Feminist Futures: Reimagining Women, Culture and Development
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Feminist Futures: Reimagining Women, Culture and Development
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Overview
Working at the intersection of cultural studies, critical development studies and feminist theory, the book's contributors articulate a radical and innovative framework for understanding the linkages between women, culture and development, applying it to issues ranging from sexuality and the gendered body to the environment, technology and the cultural politics of representation.
This revised and updated edition brings together leading academics, as well as a new generation of activists and scholars, to provide a fresh perspective on the ways in which women in the South are transforming our understanding of development.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783606382 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2016 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 528 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 16.70(h) x 1.60(d) |
About the Author
John Foran is professor of sociology and environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Priya A. Kurian is professor of political science and public policy at the University of Waikato.
Debashish Munshi is professor of management communication at the University of Waikato.
Kum-Kum Bhavnani is professor of sociology, global studies and feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
John Foran is professor of sociology and environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Priya A. Kurian is professor of political science and public policy at the University of Waikato.
Debashish Munshi is professor of management communication at the University of Waikato.
Read an Excerpt
Feminist Futures
Reimagining Women, Culture and Development
By Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, Priya A. Kurian, Debashish Munshi
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2016 Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, Priya A. Kurian and Debashish MunshiAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78360-639-9
CHAPTER 1
AN INTRODUCTION TO WOMEN, CULTURE AND DEVELOPMENT
Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran and Priya A. Kurian
At the close of the twentieth century, there were clear indications that women in the Third World and the poor suffered the dire consequence of global (mal)development. This debilitating malaise continues into the new century. Its most recent symptoms include: the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001; the US-initiated war on Afghanistan shortly thereafter; the use of the discourse of terrorism by the governments of India and Pakistan that threatens to spill over into a nuclear stand-off; the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank that regularly escalates the cycle of violence; the US government's targeting of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an 'axis of evil'; the Enron débâcle, in which a large US transnational corporation went bankrupt despite making millions of dollars for its chief officers through, among other things, the provision of expensive electricity for parts of India and investments in China. These examples continue to dominate public discussion, while the crises of HIV/AIDS, the impact of (and resistance to) IMF- and World Bank-directed structural adjustment policies, and the consequences of environmental destruction worldwide seem to have receded from public view. It is in this context that we feel an urgent need to reflect on development, culture and women.
In reading the outpouring of opinion from the left and among liberals urging progressives to think more deeply about the events of 11 September, often circulated on e-mail or posted on the internet, it becomes quite clear that missing in these responses to the attacks on the World Trade Center is a recognition that there is torment and strife in many parts of the world – that the attacks on the US need to be seen in the root context of global (mal)development, with particular implications for women and culture. Indeed, we believe that a misplaced emphasis on modernization strategies for the past half century is central to understanding why development has not led to a greater decrease in inequality between Third and First Worlds. In other words, development has failed the Third World. Although many explanations have been advanced, this failure is exacerbated by the end of the Cold War and the rise of projects of globalization, bringing with them an increasingly feminized poverty, an alarming process of environmental degradation and extremely elusive conditions for peace and security. What is less often recognized (although sometimes acknowledged in a sub-clause, phrase or equivocal footnote) is that women's contributions and a regard for culture are key elements in a meaningful development that aims to improve living conditions of all poor people in the South.
Women in the Third World face multiple challenges, among them poverty, unemployment, limited access to land, legal and social discrimination in many forms, sexual abuse and other forms of violence. Though similar in form to those faced by women in the First World, there are specificities of history, political economy and culture that make these realities differentially oppressive and exploitative for Third World women (see Amadiume 2000). But the women of the Third World are not victims. As 'subaltern counterpublics' (see Fraser 1997a), women in the Third World meet these challenges and confront them actively, often in remarkably creative and effective ways. In other words, there is far more to their lives than a set of interlocking 'problems' – there are many deeply fulfilling experiences, powerful emotions, beautiful creations and enduring relationships, sometimes born through struggles waged against the terms of existence. As Light Carruyo puts it in this volume: for WCD, development is not 'something that is "done to" the Third World; instead, there is an acknowledgement that Third World actors, elite and non-elite, male and female, organized and not organized, contribute to the construction of the discourse and practice of development'.
The purpose of our book is therefore to assess the situation of women across many sites in the Third World in order to elaborate a fresh vantage point that relies on aspects of both earlier and more recent approaches (such as Sen and Grown 1987, Mohanty 1991, Tsing 1993,Braidotti et al. 1994, Marchand 1995, Snyder and Tadesse 1995, Ong 1997, Fagan, Munck and Nadasen 1997,Marchand and Runyan 2000, and Bergeron 2001, among many others) and at the same time suggest a new lens through which to look at women in the Third World and the ways women resist and celebrate the circumstances of their lives. We are certainly not proposing something no-one else has done before – we are merely trying to focus attention on and give a term and platform to an emerging approach that we think is a way forward out of the impasse in development studies. This volume represents an effort to suggest the shape of a new paradigm for development studies, one that puts women at its centre, culture on a par with political economy, and keeps a focus on critical practices, pedagogies and movements for social justice.
It has been argued that work within development studies has shifted from an emphasis on political economy to now include area studies and environmental studies, along with a greater interest in gender relations (Hoogvelt 1997). However, despite this shift, overly structural and economistic approaches to development predominate, as espoused by international aid agencies such as the World Bank. The 1992 World Bank Report argued that 'Women must not be regarded as mere recipients of public support. They are, first and foremost, economic agents' (World Bank 1992: 60). The Bank's stated commitment to women's participation in economic development is a fundamental part of its neoliberal strategy for improving economic productivity (see World Bank 1994), involving the embodiment of Third World poor women as able workers and entrepreneurs while ignoring their other roles as wives, partners, mothers, citizens and activists – roles that form the backbone of all societies, but which are difficult to discern, let alone comprehend, within conventional economic analyses. As such, the World Bank has not been able to engage with the actual realities of people's lives, including gendered realities. For example, women plantation workers in Sri Lanka not only pick tea leaves, but they also have to organize their paid work in relation to their daily domestic responsibilities such as feeding the household. This responsibility can mean, therefore, that it is the husbands who have to collect the daily wages for the women's work. These are paid at just the time when cooking tasks have to begin, with a consequent lack of control by the women over their wages. Patterns such as this demonstrate how the economic agency of women is layered by a complex set of realities.
Most recently, globalization, transnationalization and internationalization are posing important issues for scholarly debates as well as for activists' practices, yet these terms often ignore the ways in which interdisciplinary thinking – and here we explicitly include work in the humanities – can contribute to an understanding of the present social and cultural conjuncture. We note that the adjective 'global' usually centres on the First World (Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand), thereby continuing to privilege the First World even as it analyses global relationships, which turns the analytic gaze away from the Third World and the agency of people living in it. Our book aims to rectify that bias by placing Third World women firmly at the centre of inquiry. Even as we do this, we are aware that the 'Third World' denotes a heterogeneous set of places, cultures and societies. Yet, in centring Third World women, we intend also to participate in debates over the desirability of bringing together many diverse experiences under one rubric, just as the categories 'woman' (Butler 1997a, Halberstam 1998) and 'Third World' do.
For some time now, there has been considerable discussion about the gendered dynamics of development (e.g. Boserup 1970, Benería and Sen 1981, Tinker 1990,Kabeer 1994, Porter and Judd 1999). These discussions are essential to our argument. However, we offer this volume to demonstrate what could happen when Third World women are placed at the centre of development and global processes. This not only transforms the projects of development, along with their underlying discourses of modernization, but, in addition, starts to make culture(s) visible. For example, in her study of the migration of Filipinas as servants/labourers, Parreñas (2001) shows the centrality of community and family, alongside the nation-state and the labour market, for understanding the textures of the women's lives. That is, in order to engage with gender, as distinct from merely acknowledging its presence, it is necessary to discuss culture.
However, simply attending to gender in an explicit manner is not enough. It is here that Raymond Williams's famous notion of 'culture' as lived experience is helpful. Williams argues for an understanding of culture not simply as a set of habits or traditions, but as a way to comprehend how people actually live their lives – a 'structure of feelings'. In other words, culture as lived experience insists on an agentic notion of human beings and is thus understood as a dynamic set of relationships through which inequalities are created and challenged, rather than as a singular property that resides within anindividual, group or nation (Williams 1960; see Hall et al. 1980 for a further development of this argument). We do this in counterpoint to the structuralism of much of the 'cultural turn' in social theory, which is often devoid of agency, subjectivity, consciousness or emotion. A 'structure of feeling' is meant to denote the blend of pattern and agency we feel should characterize cultural analysis.
WID, WAD, GAD ... WCD
There is a rich history of theoretical, applied and policy work on how best to tackle the relationship between women and development studies. This is now discussed almost canonically as the progression from WID to WAD to GAD (Rathgeber 1990, Moser 1993, Razavi and Miller 1995). Boserup's 1970 work – considered an early example of an academic, policy-oriented book that noted women's exclusion from development projects in the Third World – was taken seriously partly because the development community began to realize that the 'trickle down' approach to development had not been effective (Braidotti et al. 1994). Boserup's work is often taken as signalling the origins of the women in development (WID) approach by pointing to women's invisibility and exclusion from development (Moser 1993). WID was a way of 'mainstreaming' women (Martinussen 1997: 305) through arguing that they should be treated on equal terms with men – the 'equity approach' that gained ground in the 1970s. WID then shifted its underlying discourse from equity to antipoverty to efficiency in the mid-1980s. The anti-poverty discourse complemented the 1970s' 'basic needs' approach to development, whose solutions included income-generation strategies and skill development for women (Moser 1993). The discourse of efficiency, which developed in the 1980s, resting on WID assumptions, argued that development would become more efficient if women's resources were utilized to the full; in this way women's participation in the economy and gender equity were seen to be synonymous, a view which the World Bank and Eastern Bloc shared, with no small irony. While it stressed income generation and skills training, this way of viewing the relationship between development and women differed from the anti-poverty discourse: the former targeted women in order to increase their efficiency in the productive process, and thus promote economic growth through an efficient use of women's labour (Gardner and Lewis 1996, Braidotti et al. 1994).
Meanwhile, by the second half of the 1970s, the women and development (WAD) approach, theoretically informed by Marxist-feminism (Rathgeber 1990), raised some critical questions about the WID paradigm. WAD argued that as women's contributions have always been central to any possibility of development, the question to be asked was why women were excluded from projects of development. Consequently, the WAD approach focused not only on the integration of women into development and the simultaneous transformation of mainstream development, but also on the dependence of Third World nations on the richer nations. As expressed in the work of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), and developed by Sen and Grown (1987), the self-organization of women is a key facet of WAD analysis and practice.
The gender and development (GAD) approach is presently the discourse used by most scholars, policy planners, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to discuss the relationship between development processes and women's inequality. GAD aims to 'not only integrate women into development, but [to] look for the potential in development initiatives to transform unequal social/gender relations and to empower women' (Canadian Council for International Co-Operation 1991: 5). However, aid agencies and development practitioners tend to use the concept of gender in reductionist ways, failing to grapple with issues of power, conflict, and the larger social, cultural and political contexts that frame women's ability to resist conditions of oppression. Indeed, the use of narrow, rigid understandings of gender, despite their seeming focus on the inequality generated within notions of masculinity and femininity, can lead to an over-emphasis on structures and institutions at the expense of seeing the agency of women, an agency that may not just perpetuate inequalities but also challenge them. To our minds, 'woman' is more able than 'gender' to connote agency while simultaneously implying the need for centring gendered analyses.
All three approaches, we feel, fall short of a larger analysis of the ways in which capitalism, patriarchy and race/ethnicity shape and are shaped by women's subordination and oppression. For example, Rai argues that the WID and GAD literature 'largely continue to work within a liberal framework' (2002: 45), a framework that often homogenizes Third World women. It is also argued that WID and GAD make ethnocentric assumptions about the content of relations between women and men in different societies, 'seeing only exploitation, subordination and conflict, [rather than] cooperation and the importance of familial bonds' (Gardner and Lewis 1996: 124).
While we are sympathetic to these critiques of WID, WAD and GAD (as well as indebted to the many contributions of each), we also fault all three for not taking culture adequately into account. Even when they draw, to differing extents, upon culture as a means of discussing women's oppression, they also tend to see Third World women as victims in need of rescuing from their cultures, assumed to be static and unchanging. To approach culture as lived experience rather than as a static set of relationships permits an opening of new avenues for development, because a lived experience approach to culture centres the relationship between production and reproduction and ensures that women's agency is visible (see Chua, Bhavnani and Foran 2000). The work included in this book links women, culture and development in a new and innovative way. Such a linkage is located at the intersection of three cutting-edge interdisciplinary areas in the academic world: feminist studies, cultural studies and critical development studies (or, more generally, Third World studies).
Feminist studies in both the humanities and social sciences has suggested that analytic/critical work and policies are impoverished if adequate attention is not paid to women. Feminist scholarship in the USA, along with analyses of gender and sexuality, has started to grapple with the implications of the widely accepted argument that 'woman' is not a unitary category. But such an engagement still implicitly foregrounds US and European feminist studies, has a modernizing impulse and thus bypasses the diverse writings, cultural products and other regional and global actions of women in the Third World.
Cultural studies has directed attention to the importance of analysing cultures within their context – both locally and globally. It follows Williams and others to argue that cultures may be conceptualized as more than the habits, customs and mores of particular societies. However, the approaches found in cultural studies, although drawn upon by feminist scholars in the USA, are rarely utilized to provide insights into specific aspects of societies in the Third World. The newer approach of a Third World cultural studies, encompassing as it does a broad range of perspectives including post-colonial studies, subaltern studies and Third World postmodernism, begins to move in the direction we have in mind (see Foran 2000). But it still needs to take on insights that integrate gender, sexuality and ethnicity in a biospheric context into analyses of culture, the economy and politics (Escobar 1995 is a landmark on this point).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Feminist Futures by Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, Priya A. Kurian, Debashish Munshi. Copyright © 2016 Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, Priya A. Kurian and Debashish Munshi. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Preface to the Second Edition1. An Introduction to Women, Culture and Development - Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran and Priya A. Kurian
Visions I
Maria's Stories - Maria Ofelia Navarrete
The Woof and the Warp - Luisa Valenzuela
Consider the Problem of Privatisation - Anna Tsing
Part I: Sexuality and the Gendered Body
2. More '"Tragedies" in Out-of-the-Way Places: Oceanic Interpretations of Another Scale' - Yvonne Underhill-Sem with Kaita Sem
3. 'Revolution with a Woman's Face'? Family Norms, Constitutional Reform, and the Politics of Redistribution in Post/Neoliberal Ecuador - Amy Lind
4. Claiming the State: Revisiting Women's Reproductive Identity in India's Development Policy - Rachel Simon-Kumar
5. Abortion and African Culture: A Case Study of Kenya - Jane Wambui Njagi
6. Bodies and Choices: African Matriarchs and Mammy Water - Ifi Amadiume
Visions II
Empowerment: Snakes and Ladders - Jan Nederveen Pieterse
Gendered Sexualities and Lived Experience: Revisiting the Case of Gay Sexuality in Women, Culture and Development - Dana Collins
Revolutionary Women's Struggle and Leadership: Building Local Political Power in Rural Areas in the Age of Neoliberal Globalization - Peter Chua
'What Should I Say about a Dream?': Reflections on Adolescent Girls, Agency and Citizenship - Gauri Nandedkar
Part II: Environment, Technology, Science
7. New Lenses with Limited Vision: Shell Scenarios, Science Fiction, Storytelling Wars - David McKie with Akanksha Munshi-Kurian
8. Development Nationalism: Science, Religion and the Quest for a Modern India - Banu Subramaniam
9. What Would Rachel Say? - Joni Seager
10. Negotiating Human-Nature Boundaries, Cultural Hierarchies and Masculinist Paradigms of Development Studies - Priya A. Kurian and Debashish Munshi
11. The Intersection of Women, Culture and Development: Conversations about Visions for the Future – Take Two - Arturo Escobar and Wendy Harcourt
Visions III
Alternatives to Development: Of Love, Dreams and Revolution - John Foran
Dreams and Process in Development Theory and Practice - Light Carruyo
The Subjective Side of Development: Sources of Well-Being, Resources for Struggle - Linda Klouzal
Part III: The Cultural Politics of Representation
12. Of Rural Mothers, Urban Whores and Working Daughters: Women and the Critique of Neocolonial Development in Taiwan's Nativist Literature - Ming-yan Lai
13. Revisiting the mostaz'af and the mostakbar - Minoo Moallem
14. Mariama BÂ's So Long a Letter: 'Women, Culture and Development' from a Francophone or Postcolonial Perspective - Anjali Prabhu
15. The Precarious Middle Class: Gender, Risk and Mobility in the New Indian Economy - Raka Ray
Visions IV
An Antipodean Take on Gender, Culture and Development Co-operation - Susanne Schech
On Activist Scholarship and Women, Culture and Development - Julie Shayne
Women, Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Sustainable Development - Sangion Appiee Tiu
Reimagining Climate Justice: What the World Needs Now is Love, Hope ... and You - John Foran
Postscript: A Conversation about the Future of Women, Culture and Development - Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, Priya A. Kurian and Debashish Munshi