Women and Politics in the Third World

ANALYSING WOMEN IN THIRD WORLD POLITICS 17
influence the political agenda. Shifting the boundary between the public and the
private then becomes an important point of influence (Alvarez 1990).
Different groups of women therefore interact with the state in different ways,
and can have some influence over the way in which the state acts. It is important
to analyse under what conditions and with what strategies women’s movements
can influence the state and policy agendas. Debate has centred around whether
women’s movements should attempt to work with the state and political parties.
‘State feminism’ has emerged as an important issue in the context of
democratisation with the return to civilian governments in some Latin American
countries. Can feminist movements be successfully incorporated into the state and
achieve their own agendas or do they simply get co-opted (Waylen 1993)? This
brings us to look at ‘women’s political activity’.
WOMEN’S POLITICAL ACTIVITY
Why do women undertake political activity under certain circumstances, what
form does this activity take and how can women’s movements be analysed in the
Third World context? If identities are complex, comprising multiple intersections
of class, race, gender and sexuality, causing individuals to react in different ways at
different times, women will act politically, not simply on the basis of gender, but
race, class and sexuality as well, in a complex interaction. In the same way as it is
difficult to talk of a unitary category ‘woman’ and women’s interests, it is
impossible to talk of a women’s movement. There is not one movement, but a
diversity of different movements of which feminist movements are one part.
Broad generalisations are therefore not possible.
It is important not to fall into the trap of essentialism here. Some scholars, for
example, have analysed women’s activities in terms of an ‘ethic of care’ and
maternal thinking, arguing, in positive and perhaps rather romantic terms, that
women bring to activities in the public sphere supposedly ‘female’ values of
caring, mothering and peacefulness (Gilligan 1983; Ruddick 1989). They have
been criticised for both essentialism and universalism: looking at gender to the
exclusion of other forms of difference such as race and class, and trying to create
grand universal frameworks.
Recently attention has also focused on the form that women’s political
activities take, including whether women find new ways of ‘doing polities’
(Waylen 1992). Using approaches influenced by post-modernism and poststructuralism,
political action is seen, in part, as a struggle over dominant
meanings, including dominant ideas of woman, and aiming to change those
meanings. Using the ideas of Foucault amongst others, knowledge and the ability
to construct knowledge equals power. Much greater emphasis is therefore put on
the form of political protests: on their use of the body and symbols and metaphors
and how far they subvert dominant discourses of womanhood. One of the most
powerful symbolic and subversive acts carried out by women protesting at the
disappearance of their relatives has been the takeover of public space not normally