Fem K

The aff begins the discussion of the round with the idea of a legal action to
education. This idea is inherently anti-woman and gendered in nature. Legalism
has been centered around male concepts, consists of masculine prejudices
which further gender disparities and global harms.
Ukagba 10 (George, a published author, “The Kpim of Feminism: Issues and Women in a
Changing World”,p514 https://books.google.com/books?id=vaJIMRO9)

These theories of law have so far been adumbrated by male with emphasis on male centered
concepts and these now form what is largely referred to as the traditional legal theory. The
traditional/western legal theory is chiefly associated with the male and as a consequence beclouded
with masculine prejudices. Genevieve Lloyd noted that “The denigration of the 'feminine’ is to feminists,
understandably, the most salient aspect of the maleness of the philosophical tradition”. It is the
feminine orientation in the legal theory that is called feminist jurisprudence. Feminist jurisprudence is the philosophy of law or an
aspect of legal theory that takes into account feminists' considerations. It is the "branch of jurisprudence that examines the
relationship between women and law, including the history of legal and social biases against women, the
elimination of
those biases in modern law, and the enhancement of women's legal rights and recognition in
society”. It is the "study of the construction and workings of the law from perspectives which
foreground the implications of the law for women and women's life. It inquiries into the critical
questions of law, its scope and legitimacy and its application in the society as would protect the
interest of women. Feminist jurisprudence focuses on the law and legal concepts, legislations
(the legislature), and the judiciary, and raises questions on them on the basis of being
patriarchal constructs, and reflections of same. According to Patricia Smith. 'feminist jurisprudence challenges
basic legal categories and concepts rather than analyzing them as given. Feminist jurisprudence asks what is implied in traditional
categories, distinctions, or concepts and rejects them if they imply the subordination of women. In this sense. feminist jurisprudence
is normative and claims that traditional jurisprudence and law are implicitly normative as well.16 It is therefore imperative 'to
understand feminist legal theory as a reaction to the jurisprudence of modern legal scholars (primarily male scholars) who tend to
see law as a process for interpreting and perpetuating a universal, gender-neutral public motility.... Feminist legal scholars... (claim)
that "masculine" jurisprudence of "all stripes" fails to acknowledge let alone respond to the
interests, values, fears and harms experienced by women'''. It is a post modem school of
thought which seeks to challenge the existence and continuity of the male oriented
jurisprudence as well as its claims of universality and neutrality. In view of this, feminist jurisprudence
approach law through the feminist lenses recognizing the fact that truth, knowledge, right and justice
are concerns not only to the males but also the females. Feminists therefore advance that
women are equal with men and should necessarily be considered as such, while laws
recognizing this equality should be promulgated. I lance feminist jurisprudence centers on the political, social, and
economic equality of sexes especially as it relates to power and politics, employment and work place; and the eradication of
all forms of oppression of women in respect of social arrangements, sexual and domestic
violence, and gender based discrimination.
Since its inception, Constitutional law has been used to oppress women under
the guise of legal tradition. The idea that we should even go about using laws
and government action is a masculine understanding of the resolution
Houlgate 17 (Laurence, Department of Philosophy, “AMINTAPHIL The Philosophical
Foundations of Law and Justice,” p61,
file:///C:/Users/smsj2000/Downloads/(AMINTAPHIL_%20The%20Philosophical)

The vagueness of ordinary and legal language has always been a problem for those jurists who
attempt to interpret the Constitution and its amendments. The inclusion of some words and the omission of
others is also of paramount importance. For example, the Constitution contains many instances of the words
“person,” “people,” “male” and “citizen,” but not a single instance of “female,” “women,” or
“children.” It was generally understood in the late eighteenth century that women and children
were not persons for purposes of constitutional protections and rights. Women were not
allowed to vote in state or federal elections and children did not have any of the rights
guaranteed to adults under the first ten amendments. Women did not achieve the right to vote
until passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 and it was assumed until the late 1960s
that children had no free speech rights under the First Amendment, nor the right to counsel
under the Sixth Amendment. It took a new constitutional amendment to get women the right to vote and it took an
“interpretation” of existing amendments to determine that children should have free speech rights in school and the right to an
attorney if charged with a crime. A theory of constitutional interpretation provides an answer to the question “How
ought the
provisions of the Constitution and its amendments be interpreted?” This is a normative
question, calling on us to state and defend a standard or principle that would give us the most
plausible interpretation of a troublesome phrase, paragraph, section or amendment of the
Constitution. There have been several attempts by philosophers of law to provide a theory of constitutional interpretation.
However, some scholars have implicitly rejected making any such attempt by saying that a judge needs only to look at the text and
plain meaning of the words in the Constitution.3 No interpretation is needed. This is analogous to most of our nonlegal day-to-day
conversations. If my wife tells me she is going grocery shopping this afternoon, I do not need to “interpret” what she has told me.
She is not speaking a foreign language, nor is she using technical terms that I cannot comprehend. I do not need to deduce what she
means from her statement, as if she has given me the premises of an argument from which I am to arrive at a conclusion. By
analogy, if the words
used in the Constitution or in its amendments are in plain English,
understandable by anyone who is conversant with the language, then there is no need for an
interpretation or a deduction. Consider, for example, the “plain English” used by the framers in writing the First
Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or
abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government
for a redress of grievances.

Turns case- failure to account for the ontological roots of modern politics
ensures serial policy failure – we will repeatedly reproduce the same problems
that we seek to solve
Dillon and Reid 2000 [Michael & Julian, Prof of Politics & Prof of International Relations,
“Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency,” Alternatives: Social
Transformation & Humane Governance 25.1]
As a precursor to global governance, governmentality, according to Foucault's initial account, poses the question of order not in
terms of the origin of the law and the location of sovereignty, as do traditional accounts of power, but in terms instead of the
management of population. The management of population is further refined in terms of specific problematics to which population
management may be reduced. These typically include but are not necessarily exhausted by the following topoi of governmental
power: economy, health, welfare, poverty, security, sexuality, demographics, resources, skills, culture, and so on. Now, where there
is an operation of power there is knowledge, and where there is knowledge there is an operation of power. Here discursive
formations emerge and, as Foucault noted, inevery society the production of discourse is at once
controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role
is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its
ponderous, formidable materiality.[ 34] More specifically, where there is a policy problematic there is
expertise, and where there is expertise there, too, a policy problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed
and elaborated in terms of discrete forms of knowledge as well as interlocking policy domains.
Policy domains reify the problematization of life in certain ways by turning these epistemically and politically contestable orderings
of life into "problems" that require the continuous attention of policy science and the continuous resolutions of policymakers.
Policy "actors" develop and compete on the basis of the expertise that grows up around such
problems or clusters of problems and their client populations. Here, too, we may also discover what might be
called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the market for discourse is prescribed and policed in ways that Foucault indicated, bidding
to formulate novel problematizations they seek to "sell" these, or otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle, there is no
limit to the ways in which the management of population may be problematized. All aspects of human conduct, any encounter with
life, is problematizable. Any problematization is capable of becoming a policy problem. Governmentality thereby creates a market
for policy, for science and for policy science, in which problematizations go looking for policy sponsors while policy sponsors fiercely
compete on behalf of their favored problematizations. Reproblematization of problems is constrained by the
institutional and ideological investments surrounding accepted "problems," and by the sheer
difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological and epistemological assumptions that go
into their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely contested as an epistemological or ontological assumption. And there
is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real problem with problematizations exists precisely at the level of such
assumptions. Such "paralysis of analysis" is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since they are compelled constantly to
respond to circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact both more and less control than they proclaim. What they do not
have is precisely the control that they want. Yet serial
policy failure--the fate and the fuel of all policy--
compels them into a continuous search for the new analysis that will extract them from the
aporias in which they constantly find themselves enmeshed.[ 35] Serial policy failure is no
simple shortcoming that science and policy--and policy science--will ultimately overcome. Serial policy
failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological assumptions that fashion the ways in
which global governance encounters and problematizes life as a process of emergence through fitness
landscapes that constantly adaptive and changing ensembles have continuously to negotiate. As a particular kind of intervention
into life,global governance promotes the very changes and unintended outcomes that it then
serially reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus, global liberal governance is not a linear
problem-solving process committed to the resolution of objective policy problems simply by
bringing better information and knowledge to bear upon them. A nonlinear economy of power/knowledge,
it deliberately installs socially specific and radically inequitable distributions of wealth,
opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and globally through the very detailed ways in which life is
variously (policy) problematized by it. In consequence, thinking and acting politically is displaced by the
institutional and epistemic rivalries that infuse its power/ knowledge networks, and by the local
conditions of application that govern the introduction of their policies. These now threaten to exhaust
what "politics," locally as well as globally, is about.[ 36] It is here that the "emergence" characteristic of governance begins to make
its appearance. For it is increasingly recognized that there are no definitive policy solutions to objective, neat,
discrete policy problems. The "subjects" of policy increasingly also become a matter of definition as well, since the concept
population does not have a stable referent either and has itself also evolved in biophilosophical and biomolecular as well as
Foucauldian "biopower" ways.
Moreover, masculine power structures overlook the hard-hitting impacts of
existential crises on feminized bodies; this relegates these bodies to subjectivity
and permanent cycles of marginalization
Cohn and Ruddick 3 [Dr. Carol and Sara, Consortium on Gender, Security, and Human Rights:
“A Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction”, 2003
http://genderandsecurity.org/sites/default/files/carol_cohn_and_sara_ruddick_working_paper
_104.pdf.]/MR

One of the constitutive positions of anti-war feminism is that inthinking about weapons and wars, we must
accord full weight to their daily effects on the lives of women. We then find that the development and
deployment of nuclear weapons, even when they are not used in warfare, exacts immense economic costs that
particularly affect women. In the words of a recent Indian feminist essay: “The social costs of nuclear
weaponisation in a country where the basic needs of shelter, food and water, electricity, health and education
have not been met are obvious.... [S]ince patriarchal family norms place the task of looking after the daily needs of the
family mainly upon women, scarcity of resources always hits women the hardest. Less food for the family
inevitably means an even smaller share for women and female children just as water shortages
mean an increase in women’s labour who have to spend more time and energy in fetching water from distant places at
odd hours of the day.” While the US is not as poor a nation as India, Pakistan, or Russia, it has remained, throughout the
nuclear age, a country in which poverty and hunger are rife, health care still unaffordable to many, low-cost
housing unavailable, with crumbling public schools and infrastructure, all while the American nuclear weapons
program has come at the cost of 4.5 trillion dollars. In addition to being economically costly, nuclear weapons
development has medical and political costs. In the US program, many people have been exposed to high levels of radiation,
including uranium miners; workers at reactors and processing facilities; the quarter of a million military personnel who took place in
“atomic battlefield” exercises; “downwinders” from test sites; and Marshallese Islanders. Politically, nuclear regimes
require a level of secrecy and security measures that exclude the majority of citizens, and in most countries, all
women, from defense policy and decision- making.” From the perspective of women’s lives, we see
not only the costs of the development of nuclear weapons, but also the spiritual, social and
psychological costs of deployment. One cost, according to some feminists, is that “Nuclearisation produces social
consent for increasing levels of violence. Another cost, for many, is that nuclear weapons create high levels of tension, insecurity and
fear. As Arundhati Roy puts it, nuclear weapons “[i]nform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our
brains.” Further, feminists
are concerned about the effect of nuclear policy on moral thought, on
ideas about gender, and how the two intersect. Nuclear deve lopment may legitimize male
aggression, 15 and breed the idea that nuclear explosions give a ‘virility’ to the nation which men as
individuals can somehow also share.

The alternative is Marxist-feminism – an analysis of capital and the

heteronormative patriarchal underpinnings attached to it is net better to solve
for crises
Valiavicharska 17 [Zhivka, publishing “Herbert Marcuse, the Liberation of “Man,” and
Hegemonic Humanism” (Theory & Event, Volume 20, Number 3, July 2017, pp. 804-827 (Article))
for John Hopkins University. Published July 2017.
file:///C:/Users/User/Downloads/New%20ALT.pdf]/MR

Marxist feminists had developed what is perhaps the most profound critique of
By the early 1970s,
“traditional” Marxist formulations of labor, which complicated further relationships between
labor, technology, and capitalist accumulation: what stood for labor, namely wage labor and
industrial production, was a product of a white male political imaginary unable to account for
the work of social reproduction relegated to the home, the “private,” and other spheres outside
the factory. They showed that the work of domestic labor, biological reproduction, the
reproduction of labor power—all ignored by “traditional” Marxist accounts, which confined their notion of labor to the
factory—were central to the reproduction of capitalism. In other words, women’s reproductive labor
and their work in the home were those disavowed, invisible, unrecognized—yet absolutely necessary—
elements that the wage labor form and the “sphere of production” depended on. These critiques showed that the
embrace of technology and automation as the avenue towards freedom followed a treacherous logic, which may be able to liberate
some but not all. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, in their groundbreaking piece “The Power of Women and the Subversion
of Community,” wrote: If technological innovation can lower the limit of necessary work, and if the working
class struggle in industry can use that innovation for gaining free hours, the
same cannot be said of housework; to
the extent that she must in isolation procreate, raise and be responsible for children, a high
mechanization of domestic chores doesn’t free any time for the woman. She is always on duty,
for the machine doesn’t exist that makes and minds children…. Her workday is unending not because she has
no machines, but because she is isolated.29 For Marxist-feminists, therefore, calls for the abolition of all work,
which were so appealing to Frankfurt school members, remained male-centric, begging the question what counted as
“work” and “labor” in their accounts, who was the subject worthy of what they envi- Valiavicharska | Herbert Marcuse, the
Liberation of “Man” 815 sioned as “freedom” from necessity, and whether they could account at all for the realities of Black, brown,
immigrant, and women workers involved in domestic and care work, in affective and reproductive labor, and in a number of social
They fought against the social invisibility of reproductive,
activities not recognizable as “work” or “labor.”
affective, and care work and the ways in which these were entangled in naturalized notions of
women’s bodies and their affective social lives. They challenged the social hierarchies and meanings of “work,”
which mobilized racial, gender, and ethnic differences to subordinate, dehumanize, and devalue Black, brown, and immigrant bodies
and lives. All these became points of feminist critique of the white- and male-dominated Marxist left, as
well as a focus of
feminist organizing against exploitation and capitalism as they are entangled in patriarchal
relations and hetero-normative social forms.3
 Body Politics Theory
A. Interpretation – The affirmative must have a discussion of education that is
tied to and dependent on the bodies and voices of the speakers. The body is
never merely the matter that forms it but is also constituted by social relations.
Salamon 2010 (Gayle, Associate Professor of English and Charles H. McIlwain University
Preceptor at Princeton University, "Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality," Pp.
86)
The social aspects of my body, that sedimented history of which it is composed, do not disappear even if the ease of my
proprioceptive possession of my body renders its social aspects invisible. The force of my conviction about the certainty of my own
body paradoxically obscures the social realm and the formative role it plays in making embodiment legible. The social realm might
seem to disappear or fade away, but its effects do not, even when they are unattended to, even when they “pass” as natural. The
body is always subtended by its history. The body is felt as an immediate reality, situated in the
spatial “here” and the temporal “now,” and the presentness of our bodies to us—and of the
things our bodies deliver to us—feels absolute. Yet as a perceived and perceiving entity, the body depends on a
substratum of history, even if that history is invisible in the more mundane course of everyday life. “Perception,” Edmund Husserl
writes, “is related only to the present. But this present is always meant as having an endless past behind it and an open future
before it.”15 How are we to understand that obscured history and its relation to the bodies that it subtends? Michel Foucault states
in the introduction to The Use of Pleasure that his project in The History of Sexuality has been to uncover and write a “history of
truth.” That truth is excavated and read through a history of bodies, viewed as sites of power and
resistance. Bodies can only be understood, only become legible, through their historically
contingent specificity. A body does not exist as a naturally given phenomenon for Foucault; the
“natural” body is produced through subjection, a social construct masquerading as a natural
entity. 16 Understanding bodies is necessary if we are to understand power because bodies are both produced by and bear the
evidence of a power that is nonlocalized and dispersed; it is recognizable only through its effects, which are often bodily effects. If
we must understand bodies to understand power, it is conversely true that we must understand
power to understand bodies. Discipline, for example, is a kind of power that cannot be reduced to the institutions or
apparatuses through which it flows, although its effects can be seen in and on the bodies it regulates. The disciplinary
regimes that produce bodies as sexed and gendered may be visible in certain institutions, or
particular medical technologies, or instances of bodily violence, but discipline itself is none of
these things. Foucault writes that “‘discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of
power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is
a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology.”17 An
example of disciplinary power’s nonlocalized effects,
one with particular resonance to transpeople, might be gendered restrooms.18 Restrooms are
precarious terrain for the genderqueer, and the decision as to which door to enter is not always an easy or obvious one, particularly
for butches or FTMs at an early stage of transition. If a butch chooses the women’s room, the “proper” choice for the sex to which
sie is assumed to belong if sie is not able to “pass,” sie risks stares, hostile commentary, or getting chased right out by women
alarmed that a “man” has entered (either mistakenly or with predaceous intent). If sie enters the men’s room and fails to pass, sie
risks worse. Segregated restrooms are obvious instantiations of the binary gender system, but cannot be said to be that system.
The power to enforce a gender binary is not located in any one particular restroom or in the
women and men who might police that territory against the genderqueer; it is instead dispersed
through an entire matrix of “instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets.”
If this power cannot be localized or identified, this does not lessen its effects or force, a force that increases in proportion to the
extent that a single instantiation of that power becomes ontologized.

B. Violation – the affirmative does not actually change education – they merely
present a plan for how the USfg might attempt to fix education
C. Vote Negative –
1. Presumption – Voting affirmative in this debate will not produce the
advantages discussed. Just talking about how the USFG might change
 education changes nothing. If they had spoke about personal
experiences and given effort to try and fix issues they see then they
might have access to an impact.
2. Limits – There are an infinite amount of potential plans and policy
proposals the affirmative could fiat, but there is a limited amount of
ways we can actually affect education
3. Predictability – The USfg is inherently unpredictable and isn’t a good
model for real world understandings; body politics are not and provide a
realworld understanding about experiences
4. Education –
a. Topic Specific Education – AFF interpretation encourages bad
debate including conditionality, PICs, international fiat, etc. which
shift the focus from eductaion to generic mechanism and process
arguments that skirt real discussion of the topic.
b. Activism Good – plan focus debate requires that we invest our
advocacy in bureaucratic institutions as opposed to ourselves
which skirts accountability.
5. Fairness –
a. Ground – AFF interpretation destroys our disadvantage ground
based on individual action and forces us to defend USFG inaction –
they make it impossible to be negative.
b. Oppressor-playing DA – requiring discursively engaging the USFG
instead of individual action marginalizes participants for whom
the state is violent and/or inaccessible. It's NOT what you do, it's
what you Justify – the affirmative should have to defend the
tradition and style of debate in which they participate. Debaters
choose their style. This means they have to defend other bad
forms of education that clearly exist in the style of debate they are
engaging in.
Case
2NC
Fem K
 o/v
We begin this debate with the discussion of masculinity and femininity in
relation to politics. Our first 2 cards both talk about how the system of legalism,
specifically under a constitution excludes women and furthers the idea that
masculinity is superior to femininity. This, in turn, leads to serial policy failure
due to the inability of these actions to solve any real issues. The overlooking of
women is what specifically causes every plan to fail. These masculine systems
of power also exploit women through systems of continuous marginalization.
This brings us to the alt which is a Marxist-Feminist criticism of labor—a full
removal of all jobs that remain male centered.
 Link
Education reform entrenches gender inequality
Karam 13 ( Azz serves as a Senior Advisor on Social and Cultural Development, “Education as
the Pathway towards Gender Equality”, UN Chronicle
L(4),https://unchronicle.un.org/article/education-pathway-towards-gender-equality) SJ

In short, girls’ education and the promotion of gender equality in education are critical to development,
thus underlining the need to broadly address gender disparities in education. The rhetorical question that needs to be
raised here is whether the consistent elements of gender socialization in the region, and the
confusing messages for both sexes, can only lead to entrenching processes of gender inequality.
At the very least, it is safe to argue that gender socialization, combined with the continuing
discrepancies in education opportunities and outcomes not only provide a negative feedback
loop, but effectively contribute to entrenching patriarchal norms. Political events and the
endorsement of political leadership are often catalytic, if not necessary determinants, of policy
change. In fact, most education reform programmers are often linked to political dynamics. To date,
such reforms are typically launched through a political or legal act. In most cases, countries prioritize aspects such as forging a
common heritage and understanding of citizenship, instruction in particular language(s), and other means of building capacities as
well as popular support for party programmers. All developing country governments have, at one time or another, put special effort
into including girls in the education system. While there is a continuous role for
policy makers and governments, it is
increasingly clear that the socio-cultural terrain is where the real battles need to be waged in a
studied, deliberate and targeted fashion.

The academy and reforms of it are rooted in masculine concepts of domination

and control over women
Mansfield, Welton & Grogan 14 (Katherine, assistant professor of Educational Leadership
at Virginia Commonwealth University with a PhD in Educational Policy and Planning at The
University of Texas at Austin, Anjalé, assistant professor in Education Policy, Organization, and
Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Margaret, Professor of
Educational Leadership and Policy in the School of Educational Studies at Claremont Graduate
University, ““Truth or consequences”: a feminist critical policy analysis of the STEM crisis”,
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 8/18/14,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09518398.2014.916006) KJR

Bureaucracy and hierarchy Finally, but not exhaustively,

schools, universities, and fields of study are
bureaucratic and hierarchical: a feminist point of contention that is not mentioned in the STEM
policy discourse that we begin to trouble here. We argue that patterns of power, control,
dominance, and subordination are firmly enmeshed in modern life via the bureaucratization of
public life, coinciding, not accidentally, with substantial economic and technological changes that have
occurred since the mid-twentieth century (Ferguson, 1984). Feminists argue that rather than being essential to
achieving important organizational goals, hierarchical patterns of authority preserve the status quo that is,
in fact, restrictive of human growth and development and technological progress (Ferguson, 1984). Moreover,
bureaucracies tend to invent and reify their own language and procedures to maintain control
over people and other resources. Since bureaucratic operations are “one-directional, in that it is difficult
to ‘talk back,’ [and] acausal, in that it is difficult to find out where the directives originated and who is responsible for them”
(Ferguson, 1984, p. 15), negotiation and compromise are thwarted and change is negated. Further, in order
to engage in change-agent behavior, “one
must first penetrate the façade of ideological neutrality that
administrative structures claim for themselves and see them as political arenas in which
domination, manipulation, and the denial of conflict are standard operating procedures” (p. 17). In
addition to this is the likelihood that the oppressed are expected to be the ones to “stretch out and bridge the gap” between their
lived experiences in organizations and the “consciousness” of those in power. “In other words, it is the responsibility of the
oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes” (Lorde, 1984, p. 114). Gilligan (1982/1993) would argue that “this
hierarchical ordering, with its imagery of winning and losing” accompanied by impending
hostility, situates human beings in general, and women in particular, in destructive, lose–lose situations that
cannot be reconciled morally or ethically. Until organizations couple an “ethic of 1176 K.C. Mansfield et al. justice”
(equality) with the “ethic of care” (constructive), all people will be severely limited in their ability to transform school and work life
(Gilligan, 1982/1993).

State centered approaches to human securitization fails to include women’s

voices, only alternative is using a gendered lens on securitization logic absent
state action
Hans in 2010 (Asha Hans is the former Director, School of Women’s Studies, and Professor of Political
Science, Utkal University, India. She is the author and editor of many publications related to women’s
rights, the latest being The Gender Imperative, coedited with Prof. Betty Reardon (2010). Her book
Gender, Disability and Identity (2003) is a globally recognized seminal work coedited with Annie Patri. An
advocate of women’s rights, she has participated in the formulation of many conventions in the United
Nations. A leading campaigner of women’s rights in India, she has initiated many campaigns on the
inclusion of women with disabilities in the mainstream women’s movement. She is also the founder of
Women with Disabilities India Network. “14 Human Security the Militarized Perception and Space for
Gender” The Gender Imperative pages: 384 – 409)

Conclusion The security system globally is highly militarized and national security, as we have seen, is
placed at the core where the state and not the people come first. Boundaries have been more
important than the humans living on them. It is therefore not surprising that in Kargil, from a military perspective,
the protection of borders was of foremost importance and people were marginalized. The
animosity of the people became central in the state’s relationships to its borders. When the system
attempted change, the people’s militarist response that they were willing to die/fight for Ray was not surprising. The aim of the
article is not to be critical of the work done by the person who created the change but to
analyse its importance and its relationship to the concept of human security, especially from a
gendered perspective. Does Goodwill fit into the feminist paradigm? If we take into account the four
components most well-known feminist constituents of human security agree upon, i.e. physical
security, environment security, daily needs and dignity, it will provide us with the guidelines to
analyse Goodwill. To begin with, the importance of Goodwill to the nation state is that it controls
militancy so the security of its borders is achieved. Goodwill, Ray said, created trust between the
armed forces and civilians on the border and brought the two civilians on both sides of the
border closer. In the context of this book, the human security paradigm as used by General Arjun Ray in
Kargil is the use of the vocabulary of human security but when it stipulates that human security
is a core element of national security, it goes against the core element of human security as
projected by feminist writers. So though Goodwill provides more developmental space to the citizens on the border,
more equality to women, educational and health opportunities, the question that arises is that does it fulfil women’s human security
needs? Though it can be considered as a commendable attempt in the context of understanding
the other religion, its sustainability is questionable without which it becomes a half-hearted
attempt by those who continue to use it. Though termed a socio-politico strategy for conflict
prevention, it stops short of even attempting to do this. Using the terminology of culture of peace and human
security is not enough, especially as the approach is narrow and the aim is basically only to stop opposition. One of the advantages
of this has been projected as the number of people from this region joining the armed forces. This is militarization, an opposing force
in women’s search for security. Militarization is not easily tackled as states deliberately use it not only
through the armed forces but as an ideology of power which influences the society and civilian
life as a whole. In its process of implementation patriarchy plays an important role. This ideological manifestation of
power relations between state and citizen internalizes militarist values, including the use of
force and reinforcement of patriarchal norms. A human security system would, unlike national
security, endure confrontation rather than suppress it with armaments and do further harm. It
would create space for non-violent protest and not wipe out its own populations together with
that of the opposition across the border. Goodwill speaks of a non-violent rights-based
approach, of disarmament, of sustainable, endogenous, equitable human development and in
the same breath of military security. Though Goodwill is based on the reasoning that guns and tanks do not provide
security and is a brand name for trust and restoring hope and effective border management, Ray also speaks of security as being a
‘human defence line that can serve as its ‘eyes and ears’ on the border. In this concept the villager turns out to be the central point
of focus to manage the border areas and build a functional community–army relationship. The visibility of the projects would create
Goodwill and provide a positive image of the army, an important objective but in reality much has not been done to achieve it.
Unless the warlike situation stops on the border, security cannot be achieved. Ray does not mention a time frame when the army
would leave the borders, if at all. Can
the state’s hegemonic control shift from the military to the people?
We recognize that as the conceptualization of human security challenges the large expenditures
on the armed forces, in a market-oriented economy it will be difficult to get states to agree to it.
Armaments are where the money lies. At this point we need to remind the state that soon after independence in the 1950s, it
sponsored policies of non-aggression and promoted policies of collective security and displayed faith in the UN. As the power of the
country increased, the more radical its national security determinant became. Above all justice is important, as the military
expenditure is at the cost of other sectors, especially social sectors such as education, health and gender inequality, the factors
which influence the notion of justice. Any order which is not just has to be challenged and changed. Among this is the
hegemonization of the state which has patriarchal tendencies and so marginalizes the weak
and especially women. The other vulnerable sections are the minorities, especially religious
and ethnic communities. A human security paradigm to work must facilitate the creation of
these changes. Can this alternative suggested by Ray create the space for change? It is obvious from women’s
concerns even after human security was implemented by the army that women’s security was
excluded. They still go without fulfilment of health and other needs and their bodies are violated. In this framework provided by
Ray, human security is achieved through provisions of education, health, gender equality and
community development programmes. The programmatic approach is not enough; if these
are to be provided it must be to all citizens in conflict zones, but it stops short of
universalization in implementation. Further, the culture of peace and space for shared values of tolerance, solidarity,
democracy and economic development that Goodwill wanted to achieve fits into the feminist human security paradigm. At the same
time, in keeping with its links to national security, it falls short of visioning what it means to women. A human security paradigm
would aim for the wellbeing of the people and avoid the harmful effects of national security, as seen earlier What kind of a world of
peace can we visualize? Can human security as a paradigm be adopted by states? What is needed to add to this emerging paradigm
is a pragmatic non-violent approach to replace national security through our understanding of human security. About adoption of
non-violence by states, Mahatma Gandhi said that it is a blasphemy to say that non-violence can only be practiced by individuals and
never by nations which are composed of individuals. Thus, he suggests the role of non-cooperation which he argues is an attempt to
awaken the masses to a sense of their dignity and power. Women need to adopt these practices when state power threatens their
rights. What
we require is disseminating the information on what a feminist perception of
human security is. This should be at all levels, in general education and civil society teachings.
We need to include in our research the linkages that emerge between violence, masculinity,
gender and human security, to create a culture of peace that will replace the violence in our
lives.
 Impact
Structural violence is a form of ongoing and growing genocide that kills more
people each year than all the wars combined. In fact, genocide from structural
violence even outweighs a hypothetical nuclear war.
Gilligan 96 [James, Professor of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, Director of the
Center for the Study of Violence, and a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the
National Campaign Against Youth Violence, “Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and its Causes”, p.
191-196]

The deadliest form of violence is poverty. You cannot work for one day with the violent people who fill our prisons
and mental hospitals for the criminally insane without being forcible and constantly reminded of the extreme poverty and
discrimination that characterizes their lives. Hearing about their lives, and about their families and friends, you are forced to
recognize the truth in Gandhi’s observation that the deadliest form of violence is poverty. Not a day goes by without realizing that
trying to understand them and their violent behavior in purely individual terms is impossible and wrong-headed. Any theory of
violence, especially a psychological theory, that evolves from the experience of men in maximum security prisons and hospitals for
the criminally insane must begin with the recognition that these institutions are only microcosms. They are not where the major
violence in our society takes place, and the perpetrators who fill them are far from being the main causes of most violent deaths.
Any approach to a theory of violence needs to begin with a look at the structural violence in this
country. Focusing merely on those relatively few men who commit what we define as murder
could distract us from examining and learning from those structural causes of violent death that
are far more significant from a numerical or public health, or human, standpoint. By “structural
violence” I mean the increased rates of death, and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society, as
contrasted with the relatively low death rates experienced by those who are above them. Those excess deaths (or at least a
demonstrably large proportion of them) are a function of class structure; and that structure itself is a product of society’s collective
human choices, concerning how to distribute the collective wealth of the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting
“structural” with “behavioral violence,” by which I mean the non-natural deaths and injuries that are caused by specific behavioral
actions of individuals against individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide, soldiers in warfare, capital
punishment, and so on. Structural violence differs from behavior violence in at least three major respects. *The
lethal effects
of structural violence operate continuously, rather than sporadically, whereas murders,
suicides, executions, wars, and other forms of behavior violence occur one at a time. *Structural
violence operates more or less independently of individual acts; independent of individuals and groups (politicians, political parties,
voters) whose decisions may nevertheless have lethal consequences for others. *Structural violence is normally invisible, because it
may appear to have had other (natural or violent) causes. [CONTINUED] The finding that structural violence causes far more deaths
than behavioral violence does is not limited to this country. Kohler and Alcock attempted to arrive at the number of excess deaths
caused by socioeconomic inequities on a worldwide basis. Sweden was their model of the nation that had come closest to
eliminating structural violence. It had the least inequity in income and living standards, and the lowest discrepancies in death rates
and life expectancy; and the highest overall life expectancy of the world. When they compared the life expectancies of those living in
the other socioeconomic systems against Sweden, they found that 18 million deaths a year could be attributed to the “structural
violence” to which the citizens of all the other nations were being subjected. During the past decade, the discrepancies between the
rich and poor nations have increased dramatically and alarmingly. The
14 to 19 million deaths a year caused by
structural violence compare with about 100,000 deaths per year from armed conflict. Comparing
this frequency of deaths from structural violence to the frequency of those caused by major military and political violence, such as
World War II (an estimated 49 million military and civilian deaths, including those by genocide – or about eight million per year,
1939-1945), the Indonesian massacre of 1965-66 (perhaps 575,000 deaths), the Vietnam war (possibly two million, 1954-1973),
and even a hypothetical nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (232 million), it is
clear that even war cannot begin to compare with structural violence, which continues year
after year. In other words, every fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of
relative poverty as would be killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This
is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, and accelerating, thermonuclear war, or
genocide, perpetrated on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world.
Structural violence is also the main cause of behavioral violence on a socially and
epidemiologically significant scale (from homicide and suicide to war and genocide). The question as to which of the
two forms of violence – structural or behavioral – is more important, dangerous, or lethal is moot, for they are inextricably related
to each other, as cause to effect.

Traditional policy making and impacts ignore the everyday violence

experienced by women- focusing on the “everyday” opens up the space for
dialogue on violence as a gendered phenomenon
Elias and Rai, 2015
Juanita, an Associate Professor in International Political Economy at the University of Warwick; a
Professor in the department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick
Rai. "The Everyday Gendered Political Economy of Violence." Politics & Gender 11.2 (2015): 424-
29. Web. 10 July 2016.
This short commentary aims to think through the need to return to a more “integrated” feminist IR through a focus on some of the
ways in which feminist political economy (FPE) scholars, such as ourselves, might 424 POLITICS & GENDER, 11 (2) (2015) better
integrate a focus on gendered forms and practices of violence into our analysis. We do this via an intervention into debates about
the nature of the “everyday” political economy. At the same time, we hope that this intervention might also draw attention to the
need for a clearer understanding of the gendered structures and practices of the global political economy in feminist security studies
(FSS). We note that a neglect of everyday gendered practices of violence in IPE is, in part, a reflection of the overall marginalization
of gender within this field (Elias 2011). True (2012), however, has opened up important lines of debate — showing how violence
against women both underpins and is perpetuated by the process of global economic
transformation. Policy reports from key global economic governance institutions such as the
World Bank (2013) have nonetheless displayed a propensity to present violence against women as an
economic “cost” without examining the structures and processes that enable violence against
women to take shape within the contemporary global economic system. While we, like True, are deeply
skeptical of this approach, we do, nonetheless, seek to interrogate the “costs” of violence by focusing on the everyday human, as
opposed to just the economic, cost of this violence. Within the study of IPE, one particular opening into which
a discussion of gendered violence can make an important contribution is the recent turn to the
“everyday” (Hobson and Seabrooke 2007) — a development that has largely neglected the contributions
of feminist scholarship. This includes International Relations (Enloe 1989) and feminist scholarship on the
nature, experience, and methodological significance of the everyday (Scheper-Hughes 1992; Smith 1987). Hobson and
Seabrooke’s everyday IPE approach in particular can be critiqued for its propensity to present
the “everyday” as a site of mundane acts of political agency — a perspective that jars somewhat
when read against Scheper-Hughes’ ethnography of the “violence of everyday life” as experienced
by poor mothers in the Brazilian favelas of the 1980s. Here, the everyday is an ambiguous and
contradictory space in which injustices of political economic inequality are manifested in
women’s emotional responses to child bearing, rearing, and mortality (specifically, poor women’s
acceptance of their children’s death) (1992, 341). Scheper-Hughes’ work echoes Smith’s (1987) commitment to studying the
everyday as “embedded in a socially organized context” (p. 90) but which must also be understood as “an actual material setting, an
actual local and particular place in the world.” It
is this local material world that is emphasized by Bourgeois
and Scheper-Hughes (2004) in their rejection CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES 425 of all-encompassing (top-down)
theories of neoliberalism as structural violence — instead pointing to how it is the lived
experiences of those on the ground that generate the most useful insights that enable us to
connect everyday acts and forms of violence to broader political economic structures and
systems. In order to illustrate our argument, we outline three strands of the violence of
everyday life in the global political economy: (1) the pervasiveness of violence within feminized
global zones of work, such as export processing zones or the expanding market for migrant
domestic work; (2) women’s experience of violence in public spaces, particularly that relating to
mobility and public transport; and (3) the relationship between women’s subordination in the
household and forms of violence. The experience of violence by women factory workers is
important to consider in developing an FPE approach to everyday violence not least because of
the tendency to equate women’s entry into paid employment with forms of “empowerment”
that undermine patriarchal household relations. If we return to Elson and Pearson’s (1981) classic work on this
topic, we see how gender relations are not merely decomposed, but also recomposed and
intensified when women enter paid employment — for example, the uses of sexual harassment
as a way of securing workplace discipline (Mun˜ oz 2008). An understanding of the gendered
violence of global factory production must, furthermore, recognize how the emergence of
export processing industrialization is, in many respects, an effective “scaling-up” of the working
practices of the informal and/or homeworking sectors to the global economy (Cross 2010), serving
to reproduce the structures of domination and inequality of the household within global zones
of work. These blurred lines between the global and the household are, furthermore, evident in
the emergence of large-scale movements of migrant women to take up employment as
domestic workers, exposing women to multiple forms of violence by the state and individuals
(Elias 2013). The recomposition and/or intensification of violent gender relations is also evident in
relation to the violence that women experience in the everyday act of going to work; their
mobility invites violence. Rises in women’s engagement in economic activity outside of the
home increases their visibility in public spaces and yet also results in women experiencing forms
of disciplining or “backlash” that stem from perceptions of women as stepping out of place.
Urbanization and urban poverty bring about everyday violence for women. We see poorly supported,
overcrowded public transportation systems 426 POLITICS & GENDER, 11 (2) (2015) within urban areas as a key site for gender
violence. Travel on public transport is always mediated by class. The poor, in particular, need to travel long distances to get to work.
The issue of sexual harassment and new experiences of assault on public transport — something
that is frequently dismissed as an inconvenience rather than an act of violence — is one that
speaks particularly well to developing an understanding of gender violence as an “everyday”
phenomena. The relationship between women’s subordination in the household and violence is most frequently understood in
terms of the issue of domestic violence. Global political economic transformations do play out in
households in ways that empower women, making them less vulnerable to violence, but also in
ways that significantly disempower women. For example, Baxi, Rai, and Ali (2006) found in their study of so-called
“honour” crimes in India that one motivating factor in disciplining young women through household and community violence was
the fear that the liberalization of the Indian economy, increasing migration of young men and women to cities, and the influx of
television programmes from the West would lead to the erosion of traditional gendered social practices of marriage. The
performance of this violence was also suggestive of the elision of governance of communities with the governance of polity — caste-
based village councils (khap panchayats) being allowed to decree punishment with full knowledge of the state/ secular local
government (Baxi, Rai, and Ali 2006). Beyond these specific examples,
in thinking about the violence of everyday
life within the household from a political economy perspective, it is also important to broaden
notions of violence to include not just direct physical attack, but also forms of violence that
impact on women’s bodily integrity in terms of access to adequate nutrition or healthcare. We
would also add the psychological violence that stems from the way in which women’s work in
the domestic sphere remains unrecognized, unrewarded, and misrepresented (Waring 1988). Thus, in
outlining a theory of “depletion” through social reproduction, Rai, Hoskyns, and Thomas (2014) underscore how the nonrecognition
of the socially reproductive work that takes place within households can lead to discursive, bodily, emotional, and citizenship-
entitlement harm. By showing how macrolevel nonrecognition of socially reproductive work is intimately connected to everyday
depletion of individuals, households, and communities, Rai, Hoskyns, and Thomas develop a materialist feminist understanding of
everyday systemic violence. In this framework, harm
occurs when there is a measurable deterioration in the
health and CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES 427 well-being of individuals and the sustainability of households
and communities and when the inflows required to sustain social reproductive work fall below a
threshold of sustainability (2014, 6). In times of crises, economic downturn, war, and social conflict,
there can be an intensification of this harm. So, by revealing the links between IPE and the
everyday social reproductive work, we can analyze how women’s productive and social
reproductive commitments under late capitalism are experienced on the ground. There is, we note,
something of a gap within feminist studies of the household and social reproduction in political economy when it comes to the issue
of violence. Although
there exist multiple strands of feminist political economy analysis (Elias 2011), we
focus on the more materialist-oriented social reproduction literature since this is where we
locate ourselves as scholars. We feel that it is useful to think through how a theory of violence
might be embedded into studies of social reproduction, and one way to do this is by mobilizing
the concept of depletion. For example, by situating factory or domestic workers within broader sets of socially reproductive
relations, it is possible to point to the costs and harms that are experienced by female workers in low-paid, labor-intensive work —
the harms to their health and well-being (including emotional well-being) and broader harms to the community and (global)
household. Outlining the ways in which we think a focus on the “everyday” in IPE opens up space
for discussions of violence as a gendered phenomenon. This, then, is an intervention we hope
serves as a starting point for developing further conversations within feminist IR (while at the
same time ensuring that we continue to have conversations with nonfeminist critical IPE
scholars). This short piece is not a critique of FSS for its lack of attention to the everyday political economy (or even the not-
soeveryday political economy of neoliberal economic restructuring). Rather, this piece is a contribution to this Critical Perspectives
section, which provides a forum for thinking about ways in which we can re-engage. We recognize that for many FSS scholars
focused on unpacking the discursive construction of militarized and/or securitized identities, an engagement with the more
materialist focus of much recent feminist political economy scholarship may not be particularly attractive. However,
our
intention is that through demonstrating the strong and clear links between social reproduction,
the everyday political economy, and issues of violence against women, we can encourage a
dialogue across these subfields. In doing so, we also hope that we can inspire 428 POLITICS & GENDER,
11 (2) (2015) more FSS scholars to start thinking about links between violence and everyday political
economy.
 AT: Perm
1. Link proves that the K is mutually exclusive. They haven’t proven that we
don’t link so there’s no reason to assume both can be done.
2. Every link to the K is a DA to the perm so
a. we’ll start with the legalism DA: legal processes exclude women
and are inherently masculine. The aff perpetuates said systems
which require a Marxist-Feminist critique in order to solve
b. constitutionalism DA: insistence on a legal action that deals with
the federal government is in opposition to the feminine other as
shown by the deliberate exclusion of women from the original
framing of the constitution
3. Perm fails doesn’t specifically target systems of patriarchy will get
coopted
Perry 16 (Dr. Andre, former founding dean of urban education at Davenport University in
Grand Rapids, “How education reform exacerbates sexism”, The Hechinger Report,
http://hechingerreport.org/how-education-reform-exacerbates-sexism/) SJ

dismantling systems of patriarchy requires changing

The speakers at Rights4Girls reinforced the notion that
laws like those around prostitution, but it also demands the promotion of healthy forms of
masculinity. Likewise, ending harsh disciplinary school practices, inequitable funding structures,
and racist curricula demand we replace them with positive models. Protecting girls also requires
unlearning how we insidiously shame and abuse girls and women, including in schools, and it
requires an education reform strategy that is fundamentally different from what is offered
currently. If education reform isn’t specifically trying to replace systems of patriarchy and
white supremacy, what exactly are we doing? At the culminating speech of the DNC, the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton
said, “So let’s put ourselves in the shoes of young black and Latino men and women who face the effects of systemic racism, and are
made to feel like their lives are disposable.” Rights4Girls’ explicit efforts to replace patriarchy should be copied in education. It’s
become clear that “gap closing” isn’t a substantive goal. From New Orleans to Newark, we’ve learned there are too many nefarious
ways to close an achievement gap. We’ve
removed worker protections and fired majority women
teachers, in the name of closing gaps. We expel girls and boys of color, writing them off as
unavoidable casualties in the battle to close the gap. And we’ve funded and empowered white,
paternalistic organizations to implement these approaches. Addressing the root causes of racism, and, just as
important, sexism requires upending something far more fundamental than school autonomy and test-based accountability. It’s
time we stopped thinking that moving furniture in the same chauvinistic living room is the same
as extracting its sexist foundation. Rights4Girls’ example teaches me that education reform can be more a tool of
patriarchy and racism than a solution. We have to do more than put ourselves in the shoes of young black and Latino men and
women. We must hold ourselves accountable to ending patriarchy and systemic racism.

Attempts to include feminist ideology in state practices won’t work - WWC and
the UN proves
Gaard, G. (2015, April). Ecofeminism and climate change. In Women's Studies International
Forum (Vol. 49, pp. 20-33). Pergamon. Gaard was a UWRF Sustainability Faculty Fellow in spring
2011, Dr. Gaard is the current Coordinator for the Sustainability Faculty Fellows. Before coming
to River Falls, Gaard was an Associate Professor of Humanities at Western Washington
University in Bellingham, Washington (1997-2002) and an Associate Professor of Composition
and Women's Studies at the University of Minnesota-Duluth (1989-1997)

Although the “first stirrings” of women's environmental defense were introduced at the United
Nations 1985 conference in Nairobi, through news of India's Chipko movement involving
peasant women's defense of trees (their livelihood), women's role in planetary protection
became clearly articulated in November 1991, when the Women's Environment and
Development Organization (WEDO) organized the World Women's Congress for a Healthy Planet
in Miami, Florida (Resurrección, 2013; WEDO, 2012). Seen as an opportunity to build on the gains of the United Nations Decade
forWomen and to prepare a Women's Action Agenda for the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio
de Janeiro, the
World Women's Congress drew more than 1500 women from 83 countries. But
while its leaders alleged that the resulting “Women's Agenda 21” had been built through a
consensus process, for many of those sitting in attendance, listening to one elite speaker after
another, it was not clear how our views shaped or even contributed to this process of agenda-
formation. Participatory democracy—long a valued strategy in grassroots ecofeminist tactics—
was reduced to two dubious threads: a series of break-out discussion groups held throughout
the conference, and a “Report Card” for participants to take home and use to evaluate specific
issues within their communities and mobilize a local response (shaping the issues themselves
had no place on the report card). Along with other ecofeminists, I felt a mix of energy, dismay,
and frustration at this gathering.1 While the women leaders from many countries were valuable
participants and decision-makers in the upcoming conversations at the UN Conference on
Environment and Development, that weekend in Miami, too many speakers discussed women's
“feminine” gender roles, our “influence” on decision-makers, and the need for “reforms” to the
present system—all introduced and capped with the essentializing motto, “It's Time For Women
to Mother Earth.” Despite these flaws in rhetoric and democratic participation, WEDO's 1991
World Women's Congress has been hailed as the entry-point for feminism into the UN
conferences on the global environment, opening the way for later developments bridging
feminist interventions and activisms addressing climate change. The following year, UNCED's
Agenda 21 did not in fact include the most transformative recommendations from the Women's
Agenda 21—the analysis of environmental degradation as rooted in military/industrial/capitalist
economics, for example—or even the more reformist proposals such as implementing gender
equity on all UN panels, an issue which has been taken up again at the 2013 Council of the Parties (COP) for the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Warsaw, Poland (See Fig. 2). Perhaps WEDO's Women's
Agenda 21 had already been undermined by the 1987 report from the World Commission on
Environment and Development, Our Common Future, led by Brundtland, 1987. This report
established “sustainable development” as a desirable strategy, defined as “development that
meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet
their own needs”—which sounds reasonable enough, until one reads the document's renewed
call for continued economic growth on a finite planet, a fundamentally unsustainable endeavor.
The report completely omits discussion of the First World/North's2 over-development and its
high levels of production, consumption, and disregard for the environment (Agostino & Lizarde,
2012). Nonetheless, the Brundtland Report's “sustainable development” concept has shaped
climate change discourse for the subsequent decades, producing techno-solutions such as “the
green economy” that have perpetuated capitalist and colonialist strategies of privatization, and
fail to address root causes of the climate crisis (Pskowski, 2013). In the two decades since WEDO's Women's
Agenda 21, feminist involvement in global environmentalism has developed from a 1980–1990's focus on “women, environment and
development” (WED), “women in development” (WID) or “gender, environment and development” (GED) to an emphasis on
feminist political ecology in the 1990s–2000s (Goebel, 2004; MacGregor, 2010; Resurrección, 2013). Initially,
discussion of
women and environment focused on women in the global South, whose real material needs for
food security and productive agricultural land, forest resources, clean water and sanitation
trumped more structural discussions about gendered environmental discourses (i.e. Leonard,
1989; Sontheimer, 1991), although these structurally transformative elements were equally
present in other texts (i.e. Sen & Grown, 1987). The focus on women rather than gender tended
to construct women as victims of environmental degradation in need of rescue; their essential
closeness to nature, cultivated through family caregiving and through Fig. 1.subsistence labor, was
argued as providing women with special knowledge, and their agency as laborers and leaders in
environmental sustainability projects was advocated (Mies & Shiva, 1993; Shiva, 1989). Clearly,
this rhetoric instrumentalized women and ignored the cultural limitations of the woman-nature
linkage (cf. Dodd, 1997; Leach, 2007; Li, 1993); it was also significantly silent on the roles of men,
and the ways that gender as a system constructed economic and material resources that
produce “victims” (MacGregor, 2010; Resurrección, 2013). The shift to a “feminist political ecology”
(Goebel, 2004) involved a macro-level exploration of the problems of globalization and
colonization, a micro-level examination of local institutions for their environmental
management, a critique of marriage institutions for the ways these affect women's access to
natural resources, and an interrogation of the gendered aspects of space in terms of women's
mobility, labor, knowledge, and power. The shift from women as individuals to gender as a
system structuring power relations has been an important development in feminist responses to
climate change. Moving forward from this herstory, I bring an ecofeminist perspective to examine the ways that climate
change phenomena have been analyzed primarily from the standpoint of the environmental sciences and technologies, and how this
standpoint forecloses the kinds of solutions envisioned.3 I examine both liberal and cultural ecofeminist perspectives highlighting
the ways women have been both excluded from climate change policy discussions and disproportionately affected by climate
change phenomena, and summarize Fig. 2. Comparing Women's Agenda 21 (1991) and the UNCED Agenda 21 (1992). (Data source:
Brú Bistuer & Cabo, 2004). 22 G. Gaard / Women's Studies International Forum 49 (2015) 20–33 proposals drawing on women's
“special knowledge” and agency as decision-makers and leaders in solving the problems of climate change. Noting the popular utility
as well as the limitations of these perspectives, I examine both climate change phenomena and climate justice analyses. In
organizing this inquiry, I am inspired by feminist activist and scholar Charlotte Bunch, founder of Rutgers University's Center for
Women's Global Leadership, whose landmark essay, “Not by degrees: Feminist theory and education” (1979) proposes four tactical
steps for using feminist theory to understand situations, place them in a broader context, and evaluate possible courses of action.
Simply stated, Bunch's theory suggests we ask, what is the problem?, how did it originate?, what do we want?, and, how do we get
there?
 AT: Framework
1. Counter Interpretation: the affirmative wins the round if they have
proven a change that isn’t rooted in gender inequality and furthers the
disparities we see in the squo
2. Reasons to prefer:
a. Fairness: in a field dominated by men, their furthering of the
exclusion of women creates an unfair debate space in which
masculinity is perfered over femininity.
b. Inclusion: Their understanding of the debate round excludes
minorities that speak up about their oppression. This causes harm to
all debaters who aren’t hegemonically masculine by isolating them
from the activity
c. Policy making stifles change because of gender constraints
Schofield and Goodwin 10 (Tom and Susan, 2010, "," No
Publication, http://www.engagingmen.net/files/resources/2010/emmafulu/Public_policy-SchofieldGoodwin_2006.pdf)

The specificity of our approach to studying gender politics and gender equality in public policy
and institutions is well illustrated by comparison with the predominant approach. The latter is
informed by theories and methods developed mainly by political science, especially those used in international comparative analysis
of the policies and politics of nation states. The ongoing and large-scale study, established in 1995 by a transatlantic network of
scholars (Research Network on Gender Politics and the State) to explore “routes to feminist policy formation” in political institutions
(Mazur 2002), exemplifies this approach. Its main purpose is to explore whether, how and under what conditions women’s policy
machinery and women’s movement activism in policy making in Europe and North America are associated with achieving “positive
policy outcomes”1.. It
does so by examining correlations of policy outcomes and actions among a
range of players, including government and stakeholder officials (Research Network on Gender Politics and
Gender Politics and Public Policy Making - 3 the State – RNGPS 2005). On the basis of these findings the RNGS researchers suggest a
kind of taxonomy of the types of political alliances among women’s movement actors, women’s policy agencies and other
government players that can achieve “positive policy outcomes”. However, the study’s methodology does not permit the
researchers to explain why and how successful alliances develop to advance “positive policy outcomes”, and why and how they may
not. LouiseChappell’s (2002) study of gender politics in Australian and Canadian political
institutions is also informed by the methods and theories of political science. She draws strongly on
neo-institutionalist approaches to the state, examining the interplay of a number of state institutions over time and between two
polities, to determine how they influence feminist political action (Chappell 2002, 4-9). According to
Chappell, it is the
“gendering” of this interplay that creates opportunities for or constraints on feminist action.
Chappell argues that this derives from the operation of “gender norms”. But it is not clear exactly how
these influence political behaviour. One reason is that the meaning of “gender norms” is not fully elaborated in theoretical terms.
Sylvia Walby (2004, 8) has suggested that the lack of theoretical explanation is an inherent characteristic of the “gender norms”
approach generally. A
second reason is the absence of systematic empirical analysis of the
relationship between “norms” and the political action discussed. As a result, “gender norms”
and political action are connected as a correlation that implies a particular institutional gender
dynamic (or dynamics) by which the correlation is produced. Yet the dynamic (dynamics) itself is
not explored to explain exactly how and why particular “gender norms” and political actions are
linked and produced within institutions.