Desire for Development: Whiteness, Gender, and the Helping Imperative

by Barbara Heron

In Desire for Whiteness, Gender, and the Helping Imperative , Barbara Heron draws on poststructuralist notions of subjectivity, critical race and space theory, feminism, colonial and postcolonial studies, and travel writing to trace colonial continuities in the post-development recollections of white Canadian women who have worked in Africa. Following the narrative arc of the development worker story from the decision to go overseas, through the experiences abroad, the return home, and final reflections, the book interweaves theory with the words of the participants to bring theory to life and to generate new understandings of whiteness and development work. Heron reveals how the desire for development is about the making of self in terms that are highly raced, classed, and gendered, and she exposes the moral core of this self and its seemingly paradoxical necessity to the Other. The construction of white female subjectivity is thereby revealed as contingent on notions of goodness and Othering, played out against, and constituted by, the backdrop of the NorthSouth binary, in which Canada’s national narrative situates us as the “good guys” of the world.

Genres: Nonfiction

204 pages, Paperback

First published December 4, 2007

Reviews

[Sara-Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

On target with just about everything. And this is one of the first things I’ve read to explicitly address the gendered aspects of the desire to help.

Critique, briefly: Heron has a generally limited view of self-interest--more specifically she doesn’t begin to approach why it is that bourgeois subject formation relies so on a moral narrative of the self. Yes, we (the white bourgeois) are invested in maintaining a position of innocence, but why and at what cost to ourselves? (lack being the key absent concept here). That she skirted around the possibilities of a lack internal to the white bourgeois is not surprising; we can’t look at everything at once, and how to look at what isn’t there? Still, there are quotes from her interviews with female Canadian development workers that, although too quickly analyzed by heron, point interestingly beyond the stilted interpretations of the theoretician. something else was off for me, maybe the tone? i think this something would have benefited from her being more revealing about her involvement (she is at pains to include herself, but it is only a formal ‘we’ here--there are no stories, no exposure of complicity that feels grounded). Barb seems like she is continuously choking on something while writing—a feeling I am quite familiar with.

Also, in the end she sneaks in, seemingly from left field, that she still thinks it is possible to help. ?