This paper examines the various ways in which women in particular participate in the construction and reconstruction of the coastal environment, influenced by individual understandings of power. Through these understandings, women modify local discourses and meanings to transcend socially defined gender boundaries.
To demonstrate these experiences, I draw on ethnographic material to illustrate the range of meanings of power that have been derived from women's interactions with coastal space and resources in the coastal village of Saadani in Tanzania. Women have tried to modify the spatial landscape of gender and power through subjective evaluations of work. The analysis also illustrates that through individual perceptions and actions, women's participation in coastal resource utilisation is continuously being socially negotiated Cole She perceives the environment as a space whose understanding and mapping "speaks about social relationships" Ardener , a space that is sometimes expressed in the way in which we give spatial metaphors to social relationships in our everyday language.
Leach thus applies a set of interpretive concepts, which are, performance, event and action which according to her, signify the relation of an active agent to the source or reason of an individuals' action in an environment, and through which" [gender] relationships come to be seen not as static, but as fluid and negotiable" ibid It should be simultaneously problematized as a meaningful development of social experiences and interaction within localised social relations.
These localised social relations, that to a great extent define what are allowable as performances and actions of women within that social environment, also provide the space where women can "actively construct their own identities within the material and discursive constraints of their lives" Askew : The difficulty in recent approaches to gender and the environment arises from their failure to clearly demonstrate the relationship between material conditions and the kinds of genderised meanings that individuals attach to natural resources in changing circumstances Leach ; Rocheleau el al New experiences lead to new kinds of understandings of the environment Berry , and of gender realities.
To women, these realities recognise a dynamic environment which although can be dominating, it also offers possibilities for their emancipation from male dominated practices Sawicki Following Foucault , active construction would not mean that individuals acquire control of the processes determining relationship to resources, but may indicate the ability of an individual to have the choice to engage in the type of relationships an individual wants to, according to individual understandings of that type of engagement.
