Wedlock or deadlock? Feminists’ attempts to engage irrigation engineers

Irrigation truly is a men’s world. Rights to water and irrigated land are mostly vested in men, and decisionmaking about irrigation is likewise dominated by men. Ways of speaking and thinking about irrigation can also be characterized as masculine in that they render the work and activities of women invisible, and denote the analysis of social and gender relations as irrelevant. The irrigation profession is also masculine: most irrigation professionals are men, and professionality is associated with masculinity. The ‘maleness’ or masculinity of irrigation is not the natural order of things, nor (necessarily) the most desirable or efficient way of organizing the irrigation world. Instead, irrigation has been discursively, culturally and ideologically constructed as a male domain, technology and profession. Through this construction, irrigation is provided with a special status. Professional irrigation discourses, understood as particular truths and representations shaped by specific conjunctions of knowledge and power, lend support to this construction by identifying appropriate and legitimate ways of practicing irrigation as well as of speaking and thinking about it. Showing that this is so, and in doing so challenging the conventional ways in which irrigation is conceived and defined, is an important part of what this thesis is about. It is based on the recognition that language and meanings constitute one important
field of (feminist) politics and power. The pre-occupation of the book, therefore, is with how different conceptual schemes and theoretical languages, seen as specific ways of looking at and ordering irrigation realities reflecting specific concerns, priorities and interests, visualize women and allow questioning gender relations. [authors abstract]