KEY CONCEPTS – GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT

Agents : Ordinary people who create historical change through the activities and struggles of their everyday lives. Compare this with “change agent,” an especially knowledgeable person or organization that brings change to others.

Androcentric : Male centred, a masculine point of view.

Androcentrism : A term developed by feminist theorists to describe the dominant worldview that, until recently, mostly excluded the experiences of women from its analyses. This term also refers to an approach taken to knowledge and the production of knowledge.

Assumption : A supposition that is taken to be true but might not be based on factual evidence.

Biological determinism : A view on which it is argued that human social behaviour is the result of factors inherent to the biological makeup of human beings. This is often contrasted with explanations of human behaviour based on social or sociopsychological factors.

Class : A social or economic division in society. Theorists sometimes differentiate between economic class (based on access to economic resources or material goods) and social class (based on status, prestige, family background, and other factors). One’s class is defined largely by one’s relationship to the means of production; the capitalist class owns the means of production.

Deconstruct : To examine the underlying assumptions attached to certain concepts.

Deconstruction : An analysis of the derivations, contexts, and uses of language or discourse, conducted to unpack their implicit power relations and hidden agendas.

Discourse : An historically, socially, and institutionally specific structure of statements, terms, categories, and beliefs.

Egalitarianism : Relations based on the more or less equal participation of all adults in the production of basic necessities, as well as in their distribution or exchange and in their consumption.

Epistemology : A theory of knowledge, a strategy for justifying beliefs.

Equal opportunity : Conditions that must be created so that women have the same options as men and the same life chances.

Essentialism : Lumping a variety of categories into one, ignoring differences, and emphasizing similarities, despite little evidence for such a generalization.

Ethnicity : Group associations based on any combination of common characteristics, including culture, language, religion, phenotype, geographic region, and ancestry. It is recognized that historical and social factors shape the formation of ethnic groups and bestow on them a distinct identity.

Ethnocentric : Believing that one’s own race, nation, or culture is superior to all others.

Feminist : An individual who is aware of the oppression, exploitation, or subordination of women within society and who consciously acts to change and transform this situation.

Gender barriers : Obstacles to equality that may exist in the laws, norms, and practices of a society and can be identified and removed.

Gender relations : A society’s socially constructed relations between women and men.

Global feminism : The celebration of different feminisms, grounded in the specificities of women’s multifarious experiences. This will not occur until women from all racial groups believe that feminism recognizes their lived realities and incorporates those realities into feminist theories.

Globalization : The idea that the world economy has reached a new level of integration. Heightened capital mobility with globalization means that companies operate worldwide, creating a “global assembly line”; goods, capital, and, to a lesser extent, people move around the globe.

Grand theories, or metanarratives : Grand theories, such as liberal and Marxist frameworks, claim universal validity and thus the capacity to explain global realities, particularly modernity.

Hypothesis : A supposition made as a starting point for further investigation.

Identity : A cluster of ideas and language or discourse that defines the way most people behave and think about a subject and that increasingly forms the bases of major cleavages among people.

Ideology : Any body of discourse that has the effect of masking and sustaining power relations and inequality.

Labeling : Reducing the complex experiences of an individual or group to one dimension, thereby controlling them more effectively and making it more difficult for them to gain credibility for their own struggles.

Metatheories, or metanarratives : See grand theories, or metanarratives.

Metropole : The capitalist countries that dominate the world economy, mostly found in Europe and North America in the 1960s and 1970s. See also periphery.

Mode of production : The organization of wealth creation in a society, including the technical “means of production” and the “relations of production,” which determine who controls production and owns the wealth produced.

Model : A graphic representation of the links between various phenomena and concepts on which a theory is based.

Multiple jeopardies : Racism, sexism, and classism simultaneously experienced by women from marginalized groups, especially visible minorities. This simultaneous experience not only compounds these oppressions but reconstitutes them in specific ways.

Patriarchal ideology : A set of ideas defining women’s roles as different from, and subordinate to, those of men.

Patriarchy : A system of male domination that is widespread but historically specific and can vary over time and context. Originally, this term was used to describe societies characterized by “the rule of the father,” that is, the power of the husband or father over his wives, children, and property. The term has now come to refer to the overall systemic character of oppressive and exploitative relations affecting women.

Periphery : The Third World countries, characterized by underdeveloped economies and dependent relations with the metropole. See also metropole.

Personal is political, the : The view that male domination and women’s resistance to male domination occur in both of the so-called public and private spheres. The concept is often associated with radical feminism.

Positivism : A philosophical doctrine contending that sense perception is the only admissible basis of human knowledge and precise thought. This doctrine became the basis of a hierarchy of knowledge emphasizing the sciences over theological or metaphysical inquiry.

Power : Personal, economical, political, or social ascendancy and control exercised by one individual or group over another. Often this is most clearly seen in relationships between people. Liberal and Marxist thinkers associate power with control over resources and institutions. Postmodernists see power not as something held only by the ruling class but as something diffused throughout society, exercised in many diverse ways by many diverse people, and closely tied to control over knowledge and discourse through attitudes, perceptions, and behaviour.

Production : Producing commodities for the capitalist system and producing the commodity “labour power” on a generational basis.

Production relations : A Marxist-derived concept that refers to the organization of work and production among genders, classes, or other social groupings in a specific social and physical environment.

Public and private spheres : A distinction defining the limits of governmental authority with a view to preserving individual liberty. Women have often been associated with the private sphere; men, with the public one.

Race : Differentiation of human beings into various subspecies. This is usually based on outward physical (or phenotypical) features, such as skin colour, facial features, and hair type. Many social scientists today recognize that race is defined differently in different societies and at different times and so is largely socially determined. They prefer, therefore, to use the term ethnicity. Race is socially constructed and plays a crucial role in women’s experiences and opportunities.

Representation : A term commonly used to refer to an aspect of democratic processes that permits individuals or groups to select those who will carry forward their ideas and agendas to higher authorities. The term is used in a different sense in current theoretical writings to question the power relations implied by having one group convey information about another group in authoritative ways that may deny the people being “represented” the opportunity to present their identity on their own terms.

Reproduction : The biological reproduction of children, that is, childbirth and lactation; the physical reproduction of the wage labour force on a daily basis through domestic work; and the social reproduction of the patriarchal capitalist system through maintaining the ideological conditions that reproduce class and gender relations and the political and economic status quo.

Resistance : Action or inaction, talk or silence, often hidden or covert, through which members of oppressed groups indicate to themselves, each other, and, more rarely, outsiders that they reject the conditions of their oppression and the legitimations proffered by dominant groups.

Restructuring : The changes occurring in companies and economies as a result of the rapidly changing world economy and heightened global competition. Both economic forces and policy choices shape restructuring.

Sexual division of labour : The allocation of tasks and responsibilities in society to women and men. In most inegalitarian societies, the tasks allocated to women have a consistently lower value than those assigned to men.

Social capital : Anything, other than capital, that enhances economic performance.

Social construction of gender : The social definition and determination of ideas and practices. People socially define and determine and can therefore change the ideas and practices related to feminine and masculine characteristics, activities, and ways of relating to one another.

Stratification : Structured inequalities between groups in society, based on gender, class, ethnicity, or other distinguishing characteristics. Although systems of stratification have existed in virtually all societies, significant differences in wealth and power emerge within state-based systems.

Theory : A system of ideas and principles for explaining a particular phenomenon.