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This article provides information about the gender relation approach for women’s development:
These have been critiqued by a group of women who promoted the gender analytical approach to development for being too monolithic to be of much use in practice. At the same time the WID promotion of the category “woman” was also found wanting for the exclusive focus on women creates woman and man as isolable categories.
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Those who promote the gender analytical approach adopt social relations of gender as their chief analytical category and extend the Marxist concept of social relations beyond the production of objects and commodities to areas of gender relations such as procreation, care of children, old and sick and to what all comes under the daily reproduction of labour. Instead of seeing power rooted in men and denied to women in all circumstances, this approach sees power in general inherent in gender relations.
While it explains women’s subordination in gender relations in the household it does not limit itself to the household and analyses how asymmetrical gender relations springing from the household interact, relate and define relations in the broader economic arena. Gender relations, thus are not merely male-female relations, they refer to the “full ensemble of social relationships”, through which men become men and women become women. More than the sex, it is the socially differentiated arrangements and patterns of gender behaviour and relations that define the differential experience of the world by men and women.
The gender relations framework thus frees woman and man from any biologistic determinism, while at the same time not negating the fact of different sex bodies leading to different rules and practices coming into operation so as to define gender relations and make for gender inequality.
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The framework goes further to emphasise that other social relations such as class, race, ethnicity, religion, etc. mediate to define and translate gender inequality, so that neither class, nor sex, nor any other attribute has prominence over other as a determining principle of individual identity, social position or power. By rethinking of men and women without a universal structure of patriarchy, the gender relations approach makes it possible for constructing gender subordination in different societies, communities, institutions and arenas of action in a historically specific manner thus making for a more realistic and pragmatic attempt at changing how men and women work, live and relate.
Ascription of gender roles is often done discreetly, it may be implicit rules and practices that promote one gender rather than the others and there are strong biologistic ideologies supporting them. Many gender discriminatory practices like the sexual division of labour, construction of an elaborate and sacrificial motherhood or violent and aggressive manhood stand to be questioned more logically once it is realised that they are neither instinctual, nor dictated by biology, rather it is an elaborate social system of gender relations that defines them and that privileges one gender over the other in terms of resources and power.
Lastly, development planners must realise that gender is never absent, though family is a critical site for the beginning of its operations, it operates as a pervasive allocation principle determining the participation of men and women in all social institutions. It links production with reproduction, the domestic domain with the public domain and the microeconomic units with the larger economy.
A gender relations approach has the advantage of being an inductive mode of analysis and can thus explain empirically found contradictions of subordination and power and the multiplicity of outcomes of developmental interventions, sometimes “emancipatory”, sometimes making for more oppressive and subordinating conditions for women across the world.