Gaslighting and dispelling: Experiences of non-governmental organization workers in navigating gendered corruption
基于对一家女性非政府组织的30个月民族志研究，提出用“煤气灯效应”解释性别化腐败的隐蔽性，并揭示从业者通过“驱散”实践来维护民主规范。
How does corruption adopt gendered guises and how do women combat it in practice? Theorizing from the basis of a 30-month ethnography within a women’s non-governmental organization (NGO), the article proposes gaslighting as a way of interpreting gendered corruption, owing to its elusive but pernicious nature. Gaslighting is posited as the deployment of tactics to make women doubt their sanity and as a means of securing personal advantage. Gaslighting triggers embodied forms of struggle, and the article offers the notion of dispelling as denoting the persistent, patient and reiterative counter-practice of NGO practitioners to assert democratic norms of liberty and equality. The article provides rich empirical insight both into how corruption is enacted through the citing of patriarchal norms and how such norms are contested through the bodies of practitioners. These insights are important at a time when governments globally claim gender equality while undermining it in practice.