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Abstract:
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In August 2008, a woman living in rural southern Malawi provided us with her own definition of gender. Gender means there is no difference between women’s work and men’s work. Even though gender [in English] has come [yabwera] I still feel like there are other activities that women cannot do. Her use of the English word for gender (amid the other words in Chichewa) and her suggestion that gender “has come” to Malawi signal that she, and many other rural Malawians, view gender as new and brought into Malawi from outside. To some degree, this characterization is not completely inaccurate. After all, it wasn’t until the 1990s era of democratization and the accompanying influx of NGOs that concepts such as gender, human rights, empowerment, and democracy became prominent topics of study and intervention in Malawi. The importation of the concept of gender, entangled as it was and is in projects of liberation, empowerment, feminism, and human rights, has thus taken on a technical hue in Malawi, where the main thrust of much of the research and intervention around the topic has been to address the special vulnerability of women to social problems like AIDS or poverty and to alter traditional practices that comprise women’s liberation, autonomy, or equality. Among other things, this has facilitated a chasm between gender theory and “the gender issue.” While current gender theorists in the ivory towers of developed world universities tends to concern themselves with issues of gender performance, the links between gender and sexuality, queering feminism, or post-gender perspectives, activists and those charged with incorporating gender into developing nation policies concern themselves with the “gender issue;” how to increase equality for women in societies deemed patriarchal and traditional, how to bring attention to violations of women’s rights, or how to erode cultural norms of domestic violence, for example. Our dual challenge as feminists and researchers, then, is to find a way to imbue the analytic category of gender with power to bridge the gap between theory and the real world, to link gender as analytic category with gender as lived experience. Anthropologist Henrietta Moore suggests that we should ask what the fragmentation, ambiguity, and multiplicity [of gendered identities and the term gender itself] are doing for us as social scientists and for people in their lives. This paper draws attention to and makes gestures toward closing the gap between “our” world of theory and “their” world of practice. We aim to illustrate how the tenor and character of the initial importation of the concept of gender into the Malawian context continues to impact, construct, and pose challenges to the study of gender in Malawi. Ultimately, we argue that complex and ethnographically grounded approaches to studying gender in Malawi may serve as a corrective to a long legacy of conceptual imperialism that has ramifications for both the researched and researchers in Malawi. |