Essays On Gender And Governance - United Nations Development ...

The Impact of Gender Inequality on Governance
The state and its agents may act, in conjunction with family
and community, to maintain the domesticity of women in particular
ways and at particular times, while also enabling spaces and
opportunities for women to disrupt their domestication. The actual
consequences of state action or inaction, and how women act in
such situations, are mediated by women’s class, caste, ethnic, and
other status, as well as by the nature of the state. For example, in
processes of governance, the state compounds private patriarchy
and the domesticated feminine when it nominates or
(mis)recognises men as heads of households in contexts such as
land distribution, local resource management or displacement
compensation, regardless of whether or not women too are land
owners or heads of households. An example from Sri Lanka
highlights this. Generally in Sri Lanka, women across ethnic groups
have had significant rights to own land. These rights are reflected
in bilateral and matrilineal patterns of inheritance, even if the
gendered control of land, per se, varies by ethnic group and region. 4
The nineteen-year old ethnic civil war has caused tremendous
internal displacement and community losses, which have
increasingly catapulted women into roles previously unfamiliar
to many of them, including as head of household and primary wage
earner. The new roles have compelled women to reorganise their
lives to cope with the changes while also providing for increased
personal autonomy in certain contexts. In rehabilitating displaced
persons, the state has taken to allocating land with little regard for
local inheritance patterns and traditions of land ownership, or to
changes in women’s lived realities. Thus, women are ignored as
potential title holders and land is given in men’s names only, unless
it can be proved that the male head of household is dead. State
officers may refuse land grants to women deserted by their
husbands or where a husband’s whereabouts are unknown
(Rajasingham-Senanayake, 2001:119). By privileging marriage in
this context, as the gauge of who should and should not receive
land, the state institutionalises hetero-normativity. Thus, the state
acts as a moral guardian, and ties together sexual morality, material
autonomy and (un)worthy citizenship. It rewards women who are
“properly” appended to a man and penalises women who are
4
See Bina Agarwal (1994).
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