My second report / meeting facilitation for the subject Media 303: Media and Discourses in Development under Eli Guieb PhD at the College of Mass Communication, University of the Philippines Diliman.

1. Reframing and Remaking
Development:
Related Issues in Redreaming
Discourses of Development
Cindy Cruz 86-16518
PhD Media Studies, UP CMC
Media 303: Media and Discourses in Development

2. Points of Intersection
• Dominant groups promote and enforce laws,
practices and discourses for the “common good”.
• Key factors in women’s relegation to reproductive
work and primary responsibility for childbearing
and rearing:
• Institutionalization of Patriarchy
• Science as authority and control
• Biological determinism
• Social construction of gender and gender roles
– the assignment of traits
– the double standard, and
– the divide between male entitlements and female
responsibilities

3. • Sexual division of labor
– productive work
– reproductive work
– Appropriation of female labor
• Relations of power / relations of oppression –
interactions and negotiations with other actors
within the family, marriage, community, socio-
economic group, nation
• Women as culture and knowledge bearers,
creators and propagators through day-to-day
hands-on interaction with people and nature
• Institutional representations of and discourses on
women, particularly in the media, and how these
are consumed as truths

4. People or Population: Towards a
New Ecology of Reproduction
Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva

5. Main Points of the Article

6. • Discourses on the acceleration of environmental
degradation revolve around not the
industrialization, technological progress and
affluent lifestyle of the developed nations but
the population growth, particularly of the poor
in the Global South.
• By virtue of their biological sex and societal
gender entrapments, women are ultimately
viewed as the cause and culprit of the
population explosion as blamed for the
degradation and abuse of the environment and
all resources.

7. • Population control addresses only women as
“aggregated uteruses and prospective
perpetrators of over-population” without
considering and demanding changes in the
“overall political and economic structures of
the world (dis)order.” (p.282)
• As facilitated by capitalist patriarchy, women
are cast as reproducers who “experience
themselves as passive and alienated from
their own bodies, their procreative capacities
and from any subjectivity.”

8. • Population is conceptualized as transforming
people into mere numbers –
depersonalization in the assignment of blame
and creation of solutions.
• Capitalist patriarchy and the Cartesian-
Newtonian paradigm colluded to lead to the
degradation of the environment by robbing
the people of the commons, transforming and
deforming markets, demonizing women in
their intimate knowledges of birthing and
birth control – all towards the exploitative
world market and its mechanisms that
produce poverty.

9. • Birth control as produced within the
mechanisms of capitalism are coercive, thrive
on misinformation and deny advantages
depending on class, race, and socio-economic
advantage.
• The establishment of parallels between
environment and women and the proposed
rejection of control and abuse towards
nurturance pushes forth the transformation of
gender-bound characteristics in handling the
earth and ourselves.

10. QUOTES

11. • “ Development of this new sexual and
reproductive ecology is essential if women are to
be enabled to maintain their human dignity; it is
even more important for men who, in militaristic,
patriarchal society are taught to identify their
sexuality with aggression… directed not only
against their sexual partners, but also against
themselves. To conquer the ‘enemy’, ‘nature’,
women, other people, they must first learn to
conquer themselves, which means they must
reject and destroy in themselves the caring,
loving, nurturing characteristics that are generally
attributed to women, and for which they are
devalued.”

12. • “This new understanding of non-patriarchal
sexuality can develop only together with changes
in the sexual division of labor, the economy and
politics. Only when men begin seriously to share
in caring for children, the old, the weak, and for
nature, when they recognize that this life-
preserving subsistence work is more important
than work for cash, will they be able to develop a
caring, responsible, erotic relationship to their
partners, be they men or women.” (Mies and
Shiva)

13. Imagining Identities:
Ethnicity, Gender and Discourse
in Contesting Resources
Babette P. Resurreccion

14. Main Points of the Article

15. • Identities are imagined – socially (historically and
scientifically) constructed, negotiated, reworked
and moulded to serve needs and desires.
• Access and entitlement to resources are political
projects tied to the establishment, validation and
negotiation of group and individual identities as
informed by race (or ethnicity), class, and gender.
• The contention for resources takes place amidst
discrimination and unequal power within
hierarchies of opposing sides – the most basic of
which is gender.

16. • Dominant discourses are propagated by the
dominant groups – tending to mute, exclude,
and annihilate those of the marginalized and
powerless.
• Discourses surrounding names (for ethnicity)
and culture (for gender) as a claim to
resources are treated as givens when these
are actually value-laden constructions.
• Whose historical account /scientification
/authority is valid? How do these come to
stand as regimes of truth?

17. QUOTES

18. • “Traditions and indigenousness are therefore not
givens. Their meanings are actively reworked by
actors within each new context. The production
of culture, or the idea of a community, is by and
large a mental construction: this culture itself
becomes a resource and repository of meaning,
and a referent of their identity, re-asserted in the
face of change that threatens present
opportunities or gives rise to new ones.”

19. • “By itself, culture is also an unequal terrain
between women and men. The Kalanguya men
and an American missionary assert this as a
means to access resources, while the Kalanguya
women, also architects of culture, are excluded
from the public terrain of contestation. The
construction of ethnic identity… is patently a
male discourse of power over women. It grants
epistemic privilege to men, vesting in them the
authority to validate the identity of a community
through its ethnic name.”

20. • “Private notions of gender – both statist and
customary – have also historically shaped what
sort of citizens Kalanguya women are in the
public sphere today. Citizenship… is therefore not
a uniform experience among indigenous people
but mediated by relations of gender (class, age,
ethnicity). Far from being invisible or peripheral,
gender relations therefore influence the
processes of “imagining community”, as people
contest resources and harness their
environments.” (Resureccion)