Embodied intersections: Gender, water and sanitation in Cameroon

Abstract

abstractA cornerstone of feminist thinking, intersectionality offers a critical analytical tool for exploring how gender intersects with other social structures of power. However, this leaves intersectionality grounded firmly in social analysis. Becoming increasingly salient are the complex political and material relations between social power, infrastructure and water (Linton and Budds, 2014). Intersectionality – centring the entanglement of difference – offers an opportunity to explore the interplay between social relations and difference in the physical world (Thompson, 2016). Drawing on participatory visual research with women and men across four communities in Cameroon, we elaborate how gendered social relations intersect with the material dimensions of water and sanitation. Given gendered and age-based divisions of labour, women and girls play a primary role in household water management. This article centres on women’s concerns about everyday water access, use and control to elaborate how intersectional social dynamics in relation to water also intersect with water in the physical world. Expanding intersectional thinking beyond the social realm, we also demonstrate how gendered intersections shape and are shaped by the material and physical dimensions of water. This suggests that theorising about social difference alone risks missing how environmental factors influence different groups’ experiences of power, privilege and oppression.