Gender, Power, and Non-Governance

Is Female to Male as NGO Is to State?

Andria D. Timmer, Elizabeth Wirtz, Andria D. Timmer, Elizabeth Wirtz

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781800734609
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781800734616
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Social Sciences

Using Sherry Ortner's analogy of Female/Nature, Male/Culture, this volume interrogates the gendered aspects of governance by exploring the NGO/State relationship. By examining how NGOs/States perform gendered roles and actions and the gendered divisions of labor involved in different types of institutional engagement, this volume attends to the ways in which gender and governance constitute flexible, relational, and contingent systems of power. The chapters in this volume present diverse analyses of the ways in which projects of governance both reproduce and challenge binaries.

PART I

Patterns of Reproduction

NGO and State Relations through a Gendered Lens

The chapters in this section explore how patterns of behaviors in State and nongovernmental relationships can be understood in a gendered framework. The male/female dichotomy helps to provide insight into power relations. Generally nongovernmental activities are more likely to be associated with nurturing activities, gendered female due to their association with nature, a feminine work force and compensation commiserate with a feminine work force, and a relative subservient position to the State. The dichotomy, however, is fluid and flexible. That is, NGOs can take on activities, roles, and powers often relegated to the State and vice versa. They can act in ways that are active and advocacy promoting. In the introduction, the authors argue that this blurring of boundaries or “flipping of the script” does not ultimately challenge the dichotomy nor upset the power hierarchy. However, nongovernmental organizations are continually vying for control and access to power. That is, they do not passively sit in a subservient role but seek to upset the balance and increase their visibility, access to resources, and ability to effect change. The chapters in this section each explore how NGOs challenge the male/female dichotomy.

Alexandra Crampton examines elder care in the United States and Ghana in the first chapter of this section, “NGOs and States of Aging: NGOs as Male/Culture Advocates and as Female/Nature Caregivers.” Through a comparison of these two case examples, it is possible to see the flexibility of the analogy that frames this volume. Elder care is associated with nurturance, nongovernmental activity, and a female work force. As such, the work is often devalued in terms of both salary and prestige. Thus, in many ways, Crampton’s analysis maps easily onto the male/female dichotomy. This binary, however, is complicated when the nature/culture element is added back in. Crampton argues that in Ghana the presumed need for elder care is dictated by Western founded and funded INGOs (International NGOs). These large transnational organizations act in top down, controlling ways that seek to manage what they view as an uncontrolled situation. Therefore, in this instance, NGOs align with culture (controlling) and act in a more masculine way. The push to provide elder care came from NGOs acting in ways to establish power and dominance. Crampton’s analysis focuses on how NGOs may have more power in so-called weak states, but also shows that the dichotomy does not render nongovernmental organizations powerless. This point is further explored in the second contribution to this section.

In “Surviving the State: Strategic Essentialisms and the Complexities of Indigeneity among the Ainu of Northern Japan,” Christopher Loy explores the ambiguity between State and non-State through his analysis of the Ainu Association of Hokkaido. The Ainu Association is both and neither as it is State-sponsored and often critiqued for acting in State-like ways, but also as an NGO is able to use the ambiguity afforded to it by this designator. Loy traces the history of the Ainu Association and examines how their goals and strategies have changed over time, but “by strategically adopting essentialist positions regarding culture, language, and race,” the Ainu have been able to negotiate their relationship with the State and assert their identity as an indigenous population, unique from ethnic Japanese. As such, Loy’s analysis focuses more on the NGO/State, nature/culture aspects of the dichotomy and in so doing provides evidence for the flexibility and ambiguity of the NGO form.

In the final chapter of this section, “From ‘Warm and Fuzzy’ to ‘Business Oriented’ Practices: The Politics of Exclusion and Masculinization of Alternative Justice in the United States,” Amanda J. Reinke explains the ambiguity of State/NGO relationships with an analysis of alternative justice NGOs. These NGOs fill in the vacuum left by the State as it withdrew from the provision of social aid and work to subvert State violence. They have shifted from more feminine and nurturing practices (“warm and fuzzy”) to masculine “business oriented” ones and in so doing can serve to exclude the very populations they seek to assist. The Black recipients of their programming face exclusion, and the work takes on the veneer of Whiteness. Reinke’s analysis further complicates the ambiguity of the dichotomy. The State prioritizes a masculine, punitive approach to justice and one that values Whiteness, aligned with order, homogenization, and control. In their support of alternative justice NGOs, the State recognizes the need for more feminized and less punitive forms of conflict resolution, but these are wholly undervalued.

Each of these chapters complicate and challenge the male/female dichotomy as it relates to the relationship between NGOs and the State. In each case, the NGO takes on roles, responsibilities, and identities that are more masculine. However, in none of the cases do NGOs subvert the power of the State. In fact, all these examples show how the NGO normalizes the power hierarchy. Elder care NGOs in Ghana revert to their more subservient position once the State had put into place policies for aging populations. The Ainu could act in State-like ways, but need the flexible fluidity of nongovernance to make their claims to identity. And, despite a movement away from “warm and fuzzy” alternative and restorative justice, NGOs exist primarily because they can provide alternatives to the punitive models of justice adhered to by the State. In all cases, the recipient of NGO work is under- or devalued in the eyes of the State, and, at least in the case of elder care and alternative justice, the work is literally feminized in that the work force is female, is underpaid, and receives low prestige. The next section of this volume will take up the feminine nature of NGO work by looking at the manner in which the work force, the nature of work, and, often, the care recipients are gendered female.

CHAPTER 1

NGOs and States of Aging

NGOS as Male/Culture Advocates and as Female/Nature Caregivers

Alexandra Crampton

Once considered a social problem only for “strong” and “wealthy” states, population aging has gone international as a global problem confronted through UN and INGO (international NGO) efforts. It is defined through demographic statistics broken down by age and gender into population pyramids (Crampton 2009). The aging problem is located through dependency ratios, which measure the number of those “aging” (or elder) relative to those of working age, which is commonly defined as ages sixteen–sixty-four. Large or rising dependency ratios signal the need for public responsibility and intervention. In this way, older adults join women and children as vulnerable populations of global and national concern. As in other NGO practices studied in this volume, those organizations that provide “age” or “elder” care on behalf of the State tend to conform to Sherry Ortner’s typology that female is to male as nature is to culture. That is, this work is constructed as necessary to support bodily states that cannot be otherwise controlled or cured. It is feminized both because of its association with nature and nurture and also because paid staff, volunteers, and care recipients tend to be women. UN conferences have constructed the burden of being female and older as a “double jeopardy” requiring State intervention (UN 1983). Given that in institutions of elder care the NGO staff and the care recipients are typically gendered female, this work is often deemed less than. This is evident in the low compensation through salary and social prestige provided for NGO staff and paid caregivers.

Comparison of elder care in two locations—the United States and Ghana—illustrates the flexibility of the male/female–State/NGO dichotomy. Although global discourse on population aging and intervention naturalizes an NGO role of support in relation to the State, social histories suggest a different trajectory. In the United States and Ghana, individual and NGO activism first engendered the State to assume responsibility for age (or elder) care before this became formalized through national legislation. In Ghana, NGO players have also included INGOs, particularly the American Association for Retired Persons (AARP) from the United States and HelpAge International (HAI) from the UK. Using Sherry Ortner’s distinction of female/nature to male/culture, this NGO–State interaction provides examples of how the NGO can assume a male/culture role in relation to the State. In this dynamic, the NGO is the active agent, pressuring the State to realize public responsibility. Another gendered dimension is how the work of lobbying (or agitating) the State has been less feminized in terms of status and gender identities of leadership. Thus, in two national examples of aging as a problem to solve through State and NGO intervention, I argue that before an NGO relationship of female/nature/care has evolved, the State was prompted to “care” through NGO pressure better described as male/culture/advocate (or lobbyist). If this pattern can be found in other examples, then the female/nature to male/culture binary might serve to help analyze how NGO/State relationships vary depending on whether NGOs and INGOs are working to create (or transform) State-level change or working to serve established State interests.

My work on NGOs and elder advocacy contributes to anthropological work challenging the tendency in gerontology to naturalize its presumptions (see Cohen 1994). Margaret Lock, for example, questioned the presumably clear boundary of nature/culture of aging in her work on menopause. In cross-cultural study of menopause in Japan and the United States, she finds that menopause is a culturally and biologically different experience for women in each country (Lock 1994). Turning to a presumption that the nature/culture relationship is one of subordination, Sarah Lamb (2000) has studied how age-related loss is welcomed in India as a means toward greater spiritual enlightenment, and therefore as a source of growth rather than decline. Lawrence Cohen entitled his book No Aging in India (1998) from a quote by an interlocutor who defined aging as gerontological expertise. I found a similar sentiment in Ghana as I observed elder advocacy professionals respond to the complaint that aging was, “A White man’s problem.” In the United States, there is a related kind of gerontological rejection. Sharon Kaufman found that older adults tended to define themselves as “ageless” (Kaufman 1994). I interviewed a gerontological social worker who complained that her first problem was often how to get older adults to accept a client role in the first place. Examining the paradox of “no aging” among older adults targeted for NGO and state intervention reveals an ongoing negotiation that is often hidden from policy and professional presentations of self-evident problems and solutions.

Despite contradictions between lived experience of aging and population aging discourse, population aging has not only spread across national policy concerns of the welfare state but has also been constructed as a shared, international problem of “global aging.” That is, population aging problems have been aggregated through international networks into a global project of population management. This has been initiated and sustained primarily through UN conferences and documents. Despite pandemics such as HIV/AIDS, an aging and even “graying” world population is constructed through demographic statistics. As in national aging discourse, the prescribed role of scholars within global aging is to evaluate the problems raised by population aging and to provide suggestions on how to solve them, rather than to question whether there is a naturally occurring problem in the first place. My role as an ethnographer has been to denaturalize this prescribed role by including it as part of field research inquiry.

One part of this denaturalization has been to follow the construction of aging as a problem by elder advocates in the United States and Ghana. In tracing the histories of this construction in the United States and Ghana, I find that the female/nature to male/culture typology can be useful. I argue that the NGO has been male to the State as female when examining how gerontological representations have emerged in these two countries. Male is used in the sense of conflation with a role of culture as that “which bends nature to its will” (Ortner 1974), such as the essentialized nature of the physical body or the nature of the social body (as in a population under care and control of the State). That is, NGOs have played an important role in identifying aging as a social problem and tasking the State with providing solutions. However, a subordinate and feminized NGO role has later emerged in the wake of advocacy success. This role follows from the State assuming responsibility for aging as a national problem to solve through policy and other welfare support. Responding to other discussions of privatization in this volume, age care responsibility in the United States has been followed by contracting out to feminized NGOs and providing tax credits to (typically female) family caregivers. In Ghana, State responsibility for aging remains an unfunded mandate. The female/nature to male/culture binaries, then, are useful not as permanent labels on NGO/State relationships but in understanding NGO/State coevolution within political–economic contexts that respond to and shape these relationships.

In the next section, I provide background to the study from which my data were collected. I then, using a focus on the United States and Ghana, describe how NGO work helped create aging as a social problem for the State to solve as individual countries and in global cooperation. Overall, I argue that examination of NGO/State relationships in terms of female/nature to male/culture shows how NGOs in each country have actively worked to create the state policy context in which feminized NGOs are then identified to serve the State. To help distinguish how male and female can mark changes in NGO-State relationships, I add the tag of care/advocacy to the binary of female/nature to male/culture. This means that the NGO can be male/advocate or female/caregiver in relation to the State within culturally mediated responses to aging as inevitable and yet open to cure.

The Study

The data for this analysis are taken from my research in which I seek to denaturalize gerontological intervention work by following the logic of global and national aging discourse and its practices. That is, if problems of aging can be reduced by demographic statistics to a natural and self-evident problem, then intervention benefits ought to be observable at the level of State and NGO intervention practices in any country that has been identified as “aging.” Over sixteen months during 2004–5, I followed the logic, processes, and outcomes of an elder mediation intervention project in Ghana and in the United States. The two countries were chosen as research sites given a binary distinction found in global aging discourse based on modernization theory that divides countries into those that are “developing” (and therefore have yet to fully confront population aging) and those that are “modernized” (and therefore include aging as part of welfare state policies and services). My study was conducted in one country found in each half of this binary. That is, Ghana was chosen due to its global role as a gerontology leader among “developing” countries, especially due to the career and advocacy work of Nana Apt. The United States was chosen as a leader among “modernized” countries, exporting its national policy through convening global conferences on aging.

The main research site within each country was an NGO with national and international influence within gerontology. Both NGO elder mediation projects used population aging discourse to rationalize intervention, and both used the same intervention of mediation as a form of interpersonal conflict resolution. If aging is a problem and “elder mediation”¹ as intervention solution were global in theory, then intervention success should have been possible to evaluate and compare in these contexts.

I followed each project as a participant observer, assisting in training and mediation practice during preliminary fieldwork, and then observing and recording mediation cases and program development during sixteen months of data collection. My goal was not to prove whether mediation would work as intended as much as to understand how the underlying intervention rationale had emerged, how it was sustained, and with what effects. In other words, I was trying to understand intervention as “on the make” culturally, shaped by and actively shaping discourse and social practice. As Annelise Riles (2001) found in her study of a women’s NGO in Fiji, this required finding an “inside-out” methodology—one that would help me to get outside of the constructed logics to better understand them as cultural practice.

There were two inside-out problems. One was how to get outside of a discourse in which aging is a self-evident population-level problem requiring State intervention. I asked, How is global aging as a problem also a cultural project, and whose project is this? Unpacking the social history of aging as a social problem in the United States was a largely historical project—reading social histories of critical gerontologists showing how the problem of old age was due to active effort and unintended consequences of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century professionals, progressives, and policymakers. In Ghana, this social history has been heavily influenced by larger international contexts of UN conferences and NGO networks. The cultural project question then expands to NGO advocacy as a global occurrence. Whether this work should expand into Ghana was openly contested during my field research in Ghana (2004–5). The main contention laid in the idea that aging is a “White man’s problem” and therefore a cultural import if not imposition.

The second inside-out problem was how to get outside of the logics of elder mediation as an intervention to fix problems associated with aging. My strategy for addressing the second inside-out problem was to compare the global aging construct within and outside of elder advocacy and policymaking environments. Questions included the following: Is aging experienced as a natural, embodied problem in Ghana and in the United States? If so, were NGOs or the State expected to intervene? What other experiences and interpretations were left out of narratives used by NGOs and State actors to rationalize and legitimize their work? Data were collected explicitly through semi-structured interviews, media clippings, and informal conversation both with informants who worked for NGOs (as paid staff or volunteers) and those who lived outside of them. The goal was to reality test the assertions of elder advocates about the social reality and culturally informed interpretations of aging in each country.

In the study field sites, a much longer and more entrenched (institutionalized) history is found in the United States while a more recent and contested history is emerging within Ghana. The next section reviews historical and contemporary dynamics of aging, NGOs, and the State in each country. Ironically, current trends in the United States look to shrink State intervention and devolve responsibility to NGOs and families while NGOs in Ghana push for greater State responsibility given the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction. Is Female to Male as NGO Is to State?
• Part I. Patterns of Reproduction: NGO and State Relations through a Gendered Lens
• Part II. Care Work as Feminized Work
• Part III. Beyond the Binary: Intersectionality and Queer Spaces in NGOs
• Conclusion. Queering the NGO/State Binary: On Governing Stateless Peoples
• Index