Creating disaster risk and constructing gendered vulnerability

This chapter explores the landscape of disaster risk and vulnerability through a feminist lens. It takes as its starting point that the current development model creates disasters, and that disasters are to be expected as ‘normal’ outcomes of the economic growth focussed neo-liberal era. Disasters reflect and intensify rather than disrupt this normality, leading not to ab-normal but rather ‘super-normal’ experiences of everyday realities. For women, this may include experience of super-normal patriarchal relations, often at the hands of the those charged with protecting them. The chapter highlights how at the same time the field of gender and development has helped create a specific gendered vulnerability to disaster. Although women's intrinsic vulnerability is largely a myth, patriarchal structures that shape social relations bring into being feminised vulnerabilities. The same structures shape what are acceptable feminine characteristics, creating women as the ‘virtuous-victims’ of disaster. Justifying their policies as built on a morally driven response to women’s vulnerability, policy makers rely on women’s socially constructed virtuous nature, their ‘natural’ altruism, to efficiently deliverer resources and services to others. The chapter argues in policy terms ‘doing gender’ has become something done to women to achieve other development and disaster-related aims.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Why Vulnerability Still Matters: The politics of disaster risk creation on April 28, 2022, available online: http://www.routledge.com/9781032113418.

It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.