Gender politics

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Gender policy or gender policy is the totality of the structures ( polity ), processes ( politics ) and content ( policy ) for controlling the gender order of a society or organization. Every society and organization is subject to a direct or indirect form of gender policy that is designed and controlled according to overarching social or political goals . This makes the gender identification and allocation of people an important criterion for the distribution of power within a society.

The more multi-layered and differentiated a society, the more multi-layered and differentiated is its gender policy. In modern societies it ranges from the supranational, national, regional and local to the private level and encompasses political, economic, social, cultural and religious functional areas.

In contrast to other policy fields, gender policy in modern state societies, supra-state and other organizations is a cross-cutting policy that affects all policy fields .

etymology

Gender politics is a compound of gender and politics . It was only used occasionally in German from the end of the 19th century. It was initially used in two different ways to mean gender:

  1. Gender policy in terms of families or communities of descent ( genealogical meaning of gender )
  2. Policies related to sexual assignment as male or female.

It was not until the 1980s, a wider use prevailed, in the importance of a socio-political power strategy in terms of the gender order of men and women for making experienced men was immediately clear that the disclosing, explicit term a fundamental political change not only in terms on women and family policy , but also in relation to men. The question was therefore:

"Do you want to do gender politics here, or what is all of this ?!"

Where conflicts and confrontation should be avoided, the explicit naming of gender politics and the description of structures, processes and content have continued to be avoided. The aim of the non-naming or concealment is to avoid the associated disclosure of power issues, to maintain the power taboo and to conceal the socio-politically intended change in the balance of power in the gender order.

Development of political conceptual concept

In the political arena, the “traditional invisibility” of gender has long been an effective “strategy for securing the power of masculinity”. By “implicitly or explicitly rejected” the gender category, gender politics “escaped scrutiny as well as criticism and change”.

Implicit gender politics

Belonging to the male sex has historically been a prerequisite for being able to control social systems of order. This was enshrined in law through gender guardianship . Gender politics has historically been characterized by a clearly polarized hierarchy of the sexes with a superordinate male habitus and a subordinate female habitus. However, these gender politics were not yet explicitly designated as such, but were implicit , namely as part of other socio-political orders - whether economic , social , cultural , religious or otherwise.

With social differentiation, women's movements emerged in western societies in the 18th and 19th centuries , which increasingly questioned male privileges and their veiling and promoted the emancipation of women. At the same time, the extremely different life experiences and basic political views between the women had a braking effect, as they led to dividing lines and sharply diverging interests between women of different social classes and milieus .

In the course of the 20th century, women's suffrage and equal civil rights for women and men were finally introduced in many societies .

Women's policy as the first explicit gender policy

From the middle of the 20th century, politics by and for women gradually expanded into a separate field of politics, known as women's politics . For a long time, however, this policy area was fragmented and weakly institutionalized.

However, through research on women , systematic knowledge of gender as a social category began to emerge.

"It was about breaking a silence: silence about a gender policy that believed it could do without women making equal contributions; Silence about a structural injustice inscribed in the institutions and embodied in the people; Silence about an allocation of places that excluded and included women at the same time and demanded a loyalty from them that has deeply shaped the social characters; Silence about a system based on gender relations, which could have been kept silent for so long because it came along as an apparently natural norm. "

With the emergence of male research and the exploration of non-binary forms of gender, the focus expanded to gender research . This was also reflected in political science research on women.

In the political arena, the restriction to women also increasingly turned out to be a dead end. For as long as only women are politically marked and visible as sex beings, general politics and men as political subjects continue to appear genderless. In addition, women's policy was always either descriptive or normative around women as a gender, which often did not promote gender equality goals, but rather undermined them. As a result, men continued to appear as genderless and thus as autonomous, capable and rational political subjects - in contrast to women who were visibly marked in terms of gender politics.

Explicit gender politics

Since the 1990s, gender knowledge has expanded in women's and men's studies and joint gender research has developed . This change also took place in the political arena. The subject area previously limited to women was expanded to include the male opposite pole and non-binary forms of gender , made explicit and referred to as gender politics or gender politics.

"Today we no longer see femininity and masculinity as 'fate', but as the result of a normative gender policy, as a learning process that generally follows the legal text of bisexuality, but is neither natural nor inevitable."

Main Strategic Approaches: Gender Democracy and Gender Mainstreaming

In order to make gender policy explicit and to shape it, two strategic approaches have so far been developed and implemented:

  • Gender democracy aims to involve all genders in structures, decision-making processes and the design of the content of gender policy. So it is about establishing democratic relationships between the sexes in a society, an organization or a company.
  • The aim of gender mainstreaming is to disclose and take into account the different life situations and interests of people of all genders in all decisions at all levels of society in order to bring about gender equality.

Countercurrent: Persistent opposition to disclosure of gender politics

Disclosure of gender policy continues to be rejected by some social interest groups. These include, for example, stakeholder groups from anti-feminism , masculinism and conservatism or neoconservatism .

Cross-cutting policy

Gender policy is a cross-cutting policy that affects all policy areas - whether economic policy , health policy , transport policy , foreign policy or family policy . In this respect, all other policy fields implicitly or explicitly contribute to gender politics and shape it with their political impact on social structures ( polity ), processes ( politics ) and content ( policy ).

Analytical category

Beyond its importance as a cross-cutting policy, gender policy is used as an analytical instrument. Social orders can be examined on the basis of four aspects of gender-political steering effects:

  • Are there symbolic orders and strategically applicable, culturally available, symbolic representations and mystifications of gender?
  • Are there norms enshrined in religious, scientific, legal, and political doctrines that codify the meanings of gender?
  • Are there institutionalizations and organizational structures of gender relations in the area of kinship and family , in work and professional life , education and the political system?
  • Are there identity politics in the processes of constructing gendered, individual and collective identities ?

Examples

politics

  • After the end of the First and Second World War, working women were using gender politics from the profession pushed back to clear for jobs for the returning from the war men.
  • National Socialist gender policy was part of his more comprehensive racial policy: racism as the policy of the “weeding out” of ethnically and eugenically “inferior” people for the purpose of “promoting”. It was also part of his more comprehensive women's policy of childbirth and maternal cult under the primacy of the state in the field of life. There was a systematic intertwining of the National Socialist gender and race policy.

economy

  • It is often difficult for companies to change the gender-political orientation of male management structures.

religion

  • From 1996 to 2001 women's rights were massively curtailed under the Taliban in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan through gender-political regulations. The aim was to commit women to the beliefs of seclusion (" Parda ") and thus to create a safe environment for them in which their chastity and dignity are inviolable again. As a result, women were forced, among other things, to wear the burqa in public .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Ulrike Liebert: Women's policy / gender policy . In: Everhard Holtmann (Ed.): Political Lexicon . 3. Edition. Munich 2000, p. 192-195 .
  2. ↑ a b Gabriele Abels: Gender Policy . In: Dieter Nohlen, Florian Grotz (Hrsg.): Small Lexicon of Politics . 6th edition. Bonn 2015, p. 219-224 .
  3. ↑ Manfred G. Schmidt: Dictionary of politics . 3. Edition. Stuttgart 2010, p. 300 .
  4. ^ "Gender politics" in books on Google Books (1800-1950). In: Google Books. Retrieved January 4, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Gender Policy . In: Digital dictionary of the German language. Retrieved January 4, 2020 .
  6. ↑ a b Again and again the dear family. In: time. January 23, 1987, accessed January 4, 2020 .
  7. ^ Todd W. Reeser: English-language masculinity research . In: Stefan Horlacher, Bettina Jansen, Wieland Schwanebeck (eds.): Masculinity. An interdisciplinary manual . Stuttgart 2016, p. 28 .
  8. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Wehler: German history of society 1849-1914 . tape 3 . Munich 1995, p. 1094 .
  9. ↑ a b Christina Thürmer-Rohr: End of Kassandra Syndrome? The tragedy of silence and the recapture of language . In: Jacob Guggenheimer (Ed.): "When we were gender ..." - Remembering and forgetting genders: Analyzes of gender and memory in gender studies, queer theories and feminist politics . Bielefeld 2013, p. 171-189 .
  10. ↑ Markus Theunert : Men's politics (s) - a framework concept . In: Markus Theunert (Ed.): Men's politics. What makes boys, fathers and men strong . Wiesbaden 2012, p. 15 .
  11. ↑ Susanne Rouette: social policy as a gender policy: the regulation of women's work after World War II . Frankfurt 1993.
  12. ^ Edelgard Kutzner: The disorder of the sexes: industrial production, group work and gender politics in participatory forms of work . Munich 2003.