Introduction: feminisms in development: contradictions, contestations and challenges

ANDREA CORNWALL, ELIZABETH HARRISON AND ANN WHITEHEAD

This book explores the contested relationship between feminisms and development and the challenges for reasserting feminist engagement with development as a political project. Its starting point is pluralist – there are feminisms, not feminism, and 'development' covers a multitude of theoretical and political stances and a wide diversity of practices. Our contributors represent some of this diversity. They include those who have been involved with key conceptual and political advances in analysis and policy, feminist 'champions' from within development organizations, and researchers and practitioners engaged in critical reflection on gender generalizations and their implications for policy and practice.

Most of the chapters in the book derive from a workshop held at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, in July 2003. Entitled 'Gender Myths and Feminist Fables: Repositioning Gender in Development Policy and Practice', this workshop was designed to encourage reflection and taking stock. It drew together people from across diverse sites of thinking and practice that constitute contemporary engagement with questions of gender in development. One widely shared perspective was the sobering recognition of the enormous gap between feminists' aspirations for social transformation and the limited, though important, gains that have been made.

Gender inequality has proven to be much more intractable than anticipated. In several arenas women's capabilities and quality of life have worsened, not improved; legislative reform is not matched by changes in political and economic realities to enable women to use new laws; gains in one sphere have produced new, detrimental forms of gender inequality; women everywhere are having to fight to get their voices heard, despite new emphases on democracy, voice and participation. At the same time, arguments made by feminist researchers have become denatured and depoliticized when taken up by development institutions. For many, what were once critical insights, the results of detailed research, have now become 'gender myths': essentialisms and generalizations, simplifying frameworks and simplistic slogans.

This introduction sets out three interconnected themes that our contributors explore to illuminate these disappointments. These are also reflected in the structure of the book. First, we highlight the struggle for interpretive power as a core element of feminist engagement with development. Moves from 'women' to 'gender' and the creation and critique of specific gender myths signal what has been a continual battle over interpretation – a battle that is embedded in a politics of engagement in which the initial power quotients are unequal. Second, we scrutinize how the way that development institutions function undermines feminist intent. Bureaucratic resistance plays a major role here, but the ways in which this takes place are complex, reflecting power both inside and outside of institutions. Lastly, we explore a major challenge in the project of repoliticizing feminism in gender and development; that of how to achieve solidarity across difference, because there is no simple 'us' in feminism, let alone a single diagnosis of either problems or their solutions. This is especially demanding in a context of shifting development policy preoccupations, changing aid modalities and ever more polarized geo-politics.

Thirty years of feminist engagement with development has led to the distinctive and plural field of inquiry and practice of gender and development. This field includes an institutionalized set of practices and discourses within development institutions which goes under the acronym GAD, but it is not confined to this. The wider field of gender and development also refers to the innovations in research, analysis and political strategies brought about by very diversely located researchers and activists. There has been no shortage of reflexive engagement within gender and development research, writing and activism (Kabeer 1994; Goetz 1997; Miller and Razavi 1998). The collection edited by Cecile Jackson and Ruth Pearson (1998), Feminist Visions of Development, critically reflected on changing orthodoxies, and on issues of positionality and representation. And a growing and increasingly sophisticated literature exists on the experience of gender mainstreaming (for example, Macdonald 2003; Rai 2003; Kabeer 2003; Prügl and Lustgarten 2005). This book engages with these debates through a particular lens, that of the narratives that gender and development has done much to popularize. It is...