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Outline

Gender Reverse Boot Camp in Madagascar

2022, Gender Reverse Bootcamp in Madagascar

https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.15670569

Abstract

Around the world, gender inequalities are striking. Men hold 50% more wealth than women, while 61% of the poorest people are women. The global gender pay gap stands at 19%, and women perform more than three-quarters of unpaid domestic work. Additionally, two-thirds of the world's illiterate population are women, and one-third of women have experienced physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime. These injustices are exacerbated by insufficient legislation: 67 countries do not consider domestic violence a crime, and 43 countries have no legislation regarding marital rape. The consequences of climate change also disproportionately affect women and girls, who make up 80% of climate-displaced persons. In developing countries, women constitute nearly 50% of the agricultural workforce, but only 13% of these female farmers own the land they cultivate. However, simply presenting these data does not engage men and women in the same way. We hypothesize that the experience of these injustices is primarily embodied in the victims, and that their physical experience is an essential prerequisite for an intimate and thus engaging understanding of the issue of inequalities conducive to action. In behavioral psychology, this phenomenon is roughly illustrated by the difference between procedural knowledge and declarative knowledge. To embody these data, we created an immersive role-reversal experiment (mainly involving the distribution of legislative power and reproductive labor with an unequally distributed currency system) with 20 young Malagasy member of a Youth wing (10 men and 10 women). For one week, they lived in a futuristic dystopia where, following global conflicts and climate disasters, women had "taken back" power and applied the same inequalities that exist today in Madagascar. Each day, workshop sessions allowed participants to "open the archives of the world before," confronting them with the real injustices of contemporary Madagascar amidst their fictional daily lives