Gender Equality Machineries Across the Global South: Critical Actors in Crisis Times

Abstract

In these challenging times for gender justice, democracy, and peace, Gender Equality Machineries (GEMs) - the state-based structures that promote the rights, status, and condition of women in their full complexity and seek to strike down gender-based inequities - play an important role in preventing the reversal of women’s rights and gender justice. This panel endeavors to “go global” with the scholarship on Gender Equality Machineries (GEMs) and state feminism, which has primarily only focused on the Global North by bringing together research on China, Rwanda, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. This collection of papers analyzes the complex dynamics of GEMs and their capacity to support the pursuit of gender equality in contexts where political institutions, bureaucracies, and civil society are threatened by authoritarianism, conflict, and democratic decline. As “critical actors” in promoting gender equality policy, GEMs have the potential to compel governments to keep gender equality a top priority, to deepen democracy and democratic practices, and are a major vector for gender mainstreaming. GEMs also partner with women’s civil society organizations to support marginalized groups and communities to better achieve their complex policy goals through “state feminism.” However, research on GEMs and state feminism has predominantly focused on Global North countries. While GEMs exist and operate in all of the world’s regions, questions remain about how these institutions operate in political contexts where democracy is fragile or autocracy remains in place, whether and how they create opportunities for gender justice in authoritarian contexts, or how these state-based institutions interact with autonomous women’s movements in a diverse range of political, cultural and socio economic context found in the countries of the Global South, to name a few.

Title	Details
Masculine Women or Feminine Men?: Evaluating Citizens’ Responses to Leader Gender and Style in China	View Paper Details
Gender Machinery and the Politics of Inclusion in Neoliberal Authoritarian Rwanda	View Paper Details
Maneuvering Weak Institutions: Women’s Machineries in Iran	View Paper Details
Personal Status Law Reform in Saudi Arabia: Democratic Opening or Authoritarian Calibration	View Paper Details
‘Women-friendly’ Heads of Government: An Advantage or a Curse for Gender Equality Machineries and Organized Women? Evidence from Brazil	View Paper Details