Fluid lives: subjectivities, gender and water in rural Bangladesh

Challenges to Water Security along the “Emerald Coast”: A Political Ecology of Local Water Governance in Nicaragua

“…For example, national water laws mediate the experience of "local" water use, access, and distribution; these laws thus merit attention even in contexts that appear insulated from national legislation and political governing centers, as is often the case for rural settings. Moreover, and as this article demonstrates, situations of water insecurity are not always defined by the physical amount of water available via natural processes, but are more often the result of a convergence of issues reflecting power dynamics and relations based upon race, ethnicity, gender, class and/or political systems [5,[12][13][14][15][16].…”

Between Stagnancy and Affluence: Reinterpreting Water Poverty and Domestic Flows in Delhi, India

“…But the change with even wider scope, affecting long-and short-term residents, was that women became mobile in the economic flows of outside work. Sultana (2009) examines the fluidity of water in Bangladesh between women's physical spatial mobility and patriarchal social norms in a way that understands spatial and social realities as products of each other. Sultana (2009) argues that in everyday life in Bangladesh, the negotiation of water conflicts involves discourse that resurrects and reshapes gendered identities, which consequentially reinforce and challenge gendered access to water.…”

“…Sultana (2009) examines the fluidity of water in Bangladesh between women's physical spatial mobility and patriarchal social norms in a way that understands spatial and social realities as products of each other. Sultana (2009) argues that in everyday life in Bangladesh, the negotiation of water conflicts involves discourse that resurrects and reshapes gendered identities, which consequentially reinforce and challenge gendered access to water. By reading Sultana's argument of social and spatial fluidity into the context of the basti, anxieties around the expansion of gendered spaces and identities find expression in the narratives of illegitimate water access.…”

“…Scholars in several fields have investigated this relationship, though particular insight has come from literatures that critically examine the link between intersectional subjectivities and developmental processes. This article draws from understandings of the way gender is made through water, expanding on the applications of Sultana's (2009) argument of social and spatial fluidity and O'Reilly's (2006) mutual construction of meanings of women and water. It elucidates the spatiotemporal rhythms of fluidity of women and water access, tracking how universalistic narratives of economic development are paralleled within the community but marked by a critical emphasis on the imbedded informality of state-led development.…”

Determination of Safe Carrying Load Limit for Women Carrying Water

“…Physical loading of the body within an individual's capacity for adaptive responses may lead to tissue strengthening; however, frequent loading beyond capacity for adaptation or repair may lead to injury through fatigue failure, accumulation of fatigue damage [5] or early degenerative changes in bone and soft tissues [6]. However, water carrying is a physical activity and assumptions have been made that water carrying is detrimental to health and associated with musculoskeletal disorders, such as spinal pain or other joint problems [7,8]. Such assumptions are supported by strong evidence that the physical demands of work such as handling heavy materials, bending, twisting and lifting, are risk factors for onset of simple low back pain [5,9] and other musculoskeletal disorders [10,11].…”