Abstract: Common paradigms of water insecurity focus on material aspects and outcomes, for instance, piped infrastructure or bodily health. Definitions of water insecurity often engage with uses of water for domestic, productive, and industrial purposes. Considerable research foregrounds the ways that water insecurity is differentiated in terms of gender, age, socio-economic status, caste, or other axes of inequity, with varied outcomes for well-being and health. This chapter builds on recent work to propose an approach to gendered aspects of water insecurities that highlights non-material dimensions, enabling the consideration of gender and water insecurities otherwise. This perspective builds on an extended gender approach, as well as a relational understanding of water inspired by feminist, post-structural, post-humanist, and Indigenous theories and ontologies. Including these diverse understandings enables a consideration of gender and water insights more fully beyond the material. This chapter develops these ideas by moving through three interconnected currents/themes – 1) gendered notions of the self as linked with broader understandings of water, 2) water relations as fostering connections to place, landscape, and more-than-human beings and waterscapes, and 3) gendered and intersectional political engagements made possible through relationality with water.
Arriagada, E., Harris, L.M., Splichalova, D.V. (2024). Beyond material dimensions of water insecurity: Gendered subjectivities, senses of community, and renewed political possibilities. In T. Acevedo-Guerrero, L. Bossenbroek, I. Leonardelli, M. Zwarteveen, & S. Kulkarni (Ed.s) Routledge handbook of gender and water governance (pp. 388-400). Routledge.
The chapter is available open access via this link.