Many predict that global warming, rapid urbanization and development, increasing population and wealth, environmental degradation, and neoliberal policy reforms will increase the frequency and intensity of disasters, and the human and economic costs of such events. These risks are born disproportionately by poor people the world over. Attending to the social and political dimensions of disasters—including social inequality, power relations, and possibilities for change—is of crucial importance, then, as we turn the page on one of the deadliest disaster years in recent decades.
Social scientists, policy makers, and others concerned with issues of social justice have much to learn about social inequalities and the potential for change generated by disasters. This session interrogates, in particular, the political and social terrain of gender relations. Disasters unfold in social contexts structured by gender inequality and a great deal of research finds that women are disadvantaged before, during, and after disasters. These inequities could lead to the conclusion that gender inequalities are inevitably re-established and even magnified by disasters. However, there are also reasons to believe that disasters open up possibilities for progressive change.
Disasters dramatically alter the bio-physical environment and, by their very nature, disrupt everyday social interactions; thus, they create opportunities for transformations in political, economic and social life. In particular, the turbulence of post-disaster social life disrupts everyday gender practices which may necessitate new gender strategies. More broadly, those on the margins suffer most deeply from the landscapes of despair borne by disasters, and it may be by virtue of this social dispossession that the impetus for change is forged (a process writ large in recent political uprisings like global Occupy movements and the Arab Spring).
The foregoing suggests that disasters have the potential to disrupt the reproduction of inequalities, including gender, but this line of inquiry is in the early stages of development. In disaster studies it is not yet clear what the catalysts for change are, nor under which theoretical or practical conditions gender shifts, progressive or otherwise, are likely to occur. Even less is known about intersections between gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, social class, and region and the implications for post-disaster change.
This leaves a number of questions unanswered, including, but not limited to:
Can disasters spark shifts in gender relations? What are the catalysts for such shifts? To what extent do new gender practices reinforce and disrupt existing inequities? Since gender intersects with multiple modalities of power, do shifts in one domain ripple into connected domains? Disasters can create occasions for new alliances to form among disenfranchised groups. Do coalitions form around social inequalities in housing and relocation, resource distribution, environmental hazards, or human rights violations? Do these struggles for social justice include, or even necessitate, a redoing or even undoing of gender? Consideration could also be given to the experiences of marginalized men; to wit, how are masculinities shaped in response to injustices occasioned by disasters, including strategic coalitions with others on the fringes of social hierarchies?
