GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT IN BRIEF
BRIDGE BULLETIN, ISSUE 14, JANUARY 2004
Gender and citizenship
IN THIS ISSUE:
 Re-framing Citizenship
 Journey Without Maps: the story of Naripokkho
 Anti-Violence Organising at the US-Mexico Border
This issue of In Brief looks at the ways in which working with ideas of citizenship can help promote
gender equality. An approach to development that starts from the perspective of people as citizens can
enable development actors to support struggles for rights and participation in decision-making for those
marginalised on the basis of gender. As in the case of Naripokkho, this involves re-framing citizenship
rights and responsibilities to include the needs of women and to ensure their access to policy and
institutions. People’s understandings of citizenship differ according to context, and change through time.
Concepts of membership and belonging are re-negotiated as new alliances are formed in the light of
shared interests – as shown by cross-border anti-violence work in the US and Mexico.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------[BOX]
Citizenship means:
membership and belonging
rights and responsibilities
universality
a status and a practice
a process
a relationship with the state
a way of being in the world
participation
decision-making
obligations
entitlements
roles
duty
identity
access to legal protection and justice
nationality
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Re-framing Citizenship
SHAMIM MEER and CHARLIE SEVER
Citizenship is a slippery term. Its abstract nature makes it hard to pin down, to describe what it means in
real, lived experience. It can mean all things to all people.
There are those for whom citizenship is a site of achievement, of power and validation of their place in
the world – a way of achieving positive change and gaining a better standard of living for all groups. For
others it can be a malign concept − exclusive, alienating or threatening − serving only to marginalise and
exclude by allowing some in and expelling those who do not fit on the basis of gender, class or race.
Some may say citizenship has “no relevance” to their lives, lives that are already too full with the
pressures of daily life to consider participating in broader decision-making or struggles over rights.
Yet how can we describe what citizenship is or what it means in the lives of people living in poverty and
insecurity? Can we demystify ideas of citizenship and paint these ideas as they appear in real scenarios,
campaigns and projects across the globe? Many development workers have argued that using the
language and the arguments of citizenship is a powerful way of working in development programmes that
seek to bring about gender equality through focusing on people and how they interact with institutions.
Initially though, we must try to understand the different meanings we give to the term, how it may shift
depending on who is speaking, and how it is shaped by historical legacies. The box (left) shows a
number of ways in which citizenship can be described. From the perspective of gender, several problems
immediately become apparent with some of these terms.
Firstly there is a problem with the idea of “universal” rights and responsibilities. In reality people do not all
have the same needs or the same position in society – there is no “universal” citizen. This means that
rights and responsibilities are in fact constructed on behalf of society’s most powerful groups – powerful
through gender, ethnicity, race or class positions – in their interests and to serve their needs.
Secondly, citizenship is generally based on people’s position in society – where they are placed in
relations of unequal power and what social roles they are expected to perform. In most societies there
are “appropriate” roles for women and men – idealised roles that assign women to the domestic, private
arena of home and family and men to the public realm of politics, economics and decision-making. Such
a divide may only be an idea of “appropriate behaviour”, but such ideas have material implications. This
public/private divide means that it is men who are seen as full citizens – as politically active decisionmakers. Women, who are not seen as political agents, are seen as dependants of men who govern
society on their behalf. Those who depart from such roles may be stigmatised, excluded, or their actions
rendered invisible.
In the light of these problems, feminists and women’s rights activists have sought to reframe citizenship
from a gender perspective and to show how struggles for women’s rights must be seen as citizenship
struggles that affect everyone in society rather than “minority interests”.
Including the excluded
One direct way of addressing the problem of exclusion from the arenas of decision-making is affirmative
action policies and political quotas.
‘Women in our town thought participation in politics was only for men. Now they believe they can
become councillors and governors’. In a context where civil liberties for the majority black
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population were relatively new, Namibian women have campaigned for legal quotas for women in
political office. In the process of the campaign a new awareness of women’s rights has been
created and perceptions that women are not political actors have been challenged.
A second way is to base rights on the actual needs of women and of men in minority groups and not on
the needs of a “universal citizen”. This means ensuring that marginalised groups can voice their needs
and that these voices reach and change powerful institutions.
In the late 1990s, activists and researchers in South Africa conducted a campaign to intervene in
reform of customary laws concerning marriages where a man was able to take more than one
wife (polygyny). At one meeting a researcher noted that a section of women sat silently watching
the mass of dancing members chanting ‘one man one woman’. She asked these women why
they were silent. They replied that they lived in polygynous marriages and that their livelihoods
would be threatened if polygyny was not recognised. Ultimately the intervention made by the
campaign in the reform process framed the law in a way that would make polygyny expensive
(eventually leading to its disappearance), while safeguarding women’s rights to marital property.
Redefining the public/private divide
The divide that places men and women physically in mutually exclusive spheres also determines the
attention given to different interests and needs. Family, domestic and sexual concerns have long been
neglected by public and/or political solutions. To counter the view that private concerns are not seen as
the stuff of politics, feminists have asserted that issues to do with sexuality and reproduction and “private
wrongs” such as domestic violence are matters for public attention. They have also argued that political
participation must be defined to include informal politics such as women’s groups, support services and
other forms of social mobilisation.
Sex workers in West Bengal, India, challenged their exclusion as full members of society by
asserting their rights to organise. They argued that it was important for them to define the
problem of trafficking for sex work, and the solutions to this problem, from their own perspective.
Through giving voice to their particular needs and demanding rights based on these needs, they
challenged ideas that sex is a private issue that should not be talked about in public.
Conclusions
Undertaking struggles to defend, reinterpret and extend rights can therefore help women make clear that
they are political beings. Collective struggles allow women to make their voices heard so that these
voices influence the institutions that circumscribe women’s lives – the household, market, state, and the
international arena. Such a combination of claiming rights, participation and influence can lead to more
meaningful forms of citizenship for those who have hitherto been excluded.
In working towards these goals, processes of research and gender analysis are needed in order to better
understand what lies behind discrimination and exclusion. Efforts should be made by policy-makers and
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practitioners to enable people, particularly women, to define their own needs and solutions and to
interpret rights and responsibilities from their own perspectives. This will mean addressing so-called
“private” issues such as domestic violence and sexuality, alongside economic and political participation,
as citizenship rights.
Women’s organisations are powerful expressions of active citizenship, particularly in campaigns that
include advocacy, awareness-raising and lobbying. Civil society organising for gender equality must be
supported with resources, training and capacity-building to enable effective interaction with, and influence
over, policy and institutions.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------Journey Without Maps: the story of Naripokkho
SHIREEN HUQ, Naripokkho
Just as bread is not rice, women are not human beings.
- popular saying
Not as mothers and sisters, as human beings we want our dignity and as citizens we want our rights.
- Naripokkho slogan
Naripokkho is a women’s activist organisation founded in 1983. The story of Naripokkho demonstrates
two important ways in which citizenship has been re-defined in the interests of promoting gender equality:
firstly by demanding that women’s rights be recognised as the rights of full citizens and secondly by
questioning the meaning of “appropriate behaviour” for women.
Women in Bangladesh were of interest to political parties only in so far as we were vote banks. We were
of interest to development agencies only in our roles as mothers and carers of families and households.
In either case our concerns were subsidiary to the more “important” issues at hand – issues of state
power and rule, and of poverty “alleviation”. Fundamental inequalities in the formal rights and freedoms
and in the reality of everyday life were not addressed. Above all there was no understanding of the need
to alter the embedded meanings of what it is to be a man or a woman in our world.
In its 20-year history Naripokkho has worked on issues from safe contraception to the improvement in
services for violence survivors, to struggles for recognition of peasant women as agricultural producers.
We have launched campaigns to protest against the dumping of toxic wastes, human rights violations of
ethnic and religious minorities, and the introduction of Islam as the state religion. Naripokkho has also
fought against the eviction of thousands of women sex workers and their children from brothels in Dhaka
and Narayanganj and convened and nurtured an alliance of NGOs in support of the human rights of sex
workers.
On International Women’s Day in 1991, for the first time in Bangladesh over two thousand women,
coordinated by members of Naripokkho, marched through the streets of Dhaka. They gathered in a rally
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before the Parliament building to demand Rashtro ebong poribarey, shoman hobo odhikarey (Equality in
the state, equality in the family). In 1995, Naripokkho organised the first national conference of women’s
organisations, attended by more than 400 women from 240 women’s organisations from all over
Bangladesh; a second conference took place in January 2002.
Naripokkho sought to build an alternative to the dogmas of political parties on the one hand and the
agenda of development agencies concerning “women’s development” on the other. In the early days we
started by focusing on women as development workers rather than development recipients. The fact that
women development workers did not conform to the accepted boundaries of being female, particularly in
rural Bangladesh, meant that for many there were heavy personal costs. The risks attached to stepping
out of line and being punished, and of being alienated or rejected by families and communities, were all
real risks facing us. How much risk each of us could afford to take depended on our fallback positions.
Did we have families that understood and supported us in our politics and our actions? No, clearly not all
of us did.
Naripokkho’s members remain predominantly women working with development agencies at different
levels. However, membership is now more mixed than when it started up in the 1980s, and includes
teachers, lawyers, doctors and researchers. The strategy has also shifted from its initial emphasis on
addressing the concerns of women development workers and we now put our energies into networkbuilding with local women’s groups all over the country.
The organisation has continued to encounter opposition and hostility. We were tainted, and were
accused of either being an NGO-driven group (which had connotations of “western and donor-driven”), or
as too radical and ugro (vulgar, aggressive). There was apprehension that we were not controllable and
that we lacked sufficient respect and reverence for “custom and tradition”. Even so, we were also
attractive in another sense. There was something curious about us, about our energy and our apparent
“audacity”, our damn care bhaab (couldn’t give a damn attitude).
For us the question of balance between engagement with the policy process and activism in the
organisational sense of movement-building remains unresolved, and we find ourselves continuously
struggling with how to maintain a critical stance while engaging. In 1990 two key members of Naripokkho
were invited by the government to sit on its National Education Advisory Committee. A number of
members in the organisation were of the opinion that Naripokkho’s participation in the committee would
extend legitimacy to the “autocratic” regime of the time. Ultimately, Naripokkho agreed to join the
committee, but suffered the loss of some of its members.
Naripokkho’s journey illustrates some of the complex meanings and expressions of citizenship. It shows
how women’s rights are often not accepted as citizen rights in the context of development policies. It
involves women stepping outside the “appropriate role” of female citizens and it describes how they have
faced exclusion and prejudice. It also paints a picture of active citizenship in the struggles against such
exclusions in the form of decisive action, agency and collective struggle.
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This article is based on Huq, S., forthcoming 2004, ‘“Bodies as Sites of Struggle”: Naripokkho and
Women's Rights in Bangladesh', in Kabeer (ed.).
For more information contact:
Naripokkho
G.P.O. Box 723
Dhaka 1000
Bangladesh
Tel: +880 2 8119917
Email: convenor@pradeshta.net
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----------------------------
‘Alliances symbolise the creation of spaces for sisterhood and solidarity’.
Cartoon from Equipo de Comunicación Alternativa con Mujeres (ECAM), 2000, ‘Leadership’ (Liderazgo),
Local Power (Poder Local) Series, No 3, Tarija: ECAM (page 13)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------Gendered Anti-Violence Organising at the US-Mexico Border
KATHLEEN STAUDT and IRASEMA CORONADO, University of Texas at El Paso
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s fourth largest city, is located immediately next to El Paso on the US-Mexico
border. The city is “maquiladora capital” on account of the large number of foreign-owned exportprocessing factories. The maquiladoras employ a majority female workforce working for wages that are
ten times less than the minimum wage in the US. Together, over two million people live in the region, on
both sides of the border, many of them related through kinship, friendship, and interdependent work and
consumption. Over the last decade, more than 300 girls and women have been murdered, a third of them
raped and mutilated before death. The majority are aged 11−22, most from backgrounds of extremely
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scarce economic means. Hundreds more are missing. Police officials operate with impunity, indifferent to
victims’ families.
The Coalition Against Violence toward Women and Families at the US-Mexico Border was born in 2001
after a labour-organised solidarity meeting in Juarez where violence against women emerged as a major
issue. Since then, organisations and individuals in the Coalition have worked bi-nationally to spread
awareness and to change policies. Some of these organisations also raise funds for victims’ families.
The Coalition maintains links with regional, national, and international networks and journalists.
Global-local connections are more obvious at international borders. Campaigning and advocacy over
women’s rights are usually limited by interpretations that see citizenship rights in terms of national
sovereignty. Cross-border organising and collaboration therefore faces problems when its aims involve
claiming legal redress and protection that are available only under national law.
Juarez and El Paso are joined together at the hip, heart, and soul. Most residents share Mexican
heritage. The victims are mostly Mexican citizens, but four victims have been American, one Dutch, and
another Honduran. Thugs − perhaps sent by the authorities; perhaps protected by authorities − visit
victims’ families to intimidate them into silence.
This case study demonstrates feminist re-workings of citizenship that interpret it as active membership of
different groups or communities – not just of the nation. Such communities may be those that span
national borders due to their location, or they may be regional or even global communities such as
women or the poor. This campaign aims to unite people working in the name of a feminism informed by
compromiso – a sense of social commitment and an obligation as citizens of one or more of these
communities. Coalition members are a mixed group: human rights, faith-based, and labour activists;
teachers and students, mostly from higher education institutions; and staff who counsel and shelter
battered women. Members are both “insiders” and “outsiders”. Insiders either occupy strategic positions
such as employment in the state senate or are professors with a bit more access to decision-makers;
outsiders tend to be radicals with long histories of organising rallies, protests, and generally “raising hell”.
Activists symbolise the deaths with black crosses on pink backgrounds, painted on telephone poles,
buildings, protest signs, and pins that people wear. Women dress in mourning at protests: mujeres de
negro (women in black). Public events draw huge crowds to town plazas.
Coalition members cultivate support among leaders, submitting resolutions and proclamations to local
government councils denouncing anti-female violence. They support bi-national cooperation among
police investigators and criminal justice agencies to enhance professional investigations, share lab and
testing facilities and utilise international tip lines (phone lines where crimes can be reported). In October
2003, a US Congressional delegation of mostly Hispanic and Women’s Caucus members, visited the
border to meet with victims’ families, activists, lawyers, and officials. The visit produced a ripple effect.
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Legislation has also been introduced to fund greater bi-national cooperation over the investigations and
anti-female violence activities.
Much more remains to be done. We invite readers to get involved and to gain deeper insights through
reading our book Fronteras no Mas: Toward Social Justice at the US-Mexico Border.
For more information contact:
Kathleen Staudt and Irasema Coronado
Department of Political Science,
University of Texas at El Paso,
El Paso, TX 79968
USA
Tel: +1 (915) 747 7975
Fax: +1 (915) 747 6616
Email: kstaudt@utep.edu and icoronado@utep.edu
On 30th October 2003, around the time of the Day of the Dead commemorations, a rally was held at the
University of Texas at El Paso to mourn and remember the murdered girls and women of Ciudad Juarez.
Ni Una Mas! (Not One More!) is a signature phrase used on both sides of the border.
Photo by authors.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----------------------------
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‘My Mother is Egyptian … The Nationality is my Right’
Front cover of Egyptian Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women (ADEW) Annual
Report, 2001.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------
‘This is a new form of social mobilization − by holding events in the public plaza where families come
every Sunday to enjoy their day off, we educate more people than we might if we walked by holding
protest signs.’ (Organiser Luz Mendez).
Grossman, L., 2003, ‘Enough is Enough! Guatemalans protest violence against women’, Global Fund for
Women Newsletter. Photo by Olga Talamante.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------
[Quote]
Grappling with concepts like citizenship, freedom, and pluralism requires individuals to question virtually
everything they know to be true about their roles in society … This process can be both exhilarating and
disquieting.
Ahern, P., Nuti P. and Masterson, J., 2000, ‘Promoting Gender Equity in the Democratic Process:
Women’s Paths to Political Participation and Decisionmaking’, PROWID Synthesis Paper, Washington:
International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW) and Centre for Development and Population
Activities (CEDPA) (page 33)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------References and further reading
Bulbeck, C., 1998, ‘Individual versus Community’ in Re-Orienting Western Feminisms: Women’s
Diversity in a Postcolonial World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
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Kabeer, N. (ed), forthcoming 2004, Meanings and Expressions of Citizenship: Perspectives from the
North and South, London: Zed Books
Lister, R., 1997, ‘Citizenship: Towards a Feminist Synthesis’, Feminist Review No 57: 28−48
http://www.siyanda.org/docs/lister_citizensynthesis.pdf
Mukhopadhyay, M. (ed.), 2003, Governing for Equity, Gender, Citizenship and Governance, Amsterdam:
Royal Tropical Institute (KIT)
http://www.kit.nl/gender/assets/images/ConferenceReport.pdf
Staudt, K. and Coronado, I., 2002, Fronteras No Mas: Toward Social Justice at the U.S.-Mexico Border,
New York: Palgrave Macmillan
Sweetman, C. (ed.), 2003, Gender and Development, Vol 11 No 3 − Gender and Citizenship
http://www.siyanda.org/docs/sweetman_gendercitizenship.pdf
http://www.siyanda.org/docs/wheeler_citizendem.doc
http://www.siyanda.org/docs/sinha_citizenstate.doc
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 2000, Women’s Political Participation and Good
Governance: 21st Century Challenges, New York: UNDP
http://magnet.undp.org/new/pdf/gender/wpp/women_book.pdf
VeneKlasen, L., 2002, A New Weave of Power, People and Politics: The Action Guide for Advocacy and
Citizen Participation, Oklahoma: World Neighbors
Yuval-Davis, N., 1997, ‘Women, Citizenship and Difference’, Feminist Review No 57: 4−27
http://www.siyanda.org/docs/davis_citizendifference.pdf
Please note, all internet addresses provided above were current as at December 2003.
Useful websites:
The Centre for Legislative Development (CLD)
http://www.cld.org/
Centre for Women’s Global Leadership
http://www.cwgl.rutgers.edu/
Citizenship Studies, Information and Action (CEPIA)
http://www.cepia.org.br/
Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) − Gender
http://www.kit.nl/gender/
Siyanda – www.siyanda.org (search using the term “citizenship”)
UNDP Programme on Governance in the Arab Region (POGAR) – Gender and Citizenship Programme
http://www.undp-pogar.org/activities/citizenship/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------IN BRIEF
Tell us what you think of this issue!
Email: bridge@ids.ac.uk
or write to us at:
BRIDGE, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9RE, UK
Fax: +44 (0)1273 621202
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Also available: Cutting Edge Pack on Gender and Citizenship
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Agency for International Development, the Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Swedish
International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), the Swiss Agency for Development and
Cooperation (SDC) and the Development Research Centre on Citizenship, Participation and
Accountability (Citizenship DRC).
© Copyright: Institute of Development Studies 2004 ISSN: 1358-0612
Editor: Charlie Sever
Thanks to BRIDGE colleagues Hazel Reeves and Susie Jolly for their editorial support and to Judy
Hartley for copy-editing.
For further information on BRIDGE please contact:
BRIDGE, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9RE, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1273 606261 fax: +44 (0)1273 621202
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