Gender Blindness and the Annulment of the Development Contract

Contexto Internacional, 2018

Emerging from an urgent sense of the importance of dislocating universalist narratives about the international, this Special Issue of Contexto Internacional, titled Gender in the Global South: Disturbing International Boundaries, opens the discussion on the state of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies from a global South perspective. The collection of essays gathered in this first of three parts of the Special Issue offers intricate and complementary reflections on the ways bodies marked by gendered categories manage to exist, to move, to resist and to survive in spite of structures that try to pin them down, silence their voices, erase their existence. By means of narrative, conceptual, political and ethnological meditations, they show how these bodies insist to re-exist (Walsh 2013) despite the multifarious structures of power that render their lives both possible and impossible.

Negotiating Gender Equity in the Global South, 2019

This book provides exciting new ways of thinking about how women's rights policy change occurs in the Global South. Drawing on meso-level analysis of how six countries passed legislation to combat domestic violence, the book shows, for example, the importance of forming strategic alliances around the interests and ideas of dominant actors; the role of elite cohesion; and the politics of ideas and discursive framing of gender equity. It is certain to influence contemporary thinking about gender-related policy reform and, as such, it is a must read for international and domestic policy makers, women's rights activists, donors, scholars of gender and politics, and many others.'

European Journal of Politics and Gender, 2018

Critical feminists have argued that research on women and gender is not sufficiently 'global' in its representation of scholars and perspectives. We draw on these works to argue that the scholarship on women, gender and politics does not sufficiently consider the effects of the global order in the Global South. We propose the adoption of a 'global lens' to address this gap. We further examine the representation of South-based scholars by analysing leading women, gender and politics journals, and find that they are severely under-represented as authors. We propose steps to address this underrepresentation and to decolonise the scholarship.

Contexto Internacional, 2019

2008

The contributors to this book are from the North and South and include trainers on development issues, a filmmaker, policy-makers, advisers to large international NGOs (INGOs) and United Nations programmes, as well as academics. In acknowledgement of the frequently uneasy relationship between feminism and development, this book is an attempt to reposition feminism within development studies. Its central argument is that many development institutions function through bureaucratic structures and unequal power differentials that undermine feminist intentions. Maxine Molyneux's powerful concluding chapter challenges the myth, as she sees it, 'that gender has been so successfully mainstreamed into development policy that there is now little need for women's projects and programmes, or indeed for women's policy units' (p. 227). Certainly, there has been significant progress with female literacy, longevity, health and access to political life. [1] Yet Molyneux is concerned about the 'globalization of feminism, ' that is, a process in which 'the transformative agenda has been captured by power, co-opted and instrumentalized, and its political vision has been neutralized, where not excised' (p. 234). Many of the 18 essays explore aspects of this process of neutralization and seek to resist it. Many authors are concerned to reopen questions seen as settled. The book's subtitle, 'contradictions, contestations and challenges' is a testament to the contributors' scrutiny of assumptions concerning gender and development. The editors affirm the pluralist nature of feminism, and argue also that '"development" covers a multitude of theoretical and political stances and a wide diversity of practices' (p. 1). They reflect on the fact that despite the engagement within gender and development (GAD) research and the abundant literature on gender mainstreaming, the project of social transformation that is at the height of feminists' activism and engagement

Routledge eBooks, 2018

The relation between women's empowerment and development, understood either as economic or human development, continues to be the object of much academic work. The two books reviewed here are part of this ongoing interest, but they also point to an area that deserves particular attention: women's voices. The interest in people's voices in development studies can be traced back to the effort of the World Bank to collect the experiences of the poor, published in three separate volumes, known as the 'Voices of the Poor.' These voices have been typically used to illustrate the challenges associated with the design and implementation of development policies, programs and projects in the global South. There is no denying the value of such an approach. However, something is lost when we focus on the barriers to development. These books showcase that studying enabling factors can enrich our understanding of the relation between empowerment and development in the global South. The two books share important similarities. They both explore and recount stories of women's empowerment in contexts shaped by material limitations, patriarchal structures, and cultural constraints. They deploy qualitative approaches in the form of in-depth interviews, but they also provide quantitative data that adds strength to their findings and helps ground their studies in the broader national and global contexts. They both adopt the 'gender and development' (GAD) approach rather than the 'women in development' (WID) approach. In this sense, Panday notes how women's participation in politics alone (a WID approach) does not translate automatically into empowerment. Instead, a full account of the gender dynamics (a GAD approach) is necessary to assess women's political agency. In a similar vein, Okkolin notes how gender parity in education (a WID approach) is not enough to understand the full impact of education on women's agency. Instead, this requires examining the broader dynamics of gender equality and inequality (a GAD approach). In this sense, both authors note how gender roles and images of womanhood linked to the domestic/private sphere (e.g. marriage, family, childcare) constrain women's agency (i.e. their choices and their capacity to act upon those choices). Interestingly, their research also reveals how men (e.g. fathers, husbands, friends, colleagues) can be important enabling factors in the educational, social and political empowerment of women in the global South. Both studies adopt and adapt the capabilities approach associated with the work of Amartya Sen, and embrace the concept of human development championed by the United Nations Development Programme. Last but not least, they both position women's voices as central to their analyses of women's agency and empowerment in the global South. Yet, for all their similarities, there are also important differences, not least in the execution of the task. Thus, whilst Okkolin's book is an outstanding contribution to the field, Panday's contribution, whilst interesting and valuable, comes across as a missed opportunity.

IDS Bulletin, 2009

2020

Although single articles about gender in the Global South have been published once in a while in the European Journal of Women's Studies, this is the first special issue dedicated entirely to feminisms in and of this part of the globe. It is based on a lecture series organised by the editors in the summer of 2018 at the Cornelia Goethe Centre in Frankfurt/ Main, Germany. Germany is not the only European country where contributions from the Global South are almost completely missing from the academic feminist discourse and even debates on transnational feminisms may include only very few feminist postcolonial thinkers-mostly situated in the Global North. This blank space constituted one of the starting points of our initial reflections. A second one was our aim to highlight feminist responses to the multiplicity of global crises of capitalism and their economic, ecological and political articulations. Long before the beginning of the COVID crisis, global inequalities have been increasingly widening and worsening and authoritarian, nationalist, racist and anti-feminist culminations of neoliberalism have put increasing pressure on alternative practices and emancipatory ideas for the future. All over the world, feminists have produced new concepts and practices of solidarity to design political, economic and ecological alternatives and feminist concepts of justice, whilst much of longstanding experience, and fundamental critical knowledge in this field stems from the Global South. Radical feminist movements and thinkers from the Global South have provided crucial analyses of how gender inequality, interlocking forms of oppression and exploitation are entangled in local and global realities of contemporary capitalist social formations. Most prominent for such an approach are the multitude of contributions from the feminist South-South network DAWN (see Antrobus, 2015). They show how unequal living and working conditions are constitutive of the development of global economic and ecological conditions and question the dichotomy between the local and the global as well as between the North and the South. How important local dimensions are to the analysis of

Ids Bulletin-institute of Development Studies, 2004

Gender Place and Culture, 2003

Feminists have been crucial in challenging the gender-blindness of development discourse and practice. In the process, they have shaped the move from the feminisation to the engendering of development over the last three decades. This article explores this broad shift, focusing on the recent transformations within gender and development discourse and feminist approaches to development relating to diversity and representation, human rights, and the incorporation of men and masculinities within the development agenda, all set within the context of a globalising era. It highlights how women from the South have been critical in reshaping contemporary feminisms to celebrate difference and plurality and challenge Western hegemony. At the same time, feminists have also emphasised the commonalities among women in the name of addressing gender inequalities, evidenced in a recent upsurge in forging transnational alliances facilitated by the contradictory processes of globalisation.