Abstract
Feminist scholars struggle to articulate gender relations in different contexts. Using the concept of local gender contract - a place specific agreement of gender relations, we explore how women’s networks challenge or shift gender contracts in their communities. Based on two empirical case studies of women´s groups from Eastern Africa and Thai migrants in Sweden, we show gender contracts are challenged through women’s homosocial activities. We highlight tensions between gender contracts and the women’s goals revealing a complicated process of assent and resistance. This study expands gender contract theoretically and provides a way to understand vulnerable women’s activities.
Highlights
Background to Our Case StudiesEthnographic data was gathered through qualitative methods stemming from two empirically different projects
LGC are grounded on the idea of negotiation between genders as a way to move from one local gender contract to another one
By interpreting disparate case studies we have sought to advance the understanding of negotiating and constructing local gender contracts as they are formed in homosocial groups in relation to patriarchal systems
Summary
Ethnographic data was gathered through qualitative methods stemming from two empirically different projects. Despite vast differences in context, both groups of women were vulnerable, oppressed and stigmatized In response to these conditions, women gathered and worked together to gain leverage to renegotiate the imbalanced local gender contracts that shaped their daily lives. Women’s networks play a central role in helping women adapt to life in Sweden They are become forums for challenging and maintaining gender contracts through homosocial practices. Gender contracts have been studied at the individual level for instance research regional variations of gender contract in Sweden (Forsberg, 2010) and local gender contracts in Norway (Grimsrud, 2011; Gerrard, 2011); housing conflicts in Southern Africa (Larsson and Schlyter, 1995); womens self-help housing in Botswana (Kalabamu, 2005); the renegotiation of the LGC in Laos due to the rubber boom (Lindeborg, 2012), gender adaptive capacity to climate change in Kenya (Caretta and Börjeson, 2015) and landscape formation in East Africa (Caretta, 2015b). We use our cases to explore how homosocial practices are an important part of the production of gender contracts, something previously not explored in depth
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