ABSTRACT
Famine analysis and famine policy have usually been conducted without considering how famine could affect gender relations. I define gender relations to be the social constructs of how men and women behave in relation to, and in transaction with, each other, and also signifiers of power relations between men and women (Young et al. 1981; Gallin and Ferguson, 1991: 4-7; Kabeer, 1994: 53-67). There has been some interest in gender within the literature on household food security, coping mechanisms and food production (for example, Corbett, 1988; Lieten et aZ., 1989; Mackintosh, 1989; Whitehead, 1990; Davies, 1993; see also Koch Laier et al. 1996) ; however, these studies do not address the central argument of this chap ter: that recurrent famine events introduce long term irreversible changes in relations between men and women.
