Gender, survival and self-respect: dimensions for agency for women within a poor rural Indo-Fijian community

Abstract

The overall aim of this study is to outline the major methodological and conceptual challenges to understanding poverty in Fiji from a gender perspective. This study has sought to go beyond previous poverty approaches used in Fiji by examining poverty and intra-household relations using Sen's capability approach. I examine how Sen's capability approach can be used to study one core and overarching feminist concern, namely gender inequality and domestic power imbalances in the context of poverty and well-being evaluations. The thesis is divided into two interrelated parts. The first part is an exploration of Sen's capability approach with emphasis on intra-household relations and its implications for a theoretical framework on gender inequality. The second part ofthe thesis is about Indo-Fijian women's lived experiences of poverty and the ways in which these experiences denote gendered dynamics of survival, forming the basis on which to test my central concerns. The premise of my argument is that while women may experience gendered poverty as part of the capability failure, they never fail to utilise their agential capacities in their daily struggles of survival and fight against poverty and patriarchy. It is only through grounded analyses like this study that issues of agency can be meaningfully assessed, because it is only at that level that the context, content, and consequences of choice can be understood and interpreted. Women in traditional societies are likely to make choices which are essentially disempowering and also detrimental to their economic well-being. This is because deeply entrenched rules, norms and practices often influence women's behaviour, define values and shape their choices. The understanding of agency informing the capability approach in this research is qualified by being anchored within an institutional understanding of the conditions of choice (i.e. structures of constraint) and participant's situational accounts of choice and their agential capacities.