Fluid lives: subjectivities, gender and water in rural Bangladesh

Abstract

This article seeks to contribute to the emerging debates in gender–water and gender–nature literatures by looking at the ways that gendered subjectivities are simultaneously (re)produced by societal, spatial and natural/ecological factors, as well as materialities of the body and of heterogeneous waterscapes. Drawing from fieldwork conducted in Bangladesh on arsenic contamination of drinking water, the article looks at the ways that gender relations are influenced by not just direct resource use/control/access and the implications of different types of waters, but also by the ideological constructs of masculinity/femininity, which can work in iterative ways to influence how people relate to different kinds of water. Conflicts and struggles over water inflect gendered identities and sense of self, where both men and women participate in reproducing and challenging prevailing norms and practices. As a result, multiple social and ecological factors interact in complex and interlinked ways to complicate gender–water relations, whereby socio-spatial subjectivities are re/produced in water management and end up reinforcing existing inequities. The article demonstrates that gender–water relations are not just intersected by social axes, as generally argued by feminist scholars, but also by ecological change and spatial relations vis-à-vis water, where simultaneously socialized, ecologized, spatialized and embodied subjectivities are produced and negotiated in everyday practices.

Keywords:

• gender
• subjectivity
• water
• arsenic
• Bangladesh

Acknowledgements

I would like to gratefully acknowledge the MacArthur Program and various grants from the University of Minnesota, the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and UK's Department for International Development (DFID), for funding the PhD dissertation research that is described in this article. Huge thanks to all the people in Bangladesh who warmly shared their lives and made the research possible. I would also like to thank the following people for their feedback on various drafts of this article: the three anonymous reviewers, Jennifer Hyndman, Robyn Longhurst, Kathleen O'Reilly and Paul Robbins. All shortcomings, of course, remain entirely mine.

Notes

1. For greater detail on the methodologies used and the study sites and research participants, see Sultana (2007a, 2007b).

2. Details of the arsenic situation in Bangladesh can be found in Ahmed and Ahmed (2002), Ahmed (2003) and Sultana (2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c).

3. While the concentration of arsenic in water may vary considerably within short distances, the policy that is being followed by the Bangladesh government is to paint red tubewells that are producing arsenic at concentrations greater than 50 micrograms/liter and paint green those that are at concentrations below 50 micrograms/liter. It is worth mentioning that the WHO (World Health Organization) standard of permissible arsenic in drinking water is stricter at 10 micrograms/liter. A discussion on the politics of such development endeavors is beyond the scope of this article. For more details see Sultana (2006, 2007a, 2009).

4. I do not have the space in this article to go into detail on the measurements of class or the politics involved in such measurements, but do want to highlight that I recognize it is a contentious, multifaceted and complex issue. In this article, I use three broad categories of class (wealthy, middle, poor) based on overall landholding, income, remunerations and assets. In rural Bangladesh, ownership of land is the largest source of wealth and power and class is closely linked to education and non-agricultural earnings (for further discussion, see Sultana 2007a).

5. Such sentiments are stronger in more remote and conservative areas and less so in areas closer to urban centers, where more women have begun to go about without the ghumta and have normalized such attire in line with more urbanite women. A few of the highly educated women or job-holding women in villages may be seen without a ghumta, but they are often seen as exceptions to the norm due to their education/earning status. While religion does play a role in this irrespective of social location, as more conservative Muslim families will practice covering than less conservative Muslim or Hindu families, ghumta is practiced among Hindus too, but less stringently.

6. Jacobs and Nash (2003: 270) capture the arguments put forth by Probyn (2003) in the following poignant way: ‘Probyn is not specifically concerned with cultural institutions, but she is concerned with how we live with difference and, in particular, the “the material contexts which allow and delimit our individual and collective performances of selves” … Probyn reminds us that all is not choice and play in the making and remaking of subjectivities; rather, she wishes to know better the things (ideologies, institutions, bodies, distances, emotions, noises, smells) that “drag … upon us as we move through space”’.

7. Focusing on the body is not essentialist, but involves locating agency, work, subjectivity, emotions and imaginations in bodies that exist in negotiated realities of family, work, socio-political norms, customs and rights. Thus, bodies have agency and are constrained, they perform tasks, are inflected and imbued with meaning and regulation and physically situated within various social locations. Bodies suffer pain from illness, are regulated when ‘out of place’, take part in institutions and produce the realities of nature–society relations; thus abstract notions of bodies are not particularly helpful in understanding how water comes to influence lives and social relations. Embodied subjectivity highlights the ways that individual bodies are inscribed with difference. Specificity, multiplicity and complexity are embodied in subjectivities that take into account bodies, experiences, spaces and places. A focus on subjectivity is not to resort to physical essentialism or reductionism, but to recognize the ways that bodies and embodiment are important in the daily lived experiences and realities of differentiated peoples and places. Active agents are involved in embodied subjects (Braidotti 1994, 2002), where agency of gendered subjects is seen as subjectivity having agency, of being in the world (Jackson 1999).

8. As Katz argues, however, ‘if being “hailed” or recognized as a subject comes with particular terrain of practice, then by definition agency is curtailed’ (Katz 2005, 233). This is a useful point as people demonstrate various levels of constrained agency in arsenic waterscapes (as discussed above). See also Robbins (2007) and Agrawal (2005) for various ways by which subjectivities in relation to nature/environment are being debated.