Gender Analysis

(Political Structure)

Prepared by:
Alvin Jay Sarino
Jobille Love Roderos
Feliz Joy Enjog
Danielyn Nobleza
Jahed Salman Datumanong
Shawnee Lyn Mopal
Senceda

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Chapter I

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 A. Background of the study

Gender history (global history of gender politics) focuses exclusively on the feminism of
the 1960s and the 1970s has contributed too many students' misperceptions about women's
activism and unwillingness to self-identify as feminist. This skewed focus often leads students to
conclude that the feminist movement was an isolated event unconnected to broader political and
economic trend and reinforces the idea that women's activism is peripheral to understanding of
key developments in recent American history. As people who both research and teach U.S.
political and gender history sought strategies to overcome these problems. Have found that making
women's activism a fundamental part of all of our courses enhances discussion of the central
themes of postwar American politics, including political economy, social welfare policy, and
social movement history. At the same time, it can offer students a richer and more positive view
of 1960s and 1970s feminism by helping them understand its broad motivations, diverse actors,
landmark achievements, and significant shortcomings. This approach requires reimagining key
historical developments with an eye to women's activism rather than entirely overhauling existing
lectures and frameworks. We will offer a few examples.

Postwar in America devote several early classes to the 1950s, especially the widespread
expansion of suburbia provides an excellent opportunity to challenge basic assumptions and to
introduce broader trends and themes regarding gender and political economy. By examining the
way the main forces of suburbanizationthe G.I. Bill and the Federal Housing Agencydid not
just favor white middle-class Americans, but also heterosexual married couples, students learn that
it was not solely Leave It to Beaver and popular advertisements that promoted the ideal of the
nuclear family. These ideals were also codified firmly into federal policies that extended the New
Deal's gendered segmentation of social welfare policy and the workforce. Discussing the
difficulties women had trying to gain access to credit and mortgages in the 1950s helps make
concrete for students the ways in which federal housing policy, tax laws and other forms of
government subsidy significantly favored traditional married couples in which the wife was

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financially dependent on the breadwinner husband

These same policies encouraged the increasing number of married women who did work
outside the home to perceive themselves as secondary wage earners, and steered them into lower
paying and often part-time service sector work. As Connie Fields's documentary The Life and
Times of Rosie the Riveter brilliantly highlights, for most single women and women whose
partners did not earn a family wage, including many African American women, the rigidly
gendered segmentation of the labor force meant exclusion from the affluent life and meaningful
work regardless of skill or ability. By studying these policies and the ways in which they
circumscribed women's lives, students learn that Betty Friedan and the women her Feminine
Mystique influenced to become politically active were not simply aiming to seek personal
fulfillment. By recognizing that activists were seeking to address some of the inequities embedded
in the New Deal State, students come away with a fuller understanding of the economic
circumstances and limitations that inspired and structured 1960s and 1970s feminism.

Most students learn about Rosa Parks in elementary school and she remains a key figure in
undergraduate courses, but highlighting the gendered dimensions of her actions helps to challenge
students' preconceptions of the civil rights movement and expand their ideas about feminism.
Danielle McGuire's discussion of Parks earlier activismespecially her longstanding campaign
against the sexual violence toward black womenfundamentally destabilizes ideas about the
chronology, dimensions, and issues at the heart of the struggle for racial justice. Looking at Parks
in this light also offers the chance to expose students to other African American female activists
such as Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Septima Clarke whose activism at the local level
played a pivotal role and also served as a key inspiration of many leaders and grassroots organizers
in the civil rights and feminist causes. Moreover, asking students to question Parks's decision to
present herself not as a seasoned activist, but rather as a respectable and apolitical seamstress forces
them to analyze the benefits as well as the costs of using gendered and classed norms to challenge
forms of exclusion and oppression.

The National Welfare Rights Movement (NWRO) offers another important way to

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understand the dynamics of gender, race, and class at work in the civil rights movement. The
NWRO fused black power and civil rights tactics, sometimes challenging and other times aiming
to work within the political system to gain economic justice. Discussing why the NWRO
frequently gets left out of the national civil rights narrative and the standard accounts of second-
wave activism further helps students to understand the linkages between the civil rights movement
and black power. Such a discussion also challenges assumptions that black power activists are
primarily African American men and that second-wave feminists are white-middle class women,
and shows students the broad spectrum of activists and claims involved in these pivotal social
movements.

As the 1970s and 1980s have moved from forgotten to pivotal decades in most courses on
the post-1945 history, a discussion of the fate of the family wage and changing family structures
can help enhance understanding of fundamental changes in both political realignment and
everyday life in the United States and further expand students' understanding of the feminist
movements. Pairing primary sources from the so-called "family values" debates from the 1970s
and 1980s alongside data on real wages and income, private-sector labor union membership, and
the political economy of caregiving work, provides one crucial way to achieve these objectives.

An eye to the increased role of women in sustaining the family economy not only indicates
complicated changes in the labor market, but also illuminates how these economic forces have
altered gender roles within both traditional and alternative family structures. To maintain their
consumption standards, American households in recent decades have had to work more hours and
go into debt. Women workers have contributed most of those new hours, and many rightly perceive
men's falling real wages as a loss and the double day of waged work and unpaid caregiving and
domestic work as a burden.

Studying changes in the economy and family structures helps to correct the erroneous belief
that it was feminism alone that thrust women across the class spectrum into the workforce in the
1970s. Looking at successes such as the dramatic increase in female professionals, as well as
failures like the persistent disparity in pink and blue collar wages can help students understand the
incomplete nature of the feminist revolution and the entrenched poverty among single mothers and

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their children. However, this debate about work and family can also force students to recognize
the significant achievements of second-wave feminism and the ways in which it helped introduce
key topics about the division of labor and equitable partnerships into public discourse and
individual relationships which have had important and tangible benefits to the lives of many men
as well as women.

Finally, the reconstituted welfare state of the last 20 years cannot be completely understood
without using gender as a category of analysis. Examining welfare to work reforms and the rise of
mass incarceration reveals how federal policy over the last 30 years has redrafted the gendered
assumptions of the New Deal social reform. Specifically, changes in welfare benefits have
withdrawn much of the financial support that had been previously allocated to poor women for the
caregiving work they performed within their own families. The increasing necessity of full-time
paid work for most working and middle class mothers in the 1980s and 1990s led to widespread
public support for welfare to work reforms for poor mothers culminating in the 1996 Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act replacing Aid to Families with Dependent Children
(AFDC) with Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), with a life-time limit of five years.
Conservative politicians' emphasis on marriage as a solution to enduring high poverty among
single mothers and their children is a tacit acknowledgement that these welfare to work reforms
leave many single women unable to fully provide for their families, even if they are working full
time.
Looking at the five-fold increase in incarceration rates since the 1970s, which has
disproportionately placed African American and Latino men in prison, helps students recognize
the problems with using marriage as the basis for welfare policy as well at the new forms of gender
division taking shape. These social policies also mark important changes in Americans'
conceptions of the general welfare and the appropriate scope of government action. Welfare reform
and the rise of mass incarceration, therefore, show not just new and deeply entrenched divisions
of gender and race, but also that the embrace of the free market and abandonment of a social
welfare safety net transcends party linesthough the use of family values rhetoric often
deliberately obscures this fact. Studying these developments gives students a more accurate
understanding of the labels of Democrat and Republican and liberal and conservative. Examining
the bipartisan and gendered dimensions of these attitudes also helps students to understand the new

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challenges and issues that feminism must address in the coming decades.

In the twenty-first century western world, the idea that women and men naturally possess
distinct characteristics is often treated skeptically, but this was an almost universally held view in
the eighteenth century. Ideas about gender difference were derived from classical thought,
Christian ideology, and contemporary science and medicine. Men and women were thought to
inhabit bodies with different physical make-ups and to possess fundamentally different qualities
and virtues. Men, as the stronger sex, were thought to be intelligent, courageous, and determined.
Women, on the other hand, were more governed by their emotions, and their virtues were expected
to be chastity, modesty, compassion, and piety. Men were thought to be more aggressive; women
more passive. These differences were echoed in the faults to which each sex was thought to be
prone. Men were prone to violence, obstinacy, and selfishness, while women's sins were viewed
as the result of their tendency to be ruled by their bodies and their emotions, notably lust, excessive
passion, shrewishness, and laziness.

Expectations of male and female conduct derived from these perceived virtues and
weaknesses. In marriage, men were expected to rule over their wives, and all property (except in
some cases property acquired by the woman before marriage) belonged to the husband. Men were
the primary wage earners, while women were expected to be primarily responsible for housework
and childcare, though both sexes participated in all these activities. Women's paid employment
was typically low status, low paid, and involved fewer skills and responsibilities than men's. The
types of work available to women were confined to a few sectors of the economy where the work
could be seen as an extension of women's domestic responsibilities, such as domestic service, the
clothing trades, teaching, and nursing. In politics, women possessed virtually no formal rights,
though they could exercise influence informally. Beyond employment, women's public roles were
generally confined to the exercise of their moral and domestic virtues through participation in
religion and charity.

However, one should not exaggerate the differences between the sexes, since there were a
number of activities, both public and private, engaged in by both. Particularly among the poor,
men and women were forced to do whatever was necessary in order to survive, both in unpaid

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work such as housework and childcare, and in employment for financial gain such as street selling
(pictured) and some aspects of weaving.

There were a few opportunities to step outside accepted gender roles. Both men and women
occasionally dressed in the clothes of the opposite sex to participate in masquerades, and women
occasionally dressed as men in order to gain access to opportunities (such as military service)
otherwise denied to their sex. Within London's homosexual subculture, men sometimes cross-
dressed as women and adopted effeminate characteristics.

It is often argued that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed a
significant change in gender roles, which led to the emergence of separate spheres in the
nineteenth century. The growing influence of evangelical ideology placed an increasing moral
value on female domesticity, virtue, and religiosity. It is argued that increasingly public life and
work was confined to men, while women were expected to stay at home. New ideas about the
female body led to a decline in the belief that women were the more lustful sex; now women were
idealized as mothers (the angel in the house), while those who failed to meet expectations were
censured as prostitutes with uncontrollable sexual desires.

Recently historians have begun to question some aspects of this story, pointing out that
these ideas of gender difference were for the most part very old, and that women were not excluded
from work and public life in the nineteenth century. Women were excluded from some occupations
and activities, but they entered new ones, for example authorship, teaching, and charity work.
Working-class women still had to work to support themselves and their families, though the range
of occupations available to them may have narrowed and some work, such as sweated labor in
the textile trades, took place in the home. Towards the end of the century new jobs outside the
home became available, and many women became clerks, typists, and shop assistants.

It is true that the concept of the respectable male breadwinner, who had the responsibility
for providing financially for his entire family, was increasingly influential in this period.
Consequently, women were frequently expected to give up their jobs when they got married. With
the development of empire and a new wave of prosecutions of homosexuals in the 1890s, men
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were increasingly expected to demonstrate the masculine traits of muscle, might, and sexual
attraction to women, combined with chivalrous concern for the weaker sex.
While gender differences may thus have been accentuated, the spheres of male and female
activity were by no means totally separate, even at the end of the nineteenth century. As the
proceedings indicate, both men and women were present in many aspects of public and private
life.

From the mid-nineteenth century womens inferior social position was increasingly
questioned by feminist writers and in campaigns to eliminate discriminatory practices. Women
(and some men) demanded, with some success, increased employment and educational
opportunities for women, reform of married womens property law, more equitable divorce laws,
and repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, which subjected alleged prostitutes to examination for
venereal disease.

From 1866, the suffrage movement campaigned to get women the vote, which had been
given to property-owning men by the 1832 Reform Act, and was extended to working-class men
in 1867 and 1884. During this campaign arguments for the female vote developed into critiques of
the ideology of separate spheres and the understandings of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality
on which it was based. Women, it was argued, should no longer be defined as the sex, simply as
receptacles for male sexual activity.

From 1905, frustrated at the lack of progress, the suffrage campaign turned militant. Under
the leadership of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, the Womens Social and Political Union
staged demonstrations and engaged in acts of vandalism such as breaking windows by throwing
stones. Some of those arrested were tried at the Old Bailey: see the trials of Emily Davison in 1912
and Emmeline Pankhurst in 1912 and 1913. Some of those imprisoned (including Pankhurst) went
on hunger strikes. In May 1913, Davison jumped in front of the Kings horse on Derby Day and
was trampled to death. World War I intervened, but women over the age of 30 were finally given
the vote in 1918.

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Brgy. Dadiangas North History

Barangay Dadiangas North with an area of 3.2443 square kilometers and a population of
more or less 66,000 is one of the fastest growing barangay in the City of General Santos both
demographically and economically.

With the uncontrollable growth of the population of Barangay Dadiangas, the peace and
order problem may complicate or make matters more difficult to content with along the slack in
the efficiency of the services that the barangay can render. As a solution to these foreseen
problems, the barangay council passed Resolution No. 41, Series of 1989 requesting the
Sangguniang Panlungsod of General Santos to divide Barangay Dadiangas into four subdivisions.

Consultations were made in line with the governments consultative and participatory
democracy and it was found out that 70% of purok officials favored for its division. To this effect,
the city council passed Resolution No. 90, Series of 1990 and was duly approved by the City
Mayor Rosalita T. Nuez on June 13, 1990 creating four barangays out of Barangay Dadiangas.
The name Barangay Dadiangas North derived mainly on its mother barangays geographical
descriptions and where the first elementary schools located namely: Dadiangas North Elementary
School, Dadiangas West Elementary School, Dadiangas South Elementary School and Dadiangas
East Elementary School.
The newly created Barangay Dadiangas North with its territorial boundaries defined as
bounded on the north by a portion of Roxas Avenue and Pendatun Street, on the south by Daproza
Avenue (formerly Sergio Osmea Avenue) and on the west by Silway River. This shall be deemed
officially distinct and separate from its mother barangay only upon the ratification by a majority
of the votes cast in plebiscite. Thus, upon the approval of the Commission on Election, Manila, a
plebiscite was conducted in the entire area concerned on February 24, 1991.

Out of 3,055 voters who cast their votes, 1,876 were in favor of the division/creation of the
barangay while 1,179 votes were against its creation.

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 On March 5, 1991, the City Mayor appointed and inducted the first barangay officials of
the newly created Barangay Dadiangas North lead by Barangay Captain Domingo A. Santiago and
his kagawads Mr. Renato Diagan, Mrs. Maya Sophia Mabute, Mr. Antonio Bautista, Jr., Mr.
Antonio Pea, Mrs. Nena Sun and Mr. Alfredo Lising.

Existing infrastructure projects were implemented before its division. These include the
construction of bus terminal and the barangay public market at Bulaong and the asphalting and
concreting of various streets.

During the term of Barangay Captain Domingo Santiago, he initiated the construction of Barangay
Hall through the aid extended by private sector. This was done by donating either in cash or in
kind such as construction materials.

Government funded projects includes water system at Bulaong Terminal and public
market: drainage system within the perimeter of Bulaong Public Market, lighting of terminal
underground drainage along Osmea Avenue to Bulaong Terminal, concreting of Jose P. Laurel
Avenue. Construction of day care center in the barangay was not yet implemented due to lack of
school site. This project was implemented in 1991.

As the national and local election was set on May 11, 1992, Barangay Captain Domingo
Santiago filed his certificate of candidacy before the Commission on Election to run for city
councilor.
On March 23, 1992, Domingo Santiago turned over his duties and responsibilities as barangay
captain of Barangay Dadiangas North to Mr. Antonio Bautista as the barangay captain, also
appointed by the City Mayor.

Today, Barangay Dadiangas North is still in its early stage but its barangay officials
works hand in hand for its continued progress especially in the proper implementation of
development projects and the problems/cases brought to them by their constituents.

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Brgy. Information

Date of Creation June 13, 1990

No. of Purok 13
No. of Household 2,345
Infrastructure
Hospital 1
Schools 11
Roads 2

Geographic Information

Topography/Terrain Characteristics Plain

Territorial Boundary
North National Highway
South Sergio Osmea Ave.
East Roxas Avenue & Pendatum
West Silway River
Distance from the city proper 1.5 kms
Total Land Area 3.2443 sq km/97 hectares

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Demography

Classification URBAN
Total Population 12,000 more or less
Dialect Spoken Illonggo, Cebuano, Ilocano, Tagalog, Kapampangan
Ethnic/Tribal Groups Muslim, Blaan

List of Puroks
Purok Purok Chairman
Purok 1 Maria Lourdes L. Sugabo
Purok 2 Janeth Custodio
Purok 3 Agnes Belgera
Purok 4 Beverly Daga-ang
Purok 5 Jasmin Lasconia
Purok 6 Arnel P. Siao
Purok 7 Pepito C. Quizon
Purok 8 Evelyn Galapate
Purok 9 June S. Lupman
Purok 10 Felipe L. Ramos
Purok 11 Winniefredo T. Padilla
Purok 12 Richard Depay
Purok 13, CM Recto Jed L. Villodres

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Barangay. Officials

Hon. Honorio H. Lorica Jr.

Punong Barangay

HON. Genesan A. Saulon

Barangay Kagawad

Hon. Renante C. Cloma

Barangay Kagawad

Hon. William M. Go
Barangay Kagawad
Hon. Luzviminda R. Tampus
Barangay Kagawad

Hon. Arnaldo A. Espaola

Barangay Kagawad

Hon. Noel T. Bautista

Barangay Kagawad

Hon. George T. Seneriches

Barangay Kagawad

PUROK FIESTA AND BARANGAY ANNIVERSARY

Barangay Address Activity Date
Dad.East Foundation Anniversary June 13

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B. Rationale

One of the factors that affects gender is the political structure, emphasizes that
political structure has a big impact with come in analyzing gender status in the society especially
in the phase of politics.

Who governs is a traditional question in the study of politics: who is absent and who is
present in the domains of public power? Understanding how women and men lives shape their
political attitudes and affect their policy orientations remains a significant challenge for todays
study. But as of now the under representation of women in the political field was reframed as a
serious problem for democracy and human development, which was seen to raise awkward and
crucial questions about the distribution of power.

Debates regarding Gender and Politics have captured the imaginations of social and
political actors over recent decades with increasing vigor, affecting every discipline in the social
sciences. Today, Gender and Politics is one of the most energized fields in the discipline of
Political Science. The field explores power relations and governance from a perspective that
recognizes gender, along with other identity markers, as politically and socially constructed
categories.

Some of the questions that are addressed in the field of Gender and Politics include: the
unequal status between men and women in political, economic and social affairs and processes;
the nature and implications of same-sex marriage rights and related debates; whether and how
gender structures public opinion and political behavior, as well as, political candidacy and political
communications; the relevance of feminist theory to an understanding of historic and
contemporary questions of justice, authority and power; the meaning and significance of identities
regarding gender, transgender, sexual orientation and sexuality; the implications of a gendered
analysis of institutions such as the state, international organizations, bureaucracy, the military,
political parties, social movements and trade unions; the impact of a gendered analysis of

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development and underdevelopment, international conflict, globalization, migration and
citizenship; and the gendered nature of public policy in Philippines and global politics and through
this reason weve come up to make this gender analysis about political structure to go deeper
beyond of what we understand about gender politics and how it really affects gender.

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C. Objectives

Group 6 named Simper Fidelis focusing about the political structure aims in doing this research is
the following statement:

Deepen our understanding of the structural conditions and the changes that are needed in
making and enacting of public policy to address these conditions;
Help identify strategies and opportunities for promoting gender equity within key
institutions, policy-making processes, non-governmental policy actors and the social
discourses within which public policy is framed;
Help specify the changes that are needed in mens gender practices and identities that will
serve to promote gender equity within public policy towards the goal of preventing
violence against women.
Define gender needs in the phase of politics.

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D. Problem Presented

Gender quotas like Rwandas were devised to improve the problem of female under
representation in government. Women hold only about one-fifth of seats in legislatures worldwide
The specific parameters of quotas often vary by country, but sometimes use gender-neutral
language, for example by requiring that a party list contain at minimum 40 percent of each sex.
However, gender quotas are always understood to impose a floor on the number of female
representatives, since under representation does not affect men as a group (though individual men
may still be excluded based on their minority status in other areas). The assumption behind gender
quotas is that women are present in low numbers because something has gone wrong in the political
recruitment process, rather thanas opponents of quotas insistthat women participate in a fair
system and are consistently defeated at the party and electoral levels simply because voters find
them less qualified to serve.

But one researcher is taking this logic and flipping it on its head, arguing that the real
problem isnt that women are underrepresented, but rather that men are over represented. Rainbow
Murray, an associate professor of politics at Queen Mary University in London, proposes that
governments move away from implicit quotas for women, which frame women as outsiders and
men as the norm, and toward explicit quotas for menweeding out the male politicians who are
perhaps not all that well qualified. We cannot automatically assume that men are present in these
proportions because they were the best representatives available, Murray said. Anthony Weiner?
Todd Akin? Did those guys really get elected because they were the best society had to offer?

Akin and Weiner notwithstanding, its almost impossible to imagine such a system working
in the United States. Countries with parliamentary systems are able to implement quotas with
relative ease, since political parties have much greater control over the selection of candidates, but
in the U.S., mandatory quotas at the party level would likely be unconstitutional. But Murrays
argument is as much a call to reconsider the way society thinks about political exclusion as it is a
proposal to actually change electoral laws.

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 A quota for men would establish a ceiling on the share of male representatives, theoretically
driving up the quality of representation for both men and women by making the electoral process
more competitive and meritocratic. The current arrangement, in which wealthy, ethnic-majority
men dominate as representatives, does not serve the interest of the full range of men in society
and therefore, Murray argues, men have an enlightened self-interest in supporting quotas for
men. Quotas alone would not necessarily result in a more representative sample of men in office.
Murrays argument requires a certain amount of optimism about the attitudes of voters themselves,
since even with a more diverse slate of candidates, inherited beliefs about who is fit to go into
politics are unlikely to evaporate.

The list of reasons for female under representation is long and deeply rooted. There are
simultaneous problems of supply and demandqualified women often opt not to run, and they are
overlooked by political gatekeepers when they do. Women also have historically lacked the funds,
social connections, free time, and education to run for office. Now that the education levels of
women in western democracies often exceed those of men, newer theories suggest that women are
socialized to have lower political ambitions, or that potential female candidates may be deterred
by the prospect of public humiliation in the media and in legislatures. When they do decide to run,
previous research has demonstrated that women undergo a more difficult selection process, pressed
to demonstrate their competence according to traditional male-oriented criteria, while also
demonstrating an added value in their experience with womens issues.

Quotas for women address the demand-side problems of under representation, accepting
that women face an uneven playing field, and seeking to create a less unfavorable environment for
potential female candidates. (Once quota women enter office, however, they still face suspicion
and dismissal, regardless of their qualifications. Critics charge that quotas amount to preferential
treatment by sex, since quota women often displace incumbents who by no fault of their own
happen to be male.)

Moreover, assuming men dont have a naturally superior talent for holding office, it cannot
be true that the current proportion of men in legislatures won their seats in a truly meritocratic
contest. While individual men face scrutiny during their evaluation as candidates, they are not

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required to justify their inclusion in the political process. Enforcing a ceiling for male
representatives might change that, and it would reverse the current stigma of having been brought
into office by quota.

The qualifications that make a good representative are highly contested among scholars
and highly gendered among voters, skewing our ideas of merit toward stereotypically masculine
qualities and making the pickings for successful candidates unnecessarily slim. If voters hold the
essential prerequisites for candidates to be time and money to run a campaign, charisma,
eloquence, public argumentation skills, media appeal, intelligence, and networks, its natural that
the winners typically come from elite institutions, careers in business or law, and springboard
positions ... such as coveted, usually male-dominated positions within local or party politics.

What do men have to gain from curbing their dominance as representatives? More than
you might expect.

However, studies on quotas and individual political background suggest that using
established (i.e., male) norms to evaluate female politicians risks devaluing credentials women are
more likely to hold, like grassroots or community-organizing experience, that may in fact be more
useful for representatives than the traditional prerequisites. Career and educational prestige are
likely superfluous, since representatives must take a broad approach towards the many issues they
vote on, delegating to staffers the task of mastering details and making expertise in any one subject
only a minor advantage. A high level of personal ambition is also unnecessary, since a candidate
who favors his or her own advancement could be seen as violating the principles of representative
democracy. Murray argues for the inherent usefulness of qualities like authenticity, empathy, and
personal experience with common concerns like public-school zoning, caring for an ailing parent
or child, or the price of milk, which are traditionally considered feminine (although they are not
necessarily possessed by women more frequently than men) and have therefore been devalued as
qualifications.

What do men have to gain from curbing their dominance as representatives? More than
what is expected and not only those men who are not part of the dominant classes. The status quo,
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Murray contends, encourages a specific sort of masculinity based on aggression, confidence,
virility, and power. Research on organizational culture has found that male-dominated
environments can be intimidating for men as well as women, with men compelled ... to conform
to the dominant culture, even when this does not come naturally. Those already in power, of
course, may feel that they lose out when the talent pool is widened. But they would be hard-pressed
to argue that the existing, less diverse body is a better representation of the whole of society.

Furthermore, men have distinct gendered interests in some political areas, including
healthcare, where mens needs differ substantially from womens; education, where men now lag
behind women in many subjects and countries; and paternity, where men have special interests
as fathers. These interests may go unaddressed when essentialism reigns, allowing views about
what men want and need [to] thrive unchallenged, and preventing discussion of modern concerns
such as flexible work arrangements that would allow men to be primary or equal caregivers of
their children.

More than an institutional reform that might chip away at gender inequality, quotas for men
are most powerful as a provocation. Freed from practical constraints, the idea offers tools for a
new mindset in which men and women admit that the paucity of women leaders is equity denied
and work to change it.

Contemporary notions of democracy provide that every citizen has the right to seek public
office and participate in the process of decision making. However, in practice many social interests
are not represented, as only a small proportion of the population seeks elective office and even
fewer are elected. This includes women and the people living with disability, who quantitatively
are the most under-represented as candidates in elections.

Various economic, political, social and systemic practices narrow the field of potential
female candidates. Systemic factors such as the type of electoral system adopts; (the First-Past-
The-Post system) and the nature of the party system affect mens and womens access to political
life. Party politics is still virtually an exclusive affair of men as only very few women were elected

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into offices of political parties. The party machineries are male dominated. Womens wings of
parties have been abolished but have been quickly replaced by the position of Woman Leader.

Male dominated political culture and values are one of the reasons for gender imbalance in
elective offices. The situation has been further aggravated by the growth of corruption, criminal
activity and violence perpetuated by the major political parties. There is a widespread incidence
of violence against women and women are victims of different forms of discrimination and
religious fundamentalism. Women hold a secondary position except as voters. Indigene-ship has
been used as a weapon to exclude women from political participation. Women who are married to
men who are not indigene of their local government or state suffer systematic discrimination. They
are told to return to their maiden local government to contest for elective positions. At the same
time their marriage to men from other local government has alienated them from their families of
birth.

Electoral finance is an increasing obstacle to the achievement of gender equality in the

electoral process. This is partly because women have traditionally been relegated to the private,
domestic sphere, and thus have neither the personal financial resources nor the moneyed networks
to allow them to compete effectively in increasingly expensive electoral politics. The cost of
contesting a party nomination was disadvantageous to women, who on the average had less access
to financial resources than men (Brodie 1991:7).

There is always a clear preference of male aspirants over female aspirants by party machinery, and
the electorate. Other experiences include insincere negotiations for consensus in favor of male
aspirants or sheer pressure from family engineered by external forces to compel potential female
aspirants to step down in favor of male aspirants. Among the hypotheses given as to why women
are eliminated in the primary process or if they succeed, later on as candidates, is that they usually
cannot compete with male aspirants or candidates in terms of vote buying.

The process for the selection of candidates is not always an open democratic process where
the merits of male and female aspirants are determined by the party members. The men who fund
the parties or Godfathers see themselves as the owners of the parties and therefore control and
22 | P a g e
dominate others including the party leadership. Even when women win the party nomination
exercise they still have several hurdles to cross within and outside the party. According to Ibrahim
and Salihu (2004)1 several labels (anti party people, cultural deviant, use of invectives and insults)
are used as strategies to exclude them from participating and once a negative label has been
successfully imposed on an aspirant, it is easy to exclude the labelled person irrespective of the
formal rules and procedures established, because the persons legitimacy has been eroded.

Political Parties are critical in determining who runs for elective positions, yet women are
not found in decision making organs of parties. The more popular position for women is that of
Woman leader which has little or no powers. Women are often marginalized and excluded at the
Political primaries level by neglecting delegates votes or cancelling primaries completely and
presenting a consensus candidate. Although many of the political parties have waived the payment
of high nomination fees for women, they hardly make it through the primaries.

The state has therefore not shown sufficient commitment both in terms of providing the
appropriate legal framework, accountable institutions and the capacity for gender planning and
budgeting. It had not accepted affirmative action for bridging gender gaps, had not engendered
party and election guidelines despite the existence of a National Gender Policy and the ratification
of CEDAW since 1985.

Few women are card carrying members of political parties and their recreation activities
were tied to their reproductive activities and were home based limiting skill building, mentoring
and constituency building. Male politicians in comparison were more involved in political
associations and recreation clubs and spent more time outside the home networking with other
men. Traditional Rulers and Religious Leaders have a lot of influence over who contests and wins
elections particularly at the local government level.

Gender politics of policy research is one component of the overall UN multi-country study
methodology. The gender politics of policy research can be conducted on its own or with the other

23 | P a g e
components for a more comprehensive picture of the social structures and the underlying norms,
attitudes and behaviors related to mens use of violence against women.

The ways in which violence supports patriarchythose structures and institutions created
to sustain and recreate mens dominance and power over womenhave long been documented by
feminist scholarship and activism. More recently, research studies and program interventions have
sought to better understand and address the connections between masculinities and the nature and
impacts of violence that supports patriarchy. This work has variously drawn on tools and literature
from psychology and sociology to conceptualize the masculinity of violence, with the intention of
developing strategies for working with men and women to prevent violence against women.

In recognizing that there is not a singular masculinity but rather multiple forms of
masculine expression and practices that can and do change over time, the masculinities work with
men has expanded to also look at how men can choose non-violent, gender equitable ways to be a
man. By doing so, men are thus challenging the hegemonic practices of masculinity. To support
men in challenging hegemonic masculinity, much of the focus of the masculinities work with men
has been on the internal and interpersonal dimensions of mens experience of the gender order.
Through education campaigns and intensive group discussions, this work has sought to address
mens individual internalization of gender norms and how this plays out in their attitudes and
violent behaviors. It is these attitudes and behaviors that constitute the primary focus of the
quantitative and qualitative components of the UN multi-country study methodology.

At the same time as examining the internal and interpersonal dimensions of mens
experience of the gender order, it is also important to consider the institutional and ideological
dimensions of its workings. To prevent violence against women, it is essential to understand the
ways in which gendered violence is reproduced by the policies and cultures of political, economic
and social institutions and legitimized by ideologies that sanction hierarchies, based not only on
gender but other axes of inequality, including sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, caste, religion/faith
and age. This institutional and ideological focus serves to emphasize that violence is not simply
the behavior of individuals but is structured by and within unequal social relations as a tool of
oppression. Therefore, it is worthwhile to explore not only individual mens experiences and

24 | P a g e
perpetration of violence but also the broader environment of policies, institutional cultures and
ideologies that enable violence to occur.

It could be useful to explore mens roles within the context of policy and policy-making.
As the policy makers and power holders in societies across the region, elite men are a critical
constituency for driving policy changes. As the managers and staff of political, economic and
social institutions, men can assume an essential role in ensuring that progressive policies are
enforced. As gendered beings, men can also benefit from changes in the gender order, alongside
women, because violence harms some men at the same time as it oppresses women. Many men
experience oppression on the basis of class exploitation, racism, homophobia and caste and/or
faith-based discrimination, thus they share a common interest with women in demanding policies
for greater social justice, including gender justice.

To generate this greater understanding of the policies, institutional cultures and ideologies
that create an environment in which there is gender equity and equality of men and women in the
governmental politics.

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Chapter II

26 | P a g e
Review of the Related Literature

According to Aristotle, the politics in which he evaluates differing constitutions in search

of the best method of government. Since this time there has been deep-rooted disagreement as to
what and who must continue the politics. There is even disagreement about the status and the
statement of the nature of politics. With which regard to definitions of politics there are those who
define politics in terms of governmental institutions and others who define it in terms of relations
of power. Some focus on a narrowly defined range of power relations; others adopt a very broad
range. With regard to the status of such definitions themselves, there are those who argue that there
is an empirically verifiable truth as to what constitutes the politics (Easton 1968). There are others
who maintain that any definitions will be no more than a contingent social construction , the
discipline of the politics being dependent upon the nature of the political arena, itself dependent
upon socially constructed and historically variable forces. Definitions of politics are not therefore
discoverable in nature but rather a legacy or convention (Wollin 1961:5).

It is the second contextualist approach that is more dominant in contemporary debates.

While the positivist perspective (endorsing objectivity) was strongly articulated throughout the
1950s and 1960s, the more common approach during the 1970s and 1980s was social
constructionist relation to status (leftwich 1984:a 4). During the 1990s with the rise of the
deconstructionist methodology, a third perspective also emerge in relation to this debate.
Definition of the politics, it is now frequently argued are neither empirically true nor simply
reflections of underlying social relations, but rather active to shape the real world. Political
theory does not reflect already given to social relations, as Kate Nash argues, it is part of attempt
to institute them (Nash 1998: 50). This insight has increased the intensity of the debate concerning
the substance of these definitions.

In recent times of debates within political studies about the nature of the politics have
tended to polarized between advocates of politics as institutions of government and as relations of
power. In the former the politics is equated with the juridical issues of rights, justice and
responsibility. In the latter political is equated with the instrument at issues of power, policy and

27 | P a g e
pragmatism. Within this debate politics gets bifurcated, as William Connoly tells, between
principle and instrumentality, with one group of individuals (rights of theorist, theorist of justice)
celebrating the former and another group (Utilitarianism, pragmatist) insisting upon the
incorrigibility of the latter (Connolly 1991: 74). On the institutional conception of the political
politics is defined as government institutions. On the instrumental conception of the political
politics is defined as the power and decision-making. These two different conceptions of politics
generate two different sets of criteria for differentiating political life from all other aspects of
society and thereby for isolating the subject matter of political science (Easton 1968: 283)

Although the broad conception of the politics has its weaknesses it is nonetheless the one
that more than any other has created the disciplinary space for considering the issues of gender
as central study of politics. It is the adoption of the narrow institutional and instrumental
conception of the politics of the most dominant renderings of the discipline that accounts for the
fact that the study of politics has been the one to take up the challenge of feminist scholarship, and
more recently mens studies, and modify the cannon. The more extensive power-based conception
of the politics both emerges from, and make possible, the feminist to do the orthodoxy of politics.

There is, Pateman has influentially proposed something about the discipline of the politics
and the orthodox understanding of the subject matter of political inquiry that makes it particularly
resistant to feminist argument. She claims that the power of men over women is excluded from
scrutiny and deemed irrelevant to political life and democracy by the patriarchal construction of
the categories with the political the political theorist work (Pateman 1989: 13-14). Joni
Lovenduski makes a similar claim. The dominant conception of political studies is bound to
exclude women, she tells us, largely because women do not usually dispose of public power,
belongs to the political elites or hold influential positions in government institutions (Lovenduski
1981: 88).

What is intriguing here is that Lovenduski and Pateman make the same claims regard to
the orthodox study of politics even though they significantly distinct conceptions of which
orthodoxy they have in mind. The discipline of politics has been bifurcated into Political Science
and Political Theory, which have tended to operate with institutional and instrumental conception

28 | P a g e
of politics respectively. The former largely fails to theorize power; the latter adopts narrow, one
and two-dimensional conceptions of power. Each has been overtly and inherently exclusionary
regarding issues of gender. They represent distinct but equally inhospitable- traditions.

Pateman criticizes the primarily institutional focus of liberal political theory, while
Lovenduski the primarily instrumentalist focus on positivist political science. Both the
instrumental and institutional conceptions of politics focus attention on the public sphere of
decision-making. Both excluded from the proper remit of political study of social relations that
characterized the public sphere. As a result Pateman argues, both womens exclusion from the
public world and the manner of our inclusion have escape the noticed of political theorist
(Pateman 1984: 4).

With regard to political science Lovenduski argues that, if gender is considered from the
instrumentalist conception of the politics, it is as a background variable, rarely surfacing
significant. Work has been done by female political scientist within this framework to identify bias
in the standard literature on political participation and voting behavior and to collect new research
material (Bourque and Grossholtz 1998). But many feel that a more substantial understanding of
womens political behavior would require a critical questioning of the definition of what is political
itself.

Lovenduski locates the primary source of womens apparent exclusion from the study of
politics with post-war positivism and its construction of America political science. Virginia Sapiro
argues that the legacy of positivism has been more ambivalent than this in relation to feminist
research. While it has inhibited research (as Lovenduski points out), it has also promoted the study
of women in that rigorous conventions of objectivity adopted by positivist political science enabled
women to subject the statements made by political scientist to empirical test (Sapiro 1998a: 72).
In other words, women were able to break into the field by holding the discipline accountable to
its own professed ideals of objectivity.

Yet the political theory is half of the discipline of politics has been perhaps more resistant
to the question of gender. Indeed, Susan Moller Okin, herself a prominent political theorist, argues
29 | P a g e
that, compared with some other academic disciplines, contemporary political theory is in one
significant respect in the Dark Ages most political theorist have yet to take gender- by which I
mean the social institutionalization of sexual difference seriously (Okin 1991: 39). One of the
first and most influential theorist to attempt to challenge this state of affairs was Pateman. The
object of her critique is not 1950s positivism but seventeenth-century social contract theory.

Pateman claims that sexual difference and the subordinate of women are central to the
construction of modern political theory. This means that contemporary political theorist, whatever
their personal commitments, are able to admit the relevance or significance of feminist questions
and criticism only with great difficulty. This is not because of individual bias, but because of such
matters are systematically excluded from their theorizing by the modern patriarchal construction
of the object of their studies, political theory itself (Pateman 1989: 3) the central mechanism by
which the exclusion is realized is the assumption that the political is public and that the private
real of the domestic, of familial and sexual relations, lies outside the proper concern of the study
of the political.

Patemans distinctive contribution has been revealed the significant role played by the
seventeenth-century social contract theorist in the creation of this exclusion. Such is the continued
influence of these theorist that contemporary theorist now work within their parameters without
subjecting them to explicit scrutiny. This means that the political implications of a social ordered
divided between public and private arenas have come to be precluded from critical investigation.
If definitions of political are themselves political acts entailing the exercise of power, the power
of this particular discourse is so great as to have achieved hegemonic status. Pateman tells, to
understand what is excluded in the classic social contract definition of the politics, and why. The
original social contract is conventionally depicted as a contract between equals which ensured
peoples political freedom. What has been systematically forgotten is that it also entailed a sexual
contract, which ensured womens social subordination (Pateman 1988:11-115)

One of many implications of Patemans analysis is that the continued omission of questions
of gender from politics syllabuses has been a result not simply of contingent and individual sexism,
but rather of a fundamental partiality of the very terms of debate upon which the discipline has

30 | P a g e
been based. Both Lovenduski and Pateman take what they perceived to be dominant disciplinary
paradigm to task for failing to be adequately inclusive with regard to gender. Because the study of
politics has become so bifurcated between science and theory, they do so on very different terms.
What they share, however, is a firm belief that the very construction of the discipline of politics
needs to be recast if it is consider the political experiences of women and allow a meaningful
consideration of gender.
The attempts to develop a political theory sensitive to the insights of feminism have clearly
been significantly hindered by the essentially patriarchal assumptions underpinning the very
discipline itself. The belief that the bases of theoretical reflection need to be conceptualized if
gender is to be adequately considered stood, for a significant period, in direct conflict with a
widespread feminist rejection of the very project of theoretical abstraction. Once feminist did
embrace the theoretical inquiry, however, the areas of the study ranged from the subjectivity to
aesthetics, but rarely concentrated on the institutions of government.

If there is paradoxical relation between politics and feminism, there is also an ambiguous
relation between feminism and theory. .within early second-wave articulations of feminism there
was a pronounced hostility to theory. Misgivings about the pursuit of the gender theory came not
only within the male academic establishment (worried about gender as an appropriate theoretical
concern), but also from within the womens movement itself (worried about theory as an
appropriate form of engagement). The feminist suspicion of theory was, at least at the beginnings
of second-wave feminism pronounced.

A significant number of feminist argued, and some continue to argue though increasingly
against the tide of both feminist and academic opinion that the establishment of feminist theory
as an academic discourse, and of womens studies as an academic discipline, entailed the
exploitation and de-radicalization of feminism. The fear was, and is, that the energies that should
be directed towards the transformation of social and sexual relationships would inevitably be
dissipated in narrow scholastics battles which serve only to perpetuate those hierarchies of control
and authority to which the womens movement is opposed (Evans 1997:17). This suspicion was
based on two distinct concerns; elitism and abstraction.
The concern about the elitist, anti-democratic nature of theory can be met with the argument that

31 | P a g e
theory is likely to become elitist for reasons outside itself. To assume that work which is difficult
is elitist is to confuse the form with the context. The concern about abstraction, however, pertains
to form itself. It has often been asserted (both by certain feminists and by their mainstream critics)
that there is something distinctly masculine about the very endeavor of theory, and something
particularly feminine about the reliance upon feeling and personal experience. As Mary Evans
notes, this frequently served to legitimate subjective and personal reactions to subordination rather
than the coherent analysis of that subordination (Evans 1997:18).
Both essentialist and strategic arguments were deployed to justify this subjectivism. The
essentialist argument asserts an essential female nature, which generates an embedded, particular
emotional form of understanding (To be discussed in chapter 3). The strategic argument responds
to the perceived role existing theories in the perpetuation of patriarchal power relations with the
inversion of the allegedly objective view of theory and the celebration of subjectivism.
In the words of a much-read manifesto of early second-wave feminism: We regard our personal
experiences and our feelings about hat experience as the basis for an analysis of our common
situation. We cannot rely on existing ideologies as they are all products of male supremacist
culture. We question every generalization and accept none that are not confirmed by our
experiences (Firestone and Koedt 1969:55).This perception that all theory could be equated with
patriarchal ideology led to an antitheoreticism and radical subjectivism among many women active
in the womens (Gran 1993).
It is interesting to reflect that this early hostility to theory has done little to dampen the enthusiasm
with which numerous other feminist took up the challenge of developing new, distinctive feminists
theories. The risks of anti- theoreticism and the dangers of remaining at, what Evans refers to
as, that stage of primitive subjectivism that is characteristic of some of the most reactionary social
organizations in existence (Evans 1997:20) proved too compelling to ignore. Theory became
something to embrace and transform. In response to the question why theory? Jane Flax argues
that: the most important characteristic of theory is that is a systematic approach to everyday
experience. This everybody does unconsciously. To theories, then, is to bring this unconscious
process to conscious level so it can be developed and refined. All of us operate on theories, though
most of them are implicit. We screen out certain things; we allow others to affects us; we make
choices and we dont always understand why. Theory, in other words, makes those choices
conscious, and enables us to use them more efficiently (Flax 1993: 80-1)

32 | P a g e
 In short political commitment to social change which motivated early feminist anti-
theoriticism has come now to underpin the creation and application of ever-increasingly
sophisticated theories. Since the early 1980s production of feminist and gender theories has been
nothing short of staggering. The initial suspicion of abstraction nonetheless remains.

The contemporary acceptance of gender as a legitimate area of study in the sociology of

politics and health a hard fought and ongoing battle for recognition. Early challenges to male
hegemony emphasized women's invisibility (Clarke 1983). Oakley (1974), for example, wrote of
women's concealment in academia and the consequent exclusion of areas of social life, such as the
domestic world, from the vision of sociology. A distorted picture was created by male stream
social theory as it attempted to fit women into pre-defined male-oriented categories. In retrospect,
it is clear (Oakley 1985) that sexism in sociology cannot be overcome just by bringing women into
the various subareas of the discipline (such as the sociology of work, deviance, the state, and so
on), rather the various domains of sociology need restructuring. As second wave feminist theory
gained momentum during the 1970s and 1980s, a range of contested approaches began to emerge.

Basic and common to all feminisms is the understanding that patriarchy privileges men by
taking the male body as the 'standard' and fashioning upon it a range of valued characteristics (such
as good health, mastery, reason and so on) and, through a comparison, viewing the female body
as deficient, associated with illness, with lack of control and with intuitive rather than reasoned
action. In associating 'deficiencies' of the female body with women's reproductive capacity,
patriarchy conflates biological sex and social gender. The broad task of feminism has been to
question this elision by showing that gender is socially constructed. Through this we can identify
the social processes that construct the female body as inferior and that discriminate against women
(and favor men). At the most general level, then, feminist theories of health, illness and health care
have the same task in common: the attempt to show that women's experience of health is socially
constructed rather than built directly upon biology or the materiality of the body.

However, there are significant differences in the particular way in which feminists theorize
patriarchy and its relationship to health. Indeed, a broad appeal to the socially constructed nature

33 | P a g e
of sex and gender itself conceals a range of different positions. For example, much second wave
feminist writing refers to the way in which women's social experience (including her health and
health care) is mediated by the institutions of patriarchy, usually in oppressive ways. There is the
sense that we can lift the veil of the social and reveal the 'reality' beneath. Foucauldian social
constructionism develops a quite different agenda. As Nettleton writes, it is an approach which is
very 'different to the sociology of medical or scientific knowledge which aims to expose the social,
technological or ideological interests which distort or contribute to the creation of certain types of
knowledge' (1992:149). Rather, women's bodies and their experience are only knowable through
the discourses that constitute them. In these terms 'the sexed body can no longer be conceived as
the unproblematic biological and factual base upon which gender is inscribed, but must itself be
recognized as constructed by discourses and practices that take the body as their target and as their
vehicle of expression.' (Gatens, 1992:132).

Differences in the way in which various feminist theories conceptualize the relationship
between sex and gender have a number of implications for the way in which we understand
women's health. Undoubtedly, a number of objections can be raised against categorizing feminist
thought: it can obscure more than it reveals and can lead to the stereotyping of particular views
(Stacey 1993). Clearly, there is a danger of artificially constructing a common position out of what
is, in effect, a continuum of views. However, it is possible to suggest that there are feminists who
hold more in common with each other than with other groups of thinkers, while also appreciating
that heuristic groupings (such as liberal, radical, Marxist, and post-structuralist feminisms) may
conceal differences between individual writers.

Liberal feminists argue that there is no intrinsic relationship between sex/biology and
gender. Emphasis is placed on women's access to positively valued 'male roles' and male
experiences (see Wolf 1994) which are associated with good health. As a consequence of focusing
on rational behavior, the body is mute and passive (Jaggar 1983, Scott and Morgan 1993). Radical
feminism takes a contrasting approach which endorses a strong connection between sex and
gender. It attempts to undermine patriarchal privilege by positively valuing what is distinctive
about the female, rather than the male body. The body is central to, and for some radical feminists
effectively determinate of, women's experience. Control over the body is also central to Marxist

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feminism, although many writers in this tradition are critical of what is seen as radical feminism's
essentialism, arguing that while the 'biological base' is important, it is modified in different social
contexts according to women's historical relationship to the means of production under patriarchy
(Allen 1983, Barrett 1980). There are, then, important differences within second wave 'modemist'
feminist thought. However, from the perspective of a post-structuralist critique they have much in
common. It is to this perspective that we now tum. Feminist post-structuralism some writers claim
a particular affinity between feminism and post-structuralism (see Fraser and Nicholson 1990,
Hekman 1990) notably in regard to the work of Foucault (Sawicki 1991, Weedon 1987) even
though, as will be discussed later in the paper, this affinity is recognize not to be without tensions
by many (see Diamond and Quinby 1988, McNay 1992). For some, such as Shilling (1993),
feminism itself is an enabling condition (far too lightly acknowledged by male writers (Morris
1988)) for the development of post-structuralist discourses generally, and for particular areas such
as the sociology of the body.

With its rejection of the 'grand narratives' of modemist thought, which guarantee some
forms of knowledge as legitimate and morally 'right', post-structuralism has forced feminism to
confront head-on a range of dilemmas that have been under review for some time. In particular, it
is critical of Marxist/socialist and radical feminists which are premised upon an ultimate 'cause of
oppression' (be it patriarchy and/or the class structure) for all women, and which believe that the
privileged reason carried by particular social groups, such as the proletariat or women (Haraway
1990, Sarup 1993), is the harbinger of liberation. The work of black feminists (which traverses the
spectrum of feminist thought) has been particularly important in drawing attention to the
oppressions that can result from the notion of 'sisterhood' (hooks 1984) with its implication that
gender is the sole determinant of women's fate (Collins 1990).

It is difficult to provide a concise overview of the defining features of post-structuralist

feminism, even speaking of a post-structuralism can be seen by some to run the risk of 'violating
some of its central values - heterogeneity, multiplicity, and difference' (Flax 1990:188). Central,
however, is a reconsideration of prior conceptualizations of the 'subject'. In modemist social
thought the individual subject is the prime agent of social transformation. In post-structuralism
this is inverted and the focus is on how subjectivity is shaped, not on how individuals shape the

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world (Linstead 1993). The rejection of any sense of an 'essential subject', coupled with a challenge
to the search for original causes (Barrett 1992) and the rational pursuit of reason (Flax 1990),
culminates in the view that knowledge (held by the individual, which includes the sociologist) is
never authentic. Since we can never uncover 'reality' in pure form or find a guiding logic for social
change, a social realist epistemology is clearly rejected (Fox 1993). There is no 'objective reality'
out there in the social world to be discovered by the sociologist. Rather, the various 'truths' that
seem to exist for us - such as, the existence of women and men, old and young people - are
discursive categories created through the use of binary logic.

Jane Flax summarizes the appeal of post-structuralism to feminism in the following way.
Its focus, she writes, is on 'how to understand and (re)constitute the self, gender, knowledge, social
relations, and culture without resorting to linear, holistic, or binary ways of thinking and being'
(1990:29). The deconstructive method intends to reveal that gender differences are created
textually: the privileged term depends on unconscious displacement or suppression of its opposite
(Derrida 1982, Grosz 1990).
Thus the category 'woman' depends for its existence on the 'opposite' category 'man'; one cannot
be understood without the other. In creating this opposition we artificially, and inappropriately,
divide people into two camps. Once we have done this we build a series of other characteristics on
top of gender i.e. women are unhealthy, men are healthy; women are irrational, men are rational
and so on. It is by this process that man is privileged. The aim in deconstruction is to show that
real life experience is not like this; attributes and experiences like acting rationally or being healthy
cross-cut gender and are not the province of men or women as a group. Central to post-structuralist
feminism's political agenda is the aim 'to destabilize - challenge, subvert, reverse, [and] over-turn'
(Barrett and Phillips 1992:1) these hierarchical oppositions by recognizing commonalities across
gender so that men can no longer be easily associated with all that is valued and women with all
that is de-valued.

Such an approach is becoming increasingly evident in feminist work in anthropology,

psychology and the natural sciences. By the 1980s feminist scientists, in particular biologists, had
begun to raise questions not just about androcentricity but also about the dualistic thinking which
has led to the construction of the scientific paradigm, which includes biomedicine, as masculine

36 | P a g e
and anything outside it as necessarily feminine and unscientific, constraining our knowledge of
the natural world and forcing it into organizations, which might not exist (Bleier 1984).

The biography of Barbara McClintock, a cytogeneticist (Fox Keller 1983), illustrates the
way in which the 'masculine paradigm' with its 'male hierarchy' may be called into question. Her
challenge to scientific and thus male authority came through a reconceptualization of the relational
order of the behavior of molecules. Using 'feminine methods': feeling, intuition and ideas of
relatedness; in her own terms 'a feeling for the organism', McClintock discovered that the
molecules of which the cells are composed, rather than being directed by what Crick and Watson
had called a 'master molecule' with its implicit hierarchical order, were controlled through their
complex interaction. A similar challenge came from Fox Keller's (1985) account of the 'pacemaker
concept' in theories of aggregation in cellular slime mold. Fox Keller was interested in the
differentiation of cells from the same initial cell in morphogenic development. Cellular slime mold
provided an interesting case since it has the 'property of existing alternatively as single cells or as
a multicellular organism' (1985:151). In questioning the triggers for aggregation. Fox Keller found
that what were later to be called pacemaker or founder cells, were not needed; aggregation could
occur without prior differentiation. In much the same way that a 'master molecule' concept held
sway in the McClintock story. Fox Keller reveals here that a monocausal 'governor understanding'
cut out more 'global, interactive accounts' (1985:155) of cell diffusion until the 1980s.

Twentieth century science increasingly shows a tendency to abandon the certainty of

Enlightenment ideas such as Newtonian physics.

Although it would be inappropriate to call McClintock's or Fox Keller's work feminist, a

number of feminist writers on science have addressed themes which are consistent with a
postmodemist position in their call for a science which is 'decentered, pluralistic, non-hierarchical
and hermeneutic' (Hekman 1990:226). But, in broader terms, feminism has been reluctant to
recognize this such that 'no major feminist critic of science has explicitly embraced
postmodemism' (Hekman 1990:331). The advocacy of a distinctly feminist standpoint
epistemology in particular takes us a long way from such a position. In this regard McClintock's
acceptance into the 'male scientific community' justified through her award of a Nobel Prize, raises

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a number of issues. Does her work involve a reconceptualization of science in which a new
approach is legitimated and a multi-faceted scientific paradigm is the result? Or, might it represent
a 'male take over', in which men incorporate 'feminine' methods into scientific practice, tuning
stance once more into a gender-blind activity?

Referring to Fox Keller's (1985) description of McClintock's style, Hekman quite

appropriately warns that, to appeal to intuition as opposed to reason . . . entails not a displacement
of [the] gender-based dichotomy, but an attempt to move from one side of the hierarchy to its
opposite, to privilege the dis-privileged side. The advocacy of intuition involves reifying the
distinction between reason and emotion, rationality and irrationality that is central to
Enlightenment epistemology. What is needed is not a reliance on intuition to the exclusion of
reason but a means of breaking down the distinction between the two modes of thought (1990:132-
3).

Though undoubtedly the complex of modem medicine comprises many paradigms, the
extent to which dualism is embedded in our thinking may only be fully appreciated when
investigating the healing systems of other societies. For example, Ngubane (1976) has illustrated
the ways that concepts of health, illness and treatment among the Zulu are related to the whole
person within the physical and social environment. Oats (1990) has confronted the problem of
dualistic thought in his work in Chinese medicine, showing that whereas in the Western system of
medicine, emotions and somatic function are separated, in Chinese thinking they are not.
Emotional changes and specific somatic dysfunction are recognized but seen as corresponding and
sometimes identical. Duality is collapsed thus making possible, for example, 'the melancholy
spleen'. In contradistinction, recent therapies in the USA and Europe use the privileged status of
the mind in the treatment of cancer (Delvecchio Good et al. 1990,
Gordon 1990, Pandoiphi 1990).

Hutheesing in 'Becoming a Lisu Woman' explains that, 'I needed the study of a minority
group to understand my own Western assumptions of oppression and of the superimposition of
male and female' (1993:99). In her explanation of the gender system, 'women were both "superior"
and "inferior" depending on the context of the situation and the frame of reference of the observer.'

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In a study of motherhood, in many ways similar to that of Oakley (1980), Schrijvers (1993), a
feminist anthropologist, has shown how her conceptualizations changed with the experience of
resistance in the early 1970s to trying to combine motherhood with work, and the relative freedom
she experienced in Sri Lanka where work and motherhood were the norm. Her conceptualizations
changed as she 'confronted the different experiences and images of mothering both in herself and
those subjects involved' (1993:156). This gave rise, in her own words, to a 'multifocal discourse'
dependent upon its historical, local and personal location (1993:156).

In contradistinction to developments in feminist anthropology and feminist science,

suggestions of ways to improve women's health and health care from the sociology of health and
illness appear to retain the legacy of binary thinking making a basic distinction between men and
women, reproduction and production, home and work, emotion and reason and so on. The
privileges which inhere in the binaristic conceptualizations which gird health care are clearly
criticized, but the oppositions themselves tend to go unchallenged. In these terms critique centers
on the consequences of dualisms for women's health while failing to offer a thorough-going
criticism of them in the context of gender. Ironically, this means that feminism can end up
colluding with biomedicine as it engages and perpetuates the very modernist (i.e. binary) thinking
which has historically sustained male hegemony. We turn now to an exploration of how this takes
place.

The post-structuralist critique applied to the sociology of reproduction from the perspective
of feminist post-structuralism binaristic thinking hashad a number of negative consequences for
research on gender and health. These include: the universalizing of women's health and health care
experience and, in some cases, the valorization of gender differences; a preoccupation with the
abnormal and the pathologization of women's health; the production of poorly drawn health care
'alternatives' and the homogenization of the 'mainstream'; and, finally, a focus on women rather
than gender (and a consequent lack of attention to men's health).The universalizing of women's
experience and the valorizations of gender differences in summarizing the dilemma of 'modernist'
feminism, Di Stefano (1990:73) writes that 'the choice seems to be one between a politics and
epistemology of identity(sameness) or difference.' This is an ongoing debate among feminists, for
example psychologists have struggled with the consequences of the substantiation of these

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positions through scientific evidence (Kitzinger, 1994). More broadly, in 'equality feminism'
identified in early work (Beauvoir, Freidan etc.) and in contemporary liberal feminist work
(especially in the USA; see Wolf, 1994) there is an appeal to gender- neutral humanism where a
central place is given to the rational subject (Jaggar 1983, Tong 1992). Concern is with the
particular roles and statuses that men and women inhabit. Explicitly or implicitly, women's
circumstances (which includes her health) are problematic because she is excluded from the valued
social positions held by men (for example, the world of paid employment). In the 1970s, political
agendas centered quite appropriately upon identifying barriers (particularly legal and educational)
to women's access to the public sphere. This body of thought has had a considerable influence
upon research on the gendered patterning of illness (see Verbrugge 1985)'. Yet here men are still
the standard against which women are defined, a position which also holds for radical feminist
work, even though the latter operates within an epistemology of difference rather than identity.
Referring to the problems of assimilation for women, Di Stefano aptly characterizes the counter-
appeal of radical feminism; 'the critical activity and insight produced by the voice of the other [i.e.
women] provides a visceral, tangible sense of alternatives' (1990:71). Yet, as she goes on to note,
the 'choice' between improving women's conditions (and, in our terms, their health) by reference
to either sameness (liberal feminism) or difference (radical feminism) is a pseudo-choice since it
is a choice already framed by a 'gendered narrative of us and them' (1990:73).

Post-structuralist feminism 'stands on the back of this previous work. Indeed, as broad
notes, how 'could we now speak of the differences that inflect gender if gender had not first been
shown to make a difference?' (1990:141). Aware of the need to keep in mind that radical feminism
is not a unitary position (Hanmer 1990), we can nonetheless identify as a common theme the
designation of patriarchy as the root of oppression militating against any possibility of 'equality on
men's terms' (Rowland and Klein 1990). While it is clearly recognized in most of this work that
women are located differently by geography, age, class and race, and may experience oppression
differently, there is simultaneously the view that women form an inherent class.

Feminized difference is a project for the elimination of women's oppression which is,
importantly for our concern with health, built around control of the body. Women's embodiment
(as differentiated from that of men) is crucially anchored in reproduction and a given affinity with

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'nature'. The extent to which this work is imbued with essentialism is a subject of quite heated
debate in feminism. Essentialism can be defined as a belief in a true essence 'that is most
irreducible, unchanging, and therefore constitutive of a given person or thing' (Fuss 1989:2). Here
female/male can be seen as prior to the social experience mapped onto them. Essentialism has been
argued to underpin much of radical feminism through the work of such writers as Mary Daly,
Andrea Dworkin,

The term radical feminism, of course, covers a wide spectrum of thought. (Ramazanoglu
(1989) identifies it as the feminism most difficult to define because of its diversity). In its strongest
form there is a celebration of women's bodies and the capacity to nurture and create (Gatens 1992),
and motherhood is celebrated (Weedon 1987). There is a sense of a pure and original femininity,
a female essence outside of the social an untainted by patriarchy (Fuss 1989). The work of Nancy
Chodorow
(1978) exemplifies this. For Chodorow, a distinct self is formed out of the process of mothering
which creates women as different from men through the formation of an essentially relational form
of interaction with others. In these terms, women must reclaim their bodies from men. The
following quote from Lipchitz illustrates this perspective; 'women are witchlike in being able to
give birth to live beings and are therefore possessors of an invisible internal substance that
provokes fear because it links them to another world than that of male culture' (1978:39). Similarly,
Rich summaries her views in the following way,

I have come to believe . . . that female biology . . . has far more radical implications than
we have yet come to appreciate. Patriarchal thought has limited female biology to its own narrow
specifications. The feminist vision has recoiled from female biology for these reasons; it will, I
believe, come to view our physicality as a resource, rather than a destiny. In order to live a fully
human life we require not only control of our bodies . . ., we must touch the unity and resonance
of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, and the corporeal ground of our intelligence
(1992:39).

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 Rich sees men as jealous and fearful of women's reproductive power. Mary Daly calls for
women to discover a new identity founded on 'true' femaleness, based on women's biological
nature: 'for we are rooted, as are animals and trees, wind and seas, in the Earth's substance. Our
origins are in her elements' (Daly 1984:4). Aspects of femaleness are not open to men and here the
' "true" female self is identified with wild, undomesticated nature' (Weedon 1987:134).

In the writing of some radical feminists' experience is valorized in gendered terms through
the explicit claim of a superior female morality (Tong 1992, Segal 1987). Griffin exclaims - 'we
are mothers . . . the small body lying against our body vulnerable . . . we love this body, because
we are part of the body . . . If men bore children, we imagine, they would burst from their heads .
. . and be fully grown, and dressed, and god-like with no need to eat, no substance pouring from
their substance'
(1980:72-3). Here, then, men are different from women; even if they could give birth, that birth
and their child would be very different to the child of woman; their experience would be very
different, less 'real'.

Of course, not all radical feminists adhere to this 'strong' position. Even those who once
appeared to do so have begun to re-think their earlier work. For example, in the 1970s edition of
Woman Born Adrienne Rich wrote: 'the diffuse, intense sensuality radiating out from clitoris,
breasts, uterus, vagina; the lunar cycles of menstruation; the gestation and fiction of life which can
take place in the female body' (1970:39), has as yet unrealized radical implications. To live a fully
human life. Rich wrote, women must realize their 'bond with the natural order.' In the new preface
to the 1992 edition of the same book, she writes that she never intended her work to lend itself to
sentimentalization of women's nurturance, and that she would now no longer envisage patriarchy
as a pure product (Rich 1992). Andrea Dworkin (1988), whose work is often sin- gled out as
essentialist, claims that the whole criticism of essentialism is misplaced. She writes that
essentialism is biological determinism, virtually equivalent to Nazism and, as such, has no rightful
place in feminism. The debate over feminist essentialism is, then, highly contested and unresolved.
With its freight of reductivist determinism, 'essentialism' is likely to be a position that most
feminists would want to avoid. Nonetheless, it does seem fair to say that the notion of a 'raw
material' that women hold in common, often provides the starting point for the social construction

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of gender in radical feminism. For example, Rowland and Klein wish to avoid a determinist logic
built around the body in favor of a constructivist position, but still remark that 'the fact that women
belong to the social group which has the capacity for procreation and mothering, and the fact that
men belong to the group that has the capacity to carry out, and does, acts of rape and violence
against women, must intrude into the consciousness of being male and female (1990:297-8).

Within contemporary feminism the essentialist position which politicizes the body through
biological difference inherits some of the problems for which the natural science paradigm has
been criticized. Classification, within this paradigm (Bames 1982) proceeds on the basis of
similarities and differences according to the particular properties which objects have. There is in
this procedure a clear and precise ordering of data such that a future instance of a particular object
has a predetermined classification. In consideration of the biological categorization of sex, based
upon chromosome composition, categorical distinctions may be made between male and female.

Critics have pointed to the tendency of feminist work which centers on difference to
collapse a distinction between sex and gender. This occlusion continues in feminist work despite
research which shows that markers for sex at birth are drawn from continuous data (Birke 1992,
Shilling 1993). Between two and three per cent of individuals are prone with intersexual
characteristics. But, despite the fact that there is no absolute distinction between the sexes only
'variations on a continuum whose midpoints are less densely populated than its outer edges', 'there
is great cultural pressure to erase these midpoints' (Epstein 1990:124). The experience of living on
these boundaries and the pressure to 'choose sides' is poignantly demonstrated in the writings of
Herculine Barbin (Foucault 1980). Physicians are under great cultural pressure to mark sex at birth
and to use surgical and hormonal interventions to maintain binary gender as an absolute (Epstein
1990).

Hence, we can see biology as 'distorted' by socio-legal classification as gender differences

are socially created (Delphy 1993) by the suppression of similarities and the exaggeration of
differences (Connell 1987). A classification based on traits, and the search for a 'universally
correct' position (Davis 1992) forces us into oversimplification and acceptance of a unity-

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dimensionality, dichotomies artificially drawn and the possible consequences of an essentialist
picture of women which is false. The conventional use of a classification procedure of semantic
differences and the structure of language may be seen at one and the same time as both
conservative and oppressive. This is not to adopt an anti-essentialist stance, but only to point out
that a danger underlies the strategy of difference, a danger that deploying commonalities among
women unavoidably embeds such traits within women. Thus, feminist efforts to transform
differences between women and men, differences we have assumed are socially constructed and
therefore subject to change, may have the unwanted effect of perpetuating gender as an essential,
irreducible part of identity (Frug 1992:36). While it is evident that social science work on gender,
health and health care may not have explicitly adopted the perspectives that we have outlined, it is
in many ways derivative of them and, because of this, it inherits their underlying dualistic and,
arguably, essentialist thought where, what both feminists and phallocentrists see as hegemony
based on masculine perceptions of domination, performance, hierarchy, abstraction, and
rationality, finds its antipode in a woman's communing proclaiming itself as naturally nurturant,
receptive, cooperative, intimate, and exulting in the emotions . . . [feminists] assume that such
principles exist and that they have been fixed and dichotomous since the dawn of patriarchal
history Thus it is that the dominant culture and the counterculture engage in a curious collusion
in which... a rebellious feminism takes up its assigned position at the negative pole. (Cocks
1984:33, 34 our emphasis).

Central to the post-structuralist line of argument, then, is the point that duality can become
more enslaving than liberating. Reproduction is centered in universal discourses in sociological
work on health care; in reclaiming birth (from male obstetrics), it can become the province of all
women. Eisenstein, referring to women and the law, expresses this well; she writes: 'when the
"difference" of childbearing homogenizes females a mothers, mothers are denied their
individuality: all women become the same - mothers - which immediately characterizes them as
"different" from men' (1988:90). Thus in an attempt to create what we can term 'reverse privilege',
reproduction is still centered for women and put on the agenda as if it were central to all women's
lives. This may serve to lockwomen into reproductive roles which may be politically problematic
since the centrality of reproduction, contraception and childbirth to biomedicine is transferred to
women's experiences. This may be the reality of their experience, but equally importantly, it may

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not. To a certain extent this may be seen as an unavoidable consequence of a critique which appears
as if it must engage the dichotomies of biomedicine to develop its own narrative.
Pre-occupation with the abnormal: criticisms of obstetrics and the proposed midwifery alternative
In the area of reproduction, and more broadly, there is a pre-occupation with the abnormal. The
critique (quite rightly) points to the iatrogenic properties of biomedicine but, unfortunately, this
again centers on pathology. Ironically, it is almost as if women cannot be well any more (and, as
discussed below, men cannot be ill) - witness the large number of books on women's health
problems (with the emphasis on problems) within both the academic and more popular press. To
a degree this serves to confirm women's disadvantaged cultural position through their (ill) health.

'Alternativism' to male-biomedicine were heavily valorized in research in the 1970s and

1980s. This was particularly evident in suggested alternatives to mainstream gynecological and
obstetric care. Sheila Kitzinger, for example, wrote that the new midwifery has a vital part to play
in the woman's movement and is at the very center of the great creative upheaval which is taking
place as we reclaim our bodies and come to learn about, understand and glory in them. This new
midwifery gives vivid expression to the way in which women are discovering strength and
sisterhood as we tum to help and support one another during the intense, exhilarating and powerful
experience of childbirth (1988:18). A clear line of demarcation tends to be drawn in the literature
between obstetrics and midwifery: each is portrayed as a unitary and internally coherent body of
thought and practice which is at odds with the other (see Oakley 1984, Graham and Oakley 1986,
Rothman 1982). The 'alter-native' female-midwifery is clearly put forward as the better model.
The assumption that we can uncover a contraposition which is unitary has been pervasive in
research on the conduct of birth. The fact that the alternative form of maternity care proposed in
research in the 1970s and 1980s was not explicitly stated as a need/or all groups of women (ethnic
minorities, different social classes, ages etc.) and, instead, that potential different needs were
silenced, only serves to underscore the universalistic assumptions of much of this research. The
charge of elitism evidenced in the privileged white middle-class voice of much research, and the
silence around differences between women, applies well to Barbara Katz Rothman's influential
1982 work In Labor, Women and Power in the Birth Place which ends with an implicit call for a
home-based natural birth experience (in contrast to an earlier experience of giving birth in
hospital). This is made in joyous terms with little recognition that many women may not be in the

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position to avail themselves of such an 'alter- native' even if they wanted to. If we conceive of
power as a fundamentally male preserve we are led to gloss over ways in which women may exert
power over others (Flax 1990), including other women (Annandale 1988, hooks, 1984). In these
terms, as recent institutional reforms stimulate community midwifery (Winterton Report, 1992 and
responses to it) midwives may begin to consider the notion of affinity with women embedded in
such concepts as 'continuity of care' (in historical and contemporary contexts) as masking the
potential exploitation of midwives by their clients (Hardy 1993).

The demarcation between obstetrics and midwifery begins to explain why we have an
extremely poorly drawn picture of 'alternatives' (be it in childbirth or any other area) - they exist
in opposition to dominant practice 'A' (obstetrics) but they do not appear as 'B', but as 'not A'.
Within this framework the lived experience of midwifery (for example) is revealed only as the
largely unsearched antithesis of obstetrics. An alternative is called into existence in powerful and
convincing terms, while at the same time its central precepts (such as 'women controlled', 'natural
birth') are vaguely drawn and in practical terms carry little meaning. Thus feminist work tends to
enter into complicity with male hegemonic culture by attributing to it the power which it gives
itself. Cocks writes that the more feminism 'describes itself as all the established society is not, the
more it shows itself an unwitting prisoner of the established conceptual schema, which delineates
for it definition and counter definition, image and counter image (1984:33). Power and control are
conceptualized as oppositional and all encompassing; women become, in Sawicki's words, 'passive
objects of medical surveillance and management', 'patriarchal models of thinking and behaving,
and the technological instruments of patriarchy, become inherently dominating, controlling and
objectifying' (1991:76, 73). Women can become victims.

There is an appeal to a return to what childbirth 'really is', yet as Treichler (1990)
maintains, this is untenable since discourse itself is the site in which birth becomes knowable.
'Alternatives' (or forms of resistance) are poorly drawn precisely because their meaning is always
constructed through a process of deferral (Derrida 1982, Fox 1992). We would argue that
'alternatives' such as 'natural birth' are relational concepts constituted through dialogue with
biomedicine. Obstetrics and midwifery are self-referential: natural birth finds the conditions for its

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existence in its very critique of biomedicine (as, in much the same terms, obstetrics developed
historically).

The frameworks of women, their partners and friends, midwives, nurses and obstetricians
are unlikely to be opposed in an ontological sense but instead may elide and collide in response to
local contexts. Thus the dominant discourse (of obstetrics, for example) must itself create the
conditions, or discursive space, for a reverse or alternative form. Indeed, the very existence of the
dominant form depends on points of resistance to act as a target and support (Burrell 1988). So
power is a resource for action and it is possible (or, perhaps, even necessary) to recognize areas
such as childbirth as a contested site in both contemporary and historical form. Such an approach
moves away from a passive conceptualization of women controlled by obstetrics (while still
recognizing the institutional power of dominant discourse), and presumes the co-presence of a con-
tested voice.

We tum now to a third consequence of binary thinking in feminist research on gender and
health which is that there has been a focus on women rather than gender, and that men's health has
been relatively ignored. Much of the feminist discourse on health and social experience centers on
women and cuts out men. This can be problematic even in areas which have in recent traditions
been reclaimed as female. As Eisenstein notes, this means that 'femininity and biological
motherhood are one and the same; masculinity and fatherhood [can] have no similar biological
relationship (1988:91). Christine Delphy has recently questioned what she terms 'the maternal
demand' in the women's movement which sees the baby as 'automatically affiliated to the woman
who brought it into the world' (1992:16). This, she writes, circumscribes women's identity to
motherhood, assumes that only a parent can defend a child, and gives exorbitant rights to some
groups (women) and not others (men).

Explanation for the invisibility of men in the reproductive process cannot rest with duality
alone since cross culturally and historically child birth has been and still is very largely the
province of women, but the entrenchment of women in their reproductive role can leave men
without one (Meerabeau 1991, Mason 1993). This lack of involvement, as a consequence, is
particularly evident in the investigations and treatments of infertility where researchers (see

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McNeil et al. 1990) have quite rightly pointed to the pathologisation of women's reproductive
systems and have significantly questioned the object of technologically assisted reproduction. Yet
it is interesting to note that despite this invocation and the questioning of why men have not been
the focus of medicine's attention, sociologists have gone little way towards an understanding of
aspects of male infertility themselves. Part of the reason for this may be that, once again, at one
and the same time as they criticize biomedicines pathologization of women, sociologists also
engage its problematic as they replicate focus on abnormalities of women's reproduction (although,
see Tiefer,1987). As Prefer states, 'implicit in the medical definitions and unchallenged by
feminists, is the assumption that the male reproductive system is structurally efficient, and that its
functions proceed smoothly' (1985:31). Just as biomedicine fractures social experience, so too can
social science research on infertility, where social relations of gender (between men and women
and between men and between women) are displaced as women and men are posed as opposites
and attention is on individuals rather than the relations between them.

A further consequence of ignoring men and treating women as a priority distinct from men
is that women's health is constructed as 'poor' against an implicit assumption that male health is
'good'. Ironically, man is privileged as unproblematic or is exempted from determination by gender
roles (Flax 1990). In such a view women 'cannot' be well and, importantly at this point in our
argument, men cannot be ill; they are 'needed' to be well to construe women as sick. Men's poor
health remains invisible. This is a fundamental problem, not just because it is important to look at
the social context of men's health, but that the assumption of absolute difference undermines our
ability even to understand women's health (as different).

A growing body of both qualitative and quantitative research reveals that women either
'are' or perceive themselves to be more ill than men and make more use of health services
(Kandrack, et al. 1991, Verbrugge 1985). In some interpretations of quantitative data where men
and women are distinguished, male health status is glossed over since it is relevant only to
construct women's health as poor in relative terms. While data may indeed portray worse health
among women (the factor which tends to be focused on in interpretation), they are also likely to
show a residue of ill health among men to be worthy of study (see Blaxter 1990).

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Liberal Feminism

Liberal feminism is rooted in classic liberal thinking that individuals should be free to
develop their own talents and pursue their own interests. This approach sees gender inequalities
as rooted in the attitudes of our social and cultural institutions. Liberal feminists do not see
women's equality as requiring a reorganization of society, but they do seek to expand the rights
and opportunities of women.

A main focus is protecting equal opportunities for women through legislation. A big step
forward for the agenda of liberal feminists was the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment,
which in part states that Equality of rights under the law shall not be abridged by the United
States or by any State on account of sex.

Of Jaggar's categories, liberal feminism remains a strong current in feminist political

thought. Its primary concern is to protect and enhance women's personal and political autonomy,
the first being the freedom to live one's life as one wants and the second being the freedom to help
decide the direction of the political community. This approach was invigorated with the
publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971) and subsequently his Political
Liberalism (Rawls 1993). Susan Moller Okin (Okin 1989, 1979; Okin et al. 1999) and Eva Kittay
(Kittay 1999) have used Rawls's work productively to extend his theory to attend to women's
concerns. From a more critical perspective, several feminist theorists have argued that some of the
central categories of liberalism occlude women's lived concerns; for example, the central liberal
private/public distinction sequesters the private sphere, and any harm that may occur there to
women, away from political scrutiny (Pateman 1983). Perhaps more than any other approach,
liberal feminist theory parallels developments in liberal feminist activism. While feminist activists
have waged legal and political battles to criminalize, as just one example, violence against women
(which previously, in marital relations, hadn't been considered a crime), feminist political
philosophers who have engaged the liberal lexicon have shown how the distinction between private
and public realms has served to uphold male domination of women by rendering power relations
within the household as natural and immune from political regulation. Such political philosophy
uncovers how seemingly innocuous and commonsensical categories have covert power agendas.

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For example, old conceptions of the sanctity of the private space of the household and the role of
women primarily as child-bearers and caregivers served to protect male domination of women in
the household from public scrutiny. Feminist critiques of the public/private split supported legal
advances that finally led in the 1980s to the criminalization in the United States of spousal rape
(Hagan and Sussman 1988).

While liberal feminism continues to flourish, it is not without its critics, especially given
that it continues to treat unproblematically many of the concepts that theorists in the 1990s and
since have problematized, such as woman as a stable and identifiable category and the unity of
the self-underlying self-rule or autonomy. Critics (such as Zerilli 2009) have argued that the
universal values that liberals such as Okin invoked were really expanded particulars, with liberal
theorists mistaking their ethnocentrically derived values as universal ones. At the same time,
however, some feminist critics are showing how many of the values of liberalism could be
performatively reconstituted.
Nonetheless there is very important work going on in this field. For example, Carole Pateman and
Charles Mills have been working within the liberal tradition to show the limits and faults of social
contract theory for women and blacks. Their jointly authored book, Contract & Domination, levels
a devastating critique against systems of sexual and racial domination. This work engages and
critiques some of the most dominant strains of political philosophy.

Radical, Socialist, and Marxist Feminisms

While feminist liberalism continues to flourish, the historical developments and emerging
debates described in the previous sections have eclipsed or deeply transformed Jaggar's other three
categories of radical, Marxist, and socialist feminism (Jaggar 1983). Also, the grand narratives
that underlay these views, especially the latter two, have fallen out of favor (Snyder 2008). This
subsection briefly covers these approach's concerns and transformations.

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 Those who continue to work in radical feminism remain committed to getting at the root
of male domination by understanding the source of power differentials, which some radical
feminists, including Catharine MacKinnon, trace back to male sexuality and the notion that
heterosexual intercourse enacts male domination over women. Women and men are divided by
gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the requirements of its dominant form,
heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission. If
this is true, sexuality is the linchpin of gender inequality (MacKinnon 1989, 113). Radical
feminists of the 1980s tended to see power as running one-way, from those with power over those
who are being oppressed. As Amy Allen puts it, Unlike liberal feminists, who view power as a
positive social resource that ought to be fairly distributed, and feminist phenomenologists, who
understand domination in terms of a tension between transcendence and immanence, radical
feminists tend to understand power in terms of dyadic relations of dominance/subordination, often
understood on analogy with the relationship between master and slave. (See the section on radical
feminist approaches in the entry on feminist perspectives on power.) Unlike the more reformist
politics of liberal feminism, radical feminists of the 1980s largely sought to reject the prevailing
order altogether, sometimes advocating separatism (Daly 1985, 1990). But a new generation of
radical feminist theorists shares some of the commitments of the postmodern feminists discussed
below, e.g., skepticism about any fixed gender identity or gender binaries and a more fluid and
performative approach to sexuality and politics (Snyder 2008).

Through much of the twentieth century, many political theorists in Europe, the United
States, and Latin America drew on socialist and Marxist texts to develop theories of social change
attentive to issues of class relations and exploitation in modern capitalist economies. After learning
of the horrors of Stalinism, most Western Marxists and socialists were extremely critical of the
communist systems in the Soviet Union and later in China. Western, mostly anti-communist,
Marxist thought flourished in Italy (with Antonio Gramsci's work), England (with Stuart Hall and
Raymond Williams' work), France (with the Socialisme ou Barbarie group), and the United States
(but less so there after McCarthyism yet renewed somewhat in the 1960s with the New Left).
Jaggar's 1983 book summed up well the way feminists were using socialist and Marxist ideas to
understand the way women were exploited and their laboring and reproductive work devalued and
unpaid though necessary for capitalism to function. In the entry on feminist perspectives on class

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and work, the authors point to much of the work that was going on in this field up through the mid-
1990s.

But since then, the authors note, various postmodern, postcolonial, poststructuralist, and
deconstructive theories have criticized the bases for socialist and Marxist thought, including the
grand narrative of economic determinism and the reduction of everything to economic and
material relations. At the same time, Marxist analyses are important parts of other contemporary
feminist philosophers' work. (See Dean 2009, Fraser 2009, Spivak 1988.) So while the categories
of socialist and Marxist feminisms are less relevant today, many feminist philosophers still take
seriously the need to attend to the material conditions of life and engage in the hermeneutics of
suspicion that Marxist analysis calls for.

Socialist feminism evolved from the ideas of Karl Marx, who blamed capitalism for
increasing patriarchy by concentrating power in the hands of a small number of men. One main
tenet is that the family form created by capitalism (women staying home, while men work) is the
main source of women's inequality, and that replacing the traditional family can only come about
through a socialist revolution that creates a government to meet the needs of the family.

Difference Feminisms

A major set of fault lines in feminist thought since the 1990s is over the questions of the
subject of woman. According to Mary Dietz's 2003 article laying out the field, there are two
large groups here. One champions the category of woman (in the singular and universal), arguing
that the specificity of women's identity, their sexual difference from men, should be appreciated
and revalued. (The other is discussed in the next subsection.) This difference feminism includes
two distinct groups: (i) those who look at how gendered sexual difference is socially constituted
and (ii) those who look at how sexual difference is constructed symbolically and
psychoanalytically. The first, social difference feminism, includes theories that revalue mothering
and caring and has been developed largely in the Anglo-American context. (See for example

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Tronto 1993 and Held 1995.) The second, symbolic difference feminism, is that of what are often
referred to as the French Feminists, including Irigaray, Cixous, and Kristeva. They belong in this
group to the extent that they value and distinguish women's specific sexual difference from men's.
Irigaray's focus on sexual difference is emblematic of this. Social-difference and symbolic-
difference feminisms have very little to do with each other but, Dietz argues, they share the notion
that a feminist politics requires a category woman that has a determinate meaning (Dietz 2003,
403; Nicholson 1994, 100).

Social Difference Feminism: The new generation of radical feminists briefly described
above could be considered a part of social difference feminism, at least to the extent that these
theorists take seriously the category of woman and want to develop an ethics and politics upon it.
Another good example of social-difference feminism is care ethics, which was originally
developed as an alternative to mainstream ethical theory, has been harnessed to counter liberal
political theory (Gilligan 1982; Held 1995). (See the discussion in the entry on feminist ethics.)
Drawing on feminist research in moral psychology (Gilligan 1982; Held 1995), this field explores
the ways in which the virtues that society and mothering cultivate in women can provide an
alternative to the traditional emphases in moral and political philosophy on universality, reason,
and justice. Some care ethicists have sought to take the virtues that had long been relegated to the
private realm, such as paying particular attention to those who are vulnerable or taking into
consideration circumstances and not just abstract principles, and use them as well in the public
realm. This approach has led to intense debates between liberals who advocated universal ideals
of justice and care ethicists who advocated attention to the particular, to relationships, to care. By
the 1990s, though, many care ethicists had revised their views. Rather than seeing care and justice
as mutually exclusive alternatives, they began to recognize that attention to care should be
accompanied by attention to fairness (justice) in order to attend to the plight of those with whom
we have no immediate relation (Koggel 1998).

The care ethics approach raises the question of whether and, if so, how women-as-care-
givers have distinct virtues. Feminists as a whole have long distanced themselves from ideas that
women have any particular essence, choosing instead to see femininity and its accompanying
virtues as social constructs, dispositions that result from culture and conditioning, certainly not

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biological givens. So for care ethicists to champion the virtues that have inculcated femininity
seems also to champion a patriarchal system that relegates one gender to the role of caretaker. The
care ethicists' answer to this problem has largely been to flip the hierarchy, to claim that the work
of the household is more meaningful and sustaining than the work of the polis. But critics, such as
Drucilla Cornell, Mary Dietz, and Chantal Mouffe, argue that such a revaluation keeps intact the
dichotomy between the private and the public and the old association of women's work with
childcare. (Butler and Scott 1992; Phillips and NetLibrary Inc 1998, pp. 386-389)

Symbolic Difference Feminism: Notable among the French Feminists for having a
political philosophy is Luce Irigaray, who has written several books on the new rights that should
be afforded to girls and women. Irigaray's early work (1985a and 1985b) made the case that in the
history of philosophy women have been denied their own essence or identity. Rather they have
been positioned as men's mirror negation. So that to be a man is to not be a woman, and hence that
woman equals only not-man. Her strategy in response to this is to speak back from the margins to
which women have been relegated and to claim some kind of essence for women, and along
with that a set of rights that are specifically for girls and women (Irigaray 1994 and 1996).
Criticisms of her views have been heated, including among feminists themselves, especially those
who are wary of any kind of essentialist and biological conflation of women's identity. To the
extent that Irigaray is an essentialist, her view would indeed be relegated to the approach outlined
here as symbolic difference feminism, as Dietz 2003 does. But there are compelling arguments
that Irigaray is wielding essentialism strategically or metaphorically, that she isn't claiming that
women really do have some kind of irreducible essence that the the history of metaphysics has
denied them (Fuss 1989). This other reading would put Irigaray more in the performative group
described below. The same kind of argument could be made for the work of Julia Kristeva, that
her metaphors of the female chora, for example, are describing the western imaginary, not any
kind of womanly reality. So whether French feminist thought should be grouped as difference
feminism or performative feminism is still very much open to debate.

To the extent that the above two types of feminist theory are pinpointing some kind of
specific difference between the sexes, difference feminisms have raised concerns about
essentialism or identifying distinct values that women have as women. Such concerns are part of

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a larger set of criticisms that have run through feminist theorizing since the 1970s, with non-white,
non-middle-class, and non-western women questioning the very category of woman and the
notion that this title could be a boundary-spanning category that could unite women of various
walks of life. (See the entries on identity politics and feminist perspectives on sex and gender.)
Criticisms of a unitary identity of woman have been motivated by worries that much feminist
theory has originated from the standpoint of a particular class of women who mistake their own
particular standpoint for a universal one. In her 1981 book, Ain't I a Woman?: Black women and
feminism, bell hooks notes that the feminist movement pretends to speak for all women but was
made up of primarily white, middle class women who, because of their narrow perspective, did
not represent the needs of poor women and women of color and ended up reinforcing class
stereotypes (hooks 1981). What is so damning about this kind of critique is that it mirrors the one
that feminists have leveled against mainstream political theorists who have taken the particular
category of men to be a universal category of mankind, a schema that does not in fact include
women under the category of mankind but marks them as other (Lloyd 1993).

Diversity Feminisms

Hence, one of the most vexing issues facing feminist theory in general and feminist political
philosophy in particular is the matter of identity (see the entry on identity politics). Identity politics
in general is a political practice of mobilizing for change on the basis of a political identity (women,
black, chicana, etc.). The philosophical debate is whether such identities are based on some real
difference or history of oppression, and also whether people should embrace identities that have
historically been used to oppress them. Identity politics in feminist practice is fraught along at least
two axes: whether there is any real essence or identity of woman in general and even if so whether
the category of woman could be used to represent all women. People at the intersection of multiple
marginalized identities (e.g, black women) have raised questions about which identity is foremost
or whether either identity is apt. Such questions play out with the question of political
representationwhat aspects of identity are politically salient and truly representative, whether
race, class, or gender (Phillips 1995; Young 1997, 2000). The ontological question of women's
identity gets played out on the political stage when it comes to matters of political representation,
group rights, and affirmative action. The 2008 U.S. Democratic Party primary battle between

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Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton turned this philosophical question into a very real and
heated one from black women throughout the United States. Was a black woman who supported
Clinton a traitor to her race, or a black woman who supported Obama a traitor to her sex? Or did
it make any sense to talk about identity in a way that would lead to charges of treason? Of the
approaches discussed above, radical and maternal feminism seem particularly wedded to feminist
identity politics.

The other large group of contemporary feminist philosophers that Dietz (2003) describes
disagrees entirely with the idea that there is or needs to be a single and universal category of
woman. Dietz refers to this group as diversity feminism, which began with what I described
earlier: women of color and others pointing out that the presuppositions of mainstream feminism
were based on their very particular race and class. In the 1980s and 1990s philosophy along with
the rest of Western culture started grappling with demands for multicultural perspectives. Shortly
thereafter postcolonial theory raised the need to become aware of multiple global perspectives. As
Sharon Krause describes it, this development involved the world diversification of feminism to
a more global, comparative, and differentiated body of work (Krause 2011, 106). This
diversification, Krause notes, is also due to new literature on intersectionality, that is, the ways in
which the intersections of our multiple identities (race, gender, orientation, ethnicity, etc.) all need
to be attended to in talking about political change (Krause 2011, 107). Intersectionality also links
up with discussions of hybridity in postcolonial literature, of religion and globalization, and of
the experiences of LGBTQ people. The result is an explosion of knowledge about the lived
experience of differently placed and multiply-positioned women (Krause 2011, 107).

Performativity Feminisms

If the diversity feminists, from multiculuturalists to postcolonial and intersectional

thinkers, are right, then there is no reliable category of woman on which to base feminist politics.
By the end of the 1990s some saw this as a radical danger of relativism, and the field seemed to be
at an impasse. But then another approach began to emerge. As Mary Dietz writes in her 2003 essay
on current controversies in feminist theory,

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 In recent years, political theorists have been engaged in debates about what it might mean
to conceptualize a feminist political praxis that is aligned with democracy but does not begin from
the binary of gender. Along these lines, Mouffe (1992, pp. 376, 378; 1993), for example, proposes
a feminist conception of democratic citizenship that would render sexual difference effectively
nonpertinent. Perhaps the salient feature of such conceptions is the turn toward plurality, which
posits democratic society as a field of interaction where multiple axes of difference, identity, and
subordination politicize and intersect (e.g., Phelan 1994, Young 1990, 1997b, 2000; Benhabib
1992; Honig 1992; Ferguson 1993; Phillips 1993, 1995; Mouffe 1993; Yeatman 1994, 1998;
Bickford 1996; Dean 1996; Fraser 1997; Nash 1998; Heyes 2000; McAfee 2000). (Dietz 2003,
419)
Following up on what has happened in feminist political theory since Dietz's article, Sharon Krause
writes that this work is contesting the old assumption that agency equals autonomy and makes
room within agency for forms of subjectivity and action that are nonsovereign but nevertheless
potent (Krause 2011, citing Allen 2007, Beltrn 2010, Butler 2004, Hirschman 2002, and Zerilli
2005.) For some theorists, Krause writes, this shift involves thinking of agency and freedom in
more collective ways, which emphasize solidarity, relationality, and constitutive intersubjectivity
(Krause 2011, 108, citing Butler 2004, Cornell 2007, Mohanty 2003, and Nedelsky 2005).

This constellation of thinkers could be working in what we could call performative political
philosophy, performative in several senses: in theorizing how agency is constituted, how political
judgments can be made in the absence of known rules (Honig 2009, 309), how new universals can
be created and new communities constituted. Performative feminist politics doesn't worry about
whether it is possible to come up with a single definition of woman or any other political identity;
it sees identity as something that is performatively created. How we assume these identitites,
Drucilla Cornell writes, is never something out there that effectively determines who we can be
as men and womengay, lesbian, straight, queer, transsexual, transgender, or otherwise (Cornell
2003, 144). It is something that is shaped as we live and externalize identities. From a performative
feminist perspective, feminism is a project of anticipating and creating better political futures in
the absence of foundations. As Linda Zerilli writes, politics is about making claims and
judgmentsand having the courage to do soin the absence of the objective criteria or rules that
could provide certain knowledge and the guarantee that speaking in women's name will be

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accepted or taken up by others (Zerilli 2005, 179). Drawing largely on Arendt and Butler, Zerilli
calls for a freedom-centered feminism that would strive to bring about transformation in
normative conceptions of gender without returning to the classical notion of freedom as
sovereignty that feminists have long criticized but found difficult to resist (ibid.).

In its feminist incarnations, this view also takes its cue from Judith Butler's performative
account of gender as well as Hannah Arendt's observation that human rights are created politically,
as well as other thinkers' ideas, to describe an anticipatory ideal of politics. Linda Zerilli describes
this kind of feminist politics as the contingently based public practice of soliciting the agreement
of others to what each of us claims to be universal (Zerilli 2005, p. 173). From a performatve
perspective, normative political claims appeal to other people, not to supposed truths or
foundations.
This view recuperates many of the ideals of the Enlightenmentsuch as freedom, autonomy, and
justicebut in a way that drops the Enlightenment's metaphysical assumptions about reason,
progress, and human nature. Instead of seeing these ideals as grounded in some metaphysical facts,
this new view sees them as ideals that people hold and try to instantiate through practice and
imagination. Where many ancient and modern ideals of politics were based on suppositions about
the nature of reality or of human beings, contemporary political philosophies generally operate
without supposing that there are any universal or eternal truths. Some might see this situation as
ripe for nihilism, arbitrariness, or the exercise of brute power. The performative alternative is to
imagine and try to create a better world by anticipating, claiming, and appealing to others that it
should be so. Even if there is no metaphysical truth that human beings have dignity and infinite
worth, people can act as if it were true in order to create a world in which it is seen to be so.

Peformative feminist political philosophy shares liberal feminism's appreciation for

Enlightenment ideals but in a way that is skeptical about foundations. Just as Zerilli performatively
reconstitutes the concept of freedom, Drucilla Cornell recuperates ideas of autonomy, dignity, and
personhood, in a new performative capacity, as ideals that people aspire to rather than as moral
facts waiting to be discovered, applied, or realized.

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 Despite the shared post-foundational theorizing among performative feminists, when it
comes to thinking about democratic politics, there are sharp divergences, namely on the question
of what it means to actualize public spaces and enact democratic politics (Dietz 2003, 419). On
this questions, theorists tend to diverge into two groups: associational and agonistic. Associational
theorists (e.g., Benhabib 1992, 1996; Benhabib and Cornell 1987; Fraser 1989; Young 1990, 1997,
2000) gravitate more toward deliberative democratic theory, while agonistic theorists (e.g., Mouffe
1992, 1993, 1999, 2000; Honig 1995; Ziarek 2001) worry that democratic theories that focus on
consensus can silence debate and thus they focus more on plurality, dissensus, and the ceaseless
contestation within politics.
The differences spring from, or perhaps lead to, different readings of the philosopher who has most
inspired performative political theory: Hannah Arendt, namely Arendt's ideas of speech and action
in the public sphere, of the meaning of plurality, of the ways in which human beings can distinguish
themselves. As Bonnie Honig, a champion of the agonistic model writes, Political theorists and
feminists, in particular, have long criticized Arendt for the agonistic dimensions of her politics,
charging that agonism is a masculinist, heroic, violent, competitive, (merely) aesthetic, or
necessarily individualistic practice. For these theorists, the notion of an agonistic feminism would
be, at best, a contradiction in terms and, at worst, a muddled and, perhaps, dangerous idea. Their
perspective is effectively endorsed by Seyla Benhabib who, in a recent series of powerful essays,
tries to rescue Arendt for feminism by excising agonism from her thought. (Honig 1995, 156)

Associational theorists tends to look for ways, amidst all the differences and questions
about the lack of foundations, it is possible to come to agreement on matters of common concern.
This is seen in feminist democratic theory, perhaps best known through the works of Seyla
Benhabib (Benhabib 1992, 1996), greatly inspired by her non-agonistic reading of Arendt and of
the work of the German critical theorist, Jrgen Habermas. Benhabib's work engages democratic
theorists quite broadly, not just feminist theorists. This passage of hers helps to clarify what she
takes to be the best aim of a political philosophy: a state of affairs to which all affected would
assent. As she writes, Only those norms (i.e., general rules of action and institutional arrangements)
can be said to be valid (i.e., morally binding), which would be agreed to by all those affected by
their consequences, if such agreement were reached as a consequence of a process of deliberation
that had the following features: 1) participation in such deliberation is governed by norms of

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equality and symmetry; all have the same chances to initiate speech acts, to question, to interrogate,
and to open debate; 2) all have the right to question the assigned topics of conversation; and 3) all
have the right to initiate reflexive arguments about the very rules of the discourse procedure and
the way in which they are applied or carried out. (Benhabib 1996, 70)
Following Habermas, Benhabib contends that certain conditions need to be in place in order for
members of a political community to arrive at democratic outcomes, namely the proceedings need
to be deliberative. Some take deliberation to be a matter of reasoned argumentation; others see it
as less about reason or argumentation but more about an open process of working through choices.
(McAfee 2004.)

Not all theorists who tend toward the associational model embrace deliberative theory so
readily. Iris Young's pioneering book, Justice and the Politics of Difference and several of her
subsequent works have been very influential and have led to a good deal of hesitance in feminist
theoretical communities about the claims of deliberative theory. Where Benhabib is confident that
conditions can be such that all who are affected can have a voice in deliberations, Young points
out that those who have been historically silenced have a difficult time having their views heard
or heeded. Young is skeptical of the claims of mainstream democratic theory that democratic
deliberative processes could lead to outcomes that would be acceptable to all (Young 1990, 1997).
Young, along with Nancy Fraser (Fraser 1989) and others, worried that in the process of trying to
reach consensus, the untrained voices of women and others who have been marginalized would be
left out of the final tally. Young's criticisms were very persuasive, leading a generation of feminist
political philosophers to be wary of deliberative democratic theory. Instead of deliberative
democracy, in the mid-1990s Young proposed a theory of communicative democracy, hoping to
make way for a deliberative conception that was open to means of expression beyond the rational
expression of mainstream deliberative democratic theory. Young worried that deliberation as
defined by Habermas is too reason-based and leaves out forms of communication that women and
people of color tend to use, such as greeting, rhetoric, and storytelling. Young argued that these
alternative modes of communication, modes that women and people of color and other
marginalized people tended to use, could provide the basis of a more democratic, communicative
theory. In her last major book, Inclusion and Democracy (Young 2000), Young had clearly moved
to embrace deliberative theory itself, seeing the ways in which it could be constructed to give voice

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to those who had been otherwise marginalized. More recent feminist democratic theory has
engaged deliberative theory more positively. (See McAfee and Snyder 2007.)

Where liberal feminists inspired by John Rawls and democratic feminists inspired by
Jrgen Habermas and/or John Dewey hold out the hope that democratic deliberations might lead
to democratic agreements, agonistic feminists are wary of consensus as inherently undemocratic.
Agonistic feminist political philosophy comes out of poststructural continental feminist and
philosophical traditions. It takes from Marxism the hope for a more radically egalitarian society.
It takes from contemporary continental philosophy notions of subjectivity and solidarity as
malleable and constructed. Along with postmodern thought, it repudiates any notion of pre-
existing moral or political truths or foundations (Ziarek 2001). Its central claim is that feminist
struggle, like other struggles for social justice, is engaged in politics as ceaseless contestation.
Agonistic views see the nature of politics as inherently conflictual, with battles over power and
hegemony being the central tasks of democratic struggle. Advocates of agonistic politics worry
that the kind of consensus sought by democratic theorists (discussed above) will lead to some kind
of oppression or injustice by silencing new struggles. As Chantal Mouffe puts it, We have to
accept that every consensus exists as a temporary result of a provisional hegemony, as a
stabilization of power, and that it always entails some form of exclusion (Mouffe 2000, 104).

Where associational theorists seek out ways that people can overcome systematically
distorted communication and deliberation, Dietz notes that agonists eschew this project because
they understand politics as essentially a practice of creation, reproduction, transformation and
articulation.... Simply put, associational feminists scrutinize the conditions of exclusion in order
to theorize the emancipation of the subject in the public sphere of communicative interaction;
agonistic feminists deconstruct emancipatory procedures to disclose how the subject is both
produced through political exclusions and positioned against them (Dietz 2003, 422).

New work in democratic theory and new readings of Arendt's philosophy offer hope of
moving beyond the associational/agonistic divide in performative feminist politics (Barker et al.
2012). Benhabib's proceduralism is being surpassed with more affect-laden accounts of
deliberation (Krause 2008). Instead of the rational back-and-forth of reasoned argumentation,

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theorists are beginning to see deliberative talk as forms of constituting the subject, judging without
pre-conceived truths, and performatively creating new political projects.

In sum, feminist political philosophy is a still evolving field of thought that has much to
offer mainstream political philosophy. In the past two decades it has come to exert a stronger
influence over mainstream political theorizing, raising objections that mainstream philosophers
have had to address, though not always very convincingly. And in its newest developments it
promises to go even further.

Simone de Beauvoir

The publication of de Beauvoirs The Second Sex in 1949 marked a watershed for feminist
theory and politics. In it, de Beauvoir presents the idea of Woman as Other, a relational theory
of femininity that asserts that the category of woman is defined by everything man is not. De
Beauvoir also focused on how control of womens sexuality and reproduction has historically
subjugated them to men, and was one of the first theorists to argue that gender was not an essential
characteristic of people, but rather something that one becomes through socialization. One is not
born, she wrote, but becomes a woman. Her work is a cornerstone of feminist social theory,
and has been highly influential to second- and third-wave feminist thought and politics.

Dorothy Smith

Dorothy Smith is a Canadian sociologist best known for her critiques of male bias within
social theory and for the development of institutional ethnography. Smith is renowned for
developing a distinctively feminist-oriented sociology, arguing that the abstract, all-encompassing
theories common in sociological thought are problematic in that they come from an implicit male
perspective that ignores or suppresses the experiences of women. Smith advocates beginning
inquiry not in the realm of abstract theoretical systems but from the standpoint of women in their
everyday lives. In starting with peoples experiences, Smith argues, sociologists can then move

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out to explore the institutions and social relations that structure and often exert control over these
actors lives. Smith calls this approach to social inquiry institutional ethnography, and claims
that it is not a sociology for sociologys sake, but a sociology for people (see, for example,
her Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People).

Patricia Hill Collins

Patricia Hill Collins is Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University

of Maryland and former President of the American Sociological Association. Collins is a
foundational theorist of what is commonly called intersectionality, a perspective on inequality
which argues that oppressions of race, class, gender, and sexuality cannot be understood in
isolation from one another, but instead intersect and help mutually reinforce and shape one
another. For example, Collins argues that the gender inequality that Black women have historically
experienced is related to but qualitatively different from the gender inequality experienced by
White women. This is not because of essential differences between Black and White women, but
because White women have historically been privileged racially while Black women have been
dominated through race and gender. Collins first presented this field-shaping perspective in Black
Feminist Thought in 1990. More recently, she has written Black Sexual Politics, a book that more
fully explores and theorizes the intersections of racial and sexual oppression.

Judith Butler

Considered by many to be the most important feminist theorist writing today, the philosopher
Judith Butler first came to prominence through her provocative book Gender Trouble. In it, Butler
controversially critiques the idea that a universal notion of woman should serve as the foundation
of feminist politics and thought. Instead, drawing on the ideas of Foucault and the philosopher of
language, J. L. Austin, Butler argues that the seeming reality or naturalness of gender, sex, and
sexuality is actually a product of the ways we act them out in conformity to cultural languages and
norms. In addition to her groundbreaking work on gender and sexual identity, Butler has also
written on issues central to moral and political philosophy. She teaches at the University of
CaliforniaBerkeley

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 Though feminist thought was largely ignored in mainstream social theory until the last few
decades, feminist social theory has a history as long and storied as feminist movements themselves.
In fact, since feminist theory emerged from womens political movements, its impossible to tell
the history of feminist theory apart from a history of feminism.

The history of feminist politics and theory is often talked of as consisting of three waves.
First-wave feminism is generally associated with the womens suffrage movements of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First-wave feminism was characterized by a focus on
officially mandated inequalities between men and women, such as the legal barring of women
from voting, property rights, employment, equal rights in marriage, and positions of political
power and authority. Second-wave feminism is associated with the womens liberation movements
of the 1960s and 1970s. While seeing themselves as inheritors of the politics of the first wave
which focused primarily on legal obstacles to womens rights, second-wave feminists began
concentrating on less official barriers to gender equality, addressing issues like sexuality,
reproductive rights, womens roles and labor in the home, and patriarchal culture. Finally, what is
called third-wave feminism is generally associated with feminist politics and movements that
began in the 1980s and continue on to today. Third-wave feminism emerged out of a critique of
the politics of the second wave, as many feminists felt that earlier generations had over-generalized
the experiences of white, middle-class, heterosexual women and ignored (and even suppressed)
the viewpoints of women of color, the poor, gay, lesbian, and transgender people, and women from
the non-Western world. Third-wave feminists have critiqued essential or universal notions of
womanhood, and focus on issues of racism, homophobia, and Eurocentrism as part of their feminist
agenda.

Feminist social theory has influenced and been influenced by the agendas and struggles of
each of these waves. First-wave theorists like Mary Wollstonecraft and Susan B. Anthony were
influential for their focus on how womens lack of legal rights contributed to their social demotion,
exclusion, and suffering. Second-wave theorists like Betty Friedan and Andrea Dworkin were
prominent for their focus on womens sexuality, reproduction, and the social consequences of
living in a patriarchal culture. And third-wave theorists like Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak
are significant for critiquing the idea of a universal experience of womanhood and drawing
attention to the sexually, economically, and racially excluded. Moreover, feminist social theorists

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in each wave have critiqued the male biases implicit in social theory itself, helping to construct
social theory that draws on rather than excludes the experiences of women.

Ultimately, if feminism, broadly understood, is concerned with improving the conditions of

women in society, feminist social theory is about developing ideas, concepts, philosophies, and
other intellectual programs that help meet that agenda. Feminist social theory, like any theoretical
tradition, is best seen as a continuing conversation of many voices and viewpoints.

Feminist theory matters today in some commentators believe that the womens movements
of the twentieth century were so successful in combating gender inequality that we have entered a
postfeminist era. While it is undeniable that feminist political movements have made tremendous
gains for women over the last 100 years, social scientific evidence demonstrates that there are still
large inequalities between men and women when it comes to areas like income and wealth,
political power and opportunities, legal rights, sexual assault, rape, domestic violence, and overall
status in society. This is even more the case in countries outside of the United States and Europe.
As long as gender inequality and oppression exists, feminism and feminist thought will continue
to matter to millions of people throughout the world. Moreover, feminist intellectuals continue to
develop cutting-edge and nuanced understandings of the social world that enrich the power and
possibilities of social theory writ large.

Feminists have five basic principles: they believe in working to increase equality.
Feminist thought links ideas to action, insisting we should push for change toward gender equality
(and not just talk about it). Feminists also believe in expanding human choice, the idea that both
men and women should be able to develop their human traits, even if those go against the status
quo. If a woman wants to be a mechanic, she should have every right and opportunity to do so.
Another feminist principle, eliminating gender stratification, proposes that laws and cultural
norms that limit the income, educational, and job opportunities for women should be opposed. The
final two principles are fairly straightforward: ending sexual violence and promoting sexual
freedom - that women should have control over their sexuality and reproduction.

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Conclusion

Therefore we conclude that those theories about political structure regarding of who must
govern is given to both male and female. Each person has the right to be in the political phase of
government. Pateman and Lovenduski talks that women should be excluded in the politics but as
this theory goes wider women create feminism theory argues what Pateman and Lovenduski state
in their theories. Feminism theories talks that women has also potentials to get involve in the public
and governmental sphere. What matters is that it must possess the equity and equality of women
as like as men.

We could understand that politics is one of the reasons affecting gender inequality. Less
opportunity are given to women who wants to get involved in politics. Furthermore, we also found
that there are some Gender bias in the theory of Pateman and Lovenduski with come to the women
but most given to the side of men which are affecting the gender equity.

The rights that the human have must be exercise. Today, Philippine constitution protects
the rights of each citizen specially the participation of women in political sphere providing Article
III, Sec. 14 of the Philippine constitution also known as Women in nation building their rights
to be involve in the political sphere and other Republic Acts in promotion and protection of
women.

As you walk down the street of the Philippines today and ask people what they thought of
gender equality in politics, you would get a resoundingly positive response. Walk down the street
in other place and ask the same question, and they answers been rather mixed. Women struggle to
get an education, healthcare, and a voice in politics in other countries. The rights we possess is
not just bestowed or given by the constitution we have but it was given freely by our almighty
God.

66 | P a g e
Chapter III

67 | P a g e
A. Research Locale

Brgy. Dadiangas North History

Barangay Dadiangas North with an area of 3.2443 square kilometers and a population of
more or less 66,000 is one of the fastest growing barangay in the City of General Santos both
demographically and economically.

With the uncontrollable growth of the population of Barangay Dadiangas, the peace and
order problem may complicate or make matters more difficult to content with along the slack in
the efficiency of the services that the barangay can render. As a solution to these foreseen
problems, the barangay council passed Resolution No. 41, Series of 1989 requesting the
Sangguniang Panlungsod of General Santos to divide Barangay Dadiangas into four subdivisions.

Consultations were made in line with the governments consultative and participatory
democracy and it was found out that 70% of purok officials favored for its division. To this effect,
the city council passed Resolution No. 90, Series of 1990 and was duly approved by the City
Mayor Rosalita T. Nuez on June 13, 1990 creating four barangays out of Barangay Dadiangas.

The name Barangay Dadiangas North derived mainly on its mother barangays
geographical descriptions and where the first elementary schools located namely: Dadiangas North
Elementary School, Dadiangas West Elementary School, Dadiangas South Elementary School and
Dadiangas East Elementary School.

The newly created Barangay Dadiangas North with its territorial boundaries defined as
bounded on the north by a portion of Roxas Avenue and Pendatun Street, on the south by Daproza
Avenue (formerly Sergio Osmea Avenue) and on the west by Silway River. This shall be deemed
officially distinct and separate from its mother barangay only upon the ratification by a majority
of the votes cast in plebiscite. Thus, upon the approval of the Commission on Election, Manila, a
plebiscite was conducted in the entire area concerned on February 24, 1991.

68 | P a g e
 Out of 3,055 voters who cast their votes, 1,876 were in favor of the division/creation of the
barangay while 1,179 votes were against its creation.

On March 5, 1991, the City Mayor appointed and inducted the first barangay officials of
the newly created Barangay Dadiangas North lead by Barangay Captain Domingo A. Santiago and
his kagawads Mr. Renato Diagan, Mrs. Maya Sophia Mabute, Mr. Antonio Bautista, Jr., Mr.
Antonio Pea, Mrs. Nena Sun and Mr. Alfredo Lising.

Existing infrastructure projects were implemented before its division. These include the
construction of bus terminal and the barangay public market at Bulaong and the asphalting and
concreting of various streets.

During the term of Barangay Captain Domingo Santiago, he initiated the construction of Barangay
Hall through the aid extended by private sector. This was done by donating either in cash or in
kind such as construction materials.

Government funded projects includes water system at Bulaong Terminal and public
market: drainage system within the perimeter of Bulaong Public Market, lighting of terminal
underground drainage along Osmea Avenue to Bulaong Terminal, concreting of Jose P. Laurel
Avenue. Construction of day care center in the barangay was not yet implemented due to lack of
school site. This project was implemented in 1991.

As the national and local election was set on May 11, 1992, Barangay Captain Domingo
Santiago filed his certificate of candidacy before the Commission on Election to run for city
councilor.
On March 23, 1992, Domingo Santiago turned over his duties and responsibilities as barangay
captain of Barangay Dadiangas North to Mr. Antonio Bautista as the barangay captain, also
appointed by the City Mayor.

69 | P a g e
 Today, Barangay Dadiangas North is still in its early stage but its barangay officials
works hand in hand for its continued progress especially in the proper implementation of
development projects and the problems/cases brought to them by their constituents.

70 | P a g e
Map of General Santos City

71 | P a g e
Map of Barangay North

72 | P a g e
Barangay North Elementary School

73 | P a g e
Houses in Barangay North

74 | P a g e
75 | P a g e
76 | P a g e
River near Barangay North

77 | P a g e
A. Respondents Statistical

Political and Institutional Factor

(Barangay North Prk. 1, 2 and 3)

V.1 V.2 V.3 V.4 V.5

Name

Bianes Gianzell No No Yes No No

Clemea Genelyn No No No Yes No

Melida Joveniel No No Yes No No

Esposa Aprilyn yes No Yes No No

Mellerosa Leslie Yes No Yes Yes Yes

Walta Elena Yes No Yes Yes Yes

Mara Che-che No No Yes Yes No

Dumaog marina No No Yes No Yes

Tanggo Lita No No Yes No Yes

Senope Liza Yes Yes No No No

Bandirado Maricel No No No Yes No

Salvador Princes No No No Yes No

Chanto Lusterio No No No No No

Angan Jerald No No No No No

Estopito Lenilyn Yes No No Yes Yes

Espora Araseli No No No Yes Yes

78 | P a g e
Moreno Esmanra No No No No Yes

Ambong Michelle No No No No No

Payba Vicente No No No No No

Tanaid Geraldine No No No No No

Lim Ninfa No No No No No

Payba Rhasmiyah No No No No No

Payba Chryslene No No No No No

Joseph Dores A. No No Yes Yes No

Clemea Melchor No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Paradero Renelda No No No Yes Yes

Piamonte Arlene M. No No Yes No Yes

Igue Leonardo No No No No Yes

Gundto Norma Yes No No No No

Layo Roneto No No Yes Yes No

Sambli Lucie No No Yes Yes No

Delalos Flora mae No No Yes Yes No

Castillo Marisar No No No No No

Gonato Rye Angela No No No No No

Tipawan Juneth No No No Yes Yes

Rivera Carlito No No No Yes No

Layo Costodia No No No Yes Yes

Sopita Jovzelyn No No No No Yes

79 | P a g e
Babas Lolita No No No No Yes

Pakyatan Ellen No No No No No

Rivera Jordan No No No Yes Yes

Sumilhig Sonia No No No No Yes

Panayag Lorena No No Yes No Yes

Lino Rizalde No No Yes Yes No

Mandubayan Lociden No No No Yes No

Baylomo Lauren No No No Yes No

Jocado Rio No No Yes No Yes

Hemongala Mediver Yes No No No Yes

Apuya Lory Yes Yes Yes No Yes

Kabuya Renato Yes No Yes No No

Agustinez Annlle Yes No Yes Yes Yes

Panisan Glibre Yes Yes Yes Yes No

Baromalague Elvie No No No No Yes

Ariston Xando No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Nequia Samuel No Yes No No Yes

Lara Mauricio Jr. No Yes No No Yes

Sino Elmer No Yes Yes Yes No

Bacali Mercidita Yes Yes No No Yes

Perez Nilda No No Yes Yes No

Mansibad Norwel No Yes Yes Yes No

80 | P a g e
Bolenses Allan Yes No No No Yes

Dagoplo Merilito No No No No Yes

Socias Evita No No Yes Yes Yes

Sposa Richard No No Yes Yes No

Domingo Honey Jane No No No Yes No

Macapas Rhea Yes No No No No

Jesus Josiemer No No No Yes No

Diaz Roselyn No Yes No Yes No

Ticdan Roselito Yes No No Yes Yes

Ubos Joel No No Yes Yes No

Talangin Neil Yes No Yes Yes No

Legala Arnbold No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Gaser Fe No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Rolando Josep Js. Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Aspasecio Amalia No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Montefolca Deceroso No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Montano Locreta No Yes Yes Yes No

Vellez Loeber O. No Yes Yes Yes No

Vellez Judith No Yes Yes Yes No

Tapinit Lucy Yes Yes Yes No Yes

Tello Mary Jane Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Billalon Susan Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

81 | P a g e
Serdoncillo Rowqena No No Yes Yes Yes

Salamanca Lucy No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Lerialos Rosemarie No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Geraldo Estrelleta No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Asas Sella Rowalfe Stella No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Recla Susan No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Gaser Jerry No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Bentolero Meriam Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Bawiin Ranau Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Alig Renato Yes Yes Yes No Yes

Gunay Rodeline B. No No No No No

Marriano Mary Jean No No No No No

Monteza Rowena Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Enanta Rezel Yes No Yes No Yes

Galvez Terecita Yes No No No No

Perez Archie Yes No Yes No No

Heyorpe Ricthel No No No No No

Albanez Regina No No No No No

Sosobrado Marychris No No No No Yes

Iagi E;ya Yes No No Yes No

Delian Rim Alben Yes No Yes No Yes

Escobar Fairey No Yes No No Yes

82 | P a g e
Curduva Rena mae Yes No Yes No No

Lubina Romeo Jr. Yes No No Yes No

Sasyes Vannesa Yes No Yes No Yes

Reyorpe Esrilia Yes No No Yes No

Antaran Novi Yes No No Yes No

Binantay Jesseca Yes No No No No

Santiago Jocelyn Yes No No No Yes

Mobilis Victorino Yes No No No Yes

Flores Clara Yes No Yes No No

Legala Arnold No No No Yes No

Wung Emely No No No Yes No

Laso Carmelita No No No Yes No

Mangco Graceia No No No Yes No

Catalan Mary Grace No Yes No Yes No

Catalan Marissa No No No Yes No

Susmea Airen No Yes Yes Yes No

Trinidad Aimee No Yes No No No

Lavia Chanda No No Yes No No

Olaer Zoilo No No Yes No No

Serdinia Marites Yes No No No No

Puyos Virgie Yes No Yes No No

Catalan Joan No No No Yes No

83 | P a g e
Bodiongugan Christopher No Yes Yes Yes No

Goloya Leonara No No Yes Yes No

Decona Nidalem No No Yes Yes No

Surriga Marivic No No No Yes No

Cargade Vivin No No Yes Yes No

Rasonabi Luzviminda No No Yes Yes No

Manalundang Amelita Yes No No Yes No

Labra Esponila No No Yes No Yes

Dichosa Audie Sr. No No Yes No No

Ranes, Saturmina No No No Yes No

Lobela Maly Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Lacarta, Evange No Yes No No Yes

Andreno Leonida No No No No No

Ybanez Leonora No Yes No Yes No

Antyora Esperanza No No No Yes No

Laderan Ailyn No No No No No

Sumalinog Patricia No No No No No

Melida Crastina No No Yes No No

Layo rosalinda Yes Yes No No Yes

Custodia Janet Yes No No No No

Batomalaki Verginia Yes No No No No

Gementiza Merlyn No No Yes No No

84 | P a g e
Anyora merma No No Yes No Yes

Ama anafel No No No Yes Yes

Licdan sheila No No No No Yes

Buhos Lolita E. No No Yes Yes No

Sumbilon Ronstica No No No No No

Lumpayaw Pedro No No Yes No Yes

Angeles Rody No No No Yes Yes

Saya Maricel Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Presas Jane Mary No No No No No

Bakalonde Felisita Yes No No No Yes

Montesa Rowena No No No No Yes

Bakalnde Luleta No No No No Yes

Batomalaki Larry Yes No No No No

Cornada Kyla No No No No No

Miyasco Amor No No Yes Yes No

Dela Cruz Jelly M. No No No No No

Ayan Princess No No No No No

Escao Gerardo No No No No No

Ampnon Boy Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Waling Darvin No No No No No

Rasonabi Juanito No No No No No

Resaba Regelen No No No No No

85 | P a g e
Lopez Bonyoun No No No No No

Pedro Renalyn Yes No Yes Yes Yes

Landas Dante jr. No No No Yes No

Salvi Laston No No No No Yes

Liston Wanita Yes No No No Yes

Gustodia April Joy Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Custodia Estepane No No No No No

Jhenrey Gustodio No No No No No

Gustodio Reynaldo Jr. No No No No No

Aguinas mary Jane Yes No Yes No No

Akbay teddy Yes No Yes Yes No

Baylomo George Yes No Yes Yes No

China Alien No No Yes No Yes

Conejar kJenalyn Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

David Emelda Yes Yes Yes No Yes

Adaeza Wedzhar No No No No No

Carillo Evelyn Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Pap-ag Candelario No No No No No

Alfante Juveyn No No No No No

Tacalan Divina No No No No No

Sicop Alonie No No No No No

Angeles Raquel No No No No No

86 | P a g e
Jancorda Juy No No No No No

Aballe AnalizA No No No No No

Pepuela Minio No No No No No

Gines Lourdes C. No No No No No

Jancorda Zanda No No No No No

Tarly Carjelie Yes No No No No

Maningo Princess Joy No No No No No

Angeles Eva No No No No No

Ortiz Rosalinda No No No No Yes

Labaran Lorita No No Yes Yes No

Lazo Enhami No No No No Yes

Omega Danna Claire No No No Yes No

Porras bernardo No Yes No No No

Galvie Vilma Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Jamale Crisena No Yes No Yes No

Dela Torre Jessa S. No No No No Yes

Sotto Florita No No No No Yes

Tabangay Divina A. No No Yes Yes Yes

Gac-ang Brenda G. No No No Yes Yes

Arellano Claudia Yes Yes Yes No Yes

Paler Jojemar J. No No Yes Yes Yes

Simene Meashell No No No No No

87 | P a g e
Cawan Ida No Yes No Yes No

Caballes Merlie No No Yes Yes Yes

Mintar Jen jen No No Yes Yes No

Cuesta Jeanelyn No No Yes Yes No

Molijon Cathalina No No No Yes No

Enentay Renante No No No No Yes

Enantay Martina No No Yes No Yes

Lara Rosalia No No No No Yes

Ortiz Jerry No No Yes No Yes

Tuling Maria Fe No No Yes No Yes

Perez Anabelle No No Yes Yes Yes

Loquillano Renato No No Yes Yes No

Alfanta Corazaon No No No No Yes

Utto Rowen No No Yes Yes Yes

Langcuyan Mary cris No No No Yes No

Hancorda Jonnalyn No No No Yes No

Omega Marites Yes Yes No No Yes

Porras Lolita No No No Yes No

Calagason Mischelle No No No No Yes

Belgera Wilfredo Yes Yes No Yes No

Masaglang Cessanta No No No Yes Yes

Kamid Emma D. No Yes No Yes Yes

88 | P a g e
Rivera Chona No No No Yes No

Peruno Cynthia No No No No Yes

Timbal Salvacion No No No No Yes

Sicof Adrian N. No No No No No

Alfante Rose S. No No No No No

Salvacion Rayona No No No No No

Morillo Belen No No No Yes Yes

Cabillo Carmelia Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Yes 64 56 101 115 105

No 180 188 143 129 139

Total 244 244 244 244 244

89 | P a g e
 Political and Institutional Factor
(Barangay North Prk. 8, 9 and 12)

V.1 V.2 V.3 V.4 V.5

Name

Sotto Arnold G. Yes No No No Yes

Garcia Joel No No No Yes Yes

Sorbilla Elsa Yes Yes Yes No Yes

Pason Eleonor Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Pepito Marissa No No No No No

Baculi Noprate No No Yes Yes Yes

Montalban Maristela No No Yes Yes No

Labrador Lea Yes No Yes No No

Sapio Shiela Mae No No Yes Yes Yes

Labrador Carmeleta Yes No No No No

Lligo Bernardo Yes Yes Yes Yes No

De Vicente Joanna No No No No No

Rosque Vibelyn P. No No No Yes No

Jose Evelyn M. No No No No Yes

Adaya Ligaya J. No No Yes No Yes

Castill Juvy No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Dioso Nimpha Marie No No No Yes Yes

Del Rosario Strella No No No Yes Yes

90 | P a g e
Sotto Cleopatra No No No No Yes

Jagucoy Angelino No Yes No No Yes

Apuhar Josie No No No Yes Yes

Dela Cruz No No No Yes No

Peligro Perlita No No No Yes No

Cudamat Shirley No No No Yes No

Lara Glen Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Montega Ronel Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Dela Torre Joesam Yes No Yes Yes Yes

Catalan Eljhon Yes Yes Yes No Yes

Carillo Agapito No No No No Yes

Gonato Shiola Mae No No No No Yes

Catalan Ronaldo Sr. No No Yes Yes Yes

Dosaban Ernesto O. No No Yes Yes No

Sugabo ma. Lourdes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Sygabong Ma. Lourdes No No No No Yes

Guiang Adela No No No No No

Mendez Lilia C. No Yes No No Yes

Morena Jessie Yes Yes No No No

Ongkingo Deselyn S. No No No No Yes

Garayanala Vilma C. No No No No Yes

Cawa Joy No No No No Yes

91 | P a g e
Ongkingo Catalino Jr, No No No No Yes

Espora Mary Jane No No No No Yes

Badilla Iluminada No No No No Yes

Loquillo So No No No No Yes

Canoto Jesemer No No No Yes No

James Lenirimia No No No No Yes

Calasa Jovin No No Yes No Yes

Lara Marlelyn No No No No Yes

Kwata Raida Yes No No No Yes

Igalan Robily No Yes No No Yes

Sogumban Naice Yes No No Yes No

Catalan Chona No No No Yes No

De Jesus Gennifer M. No No Yes Yes No

Pandato Angelica No Yes No No Yes

Langkoyan Merlinda No No No No Yes

Bascones Mark Louie No No Yes Yes No

Estrada Analysa No No No No No

Sugabo Marilou No No No Yes No

Abanal Jessa B. No No No Yes No

Laurita Maricel No No No Yes No

Alinsasaguin Jay Gasas No No Yes Yes No

Jost Verginia No No No No No

92 | P a g e
Gierza Kessabel Yes No Yes No No

Losada Anabel Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Egas Guadalope Yes No Yes Yes Yes

Bernal romnick No Yes Yes Yes No

Timcang Andy No No No Yes No

Bulpa Ma. Fe No No Yes Yes Yes

Calungsod Vicky No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Ahyeng Rey No No Yes Yes Yes

Utto Vivian No No No No Yes

Pilapil Michelle No No No No No

Julagting Raquel No No No No Yes

Gilladoga Napoleon No No No No Yes

Danie Jerric No No Yes Yes Yes

Largo Roberto No No No Yes Yes

De Guzman Jerson No No No No Yes

Gonzaga Brandon Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Avela Rogelio Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Sanchez Demer jhon Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Alvarez Luzviminda Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Hembra Jimmy Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Lim Geromile No No No Yes No

Diego Kevin No No Yes Yes Yes

93 | P a g e
baluya Jose No No Yes Yes Yes

Complied Loreta No No No No No

Charissa Mae No No No No No

Santiollan Jaime No No No No No

Jabonete Jene rose No No Yes No Yes

Montilla Shirlyn No No No Yes Yes

Flores Joey No No Yes Yes No

Bactong Nimfa No No No No No

Grandisila Hernani No No Yes Yes Yes

Llanes Patti Jane No No Yes Yes No

Andang Jecel No No Yes Yes Yes

Guamen Anita No No No No Yes

Pabilona Armie No No Yes Yes No

Prieto Relita No No Yes Yes No

badayos jessica No No Yes Yes Yes

Sabanay Razel Joy No No No Yes Yes

Siri Estilito No No No Yes Yes

Aliwanas Lucia Yes Yes No Yes No

Bantilan Rosalinda No No No Yes Yes

Dignadice Emelda No No Yes Yes Yes

Maso Elizabeth No No No Yes Yes

Pido Joy No No No No Yes

94 | P a g e
Rabuya Julije Marie No No No Yes No

oraya Raquel D. No No No No Yes

Bacullo Jairus No No No No Yes

Yocanco Adolfo No No Yes Yes Yes

Bargas Marcela No No No No Yes

Lino Lailanie No No No No No

Mamaliba Box No No Yes No Yes

Linoy Theresa No No No No No

Patac Wine Freda No No No No No

Manggobat Clarita No No No No No

Sajol Alan No No No No No

Dandy Chary Mae Yes No No No No

Tulta Joemar No No No No Yes

conception Esmeraldo No No No No Yes

Tadarojeo Benjie Yes Yes Yes No Yes

Abao Farhana No No No Yes No

Tesones Purification No No No No No

Tamponyok Carmela No No Yes Yes Yes

Dulo Lovely Mae Yes No No Yes No

Takbil Jaria No No Yes Yes Yes

Fernandez Cynthia No No No No No

Simson Ventilacion Yes Yes Yes No Yes

95 | P a g e
Pasculado Elaiza M. No No No No No

Neri Loyd No No No No No

Dimakale Mary Ann No No Yes Yes No

Pedrajas Christina Jay Yes No Yes Yes Yes

Solano Jonalyn No No No No No

Gallego kenneth No No No No No

Magsalay Rosalinda No No Yes Yes No

Paguntalian Estella No No No No No

Timkang Elima No No No Yes Yes

Panes Nenita No Yes Yes No No

Tablasan Alfredo No No No No Yes

Timkang Alvin No No No No Yes

Lara Hermina No Yes No No Yes

Tolentino Cristi No No No No No

Sabitin Elena No Yes No No No

Cuico Carolina No No No Yes Yes

Medena Pedrino No No No Yes Yes

Maturan Vivian No No No No No

Racines Marcelino Jr. No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Patricinio Ranny No No No No No

Orlando Wata No No No No No

Dosaban Ernesto O. No No Yes Yes No

96 | P a g e
Castro Maricel No No No Yes Yes

Ganapati Danilo No No No No No

Rivera Maryjoy No No No No No

Piar Junzy No No No No No

Diapera Anamarie No No No No No

Antipuesto Elbina Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Nueva Arlyn No No No No No

Revira Cilya Yes No Yes No Yes

Bensoy jenny No No Yes No Yes

Balapate evelyn Yes No No Yes No

Duray Adrian No No Yes Yes Yes

Clara Cresulta No Yes No No Yes

Sierte Dominador Yes Yes Yes Yes No

Inarga Angelo No No Yes No Yes

Vilan Angel Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Rasonable Cyrrille No Yes No No Yes

Careol Marcelo No Yes No Yes Yes

Corpuz aneta No No No Yes No

Paraqilis Elasa No No No No No

Magleciom Ma. Fe No No No No Yes

Laureno Christine No Yes Yes Yes No

Gusila Anysha No Yes No No Yes

97 | P a g e
Gurila Gzeil No Yes No Yes No

Reyes Hazel No No No No No

Ampan Dynalou No No No No Yes

Takil Micheal No No No No No

Marte Jane No No No Yes Yes

Calago Jean No No No No No

Sereno Aguillo No No No No No

Matulac Ailene No Yes No Yes Yes

Pekalido Boych Yes Yes No No Yes

Maghanoy Eloeonor No No No Yes Yes

Jaralba Jose No No No No No

Calig Asma No No No No No

Cabusog Rosalie No No No No No

Panrungao Marilou No No No No No

Chavez Gilbert No No No No No

Welson Bhenteno No No Yes Yes Yes

Luyaw Mrilou No No Yes Yes Yes

Tacud Nalieta No No Yes Yes Yes

Doblon Estrella No No No Yes No

Subasco enrico No No No Yes Yes

Tacud Fraxulo No No No No No

Faja Rowena No No No Yes Yes

98 | P a g e
Andrada Marie No Yes No Yes No

Araw-araw Arsenio No Yes Yes Yes No

Sebastian Carlim No No No No Yes

Caleza Jong No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Mondejar Rolen No Yes No Yes Yes

Gilo rolando No No Yes Yes Yes

Jabonete Milagros No No No Yes Yes

Regala Cristy Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Jabonete Nareen No No Yes Yes No

Pido Jeffrey No No No No No

Ayda Mwankeo No No No No No

David Gerial Mae No No Yes Yes Yes

Quirda Jesel No No No No No

Guines Norma No No No No No

Davonay Larry No No No No No

Igbria Ezekel No No No No No

Nicolas Maribel No No No No No

Muania Mary Grace No No No No No

Yakit Sepreyano Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Meode Jimboy No No No No No

Gloria Digen No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Yakit shelden No No No Yes No

99 | P a g e
Capaque Charlie No No No No No

sarmiento Clifford King No No No No No

Peralta Mack Randy R. No No No Yes No

Rosano Gen Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Cambarijan Alexander Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Lopez Friendy No No No No No

Janero Elmer No No No No No

Radriliza Felterico No No No No No

Sogi Lailyn No No No No No

Pacho carmelita No No No No No

Billernia No No No No No

Abucot Jocile No No No No No

Castor Larry No No Yes Yes No

Banlonga Welkerson No No No No No

Avelino Shiela No No No No No

Redeza Alvin No No No No No

Nolle Beth No No No Yes No

Honate Eden No No Yes No Yes

jagnas Jenalene No No No Yes No

Merino Merlyn No No No Yes No

Cabusog Rosalie No No No No No

Cabreros Rachel No No No No No

100 | P a g e
Dela Cruz Mary Grace No No No No Yes

Villa Virginia No No No No No

Muring Bibilyn No No No Yes Yes

Ampaya Edelyn No No No Yes Yes

Penuela Edson No No No No No

Wata Orlando No No No No No

Concillado Renz No No No No No

Luther Paanglitan No No No No No

Yes 38 48 79 114 124

No 208 198 167 132 122

Total 246 246 246 246 246

101 | P a g e
RESPONDENTS

It was May 16,2015 that were the students of Cronasia Foundation College Incorporated,
under the social work department, conducted a survey and interview for gender and
development, this study was focus 0n family income, cultural values, personal hygiene, proper
waste management and disposal, their educational status, and political status, this study was
very interesting because the result of this study, with the proper collection, gathering, organizing,
analyzing, and interpreting the data, the government may take a precautionary measures or to
be aware and take some actions to know and at the same time to solve the problem of the basic
unit of our society which is the family.

Early in the morning of May 16, 2015 with the researchers gathered at Barangay North
at Purok 1 and 2, General Santos City in order to conduct an interview and survey to the
respondents of the study, the scope of the study was Barangay North, Purok 1 and 2 with 600
households served as respondents of the study.

We went to the houses of the respondents one by one; we asked them a question base
on the questionnaire that we formulated. On the interview proper we encounter different
persons, different individuals with different personalities, characters, attitudes and behavior.
Some of the respondents are willing to be interviewed, and personally, we can say theyre so
cooperative, willing to give their personal information without any mental reservation.

Some of the respondents are so hospitable, they entertained them with a smile on their
faces, welcomed them in their home as an honorable guests and visitors, these are some good
traits that we have been witnessed and we observed during the interview proper.

Unfortunately other respondents were not hospitable, they were showing their bad
attitudes towards us, when they got near to their houses they were going to shut and lock their
doors, thats how they treat the researchers, we have nothing to do except to fled away from
their home, and looking out for another respondents for the said study.

We as a researchers encounter some technical problems due to inaccuracy of

disseminating the information, with our co-researchers, there is discrepancy when we talked to

102 | P a g e
the Barangay Council of Barangay North according to them, Purok 1 and 2 comprises of 600
households but unfortunately when we were there in place there are only 300 households. At
this point the researchers confused rushed to interview the 300 households where in fact our
target respondents were 600 households based the information given to us by the Barangay
Council, but later on some minor problem arise as an optimistic researchers, we managed to
solved the problem, by researching another respondents in another Purok under the Barangay
North.

May 19, 2015 as we go back to Barangay North we searched for another Purok which we
found out Purok 8, 9 and 12, we the researchers divided into 3 groups to which we have reached
our target through the help of the Purok Chairmans.

The sun arise, after a walked we have arrived there, we encounter many persons with
such different behaviors, there were some of them such nice to us others were not, they shut
their doors maybe because they dont want to be interviewed but even if they are like that we
respect them, in the other group they found some households which they are willing to be
interviewed. We also encountered some persons who belong to the LGBT family; we can say that
they changed through the persons who surround them.

In Barangay North we noticed that the houses there were so near with each other by
which we can say it could like a squatters area but even if it is like squatters area they make
their surroundings clean, by a proper segregation of their waste.

The sun is finally goes out it is already afternoon but we continued on what we are doing,
as we enter a household with a simple family we ask them if they take a meal 3 times a day but
then they answered us with a sigh they only take 2 times meal a day it is because the income of
the family head is not enough to sustain their needs, only their 2 children have been in a proper
school while their 4 children stop, meanwhile we found out that most of the households we
entered have the family heads have no stable or permanent job.

Speaking of political status in Barangay North we noticed that their Councils were so open
to us, they approved our proposal conducting an interview in their place. Where we found out to

103 | P a g e
which the council is consist of men, while the Purok Chairmans were consist of both women and
men.

As we the researchers we have learned more from our experience dealing to people with
multi-faced behaviors but we understand the path because we are going to undertake as a future
social work. If we will become a successful once on our chosen field of endeavor we must learned
on how to longer our patience, because patience is the virtue to everybody. The respondents we
interview in Purok 1, 2 and 3 were almost 244 in the same time in Purok 8, 9 and 12 were 266
respondents all in all we interview 500 respondents.

104 | P a g e
C.Tools

105 | P a g e
Chapter IV

106 | P a g e
 A. Summary

This study was held in Barangay North with the use of paper and pen. If we see this
area as you say it does not address the people.

If we notice the place is very clean even though it was supposedly a human
accommodation. As we meet the council they taught that the population of Purok 1 and 2 have
300 household out of it we interviewed 200 households which it is 66.67% over 100%.

As of May 19, 2015 going to Purok 8, 9 and 12 which also have almost 300 households
wherein 246 households were interviewed 82% out of 100%, where we can conclude that almost
a half to reach the target.

The people there is nothing much work especially their family head only very little work.
Insufficient income of the family head cannot sustain the needs of the family members it is because
of their Educational Background to which 25% are college graduate while the 75% of it are
elementary and high school graduate, so concluding that only college graduate can easily get a
regular or permanent job.

In political aspect in Barangay North some of the households answer that women can
easily get a job it is 54% while the remaining 46% says that men are not quite get the job. Their
Barangay structure is consist of men which it is 71.43% while there are only 2 women in the
council where it is only 28.57% as we can say men have the authority to rule.

Asking the respondents through the use of questionnaires that we formulated we reach
our goal with the help of my co-researchers together we developed this research where once we
finished it by coincidence though we had difficulty gathering of information.

107 | P a g e
 B. Findings

The global problem on gender politics about inequality in the government seems to be
relevant in other places maybe some here in Philippines but not so obvious to be seen maybe in
some other phases because of the Republic Acts and Human Rights implemented here.

As we conducted a survey last May 16 & 18, 2015 at Dadianggas North specifically in
purok 1, 2, 3, 8, 9 and 12 there are some sort of problems that we found in those certain areas.
They are not capable to support their selves in participating in political aspect because they dont
have enough money to support their candidacy during election. Others were too busy in supporting
their own family and some of them dont have enough knowledge on how to handle a certain
position because they didnt even finish their studies.

We had also found out that out of eight Barangay officials there are only two women and
out of thirteen purok officials there are only six women. In this data we could say that men are
really dominant in the political structure of Barangay North.

108 | P a g e
Chapter VI

109 | P a g e
A . Annex

110 | P a g e
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