ABSTRACT

Mentioning the words ‘politics’ and ‘gender’ in one phrase is a bit like calling water wet. After all, gender itself is already a deeply political term, embedded in and raising fundamental questions of diversity and sameness, and of equity and justice. Gender is political because it is about difference; and difference lies at the heart of politics. Gender difference is a major structuring factor of social life, for instance providing the basis for the fundamental division between paid ‘productive’ labour and unpaid ‘reproductive’ and domestic labour, assigning women primary responsibility for the latter. Gender also is an important principle of cultural-valuational differentiation, with the authoritative construction of norms that privilege traits associated with masculinity, and the simultaneous pervasive devaluation and disparagement of things coded as ‘feminine’ (Fraser 1997, 20). In this chapter, I elaborate and discuss how gender ‘works’ to mediate and modify water politics. I hope to show that gender is not only a major although often implicit criterion for allocating rights and powers in water (the politics of gender in water), but also shapes and is used to either legitimize or de-legitimize water knowledge and authority by associating those with masculinity or femininity, respectively (the gender of water politics). My main aim with the chapter is to demonstrate that much in water poli-

tics is indeed about, or mediated through, gender. This is important, because gender seldom explicitly figures in water policy documents other than in a separate chapter or section that remains thematically separate from the main text. Nor is gender normally invoked in analyses of water management and distribution. Indeed, gender tends to disappear in policies and analyses through intertwined mechanisms of normalization, naturalization and neglect and through the ways in which water problems and solutions tend to be conceptually and discursively framed (see Zwarteveen 2010). Water cultures, professional identities, discourses and knowledge all work together to either marginalize or depoliticize the inherently political questions of distribution and recognition that gender entails. Identifying, uncovering and challenging the mechanisms and processes through which this occurs forms an important part of feminist gender politics in water. It involves both a rethinking of what is normal and just, as well as a reframing of what water politics is about (see Zwarteveen 2010).