Creating disaster risk and constructing gendered vulnerability

Bradshaw, Sarah, Linneker, Brian and Overton, Lisa ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1466-2609 (2022) Creating disaster risk and constructing gendered vulnerability. In: Why Vulnerability Still Matters: The politics of disaster risk creation. Bankoff, Greg and Hilhorst, Dorothea, eds. Routledge Studies in Hazards, Disaster Risk and Climate Change . Routledge, pp. 51-67. ISBN 9781032113418, pbk-ISBN 9781032113432, e-ISBN 9781003219453. [Book Section] (doi:10.4324/9781003219453-5)

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Abstract

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.

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