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Anna Turley
2005 is a crucial year for issues of development, social justice and gender equality. As this issue of Media Development goes to print, the world’s most powerful leaders are meeting at the G8 summit in Scotland to discuss aid, trade and debt relief for the world’s poorest nations. In March of this year, the Commission on the Status of Women Beijing +10 review took place in New York. In September, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will be reviewed at a UN high-level plenary meeting and in November, the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) will take place in Tunis.
While many recognise that these processes are flawed and ridden with contradictions, they do provide important opportunities for those working on issues of development, social justice and gender equality to assess what progress has been made and what challenges remain.
At the recent Beijing + 10 meeting, a number of women’s media and information and communication organisations submitted a resolution calling on governments to ensure that women, media and ICT issues are kept on the agenda of the Beijing + 10 review and that the WSIS and Millennium Declarations are affirmed and implemented. Despite this, media-related issues hardly featured in the review proceedings. Section J was largely ignored by the UN agencies involved in the review, as well as by many governments and even by important sections of civil society.
In light of this, and the other high level events taking place this year, the need to assess the evolution of the global gender and communication movement and the issues it seeks to address and to strategise for the future could not be more urgent.
A decade on
Ten years ago, in Section J of the Beijing Platform for Action (1995), the media were clearly understood as playing a fundamental role in the perpetuation of unequal gender relations at all levels of society. As the articles in this issue illustrate, this remains the case throughout the world and in many countries the situation has worsened due to changes in the social, economic and political contexts in which media operate. As Jennifer Pozner highlights, US mainstream media continue to sideline the voices of women. While the Bush administration has been very astute in its use of the media to push its neo-con agenda, the American left has failed to understand the importance of the corporate media in shaping public opinion and policy. Until it does so, the mass media will continue to deny the importance of women’s human rights and will respond with a ‘whimper’ to the feminist agenda.
As with the USA, France is currently experiencing a backlash against women’s human rights in the name of religion, encouraged by the media. Florence Rochefort’s exploration of the French media’s treatment of Muslim women who wear headscarves locates the issue in the broader context of global change that includes the Vatican’s intransigence about social behaviour, the renewal of Sharia law and the rise of religious fundamentalist movements worldwide.
In Serbia, where mass media used to be a tool for government propaganda, the struggle for gender equality in the media also continues. As Milija Radovic explores, with the spread of neoliberal economic policies in recent years, the Serbian media have diversified enormously. However, as with many other countries in transition, a tabloid mentality has emerged. In the post-Milosevic era, sensationalist reporting on the violation of women’s human rights, particularly the trafficking of women is rife.
This is also the case in Nigeria where, as Kate Omenugha’s article details, issues as basic as affordable access to the media remain a challenge. For many Nigerian women, access is seen as a privilege not a right, with many considering buying a newspaper as a luxury. Similarly in China many women, particularly those living in rural areas, do not have access to mass media. This in the very country where the UN Fourth World Conference on Women took place.
Reclaiming gender mainstreaming
The Beijing Platform for Action was not only the first time that women and media became an official critical area of concern, it was also the first time that the concept of gender mainstreaming was included in official documentation. Since then, gender mainstreaming has become a concept that has been embraced wholeheartedly by donor agencies, financial institutions and governments alike. However, there has been considerable concern amongst feminists worldwide over the way in which this concept has been understood and implemented by such organisations and the impact this has for the promotion of gender equality at the global, regional and national levels.
As Sunila Abeysekera argues, the concept of ‘gender’ as articulated by feminist thinkers has shifted over the years through the process of mainstreaming to mean something far removed from the original understanding of gender relations as power relations. Understanding of ‘mainstreaming’ has also shifted from a strategy designed to bring a gender perspective to all aspects of an institution’s policy and activities to the much less vexed issue of the quantitative and often symbolic representation of women in structures of decision-making.
As Annabelle Sreberny argues in relation to the WSIS process, gender politics do matter at the simple level of numerical representation, but it is also clear that an uncritical focus on the simple inclusion of women within institutions obscures demands for social justice and political and economic transformation. The mere presence of physical female bodies in institutions will never challenge gender roles and relations if there is no feminist consciousness behind it.
It is ironic that the development of thinking around ‘gender’ as opposed to a focus on ‘women’, and the need to ‘mainstream’ gender concerns as the most effective way to challenge inequality and injustice, emerged in part in response to the perceived failure of earlier strategies concerned with simply integrating women into development. Mainstreaming as practiced by governments and donors has taken precisely an integrationist approach where ‘gender’ has become just another word for ‘women’ and the patriarchal norms and standards that frame the institutions concerned are ignored.
For Sunila Abeysekera, these problems mean that gender mainstreaming is fast becoming an obsolete concept, which begs the question, what next? Perhaps it is not yet time to dismiss gender mainstreaming altogether, but rather to reclaim the concept and reframe it in feminist terms so that gender mainstreaming once again comes to mean a process of social, economic and political transformation through a gender lens, with the prioritisation of gender concerns.
Rejecting instrumentalism
A core part of the rationale behind the integrationist approach to achieving gender equality that has been so enthusiastically adopted by donors and governments is that of the instrumental role that women play in development. Despite the framework provided by the Beijing Platform for Action which views women’s empowerment and gender equality as ends in themselves, the Millennium Development Goals and the WSIS, for example, have taken the approach that women’s empowerment must be pursued not because it is a human right, but because women’s equality will ‘produce favourable ripple effects’ for development. This instrumentalist approach is highly problematic and as Margaret Gallagher argues, it is essential to break through the conceptual and perceptual barriers that separate ‘gender concerns’ and ‘wider concerns’ in the policy-making arena.
Just as women’s empowerment has tended to be viewed as an instrument for development, rather than a legitimate aim in itself, a similar approach is evident among some groups in relation to women and media. As the Beijing +10 process illustrates, media and communication issues continue to exist somewhat on the margins of the international women’s agenda and, as Margaret Gallagher argues, many gender activists themselves have a limited, instrumental view of the role of media in the context of a women’s rights agenda.
The result is a failure to consider media and communication as an issue, and a sometimes naïve vision of the media as instruments for women’s empowerment. Given that the conclusion of one review after another – including the Beijing +10 review - is that attitudes and mind-sets are at the core of unequal gender relations, the reluctance to explicitly address media, communication and information as issues rather than merely as instruments is a profound mistake.
Conceptualising the media as simply a instruments for women’s empowerment or women’s empowerment as simply an instrument for development is a dangerous path to follow. To avoid the depoliticisation of the media and women’s empowerment and gender equality as issues, it is vital to reject instrumentalism and instead to work to demonstrate the centrality of a gender perspective in broader debates about development, media structures and information systems.
There is an urgent need for an intersectional approach that considers the diverse needs and perspectives of women and focuses on unequal power relations – not just between men and women, but more fundamentally between rich and poor, North and South, urban and rural, empowered and marginalised.
Ultimately, whatever the issue, the questions raised for gender activists are fundamentally the same as they have always been. Those questions still revolve around the most basic issues of power and control, definitions and values, access and exclusion – issues that remain at the core of WACC’s work.
Anna Turley is Coordinator of WACC’s Women’s Programme and editor of Media & Gender Monitor.
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