Gender Division of Control

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Recommended: An essay on women and environmental development

There is a growing body of literature that has looked at the ways that the gender division of control, ownership and labour and spatial distribution of resources influence the roles and responsibilities and norms ( (Elmhirst, 2011). More recently the gendered debate and FPE has been extended to look at the construction of identities through environmental struggles and practices. There is emphasis on how gender can be re/negotiated in different socio-political and environmental contexts. This text (Sultana, 2006), like others from F. Sultana (Sultana, Suffering for water, suffering from water: Emotional geographies of resource access, control and conflict, 2011) shows how water (nature) itself and water quality can influence resource struggles and the constructions of gender as much as how struggles are gendered. ‘Gendered subjectivities are socially and discursively constructed but also materially constituted; subjectivities are produced through practices and discourses, and involve production of subject-positions (which are usually unstable and shifting)’. Sultana’s argument is that gendered-water relations are not just an interconnection of social axes but also (physical) location, spatial relations and hydrogeological (ecological) conditions related to water. The case study used looks at the once deemed success story of groundwater tube wells in Bangladesh that are now poisoning millions of people because of naturally occurring arsenic contamination. This has resulted in reduced water security as those tube wells that are safe are usually privately owned by people that can afford to drill that deep. To understand gender in water management it is important to understand who does what and why in the spatial context; it is the w...

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...orest: Gender, citizenship and creative conjugality. Geoforum, 42, 173-183.
Nightingale, A. (2003). Nature–society and development: social, cultural and ecological change in Nepal. Geoforum, 34, 525-540.
Rocheleau, D., Thomas- Slayter , B., & Wangari, E. (1996). Feminist Political Ecology, Global Issues and Local Experience . London: Routledge.
Sultana, F. (2006). Gendered waters, poisoned wells: Political ecology of the arsenic crisis in Bangladesh. In E. b. Lahiri-Dutt, In Fluid bonds: Views on gender and water (pp. 362-386). NA: Kolkata: Stree Publishers.
Sultana, F. (2009). Fluid lives: subjectivities, gender and water in rural Bangladesh. Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 16(4), 427-444.
Sultana, F. (2011). Suffering for water, suffering from water: Emotional geographies of resource access, control and conflict. Geoforum, 42(2), 163-172.

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