The 4th CHUSS Seminar interrogated the context in which Women Members of Parliament (MPs) operate in the day to day processes of parliament, exploring every day parliamentary contexts that necessitate the selection of men to speak to gender issues on behalf of women.

In a study entitled: Madam Speaker, these are colleagues who are learning to speak, can I allow them to speak?”: Gendered performances and ethnographic observations in the Parliament of Uganda, Amon Ashaba Mwiine, a member of staff at the School and a PhD candidate at Stellenbosch University, South Africa argued that gender was a key salient variable in the control of parliamentary floor proceedings.

This ethnographic study draws on feminist theories of gender performativity and the sociology of everyday life and gives insights into gender relations in parliament, especially the extent to which MPs especially males control what goes on during parliamentary debates.

A cross section of participants during the 4th Chuss Seminar Series

In his presentation, Mwiine observed that practices such as bullying, heckling and infantilization of women MPs by men often play out on the floor of parliament. He argued these everyday interactions between women and male MPs are often taken for granted yet when they are repeatedly enacted, and re-enacted, they become ‘stylized into gendered modes’ and consequently acceptable ways of public conduct in parliament.

Mwiine argued that such repeated sociological interactions which in the long-run congeal into a masculine institutional culture can be seen as gender policing practices which make it difficult for women who are constituted in mundane ways, as weak, inaudible and in need of men's protection, to present and debate ideas particularly on women's rights. In effect, these practices reproduce gender binaries, constituting women as intruders in parliament and men as ‘natural' actors in parliament. It is through such gendered relational dynamics which regulate how women ought to speak, when, where and on what issues that the idea of men as spokespersons of women becomes conceivable.