From Feminising to Engendering Development

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

Ids Bulletin-institute of Development Studies, 2004

During the last three decades, sociologists have studied the increasing presence of women in both developmental studies, and practice. At the same time, most international organizations, especially the United Nations development fund for women, have emphasized the empowerment of women, alongside gender mainstreaming in developmental initiatives (World Conferences on Women). The international organizations have focused on the integration of women as a means to increase gender equality in development projects, but have experienced several challenges (Tinker, 2002). The escalations of feminism through debates, protests, intellectual pursuits, and contributions to revolutions, have paved the way for the integration of women in development thinking (Epstein, 2001).

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The language of "gender equality" and "women's empowerment" was mobilised by feminists in the 1980s and 1990s as a way of getting women's rights onto the international development agenda. Their efforts can be declared a resounding success. The international development industry has fully embraced these terms. From international NGOs to donor governments to multilateral agencies, the language of "gender equality" and "women's empowerment" is a pervasive presence and takes pride of place amongst their major development priorities. And yet, this article argues, the fact that these terms have been eviscerated of conceptual and political bite compromises their use as the primary frame through which to demand rights and justice. Critically examining the trajectories of these terms in development, the article suggests that if the promise of the post-2015 agenda is to deliver on gender justice, new frames are needed that can connect with and contribute to a broader movement for global justice.

2004

Esta comunicação questiona o papel e a legitimidade da abordagem "género e desenvolvimento" (GAD) à luz das críticas pós-modernas das categorias universais. Começa por analisar os progressos alcançados e as dificuldades encontradas na transição de estratégias denominadas como "mulheres no desenvolvimento" (WID) para estratégias denominadas como "género e desenvolvimento" (GAD).

speech at the UN in September 2014 captured a rising wave of recognition that gender inequality can no longer be regarded as a women's issue. Watson's call for men's engagement in ending gender inequality echoed core tenets of the gender agenda in development: that gender is about the socially constituted relations between women and men, and that addressing discrimination against women means addressing men's enjoyment of privilege, as well as for creating a more equitable basis for social relations. In this article, I analyze the emergence of current agendas of women and girls' empowerment and of what has come to be called 'engaging men and boys' in the field of international development. I examine some of the contours of this field and explore feminist critiques and reservations. I end by looking at what might be gained in freeing ourselves of the strictures of a binary understanding of gender, with all that comes with this, and finding common cause in creating a world that is more just, fair, and equal for us all.

HAGAR Studies in Culture, Polity and Identities Vol.9 (1) 2009: 1-4, 2009

What does the experience of women trash collectors in contemporary Dakar tell us about the gendered politics of the Senegalese neoliberalist era? How do female ballet dancers articulate Taiwanese cultural nationalism? And do well-intentioned Israeli city planners who design a new neighborhood at the edge of an Israeli-Palestinian town improve or inhibit gender equality among the new residents?

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.

In his seminal work Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995), post-development scholar Arturo Escobar likens development to a chimera. My work builds on a sophisticated body of post-development and transnational feminist theory drawing on conceptions of the relationship of representations of development in the Third World to the interconnected webs of various transnational patriarchal and economic dominations that affect, and are affected by, the realities of marginalized communities in the Global South. In particular, I am concerned with how development discourses interlock with global systemic hierarchies of race, gender, class as well as structural oppressions, including uneven global systems of economic restructuring, neo-colonial interventions, and donor-structured development operations that hinder global solidarity and cross-border feminist organizing. Enjoining development debates to cultural texts, I explore what disparate fields such as post-colonialism, feminism, post-development have to offer and enrich the ideas about the conflicted terrain of development discourse.

Development and Change, 2007

Gender and development has grown enormously as a field over the last thirty years. In this introduction, we interrogate the ambivalence that underpins feminist engagement with development and examine what current dilemmas may suggest about the relationship between feminist knowledge and development practice. In recent years, there has been growing frustration with the simplistic slogans that have come to characterize much gender and development talk, and with the gap between professed intention and actual practice in policies and programmes. Questions are now being asked about what has become of ‘gender’ in development. This collection brings together critical reflections on some ideas about gender that have become especially resonant in development narratives, particularly those that entail popularization and the deployment of iconic images of women. This introduction explores more closely the issues raised by such myth-making, arguing that these myths stem from exigencies within the politics and practices of development bureaucracies, within the difficult politics of feminist engagement with development policy and practice and within feminist politics itself.