The Nature of Gender – Andrea Nightingale
In Andrea Nightingale’s approach to understanding the nature to gender divide, she focuses on the female’s interaction with environmental issues. Based on the views of some anthropologists, there are a few ways to go about defining gender. Nightingale chooses to define gender as a process rather than an assigned role by a social structure. She explores instances that involve social injustice and inequality which result in certain gender roles being established. In order to fully understand the process, she includes 3 reviews of written works that describe different definitions of gender including natural, essentialist, and materialist. Given these works, Nightingale concludes that more work needs to be done to investigate on “how gender and the environment are mutually constituted”. Instead of separating conversations about social structures and then looking at how they affect gender roles, these need to be studied in a more inclusive way. Although Nighdale’s analysis focuses on gender related to environmental issues and projects, the dialogue regarding social construct easily relates to the women in pre and postmodern Japanese society. In Chizuko Ueno’s, “The Position of Japanese Women Reconsidered”, she explains the shift in women’s roles can be seen as biased, but are not as repressive as history might allude. With the modernization of Japan, many believe that they were liberated, but in agricultural social structures, women were seen as the head of the household. Industrialization pushed these structures out slowly and the woman was then considered as part of the workforce to compensate for a previous lack of work. This is an interesting contrast to Nightingale’s work because instead of a struggle redefining the roles, the progress of Japan proved to accomplish the opposite (Ueno 1987).
From Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 24, no. 2 (2006): 165-185. Used by permission of Pion Ltd., London (www.pion.co.uk and www.envplan.com)
