Seeing Women and Questioning Gender in Water Management

This chapter argues that the difficulty of individual water analysts to see the role of women and gender relations in water management does not stem from their unwillingness or persistent biases, but is rather linked to a particular epistemic tradition in water management that is deeply inhospitable to the analysis of social relations and gender. The language, discursive practices and textual resources that form the heart of scientific water knowledge simultaneously form part of a wider range of cultural resources through which water professionals represent and identify themselves, and this contributes to legitimizing professional activities and choices. Much scientific water knowledge conceives of knowledge producers, and by extension of head-engineers or managers, as transcendent rational subjects who exist outside time, space and context. Mainstream irrigation thinking uses a spatial conceptual imagery with strong gender connotations. The dichotomous conceptualization of gender as two separate social categories of human beings on which this second strategy is based is analytically problematic.