Feminisms in Development: Contradictions, Contestations and Challenges (original) (raw)

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