Gender, Power, and Non-Governance: Is Female to Male as NGO Is to State?

INTRODUCTION

Is Female to Male as NGO Is to State?

Andria D. Timmer, Christopher Loy, and Elizabeth Wirtz

What is the relation of the State to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and are these relationships gendered? Drawing inspiration from Sherry Ortner’s influential contribution to feminist anthropology, Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture? (1974), this volume asks if a similar analogy could be used to interrogate the relationship between nongovernmental organizations and the State: Is female to male as NGO is to State? That is, are the same power relationships that maintain a male/female dichotomy, despite the blurred boundaries between the two categories, evident in the ambiguous division between NGO and State (Bernal and Grewal 2014)? The contributors to this volume provide case studies of nongovernmental organizations throughout the world to exemplify how the NGO/State dichotomy is one that is maintained, strengthened, and contested through normative understandings of NGOs as feminized and the State as masculine. Through analyses that explore the analogy posed here, the ethnographies demonstrate that the complex NGO/State relationship is one that can be understood as a power relationship; one that is constructed similarly to gendered power relationships. This is not to say that NGOs are female and States are male; rather, we explore the in-betweenness of male/female, State/NGO and argue that the unbounded categories are hegemonically bounded in very similar ways.

Posing the question (Is Female to Male as NGO is to the State?) does not presuppose an answer and certainly not that the answer is yes. However, asking the question catalyzes several strands of productive analyses to help scholars uncover, rethink, or recognize certain identifying aspects of NGOs. Putting these two concepts—governance and gender—together in Ortner’s structuralist binary opposition allows scholars to reconceptualize a key inquiry within NGO studies: power dynamics inherent to the NGO/State relationship. Exploring Ortner’s classic analogy also allows us to uncover the myriad ways in which the NGO form (Bernal and Grewal 2014) is feminized, alongside parallel ways in which the State is masculinized (e.g., Heng and Devan 1995; Hofstede 1998; Mackinnon 1989). Asking the question also provides a heuristic for recognizing emerging discoveries within NGO studies, such as what Liisa Malkki (2015) refers to as the domestic arts of women’s labor. Further, as chapters in this volume demonstrate, highlighting culturally constructed dichotomies such as male/female and State/NGO also allows scholars to deconstruct binaries inherent to these symbolic representations.

Gender and Power

The analogy posed by Ortner is representative of the structuralist analyses employed by many anthropologists of the time (e.g., Douglas 1966; Lévi-Strauss 1969; Sahlins 1981). She asserts that the universal inequality between the sexes is underwritten by a cultural logic that devalues women due to their symbolic association with nature, whereas men are valued due to their (also symbolic) association with culture. Given the gender disparities in political and economic power that continue to exist globally (Inglehart and Norris 2003; Ortiz-Ospina and Roser 2018), seeking a universal explanation is a reasonable endeavor. That said, the simplistic outlying of x versus y belies the complexity of the relationships between the variables. In other words, the essentialisms that anchor Ortner’s analogy (female/male, nature/culture) are merely starting points for, not the ultimate conclusion of, her analysis.

Feminist anthropology has made great strides in reformulating concepts of gender since Ortner’s original proposition of power and the sexes in a number of fundamental ways. First, the very categories male and female demonstrate more of a Western cultural model of bodily differences than a reflection of human biological diversity (Fausto-Sterling 2000a, 2000b). Biological sex is recast as a more complex process of determining normative markers of reproductive organs and hormonal levels that belies binary categorization and complicates efforts to categorize human biological sex altogether. Second, gender is no longer seen as simply the social roles that are applied to and enacted by biologically sexed individuals. That is, gender is not simply a social concept that is overlaid onto sex. Rather, gender is recast as a cultural system of meaning that reflects cultural representations of difference. Anthropologists have long noted that many cultures, past and present, have cultural representations of gender that extend far beyond the binary of man and woman (Brettell and Sargent 2017; Kulik 1998; Nanda 1998). Gender is not only a culturally created social role, but also a process of subject making and identity formation. Third, feminist scholars have decoupled gendered social roles (i.e., man and woman) from a much broader system of gendered attributes—masculine and feminine. Essentially, male, man, and masculinity (and conversely female, woman, femininity), while associated conceptually, need not be enacted in parallel manners. For example, a human assigned female sex can have a social role man and behave in a combination of masculine and feminine ways. All these categories articulate with one another, yet also demonstrate that gender is a project that is complicated and often contradictory.

Despite the growing understanding in both popular culture and scholarship that gender is nonbinary, the performative aspect of gender still aligns individuals into two discrete categories (West and Zimmerman 1987). As Judith Butler well articulates, individuals do not have bodily autonomy in that the body has its invariably public dimension, constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is mine and not mine (2004: 21). That is, bodies are publicly surveilled and inscribed a gendered social meaning. Moreover, the act of doing gender, engaging in social interactions that reproduce gender differences (Deutsch 2007; West and Zimmerman 1987), is attributed to nonhuman entities as well. As gendered attributes have meaning outside of the human biological body, they are also assigned not only to people but to many other aspects of our natural world, such as animals, birds, insects, environmental elements, colors, sounds, clothing, and buildings. Researchers have found that there is a tendency to ascribe gender to inanimate and animate objects that are objectively genderless (Boroditsy, Schmidt, and Phillips 2003; Grohmann 2009; Wilkie and Bodenhausen 2012). Gendered attributes are associated with intangible concepts as well—deities, symbols, and even institutions and organizations. That is, an institution can be gendered female or male regardless of the biological sex of the members within that institution.

Gender is a complex process in which differences in bodies, behavior, and (in)tangible concepts are assigned meaning in the form of gendered attributes. But gendered attributes do not simply describe difference. Masculine and feminine are not only situated as different but inherently unequal. Male and female, as iterations of the culture/nature dichotomy, are culturally elaborated through the production of a masculine model that is different from the feminine. The constructions are characterized by a fundamental, universal inequality: not only does woman not equal man, but they are situated as fundamentally unequal. Ortner’s 1974 analysis entails a complexity that seethes under its analogic elegance. Her critique transforms the apparent naturalistic universals into artifacts of cultural and power. As such, her analogy serves as a jumping off point for a more nuanced and provocative analysis of gender and culture.

Our reformulation of Ortner’s analogy is offered in the same spirit as her critique: as a heuristic that serves as an entry point for a broader investigation into the cultural work that goes into framing and mediating the relationship between NGOs and States. In the course of this volume, we problematize a static notion of either while maintaining that there is a widely perceived difference between government and NGO functions and endeavors. The ethnographic inquiries presented in this volume expose the complexity and nondichotomous ways of being and living. Humans do not live their lives in binaries, but cultures do produce dichotomous symbols, categories, and schema that influence how we understand ourselves and the world around us (Geertz 1973; Goodenough 1981; Hofstede 1998; Inglehart and Norris 2003; Kroeber 1952; Sharifian 2010). Humans (anthropologists included) identify and understand the unboundedness and complexity of reality through categorical representations. These imaginaries are powerful in that they shape how we approach the world. Our perceptions of reality, mediated by categorization, influence our thoughts and behaviors and, therefore, the construction of our reality.

(Non) Governance

Before we delve further into the explication of the analogy we are using to frame this analysis, it is important to situate NGOs as our subjects of study. Voluntary organizing to confront local issues of, for instance, poverty, illiteracy, environmental degradation, State overreach (or underreach) has long been an attractive site of study for commentators interested in culturally situated responses (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; Hann and Dunn 1996; Herbert 2017; Prato 2016; Rutherford 2004). For political scientists interested in civil society as a social phenomenon, these organizations appeared to be vital for the development of robust democratic institutions (e.g., Keane 1998). Yet, as Arjun Appadurai argues, democracy is characterized by a paradox whereby democracy as a mode of governance is profoundly anchored to the Westphalian Nation-State. At the same time, democracy as a set of values only makes sense as a universal, that is, as a mode of governance deployed globally (Appadurai 2001: 42). Given that Western-styled civil society institutions, understood to be an important countervailing force to antidemocratic statist tendencies, were not present in all nations, interested parties in the US sought to find ways to create or strengthen civil society organizations abroad by leveraging existing international aid organizations, like USAID (Hearn 2001; Ottaway and Carothers 2000; van Rooy 2013. The hope was that by creating, some would say imposing (see Ferguson 2014), civil society institutions in Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, the people themselves would become empowered to address social problems that Nation-States could not, or would not, address. As Cold War divisions unwound, neoliberal interests, ignoring the centrality of both voluntary and social in the definition of civil society, began to couple private property and freedom from regulation to notions of civil society (Fukuyama 2003).

Civil society is often constituted through the establishment of nongovernmental organizations. There is no consensus within the NGO-world or among scholars as to what constitutes a nongovernmental organization. The term and institutional structure, although by no means new at this time, came into vogue in the 1980–90s, a period of time called the NGO boom (Agg 2006; Alvarez 1999) or NGO fever (Bernal 2017). The rise in nongovernmetalism is often associated with the end of Sovietism and the fall of the Iron Curtain as well as the establishment of neoliberal development models in the 1980s in the Global South. During this time, organizational structures emerged from the civil sector—defined as the realm of organized social life that is voluntary, self-generating, (largely) self-supporting, autonomous from the State, and bound by legal order (Diamond 1994: 5)—bearing the designator NGO increased both in number and scope throughout the world. This time also saw a great proliferation in transnational advocacy organizations, which arose due to the emergence of a global public, a civil society. Not insignificantly, as Keck and Sikkink (1998) point out, many of these transnational organizations emerged from historical movements such as women’s suffrage and developed to address global women’s rights.

The development of a third sector of civil action in society is idiomatic of the era of transition in the post-Cold War/neoliberal era. During this time, especially in post-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe but also in the Global South, a number of NGOs formed with the specific goal of increasing democratic capacity in potential democracies. They rose in part due to the opening of spaces in which people could act in civic ways outside of the government. In the Soviet world, activities that were the purview of the bureaucratic State before 1989 were privatized and later marketized. This is especially true regarding care for marginalized people. Lynne Haney (2002), for example, explains how the needs of the poor, especially poor women, transferred from the State to private and civic entities throughout Soviet-era and post-Soviet Hungary. Accordingly, the post-Cold War era is characterized by a marked rise in civic, activist, and humanitarian organizations. Outside of the post-Soviet world, NGOs proliferated as a response to what many Western nations saw as the incompetence and corruption of newly formed nations in the postcolonial new world order. NGOs developed to presumably foster democracy and, as such, receive aid from Western governments that had originally been given to other governments but had shifted to fund newly formed NGOs, further undermining and potentially weakening nascent States. International aid to NGOs was seen as a civilizing endeavor through which Western values could be introduced and integrated into third world communities.

As a result of this specific history, NGOs are associated with democratic ways and being and acting because they are perceived to be grassroots, horizontally structured organizations that seek to benefit an underserved beneficiary group (Ferguson and Gupta 2002). They rose to prominence during a time of the expansion of Western styles of liberal democracy. It is for this reason that much of the early scholarship, what Vannier and Lashaw (2017) call the first generation of NGO studies, lauds their democratic power and ability to do good (Anderson 1999; Fisher 1997). Hardt and Negri, for example, identify NGOs as some of the most powerful pacific weapons of the new world order (2000: 36). As the field of study has matured and entered the second generation (Vannier and Lashaw 2017), however, researchers have recognized that there is nothing inherently democratic (or good) about NGOs. Rather, they tend to mirror the hierarchies found in the neoliberal States within which they work in that they function through elitism, are unaccountable to anybody except to their donor, and are distanced from those they seek to serve. NGO actors uphold themselves as, and may believe themselves to be, prime movers of social change but are in fact handmaidens of neoliberalism (Barnett and Weiss 2008; Donini 2008; Edwards and Hulme 1996; Gunewardena 2008; Harvey 2005; Hulme and Edwards 1997; Kamat 2002; Schuller 2012; Wallace 2009).

The Many Faces of NGOs

As this above discussion highlights, NGO describes and encapsulates many different organizational forms. On the one hand, for example, are GONGOs, or government-organized NGOs, which explicitly carry out the ideological and material directives of the State. On the other hand, NGO can also describe activist grassroots organizations that seek to subvert State or corporate power. NGOs can be expansive entities with a global reach, or they can be a neighborhood collaboration. And, of course, there are many intermediate positions between these extremes. Despite the inherent messiness of this site of engagement, Lewis and Schuller (2017) posit that the study of NGOs is important and productive precisely because of the analytical instability of these organizations. Studying NGOs requires us to ask such questions as: (1) How are such disparate entities understood as being the same? (2) What is the salience of the NGO form to the structure of society? And (3) who are the actors in (beneficiaries) and of (benefactors) any NGO work? In this volume, we take up these questions by looking at how the NGO sector of society is understood as a bounded form outside of the State. Our intention here is not to draw the boundaries between NGO and State but rather to explore the tension that exists at these boundaries. First, it is necessary to explore where the border is typically drawn. Although usually defined by negation, what they are not, organizations so defined are expected to look and act a certain way.

Since the 1990s, NGOs have become major players and expected contributors in national and global politics (Bernal and Grewal 2014: 1). Accordingly, they have captured the interest of social scientists, particularly anthropologists. However, despite, or perhaps because of, their ubiquity and increasing global, social, and political importance, NGOs remain poorly understood (Fisher 1997; Leve and Karim 2001; Lewis and Schuller 2017). NGO is in practice an ambiguous, catch-all category. A rather bland, cookie-cutter definition posits NGOs as that which they are not—they are not governmental and not for profit. This definition, while technically accurate, falls short of grasping the complexity and nuance of what occurs in the NGO sphere of activity. Therefore, there must be some positive characterization that cognitively ties all organizations designated NGO together.

Despite the vast differences in outcomes, intended or otherwise, of NGO work, NGOs—which bears repeating are a Western concept, created and defined as binary opposite to the Westphalian State—are understood as doing good. In order to maintain their mantle of good, NGOs must perform as moral actors by helping, advocating, mobilizing, and channeling resources for those understood as in need (Sampson 2017: 9). This presupposes the question, what good for whom? How is the goodness of the project revealed? In his analysis of Ainu organizations in Japan, Christopher Loy (this volume) uses Gayatri Spivak’s (1990) concept of strategic essentialism to explain how NGOs must continually reframe themselves using essentialist classifications in order to strategically position themselves to do their work. This can be broadly applied to the moral project of nongovernmentalism as well. It is not so much that NGOs do good but that they are essentially qualified as representing some kind of moral good and as such are tasked with the function of being good, and they strategically align themselves as such. The project of morality is not straightforward, but rather is entangled with various other actors and institutions. Briefly, these include entanglements with the State, donors, other NGOs and social activist groups, and the ostensible target populations (Sampson 2017). A plethora of ethnographic studies have cast a critical eye on the goal of doing good and highlight the uneasy relationship between NGOs and neoliberalism (Fisher 1997; Mertz and Timmer 2010; Sampson 2017). However, none of this critique has taken away from the association between nongovernmentalism and the moral good. Those involved in this work do so because they want to make a positive change in the world. Altman in this volume, for example, explains how and why individuals engage in volunteer work and argues that many of the women involved in humanitarian work speak of the need to be neighborly to support the community. Thus, they clearly position themselves as moral actors.

Despite the wealth of scholarship, it is still necessary to scrutinize the perception that NGOs are doing good. In his introduction to the volume Cultures of Doing Good, Steven Sampson characterizes the world of NGOs as the world of doing good (2017: 9) in that such organizations are perceived as having humanitarian aims. Those working within NGOs believe strongly in their mission, which is often to serve underserved populations. NGOs provide food to the hungry, wigs to children undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, and advocacy for migrants. They do work that, prior to the establishment of a formalized third sector, belonged to churches or women’s groups (Barnett 2011; Keck and Sikkink 1998). They work with invisible populations such as members of the LGBTQ+ community (Pimentel; Shirinian), the aging (Crampton), or ostracized minorities (Timmer; Wirtz). It is precisely because of their association with a moral project that NGOs are under more scrutiny than governmental and for-profit enterprises from the public, the government, and donor agencies. Donors expect their monies to go to the beneficiaries and may cry corruption when money goes to infrastructural needs like rent and salaries.

Much scholarship on NGOs remains focused on this question of the inherent goodness of NGO interventions, or labeling those that do not accomplish their presumed good works as morally bankrupt or corrupt. It is not our intention to critique their claims to morality but rather to question the work that any such association is doing. Ortner’s heuristic enables us to recast this discussion away from evaluating claims of morality as such to interrogating the conceptual structures that produce binaries in the first place. Regardless of if NGOs are doing good, the fact that they are assumed to do so is a great salience in their conceptualization.

Gendering Governance

In this volume, we argue that although the NGO/State division is as muddy as the female/male one, notions, which come from broader publics as well as researchers, practitioners, and beneficiaries, of what differentiates the two entities is profoundly gendered. To make this argument, we draw upon the foundational and important collection edited by Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal (2014): Theorizing NGOs. In their introduction to the volume, Bernal and Grewal assert that although the NGO form is almost impossible to delimit, the definition of what constitutes an NGO is profoundly gendered (2014: 3). It is so gendered primarily because feminist issues are often relegated to the NGO sphere of activity and because women are greatly represented as employees, volunteers, and beneficiaries in and of the NGO form. Our focus here is on the manner in which NGOs are more often than not subordinate to states due in part to their alignment with the category of female.

As the contributors to this volume show, organizations labeled NGO function separately from the state, even if they are doing similar work or act in State-like ways. Not only are they functionally and discursively distinct, but they are, in many cases, conceived of as lesser than, as evidenced by the general devaluation of NGO work in terms of pay, prestige, power, and the relative valorization of statists projects (Sampson 2017). Scholars of NGOs have noted that women are greatly over-represented as employees, volunteers, and beneficiaries in and of the NGO interventions in this nongovernmental sphere of activity (Bernal and Grewal 2014; Helms 2014; Stromquist 2011). The works represented in this volume explore the femaleness of NGOs, discuss the relative invisibility of NGO activity as a result of this association, and interrogate the convergence of State and NGO operations and the tensions between them in a variety of different geographical locations, projects, and typologies. A gendered analysis of State/non-State provides a useful lens with which to interrogate what Leve and Karim (2001) call the privatization of the State. Neoliberal policies that characterize the current era of governance are marked by an expansion of the masculinized arms of the state such as the armed forces, border patrols, and national security with a corresponding contraction of feminized arms such as education, health care, and social aid. When those arms that are deemed nurturing (or feminine) are reduced, nongovernmental organizations mobilize to fill the gaps, particularly in weak or repressive states. States’ reduced activity in these arenas indicate that they do not see such feminized aspects of governance as valuable, a further example of the devaluation of femininity. While NGOs and state organizations may be two sides of the same coin, a gendered analysis helps to understand how they function in distinct manners and how they are perceived differently.

Man the State, Woman the NGO

The State, as we use the term in this volume, refers to administrative bodies of governance. Governance has long been gendered male as positions of power are held by, defined by, and associated with men (Conway 2008). Globally, positions of power have been primarily held by white, cisgender, heterosexual men. Although the gender balance has been shifting, the inclusion of more women into positions of power does not necessarily upset the masculinity of the state because institutions of governance are still associated with men and centered around notions of masculinity (Heng and Devan 1995; MacKinnon 1989). That is, even as more women hold elected positions and enter governing roles, they are still held to expectations and operate in an environment centered on white masculinity. Moreover, the state is associated with masculinity in that it often takes on functions of governance that are seen as active and involve a demonstrable display of dominance. This includes maintaining armed forces, creating and maintaining civilian law enforcement and judicial systems, conferring citizenship, protecting the borders, and establishing the authority of the nation. As Ortner (1974) explains, these actions are gendered male because they are associated with culture, which is controlling, rather than nature, the controlled.

The patriarchal functions of the state are largely accepted as inevitable, such that, by design, governing bodies engage in policies that favor men because they are dominated by, centered around, and defined by men or masculine ideologies (Hofstede 1998; Olufemi 2020). This hegemonic masculinity is not dependent on a static definition of masculinity, but rather that which is masculine is negotiated through the interplay and gender relations of all members in society and all genders (Connell 1995; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). It is simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practice through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices on bodily experience, personality, and culture (Connell 1995: 71). However, even without a predetermined definition, that which is masculine occupies the seat of power and acts in a manner that maintains sexist oppression, exposing how it helps to extend control over our bodies, a control that is relentlessly justified as necessary (Olufemi 2020: 22–23).

The authors in this volume reject the premise that NGOs’ association with femininity necessary aligns them with subservience. This is a specious notion rooted in our categories that align femininity with weakness. However, we contend that a powerful NGO no more upsets the State/non-State relationship than a woman in a position of leadership upends patriarchal institutions. We ask what aspects of governance can be revealed by extending Ortner’s metaphor (masculine/State/powerful versus feminine/NGO/subservient)? That is, despite very fuzzy boundaries, does the same discursive work that categorically separates male and female operate to maintain a division between State and NGO?

There are many examples of powerful NGOs. In places like Haiti (Schuller this vol.), NGO positions often pay higher salaries and have more prestige associated with them than government ones. Rebecca Warne Peters (2016) discusses the professionalization of NGO work in many developing countries where this work is often the only work available and is therefore highly appealing to the professional class. Similarly, Alexandra Crampton (this vol.) explains how as attention to elderly care increased globally, NGOs working with aging populations became more visible and assertive, acting in more masculine (i.e., State-like) ways. In states that are often categorized as weak, NGOs are doing work that has largely been abandoned by the state either because the state does not have the capacity or does not have the desire to engage in such work. NGOs that are powerful vis-à-vis the state might engage in forms of governance, but they ultimately do not have the power to create and enact legislation, deploy the military, uphold order, or enter into treaties with governments or international governing bodies. Therefore, even if they have more prestige, their ability to engage in governance is limited. This is why, for example, Schuller argues that state actors perform drag in Haiti in order to garner the prestige of NGOs to enforce the power of the State. The actors and labor associated with nongovernmentalism are still often deemed feminine, even as they act in more culturally assigned masculine ways.

Many authors have shown that NGOs often act in State-like ways but are still perceived distinct from the State, and the difference is hierarchical. That is, NGOs are decidedly unequal to and lesser than the State. The title to this book and the NGO/State formulation sets up a binary, and, of course, any binary is inherently flawed and an imperfect device for understanding nuance, but dichotomies shape many cultural constructs. We do not accept this binary as a given but instead ask what cognitive processes maintain the divide between NGO and State and assign NGO efforts, which are often humanitarian, as lesser than, and what the effects are of this conceptualized dichotomy. The masculine State controls bodies, conquers, and exerts judicial and police power. As the organizations that run counter to State efforts or fill in the gaps where the State has withdrawn, nongovernmental agencies by default and design are defined more by their nurturing role. Several chapters in this volume, for example, highlight the manner in which NGOs are expected to do the nurturing work for those left out of the State project, such as the Roma (Timmer), indigenous peoples (Loy), refugees (Altman; Wirtz), and LGBTQ+ individuals (Shirinian; Pimentel).

The correlation of NGOs with the feminine is made even more apparent when looking at the issues of inequity in salary, prestige, and job security with NGO work. Evidence of the devaluation of the NGO sector is apparent in the notorious low-pay, high-stress, and low-prestige work environment. It is not by accident that the work force is largely skewed female. As many authors in this volume point out, women are more likely to take up the call of humanitarian work either because they have what is seen as the necessary personality (Yang), have more time for low or unpaid work (Reinke), or because they are women serving women, who are more likely to be the recipients of NGO aid than men (Panda and Pandey; Schuller). Contributors to this volume use Ortner’s suppositions regarding the genders as a salient point to begin exploring the characteristics, function, and differential variations of States and NGOs as well as the formal and informal relationships between them.

Divisions of Labor

The assumed division between the masculinity of the state and the femininity of NGOs can be explained further by delving into the pervasive notions of a gendered division of labor. The intersection of gender with labor has long been recognized and theorized in anthropology (Collins 2003; Freeman 2000; Mills 2003; Ong 1991). That said, the analytical distinction between gender and sex has not always been so clear. Once considered nearly conterminous with sex, gendered domains of labor have been characterized by spatial separation and biological imperatives (Reiter 1975; Rosaldo 1974). In Making Gender: The Politics and Erotic of Culture (1997), Ortner reflected on her own conflation of sex and gender in her original article. Gender as identity, lived experience, and performance is generally understood to be a product of discourse and power and is highly variable across cultures and histories (Butler 1990; Mills 2016). Beyond bodies, gender as a cultural formation has the potential to shape economic activity through plotting different domains of work, and even divisions of realms of human activity (public/private), along a feminine/masculine spectrum. There is a critical tradition in feminist anthropology that attends to the social production of value hierarchies that map to (equally socially produced) gender divisions, rendering a tautological relationship between low-value work and low-value people (Wright 2006). Feminized occupations, often occupied by both women and men, were once characterized by the production of inexpensive commodities—for example, food, textiles, and light manufacturing. Today they extend into various domains of knowledge work: data entry, clerical, and call center work (Freeman 2000; Patel 2010).

As noted above, feminized labor is often invested in some form of care. Feeding, cleaning, healing, teaching, and other activities that allow for individual, household, or community reproduction are typically deemed feminized labor. Even when not explicitly care work, however, women are more likely to be called upon to engage in emotional labor (Hochschild 1983). Women’s emotional labor, argues Hochschild, is expected because women in general have far less independent access to money, power, authority, or status in society (1983: 163). Women are expected to show deference, be adaptive, and have a managed heart (Zhan this vol.). The relegation of activities such as care work and emotional labor to the women’s domain is often explained in terms of the public/private dichotomy in which women’s work occurs in the private (domestic) sphere and men’s work takes place in the public sphere. Nelly Stromquist argues that the association with the private could be of benefit to women’s NGOs in that their sensitivity to and knowledge of the private sphere has enabled such groups to have expanded the view of the political, going beyond electoral politics and the politics of public office to include the power and powerlessness that exists at the micro level in intimate relationships and the household (2011: 182–83). Many of the contributors to this volume provide compelling examples of how an association with women that leverages women’s nurturing roles can give an organization or a movement political power and might (e.g., Panda and Pandey). Still others, however, contend that due to their presumed feminine qualities, NGOs often struggle with the same fights for visibility that women do (e.g., Reinke).

NGOs do highly public advocacy and activist work, but to the extent that private, household activities need to be done, they more often than not fall to the nongovernmental sector of society. Liisa Malkki asserts that many aspects of "internationalist humanitarian imagination and practice were remarkably domestic—in two senses" (2015: 3). Aid work is very often literally domestic in that it involves practices of care undertaken de facto by women and/or in the home—prototypically, nursing, cleaning, and caring for the young, the old,