Strategic essentialism, instrumentalism, and advocacy for women’s leadership: Exploring the approaches of Vanuatu women’s organisations

Overview

Gender myths – including essentialist and instrumentalist framings – can inspire action, but they can also perpetuate stereotypes and reinforce gender roles and norms. In this paper, I use Gayatri Spivak’s concept of strategic essentialism to explore how women’s organisations in Vanuatu navigate the advantages and risks of using essentialist and instrumentalist framings in their advocacy for women’s leadership and participation in decision-making. I draw on fieldwork and interviews with 26 staff and programme participants. Particularly, I highlight a case example of a women’s organisation that worked with local chiefs to endorse women candidates in the national election. I show how ni-Vanuatu young women and local women’s organisation staff perceive the deployment of essentialist and instrumentalist framings as critical in the short-term. They assess that these framings can resonate with the views and values of community members and leaders, with awareness that more explicit arguments for gender equality might provoke resistance. Once they have built support and positive relationships with community members and leaders, there is potential to gradually shift to framings that are more explicitly feminist, including arguments for gender-equitable representation. I suggest that this pragmatic approach – using framings that resonate in the short-term, and more explicit arguments for gender equality in the longer-term – could be instructive for feminist advocates who operate in contexts where male resistance and patriarchal backlash is on the rise.