From systems of separation to solidarity: Why gender is a development issue.
Gender underpins how difference is conceptualised and restricted in development. This essay takes ‘development’ to mean positive and socially just change, and argues for the pursuit of solidarity by addressing gender as an underlying concept and oppressive power structure within development. Key areas of focus are the corporatisation of development practice, representations of gender, and Euro-western epistemic hegemony.
Gender has immediate implications for human rights, economic access, the environment, and health and wellbeing (Connell, 2014, p. 521; Connell, 2009), with gender equality explicitly recognised in the Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, 2021). However, technocratic measures such as these, which accommodate the “cognitive needs of capitalism” (Lugones, 2016, p. 17) to categorise and rationalise, erase the complexity of gendered experience across diverse contexts as it intersects with race, class, and sexuality (Lugones, 2016, p.13). This approach assumes an ahistorical position on the gender dichotomy, glossing over its coloniality, and reducing it to a dehumanised and depoliticised buzzword to be leveraged on the neoliberal “gender market”(Cornwall et al., 2007; Moeller, 2018). By acknowledging the hegemonic conception of gender as inherently colonial and oppressive, its repercussions can be approached through a frame of reparation and solidarity.
Hegemonic masculinity and gender structures manifest in the discourse of development and influence gendered representation. The hyper-masculine rhetoric of a “war on poverty” (not “remedy” or “reparation”), echoes the colonial practices from which development has evolved (Kothari, 2006, p. 119). This framing at once universalises the experience of poverty, and maintains the oppositional rich/poor binary which fuels deficit discourse. The similarly reductive sloganisation of gender, necessary to “get gender on to the development agenda”(Cornwall et al., 2007) gives rise to essentialist representations of women as either oppressed victims or unsung heroines (Cornwall et al., 2007) assuming both the hegemony of dimorphic gender with little representation of those outside of it, and the right to control its narrative (Cornwall et al., 2007). Decolonising the structures within development which empower some to represent gender and disempower others through representation (Moeller, 2018), creates space for the difference and plurality necessary for solidarity (Mohanty, 2003).
Power over representation and knowledge about gender in development is predominantly Northern, with development practice adopting a northern gaze (Connell, 2014). Within a global economy of knowledge which systematically privileges Euro-western scholarship on the gendered bodies and lives (mostly of women and girls) of the global south (Connell, 2014, p. 527; Moeller, 2018), local realities and conceptions of gender are reframed through a western lens, even by southern scholars obliged to operate within the structures of the academy (Connell, 2014). As such, hegemonic dimorphic gender constructs are embedded in the theoretical fabric of development policies, programs and practices from a system of knowledge production designed to exclude the epistemologies and experiences of the majority world. By interrogating these underlying systems of knowledge production, development can foreground a planetary connection born from an intimate understanding of difference (Mohanty, 2003).
The complex structures of power inherent in development theory and practice rest on gender in its broadest sense of defining, othering, and disempowering. The work of visiblising systematic, racialized gender violence, is an issue of development as both a fulfillment of obligations to make positive and socially just change, and as an act of reparation aspiring to solidarity and connectedness.
References
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Connell, R. (2009). Short introductions: Gender (2nd ed.). Polity Press.
Cornwall, A., Harrison, E., & Whitehead, A. (2007). Introduction: feminisms in development: contradictions, contestations, and challenges. In A. Cornwall, E. Harrison, & A. Whitehead (Eds.), Feminisms in development: Contradictions, contestations, and challenges (pp. 1–17). EBSCO Publishing. https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
Kothari, U. (2006). From colonialism to development: Reflections of former colonial officers. Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 44(1), 118–136. https://doi.org/10.1080/14662040600624502
Lugones, M. (2016). The Coloniality of Gender. In W. Harcourt (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development.
Moeller, K. (2018). The girl effect as apparatus. In The gender effect: Capitalism, feminism and the corporate politics of development (pp. 41–58).
Mohanty, C. T. (2003). “Under Western Eyes” revisited: Feminist solidarity through anticapitalist struggles. Signs, 28 (2), 499–535. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.1086/342914
United Nations (2021). The 17 goals. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Sustainable development. https://sdgs.un.org/goals