Revisiting Traditional Gender Identities in Disaster Response
Published: Nov 30, 2017
Photo: Prasad
Assam is one of India’s most flood prone regions. Women here are being prioritized by the state for livelihood restoration efforts and are being placed in decision making bodies to bring them into formal emergency preparedness activities.
Abstract: It is now widely acknowledged that when disasters occur, not all members of the ‘affected community’ are affected the same way. The earlier literature on gender and disasters over-emphasized women’s vulnerabilities in the aftermath of a disaster due to their care-giving roles. It did not consider the differential vulnerabilities of diverse groups of women based on their class, caste, race, age, occupation or sexual orientations. Similarly, men’s differential vulnerabilities were seldom discussed in the early literature on this subject. After disasters like the 2004 Tsunami and 2005 Hurricane Katrina however, the importance of the intersectionality of gender with race, occupation and class and other axes of social identity became more visible and discussed in the literature. This paper provides an overview of the literature on gender and disasters and calls for the need to nuance identity categories based on their intersectionality and multiplicity to achieve more sensitive and effective disaster responses.
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A crevasse is a deep, wedge-shaped opening in a glacier or ice sheet. Crevasses usually form in the top 50 m of a glacier, where the ice is brittle. Below that, a glacier is less brittle and can slide over uneven surfaces without cracking. The inflexible upper portion may split as it moves over the changing landscape.
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