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Women, Culture, and International Relations, by Vivienne Jabri and Eleanor O’Gorman (eds.)
6. Gender and Development: Working with Difference
It is a Friday in Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. The director of a Bangladeshi development agency is visiting one of the field offices. She arrived yesterday from her home, half a day’s journey away in the capital city. As the jeep comes to a halt, a small crowd gathers. Mainly her own staff, the group is thickened by some local government officials and the inevitable gaggle of children and passers–by, who pause to see what is going on.
Somewhat stiffly, the director climbs down from the jeep. No longer a young woman, she is feeling her age. She greets the people and they smile and nod in response. She fumbles in her handbag and a gasp spreads through the crowd. In this Bangladesh, where cigarettes and the streets belong to men—on this most holy day, when fasting prohibits anything to pass the lips—this woman stands where everyone can see, meeting their eyes, daring a challenge—shamelessly, defiantly smoking.
In the heady early days of the Bretton Woods conventions, there was little doubt that the project of development was emancipatory. A brave new world was envisaged of progress and modernity—a world free from poverty, rich in human rights. In the 1990s, things look rather different. Environmental degradation and the persistence of violence, economic hardship, and political oppression have cast doubt on the dominant development models. In academic circles the grand theories have been displaced by a concern with particularity, flexibility, and difference. Emancipation is now to be sought not through a universalist project but through the recognition and celebration of diversity.
In this context, gender and development (GAD) occupies a site of critical contradiction. On the one hand, it represents a fundamental attack on the universalist claims of development discourse: what was said to hold for all was in fact scandalously particular, excluding the experience of one half of the human race! On the other hand, as it has become incorporated within policymaking, gender appears as a handmaiden to the “master discourse” of development, its political challenge domesticated into a technical concern. GAD advocates see their project as emancipatory, but paradoxically gender is the most common focus for resistance from the South, either through low–profile foot–dragging (“these outsiders don’t understand our local women”) or by more overt charges of cultural imperialism.
This contradictory context in turn produces contradictory outcomes. Women’s desks and even women’s ministries adorn the state apparatuses of many countries of the South but are generally starved of economic or political power. 1 A gender or “women in development” section has to be completed for all programs applying for North American or European funding, but privately many in these agencies believe “the gender business” is overdone. By the 1980s, a “women’s program” had become the sine qua non of any self–respecting agency, resulting in a rash of such programs being instrumentally established. One outcome of such “special programs” is to keep women marginalized, aside from the mainstream. At the same time, this policy context has nonetheless expanded the space for women to be employed as staff members and for women as clients to gain some access to aid resources. Furthermore, local feminists who had found it difficult to get outside support have found that the new priority given to gender enables them to strengthen and expand their activities. Paradoxically, although this often means small–scale project work with women, it can also involve more overtly political lobbying, including against mainstream development itself. 2
The history of gender and development reads like a switchback between domestication and emancipation—between the suppression and eruption of difference. This chapter aims to chart some of this story. It begins by setting out the dimensions of difference identified in feminist theory and showing how difference is construed in development planning. It then looks at the practical ways that notions of gender difference have been deployed in colonial and development contexts: to justify intervention, to resist intervention, and to modify intervention. Threading through the chapter is a concern with the relationship between issues of difference and emancipation—the points of tension as well as complementarity between them. Clearly there are dangers in universalism and the suppression of “other voices” that it entails. But there are dangers too in a stress on difference and the essentializing of “otherness” that this can involve. Neither “sameness” nor “difference” is set or self–explanatory. Both simplify a complex reality, suppressing some truths as they express others. They are symbolic, not simply descriptive, highly malleable, and politically indeterminate.
The opening story hints at some of this. If the director had been an expatriate, she would have confirmed herself an arrogant outsider. But in fact she was Bengali and, by birth at least, a Muslim. The self–assertion—or cultural offense—that her smoking involved was thus calculated and deliberate. Almost all who were there condemned it, but on very different grounds. For some it was evidence of apostasy, for others loose living, for yet others the pollution of western influence. For many of her staff it seemed simply ill–judged, likely to make their work harder when the dust had settled back into the tracks left by the jeep’s tires. For the woman herself it was an assertion of difference, of her right to do as she liked, to live by her own, not others’, values. She was not being “western”; she was simply being herself. Her personal defiance of local norms was to her consistent with the cultural challenge that her organization’s radical stance on gender implied. That the culture is not monolithic is shown in the range of grounds on which she provoked censure: religious, sexual/moral, national/cultural, and practical/pragmatic. These reactions also ironically affirm her cultural identity as one who belongs; the same actions from a non–Bengali would have excited comparatively little comment.
Dimensions of Difference
The notion of difference is a slippery one. Before proceeding, therefore, it is important to set down some parameters for its discussion. In feminist theory, difference is construed in three main ways. First, there is the question of women’s difference from men. How this is tackled varies widely. Very crudely, liberal and socialist feminists seek to minimize this, holding that a categorical emphasis on women’s “difference” has been fundamental to their subordination. Radical feminists, by contrast, assert women’s difference and celebrate it as the grounds for an alternative and superior set of values. The second dimension of difference stresses contrasts in the constitution of gender relations across cultures. This may provide an invitation to a more nuanced, sensitive exploration of gender/power or alternatively present a wholesale rejection of feminism as irrelevant to women on a global scale. Finally, postmodernism has focused attention on differences between and within women, emphasizing the multiple dimensions of subjectivity and the importance of context in the constitution of identity.
These three dimensions of difference are all reflected in gender and development debates. But the particular form they take reflects the fact that gender and development is, above all, a policy discourse. This does not mean that it is concerned exclusively with aid–funded programs and projects but that its concern with social change is never politically innocent. It aims not just to describe the world but to change it. And the ways that this change is configured are not random but reflect the values and assumptions of the enterprise of development more broadly and the process of managing change to which it is committed. Therefore, before considering the gender debates specifically, it is important to review briefly how contradictions with respect to difference are inherent in the way development itself is understood.
Historically, there has been relatively little discussion of cultural difference in the development context. It appears mainly in the writings of modernization theorists of the 1960s and 1970s, who argued over the extent to which “traditional values” constituted “an obstacle to growth.” 3 Although such phrasing is now politically unacceptable, these debates hint at the fact that notions of difference are fundamental to the whole way that development is understood and undertaken. The treatment of difference in development is radically contradictory. On the one hand, development both assumes and construes a categorical distinction between the “developed” and the “under”– or “less developed.” The subject–object relations this establishes are played out in myriad pairings: between donor and recipient states, majority and minority communities, urban and rural areas, planners and their “target groups,” those who know and those who are known. As Edward Said points out in Orientalism, such asymmetries serve to suppress the diversity within the subordinate group; whereas “we” have names and faces, one “native” stands for all. 4 This tendency becomes a formal requirement where planning is involved: Planning must of necessity simplify real– ity, divesting many of the particularities to formulate a portable “model.” As Wood argues, the process of labeling that this involves is an important exercise of power. 5 People’s humanity and diversity are denied as they are refigured as the targets of planning—cases detached from the stories of their own life–contexts.
On the other hand, the irony of this process is that it serves to collapse not only the differences among “the people,” but also the distinctions between them and the planners. As people become “cases” they are not only disorganized from their own worlds but also reorganized into the life–worlds of the planners. Of course, this process is asymmetric: The people enter the planners’ world, but not vice versa. But this submergence of difference is significant and as essential to the process of planning as the original assumption of it. On it depends the vital claim that planners can know the people’s needs and so prescribe the action that serves their interests best.
The silencing of discussion of difference indicates most immediately its political sensitivity but perhaps also—ironically—its centrality. What is axiomatic and taken for granted does not need to be discussed, and perhaps cannot safely be, without the whole edifice crumbling down. This view is supported by evidence from the main locus for discussing difference in contemporary development discourse: the area of human rights. Since the 1960s there has been dispute about how inclusive human rights should be—whether only civil and political or broadened/replaced by economic and social. More recently, the universal character of human rights has been challenged as western and claims made for the space for different interpretations by culture. The details of these debates are not something I can discuss here. Rather, I am interested in where the protagonists are coming from: the Arab Islamic world and East Asia. These are, of course, precisely those parts of the world that fit least easily into the categories of North and South and most radically challenge the established oppositions of developed and developing.
Gender and the Codification of Difference in Colonialism
Although women appear to be relative newcomers to the development agenda, the implication of gender in policy debates regarding (post)colonial societies is nothing new. As indicated below, an important part of the original assertion of “difference” in gender and development was the desire to attack the inappropriate imposition of western stereotypes that had characterized colonial and development policy. Colonialism was itself, of course, deeply inscribed with gender imagery, which was used to elaborate many varying lines of difference, some of which had nothing at all to do with differences between men and women. For British children, and to some extent the population “at home” more generally, the pioneer/explorer became the type of a certain kind of male hero. In India, the British Empire was symbolized by the (male) lion. Gender was also used within the divide–and–rule policy of assigning to the regions different “races” with different qualities: the tall, “martial” Punjabis were contrasted, for example, with the short, “feminine” Bengalis. Such imagery can, of course, be subverted from below. Thus, the Bengali nationalist movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries embraced this feminized identity by asserting India as the “motherland.” This at once rejected the legitimacy of the British lion and reasserted the long–established veneration of the goddess Kali in Bengal. 6
Gender relations were also used as a way of marking the divide between “modern” and “traditional.” In southern parts of Africa, for example, the “modern” urban/industrial sector was defined as male—to the extent that in some places women were actually debarred from entering it without special permission. The “backward” rural areas were by contrast construed as feminine—both in terms of the majority of their inhabitants and as inert, passive, and residual. 7 In South Asia, the precursor to gender and development was the “status of women debate,” which arose in the context of British colonialism. I offer a very brief summary of this debate to highlight some of the continuities between it and contemporary GAD discourse.
The first and most obvious similarity is that the status of women arose as a policy issue. Its highest–profile expression was in discussion of “what is to be done” about, for example, the practice of widow immolation, sati. Second, the discourses of modernity within which it was inscribed were also heavily racialized. “Barbarous” traditional India was set against “civilized” modern Britain, and the contrast was used to justify colonial intervention. This was further reinforced by taking the problematic as “women’s status,” which constituted Indian women as passive, attributed status by society, requiring “liberation” by outside agents, and indeed objectified by the debates themselves. 8
Implicit in this, of course, is that “women’s status” is something negative to be escaped. It also establishes clearly the significant lines of difference: those between Indian women and men on the one hand, and between Indian and British women on the other. This both blocked analysis of gender relations among the British and, most important, obscured differences among Indian women. 9 Finally, framing gender in terms of women’s status identified it as superstructural, effectively divorcing it from relationship with other forms of social inequality. 10
Gender and Development: The Assertion of Difference
Gender and development (or women in development, as it was first known) began in the 1970s with the assertion of difference. The major concern was to make the case for including women in development, to redesign development planning so that it took better account of women’s responsibilities and interests. Development was seen predominantly as a good thing, from which women had been left out. The challenge, therefore, was to count women in. The overall motif for this project was the need to remedy the “invisibility” of women. This was particularly resonant in purdah societies, where a veil was seen literally to have been drawn over women’s activities, but it was also applied very forcefully to the methods and approaches of development itself.
The case for taking women into account has primarily rested on the first two dimensions of difference identified earlier: the differences of women from men and cultural differences in gender relations. The first case was generally posed either on welfare grounds—that women constituted a vulnerable group in special need, or on grounds of efficiency—that including women would enable development to get its work done better. In the second case, the dominant model of development was attacked for carrying western assumptions about gender that were inappropriate to many of the societies in which programs took place. Attention focused particularly on two dimensions of this: the division of labor and divisions within the household. In both approaches, while the argument was made in the name of “Third World” women, the terms of engagement were set by factors quite external to them. This section describes this for each of the approaches in turn.
The overall framework within which the case for women’s “difference” is advanced is the distinction drawn between the deserving and the undeserving. This dates back in social policy at least as far as the Elizabethan Poor Law in England. This line of difference is yet another highly malleable one: In the UK under the premierships of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, for example, the list of the undeserving was seen to expand exponentially until there is now an almost perfect fit between it and any who might wish to claim state benefit. To qualify as deserving, groups need to prove themselves as either especially needy or especially virtuous. A third, but much less sure, alternative also exists. This is the claim for justice, if a group can show itself to have been discriminated against.
The claim for women’s “specific” interests to be taken into account in development planning has been made on all of these grounds, although the equity grounds have had by far the least prominence. Rather than arguing from first principles, the case made for women assumes a particular set of values or view of what development should be and then relies very heavily on the presentation of a particular set of images of women that establishes them as “deserving” according to that perspective. This re–presenting of women according to different development policy agendas is pointed out by Caroline Moser in her discussion of the way that styles of women’s programs vary according to wider development fashions. 11 In addition to this, there is some variation within each approach, allowing women to be painted as more active or more passive. Table 6.1 adapts and extends the framework Moser presents to express some of these dimensions.
| Table 6.1 Motives and Interests in Women’s Programs | ||||||||
|
Program Approach |
Women | Emphasis | Development Model | Methods | ||||
| Population Control | dangerous breeders; nochoice mothers | control population | global limits | top-down; women targeted | ||||
| Welfare | vulnerable group; mothers | family welfare | relief | top-down; handout | ||||
| Equity | backward class; disadvantaged by development | equality; human rights | modernization | top-down; legal/admin structural | ||||
| Anti-Poverty | mothers; poorest of poor | fight poverty | basic needs | top-down; women targeted | ||||
| Efficiency | under-utilized resources;resource managers | economic development via market | Structural Adjustment Program | top-down; business | ||||
| Empowerment | women as powerless; need question gender relations | gender as power; relations | liberation | bottom-up; struggle | ||||
There are obvious limitations to the construction of any typology such as this. In practice, programs often have a range of objectives, and the different elements are frequently found mixed up together. Thus, programs to promote girls’ education espousing the language of “equity” or “empowerment,” for example, may derive from an underlying concern to limit population growth, since “empowered,” and specifically educated, women are believed more likely to limit their family size. In addition, the outcomes of programs are not predictable simply from their character. A welfare program may promote more efficient use of resources, and an empowerment program could result primarily in enhanced welfare. Plans are modified by those who implement them, and people respond to programs in ways the developers did not foresee. 12 In addition, programs are packaged differently for different markets, so that the practical content of a program cannot simply be read off from the way it is described. A nongovernmental organization (NGO) in the South, for example, might represent the same program as welfare to its national government, as efficiency to multilateral donors, and as empowerment to a more radical northern NGO. Furthermore, the issue of instrumentality may be read at least two ways. The tailoring of “women” to fit a particular agenda may indicate the instrumental incorporation of women to serve other objectives. Alternatively, it could reflect the political necessity to use the dominant ideology against itself, making the case for including women in terms the planners will recognize and accept.
Both of these dynamics certainly exist. There is, however, no doubt that an ambivalence runs throughout the area of gender and development with respect to its ultimate objective. Is the chief aim to improve the situation for women, or is it to promote the more effective use of women for other development goals? Slippage between these two is evident across the different program approaches and so cannot simply be mapped onto the typology above. As fashions in development have changed, there has been a clear shift from an early predominant stress on the needy/welfare/vulnerable set of images to the virtuous/efficiency/capable axis. It is important, however, not to assume too quickly that more “positive” images of women necessarily represent their interests better. The current stress on women as active, competent agents seems more progressive than that on women as a “vulnerable group.” But the image of women as budding entrepreneurs, whose self–help initiatives simply need a little outside support in order to raise themselves out of poverty, also dovetails rather neatly with the global dominance of neoliberal politics and its interest in minimizing outlay on welfare or public services. The promotion of women in development undoubtedly does afford them new opportunities. There is, however, a distinct propensity for the advocacy of gender equity to metamorphose into an instrumental concern to use women as the means to achieve other ends. This shadows the tendency mentioned above—for the political challenge of a feminist perspective to be recast as a technical concern servicing the mainstream project of development.
Along with this emphasis on women’s difference from men, women’s inclusion in development has been argued on the grounds of cultural differences on gender. The first line of attack concerned the division of labor. In particular, the assumption that men were breadwinners and women housewives was claimed to have harmed the interests of women in the Third World and the interests of development itself. It was pointed out, for example, how all male cadres of agricultural extension workers had targeted male farmers for their advice and support, whereas in Africa, particularly, much of the farming is in fact done by women. 13 An allied, but somewhat more critical, account maintained that women had always been involved in development but only on male terms. Rather than being simply left out, this meant that they had actually been disadvantaged by development, either relatively by losing out in comparison with men or even suffering actual decline in absolute terms. Again in the case of agriculture, for example, it was argued that the assumption that farmers were men had resulted in a bias toward “men’s crops”—predominantly those produced in whole or part for sale—in agricultural research stations and extension support. New opportunities for realizing cash incomes had encouraged men to concentrate on crops for sale, leaving less land on which women could grow food for subsistence. Divisions within the household meant that the cash men earned was construed as their personal income, leaving women to carry a heavier burden in sustaining the family’s livelihood. 14
Recognizing these intrahousehold conflicts over resources further challenged western models of the “family wage,” the “common pot,” or a division between outside “competition” and an inner domain ruled by “love not money.” Admitting differences within the household also removed legitimacy from the formerly accepted practice of interviewing the male “head” as representative of the whole household. He might not know what other members of the household did or thought, and even if he did know he might misrepresent them where his interests were in conflict with theirs. Similarly, the conventional view of a household as containing a husband, wife, and their children was overturned as culture–bound. Exposing this stereotype showed a high proportion of households without a male head, which had been previously overlooked. These were important in program terms not only because of their numbers (30 percent of households in much of Latin America and approaching 50 percent of households in some parts of the Caribbean, for example) but also because they are particularly common among the very poor.
Embodying these tensions, the inclusion of women was advocated both as an equity issue and as a means to increase the efficiency of the development enterprise. Targeting men only meant failing to access the points at which agricultural decisions were actually made, particularly with respect to crops grown purely for subsistence use, cultivation of which was overwhelmingly women’s responsibility. Failing to engage with women could therefore restrict the expansion of “modern” farming techniques and have a negative impact on family welfare.
For some, recognition of male bias within the structures of development discourse and practice had indicated the need for a much more fundamental critique. National labor force statistics, for example, were shown to have been constructed according to a bias that privileged those parts of the economy in which men predominated and discounted those in which women figured more largely. Moving beyond issues of gender as such, this could be used to question the underlying values it betrayed: the priority given to cash crops over subsistence, or production for the market over family welfare. The gender critique of structural adjustment programs similarly moved on from seeing women as a vulnerable group that suffered disproportionately to questioning the gender bias implicit within macroeconomics itself. 15
Still others have gone a step further and called for a rejection of development itself. McCarthy, for example, maintained that the agenda for “bringing women in” reflected a concern not for the interests of women but rather for capitalist expansion. 16 Women and the subsistence sector, she claimed, were now being targeted as new sources of capital formation, labor, and markets. Targeting women through gender–specific programs introduced false lines of differentiation within the working class and thus obscured their common interests and the real nature of their exploitation. An allied argument has been made from a radical feminist standpoint by the ecofeminists. They maintain that the entire project of development is inherently imperialist, founded on the exploitation of the Third World, women, and nature. Although open to criticism on diverse factual and theoretical grounds, taken as a poetic statement there is undoubted power in its critique of development as violence, dispossession, and desire. 17
Such fundamental critiques of development are very much a minority voice. By contrast, the dominant thrust of the assertion of cultural difference has been to demand an adjustment in the technical apparatus of development. Accepting the dominant values of “productive labor” and engagement in the market as read, the chief concern was to demonstrate how women were in fact involved in the first and to promote their fuller involvement in the second. Assertion of the importance of women to production was mounted on two lines. The first was to reevaluate the significance of women’s domestic work, combating the “my wife doesn’t work” or “I’m only a housewife” syndrome. The extent of women’s work was stressed, resulting in a rash of time–use studies counting up hours and minutes that men and women spent working. These showed that women often worked longer hours on a daily basis than men and more consistently throughout the year, because demand for their labor was less subject to seasonal fluctuations.
Second, the significance of domestic work was a topic of fierce debate. Divisions between public and private spheres were challenged. The importance of domestic work to the reproduction of the labor force (servicing children and employed family members) and to the overall system of production (e.g., by stretching household income and supplying necessary labor without pay) were stressed. At the same time, a critique of the productive/domestic division was launched on another tack: that it was an invention of capitalism, and no such distinctions could be applied within other kinds of societies (the term family farm expresses this neatly). For development agencies, this led to suspicions of stereotyped women’s domestic projects, such as sewing and handicrafts, many of which had been in existence since colonial times. How far did they reflect the existing division of labor between men and women, and how far were they the imposition of inappropriate stereotypes from outside?
The second line of attack was to stress that women were already involved in productive labor—that which generated income. The notion that men were the sole supporters of their families was shown up as a myth. As already noted, in Africa particularly, men and women within the household might be allotted separate fields with differing responsibilities for providing for the family. In much of Asia, women worked in the family fields alongside their male kin or were wage laborers, particularly among the poor. Even those who did not work outside (a term whose definition varies by context) were shown to do “production–related” work such as, in Bangladesh, seed germination, crop processing, and storage. The boundaries between social and economic were seen to be much more permeable than had been assumed. Picking up on anthropological perspectives, kinship, for example, construed in western society as a private matter, was shown to have political and economic aspects vital to people’s livelihood options. In light of this, the women’s work of family networking and gift giving could be shown to be of much more than simply personal importance. 18
A clear irony will be evident to anyone acquainted with western feminist debates. This is that the arguments for attending to cultural difference are in fact made on very similar terms to those advanced by feminists within the western context. The critique of productive and domestic spheres, the studies of household budgeting, and deconstruction of the myth of the sole male breadwinner are all very familiar. At one level this is not surprising, as the vast majority of these studies were made by western women; and even when they were made by women from the countries concerned, it is western analyses (and often western research funding) that have set the terms of the debate.
A further irony, which is common to much of at least the liberal and socialist schools in western feminism, is that the argument for women’s “different” interests has been made largely on male terms. Women’s work is important because it is really “productive” (like men’s) even when it seems “just domestic” (like women’s). The major way forward envisaged for women in poverty is through income generation—production for the market—seen hitherto as the male public sphere. Of course, it is a vast generalization to identify market participation as a male gendered activity. In West Africa, for example, women have long been established as highly adept market traders. Nevertheless, the economic model that dominates development analysis is not derived from West African livelihood systems. It is difficult to deny that in the dominant economic model such terms as productive and domestic do carry gendered associations.
In gender and development, notwithstanding its change of name from the earlier women in development, the onus for change has been squarely placed on women. The failure to problematize male gender identities, or (with a few honorable exceptions) the male bias in how economic value is assigned, has various contradictory outcomes. Women’s difference from men becomes itself the problem, not something to be celebrated. Their development involves taking up more male activities, but without shedding any of their traditional responsibilites for reproductive labor. The typical women’s program replicated repeatedly in countries all over the South thus sees women organized into groups to foster income generation, along with a cocktail of literacy training, contraceptive distribution, and health and welfare advice. The obvious result of this is the familiar problem of the double day for women. Lack of interest in domestic labor means that no effort is made to challenge men to compensate for women’s expanded workload by taking on more of the responsibility for running the home. Development planners collude with the view that housework is not real work, that women’s time and labor are largely without value and therefore endlessly elastic. As D. Elson has pointed out, this of more and academic interest. 19 At the national level it results in donor–imposed development policies, such as structural adjustment programs, systematically shifting costs from the public to the private sphere, from the state to the women.
The priority placed on productive labor is so taken for granted within western culture, and even within many feminist perspectives, that it can be difficult to see any other way of validating women’s activities. The following example indicates that other alternatives exist:
In September 1988, Bangladesh suffered disastrous flooding, seriously affecting large areas of the country, including the capital, Dhaka. Food was an urgent necessity, as people’s homes were flooded, with many living on the roofs of their houses and fuel and cooking areas waterlogged. Oxfam decided to set up a kitchen in the Dhaka office. The whole office area, inside and out, was given over to makeshift cooking facilities. At the peak of operations they produced more than 90,000 chapatis a day. It was run by volunteers, the wives of the office staff. They also employed 115 women from the relief camps on a daily wage basis. Male staff and volunteers then took the chapatis out in boats to distribute them to those marooned.
As one of the team evaluating this program, I was uncomfortable with the way that it so obviously reconfirmed the existing gender division of labor. The women were in the kitchen and the men were the heroes, doing the dangerous, high–profile work of distributing the food outside. 20 Worse even than this, the one female Bangladeshi staff member 21 was consigned to the kitchen, her gender overriding her professional status. On the other hand, this might have been simply the sensible deployment of comparative advantages: the women were better at making chapatis and the men at handling boats. A national emergency is not, perhaps, the time to launch a radical gender policy.
The local staff and their wives were angry with my interpretation. First, the women stressed how glad they were to be able to do something positive in the height of the crisis. Second, they pointed out the importance of giving wages to the women from the relief camps, who usually found it harder than their men to find casual paid work. Third, they were proud of having responded themselves, with something that they could do better than outsiders, rather than waiting on the foreigners to drop a relief program from the skies. But finally, and most important from the gender perspective, the “Oxfam kitchen” made absolutely clear just how essential and skilled women’s domestic work is. This is something that is usually difficult to do, just because such work is so ordinary; but the spotlight of the crisis allowed it to be seen. While the program did not reverse gender roles, it certainly politicized them. My desire to see a challenge to the gender division of labor offended and frustrated the women volunteers. To them it was the denial of a legitimate source of their pride, both as Bangladeshis and as women.
Difference Between Women
Distinctions between women is the dimension of feminist concerns with difference that is by far the least explored in gender and development. In part, this is due to the general tendency of planning to telescope difference. The need for a tangible target makes an awareness of the multiple dimensions of subjectivity, for example, rather hard to take on. The use of women’s groups as the medium of development intervention also tends to ascribe homogeneity, suppressing difference within the group as a unit as well as within the wider population of “women” at large. 22 Reflecting a common pattern, although men are also organized into groups by development agencies, these are typically characterized by occupational or landholding status (e.g., as fishermen or marginal farmers) rather than by gender.
On the other hand, recognizing the diversity of interests within households and the variety of household structures has opened up the possibility of exploring differences between women, as well as between women and men. Attention has tended to focus on conflicts within particular sets of relationships, such as those between co–wives or between mothers and daughters–in–law. D. Kandiyoti, for example, introduced the idea of the patriarchal bargain to explain why women collude in gender subordination: They know that even if they suffer while young, their conformity will be rewarded by their gaining some power in later life. 23 Predominantly, however, gender has been seen as a basis of solidarity and differences between women attributed to other factors, such as ethnicity or class. One of the most influential statements of this position was made by Maxine Molyneux in an article questioning how far women’s involvement in the Nicaraguan liberation struggle had resulted in the recognition of “women’s interests” in the postrevolutionary state. 24 The diversity of women’s interests led her to jettison the term and suggest the notion of “gender interests,” to characterize those that are derived specifically from structural inequality by gender. She further divided gender interests into practical and strategic. Practical interests lie in bettering one’s situation within the overall system (such as women having access to cheap and affordable child care). Strategic interests relate to structural change of the system itself (for instance, challenging the assumption that domestic work is women’s responsibility).
Molyneux makes three additional points in relation to gender interests. First, women may not recognize their strategic gender interests nor desire to achieve them. In part this may reflect “false consciousness,” where women internalize the dominant culture. Another reason, however, is that strategic objectives may not serve, and may even threaten, women’s immediate practical interests. Women’s ownership of land, for example, would constitute a strategic gender interest in Bangladesh. But in most cases, even women who have formal rights of inheritance do not claim the land to which they are entitled. If they claim the land, they risk alienating their brothers, thereby jeopardizing their main form of “social security” if problems arise between them and their husbands. Their practical interest is in keeping relations sweet with their brothers in case they should need to turn to them in a crisis. This takes a higher priority than the strategic objective of owning land. Molyneux therefore argues that strategic objectives must recognize and politicize women’s practical gender interests if they are to secure women’s support.
Second, Molyneux points out that gender interests will be formulated in very different ways according to context. Solidarity must be forged rather than simply assumed; key issues in one situation may not translate to another. Third, women may not prioritize their gender interests over others that divide them. Even where women do mobilize around a particular issue, this unity is always conditional. In a situation of class, community, or national conflict, unity on gender lines tends to break down.
This framework furthers exploration of differences among women along two dimensions. Most obviously it brings out that women, like men, are divided among themselves by class, ethnicity, and so on. More innovatively, the division between practical and strategic gender interests carries the potential for seeing how gender itself may form the basis of contradictory interests among and within women. As in Kandiyoti’s ‘“patriarchal bargain,” it is the practical gender interests of older women that limit most strictly the gender interests of their younger kin, both practical and strategic. The practical and strategic dimensions of gender interests thus set up difference, and the potential for conflict, both within women and among them.
The dominant usage of this framework, however, has been as a tool for introducing gender into development planning. The more tangible needs are substituted for interests, and gender needs become a proxy for women’s needs. The way this is done involves an interesting example of the concertinaing of notions of difference through planning. In a telling occlusion, Moser in the original article setting out this framework elides the planners’ need to take women into account with the women’s needs for certain types of action or resources. The main aim of Moser’s “gender planning framework” is to distinguish women’s needs from men’s, thus ironically completing the circle to where Molyneux began it. 25
The irony of this repeated emphasis on the difference of women to men is that it fails to problematize male gender identities and the way that these are written into the basic framework of analysis. Molyneux, for instance, though she mentions that men also may have gender interests, does not pursue this. The model seems to be essentially additive, that women have (specific) gender interests in addition to those of class or ethnicity that they share with men. This fails to question how ideas of the “general” interest by class or ethnicity may be implicitly male gendered or the dynamic way in which these interests are interrelated. Studies of liberation wars, for example, recognize that women do not lose their gender when they become involved in national struggles. Rather, patterns of how women are mobilized may be gender specific—such as South African mothers being politicized by their children’s radicalism—and their modes of struggle embody, even if they redefine, their womanhood. 26
The obvious corollary to this is to analyze the gender politics also implicit within male “nationalist” or “class” positions and so question the identification of men with the general/subject and women with the specific/other. The collapsing of differences between women is clearly consequent on their continued identification as the deviation from the male–defined norm. Again, this permits a relatively differentiated male subject with respect to “public” identities, but ironically it also involves the suppression of differences within and between men as these relate to gender. In the development context, the generally poor recognition of private and personal dimensions of human life becomes an almost total occlusion for men. This has three negative implications. First, it reinforces the opposition between men and women as constituting mutually exclusive categories, denying that what are considered masculine and feminine attributes (which clearly differs by social context) are found within both men and women. Second, it also deflects attention from the conflicts and contradictions within and between men and how these support or contradict public ideologies of masculinity. 27 Third, it sustains the tendency to abstract gender from other forms of social difference.
This last point is important not simply to the analysis of gender but to the wider political import of GAD. In drawing attention to the fallacy of development’s pretensions to universality with respect to gender, the way was opened up to explore other biases, such as those by culture, class, or race. Instead of this, however, the focus on difference by gender has tended to block out other dimensions of difference and the power relations they sustain. Gender became the justice issue, women the “minority” whose interests should be considered; “social development” became, at least in some agencies, very largely commandeered by “gender specialists.” Retraining the focus to explore how gender for men and women is articulated with other social relations should therefore sharpen awareness of other justice issues. Gender would become not the endpoint but the entry point for further questioning, which would broaden and deepen both the understanding of power and the vision of emancipation.
Difference and Emancipation
I began his chapter by outlining some of the contradictions experienced in gender and development; I want to close by considering some of the contradictions the development context of external intervention raises for feminist concerns with difference, and for GAD in particular. There are, of course, many who would deny that GAD is in any way feminist. On the one hand, those hostile to feminism argue that gender differences are simply a reality that planning needs to take into account without any kind of emancipatory intent. On the other hand, feminist critiques of GAD point to its instrumental use of women and the prioritizing of efficiency over equity objectives. In this section, however, I wish to sidestep such objections and consider GAD at its best: as a feminist movement committed to fostering emancipation.
The major point on which the contradictions in GAD turn is the legitimacy of feminism as an intercultural initiative. The critical issue is this: that the feminist project is both countercultural and culturally embedded. The logical conclusion of this is that there must be different feminist projects in different cultural contexts. Stated in this way this seems relatively straightforward. In going on to explore what this means in practice, however, multiple difficulties arise.
The major difficulty concerns the understanding of culture. Colonialism, development, and globalization have resulted in highly permeable cultural boundaries. The implication of educational systems in all these three means that the continuities are particularly evident at the level of political theory and academic analysis. This means that there is at least a family resemblance between critical theorists working out of very different national contexts. The most radical rejections of western imperialism have frequently made reference to Karl Marx. It is very difficult to identify a voice that is wholly, and self–critically, other.
Alternatively, the frontiers of culture may be endlessly subdivided. The “same” society may be viewed as made up of multiple cultures—by class, age, place of residence, ethnicity, religion, politics, kinship, and so on. The logical extension of this to a culture of one is clearly absurd. And yet the assumptions on which it is based are common to much of the advocacy of difference: that culture can be described in primarily structural terms and that a common culture demands internal homogeneity. This highlights a key danger in the concern to avoid universalism: the risk of reifying cultures so that acceptance of difference between them closes the space for difference within.
It is ironic that a sometimes rather static conception of cultural difference has accompanied a sophisticated appreciation of the multiple dimensions of subjectivity at an individual level. An alternative approach is to view culture relationally and so accord it that same flexibility and indeterminacy, that same responsiveness to context. In this view, to share a culture would mean to recognize one another as belonging. This implies, as in the example with which the chapter began, that what characterizes shared culture is not the denial but the comprehension of difference.
The primary culture out of which GAD arises is development itself. Historically there is no doubt that this is a western–inspired project. GAD is countercultural in offering a critique of development; it is culturally embedded, as this review has shown, in the terms on which that critique is mounted.
The contradictions of GAD as an emancipatory project lie in the fact that development can itself be seen as countercultural within the societies that undergo intervention. The current emphasis on “good governance” explicitly advocates multiparty democracy against alternative political systems; economic prescriptions clearly privilege neoliberal values. What distinguishes this from a genuinely countercultural project is that these criticisms are offered from without, grounded in an assumption of categorical difference rather than affinity. In this context, a concern for transforming gender relations may be the vehicle of the most invasive form of intervention, the point at which the local culture is most openly denigrated. In such a case, a commitment to emancipation would seem to require siding with “local society” against the “developers”; but to do so would risk losing the critical edge of the feminist vision in failing to address patriarchal relations within the “local” culture.
Part of the way out of this conundrum is clearly for GAD advocates to support and form alliances with local feminist movements within the societies targeted for development. This means building toward an international feminist culture that can comprehend and celebrate difference. GAD’s own implication in development hegemony, however, means that this process will not be without conflict. To some degree GAD will itself form the culture that feminists of the South are engaged in combating. For GAD to pull loose from its roots in the assumption of difference, and re–root in an embracing of affinity, will involve a painful dispossession. It means disavowing the priority of its own perspectives and becoming open to respond to the challenges of others.
This would mean opening to debate the whole question of how much difference can be accommodated within an approach that could still be labeled “feminist.” The primary challenges to recognize difference have been made with respect to ethnicity and sexual orientation. What is not clear, however, is how far there is space within feminism to recognize and accord equal value to difference of perceptions with respect to gender itself. Even at–home, lay beliefs regarding the “natural” basis of gender difference or the “complementarity” of gender roles are regarded as “false consciousness” that needs to be liberated. In the development literature, perhaps the thorniest issue that repeatedly arises concerns the universality of individualism. Many Indian writers, for example, argue that women genuinely perceive their interests as intrinsically bound up with those of their families, particularly their children. To deny the validity of this and seek to distinguish the “real” (submerged/subordinated) individual interest is rejected as a form of cultural imperialism. This is very difficult for a feminism configured in the West to deal with. To embrace this on the basis of affinity means to move beyond the exoticism of reifying the “difference” of another culture and to bring the issue “back home.” This opens up the question of whether even within the western context the presumption of the individual interest is wholly adequate or if for women in particular the boundaries between self and others are less clear–cut.
In closing this chapter, I present a final example from Bangladesh, which expresses both the permeability between cultures and the flexibility within them.
A nongovernmental organization (NGO) in Bangladesh wished to employ more women as field staff, but it faced a problem. The work involved traveling from village to village visiting development groups to offer training or practical support. Purdah norms meant that women were less mobile than men. They were unused to being out on their own, and it was considered unsafe for them to travel after dark when many meetings, especially for men, took place. Although more senior male staff had motorbikes, others traveled by bicycle; but the rough condition of most roads made this physically very demanding. In any case, both bicycles and motorbikes were very much a male preserve. As a result, female staff had tended to cover a far smaller area than men (walking or taking a bus where possible). This, combined with women’s generally lower educational qualifications and apparent reluctance to take responsibility, had introduced inequities between male and female working conditions, which was causing considerable resentment.
The NGO management was split on how to tackle this. One group argued that they should formalize special arrangements for women staff: different norms for male/female responsibilities for area coverage or provision that women should be able to work in pairs. Gender sensitivity should mean that women should not be forced to compete on male terms and that it was legitimate to have criteria of achievement differentiated by gender. The other group fiercely disagreed. The NGO, they argued, should commit itself to providing motorcycles for female field staff and make learning to drive and using them in their work a condition of employment. They should show in their own actions that women could challenge local gender norms and still be “respectable.”
This is what happened. The villagers were at first surprised and amused to see women on motorbikes but very soon accepted it. Rather than being stigmatized, the women saw their standing in the community enhanced by their having command of a motorbike, which was itself a status symbol. Within a short time it became a commonplace to see the women NGO workers riding about the countryside, a living symbol of the potential to transform apparently intractable obstacles into problems to be resolved.
Endnotes
Note 1: Goetz, “The Politics of Integrating Gender to State Development Processes.” Back.
Note 2: Based in Bangladesh, for example, UBINIG lobbies forcefully at an international level against reproductive technologies, which represent a major part of many donors’ women–focused interventions in Bangladesh. Back.
Note 3: See, for example, Morriss, “Values as an Obstacle to Economic Growth in South Asia.” Back.
Note 4: Said, Orientalism. Back.
Note 5: Wood, Labelling in Development Policy. Back.
Note 6: Sarkar, “Nationalist Iconography.” Back.
Note 7: See, for example, Parpart and Staudt, Women and the State in Africa. Back.
Note 8: One of the protagonists in this debate, a British woman married to an Indian, Frieda Hauswirth Das expresses this much more eloquently and forcefully than I can. See White, Arguing with the Crocodile, p. 2. Back.
Note 9: The “status of women debate”—as pursued by Indian modernizers as well as British colonials—in fact concentrated very largely on more elite women, who implicitly “stood for” the majority. Back.
Note 10: Links were made, of course, between caste differentiation and the status of women. It is, however, interesting how British government policy to promote “backward castes,” etc., made no connection with gender debates, leaving the subjects of caste/tribe reservations explicitly neuter and implicitly male gendered. Back.
Note 11: Moser, “Gender Planning in the Third World.” Back.
Note 12: Goetz, “The Politics of Integrating Gender to State Development Processes.” Back.
Note 13: See, for example, Rogers, The Domestication of Women. Back.
Note 14: See Whitehead, “ ‘I’m Hungry, Mum.’” Back.
Note 15: Elson, “Male Bias in Macroeconomics.” Back.
Note 16: McCarthy, “The Target Group.” Back.
Note 17: Mies and Shiva, Ecofeminism. Back.
Note 18: Sharma, Women’s Work, Class, and the Urban Household. Back.
Note 19: Elson, “Male Bias in Macroeconomics.” Back.
Note 20: The danger was very real. One volunteer was killed when his boat capsized. Back.
Note 21: The ratio of women to men in the Oxfam office has increased since that time. Back.
Note 22: See, for example, Araki, “Women’s Clubs, Associations, and Other Relations in Southern Zambia.” Back.
Note 23: Kandiyoti, “Bargaining with Patriarchy.” Back.
Note 24: Molyneux, “Mobilization Without Emancipation.” Back.
Note 25: Moser, “Gender Planning in the Third World.” Back.
Note 26: See Beall, Hassim, and Todes, “’A Bit on the Side’?” Also see O’Gorman, “Writing Women’s Wars,” in this volume. Back.
Note 27: White, Arguing with the Crocodile. Back.
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