Abstract:
In 2011, the Jamaican government approved the National Policy for Gender Equality (NPGE). The NPGE was severely encumbered from its genesis in two ways. First, it was insufficiently radical to challenge the patriarchal status quo, and second, as an instrument of the state it will have to paradoxically change the same organizations and institutions that are responsible for implementing it. We begin from the premise that in addition to efforts to change existing structural sources of gender-based inequities, gender policies should seek to change notions of masculinity and femininity that sustain patriarchy.
