Gender, Floods and Mobile Subjects: A Postdisaster View

Citation:

Resurrección, Bernadette P., and Edsel E. Sajor. 2015. “Gender, Floods and Mobile Subjects: A Postdisaster View.” In Gendered Entanglements: Revisiting Gender in Rapidly Changing Asia, edited by Ragnhild Lund, Philippe Doneys, and Bernadette P. Resurrección, 207-34. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies.

Authors: Bernadette P. Resurrección, Edsel E. Sajor

Annotation:

Summary:
“This chapter examines how people in a flood-prone coastal area of the Philippines employ mobility as a means to assuage livelihood insecurity in the face of frequent disasters in unequal gendered and social ways. In particular, this chapter is an attempt to understand: (i) how people make sense of their disaster experiences, (ii) the subjectivities that shape and eventually evolve out of these experiences of prolonged insecurity and increasing mobility or immobility, and (iii) institutional efforts to build disaster resilience and secure livelihoods, and their social effects. In short, this chapter examines the role of gendered mobility in people’s post-disaster efforts at resilience-building through livelihood engagements, and which is envisaged to enable a rethinking of gender in the disaster literature that has focused almost entirely on the impacts of disasters on women and men, citing women as a heavily-impacted, homogenous group. Secondly, the fact that women and men move or remain in-place does not influence views about resilience and disaster response, and if it does, it almost always assumes that men are more mobile than women, and thus reap more advantages. We argue that as people move or remain in place, they reproduce and materialize meanings about their gendered and social selves, and thereby influence how they face and deal with disaster risks and livelihood challenges. This chapter will also employ a feminist political ecology perspective that recognizes rural populations as being geographically mobile, where women and men reconfigure livelihoods, introducing new and possibly unequal patterns of access and control, and new forms of environmental governance at different scales (Elmhirst 2011; Watts 2000)” (Resurrección and Sajor 2015, 207-8).

Topics: Environment, Environmental Disasters, Feminisms, Feminist Political Ecology, Gender, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, Livelihoods, Security Regions: Asia, Southeast Asia Countries: Philippines

Year: 2015

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