Feminisms in Development: Contradictions, Contestations and Challenges

by Andrea Cornwall (Editor), Elizabeth Harrison (Editor), Ann Whitehead (Editor)

The political project of reasserting feminist engagement with development has proceeded uneasily in recent years. This book examines how the arguments of feminist researchers have often become depoliticised by development institutions and offers richly contextualised accounts of the pitfalls and compromises of the politics of engagement. Speaking from within academic institutions, social movements, development bureaucracies and national and international NGOs, the contributors highlight on-going battles for interpretation and the unequal power relations within which these battles take place. They engage with the challenges of achieving solidarity in the context of increasingly polarised geo-political relations, and advance a diversity of critiques of simplified ideas about gender, and how these ideas come to be interpreted in institutional policies and practices.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, International Development

Kindle Edition

First published December 1, 2006

About the author

Andrea Cornwall is a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, where she directs a multi-country research programme, Pathways of Women's Empowerment (www.pathways-of-empowerment.org). She has worked in the field of sexual and reproductive health and participatory methodologies for many years, and is co-editor of Realizing Rights: Transforming Approaches to Sexual and Reproductive Wellbeing (with Alice Welbourn, Zed Books, 2002) and Feminisms in Development: Contradictions, Contestations and Challenges (with Elizabeth Harrison and Ann Whitehead, Zed Books, 2006).