Master’s Thesis in Gendering Practices Spring 2025 Vulnerability and Gendered bodies in disaster response in Malawi: Cyclone Freddy Case study

Abstract

This thesis explores the lived experiences of young women in Malawi during disasters, focusing on how they navigate vulnerability across spatial, social, political, and disaster-affected contexts. Drawing on qualitative narratives and autoethnographic accounts analyzed through thematic analysis, the study engages with theoretical frameworks of vulnerability in resistance, gender performativity, projectified politics, and consciousness in the tradition of the New Mestiza, alongside perspectives from decolonial feminism and African feminism. The study maps vulnerability as signified through fear within personal, community, and state contexts, shaping young women’s experiences, everyday practices, and interactions during disasters. It also examines gender-coded roles in disaster response, revealing both constraints and forms of agency as female- and male-coded expectations intersect with social norms. Further, it explores the projectification of humanitarian aid, showing how institutional actors and humanitarian interventions mediate these experiences, influencing opportunities for participation, protection, and resilience. The study highlights how young women negotiate contradictions, dualities, and hybrid identities, employing transformative practices to challenge restrictive binaries and reimagine possibilities for action and safety. Findings indicate that vulnerability is not only an expression of identity but also a situated negotiation within broader social, political, and structural power relations, through which young women navigate systems and generate new strategies for multiplicity and collective agency.