Exploring Theories of Patriarchy: A Perspective from Contemporary Bangladesh
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Exploring Theories of Patriarchy: A Perspective from Contemporary Bangladesh
| Author(s) | Feldman, Shelley |
|---|---|
| Abstract | This article focuses on the question: Can we provide a perspective on changing gender relations that neither assumes that patriarchy limits efforts to restructure the economy nor places primacy on patriarchy as the explanation of women’s incorporation into the Bangladeshi labor force? More concretely, can we challenge the hegemonic discourse that centers on female seclusion and Islamic backwardness, on the one hand, and the imperatives of development, on the other? The answer to both questions is yes: first, because hegemonic discourses are never totalizing but always contested, reasserted, reconstituted, and reformulated. This is because relations in difference negotiate with dominant practices through the complexities of daily life in ways that both interpret and reconstitute emergent discourses and imaginaries of change. As Chris Weedon suggests, “the failure to un- derstand the multiplicity of power relations . . . will render an analysis blind to the range of points of resistance inherent in the network of power relations, a blindness which impedes political resistance. Explanations of patriarchy, for example, which seek to account for it only in terms of privi- leged forms of power such as the capitalist mode of production, the nuclear family or male violence against women offer necessarily partial, politically limited analyses” (1987, 120-21). This position is not generated from a model of economic determinism, nor is it premised upon the functionalist assumption whereby patriarchy is explored as it serves the interests and needs of particular forms of accumulation, whether these are capitalist or noncapitalist forms of production. Second, interpretations that rest on assumptions of patriarchal domi- nance postulate a universal, global, and transhistorical notion of patriarchy in which changes in gender relations arise in response to external factors, whether through the introduction of capitalist relations into “premodern” contexts, conditionalities associated with structural adjustment programs, or household relations that intrude into the public space of the factory. They assume that change and/or “development” is a linear process that views women as passive respondents whose actions are not constitutive of the worlds they inhabit. The author argues, by contrast, that analyses need to begin with the premise that processes of restructuring occur within a con- text in which there already is an ongoing negotiation over the meanings of the boundaries between public and private and the constitution of gendered subjects within and across these spheres. |
| IssueNo | 4 |
| Pages | 1097-1127 |
| Article | Access to Article |
| Source | Signs |
| VolumeNo | 26 |
| PubDate | 2001 |
| ISBN_ISSN | |
| Browse Path(s) | Anthropology —-Social/Cultural Anthropology ——–Gender |
Social/Cultural Anthropology
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