A Review of the 8^th International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women: Gendered Worlds: Gains and Challenges, July 21-26 2002.

By Desiree Lewis and Elaine Salo

Introduction

The International Women’s World Congress, held once every three years since 1984, was hosted in Africa for the first time in 2002. Like previous congresses, this was an enormous event. Over 2500 participants from 94 countries attended (compared to approximately 70 countries represented at the previous congress), the number of presentations exceeded 1 000 papers, and many delegates found it difficult to select panels from within an overwhelming array of sub-themes within programme themes.

Moreover, as was the case with previous Women’s World Congresses, all submitted abstracts were accepted, so that very diverse voices and perspectives emerged.

Previous conferences were hosted in the Netherlands (1984), Ireland (1987), USA (1990), Costa Rica (1993), Australia (1996), and Norway (1999), and drew strong contingents of American and western European participants. The hosting of the event in Kampala, by a Women’s Studies department that has long played a pivotal role in launching women’s and gender studies in Africa, was therefore significant in appearing to signal a reorientation in the international women’s movement towards third-world, and specifically African trajectories and contexts.

This was reinforced by the fact that Kampala was also the host of the international Know-How Conference, a gathering of specialists in the collection and dissemination of information relevant to women, which started one day after the Women’s World Congress and whose main organizer was Isis-WICCE. All Congress participants were invited to attend the Know-How workshops, and all information specialists were welcomed at the thematic workshops of the Women’s Worlds Congress. Together, the two events drew together an enormous range of gender activists, researchers, students and teachers. At the same time, the fact that they were connected meant that all were encouraged to make connections between feminist research, activism and information dissemination.

The opening ceremony of the congress was elaborate. Among the events of the first day were the singing of the conference theme song by Makerere College School; opening remarks by Dr. Grace Kyomuhendo, the Women’s World convenor and Dr. Noelene Heyzer head of UNIFEM; speeches by Prof. Amina Mama based in South Africa, Prof. Marilyn Safir from Israel, Ms. Tove Strand, Executive Director of the Norwegian Agency for Development, and President Yoweri Museveni; as well as numerous performances by various cultural groups. One of the launch events that unveiled some of the complex dynamics surrounding gender initiatives in Uganda, and maybe Africa more generally, was a speech delivered by President Yoweri Museveni. Significantly, the President arrived at a point when Prof. Mama, Chair of Gender Studies at the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, was almost half-way through her keynote speech posing radical challenges for feminist activism and scholarship in the face of a growing, albeit not always overtly authoritarian, state presence in civil society and the African academy. In her comments on state feminism, Mama observed that: “In the case of authoritarian and anti-democratic regimes, illegitimate and discredited governments have sometimes been able to capitalise on the international gender political climate, deploying ‘the women question’ opportunistically, in a manner designed to curry international favour, while disingenuously domesticating their own image.”

Since Museveni raised many issues that were strongly conservative, not only was the essence of his talk in contradiction to Prof. Mama’s; in many ways, he exemplified the entanglement of the state both in Africa’s academic world as well as in gender initiatives on the continent. Confronting the challenge posed by this, Mama claimed: “If the state is to be leaner and meaner, then we are going to have to be smarter and sharper – more incisive in our analysis, better mobilised to defend our interests in the arenas of formal power, and beyond, in the corporate sector, and in civil societies that are so often deeply uncivil when it comes to women.” Many listening to Museveni’s speech grew increasingly uncomfortable about his comments on the tendency towards what he termed “vulgarisation” in certain forms of gender politics, his increasingly blunt condemnation of radical calls for gender transformation, and his reductive identification of the free market as the main path to greater rights for women in Africa. But the president had been invited to deliver a key address by the organisers of the congress, and all present were implicitly enjoined to accept his authoritative presence.

While the opening ceremony brought to the fore current complexities in the political framing of Uganda’s academic terrain as well as of gender activism, it also raised issues about Uganda’s location in global cultural politics and social hierarchies. In view of the origins of the Women’s World Congress as a venture shaped largely by funding and feminist lobbying and research in the north, it is crucial to assess to what extent the hosting of the conference in Kampala indicated a substantive reorientation of the women’s movement towards acknowledging African agendas in the development of feminist visions globally. It is of course significant that 315 papers were presented by Ugandans, while 260 were presented by participants from other African countries. Since there were 240 from the USA and Canada, 190 from Europe, 70 from Asia and 25 from Latin America, more than half of the presenters of papers were from Africa. This, together with the focus on African and African-American subject-matter, suggests not only that African agendas were central at the conference, but that African gender research may be poised to acquire a new prominence at an international level. To quote a claim made in the congress website, “Locating the congress in Uganda - in the heart of Africa - holds great potential for illuminating the voice from the south in general and of Africa in particular within the global women's movement”.

(http://www.makerere.ac.ug/womenstudies/congress).

The pre-eminence of an African ethos was also a function of the Congress’ auspicious setting. The host of the Women’s World Congress, the Women’s Studies Department at Makerere University, is ten years old and has recently acquired an imposing building at the entrance to the campus. As writers like Sylvia Tamale, Joy Kwesiga and Aili Tripp have shown, the Ugandan Women’s Movement struggled hard for women’s rights in the period after decolonisation, with the rewards of its long battle being evidenced in the significant gains for women in recent years.

This long struggle can be neglected when recent policy-making and legislation for gender justice is attributed mainly to the magnanimity of Uganda’s president, Museveni. Presently, Uganda has far more women active in politics than many other countries both on and beyond the continent, and its women’s mobilisation embraces a range of NGOs and organisations in civil society. When we visited the market place exhibition set up in the middle of campus, we found it difficult to keep track of the range of gender initiatives in the country. Some that offered especially important outlets for research and publications on women and gender in the country were Fountain Publishers’ Gender Studies Series, (which has published both Joy Kwesiga’s Women’s Access to Higher Education in Africa: Uganda’s Experience and The Women’s Movement in Uganda: History, Challenges and Prospects, edited by Aili Tripp and Joy Kwesiga - launched to coincide with the congress), the Ugandan Women’s Media Association (UMWA), the Uganda Gender Resource Centre and FEMRITE, initiated by the Ugandan Women Writers’ Association.

Makerere University also has a vibrant intellectual legacy and has long been one of Africa’s leading universities. The aura of this long-established academic institution fused with the magnetism of a landscape that has led Uganda to be described as the “pearl of Africa”. The awesome setting of the congress was therefore palpable, contributing powerfully to an impression of the independence and authority of African perspectives.

It is necessary, however, to critically assess to what extent the congress demonstrated real political and intellectual breakthroughs in the ways in which feminist agendas are likely to be conceptualised at a global level. Paul Zeleza’s keynote speech on globalisation, while very sketchy in its treatment of feminist interventions, was crucial in signalling how globalisation entails continued cultural and economic dominance, with apparently hybrid and multicultural intellectual and cultural events often covertly re-inscribing the priorities and agendas of those with a history of cultural and political dominance.

Evidence that power relations still deeply affect the global women’s movement came in the form of, for example, heated floor discussion in a panel on women, science and technology on the second day. Where feminists in the north celebrated the potential of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to increase collaborative feminist transnational dialogues, women in the south were angrily pointing to the role of ICTs in deepening inequities between north and south. The recognition of entrenched power relations was registered also in the number of presentations that stressed the need for a “new” alertness to power relations in knowledge production, and, for example, the significance of fieldworkers in the north being sensitive to the locations and agendas of women in the south. Since these imperatives were raised within the women’s movement over two decades ago, it is revealing how they are being raised with the same sense of urgency today. It is as though work towards changing the direction of the women’s movement internationally still remains at the stage of vociferously acknowledging and condemning power divides. In the meanwhile, participants in discussions continue to be baffled about how to meaningfully challenge these in the face of a global political economy that has become progressively ruthless and insidious in reproducing familiar forms of exploitation and domination.

Although the prominence at the congress of African subject-matter and an African political and intellectual legacy does not capture whose agendas usually dominate in fora such as the international Women’s World Congress, a review of sessions and papers clearly illustrates that much research produced in Africa, and indeed much produced by researchers abroad who work on Africa, is charting very distinct priorities for taking gender justice forward. What follows is a review of central conversations raised within the 18 programme themes of the congress. This discussion draws attention both to distinct and suggestive themes within contemporary African gender research and politics, as well as to what issues feminists are raising at a global level.

Proceedings

Panels were grouped into the following 18 programme themes at the congress:

1. Women’s and Men’s Studies: Research and Conceptual Developments and Action

2. Women’s Movements: Activism and Conceptual Developments

3. Gendered Identities/Constructions of Gender

4. Gendering the Young Voices

5. Gendering the Family

6. Gender and Education

7. Gender and Higher Education

8. Gender and Health

9. Gender, the Economy and the Workplace

10. Gender and Globalisation

11. Gendering Agriculture and the Environment

12. Gendering Politics and Governance

13. Gender, Law and Human Rights

14. Women, Culture and Creativity

15. Women’s Information and the Media

16. Women, Peace and Conflict

17. Women, Science and Technology

18. Development Practice.

1. Women’s and Men’s Studies, Research and Conceptual Developments and Action.

Many of the presentations on conceptual developments highlighted the conference’s objectives of focusing on gains and challenges. A number of panellists and speakers dealt with the importance of feminist methodologies that meaningfully counteracted the hierarchical opposition between the subjects and objects of knowledge, and generally approached the question of how feminist knowledge challenges the assumptions of mainstream academic knowledge and scholarship. Nancy Naples from the University of Connecticut helped to explain the recasting of this theme in recent years in a paper entitled “The Dynamics of Critical Pedagogy: Experiential Learning and Feminist Praxis in Women’s Studies”. Showing how connections between feminist praxis and women’s studies were assumed about three decades ago, she described the growing anxiety among many feminist academics, pressurised by the demands of career-oriented and masculinist academic institutions, to underplay pedagogical and methodological innovation and develop research and teaching that conformed to dominant notions of scholarly rigour.

This suggests a long, hard look at how, practically speaking, feminist research has in fact lived up to its initial goal of challenging the mainstream academy from within. As individual scholars and departments increasingly take up authoritative positions in environments where insisting upon “difference” is a guarantee of marginalisation, scope for being innovative and challenging seems to be steadily decreasing. The key issue raised by the many papers within this theme is whether the gains achieved through feminist struggle on the margins of the academy have been lost with the respectable institutionalisation of women’ studies, and what new challenges are faced by feminist within the academy.

A related discussion in the sessions on this theme revolved on reviewing different women’s and gender studies departments. Often striking here was a sober acceptance of the need, after over two decades of institutionalising the teaching of women’s and gender studies in many parts of the world, for critically assessing progress made in the face of a backlash against feminism and an ethos in which students are pressured into taking career-oriented courses appropriate to what is often defined as a “post-feminist” age. What many presenters revealed was a realisation that, beyond the quantitative gains made by several decades of institutionalised women’s studies research and teaching in contexts including Uganda, the Caribbean, the U.S, Puerto Rico, Germany, Ukraine and Australia, women’s and gender studies as a field needs to be critically assessed from the viewpoint of qualitative and long-term changes for intellectual activism, its impact on affecting student consciousness and on broadly influencing developments within civil society.

The attention drawn to “women’s and men’s studies” - reflected in the conference theme of “gendered worlds” - indicated an emphasis on the social construction of gender as a holistic human concern, rather than as an atomised “women’s issue”. The widening of priorities that were identified in the west in the seventies was illustrated in the way in which the sub-theme of “Gendering Men” was worked into different themes, such as research and conceptual developments, gender and health, gendered identities and gendering the youth and also incorporated into keynote speeches like Hilda Tadria’s “Gender and Patriarchy: An African Perspective”. Interestingly, the previous Women’s World Congress in Norway in 1999 offered the topic of “Gendering Men” as one of its thirteen main programme themes. The integration of the theme into different topics suggested a general acceptance of the centrality of studies of masculinity and patriarchies to current feminist research, and a growing integration of radical men’s studies within the field of women’s and gender studies. While this may have been the impression at the conference, there continues to be a wider discussion about granting studies of men and masculinities equal status to research on women within the field of gender and women’s studies. A presentation by Rhoda Reddock, et al., “Studying Men and Masculinities in the Caribbean”, constantly stressed how the rise in Caribbean studies of men and masculinities is threatening to destabilize the women’s movement there.

2. Women’s Movements: Activism and Conceptual Developments

The large number of African contributions in panels dealing with this theme was an important reminder of the current vigour of gender struggles on the continent and the emphasis among African gender scholars on recuperating women’s history. The documentation of this legacy was well-captured in presentations by keynote speakers and panellists like Joy Kwesiga, Margaret Kikampikaho, Aili Tripp, Mary Ssonko and Jacqueline Assimwe, appropriately, researchers based in the country hosting the conference and scholars who have long supported and interpreted Ugandan women’s movements. Other presentations from, for example, Botswana, Ghana, Kenya and Senegal, highlighted the distinctive evolution of women’s involvement in relation to broader political struggles and drew attention to women’s activism and organisation on multiple fronts – the concerted drive to challenge a plethora of colonial and postcolonial injustices.

Both directly and indirectly, these presentations offered ample evidence of the diversity and vigour of African women’s mobilisation in the face of the local, regional and international forces collectively entrenching gender and other forms of oppression. Given the rise of neo-imperialist and other authoritarian forms of governance in those parts of the world often considered more gender-sensitive than much of the third world, the presentations on African women’s movements offered challenging models of how all women’s struggles should and can address different injustices and forms of oppression. The preponderance of African contributions on this theme therefore offered opportunities for dialogue for reversing the usual transmission of expertise and wisdom from north to south. This dialogue has become more and more real, given the upsurge in the international work of NGOs and the transnational feminist initiatives and women’s mobilisation described by many delegates. Because of the multiple challenges faced by African women and other women from the south in articulating contextually-focused agendas for justice and full political and civil freedoms, their perspectives have the potential to invigorate this dialogue in numerous ways. Whether the obvious value of voices from the south in global dialogues will actually be registered, however, is another question.

3. Gendered Identities

Striking in these sessions was the attention to axes of identity beyond the predictable trilogy of race, class and gender. Often, race was given a central place. For example, Stanile James’ keynote speech on “Racialised Gender/ Gendered Racism: Reflections on Black Feminist Human Rights Theorising”, prioritised race as a key marker of difference to contest ostensibly universal human rights discourses and to confront multiple oppression. What was often made clear, however, was that multiple oppression is inevitably shaped by very particular economic, political and historical circumstances, these giving rise to highly localised forms of gendered identity and behaviour. It was noteworthy that these conclusions were drawn by speakers from very different regions ranging from Denmark, Ireland, Norway and Sweden, to Cameroon and South Africa. Here, discussions of masculinities and femininities registered transformations, paradoxes and complexities in the gendered behaviour of women and men as they battle with rapidly mutating regional, national and global economic, ideological and political forces. What these similar conclusions about vastly different contexts reveal is that gendered identities are inextricably shaped by a combination of political and social influences, and that it is not only historically marginalised groups, but all socially constructed beings who are entangled in “multiple identities”. The shift to localised, detailed studies of the intricacies of identity indicates an important move away from predictable and almost formulaic constructs towards careful empirical study of the immediate, localised and extremely complex patterns through which individuals acquire a sense of who they are.

The extent to which these localized insights can open up animated discussion and suggest paths for comparative work was highlighted in a panel entitled “Gender and Patriarchy: Resistance and Subversion” on the first day of the conference. While the panel was offered within the theme of “Women, Culture and Creativity”, papers on “Resistance and Liberation in African Women’s Writing”, “Patriarchy and Customary Law”, and “Culture, Patriarchy and Gender Struggles in Africa”, all clearly showed that particular gendered behaviour and roles were contingent on distinctive regional circumstances and changing historical forces. The animated floor discussion that followed the presentations would seem to suggest that it is often discussion about very particular patterns, rather than heavily theoretical formulae and generalisation, that can best stimulate insight into and understanding of gendering as a social process.

4. Gendering Young Voices

Discussion about the socialisation of the youth from a gendered perspective was a timely intervention into the homogenising of youth problems, and addressed subjects spanning violence and armed conflict, poverty, HIV/AIDS, customary practices, refugeeism, education and media representations. The dominance of themes that were particularly relevant to African youth confirmed the need for a continental agenda for youth concerns, superficially reflected in the celebration of the “Day of the African Child” a few months before the congress. Yet an event like the “Day of the African Child” can imply public awareness of and official recognition of the plight of the youth without any meaningful insight into ingrained problems or attention to viable solutions. The focus in many congress papers on the linked topics of sexuality, HIV/AIDS, customary practices and violence indicated far more than a superficial acknowledgment of African youth, and clearly demonstrated how central gender is to understanding and changing problems affecting the youth. Among the issues raised were why girl children are so severely discriminated against in education even though policy-making may contest this; why young girls are at such risk of contracting HIV/AIDS in contexts where young boys’ aggressively heterosexist socialisation can negate the impact of highly visible AIDS education programmes on their sexual behaviour; why gendered violence, which is often directed at young girls by family members, can remain so intransigent when it is defended in the name of custom, tradition and apparently sacrosanct lines of authority.

Youth were foregrounded not only in panel presentations. The congress sustained the visibility of young people and children throughout, with the range of dance and musical events at the opening ceremony especially indicating to us from the outset that children’s worlds needed to be acknowledged in the proceedings to follow. An especially memorable event was a song by a group of tiny girls whose chorus clearly announced that their “not being boys” did not “make them toys”. It was also encouraging to see schoolgirls at the congress. While they did not appear to have been invited to thematic sessions, their presence at more public events was encouraging evidence of the congress goals being extended to a community beyond the university. Generally, the visibility of youth, and especially young girls was heartening. But it was often unsettling when youth appeared to feature only as symbols in adult agendas, for example, to illustrate the processes of “modernisation” in Africa, or – paradoxically - as markers of an appealing traditionalism.

5. Gendering the Family

What was refreshing in these panels was the wealth of information on and discussion about family dynamics different from conventional, western-styled nuclear households. Babere Chacha’s paper “Female Husbands? Or Traversing Gender?” dealt with woman-to-woman marriage as a contractual family agreement that has a long history in East Africa. Many presentations dealing with families in Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria discussed the key role women play within households as single parents, decision-makers or breadwinners. It is interesting that the presentation by Kyama Kabadaki revealed similarities in African-American families. While the impression created by these presentations is that women are taking on powerful, masculine roles in the family, discussions were often able to draw out the underlying tensions and ambiguities that underpin this apparent authority. It often became clear that women were playing dual roles as conventional nurturers and decision-makers and, as a result, were placed under enormous emotional and financial pressure. Other papers from a wider range of contexts, such as South Africa, Ukraine and Finland dealt with the growing oppressiveness of family life for women in the face of political, economic and social pressures that are increasingly affecting domestic relations.

6. & 7. Gender and Education/ Higher Education

In the two programme themes on education, most presentations dealt with factors that affected women’s access to primary and higher educational institutions, women’s students access to, experiences of, and academic performance in male-centred institutions. Most of the papers examining access and performance were based on African case-studies and included studies of employees as service deliverers in the educational sector in Uganda and how they impact upon women’s access to education; disabled women’s access to education in Uganda; and the efficacy of educational reform policies in closing the gender gap in countries like Uganda and Ghana. The overwhelming majority of these papers cited the tremendous effect of socio-economic factors and general cultural and religious gender biases in favouring boy’s and men’s access to education over that of women and girls.

State policies, especially in the post-colonial African context, are often looked to as the cure-all for increasing women’s and girls’ access to education. Critical reviews of these policies, in terms of the challenges presented by their implementation served as timely reminders that these procedures are only initial steps in the struggle for gender equality in education. During discussions, speaker after speaker reiterated the point that officials’ commitment to policy implementation could not be assumed, and that often the struggle for the realisation of policies could be a long, drawn-out and often contradictory process. Illustrating this, Takyiwaa Manuh indicated that the privatization of higher education in Ghana indicates that, despite constitutional commitments to gender equality in all spheres, women’s educational access may be negatively affected by national prioritisation of cost recovery. While international commitments to education taken at the Jomtien Conference in Thailand, as well as national policies and state sponsorship are lauded as important tools in the struggle for gender equity, effective access for women and girls requires more radical strategies. Panel proceedings reflected an awareness that institutional cultures were often hostile towards women students and presented huge obstacles to effective retention. It was often made clear that intolerance and hostility towards women result from the lack of gender awareness amongst teaching and administrative staff; gender biases in curricula; and from sexual harassment and gender-based violence.

Research from the Philippines, Mexico, Tanzania, Nigeria and Sweden indicate that explorations in transformative pedagogical practices in primary and high schools point to promising new directions in engendering the classroom culture (Mexico), and curricula such as Maths and Science (as in the Swedish case). Best practices of gender equality in higher education, as well as the promotion of doctoral programmes in Women’s Studies were debated as alternative paths for engendering the culture of higher education institutions. Although researchers delineated aspects of a hostile institutional culture, such as the paucity of women in managerial positions in higher education, they also drew attention to the importance of women’s formal and informal networks in challenging sexist practices (for example, Jane Bennett’s presentation on sexual harassment), or supporting our access to, and successful performance in senior administrative positions. Zola Makosana examined the factors that sustained women’s leadership in higher education in South Africa, while Colleen Chesterman studied the role of inter-institutional collaboration and electronic communication in South Africa and Australia. These explorations point to the importance of employing a two-pronged approach in the struggle for women’s equality in education; namely challenging the entrenched patriarchal practice and ideology while also mapping out the contours of transformative practices. Ultimately, as the presentations by Charmaine Pereira, Deborah Kasente and Louise Morley and many others indicated, this dual focus can only be sustained if it is underpinned by creative gendered methodologies that simultaneously reinforce existing gains and pursue the new challenges arising from successes.

8. Gender and Health

Most panels in this section addressed the connections between women’s socio-economic statuses, their experience of physical and mental health, and their limited access to adequate healthcare. Presentations and discussions stressed how socio-economic and cultural practices affected gendered inequities. Papers such as Susanne Orhling’s “Gender and Immigrants’ Mental Health in Sweden” and Mattilou Catchpole’s presentation on the effects of gender bias on the healthcare of women, explicitly mapped out this interrelationship. In this way, they highlighted the inadequacies of a narrow, biomedical approach to disease and its treatment as well as the inadequate use of gender as a tool of analysis by health practitioners and researchers. The feminist interrogation of the relationship between patriarchy and the socio-legal as well as biomedical control of women’s reproduction surfaced again and again in relation to different themes. These critically examine the hegemony of biomedicine and the state over women’s bodies, and reveal the disturbing extent to which women’s bodies - at the start of the new millennium - continue to be defined as vessels that others control. This was conveyed in a session entitled “Embodied Gender”, in which Sylvia Tamale interrogated the socio-legal control that statutory and customary laws exert over women’s bodies in the Ugandan context.

Given the extent of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa, it was appropriate that a number of sessions focussed on the gendered impact of the disease and its intersections with similar socio-economic, cultural and political factors in the region. Papers dealing with the south, for example, Robert Morrell’s treatment of South Africa and Swatija Manorama’s focus on India explored similar patterns in the complex configurations of gender and identity in relation to the transmission of HIV/AIDS. Other presentations, such as a paper by Catherine Ndungo on the gender dimensions of care for those living with AIDS, revealed the increasing burden women bear as “natural” caregivers.

9. Gender, Economy and the Workplace.

As expected, this section comprised numerous sub-themes and sessions encompassing the gendered division of labour and its relationship to women’s identities; women’s marginalisation and their struggle for economic resources in the informal sector; the effectiveness of gender equity policies; gendered cultures in the workplace; and the gendered impact of globalised trade. The extensive range of research in this arena centred around five broad themes: the significance of women’s paid work as a means of accessing resources in the formal economy; the related issues of gendered roles in the workplace, the sexual division of labour and the value of women’s work within the economy; gender biases inherent in everyday workplace culture and its effects on working women; and finally, gender equity policies as gender-empowerment strategies in the workplace.

The sessions dealing with globalisation and women’s work, even though they were few, pointed to important theoretical developments. Most papers focussed on the links between global shifts in production and the reorganization of women’s work in the local context. These presentations indicated a need for careful analysis of the unique relations between local constructions of gender and global trade agendas. This analysis was well illustrated in Julius Kikooma’s exploration of the resurgence of supposedly archaic cultural assumptions in the context of “modern” entrepreneurship.

Another issue within the theme of women’s work was raised by Meg Luxton’s paper on the politics of love and care in Canada in a neo-liberal era. She highlighted ways in which women carry increasing burdens for family care in wealthy countries, as states decreased their responsibility for social reproduction. Her analysis indicates how the boundaries between the private and the public spheres are changing and reconfiguring the meaning of women’s work in a context of formal gender equality. It also points to growing similarities in the processes of gendered impoverishment in underdeveloped and developed worlds.

10. Gender and Globalisation.

Appropriately, sessions on globalisation were marked by transnational interchanges, with the different sessions being structured in such a way that discussion and presentations traversed geographical divides. What was often clear was the absence of consensus about what gobalisation means. For some, globalisation was synonymous with multiculturalism and a collective location in a world where nation-state and other boundaries no longer play the central role they did in shaping what we do, how we behave or how we think about ourselves. This benign definition of globalisation sometimes generated an overly optimistic sense of the ability of feminist groups, women’s organisations and progressive men’s groups to work democratically and concertedly towards change.

For many, however, globalisation was linked to power and understanding colonial and neo-colonial domination, with a paper like “The Gender Face of Globalisation”, presented by Farida Katuli from Tanzania directly confronting globalisation as a web of domination which negatively affects women’s work and rights far more than men’s. It was interesting that careful, textured readings of women’s roles and identity construction were marked in presentations by women in the north. These often dealt with immigrants, such as Turkish business women in London, Mexican women in the U.S. and South Asian women in Canada. That globalisation is read in very diverse ways in different locations is of course itself a manifestation of the globalisation process. There is no denying that many socially marginalised women have, with great courage and determination, struggled to fashion a sense of dignity and autonomy in relation to encounters with new worlds, symbols and meanings; at the same time, the very real impact of the economic and political pressures on many women in the global political economy is a persistent and escalating problem.

11. Gendering Agriculture and Environment.

Given the deleterious effects of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) in African contexts, it was encouraging to note that the majority of presentations on this theme focussed on two central issues. One concerned women’s roles in environmental management, rural agricultural production and food security in underdeveloped countries. The second was how women could be effectively integrated into agricultural and environmental projects. For example, one poster session highlighted women’s key roles in activities ranging from the conservation of marine resources along the Kenyan coast to women leaders’ roles in preventing environmental degradation and solving food security in Africa. In a session on agricultural resources and production, presenters described women’s roles in activities that included the application of new fertiliser technologies in Nigeria, as well as livestock-keeping and women farmers’ effects on the environment in Tanzania and Kenya.

The description of women’s roles in agriculture was an important intervention into gender-blind agricultural and environmental practices in diverse contexts. One needs to ask, however, to what extent the task of challenging existing oppressive relations can be served by description, rather than by analysis. Research that is restricted to superficial description offers limited potential for understanding the complex social dynamics that maintain gendered marginalisation. Discussion and presentations often showed that it is important to distinguish between women’s activities on the margins of agriculture as short-term survival strategies and activity that contributes to their effective long-term empowerment. Endorsing short-term and immediate gains, numerous presenters argued for affirmative policies; others such as Rachel Waterhouse, referring to the Mozambican case, argued that a focus on a single policy obscured the historical nature of interlinked processes which maintained women’s exclusion. Similarly, presentations such as that by Kissawike Kalunde on the connections between irrigation, agricultural production and household food security, and by Maliha Khan-Tirmizi on the exclusion of women from water management in Pakistan, revealed how gendered relations at the level of the state, donor agencies and within household are systemic, recursive and contingent.

Feminists promoting women’s rights in relation to the environment and development constantly debate whether it benefits women to struggle for their rights to access and manage the diverse environmental and agricultural resources within the existing system, or to create alternative routes of access via a culture of gender exclusivity. Jemimah Njuki’s presentation on women’s collective action as a means of increasing their access to resources in Kenya offered some insights into the second option, and described in detail the collaborative gendered networks and social capital that women utilise to gain access to resources.

12. Gendering Politics and Governance.

Once again, the issues surrounding women’s political participation in Uganda, and other countries in the south informed most of the sessions in this section. The concentration of presentations on women’s political gains and struggles in the post-colonial south suggests not only that feminists in these contexts have identified the state as a site of gendered struggle; they have also reflected critically on women’s past political gains and the current challenges that emanate from these gains. Amanda Gouws’ presentation on the state as a site of struggle in South Africa was especially noteworthy in this regard. In sessions focussing on issues such as the role of national machinery or the recognition of women’s roles in legitimating national governments, discussion celebrated the gains made in countries like Uganda or South Africa, and also questioned policies supporting women’s formal participation in state structures.

A number of presentations based on case studies from countries such as South Africa, Sweden and Finland highlighted the importance of transforming the state’s organisational culture if women representatives are to be effective agents for gender empowerment. Louise Vincent and Lisa Westmann argued that the existing institutional culture may often actively support gender injustice even though women’s physical representation appears to challenge this. Birgitta Niklasson argued that even though women are well-represented in the Swedish state, they may frequently protect male interests in the state. Interrogations such as these critically inform theoretical debates about the meaning of women’s formal political representation. These reflections, especially from women in the south, point to the growing body of Third World feminist theory on the postcolonial state and the promise of innovative conceptual developments in this area.

13. Gender, Law and Human Rights

This theme generated important conversations about distinctively African processes and circumstances. These embraced discussions of culturally-sanctioned violence against women, gendered rights in relation to religion; land and resource access and sex work and the trafficking of women.

It is noteworthy that discussion about women’s rights in relation to sexuality was sometimes coloured by moral and religious overtones and cultural constructions of women’s respectability.

The often heated discussions in many sessions on this theme indicated the extent to which, as participants, we were positioned within the very cultural processes we sought to critically analyse. Moreover, the very distinctive issues that speakers confronted often made it clear how difficult it was to define gendered rights in universal terms, and that gendered rights always needed to be placed in cultural contexts. At the same time, some speakers stressed how important it was not to reify or deify culture, especially in contexts where “culture” is routinely used to celebrate patriarchal identities and to enforce women’s compliance.

14. Women, Culture and Creativity

The theme of culture and creativity offered radically diverging insights. On one level, it opened up discussion of the numerous ideological forms of reproducing gender oppression, with particular emphasis being placed on how oppression may be justified in the name of the sanctity of ostensibly “traditional” cultural codes. In many presentations and panel discussions dealing with, for example images of women in literature or ways in which patriarchy was reproduced through customary practices, culture was explored as a dominant system of representation and myth-making that definitely oppressed women, albeit often in insidious ways where women were made complicit.

On another level, some discussion offered space for exploring the subversive writings and cultural expression of women. In a workshop format on dealing with this theme, this was extremely compelling, since women from the north and south offered texts in different languages and testified to the special resonance of language in metaphorically conveying alternative worlds.

In a keynote speech that posed challenges for thinking about the dual and often conflicting effects of “culture”, Thelma Awori spoke boldly about an African vision that transcended stereotypes of African powerlessness, and assertively celebrated the creative and imaginative resources that, despite, massive oppression, have always thrived on the continent. The enthusiastic response to her presentation seemed to testify to the fact that many firmly believe that the vision of personal and creative freedom, even under extremely harsh circumstances, needs to be constantly nurtured and celebrated.

The extent to which the subject of “culture” can generate wide-ranging discussion of different economic, political and cultural topics was vividly illustrated in a panel on women’s knowledge and creativity, where discussion focused on Mirjam Southwell and Chinandu Mwendapole’s paper, “Women’s Knowledge Devalued as Craft”. Their presentation indicated how important crafts produced by women are in thinking about creative cultural production in Africa. The discussion that followed also drew attention to the different forces that devalue and marginalise African women’s unique cultural creativity. Among the subjects in the lively panel discussion were: the setting of standards for African cultural creativity by northern fashion trends, global markets and monopolies, the role of middlemen and the limited possibilities for women’s organisation in the informal sector. Here culture clearly provided a path into exploration of numerous relationships at the domestic, local and global levels.

Extremely provocative questions about culture were often raised by the general events organised for delegates and members of the public. These events sometimes drew attention to the way in which culture in Africa has been equated with a sanctified tradition and placed beyond critical scrutiny. Certain extra-programme events featured women performers simply as symbols of culture rather than as active participants in Ugandan civil society. An example of this was the presence of The Nabagereka, Queen of Buganda at a cultural evening where participants were encouraged to attend in “traditional attire” and where the queen seemed to be positioned as an object for display. This event seemed to exemplify the very pitfalls that some congress deliberations drew attention to: namely the display of women’s bodies as signifiers of tradition, and the fixing of culture as unchanging “tradition”. There were moments at the congress, therefore, when extra-programme events tended to undermine the aims of exploring and celebrating women’s agencies, identities and struggles.

15. Women’s Information and the Media.

A powerful and energetic context for the theme of Women’s Information and the Media was provided by the Know-How Congress being held at the same time as the Women’s World Congress. Since the Kampala Know-How Conference was the fifth professional, global conference of women's information and media specialists, it was a forum for numerous women and men to share information, challenges and strategies for developing, at a transnational level, innovative ways of disseminating information related to gender-related struggles and rights. Significantly, the Kampala Know-How Conference centralised African agendas in defining its objectives. These included: increasing the visibility of African women’s issues in information centres, archives and services; establishing links between women information specialists in Africa and the rest of the world; equipping more women activists in Africa with Information Communication Technology skills and developing a plan of action for generating and sharing information by and with rural women activists. Since the previous Know-How Congress hosted in Amsterdam in 1998 led to a number of networks and projects for generating information sharing and demonstrated the commitment of information specialists to practical proposals, the extensive networking among information specialists that was very visible in Kampala bodes well for planning and initiatives directly attuned to African needs in the future.

The mood of enthusiasm around ICTs was also signalled by the prominence of independent media organisations in Uganda. The Ugandan Women’s Media Association has been in existence since 1983, and has worked hard both to challenge the marginalisation of women in the mainstream media, and to support independent media initiatives. Two of these, a newspaper called The Other Voice, and a radio station for women, have been documenting women’s unacknowledged place in the news, drawing attention to the gendered dimensions of many national events and providing women space for airing concerns that are ignored in the mainstream print media and in broadcasting.

Two main themes dominate discussions of gender and the media: representations of gender and stereotyping on one hand, and the role of alternative, women-centred and gender-sensitive media in countering stereotyping and institutional discrimination. The former theme was more pronounced in panel presentations and discussion. In some ways, this seemed to acknowledge the “failure” of the alternative spaces and ventures to which both the Know-How Conference and many initiatives in Uganda testify. On another level, however, it is an indication of how powerfully oppressive representations continue to function in ideologically marking women’s place in society. In a world in which women’s equality is often acknowledged in policy-making, legislation, and equal work opportunities, we seem to see growing evidence of ideology as a form of policing women’s subservience, even where material circumstances blatantly deny their peripheral roles.

16. Women, Peace and Conflict

The special urgency of sessions on women, peace and conflict could not be ignored in Uganda. The war in the north was evidenced in the high visibility of soldiers everywhere, including the building in which delegates registered. On a trip to the source of the Nile, we passed long lines of soldiers in training: young men whose rubber boots and informal backpacks clearly indicated their recent recruitment. Observing this, we considered how startling the obvious presence of a militarised society can be, even when one is aware that many societies - ostensibly not in the grip of war - are no less marked by gun-toting men and a mood of pervasive and looming violence. The effect of being in an overtly highly militarised society, however, was to make us realize the direct and immediate implications of the fact that it was men who usually carry and use guns, men whom we saw in training, and men at the centre of the conflicts we read and heard about.

Papers dealing with this theme posed questions around the implications of this: what do women do during times of war, and what role can women play in peacebuilding? Presentations and discussion underscored a conclusion that has become increasingly important - even in mainstream conflict resolution: the importance of focusing on women’s traditional roles as informal peacemakers, and on the centrality of this, rather than top-down international-led mediation in the meaningful resolution of conflict at communal and national levels. Proceedings at the congress also revealed how discourses of rights in times of conflict can be appropriated in the interests of national military goals. This was clearly raised in Mrs. Janet Museveni’s keynote speech, where she appealed to Ugandan women not to misuse their new-found rights to support the government’s opposition in the war.

17. Women, Science and Technology.

Many sessions in this section revealed feminists' deeply ambivalent perceptions of the role of science and technology in advancing gender equality. This ambivalence is well-founded, given the scientific advances that have informed eugenicist controls over women's bodies on one hand, and those that have assisted women in regaining control over their reproduction through contraceptive technologies on the other. The mixed feelings of many speakers also resulted from a feeling that science can be only as good as the context in which it is applied. Many of the African presentations (for example, Deus Mukalazi’s “Gender, Science and Technology: Can Feminists’ Illuminations of Gender Affect Science and Technology – For the Better?”) assumed the value of scientific developments in making Africa more globally competitive in general, and improving women’s positions in particular. This assumption was made in papers, like Dominuez and Gomez’s “Absence of Femaleness in Women Scientists”, which advocated women’s entry into the field of science and technology.

A number of presentations went further in scrutinizing the hierarchies and oppressive beliefs often implicit in apparently neutral scientific developments. These often assessed the masculinist underpinnings of science and technology. An important example of this was Betty Udongo’s “Exploring the Use of Ethnoscience in Enhancing Girls’ Participation in Science, Mathematics and Technology in Uganda”. Generally, discussion around and awareness of north-south divides were especially marked in deliberations on this theme, and indicated the centrality of science and technology in reflecting and reproducing global patterns of inequity.

18. Development Practice.

Presentations in these sessions focused on the need to evaluate how gender is incorporated into programmes and practices in areas as diverse as health, poverty alleviation, and agriculture. These critical assessments highlighted two important areas in assessing effective development practices. First, they pointed to the different gender theories that inform different development practices. Secondly, they indicated why women’s different identities and statuses in the local context should be taken into account. Two sessions were devoted to a discussion of the best methodologies employed to implement gender mainstreaming in a sector-wide approach in national state institutions. Although many studies assumed that states’ national commitment to gender mainstreaming policies automatically translated into implementation, presentations such as Helen Elsey’s on lessons in mainstreaming HIV/AIDS, called for a distinction to be made between programmes that are tacked onto existing institutions and those that insist upon gender mainstreaming.

Her paper pointed to the need for more innovative, gender-sensitive methodologies to assess the efficacy of programme implantation. Presentations by delegates like Lily Artz and Kelley Moult on the methods in monitoring gender-based policy and legislation in South Africa indicate the importance of assessing the gendered impact of programmes at different levels of operation and implementation. Their innovative methodological framework assists in accurate identification of the glitches as well as the successes in implementing a gender-sensitive policy.

Concluding Comments.

The hosting of the Women’s World Congress in Kampala went a long way towards ensuring that delegates retained sight of women’s differences and similarities. We were reminded of particularities not only in terms of the range of voices at the congress, but also in terms of apparently irrelevant details like very different dress styles. Our assessment of the previous congress held in Norway in 1999 was that its programme themes focused extensively on general and abstract explorations of identity. Examples of this included the themes, “GenDerations”; “New Constructions of Gender”; “Gendering the Past”; “Culture, Creativity and Spirituality” and “Gendering Men”. In contrast, the Kampala Congress seems to have offered a wide spread of both theoretical and practical engagements with gender, with many themes being offered on specific areas in politics, the economy and society. Examples here are “Gender, the Economy and the Workplace”; Gender Agriculture and the Environment”; Gendering Politics and Governance” and “Women; Peace and Conflict”.

The Kampala Congress was also emphatically oriented towards cultural diversity, with the spread of themes clearly indicating one of the main focus areas, namely the “celebration of multiculturality and diversity” (http://www.makerere.ac.ug/womenstudies/congress).

The relationship between theory and practice was often raised in very provocative ways. Often it seemed that understanding immediate, local struggles and relationships was central to developing incisive theoretical explorations, even though strategic practical interventions were usually seen to be informed by theoretical awareness. The intricate relationship between theory and practice was raised by the fact that the Know-How and Women’s World conferences were hosted at the same time. Because Know-How was an event aimed mainly at “practitioners”, and Women’s World targeted mainly “researchers”, practitioners and researchers often inhabited each other’s worlds.

Questions about theory and practice were also provocatively raised in Prof. Amina Mama’s keynote address. Establishing a tone for critically engaging with the subject at the start of the congress, Mama said that “The movement between theory and practice generates various tensions – hopefully creative ones - tensions that emanate from the continuing hegemonies and inequalities between north and south, between what is seen as ‘global’ and what is relegated to the ‘local’, between what is defined as ‘theory’ and what is defined as ‘practice’”. In very different ways, and in widely divergent arenas these “tensions” were raised again and again.

Because of its scope, the Women’s World Congress generated enormous impetus for intensive interdisciplinary and transnational conversation about research, teaching and information gathering on gender-related concerns. For most delegates, this conversation will undoubtedly continue long after the event, as we explore and pursue the many opportunities for discussion, networking and information-sharing made available by the actual event. The conference organisers offered invaluable resources in the form of a daily newspaper highlighting and reviewing central events each day, a Women’s World 2002 Magazine, a programme summary and guide as well as detailed programme and a comprehensive book of abstracts of papers. The last of these will prove especially useful as a long-term networking resource, since it lists presenters e-mail addresses and institutional affiliations.

Retrospectively considering the conference, we marvel at the energy and dedication that made the event possible. Many details we could very easily take for granted must have required tremendous coordination and planning. This concerted energy was obviously galvanized not only among the organisers and those who directly shaped the conference, but also among many throughout Kampala: the hotel managers and waitrons, restaurant owners, store-keepers, taxi-drivers, airport officials and Kampala residents who regularly interacted with delegates. It was clear that many sectors within civil society had made their resources available for different conference events. Looking back, therefore, we recall not only the intense thematic sessions, the powerful keynote speeches, or the stimulating meetings with other researchers and teachers, but more generally, the feeling of being welcomed by Ugandans whose frequent response to being thanked was the gracious phrase, “You are most welcome”.