Sustaining Power: Women’s Struggles against Contemporary Backlash in South Asia

• In Event: Women's Movements and Organizations

Abstract

How do women’s rights struggles sustain power in the face of increasing backlash around the world? Autonomous women’s movements have been vital to advancing women’s rights in the past century (Htun and Weldon, 2018), but significant gender inequalities persist. Even more critically, there has been a rise in attacks on women’s rights, a backlash triggered by perceived or actual gains made by women (Faludi, 1991; Mansfield and Shames, 2008; Goetz, 2018). Recent political shifts to the right and economic crisis triggered by austerity policies have created new challenges for women’s rights. The rise of populist leaders like Trump, Bolsonaro, and Modi, and of conservative agendas have revalorized traditional ideals of masculinity and femininity and reinforced gender-biased religious doctrines. At the same time, new modes of extraction by structures of global capitalism have reinforced the instrumentalization and exploitation of women’s paid and unpaid labor (Fraser, 2012; Phillips, 2013). At the societal level, demographic shifts including migration and urbanization have created new patriarchal constraints for women (Chant, 2013). The confluence of these reactionary economic, political, and social forces is creating newer forms of backlash against women’s rights – it has polarised public discourse on gender equality, co-opted women’s empowerment for conservative or exploitative agendas, and permitted threats to and vilification of women’s rights activists and gender-based violence.

However, women have not just been victims; women’s struggles have galvanized to counter this backlash, heralding new forms, spaces, and arenas of contention. This research proposes that investigating when, how, and why women’s power struggles have withstood backlash and succeeded in holding on to and consolidating their gains in power, can yield lessons about what works to defend women’s rights across the world. We draw on original research with 16 women’s rights struggles located in four countries in South Asia – Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan – to critically examine how women collectively retain gains made in economic, political, and social rights by securing the systemic changes necessary to lock them in, so that they are more resistant to current patriarchal backlash and future threats. We define gains to involve a redistribution of power in favor of women (Fraser, 1995; 2012) – through, for example, access to community resources and land; the recognition of intersectional identities; more economic independence and mobility; or voice and representation in politics. The history of the international women’s movement has shown that this redistribution tends to produce recurrent backlash from patriarchal and other affected interest groups, aiming to erode or reverse these initial gains (Walby, 1993; Corredor, 2019). Contemporary backlash has included co-option and appropriation (including recruiting women to attack women’s shared interests); stigmatization and vilification of women’s movement leaders; the subversion of women’s rights discourses and agendas; violence and violent threats; and the use of legal, financial, and administrative procedures to restrict women’s rights organizations and mobilization strategies.

We use multi-method analysis to find our answers. We use Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) as the overarching methodology to systematize experiences across the 16 cases of struggles and to identify factors that are necessary or sufficient to retain power and sustain gains in the face of different types of backlash. Our variables here draw on in-depth case-based, qualitative work over 4 years with 16 struggles, each of which we treat as a configuration of contextual and struggle-specific factors. We identify these factors through gendered political economy analysis, in-depth interviews across different actors associated with the struggles, and some degree of case-based process tracing. This mix of methods allows us to understand what works to defend women’s rights in South Asia, with important lessons for similar struggles across the world.

Authors

• Shandana Khan Mohmand, Institute of Development Studies

• Deepta Chopra, Institute of Development Studies

• Sohela Nazneen, University of Sussex

• Priya Raghavan