Finding the Gender Space in Indigenous Peoples Civil Society Organizations Engagement with the ASEAN

Abstract

While Indigenous People Civil Society Organizations (IP CSOs) are able to forward various concerns such as indigenous peoples’ rights, human rights, and environmental issues, one issue that has not been emphasized is gender. Though it is assumed that the issues forwarded carry with them the concept of intersectionality, there is a need to uncover the extent as to how gender is prioritized in their advocacy. This research shall re-examine existing IP CSOs’ views and engagement practices with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) that emerged in three engagement spaces where ASEAN and CSOs engage: ASEAN-established, ASEAN-recognized, and “created” spaces to find the gender space. How does each view represent gender? What gender representation practices are innate in the identified views and engagement practices? Through an interpretative content analysis anchored on ethnomethodology, the gender representation practices shall be extracted from IP CSO’s documents available at the web such as official minutes of engagement, official statements, press releases, website postings, and social media posts dated from 2017 to 2020.