Paper short abstract:

Disaster is often seen as a ‘leveller’ that affects everyone equally but the impact of disasters varies due to structural inequalities, social norms, cultural practices, gender roles, and power relations, leading to a disproportionate effect on certain populations.

Paper long abstract:

Vulnerabilities of the community are not only because of their physical nature but also due to the arrangements in societies. This paper is based on a case study of three flood-affected districts of Assam and explores how social norms and cultural practices of the community are used in a restrictive manner, confining it to women and non-binary gender identities. It is important to discern how communities living in vulnerable geographies like Assam or Majuli, in particular, being patriarchal and their disasters responses being informed based on the cultural and social constructed gender norms, and cultural practices wherein each gender group has been seen through the lens or enactments of either being feminine or masculine. And these gender stereotyping has been often produced and (re)produces through the different popular public and institutional discourses and media through reports limiting women and non-binary as ‘Victims’ of such disasters who are waiting to be rescued or emancipated by the opposite gender (Zarqa, 2014). Hence one group being idyllically portrayed as feminine limits them as victims of disasters and at the same time gendered imposed femininities of women (particularly being caregivers)restricts them and further aggravates their vulnerabilities. But at the same time, it is vital to consider that only the presence of women in public spaces doesn’t guarantee them to have decision-making power and customary practices or norms don’t allow women to govern these bodies. Hence, this paper will unpack some of these lived experience of ‘living with floods’, and their impacts.