, despite their allegiance
[*78] to rational method, are nonetheless influenced by personal and political views. n288 Similarly, members of the public are a widely divergent group. One would not be surprised to see
Politicians and bureaucrats are two sets of the
adherence to vocal, though not always broadly representative,
constituencies may lead them to disfavor less advantaged socioeconomic groups when addressing
environmental concerns. n289 In order to understand a diversity of risk perception and to see how attitudes and social status affect the risk assessment process, we must
return to the feminist inquiry that explores the relationship between attitudes and identity. 1. The Diversity of Risk Perception A recent national survey, conducted by
James Flynn, Paul Slovic, and C.K. Mertz, measured the risk perceptions of a group of 1512 people that included numbers of men, women, whites, and nonwhites proportional to their ratios in society. n290 Respondents answered questions about the health risks of twenty-five environmental, technological,
and "life-style" hazards, including such hazards as ozone depletion, chemical waste, and cigarette smoking. n291 The researchers asked them to rate each hazard as posing "almost no
politicians, land developers, and blue-collar workers disagreeing about environmental standards for essentially non-scientific reasons.
non-scientific community that affect environmental standards in fundamental ways. Their
health risk," a "slight health risk," a "moderate health risk," or a "high health risk." The researchers then analyzed [*79] the responses to determine whether the randomly selected groups of
perceptions of risk generally differed on
the lines of gender and race. Women, for instance, perceived greater risk from most hazards than did men. n292 Furthermore, non-whites as a group perceived greater
white men, white women, non-white men, and non-white women differed in any way. The researchers found that
the most striking results appeared when the researchers considered
differences in gender and race together. They found that "white males tended to differ from everyone else in their attitudes and perceptions -- on
average, they perceived risks as much smaller and much more acceptable than did other people." n294 Indeed,
without exception, the pool of white men perceived each of the twenty-five hazards as less risky than did non-white men, white women, or non-white women. n295 Wary that
other factors associated with gender or race could be influencing their findings, the researchers later conducted several multiple regression
analyses to correct for differences in income, education, political orientation, the presence of children in the home, and age, among others. Yet even after
all corrections, "gender, race, and 'white male' [status] remained highly significant predictors" of
perceptions of risk. n296 2. Explaining the Diversity From a feminist perspective, these findings are important because they suggest that risk assessors,
politicians, and bureaucrats -- the large majority of whom are white men n297 -- may be acting on attitudes
about security and risk that women and people of color do not widely share. If this is so, white men, as the
"measurers of all things," have crafted a system of environmental protection that is biased toward their
subjective understandings of the world. n298 [*80] Flynn, Slovic, and Mertz speculate that white men's perceptions of risk may differ from those of others
because in many ways women and people of color are "more vulnerable, because they benefit less from many of [society's] technologies and
institutions, and because they have less power and control." n299 Although Flynn, Slovic, and Mertz are careful to acknowledge that they have not yet tested this
risk from most hazards than did whites. n293 Yet
hypothesis empirically, their explanation appears consistent with the life experiences of less empowered groups and comports with previous understandings about the roles of control and risk
perception. n300 Women and people of color, for instance, are more vulnerable to environmental threat in several ways. Such groups are sometimes more biologically vulnerable than are
white men. n301 People of color are more likely to live near hazardous waste sites, to breathe dirty air in urban communities, and to be otherwise exposed to environmental harm. n302
Women, because of their traditional role as primary caretakers, are more likely to be aware of the vulnerabilities of their children. n303 It makes sense that such vulnerabilities would give rise
to increased fear about risk. It is also very likely that women and people of color believe they benefit less from the technical institutions that create toxic byproducts. n304 Further, people may
be more likely to discount risk if they feel somehow compensated for the activity. n305 For this reason, Americans worry relatively little about driving automobiles, an activity with enormous
advantages in our large country but one that claims tens of thousands of lives per year. The researchers' final hypothesis -- that differences in perception can be explained by the lack of
"power and control" exercised by women and people of color -- suggests the importance that such factors as voluntariness and control over risk play in shaping perceptions. [*81] Risk
perception research frequently emphasizes the significance of voluntariness in evaluating risk. Thus, a person may view water-skiing as less risky than breathing polluted air because the former
is accepted voluntarily. n306 Voluntary risks are viewed as more acceptable in part because they are products of autonomous choice. n307 A risk accepted voluntarily is also one from which a
person is more likely to derive an individual benefit and one over which a person is more likely to retain some kind of control. n308 Some studies have found that people prefer voluntary risks
to involuntary risks by a factor of 1000 to 1. n309 Although environmental risks are generally viewed as involuntary risks to a certain degree, choice plays a role in assuming risks. White men
are still more likely to exercise some degree of choice in assuming environmental risks than other groups. Communities of color face greater difficulty in avoiding the placement of hazardous
facilities in their neighborhoods and are more likely to live in areas with polluted air and lead contamination. n310 Families of color wishing to buy their way out of such polluted
neighborhoods often find their mobility limited by housing discrimination, redlining by banks, and residential segregation. n311 The workplace similarly presents workers exposed to toxic
hazards (a disproportionate number of whom are minorities) n312 with impossible choices between health and work, or between sterilization and demotion. n313 Just as marginalized groups
have less choice in determining the degree of risk they will assume, they may feel less control over the risks they face. "Whether or not the risk is assumed voluntarily, people have greater
[*82] fear of activities with risks that appear to be outside their individual control." n314 For this reason, people often fear flying in an airplane more than driving a car, even though flying is
If white men are more complacent about public risks, it is perhaps because they are more
likely to have their hands on the steering wheel when such risks are imposed. White men still control the major
political and business institutions in this country. n316 They also dominate the sciences n317 and make up the vast majority
statistically safer. n315
of management staff at environmental agencies. n318 Women and people of color see this disparity and often lament their back-seat role in shaping environmental policy. n319 Thus, many
people of color in the environmental justice movement believe that environmental laws work to their disadvantage by design. n320 [*83] The toxic rivers of Mississippi's "Cancer Alley," n321
the extensive poisoning of rural Indian land, n322 and the mismanaged cleanup of the weapons manufacturing site in Hanford, Washington n323 only promote the feeling that environmental
policy in the United States sacrifices the weak for the benefit of the strong. In addition, the catastrophic potential that groups other than white men associate with a risk may explain the
individuals harbor particularly great fears of
catastrophe. n324 For this reason, earthquakes, terrorist bombings, and other disasters in which high
concentrations of people are killed or injured prove particularly disturbing to the lay public. Local environmental
threats involving toxic dumps, aging smelters, or poisoned wells also produce high concentrations of localized harm that can appear
catastrophic to those involved. n325 Some commentators contend that the catastrophic potential of a risk should influence
risk assessment in only minimal ways. n326 Considering public fear of catastrophes, they argue, will irrationally
lead policymakers to battle more dramatic but statistically less threatening hazards, while accepting
more harmful but more mundane hazards. n327 [*84] At least two reasons explain why the catastrophic potential
of environmental hazards must be given weight in risk assessment. First, concentrated and localized
environmental hazards do not simply harm individuals, they erode family ties and community
relationships. An onslaught of miscarriages or birth defects in a neighborhood, for instance, will create
community-wide stress that will debilitate the neighborhood in emotional, sociological, and economic
ways. n328 To ignore this communal harm is to underestimate severely the true risk involved. n329 Second,
because concentrated and localized environmental hazards tend to be unevenly distributed on the basis
of race and income level, any resulting mass injury to a threatened population takes on profound moral
perception gap between those groups and white males. Studies of risk perception show that, in general,
character. For this reason, Native Americans often characterize the military's poisoning of Indian land as genocide. n330 [*85] 3. Understanding Through Diversity Flynn,
Slovic, and Mertz challenge the traditional, static view of statistical risk with a richer, more vibrant image
involving relationships of power, status, and trust. n331 "In short, 'riskiness' means more to people than
'expected number of fatalities.'" n332 These findings affirm the feminist claim that public policy must consider both logic and
local experience in addressing a problem. n333 Current attempts to "re-educate" fearful communities with only risk assessments and scientific seminars are,
therefore, destined to fail. n334 By the same token, even dual approaches that combine science and experience will fall short if
the appeal to experience does not track local priorities and values. Cynthia Hamilton illustrates these points in her inspiring account of
how a South Central Los Angeles community group, consisting mainly of working-class women, battled a proposed solid waste incinerator. n335 At one point, the state sent out consultants
and environmental experts to put the community's fears into perspective. The consultants first appealed to the community's practical, experience-based side, by explaining how the new
incinerator would bring needed employment to the area and by offering $ 2 million in community development. n336 But the community group found the promise of "real development"
unrealistic and the cash gift insulting. n337 When experts then turned to quantifying the risks "scientifically" their attempts backfired again. Hamilton reports that "expert assurance that
health risks associated with dioxin exposure were less than those associated with 'eating peanut butter' unleashed a flurry of dissent. All of the women, young and old, working-class and
professional, had made peanut butter sandwiches for years." n338 The sandwich analogy, even assuming its statistical validity, could not convince the women because it did not consider other
valid risk factors (voluntariness, dread, and so on) and because it did not appear plausible in the group members' experience. In the end, Hamilton explains that the superficial explanations and
the
"science" of risk assessment, if it is to serve effectively, must include the voices of those typically excluded
from its practice.
sarcastic responses of the male "experts" left the women even more united and convinced that "working-class women's [*86] concerns cannot be dismissed." n339 Thus even
Answers to Neg
AT” Reinforces Gender Roles
The potential for reinforcement is not a reason to reject the Aff – it is a reason why
our framework is essential to keep the state focused on gender to Prevent the turns.
Koslowski and Duvander, 2018 - prof of Social and Political Science, Univ of Edinburgh and prof of
Sociology, Stockholm University [Alison and Ann-Zofie, Working Paper 2018:05 “Basic Income: The
Potential for Gendered Empowerment?”
https://www.su.se/polopoly_fs/1.406392.1539614783!/menu/standard/file/WP_2018_05.pdf Acc
1/28/23 TA]
5. Conclusions: Basic Income, a Radical or Conservative Policy with Regard to Gendered Empowerment? A basic income promises ‘real freedom’, or a freedom from
dictate; what role then for state intervention? The interplay between social policies and norms is of key interest to social scientists and policy makers. This is
particularly clear in the arena of public health, in which the interventionist state often plays a strong role in changing our behaviours, for e.g., with regard to
smoking, alcohol consumption, vaccinations, sugar consumption. There are other examples around environmental behaviours too, e.g. recycling and reduced use of
plastic bags and other plastics. Should the state not take action too with regard to gender equalities? Norms will develop: there is no such thing as total ‘real’
freedom. Legal frameworks however, such as parental leave policies can see changes to norms, even those as deeply embedded as parenting practices. In Sweden,
such statements are hardly controversial, but choice and gender equality are sometimes contrasted, and the limits to state intervention are constantly renegotiated.
Basic income would potentially change the boundaries for state intervention, which for many sounds intuitively positive, and may well bring
many benefits. However, if the state does not intervene regarding gender-equality, gender norms will be
determined by other less visible forces, such as the power dynamics within households. It is likely that a
universal basic income has the potential for empowerment for all, but for this to be achieved, attention
will need to be paid to its potential for gendered outcomes. The concerns raised here regarding the
limitations of empowerment for women from a basic income—particularly with regard to whom remains holding the baby, doing
the majority of domestic work and the majority of both formal and informal care work—are not in themselves arguments against the
implementation of a basic income. However, there are certainly strong reasons to not let basic income
replace other structures that have been shown to be relevant for gender equality, in particular the ones directed at
supporting families, such as parental leave and childcare services.
A basic income will not reinforce women’s domestic roles – that argument relies on
classist and racist assumptions
Zelleke, 2019 - Prof of Practice in Political Science at NYU Shanghai [Almaz, May 16, Phenomenal World, “Feminist
Theory, Gender Inequity, and Basic Income” Interview by Hana Beach, https://www.phenomenalworld.org/interviews/feminist-theory-gender-inequityand-basic-income/ Acc 2/23/23 TA]
In the feminist literature there is a divide between those who think that a basic income is a good thing
for women and those who think it will reinforce women’s disproportionate responsibility for care. They
are worried that people will say that women should stay in the domestic sphere because now they are
being compensated for doing so. What’s interesting to me about the welfare rights movements that originated in the 1960s and
’70s in the US and in Europe is how they inform this feminist debate. In those movements, the women who would
have been the immediate beneficiaries of an unconditional guaranteed income were absolutely in favor
of it. It was middle class and professional women in the 1970s who were against the idea of a basic income
and who thought it would be something that would relegate women to the domestic sphere. This
argument clearly doesn’t offer an intersectional understanding of feminism. When we think about what’s good for
women, we have to think about what’s good for women of different classes and what’s good for women of
different races and ethnicities. The outsourcing of childcare is one of the things that makes it possible
for middle class and professional women to have careers. When women join the labor market, it’s not the case that care work is
redistributed evenly among men and women. It’s being redistributed among women—specifically to poor women of color, to legal and undocumented immigrants,
who now have to leave their own families in the care of someone else, who is typically unpaid, and earn a wage by caring for other people’s families. Redistributing
care work in this way does not solve gender division of labor. We have to redistribute it to men as well. HB: In her famous essay “Welfare is a Women’s Issue,”
former chairperson of the National Welfare Rights Organization [NWRO] Johnnie Tillmon made that connection about domestic service work and the division of
labor—her analysis, gained from lived experience, was spot on, which I think says a lot about the importance of participatory policy design. AZ: It’s
absolutely important to hear from the people who are going to be the biggest beneficiaries of a basic
income or any other kind of policy of welfare reform. I’m drawn to the welfare rights movement because women were arguing for
increased and unconditional welfare benefits. Those demands are clearly important to the discourse around basic income today.
AT: Too Small (Gender)
Framework controls the size of the UBI - a gendered lens pushes a UBI to adequate
levels rather than minimally sufficient ones because it recognizes that unpaid labor is
necessary to make the minimal income sufficient.
Goldblatt, 2021 - Professor of Law, University of the Witwatersrand [Beth “Basic Income, Gender and
Human Rights” https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/U-of-OxHRH-J-Basic-IncomeGender-and-Human-Rights-1.pdf Acc 1/28/23 TA]
Adequacy is an essential element of the right to social security. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural rights explained
that: Benefits, whether in cash or in kind, must be adequate in amount and duration in order that everyone may
realize his or her rights to family protection and assistance, an adequate standard of living and adequate access to health care …
States parties must also pay full respect to the principle of human dignity contained in the preamble of the Covenant, and the principle of non-discrimination, so as
to avoid any adverse effect on the levels of benefits and the form in which they are provided. 31 Adequate
social protection that is
attentive to gender must ensure that income support takes account of the position of women within
households, women’s unpaid work and care obligations, women’s lower earnings and savings, and
women’s position in the workforce which is often informal and precarious. What constitutes adequacy and whether there
are minimum core levels of provision required by rights has been debated within the field of social and economic rights .32 In addition, valid concerns
have been raised with a human rights emphasis on sufficiency leading to efforts to tackle poverty
without also ensuring distributive equality.33 A substantive equality approach to social protection rights
requires structural responses to systemic inequality via social, economic and political reconfigurations that lead to fundamental
changes to gender, class and other relations.34 It thus requires policies aimed at overcoming inequality rather than just
providing minimum levels of poverty relief. This idea of adequacy should be central to the human rights
lens used to consider questions of the theory, design and politics of a basic income. In addition, adequacy must be understood as a global issue since affordability
and economic choices facing states require international cooperation and assistance, as required by the ICESCR.35
Even a moderate UBI recognizes the value of reproductive work because it is paid
unconditionally.
Lawhon and McCreary, 2020 - profs of Geography at Universities of Oklahoma and Florida State
[Mary and Tyler, March, Antipode – A Radical Journal of Geography “Beyond Jobs vs Environment: On
the Potential of Universal Basic Income to Reconfigure Environmental Politics”
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/anti.12604 Acc 3/31/23 TA]
Equally importantly, a UBI provides support for those undertaking work that is poorly remunerated in
existing economies. Indeed, as feminists such as Federici (2012) and James (2012) have long argued, the reproduction of capitalist
workforces relies upon the exploitation of women’s unpaid work in the home. Those working as migrants and in the
service industry are equally central to ongoing production and reproduction, but undervalued in existing political economies. A UBI is normatively
different than arguments in favour of payment for specific services; as an unconditional grant, it is
received whether one works or labours. In practice, however, it enables participation in and greater valuation of
reproductive activities. While it is difficult to conceive of a UBI that would replace the standard of living of traditionally unionised, white, male
industrial labour force, a moderate UBI could effectively increase incomes and reduce the dependency of more
highly exploited populations doing socially reproductive work.
AT: Women will Exit the Workforce
A basic income will not cause women to leave the labor market – other factors are
more important and existing welfare programs give much worse disincentives to
women workers.
Cantillon and McLean, 2016 - Glasgow Caledonian University and UC Berkeley [Sara and Caitlin, Sept 3,
The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, Basic Income Guarantee: The Gender Impact within Households," Available at:
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/jssw/vol43/iss3/7 Acc 1/28/23 TA]
At the same time, predictions
of a drop in women's labor force participation may also be overstated.
Sociological and heterodox economic perspectives have emphasized broader motivations other than
income regarding labor force participation, such as status, satisfaction, and other less tangible benefits. The incentive for unemployed
persons to take up employment is most often measured using the "replacement rate" (RR)—the ratio between net income out of work and net income when in
work, and research in this area reinforces the idea of work or employment being more than just income. Empirical
data shows that there are many
choose to be working,
even if they could be close to or even better off financially by remaining unemployed. BIG advocates
(Fitzpatrick, 1999; Van Parijs, 1995) further point out that existing systems of social security have substantial
disincentives to work embodied in unemployment and poverty traps where low-income households face
severe reductions in benefits for every dollar they earn. Combined with logistical problems, financial costs of entering work, and
uncertainty regarding stability of employment, there is a huge incentive to forgo work in favor of benefits, if choosing
one reduces income from the other. BIG reduces such disincentives, thus potentially making the most
vulnerable women better off, with greater rather than lesser incentive to engage in paid labor. This issue
who choose to work, despite facing replacement ratios of close to or over 100 percent (Callan et al., 2011). That is, they
highlights the role of women's diversity in creating ambiguous effects of BIG, with some women likely to be gainers and some losers under any reform (see also
Robeyns, 2001).
AT: Social Services Turn
Non-Unique – social programs are being cut now due to GOP opposition
Sammon, 2023 - Slate politics writer [Alexander March 07, Slate “The Incredible Shrinking Power of Joe Biden’s Welfare State”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/03/snap-benefits-food-stamps-biden-welfare-poverty.html Acc 6/14/23 TA]
The worst may be yet to come. Every five years, Congress negotiates the Farm Bill, which is the country’s largest agricultural and food policy omnibus. It’s up for
negotiation again this fall. In the last go-around in 2018, Republicans tried to gore SNAP benefits during its deliberation, at the behest of President Trump, but failed to do so. It’s no
secret that slashing SNAP is yet again on the GOP’s wishlist. SNAP has also come up as a potential
hostage in the debt limit fight. After the party’s vocal pledge during Biden’s State of the Union not to cut Social Security or Medicare—and the party’s quasi-religious
respect for the largest possible military budget—SNAP remains one of the only major social services that might be cut in the name of a “balanced budget.” For President Biden, the
quiet expiration of enhanced SNAP marks yet another disappearing act in his once vaunted welfare
state. The Child Tax Credit, a signature Biden policy in the American Rescue Plan Act, halved child poverty. But it expired with relatively little
pushback at the end of 2021. Enhanced unemployment benefits expired three months before that. Now,
Medicaid is next. The continuous enrollment provision that was added to Medicaid during COVID, which has
allowed Americans to remain enrolled in the program without constant eligibility reassessments, is set to expire on March 31. It is estimated that between 5 million and 14 million
people will promptly lose Medicaid coverage once that change is effectuated. And despite the fact that these programs are effective and popular, there has been shockingly little vocal
In the first two years of the Biden administration, some very good
progress was made in the so-called war on poverty. But those gains are being given back quickly. “This is a steep and
precipitous drop in benefit amounts,” said Ellen Vollinger, SNAP director for the Food Research and Action Center. “There would’ve
opposition from Democrats to the expiration of these benefits.
been a smoother offramp if people had had more months to plan. The decision was made at the end of December, and getting the word out was a challenge.”
The negative assumes that the government budget is fixed, but a UBI increases
support for increasing the budget.
Hanna and Olken, 2018 - prof of South-East Asia Studies and prof of Economics at MIT [Rema and
Benjamin, Harvard Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall “Universal Basic Incomes versus Targeted Transfers: Anti-Poverty Programs in Developing Countries”
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.32.4.201 Acc 6/12/23 TA]
In choosing between a broader approach like a universal basic income and a
more narrowly targeted approach, several other important considerations arise in addition to inclusion and exclusion errors.
We consider four issues: breadth of political support, horizontal equity, transparency, and labor market distortions. First, we have focused on the case where
the government has a fixed budget available for the transfer program. However, political support for
redistribution may be much higher if everyone gets a “piece of the pie” (Gelbach and Pritchett 2002). Thus, as
inclusion error increases, the overall amount of funding available for transfers may increase. As the
elasticity between the total budget and the number of beneficiaries increases, universal transfers
become more attractive (Klasen and Lange 2016). Second, the principle of horizontal equity holds that each person who
has the same relevant conditions should be treated the same. Transfer programs using proxy-means
tests will have errors in the prediction algorithm—and so they do not treat all people with the same utility of receiving the benefits
identically. For programs where the income cutoff for providing benefits is near-zero, horizontal equity violations are (mechanically) close to zero, because almost no households
Other Challenges with Targeted Transfers
receive the program. Violations of horizontal equity are also mechanically zero for universal basic income: by definition, if all households receive the transfer, then all households are treated
the same.
A UBI would be in addition to other social programs, not replacement – that is what
universal means
Tereshchenko, 2023 – Political Scientist at the Panteion - University of Athens [Sofia, Feb 23 “The Global
Importance Of Universal Basic Income (UBI) Manifestation - Universal Basic Income And Why It’s A Solution Needed Right Now”
https://ssrn.com/abstract=4368245 Acc 3/23/23 TA]
A Universal Basic Income is one where every person in society is guaranteed a set amount of money to
maintain their basic needs. The UBI does not take the place of other social welfare programs, but rather
supplements them. This proposal is most often discussed as a solution for economic security, where
people would no longer have to work for money to access their basic needs or steal…by raising the criminal rates high. The UBI
could be implemented through various systems: a tax on capital, an increase in minimum wage or even an increase in the general price level. One of the most promising implementations
would be an increase in the minimum wage, which increases as productivity increases (and therefore decreases unemployment). And is adjusted to keep the same percentage of income over
time.
AT: War Impacts
Sexual violence happens on a continuum – focus on systemic impacts is key since
patriarchal warmaking causes endless violence.
Sheperd ‘9 [Laura J. Dept of Political Science and International Studies, U of Birmingham (UK),
“Gender, Violence and Global Politics: Contemporary Debates in Feminist Security Studies,” Political
Studies Review, V7 I2, Apr]
According to conventional accounts of international relations (IR), scholars focus on war (predominantly as a means to providing
the sovereign state with security) and the existence of war's corollary is a foundational assumption that goes largely unquestioned. Peace must exist, for international
relations are not characterised by perpetual conflict. However, peace
is implicitly defined, in dichotomous terms, by the absence of violent
conflict, as 'not-war'. Of more analytical interest is conflict, which is always a possibility and which, moreover, occurs between states. International
relations as a discipline, narrowly conceived, is largely unconcerned with activities that occur within the state. Minimally, feminist and other critical approaches to IR
seek to correct such disciplinary myopia. While classical realism theorises the political actor –Hans Morgenthau's 'political man' (1973, pp. 15–6) – in order to
construct the state as actor, the now dominant neo-realism abstracts the human subject from its disciplinary musings, leading to the infamous 'black box' model of
the state. Early feminist scholarship challenged this assumption as well, arguing that individuals, as human subjects in all their messy complexity, are an integral part
of international relations (see Shepherd, 2007, pp. 240–1). Attention
to the human subject in I/international R/relations – or, as Christine Sylvester
phrases it, 'relations international', to emphasise the embedded nature of all kinds of relations in the international sphere, including power relations and gender
relations (Sylvester, 1994, p. 6; see also Enloe, 1996) – allows
critical scholars to look beyond the disciplinary obsession with
war. Further, it allows us to investigate one of the simplest insights of feminist IR, which is also one of the most
devastating: the war/peace dichotomy is gendered, misleading and potentially pathological. In this essay, I address each of
these concerns in turn, developing a critique of the war/peace dichotomy that is foundational to conventional approaches to IR through a review of three recent
publications in the field of feminist security studies. These texts are Cynthia Enloe's (2007) Globalization and Militarism, David Roberts' (2008) Human Insecurity, and
Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics by Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry (2008). Drawing on the insights of these books, I ask first how
violence is understood in global politics, with specific reference to the gendered disciplinary blindnesses that frequently characterise mainstream approaches. Second,
I demonstrate how a focus on war and peace can neglect to take into account the politics of everyday violence: the violences of the in-between times that
international politics recognises neither as 'war' nor 'peace' and the violences inherent to times of peace that are overlooked in the study of war. Finally, I argue that
feminist security studies offers an important corrective to the foundational assumptions of IR, which
themselves can perpetuate the very instances of violence that they seek to redress. If we accept the core insights of
feminist security studies – the centrality of the human subject, the importance of particular configurations of masculinity and femininity, and the gendered conceptual
framework that underpins the discipline of IR – we
are encouraged to envisage a rather different politics of the global. From
Boudica to Bhopal As Sjoberg and Gentry recount (2008, pp. 38–9), Boudica was an Iceni queen who led an uprising against the Roman forces occupying the British
Isles circa 61 AD. Prior to launching the attack, Boudica's refusal to allow a Roman general to claim ownership of her land resulted in the rape of her two daughters as
punishment. However, 'many inherited tales about Boudica do not emphasise her personal or political motivations, but the savage and unwomanly brutality of her
actions' (Sjoberg and Gentry, 2008, p. 39). Almost two thousand years later and half a planet away, a toxic gas leak in 1984 at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India
caused the immediate deaths of approximately 3,000 people and left tens of thousands suffering the after-effects for decades (Roberts, 2008, p. 10). At first reading,
little links these two accounts of quite different forms of violence. The first is an instance of violent resistance against imperial oppression, and Boudica has been
vilified, her efforts delegitimised, in much the same way as many actors in 'small wars' tend to be in global politics today (see Barkawi, 2004). The second is perhaps
more usefully seen as the result of structural violence, following Johan Galtung's explanation of the same, as 'violence where there is no such actor' (cited in Roberts,
2008, p. 18). However, by asking questions about Boudica and Bhopal that are born of a 'feminist curiosity' (Enloe, 2007, p. 1, p. 11), these texts demonstrate
connections beyond the simplistic equation that is applicable to both: actor/structure plus violence equals death. In Human Insecurity, Roberts poses the question,
'What is violence?' (2008, p. 17). This is a question rarely asked in international relations. Violence is war: large-scale,
state-dominated, much studied, war. However, the three texts under review here all offer more nuanced theories of violence that focus analytical
attention on complex constructions of agency (institutional and international), structure, and the global context that is product and productive of such violence.
Through an intricate and beautifully accessible analysis of modernity –'that pot of gold at the end of the global rainbow' (Enloe,
2007, p. 64) – Enloe encourages her readers to seek the connections between globalisation and militarisation,
arguing that at the heart of this nexus lie important questions about violence and security. Roberts notes a broad
dissatisfaction with the concept of 'human security' (2008, pp. 14–7), offering instead his investigative lens of 'human insecurity', defined as 'avoidable civilian deaths,
occurring globally, caused by social, political and economic institutions and structures, built and operated by humans and which could feasibly be changed' (p. 28).
Placing the human at the centre of concerns about security immediately challenges a conventional statebased approach to security, as Enloe explains. In a convincing account of the hard-fought expansion of the concept of security, mapped on to strategic
and organisational gains made by various feminist organisations, Enloe reminds us that if we take seriously the lives of women – their
understandings of security – as well as on-the-ground workings of masculinity and femininity, we will be
able to produce more meaningful and more reliable analyses of 'security'– personal, national and global
(Enloe, 2007, p. 47). This latter quote typifies an approach for which Enloe has become somewhat famous. In the early 1980s, Enloe began asking the questions for
which she is rightly acknowledged as a key figure in feminist security studies, including Does Khaki Become You? (Enloe, 1983) and 'where are the women?' (Enloe,
2000; see also Enloe, 2004). Inspired by her own curiosity about the roles played by women and the functions performed by gender in the militarisation of civilian life,
Enloe has explored prostitution, marriage, welfare and war making with an eye to the representation (both political and symbolic) of women. In Globalization and
Militarism she offers detailed vignettes that illuminate just how interwoven violence is with the quest for (various types of) security, and demands that nothing is left
unquestioned in a critical analysis of these concepts. Even baby socks (embossed with tiny fighter planes, a gift to the parent of a small boy) have something to tell us
about gender, militarism and the casual representations of violence and war that society accepts (Enloe, 2007, pp. 143–4). Following a similar logic, although he
initially defines human insecurity as avoidable civilian deaths, Roberts focuses on 'preventable female deaths ... and avoidable deaths in children under five' (2008, p.
31). While this conflation of 'civilian' with 'women and children' is rather problematic (see Carpenter, 2006), in asking not only, where are the women? but also, why
are they dying in such disproportionate numbers? Roberts enhances his critique of 'most
security studies ... [that] largely [miss] the scale of
avoidable human misery and avoidable human death' (2008, p. 4). As mentioned above, Roberts uses Galtung's concept of structural violence
to draw attention to the manifest ways in which an increasingly interconnected global system relies on gender and
violence (and gendered violence) for its perpetuation: 'The process of globalization, to which few are ideologically or otherwise
opposed, is an essential conveyor and articulator of the masculinity that underpins andrarchy' (Roberts, 2008, p. 157). Whereas Enloe offers a persuasive and
accessible account of patriarchy, a concept familiar to feminist and non-feminist scholars alike (Enloe, 2007, pp. 66–8), Roberts suggests 'andrarchy' as an alternative,
which he defines as 'the gender-partisan ideological domination and rule structure that determines and sustains the general relative power of males over females
globally' (Roberts, 2008, p. 140). However, it is difficult to see how this reformulation either differs substantively from patriarchy as an analytical tool or assists in the
construction of an alternative theory of global violence that centralises the individual, and therefore takes gender seriously, in that it seems to essentialise violent
actors (males) and violated victims (females). In contrast, Enloe's
explanation of patriarchy challenges such essentialism as its
first point of critical intervention. That is, the assumption of essential differences between men and women
is part of patriarchal ideology, feeding into stereotypical notions of how such men and women should
behave, which in turn constitute recognisable discourses of gender: sets of narratives about masculinity
and femininity and how these are, in general, respectively privileged and marginalised. The most theoretically
coherent account of gender and violence offered in these three texts comes from Sjoberg and Gentry and employs the notion of discourse to great effect. Whereas
Roberts seeks to map out a consciously structural account of global violence, where the structure in question is a hybrid of andrarchy and a 'rapacious, increasingly
competitive and hyper-masculine' neoliberalism (Roberts, 2008, p. 118), Sjoberg and Gentry offer a more sophisticated analysis of structure and agency in their
'relational autonomy framework' that accounts for both individual agency and structural constraint (Sjoberg and Gentry, 2008, pp. 189–98). When
people
perform acts of political violence, they argue, this is a conscious choice, but crucially individuals 'choose within
a specified spectrum of socially acceptable choices' (p. 190). 'In its simplest form, relational autonomy is the recognition that freedom of
action is defined and limited by social relationships' (p. 194) and this has profound implications for the study of violence in global politics. Sjoberg and Gentry use this
insight to demonstrate that women's
violence in global politics is rendered unintelligible, through narrative
representations of the perpetrators as mothers, monsters or whores (in media discourse and academic discussion), rather than
as autonomous agents. From the abuses of prisoners held at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, via the 'black widows' of Chechnya, to female perpetrators of genocidal
violence in Rwanda, the authors show how representations of women's violence conform to and further confirm the stereotypes of violent women as either mothers
(supporting or vengeful), monsters or sexually deviant whores (Sjoberg and Gentry, 2008, pp. 30–49). The very different theories of violence outlined in these three
texts all contribute to the development of a more comprehensive and holistic understanding of violence in global politics. By insisting that international relations are
also gender relations – by demanding that we recognise that states are an analytical abstraction and politics is practised or performed by gendered bodies – all of the
authors put forward theories of violence that are corrective of gender blindness, in that the violences in question are simultaneously gendered and gendering (see
Shepherd, 2008, pp. 49–54). They are gendered because they have different impacts on male and female bodies (Enloe, 2007, p. 13), both materially as people
experience violence differently depending on their gender (and race, class, sexuality and so on) and also discursively, as what we expect of men and women in terms
of their behaviours, violent and otherwise, is limited by the meaning(s) ascribed to male and female bodies by society. Regarding the former, Roberts proposes that
we term the global victimisation of women 'structural femicide' (Roberts, 2008, p. 65), but does not sufficiently engage with the question of whether defining
gendered violence as violence against women (and children) functions to constitute the subject of 'woman' as a perpetual victim, in need of protection and lacking in
agency (Shepherd, 2008, p. 41). In contrast, Sjoberg and Gentry neatly articulate the interplay between material and discursive violence as they write a theory that
accounts 'for people's impact on global politics and for the impact of narratives others construct for and about them' (Sjoberg and Gentry, 2008, p. 216, emphasis in
original). Thus, violence is gendering as our understanding of politics is in part reproduced through violent actions. Through discursive violence against individuals –
for example, representing Chechen women suicide terrorists as 'black widows', which demands that they are attributed the characteristics of the venomous and
deadly black widow spider and, further, that their violence is grounded in familial loss, 'born directly of a desire for vengeance for the deaths of their husbands and
sons' (Sjoberg and Gentry, 2008, p. 100) rather than as the result of a process of political decision making – our understanding of that individual and of the act of
violence itself is produced. Similarly, through material acts of violence, discourses of gender are given physical form; the detainees at Abu Ghraib who were forced to
simulate oral sex with each other were forced to do so in part because of crude cultural understandings of homosexuality as deviant and homosexuals as lesser men –
that is, as women. To force a man to perform oral sex on another man is to undermine his masculinity and simultaneously to reinforce the gendered power relations
that claim privilege for masculinity over femininity, heterosexuality over homosexuality – power relations that render such an act intelligible in the first instance.
Such understandings of violence are beyond the remit of conventional state-based approaches to
international relations. However, 'it is by tracking the gendered assumptions about how to wield feminization to humiliate male[s]' (Enloe, 2007, p.
115) and how to represent gendered individuals in such a way as to render some acts of violence intelligible
as political and others as monstrous that we can begin to piece together a useful feminist account of global
violence, which is a necessary component of understanding security. Everyday Violence and In-Between Days In addition to
questioning what violence is, how it is represented and with what effects, feminist
security studies scholarship also asks which violences are
considered worthy of study and when these violences occur. Expanding the concept of violence that underpins
feminist analysis, as outlined above, allows us to take seriously what Arthur Kleinman (2000) refers to as 'the violences of
everyday life'. Beyond a narrow focus on war and state-based violence lies a plethora of everyday
violences that feminist security studies seeks to address. In the field of security studies the broadening and deepening of the concept of security, such that it is
no longer assumed to apply only to the sovereign state, has demonstrated the multiple insecurities experienced by individuals and social collectives (Booth, 2005, pp.
14–5). The development of the concept of 'human security' largely took place within the parameters of a wider disciplinary debate over the appropriate referent
object for security studies (the individual, society, the state) and the types of threat to the referent object that would be recognised. In a move similar to Ken Booth's
(1991) reformulation of security as emancipation, Roberts' quest for individual empowerment seeks to overcome the 'élite-legitimized disequilibrium' that results in
the manifest insecurity of the majority of the world's population (Roberts, 2008, p. 185). As
might be expected, the violences Roberts identifies are
innumerable. In addition to the physical violences of 'infanticide, maternal mortality, intimate ("domestic", "honour" and "dowry") killings
and lethal female genital mutilation; and avoidable deaths in children under five' (Roberts, 2008, p. 31), his analysis attacks the institutional
structures of the dominant international financial institutions (pp. 117–35) and the andrarchal and neoliberal
discourses that sustain them (pp. 136–58). In short, Roberts' answer to the question of which violences matter in
global politics is quite simple: all of them. However, while studies of human security, he argues, seek to provide the human with security, his
reformulated analytic takes as its starting point human insecurity; that is, he starts with the threat(s) to the sovereign subject rather than the subject's ontological
condition. Roberts suggests that this circumvents the disciplinary definitional problem with human security – identified by Roland Paris (2001), Edward Newman
(2001; 2004) and others – but I cannot see how this is the case, given that the answer to the question 'what is it that humans do to make the world a more dangerous
and dysfunctional place?' (Roberts, 2008, p. 28) is also quite simple: we live in it. Thus Roberts' analytic seems to suffer the same lack of definitional clarity – and
therefore policy relevance – that he ascribes to more conventional approaches; it is no easier to identify, quantify and ultimately reduce the threats experienced by
coexisting human subjects than it is to provide those human subjects with security, if security can first be defined as freedom from fear or want. I do not espouse
some construction of human nature (if such a thing were to exist) that assumes essential selfishness and a propensity for violence, nor do I assume that security is a
zero-sum game, in that one person's security must always be at the expense of another's, but I recognise that even the most well-intentioned security policy can have
unforeseen and sometimes disastrous effects. Sometimes, moreover, as Sjoberg and Gentry demonstrate, the decision to perform acts of political violence that are a
source of insecurity for the intended victims can be understood if not condoned. Enloe's analytical remit is similarly wide-ranging to Roberts', in that she focuses on
processes – globalisation and militarism – that are inherently violent. However, although Enloe also insists that all violences should count in the study of global
politics, she grounds this claim in an analysis of specific sites of violence and demonstrates with startling clarity just how everyday items – for example, sneakers – are
both globalised and militarised: Threaded through virtually every sneaker you own is some relationship to masculinized militaries. Locating factories in South Korea [in
the 1960s and 1970s] was a good strategic decision in the eyes of those Oregon-headquartered male Nike executives because of the close alliance between male
policymakers in Washington and Seoul. It was a relationship – unequal but intimate – based on their shared anticommunism, their shared commitment to waging the
Cold War, and their shared participation in an ambitious international military alliance (Enloe, 2007, p. 28). By drawing her readers' attention to the ways in which
discourses of gender (ideas about how 'proper' men and women should behave) function, Enloe reminds us that adhering to ideals of masculinity and femininity is
both productive of violence and is a violence in itself, a violence against the empowered human subject. 'Ideas
matter', she concludes, ideas about
modernity, security, violence, threat, trust. 'Each of these ideas is fraught with blatant and subtle
presumptions about masculinity and femininity. Ideas about both masculinity and femininity matter. This makes a feminist curiosity a
necessity' (Enloe, 2007, p. 161). While conventional studies of IR and security may be willing to concede that ideas matter (see Finnemore and Sikkink, 2001), paying
close attention to the work that gender does allows for a fuller understanding of why it is that particular violences fall outside the traditional parameters of study. As
to the question of when violence is worthy of study, all three texts implicitly or explicitly draw on the popular feminist phrase: 'the personal is political'. This slogan
neatly encapsulates the feminist critique of a supposed foundational divide between the private and the public realms of social life. In arguing that the personal is
political, feminist theory refuses to accept that there are instances of human behaviour or situations in social life that can or should be bracketed from study. At its
simplest, this critique led to the recognition of 'domestic violence' as a political, rather than a personal issue (see, for example Moore, 2003; Youngs, 2003), forming
the foundation for critical studies of gendered violence in times of war and in times of peace that would otherwise have been ignored. Crucially, Enloe extended the
boundaries of critique to include the international, imbuing the phrase with new analytical vitality when she suggested, first, that the phrase itself is palindromic (that
is, that the political is also personal, inextricably intertwined with the everyday) and, second, that the personal is international just as the international is personal.
'The international is personal' implies that governments depend upon certain kinds of allegedly private relationships in order to conduct their foreign affairs. ... To
operate in the international arena, governments seek other governments' recognition of their sovereignty; but they also depend on ideas about masculinised dignity
and feminised sacrifice to sustain that sense of autonomous nationhood (Enloe, 2000, pp. 196–7). These ideas about dignity and sacrifice are not neatly contained
within the temporal boundaries of any given war, nor are they incidental to the practice of warfare. Further, there is of course also the question of who gets to define
or declare war, or peace. While some of the violent women whose actions are analysed by Sjoberg and Gentry perform their violences in wartime (for example,
Lynndie England, who received the most attention from global media of the women involved in prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib; see Sjoberg and Gentry, 2008, pp. 67–
70), others are fighting wars that are not sanctioned by the international community (such as the Chechen women [pp. 97–111] and female Palestinian suicide
bombers [pp. 112–40]). As discussed above, ideas about masculinity and femininity, dignity and sacrifice may not only be violent in themselves, but are also the
product/productive of physical violences. With this in mind, the
feminist argument that 'peacetime' is analytically misleading is
a valid one. Of interest are the 'in-between days' and the ways in which labelling periods of war or peace
as such can divert attention away from the myriad violences that inform and reinforce social behaviour.
[W]ar can surely never be said to start and end at a clearly defined moment. Rather, it seems part of a
continuum of conflict, expressed now in armed force, now in economic sanctions or political pressure.
A time of
supposed peace may come later to be called 'the pre-war period'. During the fighting of a war, unseen by the foot soldiers under fire, peace processes are often already at work. A time of postwar reconstruction, later, may be re-designated as an inter bellum– a mere pause between wars (Cockburn and Zarkov, cited in El Jack, 2003, p. 9). Feminist security studies interrogates the pauses
between wars, and the political processes – and practices of power – that demarcate times as such. In doing so, not only is the remit of recognisable violence (violence worthy of study) expanded, but so too are the parameters of what counts as IR. Everyday violences and acts of everyday resistance ('a fashion show, a tour, a small display of children's books' in Enloe, 2007, pp. 117–20)
are the stuff of relations international and, thus, of a comprehensive understanding of security. In the following section I outline the ways in which taking these claims seriously allows us to engage critically with the representations of international relations that inform our research, with potentially profound implications. The Violent Reproduction of the International As well as conceiving
of gender as a set of discourses, and violence as a means of reproducing and reinforcing the relevant discursive limits, it is possible to see security as a set of discourses, as I have argued more fully elsewhere (Shepherd, 2007; 2008; see also Shepherd and Weldes, 2007). Rather than pursuing the study of security as if it were something that can be achieved either in absolute, partial or
relative terms, engaging with security as discourse enables the analysis of how these discourses function to reproduce, through various strategies, the domain of the international with which IR is self-consciously concerned. Just as violences that are gendering reproduce gendered subjects, on this view states, acting as authoritative entities, perform violences, but violences, in the name
of security, also perform states. These processes occur simultaneously, and across the whole spectrum of social life: an instance of rape in war is at once gendering of the individuals involved and of the social collectivities – states, communities, regions – they feel they represent (see Bracewell, 2000); building a fence in the name of security that separates people from their land and
extended families performs particular kinds of violence (at checkpoints, during patrols) and performs particular subject identities (of the state authority, of the individuals affected), all of which are gendered. All of the texts under discussion in this essay argue that it is imperative to explore and expose gendered power relations and, further, that doing so not only enables a rigorous
critique of realism in IR but also reminds us as scholars of the need for such a critique. The critiques of IR offered by feminist scholars are grounded in a rejection of neo-realism/realism as a dominant intellectual framework for academics in the discipline and policy makers alike. As Enloe reminds us, 'the government-centred, militarized version of national security [derived from a realist
framework] remains the dominant mode of policy thinking' (Enloe, 2007, p. 43). Situating gender as a central category of analysis encourages us to 'think outside the "state security box"' (p. 47) and to remember that 'the "individuals" of global politics do not work alone, live alone or politic alone – they do so in interdependent relationships with others' (Sjoberg and Gentry, 2008, p. 200)
that are inherently gendered. One of the key analytical contributions of all three texts is the way in which they all challenge what it means to be 'doing' IR, by recognising various forms of violence, interrogating the public/private divide and demanding that attention is paid to the temporal and physical spaces in-between war and peace. Feminist security studies should not simply be seen
as 'women doing security', or as 'adding women to IR/security studies', important as these contributions are. Through their theorising, the authors discussed here reconfigure what 'counts' as IR, challenging orthodox notions of who can 'do' IR and what 'doing' IR means. The practices of power needed to maintain dominant configurations of international relations are exposed, and
critiquing the productive power of realism as a discourse is one way in which the authors do this. Sjoberg and Gentry pick up on a recent theoretical shift in Anglo-American IR, from system-level analysis to a recognition that individuals matter. However, as they rightly point out, the individuals who are seen to matter are not gendered relational beings, but rather reminiscent of Hobbes'
construction of the autonomous rational actor. '[T]he narrowness of the group that [such an approach] includes limits its effectiveness as an interpretive framework and reproduces the gender, class and race biases in system-level international relationship scholarship' (Sjoberg and Gentry 2008, p. 200, emphasis added). Without paying adequate attention to the construction of
individuals as gendered beings, or to the reproduction of widely held ideas about masculine and feminine behaviours, Sjoberg and Gentry remind us that we will ultimately fail 'to see and deconstruct the increasingly subtle, complex and disguised ways in which gender pervades international relations and global politics' (2008, p. 225). In a similar vein, Roberts notes that 'human security is
marginalised or rejected as inauthentic [because] it is not a reflection of realism's (male) agendas and priorities' (2008, p. 169). The 'agendas and priorities' identified by Roberts and acknowledged by Sjoberg and Gentry as being productive of particular biases in scholarship are not simply 'academic' matters, in the pejorative sense of the term. As Roberts argues, 'Power relationships of
inequality happen because they are built that way by human determinism of security and what is required to maintain security (p. 171). Realism, as academic discourse and as policy guideline, has material effects. Although his analysis employs an unconventional definition of the term 'social construction' (seemingly interchangeable with 'human agency') and rests on a novel
interpretation of the three foundational assumptions of realism (Roberts, 2008, pp. 169–77), the central point that Roberts seeks to make in his conclusion is valid: 'it is a challenge to those who deny relationships between gender and security; between human agency (social construction) and lethal outcome' (p. 183). In sum, all three texts draw their readers to an inescapable, and – for
the conventional study of IR – a devastating conclusion: the dominance of neo-realism/realism and the state-based study of security that derives from this is potentially pathological, in that it is in part productive of the violences it seeks to ameliorate. I suggest that critical engagement with orthodox IR theory is necessary for the intellectual growth of the discipline, and considerable
insight can be gained by acknowledging the relevance of feminist understandings of gender, power and theory. The young woman buying a T-shirt from a multinational clothing corporation with her first pay cheque, the group of young men planning a stag weekend in Amsterdam, a group of students attending a demonstration against the bombing of Afghanistan – studying these
significant actions currently falls outside the boundaries of doing security studies in mainstream IR and I believe these boundaries need contesting. As Marysia Zalewski argues: International politics is what we make it to be ... We need to rethink the discipline in ways that will disturb the existing boundaries of both that which we claim to be relevant in international politics and what we
assume to be legitimate ways of constructing knowledge about the world (Zalewski 1996, p. 352, emphasis in original). Conclusion: 'Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend' (Mao Tse-Tung) In this essay, I have used the analysis of three contemporary publications in the field of feminist security studies to demonstrate three significant sets of analytical
contributions that such scholarship makes to the discipline of IR. Beyond the war/peace dichotomy that is frequently assumed to be definitive of the discipline, we find many and various forms of violence, occurring in and between temporally distinct periods of conflict, which are the product/productive of socially acceptable modes of gendered behaviour, ways of being in the world as a
woman or man. I have also argued that critical engagement with conventional, state-based approaches to (national) security must persist as the academic discourses we write are complicit in the construction of the global as we understand it. Further, 'if all experience is gendered, analysis of gendered identities is an imperative starting point in the study of political identities and practice'
'Tracking militarization and fostering demilitarization will call for cooperative
investigations, multiple skills and the appreciation of diverse perspectives' (2007, p. 164). While there has been
intense intra-disciplinary debate within contemporary feminist security studies over the necessary 'feminist credentials'
of some gendered analyses, it is important to recognise the continual renewal and analytical vigour brought to the
field by such debates.
(Peterson, 1999, p. 37). To this end, I conclude by suggesting that we take seriously Enloe's final comment:
Their DA impact invisibilizes gender as a structuring logic of conflict and violence
which makes their impacts inevitable
Applin et al ’23 (Samantha, Assistant Professor @ SUNY Cortland, John-Michael Simpson, Assistant
Professor @ SUNY Cortland, and Anna Curtis, Associate Professor @ SUNY Cortland, “Men Have Gender
and Women Are People: A Structural Approach to Gender and Violence”, Violence Against Women,
2023, Vol. 29(5) 1097–1118)
Research in the social sciences on violence that is not identified as “gendered” often falls into the
bracket of “mainstream” violence research. Such research focuses chiefly on incidences involving
boys/men, although this may not be acknowledged forthrightly in these analyses, and a systematic
structural gender analysis is commonly missing from mainstream violence research. The de-emphasis on
gender in such research occurs in the context of patriarchal gender systems in which researchers are
invariably situated. Empirically, it is quite clear that violence is a highly gendered social occurrence, so
feminist explanations provide context for the continued discounting of its centrality in core
explanations. The gendered nature of violence is identifiable “through perpetrators’ characteristics,
their decision-making, and its effects,” as Kaiser and Hagan (2015, p. 79) noted in a study on genocide in
Darfur, wherein they concluded that all studies of such offenses should consider gender. Given that
research focusing on the violence of boys/men is largely constitutive of “mainstream” social science
inquiries into violence, the absence of a systematic structural gender analysis is both endemic and
largely unacknowledged, a theoretical shortcoming that is aided by multiple conventions within the
social sciences. Beyond the segregation of topics on women, gender, and “gendered” violence into
specialized subareas, these conventions include the overrepresentation of men as research subjects in
violence research without categorizing such research as specialized, the absence of identifiers for men in
research that is presented as the study of people, and underpinnings of gender essentializing based on
largely unspoken presumptions of biological determinism. These latter points collectively lend
themselves to the discounting of men as gendered actors, and to the interpretation of social life,
culture, and social structure through a shallow understanding of gendered processes when men,
especially, are studied. Multiple studies have found that girls/women are underrepresented in samples
used in criminological assessments in both sociology and criminology journals (Hannon & Dufour, 1998;
Hughes, 2005; Sharp & Hefley, 2007). That men commit more violence than women traditionally
justified the tendency to focus research and theoretical development on men (Britton, 2000; Hannon &
Dufour, 1998), yet this reasoning is inconsistent with general principles of social science methodology
where comparison is the foundation of social inquiry. “When researchers sample only men because men
commit more crime,” Hannon and Dufour (1998) noted, “they are often sampling around the dependent
variable by excluding a group known to be disproportionately located on one side of the mean” (p. 64).
Significant differences in the perpetration of violence based on gender should justify more research
focusing on women and gender, not less, given that social conditions and expectations for women
provide a contradistinction to 1100 Violence Against Women 29(5) men worth exploring as scholars
theorize on the cultur men worth exploring as scholars theorize on the cultural and structural (rather
than individual or pathological) roots of violence. Additionally, the theoretical shortcomings associated
with oversampling men are compounded by the tendency in scholarship to reference studies conducted
on men as representing the proclivities, conditions, and opportunities of all people. Hannon and Dufour
(1998) found that about 90% of articles with samples of boys/men overgeneralized in their title for both
time periods. When the sample was comprised of women, the title reflected the sample composition in
all cases except one, indicating the tendency to include identifiers for samples of women. Contemporary
scholarship often builds upon a scaffold of overgeneralized research presented as research about
human conditions and behaviors. In a similar manner, societal and historical harms largely perpetrated
by men are often discussed in nongendered terms, allowing for the neglect of gendered perspectives in
assessments of these social occurrences. For example, Chief Executive Officers of the transatlantic
investment banking system who contributed to the 2008 global economic crisis played a role in
“inflicting endemic and catastrophic levels of systemic violence upon the global population at large”
(Ellis & Wykes, 2013, p. 85). Although a group largely consisting of men inflicted tremendous harm,
these acts are not typically conceptualized as a form of men’s violence, demonstrating “the massive
falsification of consciousness that patriarchy [and capital hegemony] continues to purvey” (Ellis &
Wykes, 2013, p. 85). With respect to climate change, Cuomo (2011) observed that “the implication that
humans as a species have caused climate change” is misleading and obscures the “people and particular
cultures, nations, industries, and economic systems” (p. 697) overwhelmingly responsible for these
environmental impacts. “Men, primarily wealthier heterosexual white men from the global North,”
wrote Wonders and Danner (2015) “have disproportionate influence over decisions shaping the causes,
consequences, and responses to climate change through their domination of economic and political
decisionmaking” (p. 403). Universalizing responsibility for social issues such as climate change detracts
from an acknowledgment of the systems and groups primarily responsible for these global harms that
disproportionately impact women and other vulnerable populations (Wonders & Danner, 2015). With
respect to mass atrocities such as genocide, Nyseth Brehm et al. (2016) observed that the de-emphasis
of social characteristics such as gender is common in the literature, which often focuses on men but
does not analyze gender. Talking about men in general terms not only treats the exclusion of women as
nonsignificant, but also renders men as a social group invisible. When it comes to violence, women’s
gender is more likely than the gender of men to be marked as a factor in their collective behaviors or
experiences. Because men are treated as “generalized people,” their behaviors/social conditions are
implicitly framed as nongendered. Women are identified and separated out, and thus become the group
that “needs to be explained” through a gendered analysis. By failing to explicitly equate gender with
boys/men and their behaviors, numerous researchers fail to incorporate a meaningful gender analysis in
their work (for a detailed discussion, see Ellis & Wykes, 2013). When scholars include gender in their
assessments, the treatment is often shallow, such that it does not capture the extent to which gender
structures social life. In an analysis of over 300 pieces in three of the most highly ranked journals in
criminology, Sharp and Hefley (2007) found that nearly 85% of the articles either ignored gender,
focused solely on men, or simply controlled for gender in the analysis. Similarly, in Davies and True’s
(2015) analysis of research on conflict-related sexual violence, they argued that such studies
“unintentionally compartmentalize gender, often treating it as a single, isolable variable,” and in doing
so, “neglect the volume of feminist research that reveals that gender cannot be disaggregated from
instrumentality and political violence” (p. 496). Although research on conflict-related sexual violence has
been consequential in reconceptualizing these acts as mass atrocity crimes and as political in nature, the
research also ignores the centrality of gender in explaining this class of violence, rendering theoretical
explanations, and thus policy responses incomplete (Davies & True, 2015).5
War inevitable and unending under patriarchy – the disad’s framing reifies masculine
ways of conceptualizing international relations.
Peet and Sjoberg, 2020 (Laura Sjoberg, Professor of Political Science at U Florida; the Late Jessica
Peet taught IR at the University of Florida and USC. Introduction to Gender and Civilian Victimization in
War (Print Book), SPP)
As scholars, the "lenses" we use "foreground some things, and background others" in our research (V. Peterson and Runyan 1999). Our
research questions start with the ideas, concepts, and variables we see as most important in global
politics. For example, the scholars who have written on intentional civilian victimization have started with the ideas, concepts, and variables
they see as most important in global politics, including regime type, international law, strategy, and culture. Like other scholars in IR, feminist
work uses "lenses" to foreground variables of particular interest, specifically sex, gender, and sexuality; gender identity; and gender hierarchy,
using "gender lenses" to view global politics (V. Peterson and Runyan 1999: 2). Looking through
gender lenses is a way "to
focus on gender as a particular kind of power relation, or to trace out the ways in which gender is
central to understanding international processes" (Steans 1998: 5). While women's oppression is a primary
concern for feminists, "the driving force of feminism is its attention to gender and not simply to women
.... [T]he concept, nature and practice of gender are key" (Zalewski 1995). Feminists, then, "ask what
assumptions about gender (and race, class, nationality, and sexuality) are necessary to make particular
statements, policies, and actions meaningful" (Wilcox 2009). In our analysis of civilian victimization, we
focus on how the concept, nature, and practice of gender influences states' and other war-fighting
parties' decisions to target civilians and ask what assumptions about gender are necessary to make
intentional civilian victimization appealing, despite the non-combatant immunity norm. With this focus,
we also look at the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationalism in constituting both the idea
of the civilian and her vulnerability. In order to fully grasp why those are important questions, we need to spend a little time
understanding what feminists mean by 'sex' and by 'gender' in this context. Many people see sex as biology - male and fem ale sex organs make
people men or women. 4 In the conventional wisdom, then, gender is directly related to, and maps onto, sex - men are masculine and women
are feminine. However, feminist scholarship has "questioned the conventional assumption that gender differences (and subordination) are
rooted in biological differences between women and men" (Scott 1987; Sjoberg 2006a: 32). Instead, feminist scholars suggest that the relation
between sex and gender is presumed rather than natural, where masculinity and femininity are separable from maleness and femaleness.
Masculine characteristics, like strength, protectiveness, rationality, aggressiveness, presence in public life, domination, and leadership, then,
are perceived as related to maleness, while in reality they are not reserved for men. Conversely, traits associated with femininity, like
weakness, vulnerability, emotion, passivity, privacy, submission, and care, are assumed to be the domain of women, while that is not always or
even normally the case. Genderings can be read into and back onto sex, which is malleable rather than set, and co-constituted with gender
(e.g., Butler 1990, 1993). Applying this understanding, gender
cannot be operationalized as a 'yes' or 'no' (or 'male' or
'female' question), or as a matter of degree. It also cannot be accounted for by asking questions about 'what women do' differently than
'what men do' in global politics.5 Instead, it is more of a constellation of significations, where masculinities and
femininities are mutually constituted (along with race, class, sexuality, etc.) in specific, hierarchical
relation to one another - where ( often) masculinities are prized and powerful, while femininities are
seen as undesirable and therefore subordinated. In this context, we can talk not just about men and women and masculinities
and femininities but of masculinism and feminization. Masculinism is the prizing of masculinities and the exclusion and/
or devaluing of femininities in social and/ or political contexts. Masculinism leads to feminization - the
devaluing of femininities by putting down or putting aside people, groups, or ideas associated with
femininities and by associating devalued or marginalized people, groups, or ideas with femininities (V.
Peterson 2010; see also V. Peterson and Runyan 2010). 6 V. Spike Peterson describes feminization as devalorization: Not only subjects
(women and marginalized men), but also concepts, desires, tastes, styles, "ways of knowing" ... can be feminized with the effect of reducing their legitimacy, status and value. Importantly, this devalorization is simultaneously
ideological (discursive, cultural) and material (structural, economic) .... This devalorization normalizes - with the effect of
"legitimating" - the marginalization, subordination, and exploitation of feminized practices and persons
... the "naturalness" of sex difference is generalized to the "naturalness" of masculine (not necessarily
male) privilege, so that both aspects come to be taken-for -granted "givens" of social life (V. Peterson 2010). In
this vein, a key tenet of feminist theorizing about the global political arena is that it is gender -hierarchical
(Sjoberg 2009). Though masculinities and femininities are detectable across known human history, they are not static, temporally,
geographically, or culturally. Quite the opposite, the dominant 'masculinity' or 'femininity' is different at different times, and in different places
and cultures. While "the exact content of genders varies with various and shifting socio-political contexts, ... gender subordination (defined as
the subordination of femininities to masculinities) remains a constant feature of social and political life across time and space" (Sjoberg and
Gentry 2007: 9). Feminist research in IR, then, asks how these complex notions of gender constitute and influence the realities of everyday life
in global politics . In this book, we are particularly interested in how gender influences belligerents' (especially states') decisions to attack
civilians in war in conjunction with other parts of the 'puzzle' of intentional civilian victimization. Thinking about gender and intentional civilian
victimization Revisiting the narratives that began this introduction, it is possible to see gender influencing intentional civilian victimization in
what happened to Hassan and Benedicte and their contemporaries. Referencing experiences like Benedicte's, Judith Gardam has explained that
rape is never truly aimed at or affecting just one person (1993: 363). Instead, "rape functions as a strategy to deliver a blow against a collective
energy by striking at a group of high symbolic value" (Pettman 1996: 190). By raping Benedicte, government forces were attacking non lvoirians by attacking "their" women, as "xenophobic speech [was] aimed specifically at women from the 'enemy' community," encouraging
rape and sexual violence (Amnesty International 2007). As a result, sexual violence became "an intentional strategy to terrorise, demean, and
defeat an entire population, as well as a way of engendering hate and destruction" between the rebels and the government in Cote d'Ivoire
(Amnesty International 2004). In the 1990s war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, women suffered the brunt of civilian victimization, as a result both of
apparently gender -neutral tactics and of a systematic campaign of genocidal rape. Reports of mass rape began appearing in newspaper
headlines in August of 1992 (Hansen 2001: 55). Women were raped, both individually and as proxy for the nation of Bosnia-Herzegovina also
being 'raped.' The rape of civilian women was also the rape of ('their') nation, an idea that was reiterated by Bosnian ambassador to the United
Nations addressing the Security Council in 1993: Excellencies, Bosnia and Herzegovina is being gang-raped ... I do not lightly apply the analogy
of a gang rape to the plight of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. As we know, systematic rape has been one of the weapons of this
aggression against the Bosnian women in particular. (Metrovic 1994: xii) In this statement the rape of Bosnian women is metaphor for the
destruction and 'rape' of a nation, literally and figuratively. This sort of "rape happens, not as a consequence of thoughtless, provocative, or
unfortunate behavior, but as a question of national warfare" (Hansen 2001: 59). Lene Hansen explains that, in Bosnia, [r ]aping "the nation's
women" is not only an act of violence against individual women; it also works to install a disempowered masculinity as constitutive of the
identities of the nation's men. The interconnection between individual/ collective and national/ gendered might also be illustrated by the way
that a woman impregnated by rape can be represented as a passive "national" container of a child imagined to be the future bearer of the
rapist's nationality. In this way, an individual rape can be read for its collective, national significance through the complex sign of the child's
imagined future identity as an embodiment of the enemy state. (Hansen 2001: 60) Women were also targeted for violence that was not
explicitly sexual. Some Serb policy statements emphasized depriving individual households of nutritional and medical resources necessary for
reproduction as a way to target the opponent ethnicities. Even the targeting of men had gendered connotations and implications. Planning for
the Srebrenica massacre (where an estimated 8,000 men were killed, selected as men for victimization), the killing was discussed as a strategy
for reducing the availability of men, who were characterized as fertilizers and protectors for women. Planners referred to their strategies as
"cleaning houses" such that women would pose "less resistance to repopulation" (referring to forced impregnation) without 'their' men. 7
Narratives like this could be and have been told of many wars, genocides, conflicts, and terrorist attacks around the world. In this book, we
present evidence that when belligerents intentionally victimize civilians, they are actually attacking women because of women's actual and
symbolic position in the life, livelihood, and nationalist narratives of the opponent's state and/ or nation. While most people who read
Benedicte and Hasan's stories assume that Benedicte's experience was a gendered form of civilian victimization and Hasan's experience was
tragic but a case of 'normal' or ungendered civilian victimization, we argue that it is not just in sexual violence against civilians that civilian
victimization is gendered. Instead, when civilians are attacked in war, often 'civilian' is in important ways a proxy for women, not as female
bodies but for how they are positioned in and symbolic of nation and state. Wartime sexual violence is {like other civilian victimization tactics) a
way to get to the 'heart' of the opponent by destroying both crucial resources and the very parts of their society which legitimate the fighting of
Along these lines,
we theorize intentional civilian victimization through gender lenses. Expanding on feminist work about nationalism
and war generally, and the noncombatant immunity principle specifically, we contend that the very same logic that makes
belligerents so eager to 'protect' their innocent women from wars also encourages them to attack the
women who are seen as belonging to their enemies. In war stories, just warriors fight the good fight to
protect their innocent women and children from those foreign or outside men who would attack them
(Huston 1983). Just warriors, then, legitimate not only wars generally but also their masculinities specifically
by protecting women back home (Sjoberg 2006b). Attacking the women that motivate the opponent to fight - the women that
the war in the first place - pure, innocent women that good men fight just wars to protect (see, e.g., Elshtain 1987).
symbolize his state and/ or nation and whose protection legitimates his war - attacks both the will to fight a particular war and the logic of warfighting. In these terms, as we will discuss in more detail in Chapter 3, intentional civilian victimization
can be seen as a
product of the gendered narratives that legitimate and sustain nationhood and the practices of the
making and fighting of wars. We are, of course, not arguing that women and only women are killed in the victimization of civilians.
Such an argument would be both inaccurate and oversimplified. We are instead arguing that 'civilian victimization' is, sometimes
consciously and sometimes not, an attack on women, where 'civilian' is in important ways a proxy for
women. But this proxy is not a simple, one-to-one mapping where belligerents think 'civilian' but mean
'women' (as women), even to the extent that belligerents are willing to admit attacking civilians. Rather
the proxy is a complex indicator of state/nation, based on actual and perceived strength. Belligerents
attack (women) civilians for the same reason they claim protection for their own - because
the 'protection racket' is an underlying justification for states, governments, and their wars (see, e.g.,
S. Peterson 1977). Insomuch as women are indicators, signifiers, and reproducers of state and nation, belligerents attack women to attack
the state and nation. We
contend that such an explanation, when compared to the others that have been
presented up to this point, provides both greater theoretical leverage towards understanding the
problem of civilian targeting and greater empirical explanatory power for the particulars of cases of
civilian victimization in war. In the remainder of this introduction, we outline how this book makes that argument and presents both
quantitative and qualitative empirical evidence to support it.
AT: FJG CP
UBI solves better than an FJG, addressing the causes of women’s issues.
Kathryn Karcher 2019 – Former President of California Academy of Appellate Lawyers, Certified
Specialist in Appellate Law
“How Might a Universal Basic Income or Federal Jobs Guarantee Help Women?”, Political Science
Honors Program, 03/04/2019,
https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/bitstream/handle/1773/43803/LRA2019_Karcher.pdf?
sequence=1&isAllowed=y – A.K.
When it comes to more easily predictable and thus escapable violence, a
full-time job may not be the most accessible exit
option for some women. Women who face more burdens when it comes to entering a workplace, due to
complications such as caregiving responsibilities or disabilities, may be less able to rely on a jobs program. However, this could
be accounted for with full-time childcare or forms of employment which include people with different abilities. Still, neither UBI nor FJG address
the causes of violence, so they both do a fair job of addressing this face of oppression.
Conclusions: Based on this analysis of UBI and FJG, each policy’s respective ability to undermine the faces of oppression largely depends on the
precise terms of policy that are ultimately implemented. Upon a closer look at the logic underpinning them,
it appears that UBI would
do a better job at confronting the faces of oppression that affect women. FJG’s downside is that it may
exacerbate marginalization and exploitation, and it does not do a particularly good job of undermining
any of the root causes of women’s oppression. UBI, on the other hand, does not exacerbate any of the
faces and directly combats the causes of women’s marginalization and cultural imperialism. Overall, UBI is
more closely aligned with the social justice framework and would do more for women than FJG.
AT: Budget Turn
Other social assistance programs won’t need as much funding in the aff world. Also,
poverty costs more.
Kathryn Karcher 2019 – Former President of California Academy of Appellate Lawyers, Certified
Specialist in Appellate Law “How Might a Universal Basic Income or Federal Jobs Guarantee Help
Women?”, Political Science Honors Program, 03/04/2019,
https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/bitstream/handle/1773/43803/LRA2019_Karcher.pdf?
sequence=1&isAllowed=y – A.K.
Decreased costs in other programs and increased and new taxes could offset these totals. Progressives should be cautious about cutting social
programs, particularly because this aspect of UBI can provide a trojan horse for those who wish to cut social programs that many Americans
need. Still, both
UBI and FJG would reduce the number of people who require additional assistance.
Considering the fact that studies estimate $153 billion per year is spent on public assistance programs
due to low wages, we can see that the benefits of UBI or FJG would reduce the costs of other programs.
The Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program (SNAP), the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP),
unemployment insurance, and TANF would require less funding once people had either a basic income
or a well-paying job with benefits. Increased and new taxes on the financially well-off should precede any cuts to social programs.
Carbon taxes, financial transaction taxes, and land-value taxes would distribute wealth more equitably without further burdening those in the
lower and middle classes. An additional benefit of this approach is that increased taxes on corporations and eliminating subsidies to fossil fuel
companies have the simultaneous effect of funding new social programs while helping the environment and redistributing wealth. Discussions
of these costs must include the positive impact that UBI and FJG would likely have on Americans’ spending power and the labor market. A jobs
guarantee, for instance, would employ approximately 10 million workers. When
we consider the costs offset by UBI or FJG,
along with new taxes that will make our tax system more fair, neither policy is so exceptionally
expensive. Those who remain skeptical about whether these programs warrant these changes to our
budget should consider the exorbitant cost of the status quo. Harry Holzer, a labor economist at Georgetown,
“calculated that child poverty alone costs the United States about 4 percent of GDP a year, every year,
by reducing productivity and work output, increasing the incidence of crime, and pushing up public
health expenditures of children when they become adults. That adds up to roughly $700 billion a year, a
little more than the United States spends on the military and a little less than it spends on Social Security.” Without even considering more
pressing issues of justice, poverty
is far more expensive than effective social programs.
AT: Econ Impacts
Domestic violence against women worsens economy
Ouedraogo and Stenzel ‘21
“How Domestic Violence is a Threat to Economic Development”, IMF, November 24, 2021
https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2021/11/24/how-domestic-violence-is-a-threat-to-economicdevelopment#:~:text=A%20drain%20on%20society&text=In%20the%20long%20run%2C%20high,to%20
health%20and%20judicial%20services. – Myra
It’s being called the
“shadow pandemic”—an increase in physical, sexual and emotional abuse of women is
taking place amid the lockdowns and societal turmoil caused by the global health crisis. The evidence is only growing. In Nigeria, the
number of reported cases of gender-violence linked to lockdowns increased by more than 130 percent. In Croatia, reported rapes increased by
228 percent during the first five months of 2020 compared to 2019.
The economic costs of domestic violence are higher
during downturns and could make recovery more challenging. For many women around the world, no place is
more unsafe than their own homes. As the world recognizes International Day for the Elimination of Violence
against Women, it has become clear that the pandemic has made this violence worse. Abuse of any form is fundamentally wrong and a
violation of basic human rights. New IMF staff research shows how violence against women and girls is a major threat to economic
development in a region where domestic violence is widespread—sub-Saharan Africa. The results of our study suggest that an increase
in violence against women by 1 percentage point is associated with a 9 percent lower level of
economic activity (proxied by nighttime lights). Violence against women and girls has a multi-dimensional effect
on the overall health of an economy both in the short-term and long-term. In the short term, women from abusive
homes are likely to work fewer hours and be less productive when they do work. In the long run, high levels
of domestic violence can decrease the number of women in the workforce, minimize women’s
acquisition of skills and education, and result in less public investment overall as more public resources are
channeled to health and judicial services. Previous studies have found domestic violence costs a given economy between 1 and 2 percent of
GDP. However, these studies use simple accounting mechanisms and often don’t account for potential reverse causality. Our research takes a
new approach, matching deep survey data of women in the region with satellite imagery and employs appropriate technical methods to
address endogeneity issues. We look at data from the US Agency for International Development’s Demographic and Health Survey
collected from the 1980s to the present. The surveys ask women specific questions about mistreatment. The data come from 18 sub-Saharan
African countries, covering more than 224 districts and more than 440,000 women representative of around 75 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s
female population. The surveys found that more than 30 percent of women in the region had experienced some form of domestic abuse. To
measure the impact on economic development at a district level, we compare the survey data with satellite data on nighttime lights provided
by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Nightlight satellite data can be a powerful tool for measuring economic activity
when the most used measure for economic activity—gross domestic product—is not available at the sub-national level. We found that higher
levels of violence against women and girls are associated with lower economic activity, driven mainly by a significant drop in female
employment. The physical, psychological, and emotional violence that women experience makes it more difficult for them to achieve or
maintain a job. Based on this connection, if sub-Saharan African countries in the sample were to reduce the level of gender-based violence
closer to the world average of 23 percent of women experiencing abuse, it could result in long-term GDP gains of around 30 percent.An
economic downturn, such as the one caused by the pandemic, can contribute to an uptick in domestic violence. This exacerbates the economic
costs of domestic violence compared to normal times. Our research also found other evidence for the negative impact of domestic violence on
economic activity. Domestic violence is more detrimental to countries without protective laws against domestic violence and countries rich in
natural resources where extractive industries are more likely to crowd out more women-centered jobs and lead to less economic power among
females. We also found that the economic costs of violence against women is lower in countries like South Africa, where there is a lower
gender gap in education between partners and where women have more decision-making power than in other sub-Saharan African countries.
Stopping violence against women is an indisputable moral imperative, but our research shows that it’s
economically important too. The economic costs of domestic violence are higher during downturns and could make recovery more
challenging. Countries should take efforts now to strengthen laws and protections against domestic violence. Strong laws are critical to deter
violence against women, protect victims of domestic violence, and promote women’s participation in the workforce. Improving education
opportunities for girls is an important step in the longer term. Reducing the gender education gap gives women more economic freedom and
less ability to be influenced and controlled by men. In efforts to build back better from the pandemic, policies to
and combat gender-based violence are more important than ever.
support women
AT: Cap K
Perm – Feminist UBI consistent with broader movements of degrowth.
Hermann, 2021 - MA Candidate in International Affairs at Hertie School [Katrin, Sept 28, Path for Europe,
“Reimagining Care: Feminist degrowth and UBI” https://pathforeurope.eu/reimagining-care-feminist-degrowth-and-ubi/ Acc 1/16/23 TA]
A Feminist Degrowth Perspective Degrowth
stresses the need to move away from economic growth as a sole
political objective. Instead, the focus should be on “well-being, social justice and ecological
sustainability”. Within the degrowth movement, the feminist perspective is slowly becoming more prominent, with the Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance
(FaDA) network launching in 2017. Feminist scholars have criticized capitalist production and consumption patterns
for not taking into account the invaluable nature of care work for individual and societal well-being. This
approach specifically envisions a society with diverse gender roles, where paid and unpaid work is distributed fairly among all members of society. Degrowth
carries potential to rethink the growth-centric economy and lends itself well to feminist economic
thought, which seeks to undo patriarchal power structures, which in turn alleviates the undue double burden placed on women at
home and in the labour market. Indeed, Kallis, Demaria and D’Alisa have stated that “the degrowth imaginary centres around the reproductive economy of care”[3],
with other central proposals of the degrowth school (e.g. work-sharing) emphasizing care as well. Corinna Dengler and Birte Strunk have examined the impact of the
current growth paradigm on gender and environmental injustices. Their analysis is based around the ICE model developed by Jochimsen and Knobloch (see Figure 1)
which relegates caring activities and ecological processes into the ‘maintenance’ economy, which the formal ‘monetized’ economy largely ignores. Dengler and
Strunk’s analysis acknowledges that an increase in women’s labour participation will not necessarily further gender equality. As examined, this creates a double
burden of paid and unpaid work for most women, and even when this work is outsourced to care providers, there still exists a divide, but now between the more
vulnerable and those who profit. Thus, Dengler and Strunk suggest work-sharing proposals that focus on the working day rather than working week. Since women
are most often the ones that are in charge of daily household activities (e.g. caring for other family members), a shortening of the “first shift” for both women and
men could allow for a reduction in women’s double burden and a more equal division of these daily activities amongst genders. Though by no means flawless, this
proposal is meant to emphasize the potential for feminist economics and the degrowth movement to pave the way for a caring economy and potentially alleviate
certain gender injustices. Figure 1: ICE Model The
feminist degrowth movement is centred around regeneration – in this
sense policies geared towards reforming the care economy are meant to encourage this sector to thrive.
In order to do so, redistributive measures should be introduced to ensure that carers are adequately
compensated. Consequently, both feminist scholars and degrowthers have been examining UBI
(Universal Basic Income) as a potential alternative. Feminist degrowthers have more specifically supported a Care Income that builds on
basic income proposals and emphasizes the recognition of unpaid care work performed by women. Universal Basic Income through a feminist lens A
Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been supported by degrowthers, with the feminist branch specifically
calling for a Care Income as proposed by the Global Women’s Strike and taken forward by the Green New Deal for Europe. This involves the payment
of an unconditional regular income paid to adult members of societies, regardless of work status, level of income or living arrangements. Though convincing
arguments in favour of a basic income scheme have been made, it has yet to be fully introduced into any modern welfare state due to the objections that it
undermines the incentive to work and unsustainably increases public expenditure.[4]