[LINK] "Gender equality is holding Belarus back"

[rfmcdonald]

Writing at Open Democracy, Alexander Pershai argues that in Belarus, a gender equality understood in conservative terms is causing significant issues and is only now starting to be challenged. Fascinating stuff.

It would be untrue to say that gender equality is a ‘hot topic’ in Belarus. Like many other ‘post-Soviet’ countries, Belarus remains, on the whole, a deeply patriarchal society where traditional ideas of gender norms and identities prevail. Gender stereotypes, which define the ‘correct’ behavioural codes for both women and men persist to this day, as do normative standards of femininity and masculinity. Homophobia too is common place. Moreover, gender, by and large, remains an unpopular framework through which to view social oppression and inequality. More often than not, the dominant order is explained away as a matter of tradition or with the flippant response: ‘it’s just the way things are.’

[. . .]

There is no one official definition of gender equality accepted by all in Belarus, however the dominant definitions all have one important thing in common: they refer exclusively to men and women and they dismiss entirely other ‘unconventional’ forms of gender identity. For example, transgender and intersex people are rarely, if ever, covered under the concept of gender equality in Belarus (this is sadly also true of many other societies).

[. . .]

Moreover, the conservative nature of gender equality as commonly understood in Belarus is, in direct contradiction to its proposed aim, constricted in its ability to shatter the prevailing dividing lines between men and women. Gender equality as a concept in Belarus has emerged out of a long and widely-accepted tradition, which has deeply-set views about what gender is – namely male and female – and about what it means to be male and female. This conservative conceptualisation of gender is not just simply an abstract idea which has little impact upon the lived realities of people in Belarus, it is embedded in the very system which categorises and distributes the men and women of Belarus (and those who fall in between) into specific economic, political and social structures. Within this system, social positions for men and for women are pre-set and clearly-defined. In failing to address this system, which produces and demands gender normativity, the gender equality ‘movement’ in Belarus is unable to instigate genuine and meaningful change, and is instead reduced to seeking social, political, and jurisdictional ‘adjustments’ of the existing androcentric system in which men are the norm and women simply deserve a ‘better’ share.