A feminist studies approach to eco-food relations

Jane DixonSenior Fellow, ANU

&Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor

Centre for Food Policy

May 4, 2016

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3 Parts

A summary of Walls et al (2015): argues that looming environmental resource constraints will further disadvantage women within the food system

A case example of a gender based livelihood & nutrition intervention targeting environmental resource constraints

Advancing feminist approaches to pursue food justice

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Bricolage

The Social Determinants of Health: chance or choice?

Intersection between household food insecurity and livelihoods

Feminist critiques of nutrition studies > justice studies

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Gendered producer-consumer relations

Part A: addresses the health and well-being consequences of women’s positioning in eco-social structures

Part B: describes a local change strategy for women as producer-consumers

Part C: describes a global change strategy based on transforming the socio-cultural framings of food systems that distort women’s (and men’s) relationships to food, to society and to nature

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IMPLICATIONS OF STRUCTURE VERSUS AGENCY FOR ADDRESSING HEALTH AND WELL BEING IN OUR ECOLOGICALLY CONSTRAINED WORLD

Part A

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The determinants of health

Two lines of argument:

Neo-liberalism’s emphasis on the ‘free’ individual putting in effort & making rational behavioural and utility maximising choices: self-reliance, autonomy and personal responsibility

Social democratic emphasis on choices being circumscribed by life’s circumstances, or chance, including social class, gender, race, place, era (including presence of particular policies, institutions and cultural belief systems): small cog in large system, social hierarchies and social/shared responsibility

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Socioeconomic position and life chance and choices

Based on occupation, education, gender, caste, age: life chances or socio-economic positioning (SEP)

The distribution of life chances across society creates hierarchies of power and hence differential health and well-being outcomes

Not simply about absolutes but about relativities (gradients) Nations with higher socio-economic inequalities have less social

mobility & even more unfair life chances

With global flows of people, resources etc can alter national hierarchies - the export & import of life choices and chances

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Sociocultural position and life chance and choices

Refers to prevailing norms, rules and sanctions, institutional arrangements (SCP)

SCP interacts with SEP: Gender relations and ‘the lot of women’ explained by earning capacity and property ownership... (SEP) & representation in decision-making and vulnerability to gender based violence... (SCP)

Can typify societies in terms of sociocultural conditions & hence SCP risk: loose- tight; individual liberty-social responsibility; traditional-secular; positive-negative freedoms

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Environmental resource protections, conflicts & national values

Strong self-expression values linked to higher priority over environmental protection (World Values Survey 2012), which in turn is linked to more secular societies

“tightness” of societal norms proportional to per capita level of economic resources available : when resources decline tightness follows and freedoms decline (Gelfand et al 2011)

Cultures of tightness and looseness change as environmental conditions change: eg movement of peoples previously welcomed in ‘loose’ societies

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The intergenerational transmission of chance and choices

Individual SEP and SCP is an outcome of:Genetic material and fetal environmentSocio-economic position shaped by parents’ SEPSocio-cultural conditions (or environment) shape acceptable ways of behaviour and is shaped by prevailing societal regulations/norms

= inherited capacities/stocks of resources/ways of thinking with which to act

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Social science framing: structure vs agency

Behavioural choices are largely the outcome of structural forces (life chances), which can be modified through concerted and collective individual agency

Agency is reflected in conflicts over the accumulation and distribution of structural resources: financial wealth and public goods, including natural /bio-spherical resources, access to decision-making, social infrastructures and institutions

Walls et al argument: these conflicts will increase through resource depletion in a context of global population growth, and already resource poor groups will suffer most = inequities will grow

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2 vignettes: socio-cultural specificity & national relativities

And the embodied nature of structure and agency, under different (SEP and SCP) resource-rich or constrained conditions: PeterSeetha

The dominance of life chances over choice: the social democratic version of the determinants of health

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“Peak health?”

Can life expectancy continue to rise under conditions of bio-spheric stress and collapse? (Butler et al 2012)

Climate change: high food prices (relative); pressure on fossil fuel sources and prices; availability of fertile agricultural landsRules ‘tighten’ for whole societies, but inequitable outcomesThe agentic desire to leave these conditions= transnational movement of peoples: highest in historyUnequal and unfair gendered nature of impacts

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Women’s health and well-being in a resource constrained world

Nascent gains to women’s life expectancy through education, access to health care, better nutrition and equal opportunity legislation are rendered vulnerable by reduced access to: fresh water, fuel sources and fresh food

Competition over access to livelihoods and income generation becomes more precarious

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Catalysing change

In public health: elite-led, often to protect their interests in face of working class revolt; involves government or structures of power ruling/regulating/providing

“Those with the greatest ability to exercise agency – advantaged groups...- have the greatest ability to catalyze change but the least to gain from it” (Walls et al. 2015: 61)

Advantaged groups have to: vote to restrain their own wealth accumulation; curb their resource consumption; vote for fair distributions of resources and hence privilege (SEP and SCP); enact positive freedoms in social policy as opposed to enacting negative freedoms

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A GENDER BASED LIVELIHOOD & NUTRITION INTERVENTION TARGETING ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCE CONSTRAINTS

Part B

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Nutrition and bio-sensitive interventions: a gender approach

WorldFish rationaleRural women have a major role in sustainable fisheries and aquaculture BUT have: unequal access to resources and often suffer greater poverty and hunger as a resultClosing the gender gap in access to resources= improve productivity, incomes and nutritionNeed to better understand the social norms, or SCC, that constrain poor men’s and women’s opportunitiesOffering new opportunities can also be used to mitigate the effects of climate change...

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Climate smart aquaculture

“Sustainably increase productivity and resilience (adaptation); reduce or remove GHG (mitigation); and enhance achievement of national food security and development goals” (Morgan et al. 2015)

2 interventions in south west Bangladesh to address gender inequality constraints on women farmers: to obtain training and/or assets

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Innovation dissemination and uptake

Reflected a combination of ‘inherited’ and contemporary SEP and SCP conditions: Women’s lower SEP so unable to access canals or investments for inputs; less prior knowledge or experienceWomen’s accepted gender roles meant they did not control decision-making - -exception where a community had higher education and Hindu religion prevailed; but instances where they did all the work unassisted

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Success: a combination of specific factors

Type of innovation: physical capacity; complexity; shared or sole labour process

Extra-village relations (role of project initiators and facilitators): self-sufficiency or dependency

Intra-household relations: gendered roles re decision making, labour requirements and time

Inter-household relations: sole household or communal activities

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Target gender specific limitations in capacity

Provide information and training to whole households re. expectations

Provide gender specific financial support; negotiation skills

Monitor differential changes in labour patterns and time Need technologies that are appropriate in size,

handling, cost

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APPROACHES TO ADVANCE FOOD JUSTICE BASED ON CRITICAL NUTRITION STUDIES AND FEMINIST JUSTICE STUDIES

Part C

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Critical nutrition studies

Gastronomica 2014, special issue on CNS edited by Julie Guthman …A debate with hegemonic nutrition: a singular view on the [ideal] food-body relationship; narrow metrics; decontextualized knowledgeExamines:

The science-policy-advice interface and the moral personAlternative bases for knowing nutritionNutrition and governmentalityFood production practices and effects on bodiesAlternative ways of knowing food

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A critical nutrition perspective – Guthman 2011

The problem with public health and agri-food studies: critiques of the industrial food system which end up at obesity/start with obesity (which most agree is an artefact of its measurement); Obesity discourses tend to pathologise fat bodies, especially women’s bodies

These critiques promote access to ‘alternative’ food systems and alternative diets = social exclusionary and reproduce social hierarchies

This problem-solution “exalts certain ways of living” (p.5) Health is a personal responsibility- a choice - promoted by an ideology

of ‘healthism’: a ‘super value’ that trumps other social concerns (p. 52)

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Capitalism and bio-power

Neo-liberalism ultimately responsible for obesity: low cost consumption, exacerbating inequalities in wealth, and producer of food qualities and environmental features associated with obesogenesis (Guthman, 2011:172)

Bodies are literally absorbing the conditions and externalities of production and consumption (Guthman, 2011:182)… The limits of dietary limits based on individual choice reflect the limits of capitalism

… meaningful solutions entail serious questioning of the economic system that subordinates nutritional quality and human health to the maximisation of investor returns (Winson, 2013: 251)

Healthism and nutritionism have sidelined pleasure in food

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Guthman’s position

The pol ecology position of obesity draws on environmental health and justice, and the interaction between bodies and their widely divergent environments: constrained choice [in access to food, where to live etc] is an outcome of environmental injustice

Pay less attention to what is on the table (p. 194): attend to entitlement support; commodity subsidy programs; encourage fruit and vegetable production; placement of obesogenic foods in schools

Look beyond the food system: attend to the structural inequality produced in labour markets, trade etc policies

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Feminist justice studies

Erin Gilson in Just Food, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 8(2), 2015

Developments in food and agriculture amount to a range of injustices in the way they amount to the maldistribution of the burdens and benefits associated with food …the deep roots of contemporary food injustice lie in socioculturally dominant ways of thinking about and dealing with vulnerability, dependency, and relationalityHence need to deal with their antinomies: reductionism, detachment and privatization (Gilson 2015)

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Destructive patterns of thinking and acting

Reductionism: efficiency = narrowing of value(s) to fiscal matters, productivism (Lang and Rayner 2012), externalises costs... Denies interconnectivity: nature-society; relationality and values of care ...

Detachment: ‘isolating one’s sphere of action from other contexts’ (p. 17): not innocent, but cultivated, locus of responsibility lies elsewhere BUT

Privatization: individuals accept they are responsible and do not demand public attention/action

Privatization operates through detachment, which is a form of reductionism (p. 20)

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Feminist concepts for food ethics

Intersubjective vulnerability: openness to our own and others needs and frailties: the basis for connection, affection and ethical responsiveness

Dependency: acknowledge the basis of all that we eat: the soil and water, the animals, labour in production, processing and selling, the waste, the technology and the past

Relationality: return to the social gradient and the unequal and unjust distribution of resources – acknowledge that what and how we produce and consume has impacts across the social and bio-spheric systems

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Gilson’s advice

Think and act systems of relationality

Food justice follows when relationality changes: can we eat and live well together? (Gilson 2015)

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Caldwell’s critical nutrition advice

Ask questions rather than set up questions having determined the line of argument…defamiliarity

Adopt an ethical commitment to …extend intellectual and moral kindness and tolerance…adopt the stance of the ethnographer

Continue to ask “so what” questions to reveal how dietary concerns are embedded within poverty, class, gender.. pleasure…, fear

Engage a “hermeneutics of suspicion” – scepticism alongside intellectual generosity (2014, p. 69)

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Pulling together the threads

Part A: addressed the health and well-being consequences of women’s positioning in eco-social structures

Part B: described a local change strategy for women as producer-consumers

Part C: described a global change strategy based on transforming the socio-cultural framings of food systems that distort women’s (and men’s) relationships to food, to society and to nature

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Key references

Banwell, C., Broom, D., Davies, A. and Dixon, J. (2012) The Weight of Modernity. An intergenerational study of the rise of obesity, Springer Publishing, Dordrecht.Caldwell, M. (2014) Epilogue: Anthropological reflections on critical nutrition, Gastronomica, vol 14(1), pp. 67-69Dixon, J. (2009) From the imperial to the empty calorie: how nutrition relations underpin food regime transitions, Agriculture and Human Values, vol 26 (4), pp.321-331Dixon, J. and Broom, D. (eds) (2007) The Seven Deadly Sins of Obesity: How the modern world is making us fat, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney. Gilson, E. (2015) Vulnerability, relationality, and dependency: feminist conceptual resources for food justice, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 8(2), pp. 10-46.Guthman, J. (2014) Introducing critical nutrition, Gastronomica 14(3), pp. 1-4 Guthman, J. (2011) Weighing In. Obesity, food justice and the limits of capitalism, University of California Press

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References (contd)

Morgan, M. et al. (2015) Enhancing the gender-equitable potential of aquaculture technologies. CGIAR Research Program on Aquatic Agricultural Systems. Program Brief: AAS_2015-07.Scrinis, G. (2013) Nutritionism. The science and politics of dietary advice, OUPWalls, H., Butler, C., Dixon, J., Samarawickrema, I. (2015) Implications of structure versus agency for addressing health and wellbeing in our ecologically constrained world: with a focus on prospects for gender equity, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 8(2), pp. 47-69.Winson, T. (2013) The Industrial Diet. The degradation of food and the struggle for healthy eating, UBC Press

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