Gender Myths and Feminist Fables:
Repositioning Gender in Development Policy and Practice
Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex
2-4 July 2003
Sarah White, University of Bath
‘The 'Gender Lens': A Racial Blinder?’1
1 Paper prepared for the International Workshop Feminist Fables and Gender Myths: Repositioning
Gender in Development Policy and Practice, Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, 2-4 July 2003.
Introduction
This paper comes out of two abiding concerns in my engagement with international
development: a concern with gender and a concern with race. I began work on gender in
development (GAD)i, while researching my PhD on women’s work and power in rural
Bangladesh, 1984-88. Since then gender has occupied a central place in my consciousness, my
academic life, and my practical work as (occasional) consultant for development agencies.
While this is my personal story, it also reflects my location in space and time. Born in 1960s
Britain, my growing years coincided with those of the second wave feminist movement. While
the heady politics of the 1970s came rather too soon for me, feminism hit academia in a major
way at much the same time that I began reading seriously. In international development
similarly, by the early 1980s feminist-inspired questioning was generating a whole range of
innovative research and action. Since then ‘the gender issue’ in international development has
gone from strength to strength. Far beyond the feminist lobby, there is now policy level
agreement that gender is significant in achieving all the primary development objectives:
reduced poverty; wider access to good health, education, land, technology and capital;
environmental sustainability; institutional effectiveness; and democratic participation.
While gender has provided the dominant theme in my personal and professional life, there has
also been a second motif, much more muted but nonetheless insistent and recurring, of race. By
contrast with the high profile accorded to gender in development, there is an almost total silence
on race in official publications.ii If at all it appears in coded ways, particularly under the rubric
of ‘culture’. And yet racial awareness and racial struggle is also a major part of the history of
the past forty years. The 1960s did not only see the rise of second wave feminism, but also of
the civil rights movement in the United States, which in many ways pre-figured it. Martin Luther
King became my childhood hero, while, beyond the peripheries of my vision, liberation
struggles were waged or new independence won by many formerly colonised nations, offering a
fundamental challenge to the dominant international and racial order.
While I had some involvement with race issues during my time as student in the UK, it was
during my PhD research that this theme began to take its present form. As a white person in
1980s Bangladesh, I found myself in a position of marked racial privilege which, in typical
middle class liberal fashion, made me profoundly uncomfortable, even as I benefited
significantly from it. What I observed and experienced as I hovered around the margins of the
aid community seemed to go far beyond individual acts of prejudice or discrimination to a whole
system in which advantage and disadvantage were patterned by race.
Just as my earlier work reflected my location in time and space, so the present paper is part of a
broader trend. As this workshop reflects, Gender and Development is not a unitary project, but a
conflicted terrain over which a number of competing interests do battle. In development
practice, high profile talk about gender is often accompanied by limited funding and on-going
rumblings of resistance within donor agencies as well as recipient organisations. Activists with a
background in feminist politics are perplexed by calls for 'gender training' as a purely technical
intervention. Programme and project staff are frustrated with the limited results they achieve,
and the gaps between the models they use and the way the women they are working with see
their own lives. Amongst academics, the key terms of both 'gender' and 'development' are being
hotly and creatively contested. The accepted distinction between sex and gender is questioned,
as is the focus on women to the exclusion of men and masculinity and the abstraction of gender
from other social relations such as race, class, age, sexuality and (dis)ability. Core assumptions
of development are questioned by the dissolution of 'the West and the rest' dualisms through
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globalisation, and post-colonial writings which identify imperialism at the heart of modernity.
The feminist and post-colonial writings come together with the more general discursive selfconsciousness of post-modernism, which questions distinctions between 'self' and 'other', raises
issues about the justice of moral and epistemological claims, and stresses the mutability of social
identity.
While still at the margins, issues of race and identity are increasingly being raised with respect
to development practice, particularly by feminists (see eg Matlanyane-Sexwale 1994; Crewe and
Harrison 1998; Kothari 1997). ‘The whiteness of faces and Britishness of passports’ is now
being found an ‘embarrassment’ in some UK development circles, when formerly it would have
passed without notice (Moore 1998). The openly racist expatriate bar-talk of the past is no
longer countenanced. Informal discussions reveal that many more of those working in
development experience its racial divisions as a conscious and problematic contradiction. By far
most critically, international politics since September 11 2001 has raised urgent questions
concerning the links between 'development' and a particular Western geo-political and military
project. The present paper is a small contribution to this wider context of questioning and
review.
In focusing on GAD I do not, by any means, intend to question the basic legitimacy of the need
for gender analysis. Indeed, in some ways GAD is a relatively soft target in that it includes
some of the best of development - it has at least aimed to pose questions of power. At one level
GAD may appear at the cultural vanguard of the development offensive, and certainly it has
received far more opposition on the grounds of cultural imperialism than any other part of the
development project. This fact can, however, be read another way, as signalling GAD's relative
marginality and ambiguous status within the development project as a whole. In the real-politik
of power and resistance it is rare that the centres of domination are the main objects of attack.
Nevertheless, there is a danger that GAD implies that 'West is best' as it decries gender
inequalities in Third World societies. There is a tendency to transfer uncritically Western
analytical models to other contexts. There is a sense in which trying to bring about change in
gender relations constitutes a cultural offensive. The challenge is to see these facts as points of
entry into further questioning. How does an emancipatory project maintain or lose its radical
agenda? To what extent do 'gender myths' challenge or reproduce the dominant 'development
myths'? What is it in the formation of GAD and the development industry that determines this?
This paper takes the notion of a 'gender lens' as a way of exploring the myths of GAD. It begins
by considering the 'gender lens' itself, and the new forms of awareness it engendered. It then
goes on to explore the distortion of this 'lens' in its neglect of Black feminism - a critical lack,
which not only indicates its partiality, but also vitally restricts its view. The paper closes by
considering the way forward beyond the constitution of 'gender myths', to build on the
achievements of GAD and its potential for development critique, to broaden and deepen both the
understanding of power and the vision of emancipation.
A Note on Race
In considering the significance of race within GAD, I do not intend to essentialise race. I do not
believe that racial difference exists in any absolute sense, rather it serves as one means by which
inequities in the allocation of power, resources and cultural space are organised. In many ways,
‘race’ in this paper serves as a shorthand for the differences in power between ‘north’ and
‘south’, ‘first’ and ‘third’ world. With globalisation the mapping of race onto these distinctions
- and perhaps the distinctions themselves - become increasingly problematic. As Winant
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(1994:19) notes: 'the geography of race is becoming more complex.' If 'expertise' constitutes the
'class-marker' for the development machine, the key signifier of difference lies in the contrast
between 'international' and 'local'. This can serve as a proxy for race, but does not always do so.
As with gender, the meanings that race bears differ radically by context. Believing as I do that
gender analysis has been hampered by its association with a dichotomous schema of sexual
difference, the last thing I wish is to replace this with a dualistic understanding of race. Rather, I
believe that exploring the silences on race in development may serve as a key to unlocking the
power relations inscribed within it, that operate through race but are no means contained by it.
My ultimate aim is to argue the need for a more inclusive approach to social justice in
development, which comprehends and transcends all the various ways in which differences are
established and inequities secured.
The 'Gender Lens'
The most celebrated achievement of WID/GAD is to bring ‘women’ in to development. This
took place at two distinct levels. First, and receiving most attention, this meant that poor women
in the south who had been by-passed by development were now newly included amongst its
‘beneficiaries’. Second, it also involved the expansion of middle class women as the agents of
development, engaged in development planning and outreach. In both cases this new
incorporation of ‘women’ involved two linked processes. First, ‘bringing women in’ signalled a
quantitative increase in the numbers of women engaged in development. But just as
significantly, it also entailed a new awareness of women, through the constitution of ‘women’ as
a distinct group, a group which was marked by its gender. As several GAD critics pointed out,
women had always participated in development, they had just not been recognised as such. The
new gender awareness thus did not create women’s involvement in development, but rather refigured it, first by labelling women as a group and second by incorporating them more directly
within the apparatus of intervention. Thus while women were already involved in farming or
small business, they were now more likely to be targeted directly by agricultural extension
workers or credit providers. Within the agencies similarly, the adoption of WID/GAD was due
to the agitation of a broader women’s movement, combined with pressure exerted by (mainly)
women already employed within them. In many cases, it was these existing employees who
then became the ‘new’ women’s officers (see eg Williams, 1999). Where they had formerly
been simply employees, they were now marked as women, by virtue of occupying ‘gender
posts.’ As the WID/GAD tide rose, of course, this provided a further impulse for agencies to
increase the number of women employees, many of whom had GAD-related responsibilities. A
reverse process of labelling then became evident. WID/GAD came to be labelled ‘women’s
work’ with all the negative associations for status that this carried. In some cases this was
compounded by the employment of wives of staff members to those posts, which was seen
further to compromise their professional status (Jahan 1995,41). More generally, appointments
were made at a junior level, and outside the regular departmental structures, giving them the
status of outsiders within.
The new marking of ‘women’ as a distinct group required the creation of new thinking, which
came to be labelled ‘gender awareness’ and new programmes of ‘gender training’ to instil this.iii
These programmes offer an important site for the play of 'gender myths'. Usually undertaken in a
participatory style, gender training involves both the ‘unlearning’ of folk knowledge about
women, and the absorption of new understandings. This may be tackled at a number of levels,
social, individual and institutional. Techniques borrowed from consciousness raising unearth the
‘wisdoms’ or myths of popular culture, in proverbs and common sayings or imagery about men
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and women, boys and girls. They also challenge individuals' gendered assumptions about
‘proper’ behaviour or stereotyping of 'masculine' or 'feminine' characteristics.
The major part of most gender training, however, concentrates on application to development
programmes, utilising a range of frameworks for analysing sexual divisions of labour and power.
The primary concern is to move women out of the ‘women and children’ (social welfare)
category and into the development category of ‘productive workers.’ Against the ‘myths’ such
as ‘farmers are men’ or ‘women don’t work’ are substituted the ‘facts’ of women’s global
overwork (2/3 of all) and under-reward (10% of income, 1% of property). As this workshop
demonstrates, ironically these so-called facts have themselves acquired a mythic quality. They
have been endlessly repeated, mantra-like, in diverse contexts, despite their questionable
empirical basis (Baden and Goetz 1998:23). They have also conjured up larger than life figures,
(female) victims and heroes doing battle with (male) villains, with development agencies
playing the part of fairy godmother (or father?), whose wisdom and esoteric powers promise a
magical transformation of fortunes.
The description now popular within some GAD circles of gender analysis as a ‘gender lens’,
expresses clearly what this process of inculcating ‘gender awareness’ involves. It offers, as it
were, a new set of spectacles, a way of seeing the world, in which gender (for which read sexual
difference) is magnified and constituted as the primary power relation. There is a clear dilemma
here. Just as 'gender-blind' frameworks distort the analysis of a given context, so the use of a
'gender lens' may inappropriately 'read in' gender difference, and/or block the exploration of
other power relations. Within the overwhelmingly economistic and politics-shy context of
development agencies, it was relatively easy for gender to become the justice issue; women the
'minority' whose interests should be considered; so that social development, in many agencies,
was largely commandeered by gender specialists. At its worst, the common GAD phrase, 'using
a gender lens' could therefore take on a malign meaning: that gender dimensions of difference
were magnified, while all others were screened out.
GAD and the Neglect of Black Feminism
On beginning to explore the issue of race in GAD literature, the silence becomes deafening.
Both a marker and a determinant of this is the absence of Black feminism within GAD
frameworks. My own work is as guilty of this as any one else's. It was not until I began working
specifically on issues of race, that I came to see this. Having written an outline of the problems
in GAD before looking in detail at Black feminist writers, I was doubly shocked: first at the
extent to which my own reference points were white; and second at how accurately the Black
feminist critique identifies the present problems with gender and development.
Since this is so much the norm, so much the way that things have been done that it goes without
saying, it is worth just reflecting a little on how strange this is. First, the major challenge to
1970s feminism was mounted by Black and working class women on just this point: that its
white middle class leadership had whitewashed class and race dynamics in assuming as
universal their own priorities and view of feminist struggle. The power of this critique means
that no feminist activist or academic would now deny that gender and other forms of social
difference are fundamentally related. Second, a major part of development involves
international and inter-racial encounter. You would think that development, with this context
and its remit for social change would be at the forefront of theorising and practising anti-racism.
Third, GAD - or a part of it - is the key place in development which explicitly addresses power
relations. How can it, then, have been so blind to the exercise of power by race?
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Black feminism is clearly diverse, with many points of internal contestation and difference.
However, the basic approach rests on a number of points in common. While these are well
known, their silencing in the context of development means that it is worth briefly stating them
here. Critically, Black feminists assert that gender relations are fundamentally linked with those
of race and class, and that to abstract gender from this context is both analytically flawed and
socially exclusive. This foregrounds the diversity amongst women and the contradictory
relations in and between them.
Following on from this, Black feminists have differed from white in four main areas. First,
Black feminists have consistently resisted a simple identification of 'men as the enemy' and
instead assert that their struggle must involve alliances with men. Second, they question the
identification of paid work with women's empowerment, and emphasise instead how
employment may be a key site of contradiction for women, and for the reproduction of
difference by class, gender and race. Third, Black feminists have rejected the emphasis on the
family as a primary location of oppression. Instead they have analysed the family as a site of
resistance and/or seen the oppression within it as the expression of relations which have their
source elsewhere. Finally, Black women have infused the feminist slogan 'the personal is
political' with a particular power. More strongly than their white colleagues they have
maintained the primacy of the personal as the place from which theory is made sense, resisting
the academic tendency to slip back into distance and abstraction.
As white feminism is similarly diverse, and has changed over time in response to such critiques,
it would be misleading to identify all of these points with Black feminists exclusively. The fact
that all of these problems are still evident within GAD, however, suggests how effectively the
voice of Black feminism has been silenced in development circles. This is partly a matter of
ignorance. Black feminist writers and activists were simply not amongst the default reference
points of the people who forged the GAD project. Those Black women who have voiced an
alternative within GAD have largely been feminists from the South (eg Sen and Grown, 1987).
Here the ambivalence of racial marking is evident: while feminists of the South may speak on a
global stage, their legitimacy is nonetheless at least partially invested in their 'localised' status.
While in one way this enhances their voice, in another it also renders it marginal, with respect to
the 'unmarked' voices of the North. Bunie Matlanyane-Sexwale (1994) relates a gross example
of how these contradictions were played out within a training workshop for international gender
experts. When asked to split into regional groups the women from Africa, Latin America and
Asia divided up without difficulty. The women from the North, however, resisted their
designation as European. They insisted instead on a different designation, as 'the global group.'
While much of the neglect of Black feminism is due to ignorance, it is also something that has
been actively achieved. The opposition between global and local is one of the key markers of
difference in development. When Black voices of dissent 'from the belly of the beast' do
penetrate the fog, they are quickly silenced with the claim that 'they are [usually] Americans!'
whose sense of their African roots is not shared by 'real' Africans themselves. The implicit
claim here, of course, is that they are 'no better than us', or in fact, probably 'worse than us', since
they are a particular interest group while 'we' lay claim to the objectivity of (unmarked white)
universalism.
This is shocking stuff. It is clearly true that there is no essential quality of 'Blackness' which
ensures automatic unity. Thus Black African women professionals certainly express resentment
at the appropriation of their voice by Black Americans, and assert that their common Blackness
does not overcome their difference as African and American. The key point, however, is that
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'Black' and 'white' become meaningful in context, not as integral characteristics. As power
relations - and so categories derived from them - change with circumstances, it makes perfect
sense that Black Americans and Black Africans will sometimes be on the same and sometimes
different 'sides'. If the issue is the limitations of a middle class white starting point, then it
seems perfectly possible that Black American feminists, who have had the best opportunity to
observe this most closely, might speak for others in the third world - and poorer women in the
North - on this point. The pertinence of their critique for GAD suggests that this is so. But even
if it were not, what possible justification could there be for silencing their voices on the grounds
of nationality, while for white women being of the North appears no handicap?
The Primacy of Production
As I have written elsewhere on the neglect of men and masculinities within Gender and
Development, I shall not go into this here.iv Instead, I focus in this paper on two aspects of the
Black feminist critique, the identification of productive work with emancipation; and the
importance of theorising from experience.
In line with the development preoccupations of the time, the early women studies focused on
two major areas, agrarian change and industrialisation. Within these attention concentrated on
work and households, divisions of labour and divisions in power. These two were seen as
importantly related. Women’s work, and particularly the extent to which it could be seen as
‘productive’, was seen as the crucial factor determining women’s ‘status’, which was in turn
indexed by their input into decisionmaking. While of course studies varied, a large majority of
them thus circled around three key concerns: Who does what? - the division of labour; Who
owns what? - access to and control over resources; and Who determines what? - decisionmaking
power. As time went on, and the focus on ‘status’ was criticised, these same questions were used
to assess progress towards a new objective: women’s 'empowerment'. Practical women's
programmes reflected these same concerns. A primary concern of WID initiatives was to
demonstrate how women were involved in 'productive labour', and to promote their fuller
involvement in the market. Underlying both research and practice was the clear assumption that
people’s entitlements - to social status, to welfare, to development inputs - derived from their
position as workers.
While social and political concerns have received more attention within GAD than in many
areas of development, they have always been vulnerable to hijack by the overall privileging of
economic issues. Even 'empowerment', an apparently collective and political term, has thus
been re-defined in many micro-credit studies as referring to individuals' increased levels of
economic production. Not only does the dominant approach privilege the economic over all
other dimensions of society, it also privileges a particular reading of the economic, that of
Western capitalist modernity, over other alternative views. Further, in and through this, it
introduces by stealth a particular understanding of human being, and the nature of human
society, which assumes the priority of individuals, and of agonistic over common interests.
The selection of issues within gender analysis is not random, but reflects the congruence of
diverse interests. First, the feminist theorising which inspired work on gender in development
identified women’s ‘domesticity’ as at the root of their subordination, and placed a high
premium on women’s capacity to earn outside the household (see eg Friedan 1963; Oakley
1974). Second, this reflects the priorities of the Western capitalist societies in which these
frameworks developed, where economic productivity constitutes the primary index of value.
This made it the ‘natural’ focus of concerns to establish the case for women’s inclusion in
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development programming, both for liberal feminists working within a capitalist paradigm, and
for the development professionals and institutions who were the targets of their advocacy. This
approach is also supported by the dominant tradition on ‘the women issue’ within socialist
thought, dating back to the analysis of Engels. His major work on gender, The Origins of
Family, Private Property and the State, identified the ‘world historical defeat of the female sex’
with the emergence of private property, and held that women’s entry into the wage labour
market was a vital precondition for the end of their subordination. The economic thus becomes
not only the primary index of social value, but also the dominant reference point within modes
of explanation - if you give an economic explanation for something, that is taken as sufficient, if
you offer another kind of reasoning, a further explanation is sought.
At the same time, a strong practical argument for engaging with women more directly was
advanced by the population lobby. Having had limited success with direct attempts to control
fertility through family planning programmes, they sought some reinforcements. Again linking
women’s work and status, numerous studies claimed that women’s education and/or
employment was a powerful means to limit fertility. Echoing the efficiency rationale noted
above, this meant that investment in women’s projects would pay back many dividends. Finally,
all this of course chimed with concerns to promote market oriented development. On the one
hand women were shown to be significant economic actors, so it made sense to invest in them to
expand their productivity. On the other hand, bringing women more directly into the labour
market was good for the economy and any increased income they realised would expand the
market for consumption.
The stress in GAD analyses on the sexual division of labour has been heavily criticised by
women writing as Third World Feminists.v Chandra Mohanty (1991) for example rejects the
notion that there is ‘a sexual division of labour’, as though this concept could be generalised
across all times and places. Used monolithically, such a concept can lead to equating the utterly
unlike - such as saying that purdah is equal to rape (Mohanty, 1991:66). But Mohanty’s critique
raises serious questions even when the ‘sexual division of labour’ is used in a more restricted
way. Not only does it point out the obvious, that the division of tasks between categories of
people will differ from place to place. It also highlights the theoretical baggage carried by
prioritising labour at all. This comes as a powerful reminder of how deeply embedded are our
analytical frameworks in particular assumptions. While I would argue that there are some
universal imperatives of human society - such as work, food, love, sex, childcare, shelter - these
are met and managed in vastly different ways, and none can be assumed a priori to occupy the
central place in social organisation.
The writings of Black and working class feminists offer a strong tradition of scepticism
regarding the potential of outside employment to ‘liberate’ women. As bell hooks (1983:97)
succinctly puts it, for poorer Americans freedom equals not employment, but the ability to quit
work. The critique has been mounted on three lines. First, they point out that there is nothing
new in women’s employment, the ideology of domesticity was a reality only for women of the
white middle class. Second, they contest the identification of the family as the primary site of
oppression. While not denying sexism in the home, they see it also as a place of resistance, and
the labour there as humanising and affirming of the humanity often denied in workplace
experience, especially within slavery (Davis, 1981). Third, they argue that it is the character of
work, not simply whether or not it receives wages, that makes a difference. Thus Hill Collins
(1990:48) argues that abusive, alienated labour may take place either in the market or in the
family, while exploitative wages that women can use for their own benefit or unpaid work done
out of love for one’s family can be empowering and/or creative. Research on Black women’s
entry into the wage labour market, and the racial and gender segmentation that they encounter,
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similarly cautions against the notion that paid work in itself offers a means of overcoming
gender oppression. Studies of Black women domestic workers offer a particularly poignant
example of the way that work does not necessarily erase racial and gender identities, but may on
the contrary serve to reconstitute and even intensify the subordination they bear (Hill Collins
1990: 55-7; Mura 1992). Within GAD, similar points are made particularly in the
industrialisation literature (eg Elson and Pearson, 1984). Taken together, this writings suggest an
important corrective to the implicit view that prioritises the economic over the social, as if the
economy existed somehow outside of, and prior to, society. Instead, 'productive work' is
organised in and through gender and racial hierarchies, which critically affect the extent to
which it can offer 'liberation'.
Also, it is not what is done ('skilled'/'unskilled';
'productive'/'domestic') but who does it and the relations in which it is done that determines the
meaning it carries.
Theorising Differences in Incorporating 'Women'
The second aspect of Black feminism that I want to explore is the importance of experience as
the place from which theory is made sense. Through the slogan 'the personal is political' this is
of course a theme common to feminism as a whole. However, there is nonetheless a distinctive
tone in Black feminist voices which reflects their grounding in experience, which challenges
GAD to re-consider how the absence of theorising some aspects of writers' own experiences
may reflect critical limitations to their analyses.
As noted above, one of the aspects of the 'gender lens' was to mark a new category, 'women', for
explicit incorporation in development. Under the guise of this apparently simple and unified
category, women of very different kinds were assigned very different places in the development
machinery, as 'targets' or 'beneficiaries' on the one hand, planners and 'experts' on the other. For
the women professionals involved, the dynamics of this incorporation involved a play of
sameness and difference, of moving in and out of differently gendered, classed, and racialised
identities. This potentially offered rich understanding of the diversity and flexibility of
subjectivity, and of the need to move beyond a monolithic identification of gender with sexual
difference.
At one level both the women planners and target group were united by gender. They were the
same sex, and both lived within patriarchy in their own societies and the way development was
conceived and practised. These similarities should not be discounted. Sex is a big thing, which
combined with similarities in patriarchy across different societies mean that many women do
have 'fellow feeling' with other women - and men with men - despite and across huge social
divides. The influence of ideals of international sisterhood from the women's liberation
movement and the struggle to locate themselves as professional women in what was hitherto a
man's world, without doubt made the young white middle class women who entered aid
bureaucracies in the 1970s more sensitive than their male peers to the exclusion or distortion of
third world women's experience.
At other moments, however, unity by gender dissolved in differences by race, class, and
professional location. It is a common experience for white women professionals to be treated as
an 'honorary man' in 'the field', to have the normal 'gender rules' suspended in deference to their
race, class and official status. The refraction of gender through other aspects of social identity is
tangible every time a 'Madam' asks a 'maid' to lay the table; every time a 'professional' receives a
pay slip giving her in a month what a 'village woman' would see as more than a fortune; every
time a 'gender expert' slams the door in her jeep while 'local women' sit and wait for an
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overcrowded bus; every time she takes a mouthful, cooked by a low-paid catering worker at an
international conference dedicated to the advancement of 'the poorest of the poor'.
Theorising such experiences shows in the first place how gender identities are transformed not
simply through the elaboration of national, educational and cultural differences, but also by the
changing contexts through which individuals move. They also point, however, to critical
aspects of the development project itself. In the first place, it is development which both
constructs a unity between women based on sexual difference, and also establishes a radical
distance between them.vi At one level, the incorporation of a 'sectional' interest group challenges
the basic myth of development, that it is a technical, politically neutral project, external to the
society in which it operates (Ferguson,1990). At another level, however, both the singularity and
the refraction of gender difference serve to reinforce key elements of the development machine.
Chatterjee (1993:207) describes a 'necessary self-deception' at the foundation of planning.
Planners must constitute their objects as external to themselves, about which they gather
information. But this leaves 'beyond' an 'underestimated residue' in which the planners are
themselves bearers of particular social identities, the object of the agency and politics of those
within the state and civil society.
'This residue, as the irreducible, negative, and ever-present "beyond" of planning,
is what we may call, in its most general sense, politics.' (208).
The constitutive fiction of planning, and development more broadly, turns on its own erasure.
On the one hand this means an elision of the interests of planners and planned for, such as is
achieved in this case by the categorisation of both gender planners and 'beneficiaries' with the
single term 'women'.vii On the other hand, however, the development industry looks outward and downward - at an external object, rather than considering itself as a part of the same picture.
This renders the ‘development problem’ ‘out there’, and obscures the ways in which it may be
intimately related to, or even in part constituted by, those who seek to solve it (Mitchell, 1995).
This externalising of development ‘problems’ is a key element in the attribution of difference in
development, evident both at the micro-level of particular interventions, and at the macro level
of 'grand theory', which is built on the contrast between those who are and those who are not
'developed', between those who plan and those who are planned for. In its refusal to identify
gender issues only with 'the field' and its insistence that they must be considered also 'back
home' in the office, GAD has been better than many aspects of development in resisting this.
Asserting experience as the place from which theory is made sense offers a way to consolidate
this further, by mounting a radical challenge to these conventions, insisting on the complexity of
the relationships which development assumes and constructs, and the contradictory
configuration of identity and difference within them.
Beyond a Mythic Approach to Gender Inequality
These broader political perspectives expose a key contradiction within many gender and
development approaches. This is, that a large part of the GAD critique concerns the bias within
the development apparatus, and yet GAD protagonists then have to rely on precisely those same
flawed institutions to implement sound gender policies. Putting all one’s faith in planning
therefore depends on a willed forgetfulness of where the initial problems lay, or at least a liberal
diagnosis of gender bias as a kind of mistake within otherwise equitable institutions. This is, of
course, the classic liberal feminist conundrum (see eg Pringle and Watson 1992). Furthermore,
identifying gender as the key form of social inequality, and nonetheless asserting that
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development interventions have the capacity to overcome this, shows a remarkable instance of
the fatal flaw of development hubris.
Two fundamental problems that have beset GAD and played a significant part in the generation of
gender myths: the confusion of question and answer; and the confusion of analysis and objective.
These relate to the more obvious confusion about gender as women and gender as sexual
difference. Siltanen (1994), in her discussion of gender and employment in the UK post office,
addresses the first of these problems. The need, she says, is to show how gender becomes
meaningful, and when it is not, not to assume it meaningful and that its meaning will take a prespecified form (ibid:9). Gender and Development myths assume gender to be essentially
meaningful, as if (third world) persons were somehow ascribed gender (and racial) identities prior
to their entry into society (Mohanty, 1988). This renders men and women into fixed and
oppositional categories, which obscures the remarkable fluidity and contextuality of social identity,
and the unpredictability this means for forms of alliance (Jordan, 1989). Furthermore, the
propagation of gender myths relies on fixing the meaning of gender: as subordination; as
comparative developmental advantage; or sometimes both. This imposes a false uniformity on
remarkably diverse contexts. Be it the green revolution in South Asia, structural adjustment in
Africa, or export processing in East Asia, women always lose out.viii Be it credit in Bangladesh,
rural household food provision in Africa, or community housing projects in Latin America, women
are less selfish, more responsible and more developmental than men. The analytic opportunism of
GAD, which Baden and Goetz (1998) point out, is very evident here. While subordination is seen
as socially constructed and programmes designed to overcome it, the generosity of women's natures
is apparently essentially given, and will survive their 'empowerment.'
A critical feature in the constitution of myths is their preoccupation with morality. Not only is the
meaning of gender fixed, therefore, but also the categorical dualism also lends itself to moral
elaboration, in what I have called elsewhere the 'good girl bad boy' syndrome (White, 1997).ix This
is very problematic. Not only does it obscure the virtues of men (!) but it also blocks the ethical
analysis of particular situations, as West (1993) has argued with respect to moral dualisms on race
in the United States. It directs attention away from what is being said or done to the category of
person saying or doing, and either validates or voids it accordingly. This suppresses not only the
voice of people from the 'opposing' category, but also those of others within the same group. Ethics
can attach to structures and systems, or to individual actions, but not to social categories or
identities. In gender myths, therefore, what needs to be discovered, in terms of social identity, the
meaning of gender, and moral entitlements is instead assumed: the question already entails the
answer.x In summary, to return to Janet Siltanen, and substituting 'development' for her
'employment':
'The reconsideration of theories of [development] required is one that aims to
explain aggregate patterns in terms that address the variety in disaggregated
experience.'
Siltanen (1994:11)
The confusion between analysis and objective derives from the first as it translates into
development practice. The identification of gender analysis with the advancement of women, and
more recently with 'promoting gender equality' can result in only programmes which admit these
objectives being thought relevant for gender analysis. But gender analysis is always relevant, even
if there are no women present in the programme. This is partly because gender is an issue for men
too, but more broadly, because gender is essentially articulated with other social relations such as
race and class. There is no substitute for a gender-informed analysis: without gender, any class, or
11
race, or poverty analysis is simply incomplete. On the other hand, challenging gender relations per
se is not necessarily a primary objective in all projects. Analysis needs to be contextual, and other
issues may be a higher priority at particular times. It is vital, therefore, to distinguish between
gender analysis and gender as objective in programmes. While the one is a pre-requisite, the scope
for the other must be determined by careful, contextual analysis.
Drawing on these points, as well as broader reflections from feminist and anti-racist scholarship, I
offer a number of suggestions for liberating gender analysis from its entanglement with gender
myths:
a.
Analysis should be morally and epistemologically open-ended. It should not itself contain
the answers it claims to seek.
b.
Analysis should focus on how social identities make a difference in relationship, not
assume them as fundamental attributes of individuals.
c.
Analysis needs to recognise the shifting articulations between dimensions of social
difference, and be sufficiently elastic to admit the specificity of each of these.
d.
Analysis needs to be able to admit both the resilience and the flexibility of these as power
relations.
e.
Analysis needs to be self-reflexive, theorising in and through experience. On the one hand
this means being open to questioning its own assumptions. On the other hand it means
recognising its own location with the development process, and questioning the
connections/disruptions between different levels of the development machine and the
contexts in which it works.
f.
Analysis needs to be modest, admitting its own limitations and partiality. In political action
it should thus lend itself to forging coalitions with other feminist and anti-racist struggles,
while recognising the particularity of each.
On a lighter note, there is a final aspect to this self-critique of the 'gender myths.' It is a positive
one, even though (or because?) it makes people like me look silly. This is, that notwithstanding
the fact that the published texts may fail to ground gender within other social relations,
especially race, in practice development workers throughout the world are correcting this as they
customise the frameworks for their own use. They know there is a problem, so they get on and
fix it, leaving the academics like me to bring up the rear.
References
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discourses on gender in Beijing.' pp 19-38 in Feminist Visions of Development: Gender
Analysis and Policy, C Jackson and R Pearson (eds), London: Routledge.
Chatterjee, Partha (1993) The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post-colonial Histories.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Crewe, Emma and Harrison, Elizabeth (1998) Whose Development? An Ethnography of Aid.
London: Zed.
Davis, Angela (1982) Women, Race and Class. London: The Women's Press.
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Elson, Diane and Pearson, Ruth (1984) 'The subordination of women and the internationalization of
factory production' pp 18-40 in K Young et al (ed) Of Marriage and the Market. London:
Routledge.
Engels, F (1972) The Origins of Family, Private Property and the State. London: Lawrence and
Wishart.
Featherstone, Brid and Trinder, Liz (1997) 'Familiar subjects? Domestic violence and child
welfare.' Child and Family Social Work 2:147-159
Ferguson, James (1990) The Anti-Politics Machine: 'Development', Depoliticisation, and
Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Friedan, B (1963) The Feminine Mystique. London:Gollancz.
Grossberg, Lawrence (1996) 'Identity and cultural studies: is that all there is?' in Stuart Hall and
Paul du Gay (eds) Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage.
Hill Collins, Patricia (1990) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the
Politics of Empowerment. London/Boston: Unwin Hyman
hooks, bell (1984) Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press.
Jahan, Rounaq (1995) The Elusive Agenda: Mainstreaming Women in Development. London:
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June Jordan (1989) 'Report from the Bahamas' pp 137-146 in her Moving Towards Home:
Political Essays. London: Virago.
Kothari, Uma (1997) 'Identity and representation: experiences of teaching a neo-colonial discipline'
in Liz Stanley (ed) Knowing Feminisms. London: Sage.
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Persistent Inequalities: Women and World Development. Washington DC: Overseas
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Matlanyane-Sexwale, Bunie M (1994) 'The Politics of Gender Training' Agenda (Cape Town)
23:57-63.
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(ed) Power of Development.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (1988) 'Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and colonial
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--- (1991) 'Cartographies of struggle: Third World women and the politics of feminism' in C
Mohanty, A Russo and L Torres (eds) Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Moore, M (1998) 'Look, it moves! The changing face of IDS academic staff' IDS Alumnews,
May 1998, Sussex: Institute of Development Studies.
Mura, David.1992. “Strangers in the Village.” In M Andersen and P Hill Collins, (eds) Race,
Class and Gender: An Anthology. Belmont CA: Wadsworth.
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Pearson, R (1992) 'Gender issues in industrialisation.' in T. Hewitt et. al (eds) Industrialisation and
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Pringle, Rosemary and Watson, Sophie (1992) ' "Women's interests" and the post-structuralist
state.' pp 53-73 in Barrett, Michele and Phillips, Anne (ed) (1992) Destabilizing Theory:
Contemporary Feminist Debates. Cambridge: Polity Press.
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Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality. London: Chatto and Windus.
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White, Sarah (1997) 'Men, Masculinities and the Politics of Development' Gender and
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Endnotes
i.
Some writers draw a sharp distinction between Women in Development (WID), Women and Development
(WAD) and Gender and Development (GAD), relating these to historical phases, politics, and/or ways of
understanding gender. In practice the differences are rather difficult to maintain, both because the use of
labels partly reflects the micro-politics of different institutions and because the approaches using any one
label are themselves highly diverse and often mixed together. For simplicity, therefore, I use the currently
most popular label, Gender and Development (GAD), as an umbrella term for all of these approaches.
ii
For a broader discussion of this, and consideration of how one might start thinking about race in
development, see White (2002).
iii.
See, for example, the training manuals Williams (ed) 1994 or Canadian Council for International ooperation; MATCH International Centre; and Association quebecoise des organismes de cooperation
internationale, 1991.
iv
See eg White (1997); White (2000).
v.
Women who identify themselves as Third World Feminists are not necessarily located physically in the
South - one of the best known in GAD circles, for example, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, in fact lives in the
United States.
vi.
A similar argument could be made along class - and sometimes ethnic - lines, with respect to 'women'
nationals of the same country, who comprise 'developers' and their 'target groups.'
vii
It is now more common for men to take responsibility for gender issues within development agencies,
however this is still relatively rare, and usually involves an explicit extension of gender concerns to include
men and masculinities also.
viii.
More recent work in Gender and Development offers a corrective to this simple narrative, both in recognising
differences between categories of women and in admitting that some may gain some advantages - see eg Lim's
(1990) critique of Elson and Pearson (1984) and Pearson's (1992) incorporation of this.
ix.
Featherstone and Trinder (1997) make similar points in the very different context of social policy discussions
of violence within the family in the UK.
x.
Similar problems are raised by Lawrence Grossberg (1996) with respect to the centrality of 'identity' in cultural
studies.
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