Feminist Futures: Reimagining Women, Culture and Development 9781783606399, 9781783606382, 9781350220119, 9781783606405

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A B O UT T H E E D I T O R S Kum-Kum Bhavnani is professor of sociology, global studies and feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. John Foran is professor of sociology and environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Priya A. Kurian is professor of political science and public policy at the University of Waikato. Debashish Munshi is professor of management communication at the University of Waikato.

FEMINIS T F U T URE S REIMAGINING WOMEN, CULTURE AND DEVELOPMENT

Second Edition

Edited by Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, Priya A. Kurian and Debashish Munshi

Zed Books London

Feminist Futures: Reimagining Women, Culture and Development was first published in 2003 by Zed Books Ltd. Second edition first published in 2016. Zed Books Ltd, The Foundry, 17 Oval Way, London SE11 5RR, UK. www.zedbooks.net Editorial copyright © Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, Priya A. Kurian and Debashish Munshi 2016 Copyright in this collection © Zed Books 2016 The rights of Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, Priya A. Kurian and Debashish Munshi to be identified as the editors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Typeset in Plantin and Kievit by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon Index by Ed Emery Cover design by Clare Turner Cover photo © Sven Torfinn/Panos All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-78360-639-9 hb ISBN 978-1-78360-638-2 pb ISBN 978-1-78360-640-5 pdf ISBN 978-1-78360-641-2 epub ISBN 978-1-78360-642-9 mobi

C ON TE N T S

Acknowledgements and dedications | viii About the contributors | ix Abbreviations | xviii Preface to the second edition | xx 1 An introduction to women, culture and development . . . . . . . . 1 Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran and Priya A. Kurian VISIONS ONE

Maria’s stories | Maria Ofelia Navarrete . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

29

The woof and the warp | Luisa Valenzuela . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Consider the problem of privatization | Anna Tsing . . . . . . . PART ONE

45

SEXUALITY AND THE GENDERED BODY

2 More ‘“Tragedies” in out-of-the-way places: oceanic interpretations of another scale’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yvonne Underhill-Sem with Kaita Sem

53

3 ‘Revolution with a woman’s face’? Family norms, constitutional reform and the politics of redistribution in post/neoliberal Ecuador . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Amy Lind 4 Claiming the state: revisiting women’s reproductive identity in India’s development policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Rachel Simon-Kumar 5 Abortion and African culture: a case study of Kenya . . . . . . . . 109 Jane Wambui Njagi 6 Bodies and choices: African matriarchs and Mammy Water . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 Ifi Amadiume

VISIONS TWO

Empowerment: snakes and ladders | Jan Nederveen Pieterse . . 157 Gendered sexualities and lived experience: revisiting the case of gay sexuality in women, culture and development | Dana Collins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Revolutionary women’s struggle and leadership: building local political power in rural areas in the age of neoliberal globalization | Peter Chua . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 ‘What should I say about a dream?’: reflections on adolescent girls, agency and citizenship | Gauri Nandedkar . . . 182

PART TWO

ENVIRONMENT, TECHNOLOGY, SCIENCE

7 New lenses with limited vision: Shell scenarios, science fiction, storytelling wars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 David McKie with Akanksha Munshi-Kurian 8 Development nationalism: science, religion and the quest for a modern India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Banu Subramaniam 9 What would Rachel say?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 Joni Seager 10 Negotiating human–nature boundaries, cultural hierarchies and masculinist paradigms of development studies . . . . . . . . 261 Priya A. Kurian and Debashish Munshi 11 The intersection of women, culture and development: conversations about visions for the future – take two . . . . . . Arturo Escobar and Wendy Harcourt

278

VISIONS THREE

Alternatives to development: of love, dreams and revolution | John Foran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 Dreams and process in development theory and practice | Light Carruyo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306 The subjective side of development: sources of well-being, resources for struggle | Linda Klouzal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314

PART THREE

THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

12 Of rural mothers, urban whores and working daughters: women and the critique of neocolonial development in Taiwan’s nativist literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 Ming-yan Lai 13 Revisiting the mostaz’af and the mostakbar . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344 Minoo Moallem 14 Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter: ‘women, culture and development’ from a Francophone or postcolonial perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366 Anjali Prabhu 15 The precarious middle class: gender, risk and mobility in the new Indian economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385 Raka Ray VISIONS FOUR

An Antipodean take on gender, culture and development co-operation | Susanne Schech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407 On activist scholarship and women, culture and development | Julie Shayne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415 Women, traditional ecological knowledge and sustainable development | Sangion Appiee Tiu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421 Reimagining climate justice: what the world needs now is love, hope ... and you | John Foran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 426 Postscript A conversation about the future of women, culture and development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 433 Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, Priya A. Kurian and Debashish Munshi Bibliography | 439 Index | 479

AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S A N D DEDIC A T IONS

Imagining futures is a collective endeavour. This book builds on and weaves together many conversations we have had with each other, in person and over Skype, with all our contributing authors in office corridors, at conference break-out sessions, on social media forums, and over email, and with our research collaborators, fellow activists, friends, acquaintances, and even strangers we have bumped into at public meetings, on trains and in bookshops. To each and every one, we say thank you! We thank our home institutions – the University of California at Santa Barbara, USA, and the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand – for giving us the time and space to work on this collaborative project. We especially thank the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the University of Waikato for the fellowships that brought Kum-Kum and John to Hamilton to work with Priya and Debashish on both the first and second editions of this book. It has been a pleasure to work with Zed Books, and we are delighted that this book appears with Zed, a publisher whose readership is best placed to engage with the ideas and arguments this volume generates. We thank Robert Molteno (with whom we worked on the first edition) and Kim Walker for their unstinting support for the project and their attention to detail. Our greatest thanks are reserved for all the contributors, who bore with length constraints, endless editorial comments and repeated requests for revision (from four editors). Working so closely with this group was a pleasure as well as a privilege, and never a chore. This book is dedicated: By Kum-Kum, to her late mother, whose futures always included feminisms. And to Cerina and Amal Nil for loving me with a deep love that allows me to reimagine the future. By Priya and Debashish, to Akanksha and Alya, who remind them of our shared commitment to make the future liveable, equitable and sustainable. By John, to his mother Ramona and his late father Jack, in one way or another strong supporters of women, of culture and of development. And to Cerina and Amal for putting up with their crazy father’s obsession with climate change, and much else besides!

AB OU T T H E CO N T R I B UT O R S

Ifi Amadiume is professor of religion and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Religion and the African and African American Studies Program at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. Her books include Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (Zed Books, 1987) – a Choice outstanding academic award book, and on the list of Africa’s 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century; Reinventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion and Culture (Zed Books, 1997); Daughters of the Goddess, Daughters of Imperialism: African Women, Culture, Power and Democracy (Zed Books, 2000); and, with Abdullahi An-Na’im, The Politics of Memory: Truth, Healing and Social Justice (Zed Books, 2000). Kum-Kum Bhavnani is professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara and presently chairs the Program in Women, Culture and Development in Global Studies. She has written books, articles and essays on topics that include how youth talk politics, feminist methodologies, women in prison and feminist theory, including on the interconnected configurations of ‘race’/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nation and class. She now conducts research on women in the Third World, where she, along with co-editors John Foran, Priya Kurian and Debashish Munshi, has been developing a new approach to development studies – the women, culture and development (WCD) paradigm. Drawing on that theoretical frame, she now disseminates much of her research through documentary films: The Shape of Water (2006), Nothing Like Chocolate (2012) and Lutah (2014). She is presently working on her fourth film. Light Carruyo is an associate professor of sociology at Vassar College and is currently directing the Latin American and Latina/o Studies Program. She is the author of Producing Knowledge, Protecting Forests: Rural Encounters with Gender, Ecotourism and International Aid in the Dominican Republic (Penn State University Press, 2008). Her current research looks at how transnational justice claims, expressions of solidarity and resistance, and state management of citizens and borders coincide to create and mobilize racialized ‘difference’ in the Americas.

x | feminist futures

Peter Chua is professor of sociology at San José State University, California. His research interest concerns human rights, particularly as they are related to international migrant issues and the Philippines. He has written on orientalism, cultural racism, critical social research, and the political economy of male condoms. Dana Collins is an associate professor of sociology at California State University, Fullerton. She has published widely on transnational sexualities, including her urban ethnographic research on a former sex and current global tourist district, Malate, in the City of Manila, the Philippines. She has a forthcoming book with Palgrave Macmillan (2016) titled The Rise and Fall of an Urban Sexual Community: Malate (Dis)Placed. Her other research interests lie in feminist political ecology, food justice, and the making of global ‘crises’, and she is working on some new research on food justice and ‘crisis’ in the Philippines. Arturo Escobar is Kenan distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a research associate with the Culture, Memory and Nation group at Universidad del Valle, Cali. He has worked closely with several Afro-Colombian social movements in the Colombian Pacific, in particular the Process of Black Communities (PCN). His most well-known book is Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton University Press, 1995; second edition 2011). His most recent books are Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (Duke University Press, 2008; 2010 for the Spanish edition), Una minga para el posdesarrollo (Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2013), and Sentipensar con la Tierra: Nuevas lecturas sobre desarrollo, territorio y diferencia (UNAULA, 2014). John Foran is professor of sociology and environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches courses on climate change and climate justice, activism and movements for radical social change, and issues of development and globalization beyond capitalism. He is the author of Fragile Resistance: Social Transformation in Iran from 1500 to the Revolution (Westview Press, 1993) and Taking Power: On the Origins of Revolutions in the Third World (Cambridge University Press, 2005). His research and activism are now centred within the global climate justice movement, and much of his work can

abou t t he cont ributors | xi be found at the Climate Justice Project (https://climatejusticeproject. com) and the International Institute of Climate Action and Theory (www.iicat.org). Wendy Harcourt is associate professor in critical development and feminist studies at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University, The Hague. She joined the ISS in November 2011 after 20 years at the Society for International Development in Rome as editor of the journal Development and Director of Programmes. She has edited ten books, and her monograph, Body Politics in Development: Critical Debates in Gender and Development (Zed Books, 2009), received the Feminist Women Studies Association Book Prize. Linda Klouzal is institutional records archivist at the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. She is currently supervising the processing and production of researchfinding guides for Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health collections. She is the author of Women and Rebel Communities in the Cuban Insurgent Movement, 1952–1959 (Cambria Press, 2008). Priya A. Kurian is professor of political science and public policy at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Her research spans environmental studies, critical policy studies, development studies, and science and technology studies. She is author or co-editor of four books, including Engendering the Environment? Gender in the World Bank’s Environmental Policies (Ashgate, 2000) and On the Edges of Development: Cultural Interventions (Routledge, 2009). Her work has appeared in several journals, including Public Understanding of Science, Third World Quarterly and Citizenship Studies. Her recent project on sustainability, citizenship and the governance of new and emerging technologies was funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Grant. Ming-yan Lai is an interdisciplinary scholar in gender studies and cultural studies. She is the author of Nativism and Modernity: Cultural Contestations in China and Taiwan under Global Capitalism (SUNY, 2008). Her more recent work on migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong has appeared in diverse journals, including Social Identities, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies International Forum, Journal of Contemporary Asia and Performing Ethos.

xii | f e m i n i s t f u t u r e s

Amy Lind is Mary Ellen Heintz professor and head of the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Her areas of scholarship include critical development studies, global political economy, postcolonial studies, queer theory, transnational feminisms, and studies of neoliberal governance. She is the author of Gendered Paradoxes: Women’s Movements, State Restructuring, and Global Development in Ecuador (Penn State University Press, 2005) and editor of four volumes, including Development, Sexual Rights and Global Governance (Routledge, 2010) and Feminist (Im)mobilities in Fortress(ing) North America: Rights, Citizenships and Identities in Transnational Perspective (Ashgate, 2013). David McKie teaches strategic communication and leadership at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. As well as over 80 book chapters and refereed journal articles, he has published six books, including Eco-impacts and the Greening of Postmodernity (Sage, 1997), Reconfiguring PR: Ecology, Equity, and Enterprise (Routledge, 2005), Please Don’t Stop the Music: An Ensemble Leadership Repertoire for Uncertain Times (World Council for Sustainable Development, 2009), PR and Nation Building: Influencing Israel (Routledge, 2013) and Handbook of Critical Public Relations (Routledge, 2015). He is currently completing Public Relations History: Reworking Pasts and Reclaiming Futures (Routledge, 2016 forthcoming). Minoo Moallem is professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy in Iran (University of California Press, 2005) and co-editor (with Caren Kaplan and Norma Alarcon) of Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms and the State (Duke University Press, 1999). Her digital project ‘Nation-on-the Move’ (design by Eric Loyer) was published in Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Nation as Transnational Commodity: The Mobile World of the Persian Carpet. Debashish Munshi is professor of management communication at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, where he teaches negotiation and persuasion, leading change for sustainability, and leadership,

a bout the cont ributors | xiii communication and transformation. He is an interdisciplinary scholar with a special interest in issues of diversity, equity, ethics, social justice and sustainability. He has co-led a major project on ‘Sustainable Citizenship’ funded by the Marsden Grant of the Royal Society of New Zealand, written several articles in major international journals, and co-authored or co-edited three books: Reconfiguring Public Relations: Ecology, Equity, and Enterprise (Routledge, 2007), On the Edges of Development: Cultural Interventions (Routledge, 2009) and Handbook of Communication Ethics (Routledge, 2011). Akanksha Munshi-Kurian is a first-year student of law and social sciences at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. She has a strong interest in issues relating to the environment and social justice and has been a Sir Peter Blake Youth EnviroLeader in New Zealand, a volunteer at the Waikato Environment Centre, and co-founder of the Amnesty International chapter at Hillcrest High School, Hamilton. She is a recipient of her high school’s top sociology award. Gauri Nandedkar is a PhD candidate at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. Her PhD research focuses on Millennium Development Goal 3 in the context of gender, culture and policy in rural Maharashtra, India, and examines how global initiatives have been translated into and implemented in local policy. Her research interests include gender, policy, adolescent girls, culture and rural development. Maria Ofelia Navarrete is a former guerrilla combatant in El Salvador. Now active in Salvadoran politics, she was elected to the National Assembly in 1997 as a deputy for the left-wing FMLN party and is the subject of the documentary Maria’s Story. Jane Wambui Njagi is a lecturer at the African Women’s Studies Centre, University of Nairobi. She holds a PhD in political science and public policy from the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Her areas of specialization include gender equality issues, human rights, reproductive health, democracy and democratization, governance and public policy analysis. Wambui has participated in several programmes on food security, female circumcision, African women’s health, poverty reduction, gender equality, legislative support, and monitoring and evaluation.

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Jan Nederveen Pieterse is Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp professor of global studies and sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in globalization, development studies and cultural studies. He held the Pok Rafeah distinguished chair at Malaysia National University (2014–15) and was previously at Maastricht University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, University of Cape Coast in Ghana, and University of Amsterdam. He is the author or editor of over 20 books and edits book series for Routledge and Palgrave Macmillan. Anjali Prabhu is director of the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College, where she is also professor of French and Francophone studies. The author of Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora (Wiley Blackwell, 2014) and Hybridity: Limits, Transformations, Prospects (SUNY, 2007), her work has appeared in journals such as Diacritics, Cinema Journal, French Forum, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Levinas Studies, International Journal of French and Francophone Studies, Research in African Literatures, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry and Comparative Literary Studies. She has served extensively on different committees of the Modern Language Association and the latter’s Delegate Assembly. Raka Ray is professor of sociology and professor in south and southeast Asia studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where her areas of specialization are gender and feminist theory, inequality, emerging middle classes, cultures of servitude, social movements and postcolonial sociology. Publications include Fields of Protest: Women’s Movements in India (University of Minnesota, 1999; in India, Kali for Women, 2000), Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power, and Politics (co-edited with Mary Katzenstein; Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity and Class in India (with Seemin Qayum; Stanford University Press, 2009), Both Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes (co-edited with Amita Baviskar; Routledge, 2011), The Handbook of Gender (OUP India, 2011) and many articles. Susanne Schech is professor of development and international studies at Flinders University in South Australia. She co-authored Culture

abou t t he cont ributors | xv and Development: A Critical Introduction (Blackwell, 2000), edited Development Perspectives from the Antipodes (Routledge, 2014) and publishes on a range of policy issues including participation, gender justice, poverty reduction and refugee integration. Her research currently focuses on international development volunteerism. Joni Seager is an activist and scholar in feminist geography, feminist environmental analysis, and international women’s studies. She is professor and chair of the Global Studies Department at Bentley University in Massachusetts; before that, she was dean of the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. Joni is the author of dozens of reports, articles and chapters in books and more than ten books, most recently Carson’s Silent Spring (Bloomsbury, 2014). She is the lead coordinating author of the United Nations Environment Programme’s pioneering work on producing a gendered global environmental analysis. Julie Shayne is author or editor of three books: Taking Risks: Feminist Activism and Research in the Americas (SUNY, 2014); They Used to Call Us Witches: Chilean Exiles, Culture, and Feminism (Lexington Books, 2009), winner of the Pacific Sociological Association’s 2011 Distinguished Scholarship Award; and The Revolution Question: Feminisms in El Salvador, Chile, and Cuba (Rutgers University Press, 2004). She is a senior lecturer in interdisciplinary arts and sciences at the University of Washington Bothell and affiliate associate professor of gender, women and sexuality studies and Latin American and Caribbean studies at the University of Washington Seattle. Rachel Simon-Kumar is senior lecturer at the University of Auckland’s School of Public Health in New Zealand. She has taught in the areas of development studies, women’s studies and public policy. Her research focuses on marginalized groups and political inclusion, reproductive health and North–South politics, and women and policy. She is the author of Marketing Reproduction? Ideology and Population Policy in India (Zubaan, 2006). Her publications have appeared in Culture, Health and Sexuality, Ethnicities, Social Politics, Politics & Policy, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and Critical Policy Studies. She is the co-editor of the Women’s Studies Journal of Aotearoa/New Zealand.

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Banu Subramaniam is professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, she seeks to engage the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology. She is the author of Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (University of Illinois Press, 2014) and co-editor of Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation (Routledge, 2001) and Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). Spanning the humanities, social and natural sciences, she works at the intersections of biology, women’s studies, ethnic studies and postcolonial studies. Her current work focuses on the xenophobia and nativism that haunt invasive plant species, and the relationship of science and religious nationalism in India. Sangion Appiee Tiu is a PhD student at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. Prior to this, Sangion worked as an environmental educator with a non-government organization in Papua New Guinea for more than a decade. Her doctoral thesis explores indigenous perceptions of traditional ecological knowledge and their policy implications for education in sustainable natural resource management. Anna Tsing is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and co-director of Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA). She is the author of In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (1993), Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005) and The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015; all Princeton University Press). She has co-edited several collections, including Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon (2009) and Nature in the Global South: Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia (2003; both Duke University Press). Her newest co-edited collection is Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Stories from the More-than-Human Anthropocene (Island Press, 2016). Yvonne Underhill-Sem is associate professor of development studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is a Cook Island New Zealander with close family ties to Papua New Guinea. She has taught at the University of Papua New Guinea and Australian National

a bout the cont ributors | xvii University, has worked as a development expert at the Africa Caribbean Pacific (ACP) Secretariat and was the Pacific Regional Co-ordinator for DAWN. Her current work focuses on feminisms, flowers and floriculture in the Pacific; maternities in out-of-the-way places; and silent citizens in peripheral marketplaces. She wrote her chapter with her son Kaita Sem, who identifies as a Papua Guinean New Zealander and has research interests in indigenous development in the Western Pacific, especially in Papua New Guinea and West Papua. Luisa Valenzuela is an Argentine fiction writer who spent more than ten years in New York teaching in the Writing Department, first at Columbia University and then at New York University. She is the author of a number of novels and stories, including Strange Things Happen Here (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), The Lizard’s Tail (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1983), He Who Searches (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), Bedside Manners (Serpent’s Tail, 1995) and Black Novel with Argentines (Simon & Schuster, 1992/2002). In 2001 she published a novel, La Traviesa, and a collection of essays on writing, language and women, Peligrosas Palabras. Her most recent publications in Spanish include Mañana (2010), Cuidado con el tigre (2011) and La máscara sarda, el profundo secreto de Perón (2012).

AB B RE VIA T I O N S

ANM ANWA(R) ASHA BDS BJP BPO BRC BRICS CBM CONAMU COP CSSM DAC DAWN DPP FDI FGM FMLN GAD GDP GE ICPD ICT IGGRI IGLHRC ILGA IMF IMR IRMF ISRO IUD JRM KCK KJB LGBTTI

auxiliary nurse midwife All Nepal Women’s Association (Revolutionary) accredited social health activist boycott, divestment and sanctions Bharatiya Janata Party business process outsourcing (unit) Barrio Revolutionary Committee Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa Coal Bed Methane Consejo Nacional de la Mujer Conference of the Parties Child Survival and Safe Motherhood Development Assistance Committee Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era decentralized participatory planning foreign direct investment female genital mutilation Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional gender and development gross domestic product genetic engineering International Conference on Population and Development information and communication technology International Group for Grassroots Initiatives International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission International Lesbian and Gay Association International Monetary Fund reducing infant mortality rate Islamic Revolution Mostaz’afan Foundation Indian Space Research Organisation intra-uterine device Joint Review Mission Koma Civakên Kurdistan Koma Jinên Bilind lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, travesti and intersex

abbreviat ions | xix MAKIBAKA MDG MMR NASCOP NCCK NGO NRHM NTER ODA OECD PCD PCN PoA RCH RSS RTI SDG SERUNI SEWA SSP STD TEK TFA TFR UN UNDP UNFCCC UNSCR URPC USAID UTC VHP WAD WCD WHO WID

Makabayan Kilusan ng Bagong Kababaihan millennium development goal maternal mortality rate National AIDS and STI Control Programme National Council of Churches of Kenya non-governmental organization National Rural Health Mission Northern Territory Emergency Response official development assistance Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Christian Democratic Party Party of National Reconciliation Programme of Action Reproductive and Child Health (policy) Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh reproductive tract infection sustainable development goal Serikat Perempuan Indonesia (Indonesian Women’s Organization) Self-Employed Women’s Association Sardar Sarovar Project sexually transmitted disease traditional ecological knowledge target-free approach total fertility rate United Nations United Nations Development Programme United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change United Nations Security Council Resolution United Revolutionary People’s Council United States Agency for International Development Union of Peasant Workers Vishwa Hindu Parishad women and development women, culture and development World Health Organization women in development

P RE F AC E T O T H E S E CO N D E D IT ION

Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, Priya A. Kurian and Debashish Munshi

When Feminist Futures was first published in 2003, the future was 2016, this year – the year of publication of our second edition. As 2016 opens, it is marked by a set of interlocking crises and new and exciting movements of resistance, often with women leading them, such as movements for water rights. The crises we all engage with now – and many of these overlap with others – include the movement of refugees in strikingly high numbers to Europe, the upheavals in Ukraine and the Middle East, Israel’s apartheid policies and systematic denial of Palestinians’ rights to sovereignty and survival, racist and police violence, violence against women, the expropriation of indigenous people’s lands and resources, and the complex sociopolitical, economic and environmental issues surrounding climate change. We have watched many of the development projects of neoliberal globalization suck the most vulnerable people of the world into a quagmire of systemic inequities that has led to denial of access to food, water, land and energy, effectively rescinding people’s right to live creative and fulfilling lives, despite development’s roots as a series of projects to ameliorate poverty. Such a state of affairs is the product of elite-driven, top-down globalization and corporate transnationalisms, and the hijacking of culture (as lived experience). At a Wellesley College Symposium in January 2016, the head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, argued that equal pay for equal work for women and men was essential to being part of the modern era (we thought we had that covered four decades ago). Five years earlier, UNIFEM had been merged into UN Women. In both instances, we see the determination of international agencies to call out women as a category, in order to be seen as part of a current modern era, even as they hesitate to draw on feminist approaches. In this disjuncture between the category of ‘women’ and the transformative force of feminism, economic globalization has encouraged women to perform wage labour in

pre fac e to th e second edit ion | xxi order to consolidate efficiencies – efficiencies that mean that every adult human being and too many who are still children are expected to enter the labour market. However, for people to enter markets that are organized within the logic of the unleashed, savage capitalism in which the world finds itself, is not, to our minds, a sign of progress or a progressive move, not least because the feminization of poverty continues in synchrony with women’s entry into the paid economy (Hendra 2014). Political globalization has been equally insidious. The strengthening of surveillance and border controls around the globe – a project that is running rampant around us – is considered a common-sense strategy by many, integral to the political projects of almost all governments and nation-states. Political globalization also serves to produce new forms and levels of poverty, gender violence, migration and racism, which continue to deepen the inequalities on our planet. In this period of heightened globalization, the fallout of the 2003 US-led war on the people of Iraq is also there for all to see amidst today’s world of religious fundamentalisms, mindless terror, authoritarian governments and horrific human insecurity across vast regions. Religious bigotry and gender violence often go hand in hand, although, of course, they are also present within many apparently progressive constituencies. Most organized religions explicitly view women as secondary to men, even if they rely on women to further their cause, as is the case with some sections of all fundamentalist movements. In her claim to speak out against Islamic fundamentalism, Laura Bush made a November 2001 radio speech, two months after the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in New York, in which she talked about the repression of and brutality against women in Afghanistan: ‘The poverty, poor health, and illiteracy that the terrorists and the Taliban have imposed on women in Afghanistan … Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women’s fingernails for wearing nail polish’ (Bush 2001). As Lila Abu-Lughod says, Laura Bush distorted ‘the very separate causes in Afghanistan of women’s continuing malnutrition, poverty and ill health, and their more recent exclusion under the Taliban from employment, schooling and the joys of wearing nail polish’ (2002: 784). Laura Bush did not relate the unacceptable behaviour of the Taliban (and terrorists) to all religions and cultures, but instead

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implied that the war was to be fought to save (brown) women from their ‘monstrous’ men, a point well tackled by Gayatri Spivak in 1988. This thinking still holds strong – that white folks need to move in to save black/brown women from their/our menfolk. And it is this type of thinking that we hope the women, culture and development (WCD) approach overrides through its critical focus on culture as lived experience, and women as embodiments of cultures. The intervening years since 2003 and the publication of the first edition of Feminist Futures have witnessed a growing wave of movements of determined resistance, kindled by creativity and a passion for just social change: the intifadas with women in the front lines, the (often) women-led movements by the Small Island States to save their lands from rising sea levels, the Occupy and the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movements, Pussy Riot in Russia and the nationwide protests around Istanbul’s Gezi Park in Taksim Square, indigenous and other risings from the far reaches of the Pacific to the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and the continent of Africa. Indeed, global and grassroots resistance movements that deeply comprehend women and gender inequalities and discourses remain humanity’s best hope for a future that is inclusive, diverse, just, equitable and democratic, one that is based on a recognition of the dignity of all lives, human and non-human. How can one imagine a movement of movements that raises the possibility of bringing us all together, everywhere, led by everyone and no one – from young people to the elderly, frontline communities to the middle classes, faith-based groups to secular activists – and with women in leading roles? Clearly, as we enter it, the future will need a radical overhaul for the world to survive the havoc wreaked in the name of development. And yet, on some level, development also offers ways out from the ravages of globalization, mainly because any development project worth having begins from a position of ameliorating poverty, in contrast to globalization, whose whole raison d’être lies in increasing profits. This is why visions of feminist futures continue to look ever more important. Such futures are a quest for survival, and are, for us, inspired by the many ways in which women and men in the Third World resist the oppressive conditions in which they find themselves. Such resistance is inherently cultural, because economies, social relations and ideologies are all expressed through cultures. And,

pre fac e to th e second edit ion | xxiii indeed, culture – in Raymond Williams’s ample sense of structures of feeling – is the focal point of our vision for feminist futures. We argue that it is through culture, and by drawing on the WCD paradigm, that it becomes possible to imagine new ways of living and being. The feminisms we theorize are built upon cultures: cultures of political economy, a sophisticated understanding of patriarchal relationships, and a profound recognition of how ‘race’ or ethnicity, religion and nationality interact with other configurations of inequality. This set of feminisms embraces the varied experiences of women, many on the front lines of resistance, in, against and beyond the onslaught of market-driven ideologies and practices, migrations and climate change. Those feminisms – transnational, postcolonial and Third World – make explicit how culture is the critical means by which all of us can come together to challenge the systemic and wide-ranging forms of oppression at global and local levels, located in diverse contexts. And it is not by, for or about women alone; in trying to better understand women’s lives in all the glorious messiness of resistance and subordination, we realize more clearly that feminist futures are about men as well. This future is for all of us, and our volume offers a glimpse into how some of us hope to seek it together. We believe more firmly than ever in the promise of a WCD paradigm grounded in critical development studies, an understanding of ‘culture’ based on lived experience, and attention to the multiple roles of women in deep social transformation. This second edition includes many of the chapters and Visions pieces of the first edition, each of them revised and updated to a greater or lesser degree as their authors have seen fit. We also include a number of new pieces that reflect some of the more recent developments and thinking that have surfaced in the past decade. For this preface, we highlight what is new, leaving the original introduction intact to remind readers of what we suggested when we worked on the first edition. In this second edition, we introduce new chapters by Joni Seager, Amy Lind, Jane Wambui Njagi and Raka Ray, and one written jointly by Wendy Harcourt and Arturo Escobar. We have retained the most inspiring Visions pieces from the first edition, some of which have been revised. A few of the Visions authors of the first edition have also chosen to look at fresh cases to anchor their visions. There are also new Visions pieces by Dana Collins, Peter Chua, Julie Shayne, Gauri Nandedkar, Sangion

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Appiee Tiu, Susanne Schech and John Foran. All these pieces are intended as spaces for creative reflection on some of the many possible futures struggling to be born. Joni Seager reminds readers of Rachel Carson’s landmark Silent Spring, published in 1962, now seen through a WCD lens. Carson proved a fearless role model for the entry of women into debates on science and policy in the United States. Her captivating prose style also showed the possibilities for a different kind of science writing, one that remains an important, if minority, genre in that literature today. After the book was published, Carson’s scathing attack on the indiscriminate use of chemical pesticides came to be seen as one of the triggers of modern environmentalisms. Yet, Seager’s rereading of the book goes a long way beyond the anti-pesticide frame of Silent Spring to show how prescient Carson was in her critique of institutionalized corporate science in particular, and capitalism in general. Seager’s new eyes on Silent Spring reveal the classic to be an early exposé and forewarning of the masculinist and militarist approaches to development that currently dominate the globe. The rise of the ‘Pink Tide’ governments of Bolivia and Ecuador (and until recently Venezuela) signals a new form of radical social change in the name of indigenous ways of ‘living well’ (buen vivir, or sumak kawsay). But while these movements have succeeded in articulating more egalitarian and visionary approaches to development, scholars and activists have been tracing some of their inherent contradictions on (and in) the ground. Amy Lind illuminates some of these in the context of Ecuador. At the same time as President Rafael Correa’s Citizens’ Revolution has brought diverse segments of society together to collectively chart the development of the country, and indeed has focused on the rights of women, the fragile project of an indigenous-inflected democratic socialism in Ecuador continues to privilege dominant heterosexual norms, and the revolution’s implicit heteronormative values have significant implications for sexual and other human rights. Jane Wambui Njagi also pays explicit attention to issues of sexuality, with a focus on women’s rights to abortion, exploring the ways in which women’s access to safe abortion in Kenya is severely compromised by powerful anti-abortion discourses fuelled by cultural and religious positions. The political and public influence of institutions such as churches is such that politicians have been

pre fac e to th e second edit ion | xxv loath to challenge this vociferous opposition to the legalization of abortion. Njagi carefully traces the tensions between gender and culture in discussions of development in Kenya, demonstrating how anti-abortion actors simultaneously and contradictorily dub abortion rights as both un-Christian and un-African. This cultural lens allows readers to comprehend how anti-abortion discourses are fundamentally about controlling women’s sexuality and bodies. Wendy Harcourt and Arturo Escobar have transformed their Visions piece from the first edition into a full-fledged chapter by offering readers an innovative updated conversation that takes stock of the more complex ‘pluriversal’ and intercultural political movements of today (including the aforementioned Pink Tide, as well as humanity’s troubled relationships with non-human worlds) and the terrain of feminist cyberpolitics on which social media are opening up unplanned possibilities. They demonstrate the potentials inherent in seemingly ‘small’ struggles for communal spaces in the interstices of the hegemony sought by capital, patriarchy and racism alike. David McKie invites teenage feminist Akanksha Munshi-Kurian to rewrite, with him, his first edition chapter on ‘Managing future(s)’. This piece has now become a refreshingly new and transformative view of feminist futures, wandering through the imagined worlds of science fiction and future scenarios. In providing glimpses of possible plural futures of gender and development that cannot be visualized in most contemporary settings, this chapter invites readers to draw continually on our imaginations. Raka Ray’s new chapter addresses the current migration of young people in India from smaller to larger places, with a focus on Bombay as a destination for work in film and call centres. She breaks this down by gender with revealing results about which women and which men choose to migrate and what explains the different experiences they encounter in the big cities of India. Her chapter powerfully considers women, culture and development in a concrete and highly important place. The new Visions pieces also require that we hone our skills of imagination. Centring Third World countries as sites of resistance, Peter Chua highlights the active roles of revolutionary women in allegedly remote locations in Asia and South America as they stand against the relentless advances of consumerist neoliberal forces. In

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so doing, the women nurture ideals of sustainability, and, for many, it is these women who have become role models for feminist futures. Gauri Nandedkar’s vision of the future is refracted through the eyes of adolescent girls in rural India, while that of Sangion Appiee Tiu comes through the sights of an elderly indigenous woman in Papua New Guinea. Susanne Schech takes a distinctly Australian perspective to issues of women, culture and development, pointing to the need for a WCD approach to inform government policies on both domestic and international gender and development issues. Dana Collins reminds readers that a WCD approach is all the richer for taking into account how even commodified sex, love and desire offer possibilities to imagine and create new forms of social relationships. The final new piece by co-editor John Foran tells the story of his awakening to perhaps the defining issue of our time, and the joy of participating in the attempt to imagine and assemble the biggest social movement the world has ever seen, suggesting that the climate crisis bears the seeds of a sustainable, democratic and egalitarian future if we infuse it with love, hope and … ourselves. This second edition of Feminist Futures offers a reworking of the women, culture and development approach and illuminates how our politics touch our lives in every arena, demonstrating the critical need for such insights in our present world. Just as humanity’s future is essential to feminist futures, feminist futures open up paths we may take as we move forward to create a more just planet, in societies that allow all people to live creative and fulfilling lives. It is to this future world, and all who seek it, that we hope this volume speaks.

1 | AN I N T R O D UCT I O N T O W O MEN, C U LTU R E A N D D E V E L O P M E NT Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran and Priya A. Kurian

At the close of the twentieth century, there were clear indications that women in the Third World and the poor suffered the dire consequence of global (mal)development. This debilitating malaise continues into the new century. Its most recent symptoms include: the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001; the US-initiated war on Afghanistan shortly thereafter; the use of the discourse of terrorism by the governments of India and Pakistan that threatens to spill over into a nuclear stand-off; the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank that regularly escalates the cycle of violence; the US government’s targeting of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an ‘axis of evil’; the Enron débâcle, in which a large US transnational corporation went bankrupt despite making millions of dollars for its chief officers through, among other things, the provision of expensive electricity for parts of India and investments in China. These examples continue to dominate public discussion, while the crises of HIV/AIDS, the impact of (and resistance to) IMFand World Bank-directed structural adjustment policies, and the consequences of environmental destruction worldwide seem to have receded from public view. It is in this context that we feel an urgent need to reflect on development, culture and women. In reading the outpouring of opinion from the left and among liberals urging progressives to think more deeply about the events of 11 September, often circulated on e-mail or posted on the internet,1 it becomes quite clear that missing in these responses to the attacks on the World Trade Center is a recognition that there is torment and strife in many parts of the world – that the attacks on the US need to be seen in the root context of global (mal)development, with particular implications for women and culture. Indeed, we believe that a misplaced emphasis on modernization strategies for the past

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half century is central to understanding why development has not led to a greater decrease in inequality between Third and First Worlds. In other words, development has failed the Third World.2 Although many explanations have been advanced, this failure is exacerbated by the end of the Cold War and the rise of projects of globalization, bringing with them an increasingly feminized poverty, an alarming process of environmental degradation and extremely elusive conditions for peace and security. What is less often recognized (although sometimes acknowledged in a sub-clause, phrase or equivocal footnote) is that women’s contributions and a regard for culture are key elements in a meaningful development that aims to improve living conditions of all poor people in the South.3 Women in the Third World face multiple challenges, among them poverty, unemployment, limited access to land, legal and social discrimination in many forms, sexual abuse and other forms of violence. Though similar in form to those faced by women in the First World, there are specificities of history, political economy and culture that make these realities differentially oppressive and exploitative for Third World women (see Amadiume 2000). But the women of the Third World are not victims. As ‘subaltern counterpublics’ (see Fraser 1997a), women in the Third World meet these challenges and confront them actively, often in remarkably creative and effective ways. In other words, there is far more to their lives than a set of interlocking ‘problems’ – there are many deeply fulfilling experiences, powerful emotions, beautiful creations and enduring relationships, sometimes born through struggles waged against the terms of existence. As Light Carruyo puts it in this volume: for WCD, development is not ‘something that is “done to” the Third World; instead, there is an acknowledgement that Third World actors, elite and non-elite, male and female, organized and not organized, contribute to the construction of the discourse and practice of development’. The purpose of our book is therefore to assess the situation of women across many sites in the Third World in order to elaborate a fresh vantage point that relies on aspects of both earlier and more recent approaches (such as Sen and Grown 1987, Mohanty 1991, Tsing 1993, Braidotti et al. 1994, Marchand 1995, Snyder and Tadesse 1995, Ong 1997, Fagan, Munck and Nadasen 1997, Marchand and Runyan 2000, and Bergeron 2001, among many others) and at

i n t ro d u c t i o n | 3 the same time suggest a new lens through which to look at women in the Third World and the ways women resist and celebrate the circumstances of their lives. We are certainly not proposing something no-one else has done before – we are merely trying to focus attention on and give a term and platform to an emerging approach that we think is a way forward out of the impasse in development studies. This volume represents an effort to suggest the shape of a new paradigm for development studies, one that puts women at its centre, culture on a par with political economy, and keeps a focus on critical practices, pedagogies and movements for social justice. It has been argued that work within development studies has shifted from an emphasis on political economy to now include area studies and environmental studies, along with a greater interest in gender relations (Hoogvelt 1997). However, despite this shift, overly structural and economistic approaches to development predominate, as espoused by international aid agencies such as the World Bank. The 1992 World Bank Report argued that ‘Women must not be regarded as mere recipients of public support. They are, first and foremost, economic agents’ (World Bank 1992: 60). The Bank’s stated commitment to women’s participation in economic development is a fundamental part of its neoliberal strategy for improving economic productivity (see World Bank 1994), involving the embodiment of Third World poor women as able workers and entrepreneurs while ignoring their other roles as wives, partners, mothers, citizens and activists – roles that form the backbone of all societies, but which are difficult to discern, let alone comprehend, within conventional economic analyses. As such, the World Bank has not been able to engage with the actual realities of people’s lives, including gendered realities. For example, women plantation workers in Sri Lanka not only pick tea leaves, but they also have to organize their paid work in relation to their daily domestic responsibilities such as feeding the household. This responsibility can mean, therefore, that it is the husbands who have to collect the daily wages for the women’s work. These are paid at just the time when cooking tasks have to begin, with a consequent lack of control by the women over their wages. Patterns such as this demonstrate how the economic agency of women is layered by a complex set of realities. Most recently, globalization, transnationalization and internationalization are posing important issues for scholarly debates as

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well as for activists’ practices, yet these terms often ignore the ways in which interdisciplinary thinking – and here we explicitly include work in the humanities – can contribute to an understanding of the present social and cultural conjuncture. We note that the adjective ‘global’ usually centres on the First World (Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand), thereby continuing to privilege the First World even as it analyses global relationships, which turns the analytic gaze away from the Third World and the agency of people living in it. Our book aims to rectify that bias by placing Third World women firmly at the centre of inquiry. Even as we do this, we are aware that the ‘Third World’ denotes a heterogeneous set of places, cultures and societies. Yet, in centring Third World women, we intend also to participate in debates over the desirability of bringing together many diverse experiences under one rubric, just as the categories ‘woman’ (Butler 1997a, Halberstam 1998) and ‘Third World’ do. For some time now, there has been considerable discussion about the gendered dynamics of development (e.g. Boserup 1970, Benería and Sen 1981, Tinker 1990, Kabeer 1994, Porter and Judd 1999). These discussions are essential to our argument. However, we offer this volume to demonstrate what could happen when Third World women are placed at the centre of development and global processes. This not only transforms the projects of development, along with their underlying discourses of modernization, but, in addition, starts to make culture(s) visible. For example, in her study of the migration of Filipinas as servants/labourers, Parreñas (2001) shows the centrality of community and family, alongside the nation-state and the labour market, for understanding the textures of the women’s lives. That is, in order to engage with gender, as distinct from merely acknowledging its presence, it is necessary to discuss culture. However, simply attending to gender in an explicit manner is not enough. It is here that Raymond Williams’s famous notion of ‘culture’ as lived experience is helpful. Williams argues for an understanding of culture not simply as a set of habits or traditions, but as a way to comprehend how people actually live their lives – a ‘structure of feelings’. In other words, culture as lived experience insists on an agentic notion of human beings and is thus understood as a dynamic set of relationships through which inequalities are created and challenged, rather than as a singular property that resides within an

i n t ro d u c t i o n | 5 individual, group or nation (Williams 1960; see Hall et al. 1980 for a further development of this argument). We do this in counterpoint to the structuralism of much of the ‘cultural turn’ in social theory, which is often devoid of agency, subjectivity, consciousness or emotion. A ‘structure of feeling’ is meant to denote the blend of pattern and agency we feel should characterize cultural analysis. WID, WAD, GAD … WCD There is a rich history of theoretical, applied and policy work on how best to tackle the relationship between women and development studies. This is now discussed almost canonically as the progression from WID to WAD to GAD (Rathgeber 1990, Moser 1993, Razavi and Miller 1995). Boserup’s 1970 work – considered an early example of an academic, policy-oriented book that noted women’s exclusion from development projects in the Third World – was taken seriously partly because the development community began to realize that the ‘trickle down’ approach to development had not been effective (Braidotti et al. 1994). Boserup’s work is often taken as signalling the origins of the women in development (WID) approach by pointing to women’s invisibility and exclusion from development (Moser 1993). WID was a way of ‘mainstreaming’ women (Martinussen 1997: 305) through arguing that they should be treated on equal terms with men – the ‘equity approach’ that gained ground in the 1970s. WID then shifted its underlying discourse from equity to antipoverty to efficiency in the mid-1980s. The anti-poverty discourse complemented the 1970s’ ‘basic needs’ approach to development, whose solutions included income-generation strategies and skill development for women (Moser 1993). The discourse of efficiency, which developed in the 1980s, resting on WID assumptions, argued that development would become more efficient if women’s resources were utilized to the full; in this way women’s participation in the economy and gender equity were seen to be synonymous, a view which the World Bank and Eastern Bloc shared, with no small irony. While it stressed income generation and skills training, this way of viewing the relationship between development and women differed from the anti-poverty discourse: the former targeted women in order to increase their efficiency in the productive process, and thus promote economic growth through an efficient use of women’s labour (Gardner and Lewis 1996, Braidotti et al. 1994).

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Meanwhile, by the second half of the 1970s, the women and development (WAD) approach, theoretically informed by Marxistfeminism (Rathgeber 1990), raised some critical questions about the WID paradigm. WAD argued that as women’s contributions have always been central to any possibility of development, the question to be asked was why women were excluded from projects of development. Consequently, the WAD approach focused not only on the integration of women into development and the simultaneous transformation of mainstream development, but also on the dependence of Third World nations on the richer nations. As expressed in the work of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), and developed by Sen and Grown (1987), the self-organization of women is a key facet of WAD analysis and practice. The gender and development (GAD) approach is presently the discourse used by most scholars, policy planners, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to discuss the relationship between development processes and women’s inequality. GAD aims to ‘not only integrate women into development, but [to] look for the potential in development initiatives to transform unequal social/ gender relations and to empower women’ (Canadian Council for International Co-Operation 1991: 5). However, aid agencies and development practitioners tend to use the concept of gender in reductionist ways, failing to grapple with issues of power, conflict, and the larger social, cultural and political contexts that frame women’s ability to resist conditions of oppression. Indeed, the use of narrow, rigid understandings of gender, despite their seeming focus on the inequality generated within notions of masculinity and femininity, can lead to an over-emphasis on structures and institutions at the expense of seeing the agency of women, an agency that may not just perpetuate inequalities but also challenge them. To our minds, ‘woman’ is more able than ‘gender’ to connote agency while simultaneously implying the need for centring gendered analyses. All three approaches, we feel, fall short of a larger analysis of the ways in which capitalism, patriarchy and race/ethnicity shape and are shaped by women’s subordination and oppression. For example, Rai argues that the WID and GAD literature ‘largely continue to work within a liberal framework’ (2002: 45), a framework that often homogenizes Third World women. It is also argued that WID

i n t ro d u c t i o n | 7 and GAD make ethnocentric assumptions about the content of relations between women and men in different societies, ‘seeing only exploitation, subordination and conflict, [rather than] co-operation and the importance of familial bonds’ (Gardner and Lewis 1996: 124). While we are sympathetic to these critiques of WID, WAD and GAD (as well as indebted to the many contributions of each), we also fault all three for not taking culture adequately into account. Even when they draw, to differing extents, upon culture as a means of discussing women’s oppression, they also tend to see Third World women as victims in need of rescuing from their cultures, assumed to be static and unchanging. To approach culture as lived experience rather than as a static set of relationships permits an opening of new avenues for development, because a lived experience approach to culture centres the relationship between production and reproduction and ensures that women’s agency is visible (see Chua, Bhavnani and Foran 2000). The work included in this book links women, culture and development in a new and innovative way.4 Such a linkage is located at the intersection of three cutting-edge interdisciplinary areas in the academic world: feminist studies, cultural studies and critical development studies (or, more generally, Third World studies). Feminist studies in both the humanities and social sciences has suggested that analytic/critical work and policies are impoverished if adequate attention is not paid to women. Feminist scholarship in the USA, along with analyses of gender and sexuality, has started to grapple with the implications of the widely accepted argument that ‘woman’ is not a unitary category. But such an engagement still implicitly foregrounds US and European feminist studies, has a modernizing impulse and thus bypasses the diverse writings, cultural products and other regional and global actions of women in the Third World. Cultural studies has directed attention to the importance of analysing cultures within their context – both locally and globally. It follows Williams and others to argue that cultures may be conceptualized as more than the habits, customs and mores of particular societies. However, the approaches found in cultural studies, although drawn upon by feminist scholars in the USA, are rarely utilized to provide insights into specific aspects of societies in the Third World. The newer approach of a Third World cultural studies, encompassing

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as it does a broad range of perspectives including post-colonial studies, subaltern studies and Third World postmodernism, begins to move in the direction we have in mind (see Foran 2000). But it still needs to take on insights that integrate gender, sexuality and ethnicity in a biospheric context into analyses of culture, the economy and politics (Escobar 1995 is a landmark on this point). Third World/development studies is an area of inquiry that resists being incorporated in a singular way into the projects of globalization. Although development studies has centred on the Third World, its analyses tend to be driven by economistic policy considerations, which generally locate women and culture as peripheral to a central project of increasing the gross domestic product of Third World nation-states. Third World studies typically draws on the insights of social science and historical schools such as dependency, worldsystem theory and modes of production analysis to argue that global and international processes need to be seen in situ, with a focus on the countries of the South. However, the labour, cultures and histories of women are rarely taken into account within either Third World or development studies, or, when they are addressed, most often treat women merely as victims in a system of cruel and unjust inequalities. In other words, these paradigms either deny women agency, or do not attend to the relationship between Third World women’s participation in the private and public domains simultaneously. Thus, both development and Third World studies have reached an impasse in their assessment of future prospects for the Third World, due to their failure to see the centrality of women and the significance of culture. Development and Third World studies have been further limited by their systematic marginalization of concerns of environmental sustainability that have far-reaching implications for poor rural Third World women (see Agarwal 1998, Kurian and Munshi 1999, Kurian 2000a and, in the practical sphere, Wangari Maathai, who started the Green Belt movement in Kenya in 1977).5 The environment, in fact, has been marginalized in development discourse through the very techniques mobilized against women in androcentric theorizing (Jagtenberg and McKie 1997). This volume therefore argues for a shift in development theory and practice to envision a development project that is democratic, empowering of non-elites and environmentally sustainable.

i n t ro d u c t i o n | 9 Women, culture, development: three visions

Kum-Kum Bhavnani A WCD approach takes as central that production and reproduction cannot be separated in the lives of most women. I draw on a Marxist notion of production,6 further developed by Juliet Mitchell (1971), to define productive activity as activity that creates surplus value. However, as is now often commented on but still not always grappled with, women’s productive activity is intimately related to their reproductive activity, including social reproduction. That is, women all around the world are usually expected to be in jobs where the necessary skills (and limitations) for ‘women’s work’ are derived from ideological notions of women’s abilities as well as from the work of women that contributes to household needs, the raising of children, cooking food and so on – what many have referred to as the ‘double shift’. Even when women work as builders and labourers, where the job is not evidently related to stereotypes of women’s fragility and lack of strength, the paid work that is done outside the home is in intimate relationship with the work that is done inside the home. Despite the actual tangle of production and (social) reproduction in women’s lives, in line with Eli Zaretsky’s (1976) argument, it is evident that the rise of capitalism in the nineteenth century forced a sharp split between the spheres of the public and the private, or the domains of production and reproduction, a split that means that reproductive activity is less visible in most discussions of productive activity. The invisibility of social reproduction in such discussions may explain why so many dimensions of women’s lives are missing from non-feminist discussions of production, or within development studies generally. A WCD approach, to my mind, begins from a position that women’s lives are a glorious tangle of production and reproduction, not only impossible, but also undesirable, to untangle totally. Undesirable, because such a disentangling would imply a neat separation between production and reproduction, which would imply that women’s (and men’s) lives are much tidier than they actually are. Given that it is harder to see the differing elements that configure women’s lives, a WCD approach (in the sense that we are advocating) affords the possibility of a more complex view on the ingredients in this tangle. In drawing on culture as lived experience, a WCD lens brings women’s agency into the foreground (side by side with, and within,

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the cultural, social, political and economic domains) as a means for understanding how inequalities are challenged and reproduced. In integrating production with reproduction alongside women’s agency, a WCD approach can interrogate issues of ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality and livelihood simultaneously, thereby providing a nuanced examination of social processes. Through a WCD lens, ethnicity, religion, age and sexualities, in addition to class and gender, become aspects of women’s lives that cannot be omitted from any analysis or practice. A WCD perspective argues that to speak of ‘culture’ simultaneously with development encompasses more poignantly the everyday experience, practice, ideology and politics of Third World women, and thus may provide clearer ideas for a transformative development, and a development that attends to aspects of people’s lives beyond the economic. Bina Agarwal’s work demonstrates, for example, that in order to create a transformative approach to development, it is necessary to make land rights a central issue for rural women in the Third World, and not to focus only on skills training and related intervention strategies. She argues that rethinking rural women’s land rights enhances their status vis-à-vis men, thus causing a shift in gender relations. Further, she ‘illustrates how women’s control over economic resources is crucially mediated by non-economic factors’ (Agarwal 1995: 264). It is these non-economic factors that are particular to a WCD approach, for they are capable of retaining the economic as a key means of grappling with the subordination of poor women in the Third World, while not privileging the economic above other aspects of people’s everyday lives. Culture is brought into the discussion because it provides a non-economistic, yet still partly material, way to produce knowledge and to present different strategies for making struggle and achieving social change. To discuss the integration of production with reproduction and to foreground women’s agency in achieving change can appear to be a rather abstract project. Let me therefore describe three organizations – the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), the Women’s Group of Xapuri, Brazil, and Tostan: Against Female Genital Mutilation in Senegal – that provide instances of such an integration. SEWA was founded in 1971 as a trade union for women working in the informal sector in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. Once this

i n t ro d u c t i o n | 11 was set up, the women were joined by vegetable sellers who were being harassed as they tried to sell their goods in the marketplace, by Muslim women who stitched quilts in the home and were agricultural workers, and by women who had been victimized when asking for legal wages in the tobacco-processing plants (Rose 1992). SEWA took the issue of the harassment of the vegetable sellers to the Indian Supreme Court, which ruled that the women had a right, as workers in the informal sector, to have a separate place to sell their goods. Since that success, SEWA has set up a bank for microcredit (with each of its members as a shareholder), provided child care and access to health care for its members as well as literacy and other skill development classes. The organization, considered by many to be a role model, also advises women on how best to create co-operatives (M. A. Singamma Sreenivasan Foundation 1993), and has over 220,000 members, 362 producer groups and 72 cooperatives (Srinivas 1997). The main theme uniting these activities is empowerment for poor women (Bhowmik and Jhabvala 1996). Women’s relationship to the environment has been widely discussed (see, inter alia, Dankelman and Davidson 1988, Shiva 1988, Jackson 1993, Mies and Shiva 1993, Agarwal 1998 and Kurian 2000a), although comparatively little has been written about women’s role in defending forests in Brazil (Campbell 1995). While the tragically murdered rubber-tappers’ union president, Chico Mendes, is well known for having mobilized local populations to prevent clearing of the forests in the state of Acre, very little scholarly work has attended to the women of Xapuri who were part of that union (Campbell 1995 is an exception), even though almost two-thirds of the women in Acre have tapped for rubber at least once (Kainer and Duryea 1992, cited in Campbell 1995) and women rubber-tappers have been active in defence of the forest. As a result of working together on demonstrations (empates) to protect the forest, the women set up the Xapuri Women’s Group in 1987. The group has been meeting since then to support women’s rights, provide literacy and skills education, and to challenge domestic violence. Female genital mutilation (FGM) affects between eight and ten million women and girls per year in Africa (Sarkis 1995). It is also an issue that leads to heated discussions about cultural practices and their role in the subordination of women, and calls to change such practices. The practice is protested by local and international women’s

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organizations on the grounds of health concerns for women (the cutting is often conducted in unsanitary conditions and the women’s sexual health is also at risk), as the violation of a woman’s basic human right to enjoy sexual relations and as a form of institutionalized violence against women (Doorbenoo 1994, Kassindja and Bashir 1998). FGM was confirmed as being legally permissible in Egypt in June 1997 (New York Times, 26 June 1997). As a result of the protests of women across the world, by January 1999 the practice was banned in Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Djibouti, Guinea, Senegal and Togo and was being challenged by women in Kenya and the Sudan. Tostan is a non-governmental organization (NGO) in Senegal that has worked with rural peoples for some time in a basic education programme (Melching 2001). In 1996, some of the women who had come together through Tostan established the ‘Malicounda Commitment’, a series of pledges that FGM should cease (Mackie 1998). Tostan spearheaded a widespread grassroots opposition to FGM and the practice was declared illegal by the Senegalese government in January 1999 (New York Times, 18 January 1999). Each of these organizations can be considered an example of development, for each works in a planned manner to achieve social, economic, political and cultural change. Yet none of the organizations privileges the economic above other domains and all, at least implicitly, work with a notion of culture as lived experience. I consider them examples of WCD because: • they have been initiated by women for women (in contrast to, for example, the Grameen Bank which was set up by an academic male economist to help poor women obtain credit and thus may be seen more accurately as being part of a ‘rescue’ narrative for Third World women); • they explicitly attend to the relationship between production and reproduction in women’s lives; • they represent diverse forms of meaningful agency for social change. Each of the organizations integrates all three elements of WCD to create new ideas about development, focusing on one particular aspect of women’s lives, and using this to fashion imaginative links to other dimensions of social life.

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John Foran In trying to articulate a sense of what ‘women, culture and development’ can mean as an approach to real Third World development and positive social change, I think in terms that are both autobiographical and theoretical. As a graduate student in the late 1970s, new to sociology but immersed in such social theories as existential Marxism, I happily came to awareness of the rich and varied political struggles going on in Latin America, the Middle East and elsewhere in the Third World, and made these my field of study. After initially embarking on a master’s thesis on the Allende years in Chile (from which I had to turn away as the depth of the tragedy worked its way into my soul), I found the project that would preoccupy me for the decade of the 1980s – a study of the causes of the Iranian revolution. This meant an encounter with theories about revolutions, most influentially Theda Skocpol’s ambitious structural interpretation of the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions, where she famously intoned: ‘Revolutions are not made; they come’ (1979: 17). As this went against my own theoretical and political instincts, I set about trying to show how people had made the revolution in Iran. To do this, I had to think through how political economic structures – themselves greatly but not solely shaped by the West in a process of dependent development – were challenged by the actions of social groups. The key to this puzzle for me gradually crystallized into the notion of ‘political cultures of resistance’ – the various ways that people creatively draw on experience, emotions, subjectivity, sedimented traditions and ideological refashionings to make sense of political and economic exclusion and to mobilize themselves and others in revolutionary struggles (Foran 1993, 1997a). I now had two legs of the triangle that would become WCD a decade later, at the end of the 1990s. In the intervening period, I spent a lot of time comparing the causes of revolution in Iran with other Third World cases – first Nicaragua and El Salvador, then Mexico and Cuba and eventually a set of almost two dozen cases (Foran 1997). In trying to understand better how coalitions formed and fragmented, I necessarily became aware of the contributions of feminists and scholars of race and ethnicity to the complex discussions then going on about the intersections of race, class and gender, eventually coming to replace the term ‘intersection’ with ‘interconnection’, since identity is not the mathematical addition of essentialized categories, but rather the social relationships among

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them, relationships that are subject to shifts and changes in various ways (Foran 2001; the insight here is taken from Bhavnani 1997). What WCD can be rests on an assessment of the vast potential of creatively combining (in many possible ways, as this introduction and our book as a whole attest) the three fields of critical development studies, feminist studies and cultural studies. Each needs the others to see its own blind spots. Each can contribute an angle of vision that is indispensable for breaking out of the impasse of the crisis of development. From critical development studies I have learned that Third World development, in its many times and places, is inescapably shaped by the unequal encounter of national projects with powerful ‘external’ actors. The work where this insight originally touched me remains in my view one of the most nuanced treatments of the issue: Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto’s Dependency and Development in Latin America (1979, originally published in Spanish in 1969), to which I owe the concept of dependent development. Out of the many variants of cultural studies that have influenced me – from the original English contributions of Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson and later Stuart Hall, to subaltern studies, post-colonial studies and Latin American postmodernism – I have come to think of a distinctive (if broad) field called Third World cultural studies, where the woven threads of lived experience, subjectivity, agency, dreams and visions underline the centrality and embeddedness of culture in everyday life.7 A specifically Third World cultural studies represents a political approach to culture, and a cultural approach to politics, focusing on how political cultures and discourses circulate and compete – features that are not intrinsic to Third World cultural studies, yet which seem in my view to happen here more often than in what we might term First World cultural studies, let alone the conventional ‘sociology of culture’ approaches in the USA. From the long and evolving traditions of feminist interventions into development studies – the genealogy of WID, WAD and GAD that for us leads to WCD – come the strands that most appealed to me, most powerfully the work of DAWN and Gita Sen and Caren Grown’s 1987 classic, Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions, with its brilliant demonstrations of the links that can be made when poor women are put at the centre of analysis, links that run from ecology and subsistence to patriarchal militarism and neoliberal structural adjustment.

i n t ro d u c t i o n | 15 My vision of WCD, then, is one where analysis can move flexibly between political economic macrostructures and local discourses and practices (see Freeman 2001 and Bergeron 2001 and the many works they cite for a similar approach). It would be one where scholars can centre the activities and struggles of Third World women, learning from their great variety and seeking to articulate paths to the dialogue that must precede any wider unity across lines of race, sex and world, and where Third World actors are neither victims nor heroes (see Jameson 2000), but play leading parts in the struggle against globalization from above. Indeed, development studies should confront and appropriate globalization – not the other way around – forging alliances with cultural and feminist studies. This kind of scholarship and analysis (for it is not carried out only in the academic world), to which many people are already contributing, is not new, as we have made plain already, but deserves a name, for which I see no better term at present than ‘women, culture and development’.

Priya Kurian The chants of the women activists protesting against the damming of the mighty Narmada river in western India echo in my ears as I think about my understandings of women, culture and development. It was in mapping the environmental impact assessment processes of a gigantic, World Bank-funded power and irrigation development project, the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) in the Narmada Valley (Kurian 1995, 2000a), that I first started to seriously explore the interweavings of feminist studies, cultural studies and development studies. In hearkening back briefly to the academic genealogy of my graduate studies in a US university, it is not entirely clear when my separate, parallel immersions in environmental policy, women’s studies and Third World development studies started to come together. The tenuous connections I had begun to make theoretically between these three areas – environment–gender–development – became sharper and more focused when I started fieldwork in India. A fourth element came in with fieldwork: the significance of culture. How these elements interact, respond to one another, and shape our understandings and practices of development and environmental policy are explored in my book on the World Bank’s environmental policies (Kurian 2000a). Yet the question of how we conceptualize

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and give meaning to the highly contested terms of ‘women’, ‘culture’ and ‘development’ remains. How do we theorize a WCD approach that takes as its political project the centrality of rural Third World women – themselves a diverse, heterogeneous group – in the process of development? The suggestions below draw on my ongoing research, and as such are offered as one small part of the larger puzzle that we can draw on to inform our desire for better development. A first step in thinking of a WCD approach is to get away from the reductive understanding of culture that permeates much of the mainstream development literature. The assumptions of a linear development process of moving from the primitive to the modern characterizes much of the WID, WAD and GAD schools of thought (although there is much indeed that we have otherwise learned from them). The homogeneous Third World woman in this literature is best depicted as being in the grip of ‘culture’, defined narrowly as oppressive traditions. Yet, as I discovered in my study of the implementation of environmental impact assessment (EIA),8 cultural values and practices need to be written into the EIA process to make the goal of environmental sustainability a possibility. Far from confining indigenous and rural communities to museums, as charged by development officials and elites, recognizing the centrality of culture – defined broadly as the lived experiences, and material and emotional contexts that form the fabric of people’s lives – is a significant part of making EIA meaningful in the Third World context. In other words, EIA processes will necessarily have to respond and adapt to the cultural specificities of local contexts, including recognizing the significance of indigenous knowledges, in order to be effective and meaningful. A second issue that a WCD approach needs to acknowledge is an understanding of culture as not merely an embodiment of the lived experiences of people, but as ideas, norms and values that also suffuse the concepts of environment, development and, more specifically, science and technology. Researching and writing about the SSP reinforced for me not only the centrality of environment in the study of development, but also the key insight that ideas about the environment are deeply contested cultural concepts. Both human and non-human nature are affected by global, market-based economic, political and cultural systems that help tie ecologically marginalized places to vulnerable and marginalized people (see Plumwood 1998).

i n t ro d u c t i o n | 17 Development that is not tied to a notion of creating ecologically rational and socially just societies has material implications for women in the Third World and for the way they come to terms with culturally defined notions of sustainable livelihoods. It is clear that struggles over resources in the Third World are shaped not only by material forces and political power, but also by the ideologies and understandings of what is meant by the environment. Differing notions about environment between those supportive and those opposed to the SSP, for example, continue to drive the ongoing struggle in the Narmada Valley. A third issue that a WCD approach needs to grapple with is ways of acknowledging the power and place of gendered values and ideologies in conjunction with the centrality given to women. Recognizing women as pivotal to sound development, in other words, is not to say that an analysis of gender can be done away with. Thus, if gender is understood as reflected in the worldviews and ideologies of individuals and institutions, in the distribution and control over knowledge and resources, and in the practices and control of bureaucracies, then my gender analysis of the World Bank revealed the deeply masculine bias that permeates EIA theory and practice, a bias that has profound implications for Third World women. This is not, however, to argue for an idea of gender as a coherent core – it is opening up such seemingly coherent categories of women and gender that will allow us to re-vision a development project that enables and affirms women’s agency. Indeed, an equally critical element of WCD is that it makes explicit the need to theorize women’s agency in a larger context of often, but not always, oppressive structures. It allows us to ask: What are the political, social, emotional and economic conditions that make resistances possible? Finally, WCD makes explicit the urgency of addressing the imbalances in our accounting of economic and cultural conditions that frame Third World women’s existence. If development studies and the social sciences have been characterized by an over-emphasis on economistic approaches, then, as Anjali Prabhu argues in this volume, literary studies have too often ignored the economic in their focus on the ‘purely’ cultural. This recognition of the interweaving of culture and economics comes into play when we examine the phenomenon of technolust that drives the proponents of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and biotechnologies.

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The explosion of computer and Internet technologies, inextricably intertwined with the biotechnological revolution, has huge implications for the Third World and specifically for its women. In the new frontiers of exploitation, indigenous knowledges, as much as the biophysical environment (including especially the gene pool) of Third World nations, form the capital to be extracted and commodified for (primarily) First World consumption. A WCD approach would help to explore the ways in which Third World grassroots activists and peoples respond to these new forms of colonization and exploitation. How do we work for development that empowers local peoples, provides local access and control over technologies, and keeps the process of social transformation in local hands? In studying development projects involving ICTs in India, Australia and New Zealand, similar tensions are evident between what cyberspace can and should do. But it seems clear that ICTs, used sensitively and appropriately, could be a tool for women’s empowerment (see Visions essays by Munshi and Kurian and Escobar and Harcourt in this volume). Indeed, answering the questions I raise above calls for a nuanced approach of gendering and enculturating technologies, shaped to local contexts, that may well embody what I call a ‘women, culture and development’ approach. In this volume we map some of the links that exist among feminist studies, cultural studies and development studies as well as attempt to sketch in new ones. One goal of the women, culture and development approach is to ensure that political economy is not privileged above culture, but, rather, that the two are seen as operating simultaneously and in synchrony. Thus, the contributors to the volume analyse the complex ways in which culture – in all its myriad forms – both shapes and is shaped by the term ‘woman’ and is created by women across the Third World. We also interrogate the way in which the use of culture(s) permits the expression of alternative, sustainable and empowering forms of development, a term whose purpose we define as ‘well-being’ and creativity in all domains of life. In this way, the chapters do not simply identify the theoretical and practical limitations of the three areas of study discussed above, but specify some of the links among women, culture and development to create a new, interdisciplinary framework that both alters the intellectual

i n t ro d u c t i o n | 19 identities of each element and uncovers linkages across areas routinely defined as distant from each other. While we have three sections in the book – sexuality and the gendered body, environment/technology/science, and cultural politics of representation, along with a series of Visions essays – we also see the chapters as approaches to the three interdisciplinary areas we discussed earlier in this introduction: critical development studies, Third World feminist studies and Third World cultural studies. The volume opens with three Visions essays – by Maria Navarrette, Luisa Valenzuela and Anna Tsing – which suggest particular possibilities for a WCD approach. Luisa Valenzuela’s emphasis, as befits a writer of hauntingly lyrical fiction, is on language: ‘a language made of the loudest silence. Made of courage. Made of memory.’ This complements Anna Tsing’s ‘cautionary narrative’ to ‘consider the problem of privatization’, and both harmonize well with ‘Maria’s Stories’ of guerrilla warfare and revolution, democratic parliamentary struggle and vision of a feminist future. The themes and topics they address are echoed in the writings that follow.

Critical development studies Amy Lind and Jessica Share’s chapter provides a glimpse of how to think about queering critical development studies through a WCD lens. That is, their focus on how heterosexuality is ‘institutionalized, naturalized and regulated’ within conventional ideas of development, and their critique of the link between sexual identity and national and financial wellbeing focuses on and enriches our understanding of both gender and women as well as of culture in development studies. Similarly, Ming-yan Lai and David McKie, working with fictional narratives, suggest possibilities for a critical development studies such that, as the latter puts it, ‘space, time and even gender itself can be imagined very differently from contemporary physical and social constrictions’. David McKie’s desire to present his argument through a discussion of speculative fiction and ‘non-linear developments’, by ‘connecting seemingly unrelated developments through narratives to build more imaginative and integrated frameworks’, tellingly exemplifies what the three of us see as fundamental for a WCD perspective, namely, that the imagining of non-linear futures ensures ‘multiple, gendered topographies of tomorrow’.

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Ming-yan Lai is especially effective in showing that culture, and representations of development dilemmas in literature, reveal much about the underlying social realities of development, and not always in a straightforward way where gender is concerned. The contradictions of Taiwan’s masculinist, anti-imperialist nationalist literature are thus shown to be efforts to keep women in their marginal places even when centring women in a critique of Western/Japanese domination. The implication of the analysis is that anti-imperialist (and by extension anti-globalization) struggles must be feminist as well as anti-capitalist if they are to have a chance of success. Collectively, these three essays offer possibilities for reimagining a critical development studies that has gender and sexuality embedded within it, that is attentive to cultural productions from science fiction to nationalist discourses, and that makes the key links with the domains of the political and economic. Alternative directions for a critical development studies are also present in the Visions essays by Raka Ray, Dana Collins, Linda Klouzal and Darcie Vandegrift. Ray’s critique of ‘basic needs’, forcing questions about what type of society is being imagined, pairs well with Dana Collins’s desire that the WCD paradigm actively engage with the contradictory linkages between resistance, pleasure and possibility in imagining future societies. Linda Klouzal’s proposal that any analysis of development and, thus, any possibility for a critical development studies would work better with greater insights into suffering and trauma is also echoed in Darcie Vandegrift’s aptly titled ‘Seeing the Complexity’, which calls for a new politics, a dreaming for the future out of what she calls the ‘psychic legacies’ (Vandegrift 2001) of the past.

Critical feminist studies Earlier in this discussion we argued for a critical feminist studies alongside a critical development studies. Anjali Prabhu’s essay on So Long a Letter, in which she reads a literary text in the context of her own view of WCD, asks ‘Can we then assume that a woman writing automatically remedies the masculinist tendencies of nationalist discourse?’ While Prabhu is sceptical of any automatic ascription of ‘radical’ to women’s writings, she points out that ‘the feminist nationalist rhetoric concerning development and modernity … is destabilized through the uprooting procedure by which the female narrator appropriates it’. In this way she provides

i n t ro d u c t i o n | 21 an opening for a critical feminist studies where she asks readers to consider the implications of gender as performative for the ‘women’ in WCD. What, she asks provocatively, can ‘agency’ mean in this context? Critical feminist studies is also a key theme in the chapters by Ifi Amadiume, Priya Kurian and Debashish Munshi, and Minoo Moallem. Ifi Amadiume, in looking at African matriarchitarianism and Mammy Water, questions the modernizing impulse that underlies much feminist scholarship – ‘feminism and these traditions of organized women’s empowering cultures’ are not mutually exclusive, she argues – by asking readers to reflect on the wide array of ‘sexist policies of the patriarchal colonial state’ that shape and are shaped by ‘the place of the isolated individual female in a collective women’s world’, and by reflecting on the heritage of Igbo women, which ‘includes solidarity and resistance strategies that have enabled mass mobilization by African women’. The call for a critical feminist studies to engage with colonialism, as well as the relation between tradition and modernity and individualistic subjectivities in the contemporary capitalist world, is taken in an innovative direction by Priya Kurian and Debashish Munshi in their essay on ‘Negotiating Human–Nature Boundaries’. Starting from an overdue recognition of the interdependence of the non-human and human worlds, they explore ‘the need for more fluid and more porous boundaries – within the constraints of ecological and social rationality – through an examination of the place of science and knowledge in development’. Travelling through narratives of anthropocentrism in development, how these hinder ecological and social rationality, and the relationship between these and genetic engineering, Kurian and Munshi show that the tension between activism and their own argument ‘underscores the urgency of feminist interventions’. Thus, they suggest questions for considering how a WCD approach could transform development studies while simultaneously transforming projects of development. Minoo Moallem’s essay may be thought of as a reflection on critical feminist studies, for she argues that feminist transnational and post-colonial studies, as well as gender and sexuality studies, have offered central contributions ‘in understanding revolution both as a social event and as a discourse’. In her investigation of the mostaz’af (the disempowered), Moallem demonstrates how the power of the

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mostaz’af lies ‘in its capacity to bring together … the local and the global into the same frame of reference’. She shows how culture is mobilized in revolutions, not always for progressive purposes, and how it can undermine authoritarian regimes, especially when filtered through gendered images of the daily lives of women and children in the contexts of poverty and survival. Thus, her essay demonstrates how the nation can be ‘done’ and ‘undone’ at the same time. The Visions essays by Peter Chua and Julia Shayne also capture a spirit present in our optimism about critical feminist studies. Shayne draws inspiration for WCD-informed revolutionary development projects from Latin American feminists who are revolutionaries, for they remind us ‘that women have been organizing, shaping and redirecting projects as national in scope as revolutions for decades’. Chua, in focusing on education, intriguingly suggests that the links among condoms, democratic education practices and current knowledge institutions could ‘provide genuine democratic resources for a journey of hope for many women living in the Third World’.

Cultural studies The essays by Banu Subramaniam, Yvonne Underhill-Sem and Rachel Simon-Kumar provide examples of how cultural studies could be further developed through an engagement with events and issues specific to the Third World. In her discussion of science and religion, Banu Subramaniam focuses on the ‘nature of their intersection within the landscapes of contemporary Indian politics’. By exploring how ancient traditions have come to be repackaged as modern, material science in a period of ‘archaic modernity’, illustrated in naming India’s nuclear bomb ‘Shakti’, Subramaniam exposes the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) eager embrace of a Western science which ‘extends its hegemonic hand to stabilize the Hindu nation’ and how Vaastushastra, the ancient science of architecture, has shaped public space as an amalgam of science, technology, religion and capitalism. She closes with the challenge of linking pedagogy and practice: ‘How do we intervene in our theories and practices to incorporate this new reality, these seemingly contradictory and conflicting realities across the world? How do we find new ways of thinking about these issues and teaching them? We must find alternatives to the theories we currently have, alternatives that wrestle with the oxymoronic imagery of this archaic modernity.’

i n t ro d u c t i o n | 23 Space is also key to Yvonne Underhill-Sem’s look at what she terms the smaller-scale tragedies that occur in out-of-the-way places to illuminate new ways of thinking about bodies in development studies. In a conflict centred on the claims of two women to a share of the royalties stemming from a logging operation in the close-knit community of Wanigela, Papua New Guinea, she skilfully shows how the women’s bodies became the focus of discontent, thereby contributing to the sexual embodiment of development studies by directing closer attention to the bodies closest in, ‘so that the collective “bodies” out there cannot be so easily overlooked’. Rachel Simon-Kumar’s study of the role of the state in directing the rationales of development with respect to women’s reproductive identities reminds readers of how important an analysis of the state remains in cultural studies. In reviewing the ambivalence of the Indian state’s nationalist (and simultaneously neoliberal) discourse that ‘constructed women as emblems of national culture and tradition’, she elegantly shows the mechanisms by which the state defines its obligation to women’s health, thus laying open the particularities of the ‘intimacy between politics, cultural ideologies and development’. Both the Visions essays by Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Light Carruyo discuss empowerment in the context of development studies by drawing on methods derived from cultural studies. Nederveen Pieterse discusses how empowerment – as a word, concept and discourse – might be reclaimed for an alternative development, while Carruyo’s work on tourism, development and forestry in the Dominican Republic does the same for the term ‘development’ itself, critiquing its genealogy but also recasting it in a positive call for an ‘alliance model’ among many actors engaged in a grassroots pedagogy of development, as well as suggesting the alternative term ‘sustainable well-being’. These political resemantizations are continued in the conversation by Arturo Escobar and Wendy Harcourt and the essay by Debashish Munshi and Priya Kurian reflecting on ICTs and utopias. The former makes links among utopias, development and ICTs and the latter write about the possibility of creating a network of empowered women ‘netizens’ who could knit a communityoriented net of knowledge. Nets and webs, utopias, representation, sexuality, the state, political economy: these are all specific examples of areas that a WCD

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perspective might include and they all come together in John Foran’s Visions essay, ‘Alternatives to Development: Of Love, Dreams and Revolution’, closing the volume on the note of hope we wish WCD might provide for feminist futures. In conclusion, we see the WCD project as one of support for scholarship that breaks out of the impasse of development studies, and as a ground for resistance to globalization-from-above development and organizing for social transformation. We envision feminist futures worthy of real development and vibrant cultural diversity. In the words of the global justice movement, we believe that another world is possible. And we would like to see scholars engaged in development, feminist and cultural studies crossing the boundaries that separate them from each other and from activists, especially those located in the Third World – both women and men. Notes 1. The US-based Social Science Research Council has constructed a large archive of valuable analyses at its web site: www.ssrc.org. Other important websites include: http:// www.pitt.edu/~ttwiss/irtf/Alternative. html; http://www.commondreams.org; http://AlterNet.org; and http://www. indymedia.org 2. In the knowledge that the concept is controversial, we still prefer the term ‘Third World’ to refer to the geographical areas we would like to include in this volume – Africa, Asia (excluding Japan), Latin America and the Middle East. We see a need for careful genealogical work on the best available terms – Third World and global South – as a basis for further creative thinking on alternatives to both. One striking term for discussion, coined by one of our contributors, Anna Tsing, and adopted here by Yvonne Underhill-Sem, is ‘outof-the-way places’. 3. See Escobar (1995) for a historical discussion of the notion of development. 4. Our approach in this work, it should be noted, is highly distinct

from the 1995 book Women, Culture and Development, edited by Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover, where the editors focus on lending credence to a ‘critical universal[ist]’ position on the question of ‘women’s functioning’. While sympathetic to and supportive of Amartya Sen’s ‘capabilities approach’ that seeks to redefine development in terms of the quality of life, we believe that it is fruitless to establish a universalist position on women’s lives that is somehow outside culture. Our volume also differs radically from Nussbaum and Glover in that we reject the assumed equation of culture with tradition, with traditions, themselves, being cast as oppressive (Nussbaum and Glover 1995: 4). For two other works with titles suggestive of our own, see Marchand and Parpart (1995) and Perry and Schenck (2001). 5. See, however, Braidotti et al.’s (1994) discussion of the theme of ‘Women, Environment and Sustainable Development’ (WED) as a part of their overview of the evolution of development studies.

i n t ro d u c t i o n | 25 6. ‘Whatever the social form of the production process, it has to be continuous, it must periodically repeat the same phases. A society can no more cease to produce than it can cease to consume. When viewed, therefore, as a connected whole, and in the constant flux of its incessant renewal, every social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction’ (Marx, Capital, volume I, chapter 23, cited in Bottomore et al. 1983: 417). 7. Peter Chua has characterized the perspective in the following terms: ‘Third World cultural studies explores what culture is in all aspects of life, what we mean by it, what we do with it, and its unique political and historical

relations with the “Third World.” It analyses and politicizes the ways in which making sense of all parts of the world and of our place as individuals, groups, communities, and nations within it are cultural processes. It examines how cultural meanings are transmitted and considers how the selection and interpretation of cultural messages are essential to the process through which our identities are constructed’ (cited in Foran 2000). 8. EIA, first introduced as a practice for government in the United States in 1969 and now used by many governments and international aid agencies, seeks to analyse predictable impacts of projects, programmes or plans on the environment.

VISIONS ONE

M ARI A’S S T O R I E S

Maria Ofelia Navarrete

Editor’s preface The following is the result of an interview with, and a remarkable film about, Maria Ofelia Navarrete, a Salvadoran activist. The interview was conducted by John Foran, who also edited it, in Northampton, Massachusetts in March 2001, on the occasion of the ‘At the Meridians’ conference organized by Kum-Kum Bhavnani, where Maria was a keynote speaker. Senait Kassahun and DanielleSimone Vacarr translated at the interview, and the resulting text was transcribed and translated by Danielle-Simone Vacarr. It was translated into Spanish by Jose Oscar Garcia of the Centro de Intercambio y Solidaridad in El Salvador for Maria to finalize; Leslie Schuld at CIS facilitated communication with Maria. My warmest thanks to all four. The film Maria’s Story was produced in 1990 by Pamela Cohen and Catherine M. Ryan, and directed by Monona Wali and Pamela Cohen, who have generously allowed the editor to quote extensively from it. He has interwoven passages from the film with the interview to tell Maria’s story in two different periods. Co-produced with Channel 4 in Britain, the film was shown nationally on public television in the United States. All extracts spoken by Maria and dating from 1988 are italicized. They therefore applied to specific scenes and contexts that may not be the same as presented here. With the permission of the filmmakers and Maria, the editor has taken the liberty of arranging the materials into sections. The reader can therefore identify what was said by Maria in 1988 and in 2001. Together, the extracts provide insight into the history and vision of a revolutionary activist in two distinct periods, one in the midst of a revolution and one afterwards. The editors feel that the author’s life and work eloquently embody the themes of women, culture and development in the context of revolutionary struggles under diverse and difficult conditions.

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Since this interview in 2001, Maria has studied social sciences at the university, has been elected as a Deputy for the FMLN to the National Assembly, and has served as Vice Governor of Chalatenango and as Deputy Minister of the Interior of El Salvador. Early years: ‘I was a peasant, born of a widow … ’ I was a peasant, born of a widow on 31 March 1950, the ninth of ten children. My mother did laundry. And she grew corn, sorghum and beans just to get by. You can’t imagine how hungry we were. When I went to school, all the parents bought desks for the kids. But how could my mother afford this when it cost ten pesos? All the way through sixth grade I had to ask permission to stand beside those who had desks. And when there were exams, I took them sitting on the floor. As you can imagine, my life had many limitations; we had very few economic resources, which obliged me at nine years old to start working as a servant in a house – that was how time ran until I was about 15 years old when I married a peasant from my village. Jose came to me, said he wanted me to marry him, that he would put me through school. Look how bad he was, he knew that school was the most important thing to me. He told me, ‘If you marry me, I’ll put you through school.’ ‘You’re lying,’ I told him. I was a peasant, wife of a peasant farmer. I did housework, grind, iron, wash, sew … go to mass! But this life allowed me to see many unjust things. The poor are always forgotten, and all their possibilities limited, some people with absolutely nothing. So this inequality and poverty is what made me decide to lead this life. I want to bring you back a little and tell you about the house that I worked in at age nine. The son of my boss was politically active and every day he would listen to a programme on Radio Havana called ‘Voices of the Revolution’ – all about the Cuban revolution. That was really my introduction to politics, the first time I really heard about it. I was just a servant; he put the radio on and I just had to listen while I worked. So that is where I heard my first political ideas: taking care of the poor, and other idealistic intentions, it makes you feel good. I became a youth activist in the Christian Democratic Party (PCD) for which my boss was the mayoral candidate. At night we’d go out and paint slogans and put up propaganda, it was a great thing. In 1972 we won the presidential elections with the engineer José Napoleon Duarte, but with the help of the North American ambassador the

m a r i a’s s to r i e s | 31 military decided to give power to the PCN (the right-wing/army Party of National Conciliation) candidate, Colonel Arturo Molina. It was a shameless fraud, and everyone knew it was fraud, but what could one do, as it was legitimized by the United States? So around that time a number of popular organizations started sprouting up and in 1977 I enrolled in one of them, the UTC, the Union of Peasant Workers. We were well organized throughout the country and had formed an alliance with other Christian peasant organizations. The demands of the UTC were that they give us food on the plantations during the coffee and sugar harvests, and that they raise our wages. But just to stop and say, ‘Please give us a spoonful of beans and a tortilla’, they threw the National Guard on us. The government kept increasing the repression. First they beat us. Then they selectively captured and killed people. Some were involved in politics, but others weren’t. The army went after everyone. In the invasions, the military operations, the civilian population was always a target. They pursued us to the death, and those they caught they killed. It was an indiscriminate massacre. In 1979 there was a coup d’état staged by the militia. It was a time of unbearable repression. There were some progressive elements present in the new cabinet, but they disappeared under the military repression. After the coup we were left with an unstable country. The United States saw this and decided it would be good to put Duarte in power. They took him out of exile in Venezuela and put him in office. The Americans saw Duarte as the perfect candidate to lead a counter-insurgency. In 1982 they created some false elections to make it look real and of course he won. The right wing managed to recompose itself and give birth to a new political party, ARENA (Republican National Alliance), offspring of the PCN, to fight Communism. They had a large army of death squads to enforce and impose repression. By the time of the 1979 coup I was an activist in a powerful popular movement of workers, teachers, students, Christians and others called the Popular Revolutionary Bloc (BPR). Also to be remembered was our archbishop – Oscar Arnulfo Romero – who accompanied us in our struggle, he was our voice. He was the only one to publicly denounce the repression of the dominant classes over the people. First they offered him money to live like a king if he would keep his mouth shut. He refused. Then they threatened to kill him and still he showed no fear. I’m sure he must have been

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scared, but his conscience proved stronger than his fear and he kept on denouncing them until his assassination by a death squad while celebrating mass in March 1980. By then there was an entire social movement of Christians under the guiding ideas of liberation theology. In 1979, two military operations took place in my village of Arcatao. One came on the second of February when we were celebrating the day of the Virgen de la Candelaria. We were all gathered for the celebration when about 400 soldiers stormed the village. We couldn’t leave the house or they’d kill us. We started to sing in our hammocks and open the doors so as not to let on that we were afraid. They took some people, tortured others. In August, another military operation occurred. And on the ninth of September I finally had to leave my house like so many others before me. All of us – Minita was only three years old, Morena nine, Ceci a bit older.1 We carried Minita on our backs – I never lived in a house again. I fled from my house escaping from the military and I never returned. The war years: ‘I fled from my house and I never returned …’ I never returned. First I went to a little village in Honduras. My village shares a border with Honduras. After 15 days I received notice from a Honduran official that I must leave the country immediately because someone had told them that a number of Salvadorans had taken refuge there. Some of us went to another village high atop a mountain range. The territory belonged to El Salvador, and was actually in my municipality, but we thought that it was so high up we could remain there relatively guarded and safe. I lived in the hills with my family for over a decade. The hardest thing was just learning to survive. No food, no shelter, nothing. Sometimes just eating roots and berries. We were always on the run. I don’t remember the exact date but it was somewhere in November of 1979. The guerrillas, the FMLN, were living in the hills, too. We helped and protected each other. We didn’t really know much about them, we only heard of their activities. In the mountains arrived a guerrilla fighter or a number of them to incorporate us to help the guerrilla movement. And that’s where we became guerrillas. When they say you’re converted to the side of the guerrillas, it’s not true that you’re forced to sign up. No, it was the daily necessities of our lives that made us work together. The principal reason was because we had an enemy that wouldn’t allow

m a r i a’s s to r i e s | 33 us to go to our own homes and whose punishment was death. This offered us the possibility to fight back and not allow ourselves to be killed. If they were to kill us, we needed to learn to defend ourselves. We took this step with the mentality of self-defence. Along with the need to defend ourselves, was the ideal of constructing a society of brotherhood where we loved one another, where there was justice. Others had kept running, but we were determined to persevere, we had the inspiration of creating an equal society, a new society. But every time we got a little something together, the army came in and destroyed everything. Finally I thought, ‘Well, if this is war, let’s really fight back.’ So in 1980 I joined the FMLN. If someone would have told me [in 1979] that one day I would be sitting and planning military strategy, or even carrying a gun, I would never have believed it. But just to survive I’ve learned to do so many things I never imagined I could do. Look, if you adopt the armed struggle it’s because you have no other choice. It’s not because it’s the most wonderful thing in the world. It’s that love of life is instinctive, even animals have it. So, when you see the possibility of saving your life, you save it. And if that means picking up a gun, you pick it up! The government accused us of being Communists, terrorists and subversives, but look at the people who were fighting – young boys, young girls, old women like me! This war was a problem of people who didn’t get enough to eat. It was a problem of not having a roof over your head, and not having justice. In 1981 the guerrilla leaders proposed the possibility of a military offensive. We didn’t even have arms, only a strong morale. I participated as a combatant in the attack of Chalatenango on 10–11 January and they didn’t kill us. They [were] full of weapons, and also fear. And us, without arms, but full of valour. After this military offensive, which was at a national level, the battle lines were drawn. There was a large civilian population that was unhappy. Some were discontented with the regime, but the large majority lived in constant fear of the repression on and near the front lines. We discussed the need to organize their activities. I was put in charge of the organization of the civil population. That’s when we started to get really organized. The previous year practically no one even had enough to eat, so we began to teach the people that despite the fact that we were at war we needed to plant and grow food. Small groups were formed to begin the production of the most elemental necessities. The first were the secretariats of

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production and security: we had to produce food to stay alive and to protect ourselves so that we wouldn’t be killed. We organized so we would have schools, health care and farming. With the passage of time new necessities began to surface, for example the need to organize a secretariat of health. We also realized that we could no longer permit so many children to join because being at war they weren’t learning to read, so we created both the secretariat of health and of education. They were in their early fundamental stages. They were born of pure necessity. So we pushed forth with our literacy programme, enlisting those who knew how to read to teach those who didn’t. We did all this with the clear awareness that we were forging a battle in which armed struggle played the principal role. So that is how we went along developing these tiny organisms. But we began to realize the need for a larger organization to unite and oversee all of the smaller organizations. In September of 1983 I was elected president of all these smaller organizations. The first president of the cabinet of the entire region, the region of Chalatenango. Here in this office [at the 2001 interview] we are conducting a little conversation, but our work back then was an enormous undertaking. We had to direct the entire civil population. We had to make warriors of everyday citizens. And as I was elected president of this new movement, they decided to incorporate me into the leadership of the overall revolutionary movement. So I joined the general revolutionary leadership. There was a Jesuit priest, Rafael Moreno, now he lives in Mexico because he’s Mexican, but he was with us for 25 years. We informed him of what we needed and he took care of it. He was like our ambassador at the United Nations and at one point he even denounced the government for their actions against us. Thanks to the struggle of everyone, and his commitment, in May of 1985 we succeeded in getting the UN to sign an accord which read: ‘The civil population, even though it offers food and support to the guerrilla fighters of the FMLN, as long as they refrain from taking up arms, maintains its character of civil population. As such their lives and welfare should be respected.’ It was two lines, that’s all the text said. With these two lines we finally had something to work with. We worked to make it a reality. The civilian population in the battle

m a r i a’s s to r i e s | 35 lines were the target of our enemies. They were sought out with the intention of killing them, children, horses, women, everyone. We did win something at the UN, but it was one thing to win it at the table, in theory, another to win it in the battlefields. If we had left well enough alone, we would have lost all we had gained. So we organized an entire movement around protecting this accord and making it reality. First of all we ensured that the organizations would accompany and support the civil population. We began to explain to the citizens that they needed to stay in their homes and fight for their land and their rights and we sought out support for them in the churches and NGOs. When the army arrived they captured some and murdered others, but finally the people started fighting back and the army came under international ridicule. We managed to help many stay legally in their homes of origin. The peace: ‘It’s been quite a job to readjust our way of thinking …’ During the war, it filled me with joy to know that these communities so poor and suffering, now protected by the FMLN, had great harvests and they didn’t have to pay rent for the land. It made me so happy to see how humble peasants who never used to raise their heads except to see the next row they’re going to plough, now sat and discussed, who’s going to teach class next year, and that they had to build a clinic. It was a wonderful thing: we were building a new society where the poor would have, basically, food, schools and health care. Those are the three most basic needs that a government can provide. After the war, we had quite a job to readjust our thinking and strategies for struggle, and I don’t think that we have succeeded yet, even eight or nine years after the signing of the peace accords. I have an idea to propose in some of these communities that we have organized. I’m going to see if it works next month in the general assembly, because what used to be called the social movement, the directors of the movement have turned into almost little NGOs and we all know that NGOs have one function and social movements have another. If we allow our social movement to turn into an NGO it will tame the activists – ‘I receive a salary and this work permits me this salary so I hope everything works out, but if not, I’m still going to get paid.’ A social movement cannot think like that; if it does, we are lost. This ‘well, if it works, it works, and if it doesn’t, too bad’ – NO, we have to distinguish between the two. Social movements

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are what give life to development because they are rooted in everyday sentiments about basic needs and the ingenuity to obtain them as we move along: ‘I’m not content with such and such a thing, I propose that we do such and such a thing’ and everyone gets to speak and together we change things. This is the function of a social movement, while the function of NGOs is more to do technical things. Social movements can’t be NGOs. I didn’t know too much then, I still don’t know all that much, but at the time I knew nothing of the inner workings of the state economy. I knew about human beings. Then I knew nothing of the World Bank or other institutions like it. I’m going to tell you what I think now after all this time; in our country the government’s economic model is trying to take us to the same level as the developed nations. This will never happen, we are not a developed country. But as long as this is the desire of the four richest families in the country, those in charge, this is the direction our government will take. But in doing so, in trying so hard to leap ahead, they are committing horrible atrocities upon the majority of the population. We’re struggling to make cutting-edge advances in technology when a large part of the population still can’t read. There exists a great inequality when men can still hit their wives, when women still don’t have access to a decent job, or to a dignified life. Our government is failing us. It has an exclusive vision that only serves the richest four families and excludes millions and millions. I only know what I’ve lived and experienced. In serving in the national assembly [from 1997 to 2000] I grew to learn a lot about public politics at a national level. I think that the left, or better said, the revolutionary movement, needs to participate in a current analysis of the world situation, because I think that the methods, or some of the methods – these ideas we have stuck in our heads – need to be changed. We must break with them if we intend to achieve any real change. I can be on the left, spend 30 years in parliament and not see any changes for the people, so I think we need to raise people’s consciousness and together we must put pressure on the political parties to make real changes. For instance, we can’t have the people believing in a movement that in all reality never intends to take power, one who once they get there say, ‘Oh no, we’re not prepared, no, no we can’t do this.’ If we’re going to tell them to fight they better be fighting for something real, we better be prepared to take power

m a r i a’s s to r i e s | 37 and have the abilities and capacity to do so. I say all this because just recently during the latest earthquake, an economist friend of mine, a member of the FMLN, went on TV and proposed a plan of national reconstruction. His plan proposed to instal a socialist model at the national level. As I see it, this isn’t okay. First of all because it’s not rational or objective: I can’t call this glass of water I’m holding milk – it’s not milk, it’s water. We can’t go telling the people that we’re going to build a socialist model if we don’t have the proper conditions to do so. That’s just a lie to get them hooked, to inspire them. Don’t misunderstand me, there’s nothing wrong with socialism, socialism is great, but we’ve got to be realistic here. We must fight, we must fight to have our voices heard over those four rich families. We need to have a plan of reconstruction that takes into account that we are a deforested nation, a nation with earthquakes and volcanoes, a nation in which the majority of the people are illiterate, a nation in need of schools and means of production. There needs to be a different conception of reconstruction, but to begin speaking about what we’re going to have for dinner when we can’t even manage to get breakfast yet, that’s not okay. For now, I believe that the government needs to turn its attention to the rest of us, to those of us not served by this exclusive vision. In a country as poor and small as ours they’ve made extraordinary strides in technology and the like, but we still have no schools, an earthquake can come and tear down entire villages because there was no architectural planning. No-one ever bothered to say, ‘No you can’t build here, it’s unstable.’ For instance, there’s been a great exodus of rural people to the cities in search of food and shelter and better educational opportunities for their children. Families live in cardboard boxes and just scrape by selling fruit or ice cream so long as their children can attend school. There is no decentralization of resources, in fact there is far too much centralization in the urban centres. There was no urban/rural planning to say, ‘Okay we’re going to develop the northern zone’, for example, the zone where I live where there is plenty of space and the terrain is a little harder so it holds up better under earthquakes. But no, they don’t want to develop the northern zone. There is a very narrow vision of what will be developed, and in this vision, human development is the least important, the only thing of importance is economic development.

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The future: ‘As long as the soul is free … one can be happy …’ Now I’m going to tell you what I see for the future. It’s a poor vision, based only on what I have seen and lived. I never studied politics. We women need to be the principal agents of change. First of all, we constitute the majority of the population and it is on our shoulders that falls the brunt of economic activity. Upon our backs also falls the responsibility of education. We have an integral role to play in terms of educating the next generation because we raise them. Yet we cannot forget that we women are the most effective reproducers of this model that we don’t want, the model that marginalizes women. Paradoxically we are the ones reproducing this model because we teach with it. I’m referring to my country, to the underdeveloped countries. I don’t know how things are in the US, but in our countries, the women suffer. The man marginalizes her, he deems her as the lesser, he hits her, but then she teaches her son that he is superior to her daughter and when he marries, he will also be superior to his wife. It cannot be this way. In our countries that’s how the woman is, she reproduces the model of marginalization, she reproduces the social distribution of labour. Such and such jobs are for my daughters, such and such jobs are for my sons. We women are seen as noble mothers, martyrs, bearers of pain, but we’re not seen as women with rights, as equals. So, there has to be a struggle against this in our thinking. This worries me because it’s cultural, and you know how much culture weighs! It’s as much in our veins as in our heads. It weighs on me. I see this generation of youth growing up like this – it can’t continue because the youth represent the only hope that in the future this way of thinking will no longer exist. Therefore, we must teach them differently. It causes me great anguish, but we must set ourselves to do this work, to change things one by one, this is what we must do. Create a new culture. A culture of equality, of equity, not continue with this culture of marginalization that we have now. We know that culture reflects our values and the creations that society makes and that these are transmitted by each of our histories. Yes, yes, I have faith. I do a little something every day, I’m not going to change the whole world, no, I’m certainly not going to change it, but the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step and so we must take that first step because of the happiness that

m a r i a’s s to r i e s | 39 humans bring us. A child’s smile is enough to refresh my sentiments and this is what allows me to continue. The great triumph of the revolution was to resolve the basic needs of everyone. I’m not going to ask that mango trees grow mangoes eight days after planting, because I know that’s not possible, but please, building schools and teaching children to read, that’s possible, and let’s do it if we can! We have to spread the word of the need to organize, and how together you are capable of achieving things that you can’t do alone. I’m going to make a proposal when I return home so that in these communities we’ll be able to do something. When there’s a theft we leave it to the state to resolve, but why can’t we resolve it ourselves? We have to be responsible for our communities and this would teach us how. One can be happy and still poor, the two are not mutually exclusive. As long as the soul is free of ambition and greed, as long as it is free without measure or limits, one can be happy. I envision a just society, a brother- and sisterhood, one with love and solidarity between peoples. I’m going to write you later and tell you all that I’ve learned here. I have things up here (pointing to her head and smiling). Note 1. Minita, Jose and Maria’s youngest daughter, was a radio operator during the war and is now studying medicine; their middle daughter, Morena, six years older than Minita, was a medic during the war, starting at age 13, and is now a schoolteacher in Arcatao, their

home town. Their eldest daughter, Ceci, was killed in an army ambush in March 1987. Maria also lost brothers, nieces and nephews in the war. Arcatao’s population of 10,000 eventually fell to 1,000 due to army murders and flight.

TH E W OO F A N D T H E W A R P

Luisa Valenzuela

As a fiction writer, I am convinced that a shift of paradigm will take place when we reach some kind of critical mass on the subject of women’s language – when it is completely mapped, erasing double standards and invisibilities. Also when the incorporation of symbolic languages is accepted in the common discourse. The reappropriation of language gradually exerted by women is opening us to a new perception of the world, and the recognition of woman as a social construction may well counterbalance the implacable progress of the so-called New World Order. The time seems ripe, at least calendarwise, since the number ‘one’ has finally lost its thousand-year-old precedence. Time was phallic in the past millennium. Our point of view will change now that we prioritize duality, now that the date faces us with the two, a much milder and conciliatory digit than the erect one, reminder of monotheism, of dogma, of the univocal. The number one left no room for the other. In the two all oppositions fit equally, the yin and the yang, the dark and the light. According to Chevalier and Gheerbrant’s Dictionary of Symbols, in ancient times the number two was an attribute of the Mother and designated the feminine principle. We can acknowledge this wisdom even today, surmising that in the year 2000 we have crossed a threshold towards a much more open time when woman will be able to complete the development of all the abilities she kept discovering and for which she fought so hard throughout the magnanimous, magical, monstrous twentieth century. As if this weren’t enough, the new millennium put us in touch – logically – with the proliferation of the zero, honouring the circle. We should make the most of this new starting point and bring all aspects of women’s language to the forefront. We might start thinking in virtuous circles, concentric and unending. Like the circles of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires every

th e woof and t he warp | 41 Thursday. The circle is an expansion from a centre, knowledge of self, much as it is said feminine energy moves: in eddies. The protest of the Mothers continues, the circles expand or contract but will never end; every Thursday at three in the afternoon, until the destiny of each victim of the military dictatorship of 1976–82 in Argentina is known. A language made of the loudest silence. Made of courage. And memory. When history becomes cyclical, forgetting can be dangerous. These Argentine women refuse to forget. They look forward but continue going round and round in front of the Presidential Palace, soliciting a complete report as to the whereabouts of each of their desaparecidos and demanding just punishment for the guilty parties. There have been many massacres throughout Argentine history, but this is the first time the victims have names and are individualized. We struggle to keep it that way, so that each one without exception will be remembered as they were, with all their joys, ideals and sorrows. For this reason we also need to know how they ended their days. They are not simply one more number in a computer somewhere. They are beings who were very much alive and whose memory will continue to live while we are still living. Laura Bonaparte often makes this statement, speaking as a representative of all the Mothers who wear the white kerchief on their heads. Another language, the white kerchiefs. They are the opposite of the black ink stains with which the men in power attempted to erase the terrifying past. They first began to be used in the Plaza de Mayo out of necessity so that these brave women could recognize each other. And what would every mother have in her wardrobe? A nappy, was the answer. One can write on the white kerchiefs that the Mothers wear on their heads. And in fact this has happened, because little by little the women began incorporating the names of their disappeared children, embroidered or painted on the white cloth, thus inscribing the terrible history of their country’s darkest moments. Mothers of the Plaza who are proliferating throughout the world, wherever there were or are children or grandchildren lost to repression

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or dictatorships. Women who propose holding fast to a name. In the tapestry of life – who better than a woman to know it – each knot is unique and irreplaceable. Faced with the death of their loved ones, they have learned to sing louder than ever a song of life, and this song in all its pain and magnificence has crossed all boundaries. When passing through Buenos Aires, Richard Schechner noted that protests that march in a straight line have authoritarian resonance, while demonstrations that develop in a circular manner are basically anti-authoritarian. One more recognition of women’s forms of expression. If I mention only the Mothers it is simply because they are the most emblematic. Equally important in my country is the Association of Grandmothers, HIJOS, or the Families of the Disappeared. They all respond to the same language that these women inaugurated, configured mainly by silence, by the colour white, by empty silhouettes. A basically feminine language that has managed to resound stridently throughout the whole world. Pain and censorship (oh so feminine curses!) have taught women to express themselves using different, unusual forms. The protests, the distress and fury, are no longer made known with blows but with white kerchiefs and circles that are reminiscent of eternity. Women throughout history have learned to move beyond words so as to express the inexpressible. With completely feminine weapons that are the opposite of weapons but act as such, with everyday elements re-semanticized, turned around like a glove. A soft kid glove transformed into a boxing glove that strikes with the persistent gentleness and precision of a drop of water. As such, it is important to remember the Chilean arpilleras, those art naïf works the women of Neruda’s Isla Negra first created during the Pinochet dictatorship. These burlap creations were collages of embroidery, materials, little rag dolls stitched on the coarse cloth of potato sacks. They narrated, in a form that could be called charming, candid, the dramas that the people of Chile went through during the ill-fated years. Tourists bought them perhaps as one more piece of local folklore, took them home and, with luck, at some moment, their eyes opened and they understood. A perfect way of telling that which goes beyond words. Like the white silhouettes the Mothers imposed upon the entire downtown Buenos Aires (what is locally known as el centro) in the

th e wo of and t he warp | 43 final times of the military dictatorship. One morning, suddenly, the city awoke plagued with ghosts. Thirty thousand, to be exact. The 30,000 desaparecidos had their presence stamped on the walls: enormous sheets of butcher paper, white like the white kerchiefs, where the empty silhouettes of men, women and children were imprinted, with their names and dates, so that never again could anyone ignore their ever-present absence. A few years later, a new stroke of genius in the same direction. During the annual demonstration against the coup, there appeared marching alongside the Mothers a countless number of youths with their faces hidden behind completely white, neutral masks, upon which every observer could project the features of a desaparecido or a desaparecida. White masks, inoffensive only in appearance, peaceful, as the opposite of war. There they were, the masks worn by members of the association HIJOS, bringing back to our memory all those of whom the military had attempted to erase even the trace of their tomb. These are the closest examples I have at hand to show woman’s work from the dark side of language, her lateral and efficient way of expressing that which is suffused, suppressed, banned, painful, dangerous. Women are today historically the most apt to trick the censors, simply because they have acquired full consciousness of censorship, being as they were the favourite victims throughout the centuries. Woman, the silenced one, has managed to reappropriate a language that was alien to her, with which she was degraded and rendered invisible. Woman is mythically the one who can manage to say what cannot be said. We know that the price to pay is high, we don’t forget the sad story of Eve and the famous tree, but now more than ever we are willing to pay it, to run the necessary risks in order to open up new possibilities in a male world that seems to be heading for disaster. I believe that the hope for a better future is in the hands of women. Or at least in the hands of the feminine, of Shakti, of the social construction called woman. She who won’t struggle to occupy the places until now reserved for men. She who questions them thanks to her ability to operate in the margins and crevices. Those who learned to make glorious use of what years ago was called interstitial liberty

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some day not too far off will make global use of these old abilities. And of many new abilities – why limit ourselves? Acknowledgements This essay was translated from the Spanish by Nancy Gates. The editors wish to thank Light Carruyo for providing them with an initial draft.

C ON S I D E R T H E P R O B L E M O F P RI V ATI Z A T I O N

Anna Tsing

If there is a new buzzword in the international development community, it is ‘privatization’. As international law and policy promote ‘private’ corporations and ‘private’ families, what will this mean for women? If ‘public’ alternatives are systematically undermined, how might this transform women’s ability to mobilize as women? The neoliberal vision of privatization that has become so powerful these days encourages particular, peculiar notions of agency – for women, as well as men. The more powerful these notions, the easier it is for us to step into them without thinking, even as we spin rather different dreams. This is not an alliance, I believe, that feminists should endorse. And so I offer this series of thoughts as a warning, a cautionary narrative that might inform our hopes and plans. My ‘vision’ here is of the care feminists must take as we work towards more equitable and livable worlds. To consider the problem of privatization in even a speculative manner, I must first pick my way through a number of conceptual and practical thickets. To find a starting point from which questions about women, development and privatization are worth asking, I begin with ‘development’. Development, and more development Development proliferates. It likes to imagine itself as everywhere and unstoppable. It spreads because it always has a plan. In the service of proliferation, it is always ahead of itself, pulling the present behind it: it builds futures; it destroys pasts. It purposefully overwhelms us in its insistence that we not be left behind. Yet, for all its imagined power, it is as malleable – and as unruly – as a child. ‘Development’ has been a set of projects, that is, bundles of ideas and practices that fit together in some ways. Development projects, while

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shaped by international mandates, are yet varied in their inception as well as their effects because they form their coherence in relation to historically specific conjunctions and collaborations. Particular political actors come together to make development projects that are internationally recognizable and fundable at the same time that the projects articulate their socially and culturally specific dreams and schemes. To establish a place from which to ask my questions, I offer not development in the abstract, but in one concrete instance. I first knew development in one of its most aggressive forms: the authoritarian rule of Suharto’s New Order regime in Indonesia, particularly as it worked to normalize and dispossess rural minorities. Pembangunan, ‘development’, was the term for the expansion of the state. For forest-dwelling minorities, it referred to resettlement programmes aimed at clearing the forest for timber companies, mines and plantations – the state’s corporate clients. It referred, too, to cultural programmes in which the so-called backward customs of minorities were showcased as national blights that the regime could change. Through them, the regime endorsed a theory in which rural people caused their own poverty through backwardness. Yet the targeted minorities had to be taught to be poor; before development, many were rich in both culture and resources. Through development, minorities were asked to give up their livelihoods, religious commitments and ways of life to endorse a position at the bottom of the social hierarchy in exchange for only a possible attenuation of state harassment. Given this history, it is hard for me to think about ‘development’ in Indonesia – whether for women or for men or gender-undifferentiated communities – with a positive vision. Perhaps that’s why this statement highlights dangers even in a hopeful moment. In the 1970s and 1980s, New Order rural development at its bottom level usually targeted communities, public space, culture and technology as its demonstration objects: the promotion of individual profit hid behind a rhetoric of the public good. By the 1990s, however, privatization-oriented models of development had begun to influence state planning and rhetoric. The stated goal of all development began to shift towards the funding of private entrepreneurship, even in the countryside. In the mid-1990s the state offered its own interpretation of the internationally acclaimed Grameen Bank model of funding the poor, and small loans were offered to individual residents of

the problem of privatization | 47 ‘backward villages’. The Grameen Bank had offered loans to poor, credit-less rural women in Bangladesh to start small enterprises. In Indonesia, the recipients of state funds in the Kalimantan villages I knew were almost always those male household heads who were clients of the state-appointed village leaders. Meanwhile, the land grabs of plantations threatened to finish off village lands. Loans to ‘backward villages’ served to teach villagers how to be grateful but poor, just as their poverty was being firmly established through dispossession. The loans tightened the circle of masculine patronage, establishing the ability of some individuals to benefit from state discipline. In this way, a positive-seeming ‘women and development’ innovation, proliferating without feminist architects and in a terrain of coercion, led only to a more entrepreneurial patriarchy.1 In 1998, the Suharto regime fell. The transition has been an exciting time in Indonesia. New visions open up everywhere, even as new threats and challenges abound. Much that was not possible before seems now possible, even public criticism of that once-sosacred term, development. Yet the possibilities are constrained, too, by the collaboration that overthrew the New Order. In Suharto’s last days, the democratic opposition came into alliance with international agencies and transnational business enough to argue that Suharto was thwarting globalization; therefore he must go. It was a winning combination. But it put in place an equation: democracy equals globalization equals privatization. Some groups argue against this equation, but it is hard now to dislodge. A new hegemony has tentatively emerged. What will it mean for development, and women? The feminine, the private Feminists have had a lot to say about the private, but we have not yet turned our analysis to the contemporary cultural current called privatization. What are the connections between the private sphere of women’s feminine containment and the privatization of public goods and spaces? Let me begin in the North. As I have been arguing, Southern development projects are never just copies of Northern desires and plans, coming into being as they do as particular social interventions. Still, it is worth looking at Northern development packages to see what the South will at least have to address. Development packages

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are always cultural: they argue for particular ways of seeing and doing things according to a set of meaning-bound standards. They are often quite culturally exotic. (Imagine telling people they should work harder to earn less, just because they’ll be considered ‘modern’.) To dress their packages up as worthwhile, package designers strive to naturalize the cultural standards of their packages, that is, to make us accept them as universal ‘human’ wants while we exoticize the standards they are trying to replace. So it is up to critical analysts to take a more distanced look at what is being sold as the latest fashion in internationally appropriate cultural standards. Privatization is never merely an economic strategy. It is suffused with political culture. In the United States, privatization developed in the 1970s and 1980s as part of a neoconservative social agenda. This agenda recognizes only two kinds of legitimate social bodies: private corporations and private families. It has called for the destruction of other public goods, practices and institutions, from welfare to public education, environmental regulation, equal opportunity hiring and social services. If there is discrimination, this should be overcome, neoconservatives argue, by redoubled individual efforts; it is not a public matter. Government spending is fine as long as it promotes families, corporations and their economic or security interests; other forms of spending are said to be unnecessary to society. Yet the slippages that allow public funding of the private, as well as private funding of the public, have facilitated the compromises and collaborations that have made privatization into such an important public agenda in the United States. Spokespeople for schools, minority cultures and the environment can appeal to corporate sponsorship. Lesbians and gays can press for more flexible definitions of family. Federal bureaucratic labyrinths can be dismantled in favour of local solutions. There is still room for progressive concerns – but in a newly privatized form. Thus, business and professional women in the United States, including feminists and progressives, have not seen privatization as a disaster. The rhetoric of the promotion of families, in an economic boom period, has allowed elite working women to negotiate for desirable lifestyle changes. Through their collaboration with family values enthusiasts, they have gained the right to negotiate for model families in which spouses and children are important as well as careers. ‘Mommy tracks’ and ‘flextime’ have been created in business. Nonenforcement of laws about working conditions has allowed nannies

the problem of privatization | 49 to enhance the lives of working mothers. In the academic world, women bargain for spouse appointments. Each of these is possible because of the public promotion of the private family, understood as a legitimate item of elite consumption. The problem with this cultural politics is that it promotes only individual benefits. Inside it, it is difficult to cross boundaries of class, ethnicity and even marital status to identify with others. Ideals of equality and access give way to negotiations of individual privilege. Ironically, women negotiating for lifestyle benefits use a rhetoric of gender equity to obtain their goals. But, in the context of privatization, their achievements deepen status differences rather than mobilizing women as a group. Spouse appointments in the academic world, for example, work directly against the goals of equal opportunity hiring that feminists worked for only a few decades ago. If we consider the fact that no one has even dared to propose that academic departments might hire clusters of friends or intellectual collaborators, we can see how far this initiative lies from utopian feminist dreams: only spouses are acceptable in the regime of family values. What might this cultural politics mean for the South? The power of Northern models is very much felt in the South, from structural adjustment packages to the selective funding of non-governmental organizations. Yet development packages are always transformed as they emerge in the projects of Southern collaborators. The one thing that I can say about the impact of expectations about privatization in post-Suharto Indonesia is that it is surely unpredictable, and just as surely caught up in Indonesian struggles for public culture. Yet the question of privatization is worth asking and re-asking as Indonesian agendas for development, and gender, are reformulated. The stakes are high because one enormously promising change has already occurred. After years of repression, Indonesian feminism has re-emerged with a new vigour. Suharto’s New Order criminalized feminism. The concocted story of the Communist women’s movement sexually abusing and torturing military martyrs formed part of the founding myth of the regime. The fall of Suharto was similarly marked by a shocking story: the mass rape of Indonesian Chinese women during the 1998 uprising. Yet this story did not stop protest, as military instigators might have hoped; instead, it sparked an invigorated feminist mobilization of the sort that has not been seen in the North since the 1980s.

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What will feminists be able to accomplish in the current global climate? Many international observers assume that because Indonesia is predominantly Muslim, the main issue will be women’s rights to speak in public. However, elite women have long played an important role in national politics in Indonesia, and this continues in the post-Suharto era. Women have emerged as strong spokespersons in non-governmental organizations and opposition parties as well as in the current leadership. Women’s ability to speak with authority – so difficult to establish in the United States – is more straightforward in Indonesian national fora. The big issues, I believe, will lie elsewhere. One suggestive anecdote speaks to the indirect ways the agenda of privatization may make itself felt: young women in Indonesia, my friends say, are turning against birth control. The New Order had a coercive mass birth control programme that almost everyone resented. Progressive young women, in a gesture of defiance of that policy, have now jumped to have babies early and often. How often desire emerges in such reversals! And how easily this plan sits in the new international thinking about the wonder of families. Is this a privatized feminism? I have tried to make two points. First, development visions take form as context-specific interventions. They make futures in relation to particular pasts. They mobilize collaborators and gain their form in relation to the links they forge. They take the charismatic, powerful packages of development designers and transform them to become something new, for better or for worse. Second, privatization shifts the possibilities for mobilizing women as women. If feminists want to hold on to the possibility that women are a force for social justice, we will have to play this game very carefully, if at all. Note 1. Grameen Bank lending has come under increasing critical scrutiny, even in its home setting in Bangladesh. Feminists have begun to

argue, indeed, that Grameen’s women creditors become more rather than less vulnerable because of these loans.

PART ONE SEXUALITY AND THE GENDERED BODY

2 | M ORE ‘ “ T R A G E D I E S ” I N OU T-OF - T H E - W A Y P L A CE S : O C EA NIC I N TE RP R E T A T I O N S O F A N O THER S C A LE’

Yvonne Underhill-Sem with Kaita Sem

Two stories, two generations, multiple meanings

Sia I had just walked about 100 metres to the river to look for the bush knife left by my seven-year-old nephew when I heard the sound of something heavy crashing through the trees. This was followed immediately by the agonizing scream now indelibly fixed in my memory. I sprinted back to the area where we had just finished chopping and loading firewood to find my 65-year-old mother-in-law, Sia, sprawled in the small stream with her lower right leg dangling by a finger-length thread of skin. A huge branch lay alongside her and she looked alternately at her leg and then at me with a combination of terror and disbelief. My aunt, who was also in our firewood-gathering group, had already returned to the village with one load of wood and my nephew stood watching in frozen confusion. I pulled Sia gently out of the stream, her leg dragging behind her, and covered her lower body so we did not have to keep looking at her bloodless but almost detached lower limb. There was mixture of disbelief and inevitability in her eyes and her cries, and the best I could do was utter reassuring words about getting help soon. We were in a garden area accessible only by foot and some 30 minutes’ walk from the nearest houses. It was another 20 minutes’ walk to the nearest health centre with a radio-telephone, but some 500 kilometres away from the nearest emergency healthcare. In spite of the otherwise logistical impossibility of this situation, Sia lived another 20 years, although not entirely unscarred, thanks to the fortunate combination of local action and relative economic privilege. The swift and careful work of local women and men ensured that Sia was carried out of the garden on a stretcher hastily made of bush materials, and taken to the health clinic before she

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lost consciousness. This effort was matched by that of Sia’s son who lived in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea in the western tropical Pacific. From his relatively privileged position, as a telephone owner (before the now ubiquitous mobile phone) and regular and credible employee of a large organization, he was able to mobilize financial resources quickly enough for a daylight emergency air evacuation from Wanigela’s grassy airstrip.

Lia ‘She has internal bleeding,’ said my sister-in-law from the bedside of her daughter awaiting a transfusion in the provincial hospital of Oro Province, Papua New Guinea. Unsure how to interpret this, I wait another day before I can have a conversation with my niece, who is in her last year at a girls’ boarding school in a remote location. She had had a disrupted high school education because of floods, which destroyed her boarding school for two years in a row. More importantly, the floods also destroyed the gardens needed to feed the students. Lia had fainted when she was sitting her last exams, which nurses attributed to a loss of blood during her monthly menstruation cycle. She was a promising student and she was determined to complete her education even if it meant having to travel to a boarding school many miles from her home. During the school holidays she planted and harvested peanuts to generate some pocket money. After the blood transfusion in November, she returned to her home village. Two months later, after another ‘heavy monthly bleed’, in the local health sub-centre, lying in the arms of her father, surrounded by many members of her family, Lia died. The tragedy of tragedies: where is culture? Too many other people have died and continue to die in similar or more tragic incidents in ‘out-of-the-way’ places. For Anna Tsing, ‘an out-of-the-way place is, by definition, a place where the instability of political meanings is easy to see’ (1993: 27). By this Tsing suggests that for communities that are located within the geographical boundaries of specific nation-states but are considered by urban majorities to be isolated and/or living primitive lives, the discursive constructions of the nation-state are easily contestable. She uses this concept to argue for understanding marginality as formed by dialogues between the relatively isolated Meratus Dyak in South Kalimantan and urban, cosmopolitan Indonesians. By exploring the particularities of the

m o r e ‘ “ t r ag e d i e s ” i n o u t- o f -t h e -way p l ac e s ’ | 55 Meratus arguments, Tsing effectively shows the intertwined and contestable links between small, relatively isolated communities, the nation-state and global entities. I build on this concept of ‘out-ofthe-way places’ to make more explicit the potency of grappling with the slippery linkages that constitute and are constituted by the use of the more ubiquitous terms ‘developing countries’, ‘the Third World’ and ‘the global South’. My use of ‘out-of-the-way’ purposely signals my dissatisfaction with these terms and the economic constructs upon which they rest. Although all these terms enjoy wide circulation in scholarly, institutional and activist discourses, their meanings are politically sensitive and are strategically specific as often as they are naïvely nonsensical. Although all concepts share the risk of eventually becoming engrained with unintended meanings, my use of ‘out-ofthe-way places’ is in keeping with Escobar’s plea for the ‘liberation of the discursive field so that the task of imagining alternatives can be commenced’ (1995: 14). As a less politically loaded term, ‘outof-the-way places’ also provides for the possibilities of thinking about ‘marginal’ places differently. Local places are important even within the complex compressions of space and time that characterized the globalizing tendencies of earlier capitalism, the ‘new spirit’ of neoliberal capitalism that followed, and the current potential for a return to emancipatory forces insistent on subjecting ‘runaway markets to democratic control’ (Fraser 2009). However, they are also more than fixed, bounded entities. Local places are known and defined in relation to other places. Marginality is not just geographical distancing but also political, economic and cultural distancing. The importance of the concept of marginality is its imagined centre, which, by definition, can be anywhere. An ‘outof-the-way place’ then is also a relational concept that requires an examination of what and where the centre is. Equally important, this examination includes attention to the dynamics of local historical and cultural understandings. To engage with these insights requires working with complex constellations of culture and power at various scales of analysis. Tragedies can often cross these scales of analysis, but, as they do so, too often local places are overlooked. Almost daily, tragedies involving the loss of human life capture the imagination of the world’s media, which effectively relays them to the collective imagination of those with access to newspapers, radios,

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televisions and increasingly mobile phones and the internet. Often it is the sheer number of lost lives that catapults events from different parts of the world into distant homes. At other times it is the peculiar circumstances of human death and misery that make them tragedies to which so many people are spectators. Tragic though all these events are for the individuals involved, I am not concerned so much with the tragedies that make the headlines. Rather, my focus in this chapter is on the ‘smaller-scale’ tragedies that occur in out-of-theway places, such as those that we experienced above. I am thinking about the tragedy of 18 Tuvalu schoolgirls who were burned to death in their locked dormitory (Taylor 2003). The doors and windows were locked to stop the girls and boys meeting secretly in the night. The boys were not locked into their dormitories. I am also thinking about the daily deaths of women during childbirth, as the result of domestic and other bodily violence, and as the result of both curable and incurable diseases, as well as preventable conditions such as heavy menstrual bleeding related to anaemia. Despite evidence from many reports and the pithy rhetoric from the appropriate authorities that have some responsibility for avoiding these events, it seems that such tragedies may be a ‘true’ and enduring universal for humankind. For those bodies involved, the resounding response to this view is deadly silence. While there may well be some truly ‘natural’ tragedies, most human tragedies are preventable. For many people, the easiest way of preventing such tragedies is to consider the structural deficiencies that contribute, for instance, to inadequate rural health and education services. My argument is that greater attention needs to be given to the complex and place-specific constellations of power relations within which particular ‘tragedies’ occur. In this chapter I examine the complex power relations that constitute, and are constituted by, the small, closely knit community of Wanigela, Oro Province, Papua New Guinea. Because the power dimensions in this community are cast in idioms and understandings from this particular place and time, solutions to the problems of tragedies such as those I have described are not couched in calls for better health or transport services. These solutions belong to the discourses of policy-makers and planners in national government offices who are situated in different places and times. Instead, this is a story about how women, as a group and as individuals, are deeply embedded in

m o r e ‘ “ t r ag e d i e s ” i n o u t- o f -t h e -way p l ac e s ’ | 57 the masculinist discourses that constitute the conflicts over the distribution of royalties or shares flowing from foreign-controlled logging operations in Wanigela. My intention is not that this particular narrative is transformative in itself, but, as political philosopher Iris Young (1997) points out, when linked with other similar narratives, the effect is a subversion of those mainstream and malestream understandings of women that view development from a predominantly economic perspective. Instead, this story emphasizes how working from the everyday experiences of women in out-of-the-way places provides for different ways of thinking about ‘development’ and ‘politics’. This is the cultural dimension that has been ‘black-boxed’ for too long in preference to globalizing economic analysis (Chua et al. 2000). Furthermore, I show that by examining the ways in which tragedies beset women in out-of-the-way places, we can continue to advance new ways of thinking about bodies in development studies (see Harcourt and Escobar 2005, Cornwall et al. 2008, Harcourt 2009). By beginning with the body of particular women at particular times and in the same place, I am arguing here for more sexual embodiment in the practice of thinking about women and development. I argue that this is one highly effective way of identifying the major dimensions of power that constitute all social relations. Sia was not just an old woman going about her daily chores. She was intimately connected to a raft of highly contested land debates in the villages, and for many people this ‘accident’ was related directly to her involvement in these debates, not just her misfortune of being hit by a falling branch in a remote garden area. Similarly, 20 years later, Lia’s father had been intimately involved in the introduction of new land registration systems that facilitated the appropriation of land for a state-approved agrologging partnership with a foreign company. Although we can only surmise a medical cause for Lia’s death based on her own description of her symptoms in the months and days leading to her death, the activities of her close family were also under close scrutiny for any cultural transgressions they might have made, the punishment of which might be the loss of life. This formulation of culture as lived experience shows how it is critical to work with material and discursive constructions of development issues, which are mutually constituted.

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Of site and situations I write this study after almost three decades entangled in Wanigela, Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, first as a relative by marriage, then as a graduate student, then as an elder sister and aunt. My contingent connections with this place have provided me with special, often privileged, access to language, kinship relationships and knowledge that I draw on for my analysis. I have visited Wanigela numerous times since 1986 and lived there for a number of months in 1995–96. Since then I have continued to visit, although my current residence outside Papua New Guinea has limited my ability to remain closely in touch with one of the places I call ‘home’. My formal research in Wanigela, which argued for a feminist post-structuralist approach to population geography and specifically fertility analysis (Underhill-Sem 2000), involved collecting demographic data, kinship information and detailed narratives of the maternity experiences of about 30 women in Wanigela. In addition to these more formal data-gathering exercises, as a resident of Wanigela I was also involved in discussions about many current events in the area. The major one at the time was the commencement of a relatively small-scale logging operation on a block of traditionally owned land that had been officially leased to the government some 70 years earlier. There were other issues of community concern to which I was party – the sudden death of young mothers in one part of the village, plans for a new high school, and ceremonial activities such as bridewealth exchanges. More recently, in 2013, Kaita Sem, my son, stayed with his paternal family in Wanigela for two months after almost four years of living in New Zealand (Sem 2014). During that time, there were heated discussions about the latest logging operation, this time on a much larger scale and involving a well-financed foreign logging company. Other community concerns include the poor physical state of the elementary school, the reduced quality and quantity of water in the local river, and the ongoing delays in celebrating marriages. At the same time, there was also pride in the achievements of the local primary school, the excitement of a new football tournament, and relief that a new maternity ward was under construction. Although relatively small, like many out-of-the-way places, this community was still big on issues to discuss and informal discussions took place in many different spaces and with various different people.

m o r e ‘ “ t r ag e d i e s ” i n o u t- o f -t h e -way p l ac e s ’ | 59 I draw mostly on the informal discussions to which I was party in the 1990s, with some reference to discussions in the 2010s, to highlight the culture of collectivities and their gendered and highly politicized manifestations. The everyday culture of resource politics in Wanigela Since the mid-1980s, the logging industry in Papua New Guinea has been under close scrutiny because of the relative ease with which corrupt practices by national politicians and bureaucrats have been able to siphon huge financial benefits away from the people who ‘owned’ the resources (Barnett 1992). A number of legislative and procedural attempts have been made by various national governments to establish a sustainable non-corrupt forest industry. However, in the multi-ethnic and politically diverse country of Papua New Guinea, this is not an easy task and continues to be subject to political wavering among resource owners, elected politicians, forestry officials and foreign companies. Filer’s (1997) work contains many detailed examples of how these tensions play out at the local and national level throughout Papua New Guinea. More recently, the logging debate has consolidated around apparently state-sanctioned processes that allow for land grabs (Filer 2012). In this analysis I am working from yet another perspective that further complicates these tensions, because I want to get closer to the culture of politics embedded in the everyday lived experiences of women. I return to the first story that began this chapter. A year before Sia’s accident in the garden, discussions had begun between a relatively small logging company based in another province in Papua New Guinea and some self-appointed representatives of the major clans in Wanigela. Although there had been interest in logging this area before, projects had never eventuated because land in Wanigela, like the majority of land in Papua New Guinea, remains in customary tenure and therefore subject to customary non-written ‘law’. Clans are the basic landholding unit but clan lands in Wanigela rarely form large, contiguous blocks; rather, clan lands can be found at widely scattered locations. Boundaries to these lands are recognized verbally in relation to well-known landmarks such as rivers, large trees, mountains and depressions, many of which change gradually over time. For the purposes of large-scale logging or mining, this system makes ‘economically viable’ blocks of land hard to identify unless

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there is a workable collaboration with the relevant landowners. This difficulty had prevented any previous logging projects. In Wanigela, however, there was a 12,000-hectare block of land for which, in 1954, the government had managed to negotiate a lease for 99 years. The lease was subsequently awarded to Utan Plantations for copra, coffee and cocoa production. In the early 1990s, Utan was facing financial difficulties because of low agricultural prices compounded by an increasingly unreliable transportation system. Forced to find alternative ways to boost its low returns, it initiated discussions with various logging companies for the possibility of logging some of the hardwoods within its leasehold area. Only about 100 hectares of the 12,000 hectares leased were planted and so there was still a large part of the lease-holding covered in hardwood timber with 58 years to run. Utan management finally contracted a relatively small logging company that opted to selectively log the hardwood and replant with fast-growing balsa. As a leaseholder, this was within Utan’s right; however, Section 2(a) of the lease agreement states that standing timber can be removed from the land for the ‘purpose only of improvement of the land’. This provision clearly prohibits the lessee from cutting timber for sale, so close attention had to be given to how much would be paid to ‘traditional’ landowners and the local community, how this would be paid, and, more importantly, to whom it would be paid. Furthermore, the government road did not run the entire way from the coast to the logging area and so the use rights of parts of the road also had to be purchased, as did the land adjacent to the temporary landing jetty. I am not going to detail the considerable debate that followed over how much was to be paid and how this was to be done. Instead, I want to focus on how ‘real’ landowners are identified, and especially on the ways in which women are incorporated into this process. This is never an easy question in Papua New Guinea, where over 90 per cent of land is held in non-written customary tenure. Every piece of land has its own history of ownership that is recalled in different ways by different people at different times. There is rarely a single correct interpretation; rather, the greatest degree of acceptance is achieved when claims are no longer hotly challenged. Instead, contesting parties signal their agreement to disagree by retreating from public debates. Those bold enough to go ahead in this situation are taking a risk, and it is more than likely

m o r e ‘ “ t r ag e d i e s ” i n o u t- o f -t h e -way p l ac e s ’ | 61 that the project or activity that led to the disagreements in the first place will evaporate in the meantime. Women are closely involved in these debates, because, in Wanigela, it is widely understood that they are also resource owners. Despite differences in the day-to-day life of men and women, there is always time for family groups to talk about these issues, especially as couples and family groups walk to their often distant gardens on a regular basis. Women and men in different groupings are involved in a variety of activities ranging from laundry to house building and from sports training to card playing, when there is often time for both fun and laughter as well as serious discussions. Moreover, when evening meals are eaten and it is time to drink tea or chew betel nut, the talk inevitably turns to these contentious issues. In the case of the Utan leasehold property, the widely acknowledged owners were three major clans whose forebears were members of a surveying party that accompanied a government surveyor into the bush in 1946. Together they agreed where the boundaries were and a map was drawn up and subsequently gazetted. The relative extent of the land belonging to each clan was reflected in the relative proportion of recompense each clan was given in return for their land. In the 1990s there were oral records of this survey and a collective memory of the proportionate share each clan was due. Each of the men originally involved had descendants currently resident in Wanigela, although some groups had more representatives than others. My mother-inlaw, Sia, was the only resident descendant of one member of that group of three. As a woman this caused problems, but these were not problems of invisibility. In this predominantly patriarchal place, where on marriage women become members of their husband’s clans, the clans from which the women originally came are not, nevertheless, forgotten. So when it comes to sharing resources of one sort or another, these clans are only overlooked at the risk of later retribution. Women are not visible in various public hearings in which the sharing of resources, such as bridewealth distribution, is debated. However, they are actively involved in the daily discussions that form part of the often many months of build-up leading to more public events. During 1995 and 1996, numerous meetings were held by various groupings of people – clans who were the direct descendants of the three men who surveyed the land, neighbouring clan groups, distantly

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related clan groups and family groups. Women were part of all these groups. However, when it came to the large public meetings, few women participated in the forum discussions although their presence was welcome for preparing and serving refreshments. The situation was much the same in 2012. At first, Sia was not too concerned with the discussions because her husband and son were attending the meeting as members of their own clan (Yeyeu) and, among other things, they were tracking events as they related to Sia’s clan as well because it was known throughout the area that she was a member of one of the major clans (Kwakwabu). Despite Kwakwabu not having a male representative at these meetings, Sia was confident that her interests would be respected. However, as time went on, Sia realized that other clans were claiming more of their share of the royalties. Sia then tried to generate the interest of a close cousin brother (male cousin) who was also part of her original clan but who had lived in the city for many years. She sent letters to him and visited other clan members. After a particularly urgent request from Sia, her cousin eventually came back to Wanigela to attend a critical meeting. However, his lack of experience in the village discussions and his sidelining of Sia’s advice saw him diverge from the key concerns expressed by Sia. For Sia, he had failed to pursue the proper justice for their clan, which is what she had hoped, as a man, he could do. Instead of letting the issue go and despite active intervention by her husband and younger son on her behalf, Sia increased her correspondence with her first-born son, my husband, who lived in Port Moresby. As a member of his father’s clan, Sia’s son was not directly involved in the land under dispute, although every clan had important information to contribute in providing the context for which clans owned which land. Sia, however, was asking him to help her gain the recognition she felt was owing to her father’s clan. There was a financial interest involved but the more pressing concern for Sia was to ensure that her father’s clan was not covertly overlooked. Helping his mother with these issues meant that her son would be transgressing longstanding norms about respecting one’s mother’s brothers. Instead, he would be directly challenging their interpretations of historical events. With little hesitation, Sia’s son responded actively to his mother’s request. He investigated the company and the lease. He studied the relevant documents

m o r e ‘ “ t r ag e d i e s ” i n o u t- o f -t h e -way p l ac e s ’ | 63 and followed the legal requirements for royalty payments and he confronted the leaseholders over the interpretation of the lease and the people they had identified as beneficiaries. Throughout these weeks he was relaying information back to his parents in the village, who in turn kept him informed of developments there. Over the several months during which this story unfolded, Sia was moving around the village more than usual. In addition to other tasks such as gardening, marketing and attending to church activities, she was also visiting the houses of related clan members. Over time, Sia also became a familiar face at the public discussions. If she did not make it because of conflicting responsibilities, such as caring for sick family members, or being unwell herself, then her husband or village-resident son would attend the meetings and relay news back to her. It was clear that she was being kept informed of discussions and had an opinion about them. Quite often her opinion differed from that of the expressed consensus of the meeting. But she was not the only woman raising alternative views. Nie, the widow of another clan cousin, fully supported Sia. Her position was slightly different, however, as it was Nie’s husband’s clan she was defending because her son, though currently resident in the village, was not confident about talking about custom matters in public forums. Accidents do happen As discussions were getting more heated and various people were travelling to and from Port Moresby in attempts to influence the distribution of royalty payments, the first accident occurred. An integral space in all housing areas in Wanigela is a platform or veranda, the kema, which is sometimes attached to the main house and sometimes a separate structure. It is the place where people meet, talk, eat and often sleep. Because it is so well used, it is solidly constructed and well maintained. Rarely does it collapse. However, one evening the kema belonging to Nie’s family collapsed under Nie leaving her with a badly bruised leg. Although not a life-threatening accident, she left for care in the city a few days later. The next incident, involving Sia, occurred about three months later and was life-threatening. Few people made the connection between these incidents publicly, yet for most the message was clear. These two women were overstepping the bounds by their engagement in contentious land

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issues and should keep away. Along with many other people, I never learned how these ‘accidents’ were thought to have happened. This knowledge was not shared or talked about – it was not constructed discursively. However, after Sia’s accident, the family decided to stay further away from land discussions even though they felt they were getting closer to reaching that state of agreeing to disagree. This was Sia’s explicit advice because she feared that the next incident would be fatal. We all concurred with her wishes and did not engage any further in the discussions, even though members of our family held particular documents, so we were still approached for advice from other related clans. The logging continued for about 18 months before all the machinery was shipped out. Shortly after, logging trucks were no longer tearing down the road, raising dust and scattering those who were walking. The road quickly reverted to the footpath it used to be, complete with patches of mud and grass growing in the middle. The balsa continues to grow but there are no plans for harvesting it. Royalty money was distributed and Sia’s clan got some, but the final pool for distribution was never known. People were no longer flying between Port Moresby and Wanigela every week or so. Some trade stores closed up. Fewer baked products were sold at the market. There were no more public meetings about land issues. Sia was back in the village after almost a year in Port Moresby, including several months in hospital. Until her death in 2013 at the age of about 77, she often walked with the aid of a stick. She and her family continued to talk about land issues in their private spaces. The story is still told of Sia’s accident and numerous interpretations are made of it. I have presented just one version of this story to provide a glance at the extent to which the various layers of politics and culture are embedded with each other. How the branch fell on her I cannot say – perhaps someone had been in the garden area earlier. Perhaps someone was in the garden area but we did not see any traces of him or her. Why did the branch fall on Sia? Perhaps she was pushing the boundaries. Perhaps her son was pushing his boundaries. Perhaps it really was just a kind of warning. Perhaps a more powerful sorcery would have successfully caused Sia’s death and a greater disability. Perhaps there were other people involved. Whatever the answers to these and other questions, this incident will never simply be put down to Sia being in the wrong

m o r e ‘ “ t r ag e d i e s ” i n o u t- o f -t h e -way p l ac e s ’ | 65 place at the wrong time. This incident was shaped by resource conflicts in Wanigela just as similar disputes in Wanigela are now constituted by this incident. The answers to the many questions raised by this incident and indented on Sia’s body are part of a wider localized understanding of how the world works. They are part of the materially and discursively constructed culture of Wanigela, a culture that needs to be taken into consideration in any discussions of development. Tragedies in out-of-the-way places: matters of scale So what does this story tell us about tragedies on an oceanic scale? And where do women come into this picture? Although women in Papua New Guinea as a group are widely known to be the backbone of the community, they simultaneously continue to suffer a far lower status than men. In many ways the daily lived experience of many women in Papua New Guinea is characterized by hardship, abuse and often death. Campaigning for the rights of women in Papua New Guinea is one critical way to develop a context for women to be heard in local and national democratic places. Yet the potency of women’s involvement in local politics, as the above discussion illustrates, cannot be overlooked. Women do have power but not the sort of power that is vested in specific institutions. The power women have is situated in specific places and times because it is simultaneously constitutive and constituting of the societies and polities to which they belong. That is, this power is not only woven into the very fabric of society but it also emerges from the general fabric to constitute the many ways in which women express themselves either as a group or individually. One therefore cannot damage women without damaging critical warps and wefts in the fabric that is the society. Also, one cannot predict or suppose a precise way in which women, as a group or individually, will exercise the power they hold. One can be sure, though, that it will happen. The two women in Wanigela drew on more power than other members of the society were comfortable with. They were involved in discussions but both Sia and Nie were unconvinced that their concerns were being genuinely addressed so they continued talking. Unable to convince Sia and Nie otherwise, other members of the community chose other ways to express their opinion more forcefully and thus the bodies of these women became the focus of discontent.

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And with this bodily restraint, their opponents won. In other places, women are routinely raped, impregnated or physically tortured as a way of overpowering or disempowering them. My analysis seeks to show that, while women and young people are very vulnerable to such despicable and uninvited incidents, their assailants inadvertently acknowledge the tremendous power they also hold. The matter of scale that arises in this analysis draws on new thinking about working with a concept of scale ‘not as size (census tract, province, continent) or level (local, regional, national) but as a relational element in a complex mix that also includes space, place and environment’ (Howitt 1998: 49). This is useful for understanding the apparent contradiction of the grandness of the concept of Oceania viewed against the localized understandings of place in Wanigela. In this way, the matter of scale becomes one of an analysis of the embodiment of power in social relations and the places in which they operate. Understanding ‘scale’ only as how the ‘local’ dovetails into the ‘regional’ – which dovetails into increasing levels of geographical size, ending with the ‘global’ – is part of an economic and biological imagination that fails to account for fluid cultural understandings and imaginations (Marston et al. 2005) A woman’s body scarred I have purposely used a particular experience in which a sexually distinct body is scarred. The sexuality of this body is not obviously relevant. Yet, on the other hand, it is highly relevant. I want to take women’s bodies as being more than childbearing bodies. They are also hard-working bodies capable of considerable effort and strain in their daily lives. But the strength that eventually comes from this hard work, like men’s bodies, is not invincible. Like men’s bodies, women’s bodies can be broken. And when this happens it is a tragedy. In this chapter I have shown that by focusing on the bodies closest in, their flesh and blood and pain, collective ‘bodies’ ‘out there’ – that is, how women are discursively constructed – cannot so easily be denuded of their materiality, and therefore so easily overlooked. Rather than take the many examples I could draw on of the untimely and often unfair death of women as a result of menstruation, in childbirth, or as the result of domestic, civil or national violence, I want to discuss the politics entwined in masculinist activities. By

m o r e ‘ “ t r ag e d i e s ” i n o u t- o f -t h e -way p l ac e s ’ | 67 doing this, my analysis is intended to bring women’s bodies into the centre of masculinist discourses about politics and land in the Pacific. With reference to approaches that polarize political economy and cultural politics, Young (1997: 149) argues that ‘specifying political struggles and issues in more fine-tuned and potentially compatible terms better identifies possible conflict and alliance’. Here I have examined the political nuances that surround one particular tragedy in one out-of-the-way place, by focusing on the lived experiences of women in out-of-the-way places. Taking this example of an accident that could happen to anyone in many places – where large trees still stand – my intention is to widen the argument surrounding the bodily position of women in the day-to-day politics of life. In doing this, I draw attention to the ways in which women are actively shaping their lives by drawing on Young’s (1994) concept of seriality; this explains how sometimes women come together as a veritable force to be reckoned with, but at other times women as a group and individually are not able to come together (Underhill-Sem 2012). An undercurrent in this chapter is the concept of scale in terms of collectivities. Being situated in Oceania, where the ‘problem of smallness and remoteness’ is a familiar leitmotif embedded in many discussions of development (Hau’ofa 1993), I work with the concept of ‘out-of-the-way places’ to force a rethinking of the power relationships between places, regardless of geographic scale. This is not to say that large-scale human slaughter is unimportant since the protection of all human rights is an ongoing challenge. Nor do I wish to silence the call for greater action on the part of larger industrialized countries to take responsibility for their contributions to environmental degradation on a global scale. But my aim here is to contribute to the sexual embodiment of development studies by forcing closer attention to the bodies closest in so that the collective ‘bodies’ out there cannot be overlooked so easily.

3 | ‘RE V O L UT I O N W I T H A W O MA N’S FA C E’? F AM I LY N O R M S , CO N S T I T UT IONA L RE F ORM A N D T H E P O L I T I CS OF RE D I S TRIB UT I O N I N P O S T / N EOLIBER A L E C U AD OR

Amy Lind

Introduction During his presidential campaign in 2006, President Rafael Correa (2007–present) told a group of Alianza País1 women supporters at a Women’s Alliance National Conference in Machala, Ecuador that his so-called Citizen Revolution had a ‘woman’s face’ (‘La Revolución Ciudadana tiene rostro de mujer’). At the meeting, where hundreds of women listened to his speech, he promised that, upon his election into office, his administration would ‘eradicate violence against women’ and establish women’s full access to ‘healthcare, social security, “dignified” work, and education’, and, generally speaking, provide ‘equal opportunities’ for all women.2 He also promised to create a National Women’s Bank. At the same time, President Correa himself has publicly opposed same-sex marriage and, as a devout Catholic, he opposes abortion reform.3 Not long after his entry into office, the new 2008 Constitution was approved through a national referendum that helped solidify Ecuador’s shift to the left. Unlike Ecuador’s 1998 Constitution, which was drafted during a period of political turmoil and still heavily invested in a neoliberal, market-based notion of redistribution, the 2008 Constitution aims to redirect national development as part of the general shift away from neoliberalism towards a post-neoliberal or twenty-first-century socialist model of development and governance. Notions of the family figured centrally in discussions concerning the new Constitution and the remaking of Ecuador as a post-neoliberal nation: new legislation regarding women’s rights, homosexuality, gender identity and family law were introduced in the Constitution

‘re voluti on wi th a woman’s face ’? | 69 together with related legal and policy processes, broadening the traditional definition of the family to include ‘diverse families’: that is, non-normative households and/or non-kinship-based familial arrangements such as transnational migrant families,4 same-sex households and trans5 communal networks. As the legal foundation of the Citizen Revolution, the Constitution gave great hope to groups previously not recognized by law. Likewise, Correa’s 2009–13 Plan Nacional del Buen Vivir (National Plan of Well-being), the policy and planning arm of the Citizen Revolution, is anti-neoliberal and some would even say post-capitalist in its vision of the economy (these are terms used by members of Correa’s economic team) and potentially opens up the possibility of a broader notion of social reproduction, one that extends redistribution to ‘diverse families’. In this regard, the Correa administration’s buen vivir agenda has important implications for the feminist advances made during earlier (neo)liberal periods, and more generally, for notions of family and (re)production that have been advocated by several social movements in the country, including – to varying degrees and in various modes – the indigenous, migrants’ rights, feminist, environmental, Afro-Ecuadorian and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, travesti and intersex (LGBTTI) movements. Yet Correa’s own conservative views on women’s reproductive rights – views that reflect the wider trend in ‘new left’ politics in the region, in which socialist leaders publicly embrace religion and ‘family values’ (Ewig 2012) – contradict the potential ‘progress’ of the Constitution and National Plan of Well-being. In this sense, as I argue throughout this chapter, family norms and women’s rights continue to be key sites of struggle upon which the broader Citizen Revolution attempts to remake the nation as plurinational and post-capitalist. What, then, can we make of these seemingly progressive legislative and policy moves, when heteronormativity continues to be at the centre of economic development scenarios, in socialist or postneoliberal contexts as well as in capitalist, neoliberal contexts? What is the significance of ‘diverse families’ in the Citizen Revolution? To what extent is the language of the Constitution and National Plan of Well-being truly contributing to a transformation of social relations? On one hand, the ‘diverse families’ legislation signifies a modernizing move by and for the Ecuadorian state: gender and sexual rights advances are seen as key to ‘modernizing’ the revolutionary

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nation. On the other hand, in practice, a maternalist, colonialist, heteropatriarchal understanding of the family and women’s rights seems to recur within state policy frameworks, programmes and practices. At the very least, there is a disconnect between theory and practice, a point I further examine below. To begin, the 2008 Constitution, as the legal foundation of Correa’s redistributive agenda, became possible in part due to legislative and policy advances made during the neoliberal period, including the 1998 Constitution. During the 2008 National Constituent Assembly, assembly members and their legal assistants, activists and many others played roles in drafting the language that ultimately ended up in the new Constitution. These individuals and organizations worked to operationalize earlier gains so that individuals, families and households that do not fit into colonial, heteropatriarchal norms could access material gains from previous forms of legal recognition. Since 2008, the notion of ‘diverse families’ has been articulated and used in many state and civil society spaces, and its introduction in legislation has been attributed to demands made by the LGBTTI and migrants’ rights movements in particular (Lind 2008, Herrera 2011). ‘The family’ has also been re-conceptualized to some degree within economic policy frameworks. For example, some policy-makers have worked specifically towards redefining ‘development’ to address noncapitalist activities, including the ‘social and solidarity economy’, and to recognize the rights of nature as a direct challenge to extractoriented economic growth models (Acosta 2011); feminist scholars, in particular, have questioned shifting notions of reproduction in this context, including how economies of care figure into economic development scenarios (León 2008). In this way, social reproduction has been brought more to the fore, although questions remain as to whether or how this shifts the underlying heteronormative premise of the family as the foundation of the economy and the nation. A parallel discussion concerning human rights has taken place. Going beyond a call for class redistribution (the traditional socialist model), Correa supporters from various political backgrounds have argued that class itself needs to be understood as part of a broader understanding of stratification and social inequality in Ecuadorian society, one that includes a challenge to the historical regimes of (neo)colonialism, racism, gender inequality and class exploitation in Ecuador that began with earlier liberal states and continued to the neoliberal state

‘re voluti on wi th a woman’s face ’? | 71 of the late twentieth century and the twenty-first-century socialist state. In theory, a goal of the revolution has thus been to create not only a more equitable but also a more sustainable future, linking the recognition of marginalized groups to post-neoliberal redistribution. In this chapter I analyse family norms in the Correa administration’s Citizen Revolution and buen vivir agenda, focusing primarily on their legal foundations. First, I provide a framework for understanding heteronormativity, modernization and economic development in post-neoliberal and neoliberal contexts in Latin America. This is followed by my historical analysis of shifting family norms in neoliberal legal and policy contexts in the 1990s. I then address the discursive struggles concerning ‘the family’ that took place within the 2008 National Constituent Assembly; these struggles tell us much about how ‘the family’ and social reproduction are understood in current post-neoliberal development frameworks in Ecuador. In the final section, I address how familial arrangements, including ‘diverse families’, have been affected by the Correa administration’s constitutional reforms and overall buen vivir development agenda up until early 2012, particularly as a notion of heteronormativity continues to be central to the buen vivir agenda, despite advances in the realm of sexual rights. I argue that anti-neoliberal politics do not necessarily result in fundamentally altering the heteronormative foundation of ‘the family’ that is so deeply embedded in capitalist (including post-neoliberal) development frameworks and practices; rather, we see a contradictory mix of legal or policy strategies and cultural interventions that reveal the contested nature of social reproduction and family politics in the context of Ecuador’s struggle for economic sovereignty, ultimately reinforcing the longer historical trajectory of colonialist heteronormative reproduction at the centre of capitalist and socialist development practices. Heteronormativity, development and (post-)neoliberalism Until very recently, scholars have paid scant attention to how heteronormativity has been central to various forms of governance. By ‘heteronormativity’, I am referring to ‘institutions, structures and practices that normalise dominant forms of heterosexuality as universal and morally righteous’ (Bedford 2011), and to the privileging of dominant forms of heterosexuality over all others. Heteronormativity necessarily relies on naturalized gender binaries

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and an understanding of ‘the family’ as a ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ way of life. As in other studies of political economy, heteronormativity is seen as secondary, often conflated with discussions of sex and thus trivialized, naturalized and left unexamined. This is true of scholarship on the state, governance, social movements and the economy in Ecuador: most of it is largely heteronormative in its scope. Yet emergent historical and contemporary research on colonial states and logics clearly points in another direction: for example, as in many other countries, sex-related laws were set up in newly independent Ecuador (1822 onwards) in order to regulate reproduction across race and class, especially among indigenous and mestizo/a populations (miscegenation and segregation laws, for instance), and to establish a division between good and bad, pure and polluted, healthy and unhealthy, and legal and criminal forms of behaviour (for example, prostitution and homosexuality laws), often based on a colonialist cultural understanding of respectability and private versus public. In this way, both social and biological reproduction, including intimate and sexual relations, have been central to state governance, not secondary to it. Heteronormativity limited and shaped opportunities not only for non-normative individuals and households as we discuss them now, but also for those heterosexual households that transgressed ‘respectable’ racial, spatial or class boundaries. Sex was always already in the state and produced through various forms of governance. The criminalization of homosexuality, prostitution and cross-racial marriage all worked hand in hand to construct the ideal citizen: of Spanish or mestizo/a origin, middle to upper class, urban and heterosexual (Clark 2001, Prieto 2004). This ideal citizen prototype remains under contestation today. As Steven Seidman has observed, ‘regimes of heteronormativity not only regulate the homosexual but control heterosexual practices by creating a moral hierarchy of good and bad sexual citizens … It is not just the homosexual that is defiled, but specific sexual practices such as pleasure driven sex, multiple partner sex, or sex outside quasi-marital intimacy’ (2001: 322). In this sense, heteronormativity shapes and limits heterosexual citizens’ opportunities, desires and forms of expression as much as those of non-heterosexuals. Perhaps ironically, as heteronormativity has remained ‘invisible’ in many accounts of political economy, reproductive heterosexuality has simultaneously been made hyper-visible in contemporary

‘re voluti on wi th a woman’s face ’? | 73 development discourse, given the obsession with linking procreation and the nuclear, heterosexual family to the survival and health of national economies, and to the modernization of poor countries. Referred to by some as ‘reprocentrism’, or the privileging of heteronormative reproduction over all other familial or intimate arrangements (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010), the implicit or explicit family–economic development link has contributed in numerous powerful ways to shaping discussions on macro-economic policy, labour reform, the social costs of structural adjustment, climate change, poverty and human survival. Heteronormative reproduction, which is rooted in biogenetic, racialized definitions of the family, is seen as the foundation of nations and as a modernizing force that, if done ‘appropriately’, will lead to the progress of nations, be they capitalist or socialist (Hartmann 1995, Parr 2012: Chapter 3). The ‘reproductive imperative’ in development frameworks (Stürgeon 2010), in which normative notions of femininity and masculinity are reinforced and even celebrated, pervades post-neoliberal discourse as well. This explains Correa’s public call for women to support the Citizen Revolution on Mothers’ Day and Venezuelan Hugo Chávez’s assertion that mothers are the foundation of the Bolivarian revolution – these are all heteronormative battle cries for an otherwise untouched capitalist paradigm of economic modernization based on resource extraction and economic growth, one that links heterosexual reproduction to the sustainability of nature and the success of development. And, as feminist and queer studies scholars have pointed out, the developmentalist paradigm is enmeshed in cultural values concerning ‘the family’, in which not only the ideal heterosexual, nuclear, Western-style family but also particular homonormative conceptions of ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ have increasingly become a visible part of sexual modernization and modernity and are themselves linked to developmentalist notions of visibility, rights and empowerment (Lind 2010, Lind and Share 2003, Horn 2010). These notions ‘travel’ across borders, through transnational discursive and institutional networks, in multiple ways. Actors within post-neoliberal states are no less inclined to ‘modernize’ sexuality along the lines of respectability than are actors within neoliberal states. For example, recently an Ecuadorian feminist activist stated in a conversation, ‘Right now in Ecuador it is easier to talk about homosexuality than water,’ referring to the ongoing protests concerning the right to

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natural resources, led by indigenous communities, on the one hand, and the increased visibility and acceptance of LGBTTI individuals and issues on the other.6 In this imaginary, LGBTTI individuals are linked to progress, whiteness, urban centres and class respectability; water, in contrast, is linked to a lack of ‘development’, racialized indigeneity, rural areas and poverty. Interestingly, this followed the appointment of Ecuador’s first ‘out’ lesbian in a ministerial position: Carina Vance became Minister of Health in January 2012.7 During the same time period, a national march for indigenous rights, including a march for water, took place on 8 March 2012. Thus sexual politics and regimes of heteronormativity are central to seemingly benign macro-economic development planning and state (and civil society) practices – be they in capitalist or socialist, or neoliberal or postneoliberal, contexts – and are inherently racialized and classed from the start. Just as I am arguing that scholars cannot understand the material effects of redistribution without recognizing regimes of heteronormativity, scholars cannot discuss sexual politics without also accounting for how other categories of social recognition are understood and manifest in a given geopolitical, cultural and legal context.8 Heteronormativity is central to post-neoliberal forms of governance as well, as evidenced by ongoing struggles concerning women’s and sexual rights in ‘new left’ contexts in Latin America.9 By ‘postneoliberal’, I am not implying that neoliberal policies no longer exist but rather that they have lost their ‘quasi-hegemonic position’ as new forms of collective action and articulations of economic and social policy have gained salience (Grimson and Kessler 2005, Fernandes 2007). Importantly, as others have pointed out and as I argue in this chapter, Correa’s anti-neoliberal stance, like those of other new left leaders, ‘should not be confused with anticapitalist politics’ (Hart-Landsberg 2009, quoted in Becker 2011: 104).10 Yet there are some important differences with regard to family norms between neoliberal and post-neoliberal forms of governance, perhaps most obviously found in the 2008 Constitution and in the Correa administration’s buen vivir or sumac kawsay agenda, a term now used widely to connote his economic alternative to neoliberalism. In contrast to neoliberal notions of development, which privilege the ‘free market’ over all else, the concept of buen vivir is about seeking a more ‘balanced relation between the state, the market and society

‘re voluti on wi th a woman’s face ’? | 75 in harmony with nature’ (Wray 2009: 51, cited in Deere 2010: 2). Importantly, the notion of buen vivir ‘constitutes a critique of the concept of development and economic growth as the motor force of development’ (Deere 2010: 2). In theory, it privileges solidarity over competition, and sustainability over economic growth. In the 2008 Constitution, buen vivir appears as a set of principles to guide the economy and as a series of rights and social, economic and environmental guarantees, including the right to water and sufficient access to food; to a wholesome environment that is ecologically balanced; to information; to culture, science and education; to housing and a safe environment; to health; and to work and social security (Asamblea Constituyente 2008, Deere 2010). In theory, the concept of buen vivir arguably opens up space to consider feminist concerns and potentially challenge heteronormativity. Magdalena León (2009) has argued that by putting human life centre stage, the concept of buen vivir provides an opening to discuss the centrality of human reproduction – ‘all those unpaid activities generally carried out by women to reproduce the labour force on a daily and generational basis’ (as cited in Deere 2010: 3). This provides an opportunity for reimagining and operationalizing policies concerning caring labour, which remains largely ‘invisible’ in capitalist development frameworks; as such, the buen vivir framework potentially challenges heteronormativity. Nonetheless, contradictions abound. As Deere points out in her study of asset ownership and buen vivir, ‘the care economy usually gets short shrift’ in discussions of development (Deere 2010: 3), even in the current context. Correa’s claim that the revolution has a ‘woman’s face’ is not insinuating that women are autonomous subjects; rather, in many ways his discourse reinforces and prolongs the neoliberal discourse of the family – and women in their roles as mothers and caretakers in particular – as the absorber of economic change and as the ‘subjects of others’ (Guchín 2010) That is, they are seen through a maternalist lens, as linked to the family, a common observation made in contexts of male-dominated nationalist struggles (Gutiérrez-Chong 2007).11 One way this occurs is through a maternalist discourse of economic development, which is found in both neoliberal and post-neoliberal agendas (Lind 2010). Reprocentric notions of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘respectability’ are implicit or explicit parts of state laws and policies

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addressing redistribution, just as in earlier struggles for and against neoliberal restructuring; indeed, these notions continue to inform post-neoliberal development logic, as I illustrate below. ‘The long neoliberal night’: family norms and neoliberal politics in the 1990s Family norms were solidified in neoliberal legal and policy contexts in the 1990s; nonetheless, they were heavily contested. This was most evident in legislative reforms concerning homosexuality, in the 1998 Constitution, and in women’s responses to neoliberal restructuring in the country. In many ways, events taking place in the late 1990s allowed for the possibility of and helped set the discursive stage for Correa’s redistributive agenda at the constitutional level. The neoliberal development discursive context emphasized the ‘vulnerability’ of women, the poor and indigenous communities, among others, to the economic crisis, and the resulting need for state ‘protection’ for those who ‘deserve’ it (that is, ‘respectable’ citizens). A market-based notion of respectability and self-sufficiency guided many of the debates about the family during this period; neoliberal development discourse undoubtedly played a significant role in shaping the parameters of debates about family norms. The heteronormative family continued to be foreshadowed as the centre of law and policy – indeed, it was glorified by some institutions (Bedford 2011) – although some significant changes occurred, particularly with regard to sexual identity, which provided a space to dispute regimes of heteronormativity. First, homosexuality was decriminalized in Ecuador in 1997.12 This followed a series of well-publicized events in which a group of cross-dressers were arrested in Cuenca (Ecuador’s third largest city) and detained by local police, who proceeded to further abuse them. This story, now well documented (see, for example, Páez 2009, Lind 2013), held great sway for many Ecuadorians who, despite their own personal beliefs about sexual or gender identity, did not support the human rights abuses of these individuals. At the time, news of the human rights abuses circulated transnationally, and international organizations such as Amnesty International were among the first to publicly document the assaults. Local lawyers and activists also brought transnational attention to the incidents by bringing the case to the Organization of American States regional court. In 1998,

‘re voluti on wi th a woman’s face ’? | 77 following a period of great political and economic turmoil, including the ousting of President Abdalá Bucaram (1996–97), a National Assembly was convened to redraft the Constitution for the first time in many decades, as a way to regain citizen confidence in Ecuador’s political system. Given that homosexuality had only recently been decriminalized, this issue, coupled with the related topics of gender and familial norms, became more explicitly discussed among politicians; this was perhaps also due to the transnational religious right’s influence on religious organizations in the country, which explicitly linked homosexuality to the ‘decay’ of the traditional family. During the period of the interim government led by Fabián Alarcón (1997–98), the National Assembly was ratified and, in November 1997, 70 assembly members were designated, representing 11 political parties; among them, only seven were women and none of them had their roots in the women’s movement (Valladares 2003: 39, 47). Within the National Assembly, two general ideological blocs, comprising party coalitions, developed quickly: a centreright bloc and a centre-left bloc.13 The policy atmosphere was still decidedly neoliberal during this period; there was no discussion of socialism on the political horizon. During the several month-long process, assembly members debated exhaustively what should be included in the new Constitution, with an eye towards stabilizing political, legal and economic institutions and overcoming the crisis of representation. Throughout these discussions, rhetoric about ‘the family’ as the foundation of the nation’s citizenry stood out, and assembly members battled over how to define ‘the family’ in relation to almost every realm of decision-making: child and family welfare, the protection of ‘vulnerable’ groups (for example, indigenous, AfroEcuadorian, female heads of household, children, women, gays and lesbians), and the effects of broader economic and social policies and planning processes on Ecuadorian families and legally defined vulnerable communities or individuals. Members of civil society also participated in the Assembly: in particular, representatives from the indigenous movement and the women’s movement played key roles in the process. LGBTTI activists also actively participated, although in smaller numbers. They created working groups, designed proposals, and presented them to the Assembly. Some of these participants played roles in both

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civil society and the state. For example, two feminist organizations, Coordinadora Política de las Mujeres Ecuatorianas and Foro Permanente de la Mujer Ecuatoriana, and the state women’s agency, Consejo Nacional de la Mujer (CONAMU), jointly prepared a document with their proposals for constitutional change, Nosotras en la Constitución: propuestas de las mujeres ecuatorianas a la Asamblea Constituyente (We Women in the Constitution: Ecuadorian Women’s Proposals to the National Assembly; CPME/FPME/CONAMU 1998). Several other women’s organizations, including Movimiento de Mujeres de Guayaquil, Mujeres por la Democracia, Mujeres Luchando por la Vida, la Coordinadora de Salud y Género, Frente Democrático de Mujeres and Movimiento de Mujeres de Pichincha, and women from political parties and other social movements also participated in meetings with the three sponsoring groups to help draft the report. This document, which was sponsored by 35 assembly members, included several points about women’s rights with no reference to sexual identity. Additional proposals from women’s and feminist groups were also presented by members of the Assembly. Some individuals and groups, such as the Colectivo Feministas por la Autonomía, explicitly chose not to be included in the proposal because, in their view, it did not go far enough in framing the issue of rights for all women.14 In the end, 34 out of the 36 proposals submitted by women were incorporated into the 1998 Constitution.15 A significant discursive struggle took place within assembly meetings that challenged yet also reinforced racialized regimes of heteronormativity in Ecuadorian governance and development. The commission set up to analyse women’s rights was called the Commission for Women, Children and the Family (Comisión de la mujer, el niño y la familia, or Commission VII), automatically linking discussions of women’s rights to those of child welfare and (presumably procreative) family health and well-being. Debates within the Assembly regarding ‘the family’ revolved in part around a proposal that called for the following addition to the Constitution: ‘The state shall recognize and protect distinct forms of nuclear families as household units with equal rights and opportunities of its members, with the aim of providing welfare, protection and mutual respect. It will support, in particular, minors and female heads of household.’ This proposal, stemming from the Assembly’s mission

‘re voluti on wi th a woman’s face ’? | 79 to redefine ‘vulnerable groups’ in the Constitution, led to a series of debates about how to define the family, much of which centred on whether the legal definition of the family should be expanded or whether the traditional model of a heterosexual two-parent household should be preserved. Some assembly members, for example, argued that including this language in the Constitution would help ‘foment same-sex households’ and help ‘open the doors to same-sex marriage rights, and the freedom to adopt among homosexual couples’, and therefore lead to the overall ‘degradation of the family’.16 In contrast, supporters argued that this proposal was not meant to ‘stimulate abnormal same-sex partnerships’ but rather to support ‘households with integrity, above all those led by single women who have been expelled from the familial breast and are obligated to form a household without the complementary presence of a father’. The language of this proposal was included in the final Constitution, although it reinforces a heteronormative logic in that it legitimizes the nuclear heterosexual family while leaving unprotected other forms of kinship and domestic partnerships that are not constituted in state-sanctioned marriage or common law marriage (uniones de hecho). It is only in the realm of marriage that ‘love, the exercise of sexuality, and reproduction are legitimate’; consequently, it is only through marriage that hereditary, conjugal and other civil rights are legally defined (Valladares 2003: 90). Similar arguments were made by conservative assembly members during discussions concerning the inclusion of sexual orientation in the Constitution’s anti-discrimination clause; this was ultimately included, making Ecuador the first country in the region to have such legislation.17 As with expanding the definition of the family, it was argued that protecting citizens on the basis of sexual orientation could lead to an increase in same-sex households and same-sex parent adoptions and the degradation of the heterosexual family. At least one assembly member linked HIV/AIDS to homosexuals, implying that gay men are the primary carriers and therefore culprits of the perceived epidemic in Ecuador (Valladares 2003: 142). Interestingly, however, some assembly members defended this clause, and ultimately the majority supported it. Indigenous leader, lawyer and former Minister of Foreign Relations Nina Pacari, for example, supported the proposal on the basis that all groups of people should be able to live free of discrimination. Others pointed out that,

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historically, homosexuality had been treated as a crime according to Ecuadorian law and used as a justification for discrimination, including in the recent incident in Cuenca; yet others cited the history of the pathologizing of homosexuality as a mental disorder as yet another way in which discrimination on this basis had been justified and condoned by a variety of societal institutions and actors. It is important to note that the adoption of this language did not come about explicitly as a result of the presence of the women’s movement in the assembly meetings. In fact, while the women’s movement representatives may have been sympathetic to including such language (and, indeed, some of them are lesbians themselves), they did not locate its importance centrally in their documents, including in the most widely supported publication, Nosotras en la Constitución. This caused some falling out between groups such as the Autonomous Feminists Collective, which fought for a broader definition of ‘women’ in the language of the Constitution, and those who sought a more reformist agenda – arguably one more likely to be approved – that fell within the range of normative familial arrangements; that is, within the heteronormative social order. Interestingly, as I discuss in the next section, LGBTTI activists initially had more of an opening with the Correa administration than did feminists, which may reflect this history and also, importantly, the fact that homosexuality has become more acceptable whereas traditionally understood feminist issues (especially reproductive rights) have not – an aspect of regimes of racialized heteronormativity that shapes the current political landscape in Ecuador and in other countries as well, in both the global South and North. Elsewhere I have examined this phenomenon of state ‘homoprotectionism’ – the removal of masculinist state protection for women, especially indigenous women (see Lind and Keating 2013). The 2008 Constitution and Correa’s redistributive agenda Following the ‘long neoliberal night’ – a term President Correa has used to describe the neoliberal period – the Correa administration once again attempted to ‘remake the nation’ through constitutional reform.18 One of the administration’s first measures was a referendum calling for a National Constituent Assembly. In April 2007, 80 per cent of the Ecuadorian electorate approved the referendum to convoke an assembly to redraft the Constitution. A year later, two-thirds of the

‘re voluti on wi th a woman’s face ’? | 81 voters approved the new Constitution that had been drafted largely under the control of Correa’s Alianza País coalition government, which held a majority of the seats in the Constituent Assembly (Becker 2011). Before the Assembly began its work, civil society was invited to submit proposals. A committee of jurists representing the university community and the Ecuadorian government developed the content submitted by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and interest groups (Marcos and Cordero 2009). Feminist organizations put forward a variety of proposals; most of them built on the 1998 Constitution. Several LGBTTI groups also submitted proposals that ranged in theme and purpose: for example, some supported same-sex marriage, while others were critical of that approach and supported a complete redefinition of the family and marriage.19 The new Constitution was passed in October 2008, replacing the 1998 Constitution. The overall framework of the new Ecuadorian Political Constitution defines the state as ‘constitutional, rights and justice-based, social, democratic, sovereign, independent, unitary, intercultural, plurinational and secular’. Following the principle of sumac kawsay or buen vivir, it is based on respect for sovereignty and self-determination in terms of ‘economy, political life, finances, food, culture and environment’ (Marcos and Cordero 2009: 3). For the first time ever, the Constitution granted inalienable rights to nature: Article 1 of the ‘Rights for nature’ chapter reads: ‘Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structures, functions and its processes in evolution’ (Asamblea Constituyente 2008; see also Revkin 2008, Mychalejko 2008). The Constitution also asserts the right to water and the right to protest. At the same time, Spanish was designated as the official language (Quichua was dropped from the draft at the last minute, due to political pressures) and, despite the new language concerning the rights of nature, there is no constitutional clause mandating free, prior and informed consent by communities for development projects that would affect their local ecosystems, thus giving no leverage or power to indigenous communities living on lands where oil or other raw materials are extracted. Some positive changes were made with respect to sexual and gender rights: Article 11.2 of the 2008 Constitution now includes an anti-discrimination clause on the basis of gender identity as well

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as sexual orientation.20 New hate crime language is included in the Constitution and, although it does not make reference to specific groups based on social recognition, it has the potential to be used in cases of human rights abuses and other forms of harassment against LGBTTI individuals (in the workplace, for example).21 In addition, the legal definition of ‘the family’ was revised in sections of the Constitution, specifically by changing the definition from one based on blood kinship to one based on other social factors such as household composition or living arrangement.22 This opened up multiple possibilities for the extension of state benefits and legal protections (including domestic partnerships) to nonnormative families, including same-sex households but also migrant, transnational, communal and other non-normative forms of kinship (Lind 2008, Herrera 2011). In theory, individuals or couples could potentially draw on traditional common law marriage laws to expand that form of legal recognition to same-sex couples; this, however, would need to be challenged in court and would occur within a political environmental fraught with homophobic impulses.23 Interestingly, although the definition of ‘the family’ was expanded in the 2008 Constitution, the religious right was able to coalesce within the Assembly and successfully block same-sex marriage in the new Constitution. Since the 1998 Assembly, the transnational religious right had gained a much stronger hold in the country, a process that has yet to be documented adequately except through anecdotal evidence.24 A few key issues emerged during the referendum campaign as the most visible points of contention, including the right to decide on one’s body, the right to abortion and the right to samesex marriage or unions (Marcos and Cordero 2009).25 From the beginning of his term in office, President Correa stated his position against the recognition of these rights. Alliances between lesbian– feminist and trans activists were key, however, for advancing their claims before the Assembly. Their demands included: 1) a system for protection against discrimination; 2) a more detailed and progressive definition of sexual and reproductive rights, compared with their description in the 1998 Constitution; 3) recognition of alternative families and a gender-neutral definition of de facto unions; 4) the inclusion of one article in the section on the right to life that would allow the decriminalization of abortion in secondary legislation; 5) punishment for hate crimes based on gender and sexual diversity;

‘re voluti on wi th a woman’s face ’? | 83 6) entitlement to and enforceability of collective rights; 7) wide protections (e.g. in employment and housing); 8) a non-partisan constitutional court; and 9) secular ethics as the interpretative principle for the law (see also Marcos and Cordero 2009).26 Of these demands, the recognition of diverse or alternative families did take place to some degree, as language addressing migrant or transnational families and families not based on kinship or blood was incorporated into several sections of the Constitution. Similarly, gender identity was added to Article 11.2. However, the decriminalization of abortion remained untouched, as did the (heteronormative) institution of marriage. Thus one can conclude that the Constitution does indeed provide expanding state power to ‘protect’ a wider range of citizens and allow for their access to state benefits, including through law and policy. That is, the ‘national family’ has been expanded to include non-normative families and households, with important implications for transnational migrant families and same-sex households, among others. The question remains, though, how these constitutional changes will translate into institutional, material and cultural changes that truly move beyond the neoliberal family norm and shift the social reproduction imaginary. To what extent is there a post-neoliberal future that defies heteronormative logic? Querying ‘El buen vivir’: initial impacts, post-neoliberal futures In most discussions about the shift to the left in Ecuador and throughout Latin America, observers focus on redistribution as it impacts upon economic development, social class, or indigenous communities; few recognize the centrality of heteronormative social reproduction in shaping the contours of the debates, and thus the future(s) of post-neoliberalism and neoliberalism. Correa’s ‘revolution with a woman’s face’ can be seen, on the one hand, as an old idea stemming from earlier socialist revolutions that viewed women through a paternalistic lens, as reproducers and defenders of the revolutionary nation, and, on the other hand, as a historical variation of capitalist development discourse, including UNICEF’S neoliberal ‘adjustment with a human face’ approach, which addressed the ‘social costs of [neoliberal] economic restructuring’ and targeted women in their maternal roles as biological and social reproducers (Cornia et al. 1987). In all of these scenarios, reproduction is implicitly or explicitly seen as

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central to development, yet left mostly unexamined except through a heteronormative, maternalist lens. This is the case despite the now vast feminist scholarship on gender, families and neoliberalism. As scholars have pointed out, for decades now the ‘neoliberal family’ has been taught to serve as a ‘miniature welfare state’ (Lancaster 2003), as key protective functions of the state have been lost (Briggs n.d.); its struggles have been privatized and institutionalized (Lind and Share 2003); and its desires are viewed as both ‘biologically fixed’ (i.e. as products of nature) and as the vehicle for economic modernization (Lancaster, cited in Stürgeon 2010: 106). This leaves us with an increasingly unclear understanding of both feminism and the left, particularly as post-neoliberal forms of governance appropriate feminist discourse, and as feminists are divided on whether or not to support the Citizen Revolution. At a parallel event to the World Social Forum on 29 January 2009, with President Rafael Correa at his side, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez once famously declared himself a feminist: ‘I now declare myself a feminist,’ he said. ‘A real socialist has to be a feminist. If not, there is something wrong with him … Simón Bolívar was a great feminist.’ He went on to commend Manuela Sáenz, Simón Bolívar’s lover, who is known as the ‘liberator of the liberators’ (‘la liberadora de los liberadores’); she spent much of her life in what is now Ecuador and has become something of a national feminist symbol (see Lind 2005: Chapter 5). President Correa has not declared himself a ‘feminist’, although interestingly his administration has utilized and appropriated heteronormative feminist discourse to seek support for its reforms while simultaneously weakening feminists’ roles in the state. Civil society-based feminist organizations are largely fragmented, a result of divisiveness concerning ideology and also clientelistic politics (i.e. some feminist groups have benefited directly from the Citizen Revolution more than others), and also a longerterm result of generational and ideological differences between selfdefined feminists over their goals and political desires.27 The question remains, then, as to when feminist discourse matters, and how and to what extent the revolutionary potential of the 2008 Constitution will actually be implemented. To conclude, I address the initial impacts of Correa’s Citizen Revolution in this section, with the aim of querying the Ecuadorian post-neoliberal project and drawing out the implications of this case

‘re voluti on wi th a woman’s face ’? | 85 for broader debates concerning sovereignty, redistribution and social reproduction. Generally speaking, despite the revolutionary potential of the 2008 Constitution, initial actions may speak louder than words: the Correa administration’s agenda clearly promotes a heteronormative social and economic order. Following the Constitution’s passage, President Correa dismantled the National Women’s Council (CONAMU). CONAMU had been in existence since 1998 and was built on earlier institutional versions of a state women’s agency that date back to 1980. Based on Articles 156 and 157 of the Constitution, his aim was to ‘transition’ the agency into a council whose purpose included ‘addressing inequalities between men and women and those based on sexual orientation and gender identity within the infrastructure of the Council itself’ (Marcos and Cordero 2009: 4). According to the 2008 Constitution, this council was to be one of five councils addressing inequality in the areas of ‘gender, ethnic, generational, intercultural, disability and human mobility’ (Article 156). To achieve this institutional permanence, each council must first pass a law based on guidelines stemming from the 2008 Constitution; some of these laws already existed, some did not. Until 2014, the proposed commission focusing on gender was the only council without a legal basis and remained a ‘transitional commission’ for several years.28 In July 2014, an equal opportunity law was finally passed, after being blocked by assembly members for years, allowing for a permanent National Commission for Gender Equality (Consejo Nacional para la Igualdad de Género). Between 2007 and 2014, there was no permanent state agency that oversaw women’s issues per se, leaving a wide institutional gap with regard to gender equity policies, laws and education, and also an absence of mechanisms to address issues concerning sexual orientation and gender identity. In addition, possibly due to a lack of funding, a National Women’s Bank was never created nor, to my knowledge, even discussed after the campaign. Additional mechanisms were proposed in 2008 to operationalize the anti-discrimination clauses in the judicial and criminal justice branches of the government. While there have been some employee training programmes led by subcontracted NGOs, little has been done to reform them. What has been successful is Correa’s development bonds programme (Programa de Bonos de Desarrollo Humano), which provides a government-financed monthly

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distribution to qualifying poor households. However, it is not yet clear whether ‘diverse families’, such as non-kinship-based households, are benefiting from this social policy. There was an attempt by the transitional commission to include diverse families in the proposed Equal Opportunity Law but this language was removed before the final version was approved by the National Assembly. There is no concrete evidence showing how or whether the government’s redistributive programmes, including the development bonds programme, are benefiting diverse families. What is clear is that Correa continues to receive relatively high approval ratings in national polls, which most observers attribute to his development bonds programme and to his general populist approach to redistributing wealth to the poor.29 The feminist movement is largely fragmented now due to the lack of state mechanisms for addressing gender inequality, and the indigenous movement is completely alienated from, and increasingly repressed by, the government. Unlike Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro (2013–present), both of whom have relied on a large oil reserve and have made no legal or policy promises to address forms of marginalization other than social class, Correa has much less funding for his revolution and necessarily relies on oil revenues, which place his administration in direct contradiction with the 2008 Constitution. Clearly, this reality also shapes Correa’s views on his National Plan for Living Well 2009–13. Although the Constitution guarantees rights to nature, the Correa administration has repeatedly prioritized economic growth, particularly in the country’s resource extraction sector, over protecting nature, including indigenous rights to territory and livelihood. Not unlike neoliberalism, Correa’s buen vivir philosophy, although it emphasizes compatibility among capitalist and solidarity economies, nonetheless prioritizes the integration of historically marginalized sectors – legally defined ‘vulnerable’ groups – into capitalist development; it does not emphasize environmental sustainability over economic growth, despite political rhetoric to the contrary. Furthermore, despite the new Constitution’s clause granting the right to protest, the Correa administration has in fact criminalized anti-mining and indigenous social movements because of their opposition to the state (Moore 2010, Becker 2015). To some extent, the new Constitution opened up the possibility for new subjectivities and economic futures to be imagined. Yet,

‘re volu ti on wi th a woman’s face ’? | 87 interestingly, some of these achievements occurred through a strange mix of heteronormative and neoliberal logic that fundamentally clashes with buen vivir discourses of sustainability and inclusivity. The gender identity anti-discrimination clause, for example, extends protections to transsexual and transgender individuals, and the legal definition of ‘the family’ has been expanded, yet the overall Constitution frames gender in a normative fashion, thereby reinforcing state paternalism vis-à-vis women, the patriarchal family and reprocentric gender roles. In contrast to the 1998 Constitution, which viewed women largely in an ‘apologetic way’ and represented them largely as ‘victims, vulnerable, marginalized, wounded, hurt, such that they can only be subjects of rights under a conception of tutelage and protection’ (Valladares 2003: 146), the 2008 Constitution broadens the notion of family, extending it beyond kinship and citizen status. In the buen vivir agenda, women are perhaps ‘subjects of rights’ in a potentially wider range of familial arrangements, yet I would argue that they are still framed largely in heteronormative terms. This is good news for many families, including those benefiting from Ecuadorian state social programmes in countries such as Spain with large Ecuadorian migrant populations,30 but perhaps less so for individuals who do not fulfil normative gender and class, race and sexual expectations and continue to be viewed as ‘transgressing’ the boundaries of respectable citizenship and as ‘undeserving’ of reaping the benefits of the Citizen Revolution. Interestingly, the ‘diverse family’ language in the Constitution did not pass due to general agreement on expanding the notion of the family; it passed because many assembly members were focused on blocking the proposed same-sex marriage clause and overlooked the way in which (especially LGBTTI) activists drafted the language redefining the family and household (Lind 2013).31 This irony reveals the insidiousness of passing ‘pro-gay’ or ‘anti-normative’ legislation in an otherwise heteronormative context in which reprocentric discourses of social reproduction continue to be at the centre of postneoliberal discourse. Yet, as Gioconda Herrera notes, ‘it is important to recognize that while this change [in family norms] is not yet a hegemonic discourse, it is already circulating in the corridors of state power and potentially has symbolic use for vindicating the rights of families’ (Herrera 2011: 11). The future, then, depends on the ways in which activists, policy-makers and politicians continue to

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negotiate the terms of the 2008 Constitution and translate them into institutional and policy practices that actually reach ‘diverse families’; among other things, this would entail rethinking the reprocentric framework of Correa’s Citizen Revolution. Notes This chapter is a revised version of Amy Lind, ‘“Revolution with a woman’s face”? Family norms, constitutional reform, and the politics of redistribution in postneoliberal Ecuador’, Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 24 (4): 536–55. The editors gratefully acknowledge Routledge Press and the Taylor & Francis Group for permission to use this material. 1. Alianza País, or Country Alliance, is Correa’s newly created coalition government. ‘País’ also served as an acronym, ‘Patria Altiva y Soberana’, or ‘Proud and Sovereign Homeland’, during his presidential campaign (see Becker 2011: Chapter 6). 2. A portion of this conference is available online in video format. See ‘Rafael Correa se compromete a trabajar por la mujer’ at https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=Au-eiLr1GK8. 3. The Penal Code prohibits abortion except in the case of a woman’s life being endangered or at health risk, or in cases of rape of women with legally proven mental disabilities. One World Health Organization (WHO) study estimates that 95,000 women undergo abortions each year; unsafe abortions cause 18 per cent of maternal mortality in the country (Women on Waves 2008). 4. It is important to note that approximately 1.5 million Ecuadorians, out of a total population of 13 million, have left the country since 1999. Most have migrated to Spain; an earlier wave migrated to the United States (Jokisch 2007, UNFPA/FLACSO 2006). 5. Here I am referring to travesti and/or transgender communal networks. 6. Personal interview with L. Coba, activist, Asamblea Mujeres Populares

Diversas, Quito, Ecuador, 16 February 2012. 7. She resigned from this position in November 2015. 8. This certainly applies as much to the North as to the South. By ‘sexual politics’, I am referring to the terrain in which contemporary actors struggle for the right to self-determination as sexual beings, freedom of sexual and gender expression, and the right to control one’s own body. It includes, but is not limited to, the ‘rights, obligations, recognitions and respect around those most intimate spheres of life – who to live with, how to raise children, how to handle one’s body, how to relate as a gendered being, how to be an erotic person’ (Plummer 2001: 238, see also Cabral and Viturro 2006). This terrain thus extends far beyond the legal, formal or public, and includes political and cultural struggles over what constitutes citizenship, economy and national belonging; how axes of personal or intimate life are structured, including along racial, class, gender and geopolitical lines; and who ‘counts’ as a citizen in the first place. It also exemplifies how and why body politics (for example, abortion or homosexuality) tend to take a central place in national (and global) political

‘re voluti on wi th a woman’s face ’? | 89 discussions, yet are simultaneously viewed as ‘private’ issues. 9. Since 1999, at least 13 countries in the region have voted in officials who espouse anti-neoliberal ideals. 10. Some characterize Correa’s approach as nationalist and Keynesian rather than Marxist (see Becker 2011). 11. Here I am drawing on the gender and development literature on women and neoliberal restructuring, which provides an understanding of how poor women in particular have served as ‘shock absorbers’ for broader economic restructuring processes, including trade liberalization, privatization and state retrenchment measures, in which the burden of social reproduction is shifted to poor families and especially to poor women (Elson 1992a, Benería 1992). 12. Prior to the repeal of that law, individuals faced four to eight years in prison. 13. The centre-right bloc consisted of Democracia Popular, Partido Social Cristiano, Frente Radical Alfarista and Partido Liberal Ecuatoriano; the centre-left bloc comprised Izquierda Democrática, Movimiento Popular Democrático, Partido Roldocista Ecuatoriano and Movimiento Pachakutik–Ciudadanos Nuevo País. 14. Personal interview with Tatiana Cordero, lawyer and co-founder of Taller de Comunicación Mujer, Quito, Ecuador, 19 August 2008. 15. These proposals included the rights to personal integrity and to a life free from violence; to equality before the law and to non-discrimination; to equitable participation of women and men in popular election processes, in management and decision-making public spaces, in the justice system, and in controlling bodies and political parties; to make free and responsible decisions in one’s sexual and reproductive life; to equality and mutual

responsibility in the family and support for women heads of household; to nondiscriminatory education that promotes gender equity; and to co-education. They also included the state obligation to implement public policies and create a national machinery to advance women’s equality (Marcos and Cordero 2009: 3). 16. Assembly members Ricardo Noboa (formerly of the right-wing Partido Social Cristiano) and Marcelo Santos (Partido Social Cristiano) made these arguments (Valladares 2003: 88). 17. The 1998 Constitution recognized for the first time that ‘all people are equal and should enjoy the same rights, liberties and opportunities without discrimination on the basis of age, ethnicity, race, sex, language, religion, political affiliation, social origin, economic position, birth, sexual orientation [ opción sexual], health status, disability or any other kind of difference’. 18. Indeed, constitutional reform has become a key strategy of populistsocialist governance in the region: Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Evo Morales of Bolivia and Rafael Correa have all reformed the Constitution as a way to institutionalize their anti-neoliberal agendas. 19. Personal interview with Elizabeth Vásquez, co-founder of Proyecto Transgénero: Cuerpos Distintos, Derechos Iguales and assistant to 2008 Constitutional Assembly Member, Quito, Ecuador, 23 August 2008. 20. Article 11.2 of the Constitution states that: ‘All persons are equal and will enjoy the same rights, duties and opportunities. Nobody can be discriminated against on the basis of her or his ethnicity, birthplace, age, sex, gender identity, cultural identity, marital status, language, religion, ideology, political affiliation, judicial records,

90 | s exua li t y a n d th e g e n de re d body socio-economic status, migratory status, sexual orientation, health status, HIV status, disability, physical difference, or any other personal or collective, temporary or permanent distinction, that aims at or results in a detriment or nullification of the recognition, enjoyment or exercise of rights. The law will punish all forms of discrimination. The state will adopt affirmative action measures to promote substantive equality in favour of those right bearers who are placed in an unequal situation’ (emphasis added). 21. The Penal Code amendments include the revisions of Article 212.4 and 212.6. Article 212.4 reads as follows: ‘Whoever incites to hatred, disdain, or any form of psychological or physical violence against one or more persons on the basis of their skin color, race, sex, religion, national or ethnic origin, sexual orientation or sexual identity, age, marital status or disability, in public or through any channel suitable for public circulation, will be punished with six months to three years of prison. If any person is harmed (as a result) the penalty will be increased to two to five years of prison, and to twelve to sixteen if the outcome of those violent acts would be the death of a person’ (emphasis added; English translation found in Marcos and Cordero 2009: 4). Article 212.6 extends this same type of protection to the workplace. 22. Personal interview with Elizabeth Vásquez. 23. Personal interview with Elizabeth Vásquez. 24. The most obvious evidence is in the amount of financial and institutional support Ecuadorian right-wing politicians and religious organizations received to successfully block the addition of a same-sex marriage clause in the 2008 Constitution.

25. Also, personal interviews with Elizabeth Vásquez; Maria Paula Roma, Constitutional Assembly Member, Quito, Ecuador, 22 August 2008; and Rocío Rosero, former CONAMU Director and assistant to 2008 Constitutional Assembly Member, Quito, Ecuador, 20 August 2008. 26. Personal interview with Elizabeth Vásquez. 27. In particular, feminists who worked in the state prior to the Citizen Revolution oppose the Correa administration for having dismantled its state women’s agency. The wider civil society-based scenario of feminist organizing is best characterized as a set of often-unrelated organizations and networks that work on specific issues, not as one unified movement. Although this has always been typical of feminist activism in Ecuador, there is more divisiveness now than during the previous neoliberal period (1980–2007). 28. Personal interview with A. L. Herrera, President of Comisión de Transición, Consejo Nacional de las Mujeres y la Igualdad de Género, Quito, Ecuador, 15 February 2012. 29. Correa has been able to decrease poverty levels and establish the development bonds programme by redistributing debt repayment finances to social spending. For example, in 2001, 50 per cent of Ecuador’s gross domestic product (GDP) went to repaying foreign debt; in contrast, in 2009 only 15 per cent of the country’s GDP went to debt repayment. Social spending in 2008 was US$15.8 billion – three times more than spending under the previous three governments combined. Poverty levels have decreased as a result, from 38.3 per cent in 2009 to 31.1 per cent in 2011 (McAfee 2011). 30. Following the waves of outmigration in the early 2000s, the

‘re volu ti on wi th a woman’s face ’? | 91 Ecuadorian state began to allow expatriots to vote in national elections in 2005. Since then, the state has begun to offer extended social services via its embassy to ex-patriots in Spain,

thereby highlighting the state’s shift towards conceptualizing citizenship as transnational. 31. Personal interview with Elizabeth Vásquez.

4 | C LAI MI N G T H E S T A T E : R E V IS IT ING W OM E N ’ S R E P R O D UCT I V E I D ENT IT Y IN I N D I A’S DE V E L O P M E N T P O L I C Y

Rachel Simon-Kumar

Introduction In November 2014, the news of the deaths of 15 women and the hospitalization of 70 women in rural India during a ‘routine’ state-sponsored sterilization camp drew attention once more to the glaring inadequacies of the state’s family welfare programme (Burke 2014a). The alarm that this incident evokes is especially magnified in light of decades-long activism and collaborative work between the grassroots health movement and the government specifically to reform the state’s reproductive health services. Galvanized by transnational feminist movements in the 1990s and aligning with the international population development consensus of the time, the Indian state undertook to revamp its population policies in a way that acknowledged women’s interests at their core. The Reproductive and Child Health policy (RCH) was the outcome of this disquiet. In the 2003 edition of this volume, my contribution centred on an ideological critique of the RCH. I undertook a feminist evaluation exploring the Indian state’s gender ideologies, examining how these ideologies inform particular interpretations of the RCH. The chapter employed the framework of a women, culture and development (WCD) approach, deconstructing the nuanced ways in which the state’s ‘ideologies permeate the workings of political and developmental policy’ (Simon-Kumar 2003: 87). Building on the notion that policy has the power to be constitutive, I argued that structures and practices can either enable or restrict agency and enhance women’s claims to the state. The ‘culture–gender– development’ dynamic in this context focused on the historical institutional values that inform the ways in which the Indian state responds to issues of reproduction and women’s rights, recognizing

c laiming t he stat e | 93 also that these institutional values are reflections of societal, often masculinist, norms. Masculinism, in the context of reproductive health, I noted, was manifest specifically in the managerial, neoliberal focus to socio-cultural, gender problems as well as in the insouciance of policy-makers with regard to the fact that antinatalism is performed on women’s bodies. A WCD frame was posited as a counter to dominant perceptions of development policy as an ‘objective’ problem-solving tool to address women’s material concerns in economic production and reproductive labour as if the interventionist development state was ideologically irrelevant. My chapter in this second edition of Feminist Futures revisits the RCH to explore the link between ideology, state, market and outcomes for women. Extending the concerns raised in the original chapter, it asks the following: what are the outcomes for women through the RCH? What ideologies – feminist or neoliberal – inform the current programme? And how are women’s political, reproductive and productive identities consequently framed? And, in the end, has the RCH enhanced women’s political claims to the state or have particular interpretations of the state rendered it a programme furthering the development agenda? How can the ‘story’ of the RCH inform a WCD approach, with its emphasis on women’s agency? In seeking answers to these questions, in this chapter I undertake a two-step analysis of the RCH. First, I survey a sizeable body of evaluative research produced about the RCH and reproductive health in India in the last decade to investigate claims about the efficacy of its woman-centred approach. From here, I move on to a critique of the normative framework on which the policy rests, highlighting the ideological nexus between the state’s continual focus on economic development and anti-natalism. I argue that, through the RCH, there has been some shift in programme development away from the stringent family planning focus towards a more integrated approach to children’s and women’s health, which has led to some benefits for women’s health generally. However, this focus is, nonetheless, the manifestation of a particular ideological interpretation that deems progress in reproductive health indicators as akin to gender progress itself. In my conclusion, using the strands of a WCD-based critique, I point to the limitations – and, indeed, the explicitly detrimental implications – of such ideology.

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The RCH: India’s paradigm shift India’s family planning programme began in 1951. Until the 1960s, it was still a low-key, voluntary programme catering primarily to the middle class. Family planning started to become a priority under the Third Plan (1961–66), during which the central components of the programme were set up: the establishment of a dedicated Ministry or Department for Family Planning; the institution of the practices of target and goal setting from the macro to the local level; the provision of a suite of ‘modern’ contraceptives, from birth control pills to sterilizations and intra-uterine devices (IUDs); and the development of mass communication services such as social marketing and propaganda around small-family norms (SimonKumar 2006). The Emergency declared by the Indira Gandhi-led Congress government in 1975–77 led to excesses in population control methods; documented evidence of forced vasectomies and camp-style mass sterilizations created popular antipathy towards the Family Planning programme. Upon election in 1977, the incoming Prime Minister Morarji Desai’s Janata Party-led coalition government set about trying to quell the damage to the public reputation of family planning and declared a change in the programme’s name to the ‘Family Welfare’ programme, emphasizing a commitment of the new government to voluntary population control and, importantly, community welfare. For most of the 1980s, the Family Welfare programme advocated a standardized prescription of contraceptives aimed primarily at women: spacing methods such as IUDs were recommended to supplement sterilization, which was essentially the primary method of contraception for married women, and which was strongly encouraged after women had had two children. It was also a programme that was designed to achieve the aggregate fertility and mortality goals set by the government; hence, at grassroots levels, there were strict targets for community development workers to fulfil. Consequently, the community-based Family Welfare programme consisted of ‘motivation’ and ‘incentives’ to achieve these targets within a limited spectrum of contraceptive choice. It was into the above scenario that the discourse of reproductive health entered the global discourse of population and development. Originating in the transnational activism of feminists located in both the global South and the ‘West’, reproductive and sexual health was the outcome of a cogent, rights-based scholarship and practice.

c l aiming t he stat e | 95 Feminist scholars and activists, in what must be an example of one of the first instances of global networking, successfully represented a coherent policy alternative at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo in 1994, calling for a new agenda for addressing population issues. Advancing gender equality and equity and the empowerment of women, and the elimination of all kinds of violence against women, and ensuring women’s ability to control their own fertility, are cornerstones of population and development-related programmes. The human rights of women and the girl child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights. The full and equal participation of women in civil, cultural, economic, political and social life, at the national, regional and international levels, and the eradication of all forms of discrimination on grounds of sex, are priority objectives of the international community. (Principle 4 in UNFPA 1994: 12) The ICPD is seen as a ‘milestone’ in the history of population and development (UNFPA 1994). It introduced into population policy new vocabulary and discourse that had hitherto been part of the feminist lobby: ‘informed choice’, ‘rights-based’, ‘quality of care’ and ‘client-oriented’. This new discourse was the basis of significant policy revisioning that sought to provide universal access to reproductive and sexual health services, ensure gender equality and empowerment through education for girls, recognize the social and cultural dimensions of population programmes, and integrate global, regional, national and local planning and monitoring from a perspective of sustainable development (UNFPA 1994). The Programme of Action (PoA) of the ICPD was extended at the ICPD+5 review in 1999 and informed the development of the eight millennium development goals (MDGs) as well as the post-2015 MDG agenda (UNFPA 1994). India was among the 179 countries that signed up to the ICPD PoA. At the time, scholars pointed to the ‘major paradigm shift’ (Pachauri 2004: 14) that it was expected to usher in. Within a year of the conference the government revised its Family Welfare programme in line with the ICPD’s recommendations. In 1996, it introduced the target-free approach (TFA), which aimed to eliminate the state’s

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practice of enforcing numerical targets through grassroots workers. In the period immediately after the introduction of the TFA, there was a decline in the acceptance of contraception and growing concern among policy-makers at the perceived misinterpretation among local workers that they did not need to promote contraception anymore. The TFA was consequently replaced with decentralized participatory planning (DPP), which reintroduced targets; however, in accordance with the spirit of client-oriented and bottom-up development, targets were not decided at the national or district level but by the communities themselves. The Reproductive and Child Health policy (RCH) was formalized in 1997. It comprised a programme of services around maternal, neonatal and child health, adolescent reproductive health, reproductive morbidity and sexual health, facilities for safe abortions, better infrastructure and accessibility to services, among others. One government RCH policy document pointed out that ‘RCH is equivalent to Family Planning + CSSM [Child Survival and Safe Motherhood] + prevention of RTIs [reproductive tract infections]/STD [sexually transmitted diseases] and AIDS + client approach to providing FW [family welfare] and Health Care Services’ (Government of India 1997, cited in Simon-Kumar 2006: 115). As I commented in the original chapter of this volume, ‘the RCH, prima facie, appears to be grounded in a valid concern about the reproductive well-being of the women and the social circumstances under which they are able to exercise reproductive decisions’ (Chatterjee 1996 cited in Simon-Kumar 2003: 81). The programme certainly offered a range of services that can be seen as ‘gender sensitive’: counselling and intervention for contraceptive care; a package of antenatal (mainly the provision of tetanus toxoid injections and iron and folic acid tablets), delivery and post-natal services for maternal care; RTI/STD services; and adolescent healthcare (Government of India 1997, cited in SimonKumar 2006; see also Kumar 2002). Services were aimed at diverse target groups (adolescents, children, infants, couples and women) and sought to be quality-oriented and client-centred. In addition, there were initiatives to decentralize the programme; communitybased auxiliary nurse midwives (ANMs) were required to set up community needs assessment action plans identifying from the grassroots up the needs of a community. Training to improve service provision was an important component of the programme, as were

c laiming t he stat e | 97 efforts to strengthen the delivery structures. In all, these efforts were seen as a ‘bold’ approach (Visaria et al. 1999). A second phase of the RCH, the RCH-II, was launched in April 2005 for a five-year period under the banner of the government’s new National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) initiative; this was set up in the same year to address the geographical discrepancies in health outcomes and specifically aimed to strengthen public systems delivering health. The second phase was designed in line with the outcomes as outlined in the MDGs, the National Population Policy (2000), the Tenth Plan (2002–07) and the National Health Policy (2002) (Maternal & Child Health n.d.). Under the RCH-II, the objectives of the programme focused on three areas: 1) reducing infant mortality rates (IMRs); 2) reducing maternal mortality rates (MMRs); and 3) reducing total fertility rates (TFRs). The RCH-II led to greater decentralization of the programme, increased flexibility in programming and increased financial allocations to employ and train the ANMs (Vora et al. 2009). New roles for women within villages were created – namely the accredited social health activist or ASHA – to serve as an interface between the community and the public health system (Government of India n.d.). There was an emphasis on increasing the number of institutional deliveries, including through cash incentives (the Janani Suraksha Yojana), partnerships with large non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and training for ANMs to manage pregnancy complications (Vora et al. 2009). It was also a period that involved greater consultations with women’s groups (see, for example, Duggal and Ramachandran 2004). It is estimated that under the RCH-II/NRHM, 750,000 new health workers, 47,000 additional ANMs and 27,000 new nurses were inducted into the health system; these were accompanied by the integration of disease control programmes in the communities or population, and the setting up of 450,000 village health and sanitation committees and 29,000 patient welfare committees. Emergency obstetric care has been introduced or strengthened in several parts of the country, including the deployment of over 1,000 mobile medical units and nearly 3,000 new ambulances (Paul et al. 2011). Early evaluations of the programme in the wake of its implementation, including my own, had expressed concerns that it seemed to not fully understand women’s empowerment and rights (Datta and Misra 2000, Kumar 2002, Simon-Kumar 2003, 2006).

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Datta and Misra argued that ‘rights’ and ‘health’ were seen as two separate fields, so the programme was in danger of becoming ‘grass without roots’ (Datta and Misra 2000: 24). It was evident that what was overtly a limited understanding of the notions of ‘reproductive health’ was in essence a reinterpretation (or ‘translation’) of feminist concepts into a neoliberal and anti-natalist frame (Simon-Kumar 2003). This reinterpretation in turn reconstitutes the political identity of women, turning their claims of reproductive justice into an agenda of reproductive efficiency for the state (Simon-Kumar 2003). The elapse of nearly two decades since the original programme now offers space for reflection and evaluation of the programme’s outcomes. The next section provides an overview of some of the recent evaluative scholarship of the RCH, ranging from independent government-sponsored reports to academic critique, in order to assess the outcomes of the programme as a precursor to developing my critique of the state’s ideologies and its impact on women’s reproductive agency and, ultimately, political identity. A programme evaluation Much of the evaluative literature covers one or more of the following three areas: health and population outcomes; management or administration of the system; and, to a lesser degree, issues of social and gender equity. The core health and population outcomes of the RCH are infant mortality, maternal mortality and fertility levels. Aligning with India’s national population and development goals, the overarching aim of the programme, according to the RCH-I documents, was ‘to reduce infant and maternal mortality eventually contributing to the stabilisation of the population and improve the health status of women and children’ (Government of India 1997, cited in SimonKumar 2003: 83). Recent evaluation reports suggest that these are the three areas where there is considerable improvement, even though set goals have not been reached. According to the evaluation statistics presented in the Government of India’s 8th Joint Review Mission report (Ministry of Health and Family Welfare 2011), nationally, MMRs have decreased from 327 per 100,000 live births in 1999–2001 to 212 in 2007–09, against the RCH-II goals of under 100 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. Infant mortality decreased from 68 in 2000 to 47 (per 1,000 live births) in 2010 against a goal of under

c laiming t he stat e | 99 30. The TFR declined from 3.2 in 2000 to 2.6 in 2009, against the target of 2.1 (Ministry of Health and Family Welfare 2007, 2011).1 There has also been an increase in institutional deliveries attributed to the cash incentive offered by the state (Vora et al. 2009, Paul et al. 2011),2 improved antenatal care (Paul et al. 2011), and a rise in contraceptive use by eligible couples (Ministry of Health and Family Welfare 2011). There are regional and temporal discrepancies in the achievement of these health goals – in the 2008 review of the programme, four categories of states were identified: Category 1 (which included Kerala, Goa and Sikkim) were high-performing states and Category 4 (including Bihar, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Assam) were poorly performing ones. By 2011, Kerala and Tamil Nadu had achieved all the stipulated RCH outcomes while other states were still to realize them. Temporally, the evaluations suggest that the period of the RCH-I was not a particularly successful one and it has been only after 2005 that some improvements in health outcomes have started to show. Srinivasan, Shekhar and Arokiasamy (2007), for instance, argue that, despite the doubling of per capita expenditure after 1998, the pace of change during 1998–2005 for indicators such as immunization of children and the percentage of couples using modern contraception was slower than the gains made in the period prior to RCH-I (i.e. 1992–93) and during the RCH-I period (i.e. 1998–99). The slowdown, note the authors, is evident even in the stellar states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, but this is less significant given their already high RCH coverage. Bhatia et al. (2006) highlight similar results showing that childhood immunization, especially among the poor, stagnated during RCH-I (1998–2005) compared with pre-RCH (1992–98). Additionally, in a rural–urban comparison, Pallikadavath, Foss and Stones (2004) found that medical assistance at delivery and antenatal care remained at low levels especially among rural women. Vora et al.’s 2009 evaluation of maternal healthcare between 1992 and 2006 also supports this finding; there has been an overall increase in institutional deliveries but these were mostly in urban areas, among wealthier or more literate women, and mostly in the private sector. Despite the increase in institutional deliveries, the level and quality of antenatal care was poor – levels of anaemia in pregnant women were on the rise in this period and very few women sought post-delivery care. To Vora et al. (2009: 189), this signals

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an ‘overall slow progress’ despite the national safe motherhood programmes, CSSM (1992–96), and phases 1 and 2 of the RCH. The reasons for these improvements are attributed to changes in the management of the programme starting in 2005. The RCH-I, set up with World Bank loans, was largely directed by the Bank and had not been quite ‘owned’ by the Indian state (Paul et al. 2011). The NRHM, on the other hand, provided ballast to locally design and implement a programme that was responsive to community needs. Shiffman and Ved’s (2007) analysis using a ‘policy streams agenda’ framework also arrives at a similar finding. They demonstrate that, in 2005, given a unique confluence of factors, including strong domestic evidence-based policy work and political commitment, maternal mortality was put on the policy agenda for the first time. The RCH-II in particular rode on this wave of interest, for which dividends are still being generated (see also Vora et al. 2009). Yet, notwithstanding some gains, there are still areas where women’s health has remained insufficiently addressed by the programme. Paul et al. note that the IMR results, assessed globally, are inexcusably high and show up a significant failure of the programme. They report that, although maternal care has shifted from large to small hospitals, and from the private to the public sector (Paul et al. 2011: 339), concerns over maternal and child health still remain. In fact, the diversion of funding and political attention to the Janani Suraksha Yojana has meant that, while there is greater focus on ensuring institutional presence at the time of delivery, other programmes for infant and maternal care have suffered. Their analysis shows that even though the number of institutional deliveries has increased, most mothers and babies are discharged within hours of delivery because hospitals lack amenities and families want to return home after receiving the cash incentive. Thus, these women miss out on newborn counselling, establishment of breast feeding and stabilization of the mother and child post-partum (Paul et al. 2011: 338; see also Joshi and Sivaram 2014). Consequently, in 2008, the neonatal mortality rate was 35 for every 1,000 live births, with more than two-thirds of infant deaths happening in the first 28 days of life. As Paul et al. put it, ‘India still has a long way to go to reach its declared goals’ (2011: 332). From a WCD perspective, the selective prioritization within women’s maternal healthcare of institutionalization and the insufficient understanding of the cultural contexts in

c laiming t he stat e | 101 which women go through pregnancy and childbirth once again point to the absence of holistic cultural development frameworks to inform reproductive health programmes. Further, there is a critique that the RCH has not addressed issues of access to safe abortion in the country, which continues to be a concern (Duggal and Ramachandran 2004, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare 2011: 21, Paul et al. 2011). Programmes for adolescents in reproductive and sexual health, nutritional counselling and menstrual hygiene need greater development, including the involvement of boys in these programmes (Nath and Garg 2008, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare 2011: 27). Social and gender inequities also emerge as integral to the implementation of the programme. Small-scale survey studies (Srivastava et al. 2008) suggest that public hospitals are used by ‘backward’ or scheduled classes; the higher the level of education, the lower the use of public health services. Further, nonsatisfaction among these low-income users of public health services was in the range of 16 per cent to 25 per cent. Studies point out that there was a greater likelihood of institutional deliveries being attended by skilled professionals among the literate and wealthier (Pallikadavath et al. 2004, Vora et al. 2009, Sanneving et al. 2013); in fact, medical assistance at delivery and in antenatal care remained at low levels among the poor while contraceptive use increased more quickly (Mohanty and Pathak 2009). However, gender inequality was also prevalent in ‘pure’ form: that is, outside class considerations (Iyer et al. 2007; see also Sen and Iyer 2012, Sen et al. 2002, 2002a). Research demonstrates that men from poor households had the same treatment outcomes as women whose household incomes were greater than that of poor households, clearly pointing to a ‘gender bias’ in access to health services. In reproductive healthcare, such a bias manifests from early in an infant’s life; Paul et al. (2011), for instance, show that for every two male infants only one girl infant is admitted to a health facility. Sex ratios, an indirect estimate of female foeticide, continue to be low in states including Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Gujarat and Rajasthan (Paul et al. 2011). Further, where there were free services – such as immunization – gender inequality was low, but where there was payment attached to services (for acute respiratory infections and diarrhoea, for instance), sex differentials in treatment were high (Ministry of Health and Family Welfare 2011: 18). The RCH’s solutions to reproductive health – especially the

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focus on service provision – do not adequately take into account the ‘causes’ underlying the ‘causes’ of women’s poor health outcomes. They also overlook issues around sexual and domestic violence that affect women’s reproductive health, even in ‘stellar’ states such as Kerala (Thresia and Mohindra 2011). Finally, evaluations have pointed to the systemic factors that are barriers to achieving goals and widespread access to reproductive health services. Governance issues, resourcing, improved management and co-ordination, poor contractual relationships and non-availability of personnel are among the issues that have been highlighted (Bhat et al. 2007, Mavalankar and Vora 2008, Paul et al. 2011). In particular, Srinivasan, Shekhar and Arokiasamy (2007) show how the workload of ANMs have increased significantly as much of the responsibility for providing a range of RCH services falls onto them. Verma and Prinja (2007) found an over-reporting of RCH service coverage by health workers when, in fact, there were problems in recording and in information systems; only about 10 per cent of health workers actually maintained eligible couple and child information registers as required by the programme. Prinja, Lal and Verma (2007) also found that the community needs assessment was inadequate as ANMs did not have the capability to prepare action plans. Overall, although ANMs have been provided with training to take on additional responsibilities, the institutional co-ordination between the old and new systems has been too fractured for this training to be utilized effectively. Even though ANMs were being given training to deal with deliveries, they were still heavily involved in motivating couples to accept family planning (Mavalankar and Vora 2008). The new ASHA programme, note the authors, has added further confusion to the provision of an integrated service. Overall, the evaluations point out that the focus on IMR, MMR and TFR in and of themselves as goals has been unevenly successful. Further, the evaluations suggest that the current programme focus has reinforced existing inequalities or created new ones. From a gender perspective, there are still areas of gender or women’s health that have been insufficiently addressed. Importantly, what these programmatic assessments indicate is that the RCH has facilitated changes in women’s ‘condition’, or what Moser (1993) labels as practical needs, rather than in their ‘position’ or strategic needs. It is the latter, a wider set of social and gender changes, that positively impacts

c laiming t he stat e | 103 on women’s political identity in their families and communities and in relation to the state that is envisaged, from a WCD perspective, as the ultimate goal of development. Contrary to much state-led development practice, where benefits are often delivered as piecemeal outcomes that are narrowly focused on the removal of conditions of deprivation, a WCD perspective of development entails a state in which women exercise autonomy, engage respect and can make choices in the fullest possible way in their social, cultural and political milieu. To critically appraise development through this WCD lens, the question that is posed is not only whether women-centred programmes were delivered, but rather why only selective aspects of development were delivered as ‘women-centred’. Ultimately, this requires an exploration of the deep-seated values of what the state is trying to change for women. This critique of the state’s values is the focus of the feminist evaluation explored in the next section. From programme evaluation to feminist WCD evaluation ‘You know, this new thing has come in now. It’s creating a lot of problems.’ ‘What?’ ‘This reproductive health thing.’ ‘… And this other new thing has also come in.’ ‘What?’ we asked again. ‘This gender thing,’ he said. (cited in Datta and Misra 2000: 24; conversation between the authors and an NGO programme officer in India) If the ‘gender thing’ required the state’s many public servants to grapple with a woman-centred approach to population and development, throwing the system into temporary disarray, the dust has settled enough in the last two decades to discern what the landscape of reproductive health in India looks like – what, in its programmatic translation, is privileged in policy and how it constitutes women’s identities. A feminist evaluation that questions the taken-for-granted values underpinning the RCH reveals the constructedness of the policy and its implications for women. When introduced post-Cairo, reproductive health and services were framed against a vibrant discourse of claims to rights for all

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citizens, and against a vision of empowerment for women within their socio-cultural contexts. As reproductive health moved from discourse to a system of institutionalized programmes in the last two decades, the RCH has come to be re-established in its former antinatalist and managerial frames that, in some respects, have improved women’s reproductive conditions, but that largely diminish rather than augment the claims of women to political agency. I develop this argument through a critique of the manner in which the key goals and the priorities of the programme are framed. The top RCH goals stated in the language of ‘infant mortality’, ‘maternal mortality’ and ‘fertility rates’ reinforce the official anxiety with national population growth and economic development, where women and children are not the agents of reproductive health policy per se but rather are agents of development change. Casper and Simmons (2014), in an illuminating essay, critique the use of IMR or infant death in the international literature as a symbol of the health of a nation. IMR, they point out, is not framed in terms of grief and trauma associated with the loss of a child but as a standardized, socio-technical object, and a shared technology that allows global assessment of risk (Casper and Simmons 2014). Using Foucault’s idea of biopower as a framework for critique, the authors question the use of infant mortality as a biopolitical object, especially its functions as a passive descriptor of a failed state or an active mobilizer for action: ‘What if gender empowerment – seen as multi-dimensional, stratified and highly variable over time – and not the IMR became the rallying cry in development literature?’ (Casper and Simmons 2014: 95, emphasis added). Despite the strong association between women’s empowerment and infant survival, IMR continues to be privileged in the discourse of population health. The reason, they argue, is that IMR is sufficiently located as an aggregate quantity, a ‘macro’ problem that calls for neoliberal solutions located on that same macro level: governance, development and so on. Had women’s empowerment been the agreed problem, the solutions would have been focused on more structural and intimate changes, those that are ‘attentive to the intricacies and obduracies of inequality and systemic vulnerability’ (Casper and Simmons 2014: 98). Taking the completely reverse problem or the ‘other’ population crisis – that is, falling birth rates – Kramer (2013) analyses the factors that have made pro-natalist policies in countries such as Sweden

c laiming t he stat e | 105 and Germany successful but a failure in Japan and Singapore. His socio-demographic analysis arrives at the same causes as have been arrived at by feminist scholars with respect to anti-natal policies – that women’s empowerment is inescapably written into the success of any population or reproductive health policy. Both in Japan and Singapore, the patriarchal society and inegalitarian nature of marriages make it more appealing for women not to marry. Although women may have a desire to marry, the expectations of a wife (including the care of in-laws) deter educated women especially from taking that step. Particularly in Japan, the successes of equality that women find in their careers are not the same as what they would find in a marital relationship; thus, individualism trumps the conjugal existence. Even though, as part of the pro-natalist population programme, there is a plethora of incentives to encourage marriage and birth rates, these have failed in Japan and Singapore simply because the underlying cause – gender equality and the structural changes needed to make this possible – has not been addressed. The RCH similarly deserves scrutiny through the biopolitical lens. While the numbers proffered by government show improvements in the deliberately selected aggregate goals of IMR, MMR and TFR, what they do not tell us is that Indian women’s lives in the interim have slipped from difficult to intolerable. If the recent statistics are anything to go by, India’s record on gender status has been appalling. Although India is positioned as a middle-income country, it is among the lowest ranking in terms of gender equity; it was ranked by the World Economic Forum in 2010 as 132 out of 134 countries (Raj 2011). Early marriages, low literacy levels, patriarchal cultures, women’s inadequate access to and lack of reproductive decisionmaking abilities, cultural stereotypes of both traditional and modern society, and insufficient access to leadership and decision-making roles are still key issues affecting women’s health. ‘Boy preference’ continues to pervade the society (Sen 2013). Furthermore, the realization in recent years of the staggering extent of sexual abuse and violence against women in private and public spaces by individuals and in the name of religious and cultural values has earned India the ignominious label of being the ‘worst country in the G20 [in which] to be a woman’ (Pidd 2012, Sen 2013). There is ongoing persistence of bias in every field of society, which, as Sen and Iyer (2012) note, afflicts women purely and solely because of their sex. Even the

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production of knowledge – the evidence that feeds into policy change – is not immune to gender bias (Thresia and Mohindra 2011). India’s gender record only draws attention to the widening chasm between the original hopes harboured by the post-Cairo feminist agenda of reproductive health and the reality of its outcomes. Yet, these ‘non-economic’ aspects are not the frame in which solutions to improve the RCH are designed. The 8th Joint Review Mission report (JRM) (Ministry of Health and Family Welfare 2011) mentions that progress on the RCH will be based on its core principles, of which gender is only one facet. Despite this tangential mention, there is no enhanced assessment of the gender agenda of the programme. Some progress is reported in the logistics of customizing a gender-sensitive programme (for instance, the provision of transport for women to health centres and ‘gender-friendly’ signage). The report also states intentions to implement ‘gender mainstreaming’ at all levels of the programme and provide more training and the setting up of groups to improve gender responsiveness (Ministry of Health and Family Welfare 2011: 18). Gender empowerment is not mentioned in the report but progress is highlighted in ‘Gender and social equity’ (ibid.: 18). Notably, however, the document reports no disaggregated gender or social data that might aid evidence-based revisions in line with proposed gender equity objectives. Indeed, the gender shortcomings of the JRM process in the RCH mirrors similar JRM investigations into gender equity in other nationwide development programmes. As Ramachandran and Chatterjee (2014) point out in their assessment of primary education, the limitations of JRM reporting lie in the inability to conceptualize the complexities of gender inequities. Consequently, they either are treated in a superficial way or are ignored. If the JRM is a reflection of the status of gender ideologies in development policy, there is reason to be sceptical of the RCH’s ability to generate lasting transformation for women as citizens through reproductive agency. While some of the language and discourse of gender outlined in Cairo clearly permeates the RCH, the ‘development–neoliberal managerialism’ nexus (SimonKumar 2003) still persists in the design and delivery of gendered programmes. Women’s reproductive health issues are framed as aggregate development problems for which managerial solutions, most notably the ubiquitous ‘training and capability’, are then

c laiming t he stat e | 107 instituted. While not undermining the practical importance of strengthening policy institutions, the panacea of training (including gender training) has long been seen as a neoliberal solution in lieu of structural remodelling, and one that further co-opts oppositional voices into state-led governance (for a critique of neoliberal strategies in the public space, see Newman and Clarke 2009). The core of the programmes is still focused on ‘mothers’ and their procreative and nurturing abilities, and, in the more recent versions of the programme, on young women, ‘mothers-to-be’, whose health is inextricably tied to the health of the development state. Power and gender relations do not have a place in this policy design and women cannot claim a rights-based identity. Lasting bottom-up change can emanate only from structural gendered changes – and these cannot be delivered from a frame that prioritizes neoliberal development. The RCH would be well advised to take inspiration from the sustainable development goals (SDGs), which replaced the MDGs in 2015. The SDGs are described as ‘transformational’ (UN n.d.), integrated as they are with a network of goals aimed at equitable restructuring in trade, finance and food security, among other sectors.3 A similar suite of transformational reproductive health goals interlinked with localized gender relations and social structures must be deployed in future revisions of the RCH. Unfortunately, whether the current dominant state ideologies permit such radical revisioning is another matter altogether. Conclusion This chapter revisits the RCH in India to appraise the outcomes and impacts of the policy for women. Looking through the lens of programme evaluation, there are some notable improvements in selected demographic variables brought about as a result of the programme. Through a feminist WCD lens – one that explores the interdependence of production and reproduction, always in the context of women’s agency at individual, social, cultural and political levels – the RCH has augmented, not abated, inequities for and among women. These uneven results stem from the framing of the RCH programme. The state’s interpretations of reproductive health are still strongly neoliberal and development-oriented. As I have noted, ‘it would be naïve to adjudge all gender-sensitive development policy as

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transformative unless its objectives and rationales are weighted against political leverage women are likely to gain as a collective’ (SimonKumar 2003: 86). Women, unfortunately, are still instrumentalized in the state’s policy, and reproductive health constructed as a tool for larger nationalist goals. To create a programme founded on the complexities of women’s political agency is not an easy task but it is an essential step if we are to create lasting, and meaningful, change. Notes 1. According to the World Health Organization’s definition, the total fertility rate (TFR) represents the number of children that would be born to a woman if she were to live to the end of her childbearing years and bear children in accordance with agespecific fertility rates of the specified year.

2. This finding is contested by more recent research (see Joshi and Sivaram 2014) that argues that these studies have overstated what in reality is a very modest improvement in the number of institutional deliveries. 3. I thank Gauri Nandedkar who drew my attention to this point about the SDGs.

5 | AB OR T I O N A N D A F R I CA N C ULT UR E: A C AS E S T UD Y O F K E N YA

Jane Wambui Njagi

Unsafe abortion remains a major problem in Kenya despite the country’s 2010 Constitution allowing legal abortion in certain circumstances. Cultural and religious norms continue to be significant barriers to women’s access to abortion. Although a majority of traditional African cultures have tolerated abortion in cases of unwanted pregnancies, ‘African tradition’ is still held up as a major argument against abortion. Drawing on the women, culture and development (WCD) framework, this chapter examines the cultural arguments against abortion in Kenya and how these arguments limit women’s ability to access safe abortion. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates that culture is not merely an external set of traditions and beliefs, but is embedded, and shaped, through the everyday lives of people. Setting the scene Unsafe abortion accounts for 40 per cent of all maternal deaths in Kenya as well as 60 per cent of all gynaecological admissions at public hospitals (McSheffrey 2014, Wamwana et al. 2006). There were 464,690 induced abortions in Kenya in 2012 (African Population and Health Research Centre et al. 2013), which corresponds to an induced abortion rate of 48 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age (15–49 years), and an induced abortion ratio of 30 abortions per 100 births. Of the performed abortions, an estimated 157,762 women received care for complications of induced and spontaneous abortions in health facilities and 119,912 were treated at public hospitals. Some 266 Kenyan women die per 100,000 unsafe abortions (African Population and Health Research Centre 2013), which translates to more than 1,200 deaths annually due to complications of unsafe abortions. It is important to note that these devastating statistics do not include the many more women

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who avoid formal medical care and opt for homemade cures or seek assistance from pharmacists or untrained people. What is also startling is that 70 per cent of women who did seek healthcare after an unsafe abortion in 2012 had not used any form of contraception prior to becoming pregnant (African Population and Health Research Centre 2013). Also, in 2013, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR 2012) identified high perceived costs, stock-outs, unavailability of emergency contraceptives and injectables, and misinformation and propaganda as primary barriers to family planning access. The 2012 KNCHR report shone a spotlight on Kenyan cultural norms, many of which place decision-making authority around childbearing on the man and equate the use of family planning with immorality. The lack of family planning inevitably increases the likelihood of women seeking to terminate unintended pregnancies. The legal context of abortion in Kenya Prior to the adoption of the Kenyan Constitution of 2010, abortion was governed by the Penal Code (Cap. 63, Laws of Kenya).1 Under Sections 158,2 1593 and 160,4 the law criminalized both the woman undergoing abortion and the person providing it, with those convicted liable for prison sentences of up to 14 years. However, Section 2405 provided an exception by allowing for legal abortion to save a woman’s life, but the law did not go further to explain the circumstances in which lawful abortions could be provided. There were expansive interpretations of this exception issued by the Ministry of Health and the Medical Practitioners and Dentists Board, many of which suggested that abortions could be lawfully performed in cases of risk to the woman’s health or in some cases of rape (Center for Reproductive Rights 2010), but very few medical health providers in Kenya were trained on the full provisions of the law and most women remain unaware of the law’s exceptions, thus making safe and legal abortions rare. The Constitution of 2010 formally expanded the circumstances under which legal abortion could be offered.6 Although it recognizes the right to life from conception, the Constitution provides stronger protection for the lives and health of women. Whereas the previous law allowed legal abortion only to protect a pregnant woman’s life, Section 26 of the 2010 Constitution explicitly permits abortion and

aborti on an d african cult ure | 111 clearly specifies the situations in which it is permitted. These include: 1) when there is a need for emergency treatment; and 2) where the life or health of the mother is in danger. Abortions can be offered following the advice of a trained health professional. Section 26 further provides a possibility of expanding the circumstances under which legal abortions can be offered by allowing the enactment of a law for that purpose.7 Access to legal abortion is further enhanced by Article 43(1)(a) of the Constitution, which provides that every person has the right to the highest attainable standard of healthcare services, including reproductive healthcare. This provision becomes stronger when read within the context of Article 43(2), which prohibits the denial of emergency medical treatment. As part of the implementation of the 2010 constitutional requirements, the Ministry of Medical Services developed Standards and Guidelines for Reduction of Morbidity and Mortality from Unsafe Abortion in 2012.8 The guidelines, intended to reduce deaths and illnesses associated with unsafe abortion, advised health workers on who could perform an abortion, where and how, and under what circumstances. The guidelines also made it clear to healthcare workers that the offer of legal abortions could be made only to deserving cases in accordance with the law. However, the guidelines were withdrawn in unclear circumstances on 3 December 2013 with the argument that there was a need for wider stakeholder consultation on the contents of the document (Kilonzo 2015, Muiruri 2013). In a surprise move, the Director of Medical Services issued a memo to all health workers in February 2014, warning them against participating in abortion training sessions that were being offered by a local charity organization (Kidula 2015). The memo reminded all health workers that abortion on demand was illegal and, therefore, there was no need to train health workers on safe abortion or in the use of the drug Medabon for medical abortion. In September 2014, the High Court of Kenya sentenced a 41-year-old nurse to death for procuring a fatal abortion for a teenage girl. Justice Nicholas Ombija ruled that Jackson Namunya Tali was solely responsible for the death of Christine Atieno after his attempt to secure her an abortion on 27 July 2009 led to her death (Ogemba 2014). As a consequence, there is confusion among health workers about the grounds under which abortion is legal, and this, in turn, has led to the denial of safe abortion services to women. Health workers are

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afraid of providing such services as they are worried about facing disciplinary action. Although the Constitution provides for legal abortion, antiabortion crusaders claim abortion to be ‘un-African’ and vehemently opposed the adoption of the Constitution during a referendum in 2010. In the following section, I provide a characterization of antiabortion actors in Kenya and examine their ability to influence abortion policies; religious groups have significant influence in the country. In a recent case, Christian and Muslim religious groups forced the state to withdraw a TV advertisement promoting condom use with the claim that it was promoting infidelity and immorality in the country (BBC News 2013). In the Kenyan governmentsponsored advert, a woman in an extramarital affair was advised by her friend to use a condom while having sex with her boyfriend when her frequently drunk husband was away (ibid.). Although Dr Cherutich, the head of Kenya’s National AIDS and STI Control Programme (NASCOP) insisted that it was the duty of NASCOP to promote sexual health in the country (ibid.), the Kenya government gave in to the demands of religious organizations and withdrew the advertisement. Much in the same way that religious organizations have been able to engineer the withdrawal of the condom advertisement, they have managed to ensure that legal abortion provisions in the Constitution remain only on paper. Anti-abortion actors in Kenya The main anti-abortion actors are religious groups, with the major players being the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church of Kenya, the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, the Deliverance Church of Kenya, the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims and other smaller groups such as Human Life International and individuals.9 These actors have established and institutionalized their opposition to abortion and have worked hard to prevent major policy changes. For instance, a major reason for the withdrawal of the 2012 Standards and Guidelines for Reduction of Morbidity and Mortality from Unsafe Abortion10 was that only medically related institutions were involved in the process of developing these guidelines (Muiruri 2013). It is also noteworthy that the withdrawal of the guidelines followed the general elections of March 2013 in which Uhuru Kenyatta became the President and William Ruto the Deputy President, both of whom

aborti on an d african cult ure | 113 are committed Christians. In fact, the Deputy President was the leader of those who campaigned against the adoption of the 2010 Constitution and he has repeatedly made public his opposition to the provisions on abortion. The political significance and power of religious groups in Kenya’s politics relate to complex social and historical processes. First, 78 per cent of Kenyans consider themselves Christian. Of these, Protestants constitute 45 per cent, and Catholics 33 per cent (Otieno 2010). With such a powerful presence, the church in Kenya not only has been an important player in influencing state interventions in the fields of reproductive health and abortion but also is a flagship for Christian morality and ethics, firmly placing the vast majority of Christians on the pro-life side of the debate. Second, in addition to numerical strength, religious groups’ traditional involvement in the provision of education and healthcare in Kenya has ensured their increased ability to exert influence on the general public and on the state. For example, there are 974 religious-based health facilities, 964 belonging to the Kenya Episcopal Conference and the Christian Health Association of Kenya, and these provide 40 per cent of national health services (Mandi 2006). At the time of independence in 1963, 90 per cent of the schools in the country were connected to one or other of the churches,11 which means that religious leaders not only have been able to shape the opinions of a majority of Kenyans through the education system but have also been able to maintain many devout followers despite growing secularization. Third, as a result of their community work, religious leaders have managed to command respect and obedience from the general population, making them particularly powerful in electoral politics. According to a pro-abortion, non-state research participant during my fieldwork, Cardinal Njue, the Catholic Archbishop of Nairobi, threatened to marshal his followers to vote out politicians who dared to vote for the adoption of the draft Reproductive Health and Rights Bill (2008), which sought to legalize abortion in specific circumstances. This draft bill was never passed. Anti-abortion discourses in Kenya Anti-abortion actors in Kenya present abortion as unacceptable by deploying four major discourses: 1) that abortion is the murder of unborn children; 2) that abortion is detrimental to women’s health;

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3) that abortion is immoral; and 4) that abortion is un-African. I focus, especially, on the arguments influenced by religious groups that present abortion as un-African and as murder. Although the anti-abortion discourses appear different from each other, they are mainly advanced by the same group of people who insist that abortion goes not only against Christian beliefs but also against African cultural traditions. This is particularly intriguing because, in the past, African traditional cultures and Christianity have often been considered as mutually exclusive. As is noted by the WCD approach (Bhavnani et al. 2003), culture for Kenyan women is not simply a set of traditions and habits; rather, it is a lived experience for women seeking to terminate pregnancies. This view of culture as lived experience enables us to look at culture as a set of relationships through which inequalities are created and may be challenged. Religious and foetal life anti-abortion discourses Religious and foetal life discourses are the most commonly invoked anti-abortion discourses in Kenya. These discourses present abortion as morally unacceptable because it leads to the death of unborn babies and it is condemned by both the Bible and the Qur’an. The fundamental issue in these discourses is the sacredness of human life. By framing abortion in terms of protecting human life, Kenyan religious and foetal life discourses express support for an anti-abortion policy. A research participant (RA1 2009), for example, insisted that ‘the church is against abortion because abortion destroys and has no respect for the sanctity of human life’. In opposing abortion, this participant finds justification in a Christian religious master frame12 that draws on conservative religious ideologies and biblical scriptures. This argument is also evident in a pastoral letter written by Cardinal Njue, warning the Kenyan government against passing the 2008 Reproductive Health and Rights Bill, which would have allowed for legal abortion in specified situations. The Cardinal, like other antiabortion actors, makes reference to various sources, including the Vatican, to emphasize the humanity of the human foetus. Abortion is not merely the removal of some tissue from a woman’s body. Abortion is the removal of a living ‘thing’ that would become human if it were allowed to remain inside the woman’s body. Abortion is the destruction of an unborn baby.

aborti on an d african cult ure | 115 Pregnancy is the period for this new human life to mature, not just to ‘become human’. It already is human. This is why the Church considers abortion the killing of a human being, and why the Second Vatican Council called it an ‘unspeakable crime’. I remind you all to maintain the utmost respect for human life, from the time of conception. Even under threat, never use your knowledge to do what is contrary to the laws of humanity. (Njue 2008) In 2009, when negotiations on a new Constitution resumed after the 2004 draft was rejected in a referendum, religious leaders and their anti-abortion supporters again insisted that a clause specifying that life begins at conception be included. They were categorical that Kenya’s Constitution: Should be clear on the sanctity of the human life, ensure life is properly safeguarded and protected. A good constitution should be clear on rights and duties, and where life begins and ends. Life does not hang in the air; it begins and ends somewhere. There can be no legislation that says otherwise. (Mathenge 2009) Considering the power wielded by religious leaders and the fear that they may scuttle plans for a new Constitution, a clause meeting their demands was added. A pro-abortion research participant explained that: The original draft Constitution by the Committee of Experts13 made no reference to the definition of life or any provision with reference to abortion. But when the draft was handed to the Parliamentary Committee, the Catholic Church and the NCCK [National Council of Churches of Kenya] persuaded the politicians to include new subsections; one recognizing that life begins at conception and the other stating clearly that abortion is not permitted, unless, in the opinion of a registered medical practitioner, the life of the mother is in danger. It is important to note that in agreeing to overrule the Committee of Experts’ decision not to define where life begins in the draft Constitution, the members of parliament in the committee appeased

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religious leaders who had threatened to campaign against its adoption in the forthcoming referendum. Religious leaders, led by the NCCK and the Catholic Church, had threatened to reject the draft Constitution if the bill of rights did not define that the life of a person begins at conception and ends at natural death. Abortion and the corruption of Africa’s societal morals In addition, anti-abortion actors in Kenya oppose abortion with claims that it is immoral as it is a Western project that violates African traditions and culture. The Kenya Episcopal Conference, while opposing a conference on maternal and reproductive health organized by the Medical Association of Kenya, accused the medical professionals of propagating a misguided practice alien to Africa’s moral fabric. In their words: The acceptance of abortion – an unspeakable crime – in the popular mind, in behaviour and even in law itself, is a telling sign of an extremely dangerous crisis of the moral sense, which is becoming more and more incapable of distinguishing good and evil, even when the fundamental right to life is at stake. Rather than provide abortion on demand, we should ask ourselves what is the fundamental problem at hand? Why is there an increase of unwanted pregnancies in the country, increasing the rate of abortion? And a further question, when did unborn children become ‘unwanted’ when according to our traditional values all children were considered valued members of the community? What is the source of these alien and non-African values we now propagate? (Catholic Health Commission of Kenya 2011, emphasis added) An anti-abortion research participant (RA1) during fieldwork also noted that: Abortion is totally immoral. It is not just about killing women or babies, but about wiping out generations. It is about eugenics with which the West is targeting less developed countries. African cultures had systems that discouraged immorality. What we need is to uphold African morality rather than adopt European behaviours, some of which encourage immorality. An

a borti on a n d african cult ure | 117 African’s conscience wants to be moral. You encourage morality not by encouraging abortions, but by banning them. Teach young people about character moulding and morality, and also abstinence. Encourage them to ‘chill’ until they are married. (emphasis added) For his part, Peter Karanja, the head of the NCCK,14 had the following to say about abortion: The reason for these evils is indicated in the Bible in the book of James 4: 1–3, which reads: ‘What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.’ As shown in these verses, the root of evil, even killing (whether born or unborn people), is selfish desires and a craving for pleasure. Among other results of these actions and desires, there is an ever increasing deterioration in morals and respect for life. In the above quotations, abortion, in addition to being construed as murder of the unborn, is also presented as unacceptable because it is against African moral traditions. Furthermore, as Reverend Karanja implies, an unwanted pregnancy is a manifestation of women’s engagement with illegitimate sex, which, according to the research participant referred to above, is un-African. To them, therefore, access to abortion should be curtailed since it enables women to escape the consequences of their evil desires and actions, and, also, to be un-African, implying that their wish to have an abortion undermines an apparently unifying identity on the continent. Additionally, for anti-abortion activists in Kenya, abortion not only affects individual women’s lives but also has serious implications for the family, religion and society in general, as it has negative effects on African moral structure. This view is evident in the following statement by Kenyan Catholic bishops opposed to a mock tribunal organized by pro-abortion actors to sensitize the public to the negative consequences of unsafe abortion:

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There is no reason or motive that can ever objectively confer the right to dispose of another’s life. Abortion, whether legal or not, kills babies, damages women, harms families, degrades the medical profession, weakens nations and destroys churches. (White 2007) The Catholic bishops’ claims present a picture of an anarchic society in which the family, which they define as the moral foundation of African society, is destroyed as a result of women’s uncontrolled sexual desires and abortion. From the statements above, it is clear that anti-abortion crusaders in Kenya equate abortion with social and cultural disorder. As such, there are implicit assumptions about women’s roles and lives – so much so that the concerns of anti-abortion actors can be interpreted as relating not just to the immorality of abortion or to saving foetuses’ lives, but, more importantly, to the maintenance of heterosexual relationships in which reproduction not only occurs within the confines of marriage but also in which men dominate and control women’s sexuality. In other words, as Oldfield (1996: 68) notes, abortion is a critical battleground in the defence of traditional family values, upholding ‘a model of the family capable of resisting secular pressures and transmitting evangelical values to the next generation’. I would argue that because the foetal-focused and African cultureinfused anti-abortion discourses do not propose mechanisms for dealing with the multitude of factors that lead women to procure abortions, the moral question of the foetus is no more than a licence to control women’s reproductive freedom.15 The anti-abortion discourses’ appeal to both African traditions and Christian doctrinal sources of legitimation is, in many ways, ironic. Christian religious leaders in Kenya have usually accused traditional African cultures of being a stumbling block to evangelization and also of hindering women’s advancement through their support for repugnant practices such as female circumcision, widow inheritance and polygamy. Thus, the fact that Christian religious adherents make reference to African traditions as a justification for their opposition to abortion is a significant turnaround from past practices that sought the modernization of traditional African social values. Seemingly, when the need arises, Christianity can coexist with African traditions. The tendency to simultaneously deploy religion and culture – both

a borti on a n d african cult ure | 119 powerful instruments for perpetuating patriarchal hegemony – has been acknowledged by feminist researchers (Stopler 2008). The appeal to African moral traditions by anti-abortion actors is usually articulated alongside discourses that present abortion as a foreign concept being advocated by Westerners for the purpose of population control. This perception is often coupled with a widespread belief that the push for the legalization of abortion and access to contraceptives is linked to a eugenics movement aimed at reducing the populations of what one research participant (RA1) referred to as ‘lower poor races’. Kenyan Catholic bishops, for example, have identified abortion as part of a larger international effort to impose the anti-child mentality of Western feminism onto Kenyan society (White 2007). To them, ‘high levels of poverty and unemployment in an agricultural economy and a relatively high birth rate of 4.82 children born per woman makes Kenya a favoured target of international population control organisations, largely funded through the US’ (ibid.). Such concerns about eugenic motives are concretized by the fact that much international aid work in Kenya, as elsewhere in Africa, emphasizes population control, abortion, sterilization and contraception as ways of reducing poverty and enhancing development. A research participant (RA1), for example, claimed that the World Bank and other donor organizations always demand that 20 per cent of all borrowed money be dedicated to population control-related projects, which include those concerned with the provision of contraceptives and abortifacients. A fear of African population manipulation was also evident during the synod of the African Catholic bishops in Rome in 2009, with one bishop warning against the incursions of Western non-governmental organizations (NGOs) into Africa, saying that they have ‘hidden agendas’ in pushing contraception and abortion as part of population control policies (White 2009). Another participant at the same synod, Cardinal Wilfred Napier, claimed that one Western notion classifies pregnancy as ‘a sexually transmitted disease’ (ibid.). The same worry was evident in a comment by a caller to an FM radio call-in session,16 who wondered: How can one explain how clinics like Marie Stopes are flooded with contraceptives, abortifacients and condoms while there are absolutely no other drugs available to treat other diseases

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that actually kill more Kenyan women? How is it possible that if a woman went to Marie Stopes suffering from malaria or typhoid, they would be turned away, but would be attended to immediately if they wanted a termination of pregnancy, sterilization or contraception? Indeed, it is important to acknowledge that the concentration of population control policies in the developing world and among minority populations in developed countries is real and is also well documented (Kuumba 1993). While population growth in the developed world is encouraged, family planning for people of colour in the rest of the world is emphasized. Although pan-African and some feminist researchers have claimed that population policies are a strategy in the process of dominating Africa and manipulating its population (ibid.), I contend that the need for women to control their reproductive capacities should not be ignored. Moreover, allocating women the burden of ensuring the survival of the African race and tradition but without providing them with the social and economic mechanisms to do so is hypocritical. Compared with men, African women remain relatively poor, even though they are expected to take primary responsibility for the care of their children. Arguments that present reproductive health, including abortion and family planning, as Western concepts tend to receive a lot of publicity from anti-abortion crusaders, politicians and media houses in Kenya. The fact that they seem to appeal to Africans to resist cultural colonialism and foreign impositions also makes them popular with the general population. This is exacerbated by claims that abortion and family planning are propagated by Western feminists who sit on their men,17 making pro-abortion discourses unacceptable in predominantly patriarchal African societies. A feminist critical analysis of claims that abortion is unacceptable because it is un-African reveals two contradictory ideas. First, it is ironic that religious leaders, the main proponents of moralistic religious anti-abortion discourses, ignore the fact that their religions are also foreign, relatively speaking. However, this may also be the reason behind the appeal to African moral traditions, for this can bolster the authenticity of religious claims. Second, arguments that oppose abortion predominantly on the basis that controlling fertility

a borti on a n d african cult ure | 121 is a Western concept ignore the fact that women in traditional African societies also controlled their fertility using herbs and abortion, among other methods. As a research participant explained: The whole issue of controlling and managing fertility was very well done, whether it was spacing of children or unwanted pregnancies. Our traditional communities had ways at all times of dealing with that. What is so amazing is how now we want to be Africans, as an African nation. We want to modernize but we don’t want to modernize on the issue of women’s rights. We want to be modern and to drive German cars and own laptops but we don’t want to give women rights in marriage or in reproductive health. I don’t understand that at all, and therefore think we are a very hypocritical society because we did have those systems. They were there, they were broken down and we failed to replace them and think that it is what it should be. I think we are actually living abnormally. As noted powerfully by this research participant, in the African nation, everyone is allowed to be modern except for the women. Further, this speaker argues that to suggest family planning is unAfrican is not only false but is used to construct women as the primary custodians of African culture. Abortion was used in traditional African societies as a remedy for unwanted pregnancies. Thomas (2003), for example, notes that among the Meru people of Kenya, when an uncircumcised girl got pregnant, she usually procured an abortion. Afterwards, she got circumcised alongside her age mates and got married. No stigma was attached to the procedure. Perhaps a more significant pointer to this is the fact that infanticide was rather common in the majority of African traditional societies (Milner 2000). For instance, although children were highly valued, the Kikuyu people of Kenya also practised ritual killing of twins (LeVine and LeVine 1981). Moreover, because pregnancies conceived by uncircumcised girls were believed to pose grave moral dangers, girls were usually required to procure abortions or arrange for such babies’ murder after birth (Thomas 2007). This practice has also been found among the Bemba people of Zambia, as well as the Akan people of Ghana (Bleek 1990). Audrey Richards (1982: 33–4) has noted that children born to uninitiated girls were

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considered ‘creature[s] of ill omen’ who brought misfortune to their home villages by stopping rainfall, making granaries empty quickly, and compelling their parents and themselves to be driven into the bush. Although such accounts of condemning uncircumcised girls’ pregnancies point to the importance of female circumcision in readying girls for socially acceptable conception and childbirth, they also demonstrate that societies, by recommending infanticide or abortion, placed a higher value on the future lives of women and girls. As a proverb in my mother tongue, Kikuyu, summarizes: ‘It is better to save the pot than to break the pot while attempting to save the water it contains.’ However, it is important to note that what is today presented as primordial and ahistorical African tradition and/or culture is in fact a reflection of the interaction of the colonial administration’s ideas about gender relations with those of conservative African male elites and those of Christian missions. The conceptual fusing of women with culture and tradition has two particular implications for women. First, women become not only symbols in a battle to construct particular versions of modern versus traditional society, but also symbols of cultural integrity or resistance to Euro-American domination (Walley 1997). Second, the association between women and tradition has meant that African tradition has often been used to legitimate attempts to increase and/or maintain control over women, as ascertained by a WCD approach. In the case of gender relations in general, and women’s empowerment in particular, cultural tradition is viewed as timeless and unchangeable. However, cultural change is considered acceptable in certain contexts, particularly when it relates to improving men’s lives. Additionally, claims that abortion is a Western practice also assumes a paternalistic ideology that presents African women as being in need of protection from Western feminists and NGOs that coerce them into having abortions. Implicitly, it is suggested that African women who have abortions do not in fact want them (as it is un-African); rather, they are influenced by Western culture, which also condones other ‘evil’ practices such as homosexuality. This discourse presents African women as vulnerable, dependent and uninformed, and therefore in need of abortion restrictions to protect them from harmful foreign influences, which in turn free them to fulfil their traditional African role as mothers.

a borti on a n d african cult ure | 123 Implications of anti-abortion religio-cultural discourses As the analysis above reveals, anti-abortion discourses in Kenya can be characterized as moralistic, foetal life-focused and against African cultural practices. An important element of the explicit claim that a human foetus is a rights-bearing unborn human child from the moment of conception is the overt implication that abortion is murder and therefore a violation of the most fundamental human right (the right to life). In the words of a Presbyterian religious leader who participated in my research, ‘a society that can deny a human being the right to be born cannot possibly claim to be in a position to protect any other human right’. This conferring of human rights on foetuses not only places the foetus and the pregnant woman on the same level as bearers of human rights, but also intentionally interprets the foetus as a citizen, whose life the state has a specific obligation to protect. This has two possible consequences. In addition to positing a fundamental dichotomy between the rights of the woman as a person and the rights of the foetus, claiming rights for foetuses in a country where the rights of women as people do not include equal rights with men weakens women’s case for abortion by silencing women. Second, by presenting both pro-abortion activists and women who have abortions as selfish or insensitive to the life or death of foetuses, foetal life-focused discourses not only demonize women but also create a situation in which foetuses are in need of protection from their murderous mothers. Feminist scholars have claimed that the discursively constructed opposition between the rights of a pregnant woman and the foetus’s right to life is not a coincidence but is often invoked by anti-abortion actors as a rationale for efforts to control women (MacKinnon 1989). It is generally agreed that one of the major ways of reducing the number of abortions is to give women complete control over their own reproductive lives by making available contraceptives and information on their use (Cohen 2009). However, religious organizations in Kenya, led by the Catholic Church, are opposed to contraception, advising women to refrain from sex until marriage. This is clear in the following comment by the leader of the NCCK, Reverend Peter Karanja: The Bible teaches that sex is to happen only between a man and his wife. The concept of protected or unprotected sex is an illusion and a lie that some illicit sex is ‘safer’ than any other. In the end, all illicit sex leads to death since it is a sin.

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This statement makes it clear that the Canon is opposed to sex outside of the institution of marriage, rather than to birth control per se. Another consequence of the privileging of foetal life is the silencing of women who have abortions. By focusing all attention on the foetus, these discourses significantly obscure the actual reasons behind women’s abortions, and, as a result, offer little in the way of practical responses to these needs. Making abortion unavailable, as proposed by Kenyan anti-abortion actors, does not address the needs of women who seek abortion because they were raped, for instance, or are living in abusive relationships, or lack access to effective contraception, or will have to drop out of work or school to raise an unwanted child. Banning abortion also does not address the needs of women who cannot emotionally or financially provide for their other children, and neither does it help women control the timing of motherhood. Research in Kenya has shown that women have abortions for all these reasons, which restrictive abortion laws cannot and do not address. At another level, voicing concern for abstract unborn babies provides anti-abortion crusaders – and religious and political leaders even more so – with a chance to appear to be addressing issues affecting society without actually doing anything about them. In a community where more than half of the population lives in poverty, and where women have the primary responsibility for taking care of children, the anti-abortion actors’ choice of what to be concerned about can be interpreted as being out of touch with reality. This view is well captured by an anonymous caller to a radio station, who wondered: If these holier than thou fellows are so worried about children getting killed, how is it that they do not offer to take in the unwanted babies? Besides, why haven’t they bothered to first of all care for the thousands of live chukuras [street children] who live like abandoned animals on our streets? As noted by this caller, anti-abortion actors in Kenya condemn abortion but fail to provide mechanisms for dealing with the consequences of unwanted pregnancies. In addition to silencing Kenyan women who have abortions, the anti-abortion discourses also portray women who fail to embrace

a borti on a n d african cult ure | 125 motherhood in the face of unwanted pregnancies as un-African and view them as the embodiment of a social problem. When a journalist presented the spokesperson for the NCCK with data on deaths and health complications resulting from unsafe abortion, the spokesperson was quick to say: Our position is that the abortions shouldn’t be happening in the first place. Pregnancies should not be terminated. What is required is education for the women so that they don’t get pregnant if they are not interested in getting the baby. (Alsop 2010) Another cleric, a Presbyterian Church religious leader, also claimed that: ‘No one should get pregnant and then decide on abortion by claiming that they do not have resources to bring up the child.’ These Kenyan religious leaders not only castigate women for getting pregnant when they shouldn’t do but also seem to imply that all that women need to do to avoid abortion is to avoid getting pregnant in the first place. That being the case, it is unclear why clerics in Kenya oppose the termination of pregnancies resulting from rape, since such women would have had no means of avoiding getting pregnant. A religious leader expressed no sympathy for pregnant victims of rape, as he wondered: ‘Why should the baby be killed while he/she is not the criminal? Besides, there is no law which stipulates that one should be killed if their father is a criminal.’ By making such arguments, religious leaders fail to see the contradiction between their belief that women should not engage in sex and thus avoid abortion, and their failure to support abortion for women on whom pregnancy is forced through rape. Although religious leaders do not overtly blame such women for becoming pregnant, the clerics fail to exhibit any sympathy for the woman, through their demonization of the choice to have an abortion under any circumstances. The clerics also fail to acknowledge the crime of rape against the raped woman and the immorality of forcing her to suffer the consequences of this heinous crime. A fallout of the religious leaders’ claims, which ignore the circumstances in which pregnancies and abortions happen, is that it makes it difficult and controversial to legislate against elements of domination such as rape and sexual coercion. Implicit assumptions

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behind discourses that present women as responsible for unwanted pregnancies include, on the one hand, that sexual intercourse leading to conception is usually voluntary, and, on the other, that women have control over that sex. This is evident in the following antiabortion male research participant’s observation: Why do women in this country or elsewhere for that matter want to go ahead and get pregnant and then procure abortions? Why are we not realizing that the way you can avoid going through the whole problem of abortion is just by not getting pregnant? Feminist research has shown that heterosexual intercourse is not always coequally determined, but instead is often defined in terms set by men (MacKinnon 1987). As such, it is difficult to assume that women just need to avoid sexual activity to avoid pregnancy in an environment where sex can be used as an expression of male dominance. In fact, the choice to avoid sex is not available to Kenyan women as a result of the sexist nature of a patriarchal society that constantly struggles to enforce men’s control over women’s sexuality and reproduction. Kenyan men’s dominant role in controlling sexuality is evidenced by widespread sexual violence, with at least 21 per cent of Kenyan women being victims of such violence (Kenya National Bureau of Statistics and ICF Macro 2010). Moreover, as further noted by a children’s welfare activist: The era of HIV/AIDS has increased sexual violence against girls and younger women. There is a general feeling among men that young girls, especially those living in the rural areas, are safer sex partners because they are considered free of the disease. Additionally, there is also this strange belief that if an HIV/ AIDS-positive man has sex with a virgin, they could be cured. Although it is just superstition, it has increased young girls’ vulnerability to sexual perverts. This participant’s claims are supported by reports that have shown consistently that rape, especially of schoolgirls, is rampant (Wane 2009). As such, anti-abortion claims that present women as being responsible for unwanted pregnancies, as well as the sexual intercourse leading to the pregnancy, are misleading, since, clearly,

aborti on an d african cult ure | 127 there are circumstances where pregnancy is not a choice but rather is forced. The failure of anti-abortion discourses to acknowledge pregnant women’s lived realities also ignores the biological reality that women do not make themselves pregnant. Since foetuses do not rain from heaven like manna, women’s lived experiences as well as their circumstances at the time of conception cannot be wished away. After all, as MacKinnon (1984) has also noted, a woman does not just happen upon a foetus. By failing to take into account men’s contribution to unwanted pregnancies, foetal life-focused discourses present a partial view by ignoring the role played by men in women’s decisions to have unsafe abortions. Research on abortion in Africa has shown that, although men are generally opposed to abortion, they play very significant roles in women’s decisions to seek or not seek abortion. For example, qualitative explorations of men’s attitudes towards abortion in Burkina Faso, Uganda, Kenya and Zimbabwe have found that, because of men’s opposition to abortion, women normally procure abortions secretly and, in most instances, unsafely, since they often lack funds to pay for safer services (Chikovore et al. 2002, Izugbara et al. 2009, Moore et al. 2011, Rossier 2007). If men were supportive, perhaps deaths and complications resulting from unsafe operations would be minimized. An additional consequence of Kenya’s anti-abortion discourses, especially the one that portrays abortion as un-African, is the silencing of African women’s sexuality in general, and Kenyan women’s in particular. Abortion relates in major ways to issues of sexual independence by allowing women to control the unwanted consequences of heterosexual sex, especially in circumstances where contraceptives are unavailable. This was evident from comments in an online poll that asked readers to state if they were supportive of or opposed to abortion liberalization in Kenya, and why. One male reader was convinced that ‘legalizing abortion will erode morals by making women and girls able to engage in irresponsible sexual behaviours since they can access abortion’. Evidently, only women’s freedom to engage in casual sex seems to be questioned, while that of the men with whom they have sex is not even alluded to. The act of women engaging in non-reproductive sex seems to be interpreted as presenting a great challenge to gendered African traditional heterosexual relations. In fact, in Kenya, Uganda and Zimbabwe,

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men have been found to be opposed to contraceptives and abortion because these would make it difficult to know if their wives have sex with other men (Chikovore et al. 2002, Moore et al. 2011). Because the men themselves reported having sex with other women, their opposition can be construed as grounded in the fear of women being able to enjoy sex in the same way they do – without the fear of an unwanted birth. Clearly, the battle against abortion is not merely about the sanctity of life or the un-Africanness of the practice, but also about controlling women’s sexual access, their bodies and their sexuality.18 The decades-old argument that women’s liberation can only be achieved through a revolution in which women seize control over their reproductive capacities remains highly plausible (Firestone 1970). Moreover, because women’s sexuality is often publicly reduced to their conventional mothering role and conflated with their reproductive capacities (Tamale 2011), Kenyan women’s right to choice and sexual freedom is often ignored or swept aside. As a result of the condemnation, women who have abortions are stigmatized, since abortion is seen as presenting a challenge to the deep-seated masculine power that governs African sexual relations by disrupting the core of the heterosexist social order. For, as in Butler’s (1990) observation, patriarchal societies are heteronormative and usually require men and women to perform their gender by actively participating in heterosexual activity. Finally, the anxieties generated by women’s sexual control have been noted to overlap with parallel consternations over the changing roles and duties of women in society. As a result of economic structural adjustment programmes and globalization, among other factors, large parts of Africa have experienced great socio-economic polarization (Lugalla 1995). The resultant unemployment and low wages have made it difficult for men to fulfil their assumed African traditional male roles as head of the household and breadwinner, while increased participation of women in the labour market has led to a conspicuous emergence of independent women.19 Weeks (1985) has noted that, as a result of women’s increased independence, social discontent tends to be articulated via preoccupations with matters of gender, which are often accompanied by increased surveillance of women’s sexuality. As such, men’s attempts to increase control over women can be purported to be a result of hard economic times,

a borti on a n d african cult ure | 129 especially for men. This is corroborated by Silberschmidt (2001), who argues that African men’s social value, identity and self-esteem have been eroded by economic changes that have left those with a patriarchal ideology bereft of its legitimizing activities, which in turn has led not only to increased instances of sexually aggressive behaviour but also to increased attempts to control women and their sexuality in order to strengthen male identity and the sense of masculinity. A research participant, for example, explained that men who participated in rape during Kenya’s post-election violence in 2008 said it was the only way they could assert their masculinity. In such circumstances, abortion is likely to receive opposition from men as a group. Conclusion In this chapter, I have shown how anti-abortion actors deploy a number of apparently distinct yet deeply connected discourses in their fight against legal abortion. An analysis of these discourses reveals that embedded in the explicit anti-abortion discourses are implicit assumptions focused on African women’s roles and lives, including their sexual lives. The anti-abortion actors’ concerns do not relate just to foetal life and the un-Africanness of abortion, but, more importantly, to the maintenance of heterosexual relationships in which men dominate and control women’s sexuality. Such a discourse fails to recognize the essential role access to safe abortion plays in shielding women from the negative socio-economic consequences of mistimed childbearing and unplanned entry into motherhood, including poverty, loss of employment, divorce, abuse, social exclusion and poor educational outcomes. Kenyan women will continue to die from a problem that can be easily dealt with unless a powerful social movement can change these discourses, and the law. Our thoughts should be turned to such a movement. Notes 1. For the Kenyan 2010 Penal Code, see http://www.kenyalaw. org/Downloads/GreyBook/ 8.%20The%20Penal%20Code.pdf. 2. ‘Any person who with intent to procure miscarriage of a woman, whether she is or is not with child

unlawfully administers to her or causes her to take any poison or other noxious thing or uses any force of any kind, or uses any other means whatever, is guilty of a felony and is liable to imprisonment for fourteen years’ (p. 66 of the 2010 Penal Code).

130 | s exua li t y an d th e g e n de re d body 3. ‘Any woman who being with child with intent to procure her own miscarriage, unlawfully administers to herself any poison or other noxious thing, or uses any kind, or uses any other means whatever, or permits any such thing or means to be administered or used to her, is guilty of a felony and is liable to imprisonment for fourteen years’ (pp. 66–7 of the 2010 Penal Code). 4. ‘Any person who unlawfully supplies or procures for any person anything whatever, knowing that it is intended to be unlawfully used to procure the miscarriage of a woman whether she is or is not with child, is guilty of a felony and is liable to imprisonment for three years’ (p. 67 of the 2010 Penal Code). 5. ‘A person is not criminally responsible for performing in good faith and with reasonable care and skill a surgical operation upon any person for his benefit, or upon an unborn child for the preservation of the mother’s life, if the performance of the operation is reasonable, having regard to the patient’s state at the time and to all the circumstances of the case’ (p. 85 of the 2010 Penal Code). 6. See https://www.kenyaembassy. com/pdfs/The%20Constitution%20of% 20Kenya.pdf. 7. The judiciary or parliament could enact a law expanding the conditions under which legal abortion could be offered. 8. See http://www. safeabortionwomensright.org/wpcontent/uploads/2013/11/MOMSStandards-Guidelines-sep-2012-1.pdf. 9. As in other African countries, there is a significant presence of contemporary Evangelical Christianities, especially driven from the United States of America. With about 1,337 American Protestant missionaries as of 1992, Kenya was host to the largest

concentration of US Protestant mission personnel in Africa (Hearn 2002). However, the majority of people who define themselves as Christian are likely to be affiliated to the mainstream Catholic or Protestant churches historically associated with colonial conversion (Maia 2003). 10. The only organizations that seem to have been consulted in the formulation of the guidelines include Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Board, Nursing Council of Kenya, Clinical Officers Council, Provincial Directors of Health, Provincial Reproductive Health Co-ordinators, Kenya National Commission of Human Rights, World Health Organization (WHO), UNFPA, Kenya Obstetrical and Gynaecology Society, National Nurses Society of Kenya and Clinical Officers Association (FemmeHub 2015). 11. Kenya National Archives, Nairobi ES File: Education Statistics 1964–66. 12. Master frames can be conceptualized as general symbolic frames that are culturally resonant to a particular situation (Swart 1995). For more information on master frames, see Snow and Benford (1992). 13. The Committee of Experts was the main technical organ in the constitutional review process. It comprised nine experts and two ex officio members who were nominated by the National Assembly and appointed by the President. The committee was mandated to finalize the constitutional review process and deliver a new constitutional dispensation for Kenya. 14. The Reverend’s office provided a written official statement. 15. Researchers such as Green et al. (1996) have argued that battles over abortion are aspects of a larger struggle to reclaim what are seen as traditional values. Opposition to abortion often takes on additional

aborti on an d african cult ure | 131 significance as an affirmation of distinctive gender roles, opposition to feminism, and opposition to sex outside marriage (Luker 1984). 16. The radio station, Classic 105 FM, on 27 January 2009, asked listeners to call in and express their views on legalizing abortion in the country. 17. The phrase is commonly used to refer to women who control their men. 18. Ethnographic research has shown that a key element of successful African manhood is heterosexual success, and this is proven by being able to win desirable women, preventing them from being seduced by others,

and showing evidence of being a man in control (Wood and Jewkes 2001). In fact, as was demonstrated during Jacob Nzuma’s rape trial in South Africa, essentialist conceptions of African culture tend to be patriarchal and masculinist (Robins 2008). 19. Kenyan women have joined the labour force in large and increasing numbers over the last two decades due to increased access to education. At the same time, as a result of various factors, including structural adjustment programmes, there has been a decline in job opportunities for men (Suda 2002).

6 | B OD I ES A N D CH O I CE S : A FR IC A N M ATRI AR CH S A N D M A M M Y WA T ER

Ifi Amadiume

In this chapter I will examine collectivist notions of women’s solidarity in relation to women’s power in traditional cultures and societies in Africa. My ultimate goal is to highlight growing tensions in the realm of agency and culture between what I describe as traditional African matriarchitarianism and new counter-forces, such as Mammy Water. Using examples of traditional organizations of women’s cultures that embody matriarchitarianism, I argue that feminism and these traditions of organized women’s empowering cultures are not mutually exclusive. Yet, with globalization, traditional African matriarchs are increasingly marginalized and face serious competition for the control and shaping of women’s bodies. There is thus a need to revisit old grounds to raise new questions about the place of increasingly assertive individual subjectivity and choice for women and girls in new globalizing conditions of social change. Globalization and matriarchitarianism As intellectual discourse seems rapidly to be shifting to globalization, there is a renewed interest in rethinking feminism and proposing new feminist agendas, of which the women, culture and development (WCD) perspective is a promising one. For African women,1 it is important that we enter this discussion from a critical perspective that is informed by our experiences in social history. African women had to struggle even to get a voice in feminism; they were not considered equal partners in the making of feminist agendas or policies. Without equality of voice and access, globalization in African experiences is no more than advanced neocolonialism informed by advanced capitalism, in which Africans are simply consumers of imported cultures. The current expression of the new globalization is in finance capitalism in the form of loan management and trade intervention. But from the point of view of many Africans who live

b o d i e s a n d c h o i c e s | 133 from hand to mouth day by day, all this is seen as recolonization, and the place-based knowledge of local lives is once again a site to raise questions about recolonization and imperialism. As feminists committed to the discourse of social justice we are forced to deal with issues of reflexivity, cultural context, values and local intersection. Thus, the local reasserts itself and plays a role in reshaping the global conversation and the critique of the assumptions of the concept of globalization. If concern about social inequality is an essential, progressive, feminist perspective to counter the assumptions of capitalism, a focus on the local equally challenges the assumptions of the universal benefits of globalization. In generalizing about globalization from a supposed progressive perspective, there are several romantic assumptions about a loss of control by states, and a universal equal movement of people and equal access to new technologies, goods and markets. It is thought that these forces are transforming our relationship to the world in the same way. This is the illusion of a shrinking world. Yet, if we think of slavery, colonialism and apartheid, globalization is not really new, but rather only a matter of scale and speed – old hegemonies in new forms. Globalization can be seen as an agent of imperialism and an updated version of the modernization which was directed through colonial conquest. Concerns about enslavement, colonialism, apartheid and modernization in terms of equity and social justice are as relevant as ever in the encounter between African communities and the forces of globalization. Placespecific knowledges counter generalizations and can provide us with the tools to challenge imperialist agendas and sexist development. By the same token, gender knowledges counter patriarchy and sexism in our concern with criticism and empowerment. In each of these emphases – on social justice in the face of neocolonial exploitation, on the potential of the local, on women’s knowledges as sites of resistance, on the multiple complexities of subjectivity and its interpretation in the context of globalization – my work resonates well with the WCD perspective of this volume. As globalization from above gathers force, African women will suffer more abuses and more exploitation than ever before. Just as major historical contacts with Euro-Western cultures involved attacks on the humanity and cultures of African peoples, we equally expect that there will be an intensification of the erosion of the

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indigenous languages of Africans and of specific cultures of African women. Girls also face modern violence, in addition to the older traditional violence of early marriage, early childbirth and patriarchal oppression. It is, however, equally important not to lose sight of the traditional connections between mothers, daughters, girls and women in pre-colonial societies and many traditional contemporary societies in Africa today. I will use case studies to argue that colonialism created the dichotomous opposition of tradition versus modernity. The European colonial presence was defined as a civilizing mission that brought modernity to ‘savages’ and ‘barbaric’ African ‘tribes’. Europeaninvented modernity in comparison to pre-colonial gender structures can be seen as a sexist, conservative tradition that is driven by a rigid patriarchal ideology of power. It insists on defining power as male to the continued exclusion of women, even highly educated and professional women (Amadiume 2000: 22). Sadly, the lasting legacy of this experience is that modernity is conceived as the opposite of tradition, yet this claim is false, as there is a critical dialectic in which supposed modernity also presents problems for women. In traditional societies, girls had the possibility of inclusive membership in a protective women’s culture that was headed by matriarchs. Women in traditional society in Nnobi, other Igbo societies and African societies in general made and had space for themselves and were therefore involved in cultural production. I shall call this ‘the matriarchal umbrella’ which embraced all women, and I argue that all women benefited from this umbrella which created a solidarity among women. From this point of view, traditional pre-colonial Nnobi (Igbo) matriarchy was an ideological superstructure, whose ideas showed a connection between the matricentric production unit and the relations of production. All those who ate out of one pot were bound together in the spirit of common motherhood. The political culture borrowed an idea first applied to biology and production, and applied it to the basic ideological superstructure that was reproduced at wider levels of social organization in the political structure. The result was a matriarchal system in which all Nnobi people were children of one mother, the goddess Idemili, who was worshipped by all the people of Nnobi (Amadiume 1987, 1997). What was the place of girls in this type of society?

b o d i e s a n d c h o i c e s | 135 In the past few years, much of the focus on the study of women and girls in traditional societies in Africa has been concentrated on concerns about the abuse of girls and practices of circumcision (Amadiume 2000: 122–61). Women’s bodies historically have been a signifier of culture in very fundamental and significant ways. Chris Knight (1991) argues for an ancient revolution made by human females, who used menstrual, ovarian synchrony and external environmental cues such as the moon and tides to originate a symbolic human culture. As a precondition for and guarantor of women’s total solidarity, Knight’s model leaves no room for counter-normative classifications and tensions inside the female camp. I have used terms such as matriarchy to conceptualize this female power camp, which constitutes a female-oriented side of the sociocultural system. It is this growing tension between normative matriarchal orientation (matriarchitarianism) and counter-normative individualist female body signs which presents itself as a conflict between tradition and modernity in the African context. Generally, in traditional African societies, girls’ initiation schools and traditional women’s associations headed by matriarchs teach moral virtues and aesthetic ideals for responsible citizenship. Under the leadership of older women, girls’ social transitions are achieved without the sort of patriarchal violence idealizing war-blood and killing valour, even in contexts where the girls are tested and trained in ordeals of courage and endurance, sometimes involving circumcision. Yet this is not all that traditional cultures did and not all traditional cultures circumcised women. In the traditional, pre-colonial Igbo dual-sex political system, the titled women were central to consensual decision-making and controlled the marketplaces. In Nnobi, it was Ekwe-titled women, the earthly representatives of the goddess Idemili, who controlled the village women’s council. They held overall veto rights in village assemblies. The Ekwe system can therefore be seen as a political matriarchal system, which was, however, in a dialectical or structural relationship to the umunna (patrilineage)-based patriarchal system, each in dialogue with the other. A third classificatory system, the non-gendered collective humanity, Nmadu, a genderless word meaning person/human, was again based on non-discriminatory matriarchal collectivism, as a unifying moral code and culture. The cultural appropriation of the ideology of children of one mother, the goddess Idemili, generated affective relationships as opposed

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to the androcentric political culture of patriarchy, imperialism and violence. The indigenous religions were also pluralistic, as earth goddess religion was combined with ancestral religion and the religions of various gods and goddesses. In other words, traditional pre-colonial societies were pluralistic (Amadiume 1997) and not merely a consequence of European modernity. Culturing girls: Zambia and Nigeria Like many colonized African scholars, I have found myself working with the methodology of intellectual archaeological digging to recover disqualified, submerged, subordinated or appropriated African knowledges, more especially women’s knowledges. I also find that I need to recover an African knowledge history as I draw my illustration from an old anthropology classic, Audrey Richards’s Chisungu (1992 [1956]). To recover our culture, we often swallow our pride to read offensive works.2 Richards, a colonial white woman anthropologist, observed the Chisungu ceremony of the Bemba people, who are now located in Zambia, in 1931. Her ethnography showed how girls passed from socialization by their mothers to ritual initiation by the nacimbusa (I shall call this woman the ritual matriarch) into ‘the community of married women’ through the Chisungu ritual, where no man could enter the house when this ceremony took place. The knowledge taught is ritual knowledge, since belief in supernatural forces is involved. This is what Richards called the magic aspect of the rite; the ritual was transformative because it shows that women also understood the politics of religion. The Chisungu inculcated Bemba concepts of male and female, the authority of age, female solidarity and women’s power over reproduction. Bemba women were very much involved in wealth production.3 They also generated a women’s culture, the world of women. Ideal expectations of women were industriousness and loyalty to one’s own sex. As a transformative ritual, the Chisungu ceremony opened a gate of knowledge into this women’s world. The ceremony was done after the puberty rite of the first menses. It was a nubility rite preliminary to the marriage ceremony. Richards witnessed over 18 separate ceremonies in the initiation house and the surrounding bush. Her ethnographic record is thus rich in narratives, symbols, signs and meaning in indigenous women’s culture.

b o d i e s a n d c h o i c e s | 137 The nacimbusa, the ritual matriarch, must have knowledge of ritual, industry, organizational skill, tact and personality and unusual intellectual ability. She was usually an elderly woman and successful midwife, generally of royal clan, and the office tended to be hereditary. A nacimbusa wore a feather head-dress (also worn by certain chiefs), was given respect at a chief’s court and addressed with chiefly praise songs, and it is not surprising that nacimbusa women were wealthier than other people. Although Richards does not notice it, the data suggest that the political system is dual-gendered and presents a matriarchal umbrella. Here you have an interesting concept of gender-bending that is pervasive in matriarchies. In the Chisungu ceremony the bridegroom, shibwinga, is an example of gender flexibility, for this term was also used for the sister or cross-cousin who may replace the bridegroom in aspects of the ceremony. Not only is there ritual gender-inversion, we also have the important role of aunts. Richards writes, ‘A nacimbusa will teach the secrets of the chisungu to her brother’s daughter, to whom she owes special obligations, and from whom she can demand service, and she may also teach them to her own daughter’ (1992: 57). A nacimbusa had a special relationship with the nacisungu girl she had initiated and practically saw her through life. In addition to their biological mother, this women’s culture thus provided women with a social mother to support them throughout their adult lives. The ritual was a periodic restatement of the structure of women’s society and the seniority and authority of older women. Older women were confident leaders and teachers, and girls behaved towards them with respect and humility. This was before mission Christianity, colonial schools and post-colonial culture took over the education of girls and women as well. What is missing in Richards’s account is the anti-colonial struggle by African peoples, a struggle for liberation and independence and thus also for cultural independence in colonial and post-colonial discourse. In 1931 Audrey Richards had thought that indigenous cultures of Africa would ‘die out’ under enforced colonial modernity. Against this, the argument for the right to culture in colonial and post-colonial discourse posits the resilience of traditional cultures in Africa. Support can be drawn from Ngozi Onwurah’s 1993 documentary film, Monday’s Girls, whose dominant narrative centres on a ritual for the culturing of girls’ bodies by matriarchs. Through

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this we see two young women, Florence and Asikiye, make choices and decisions in relation to their future through the film’s dominant narrative, which centres on a ritual for the culturing of girls’ bodies by matriarchs. The location of the film is among the Wakirike people in the island town of Ugoloma, a fishing and trading people with a population of 20,000 in the Rivers district in southern Nigeria. Wakirike people perform Iria, a ceremony that is a puberty rite and also a girls’ rite of passage – a coming-of-age ceremony – in which the girls are called Iriabo(s). The matriarchs constitute the important ruling council of women called the Egbereremi. In the Iria ceremony, the ritual matriarch acts as a social mother and teacher. The girls are taught about men and motherhood, grace and self-discipline. When the parents take their daughters to the priestess Monday Moses, she says of a girl, ‘then I am in charge of her. I make her beautiful’ (Onwurah 1993). While in confinement, the girls listen and dance to mixed music that includes Caribbean reggae, African American soul and Nigerian high-life. Archaic elements are also present, as when Monday Moses says that the end of the confinement depends on the moon and the tide. As ritual matriarch, Monday Moses proclaims that if a girl fails to perform the ceremony, the goddess will be angry; such a failure will bring disgrace to the family. The girls are loved and pampered like princesses and they equally have to display their decorated bodies to their community in a public ceremony, a test to which each girl reacts differently. Some feel shy and embarrassed, while some are defiant and face the challenges without fear. There is no totalizing ritual in Ngozi Onwurah’s documentary. The two girls represent diverging perspectives, the traditional, happy and obedient Florence and the rebellious city girl Asikiye, a music student who has spent ten years in the city. These two girls present contrasting arguments and make different choices in relation to tradition in a changing culture. While Asikiye thinks that some traditions should be forgotten, Florence, Monday’s granddaughter, sees the benefit of tradition. Monday Moses, the matriarch in this film, says that she makes the girls look beautiful, not with clothes, but with the traditional body paint. The ceremony involves body display and, from a modernist perspective, the girls could be perceived as abused and the matriarchs as wicked old women punishing young girls.

b o d i e s a n d c h o i c e s | 139 Notions of freedom in Western feminism and European thought might reject the idea that Florence, who supports tradition and respects the ritual matriarch, is at all subversive. From a Eurocentric perspective there would be no doubt that Asikiye is the real feminist rebel, simply because she opposes African village traditions and ideals. She is following her own individual will. Yet, Florence is actually bending cultures, practising her native cultural ritual and Christianity and still wanting to finish her basically Western education before getting married. She does not feel any conflict of culture, unlike Asikiye, who rejects the body rules of the ritual that require her to bare her ‘virgin’ breast in public for inspection to confirm that she is still a girl, and not a woman who has already suckled a baby but wants to pass as a girl. Asikiye also rejects the authority and knowledge of the matriarchs and considers the women ignorant and their tutoring stupid. She is not allowed by the matriarchs to compromise the regulations of the Iria. Here again in Wakirike society, as with Nnobi Igbo society, there are two ruling camps. One is the patriarchal ruling council of men in which Asikiye’s father sits. In this men’s gathering, Asikiye’s father says of his daughter: ‘She cannot impose her will on the community’ (Onwurah 1993). The other is the matriarchal camp of the women’s council, the Egbereremi, which uses gentle persuasion and prays for the girls. The cosmopolitan and individualist Asikiye is unmoved by threats or gentle persuasion and leaves for the city without completing the ritual. With city clothes, straightened hair and curls, she hides her eyes behind dark sunglasses and prefers the anonymity of the city and its night clubs. I want to stretch this comparison of the two girls and the two locations a little further. One important site in this context of rapid globalization is the city, where violence against women – including state violence – is extremely frightening and vicious (Amadiume 2000). Under these circumstances, we could say that Asikiye escapes one form of violence to expose herself to another in the hazardous life of the city and its threat to women. Violence in this sense is external to the women’s rituals and cultures. Under these circumstances, one might ask which of these girls would more easily find support and protection if confronted with any of these new patterns of violence against women? The one under the matriarchal umbrella, or the one who lives anonymously in the city? Is there a feminist imperative

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that the rule of law must supersede ritual? Is the rule of law more empowering to women than ritual? Gender, sexuality and power ambiguity Even though Florence and Asikiye are considered daughters by their Wakirike people, their different choices of destiny change the way they are perceived and represented. The presence of a structural women’s system can create co-operation and balance, or it can result in tensions in dichotomous conceptual systems and a related gender polarity. Florence will obviously graduate into the women’s system and enjoy the protection of matriarchs. Asikiye will, in contrast, experience a negative representation and possibly name-calling. It might be said that Asikiye’s ‘head is not correct’ because she is possessed by a bad spirit, or that she is a ‘stubborn girl’ who is bent on having her own ways, and that could only lead to destructive choices or a bad marriage. She might marry someone who in appearance looks like a handsome stranger, but would turn out to be an ugly monster in disguise! I argue that this sort of name-calling and perhaps gossip from within the women’s group sanctions individuals who are subverting the group. This sort of punishment is different from popular, negative perceptions and representations of women who are seen as transgressing against the wider social system where cultures contend for dominance. Popular negative representations of women are invariably about body parts, sex and wickedness, as women are called prostitutes, insatiable whores, husband snatchers, witches and Mammy Water. In the popular imagination, there is fear of unmarried women because their sexuality is unregulated. There is equally fear of isolated old women as victims of failed kinship; they are supposedly witches. Successful older and wealthy women are either revered as matriarchs, or they are feared enemies subverting patriarchy by controlling men, thus reversing gender. Also feared are beautiful isolated young women, as a prototype of the enchanting water goddess, Mammy Water, whom some consider a postcolonial temptress goddess. Henry Drewal writes of Mammy Water: ‘She personifies unattainable, exquisite beauty, vanity, jealousy, sexuality, romantic not maternal love, limitless good fortune – not health, long life or progeny, but riches, material and monetary. She is thus very much part of international trading system between Africa and

b o d i e s a n d c h o i c e s | 141 Europe commencing in the late fifteenth century and now including other regions of the world as well’ (Drewal 1996: 311). Like Asikiye, Mammy Water likes the city and wears dark sunglasses! Asikiye might be seen as a modernist, but Mammy Water, it seems, is a mirage of modernity. Scholars disagree about the identity and origin of Mammy Water (Drewal 1988, 1988a, 1996, Gore and Nevadomsky 1997, JellBahlsen 1997). There is, however, an area of convergence in both the physical descriptions and character attributes of the Mammy Water of popular culture, and the identification of symptoms of possession. In West Africa, it is generally claimed that these spirits have luxurious homes at the bottom of the waters, are usually very beautiful, assuming various human shapes, but manifest particularly as halfwoman and half-fish, like mermaids. Mammy Water is represented as an enchanting, naked, beautiful woman who can be seen combing her long hair sitting on a rock in the sea or on the shore. It is also believed that this beautiful woman can cause tragic accidents. She can give her followers riches, but will deny them children. Henry Drewal has done by far the most extensive and sophisticated work on Mammy Water and in his description, Mammy Water is a ‘free’ nature spirit, European and not African. She is without family or children and is totally outside any social system. She attracts those with sexual problems such as impotence and barrenness. She relates to her followers as a jealous lover (Drewal 1996). Although men can be possessed by a Mammy Water spirit, the associated religion of possession sickness is dominated by women. Mammy Water is matrilineally inherited. Possessed women become priestesses and healers, as they are educated in the knowledge taught by this water goddess (Jell-Bahlsen 1997, Nwapa 1997). Mammy Water is therefore a goddess of affliction, which is conditional to the calling of her followers and priestesses. Others might argue for some duality, since her priestesses are also healers, but their healing power comes from affliction-possession and trance. The problem of Asikiye, like the problem of Mammy Water and the embodying of modernity, is not simply a question of the recognition and acceptance of hybridity, a mix of European and African. All cultures hybridize thought, incorporating what is useful. When hybridity is simply the mixing of local elements with European, Western or global cultural motifs through local agency,

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one can of course recognize a natural tendency to exchange cultures or associate with other cultures. This is not the case in a situation where Christian conversion and education teach white ideals of beauty to the detriment of local values and ideals. Some may see embodying the Other as inversions and ways of subverting local control. But subverting to whose benefit? Is it to the benefit of a racist ideal or to self? To be ‘local’ becomes a derogatory term, almost like calling someone ‘a villager’. Straight wigs, especially blonde ones, are again being widely used by African women, including women of African descent. Dreaming of blue eyes or white skin and straight hair becomes a problem of self-negation or abusing others. We can see that Asikiye’s life is defined by Western ideas of beauty – light skin, tinted, permed hair and sunglasses. As such, she is a prototype of Mammy Water. Florence is a contrast to this imported ideal of modern womanhood. Yet, Florence is traditionally modern, that is, using and enhancing her natural beauty – roundly cropped hair and body painted in familiar motifs and women’s designs with natural vegetable dyes from plants picked from her local stream. Imported Western ideals of beauty are here questioned simply because they are used to render the local as ‘bush’ and ugly and therefore inferior. Mission Christianity and colonialism imported women’s inferiority in body and status. Sexist policies of the patriarchal colonial state gave boys a head start in education in terms of numbers and in professional subjects geared to work in government, trade, industry, church ministry and education services (Amadiume 1987: 135). Girls were educated in domestic services, cooking, cleaning, child care and sewing. There was a historical Christocentric bombardment of messages that ordained women to serve their husbands, look white and follow Christ. This came with the creation of the new-nation state known as Nigeria. Under these circumstances, the empowering education that would balance this inferior, perceived feminine perspective of the colonial education came from cultural education by the matriarchs in their own ways of doing things. We indeed see Asikiye who said no to her father and disrupted ritual, expressing body freedom as she danced in a night club; the same body that she had enclosed and refused to the gaze of her village people may be available to a stranger. Her body belongs to her privately, just as the bodies of Florence and the other girls become

b o d i e s a n d c h o i c e s | 143 a collective body of Wakirike womanhood and political matriarchy. This is a different situating of body culture and power. Florence acts collectively, Asikiye acts individually. What should be our concerns about these girls in the context of post-colonialism, globalizing capitalism, mounting violence against women and the staggering statistics of the onslaught of HIV/AIDS extermination? Mammy Water, sex and capitalism Postcolonial globalization, identities, locations and places are again steadily being transformed by the forces of capital. City anonymity can indeed be as isolating as the private sphere of the nuclear family. When discussing the culturing of girls in the Iria fattening room ceremony of the Wakirike of Nigeria, I had asked questions about the choices and futures of the two girls – Florence and the rebellious Asikiye. By rejecting the matriarchal umbrella is Asikiye walking into the oppression of isolation, or into freedom? Big as the city is, class and race can turn it into a circumscribed space with only brief illusions of escape, a mirage of power just like the enchanting Mammy Water. There are, of course, other views, which see empowerment in transgression and in the ability of individual women to take charge of their bodies against all odds. Carole Boyce Davies (1998) argues, for example, that in spite of the misrepresentation and commodification of the black female body in carnival (under slavery and after, this body enters the New World as commodified), no matter what their condition, Caribbean women in the New World ‘make space’ and take charge of their bodies to express freedom. The transgressive female body is both voice and resistance; there is therefore a distinction between women who are staged and women in action (Davies 1998). The phenomena of Asikiye and Mammy Water raise the problem of the place of the isolated individual female in a collective women’s world, and equally in the individualistic modern capitalist world. Mammy Water, a major theme in the work of the African woman pioneer writer, Flora Nwapa, provides some clues as to how to read these phenomena. Nwapa’s novels are focused on her icon, a water goddess. Time and time again, she turns to a persistent ‘feminist’ question of female deviation from convention in traditional and modern settings, and the search for alternative means of women’s ‘empowerment’ and personal happiness (see Ogunyemi and Umeh

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1995, Umeh 1998, Ogunyemi 1996). I have argued that the focus on this water goddess with a fixed stereotypical sexuality enabled Nwapa to expand the boundaries of discourse on women’s sexuality in a radical fashion that is rare in the writing of women in Africa (Amadiume 1998). Mammy Water spirit, a water goddess called Uhammiri or Ogbuide, is the major spiritual and symbolic form in Nwapa’s novels. Nwapa explores women’s experiences of possession by this spirit. Belief in this spirit, who is called by different names, is widespread in Africa and the African diaspora. This is especially so in communities near rivers, creeks, lagoons, oceans and lakes. In these same communities, there also exist several other female water deities who are not Mammy Water. This is not surprising, since Africans generally deify rivers as goddesses. But what is interesting is again the motif of women’s historical habitation on shorelines, the original ecosystem of Chris Knight’s theory of menstrual synchrony and symbolic culture. This time we have a spirit of individual self-embodiment, and not the making divine of the spirit of women’s collective solidarity. Imagining choice or isolation? Nwapa’s concern about women’s bodies is grounded in the conflicts arising from domestic practices within the confining spaces and patriarchal ideologies of the European-imposed family structure. These conflicts derive either from expectations imposed on women, or the reality of this type of family as a prison. The issue and context are all about modernity. In other words, it is not quite correct to read these stories as an attack on African traditional cultures and saving African womanhood from African traditions. Nwapa’s Mammy Water is a hybrid, a mulatto, stemming from colonially derived desire for ‘whiteness’ by colonized African natives, as Nwapa herself confirms in an essay on the origin of Mammy Water (Nwapa 1997). The tensions in Nwapa’s stories are post-colonial, characterized by afflictions such as isolation, unhappiness and disconnection, as the women’s needs become more personal and individualistic. In The Lake Goddess, a forthcoming woman-centred novel,4 Nwapa introduces a women’s network of widows, but distinguishes between women’s culture and men’s by attacking certain patriarchal Igbo social rules and etiquette. In Nwapa’s narrative women own kolanut trees, break kolanuts, initiate marriage and cheat on the circumcision

b o d i e s a n d c h o i c e s | 145 ritual. The mothers bribe the midwife to pretend that Ona has been circumcised when they perform all the necessary ceremonies. I had previously read this action as a clever proposal by Nwapa on how to preserve and ‘respect’ custom in a modern context. I also think that Nwapa might be saying much more than that, as the women’s action suggests a struggle for woman’s body, whereby the matriarchs rethink their bodies and drop the required circumcision ritual. Women may have reconfigured their bodies in that one instance, but in other post-colonial situations women still find themselves struggling against fragmentation. For example, in the modern African context, religion that had earlier sealed women’s solidarity begins to divide women. In The Lake Goddess, Christianity divides mother and daughter. Ona is unable to find a balance between Christianity and the call of Uhammiri. When all attempts at normative behaviour have failed, including schooling and marriage, she ends up outside society and squarely in the domain of Mammy Water. With the intensification of Ona’s mental illness, the goddess becomes increasingly her only source of contentment. She says to her father: ‘I love to see her. I have a sense of well-being when I dream my dreams.’ As ‘a woman possessed’, the call of the goddess of the lake compels Ona to leave her husband and their three children. The context in which the final rupture takes place is further proof of Nwapa’s concern with the individual woman’s needs. Ona tries to tolerate sex to please her husband, but finds it strange and alien. Nwapa thus succeeds in writing a radical discourse on women and sexuality into African women’s heritage – a venture that she had already alluded to in One is Enough (1995 [1981]) where the protagonist, Amaka, weighs her options. One of these options is to consider, stereotypically, lesbian sex as in Europe and America. African women are thus challenged to take this on board and not to shy away from this controversy, which opens possibilities for various feminist interests and different women’s needs in a fast-changing world. Pursuing this cause, Nwapa eroticizes the image of the Woman of the Lake and disengages Ona from her husband. In Nwapa’s concern to highlight individual women’s quest for sexual freedom, she fails to exploit the full possibilities in Igbo gender flexibility, which she had knowledge of but had her main characters dismiss in her novels. Yet, Igbo women have and share with other women a heritage of solidarity and resistance strategies

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that have enabled mass mobilization by African women in historical social movements (Amadiume 1997). Under the forces of capitalistdriven globalization, we need to contrast individual choice with women’s solidarity, in the context of the matriarchal umbrella with its traditional African women’s knowledge and power network systems. The problem of motherhood and the stigmatization of female infertility have led critics to emphasize Nwapa’s disaffection with traditional Igbo culture. Nwapa engages in this criticism through her implied condemnation of church and boarding school education. We can read this in her stereotypical characterization of both Ona’s mother, Akpe, and grandmother, Mama Theresa, as fanatical Christians who totally reject traditional religious belief and do not have a good relationship with Ona. Similarly, Madam Margaret, the head of the convent school that Ona attended, is called ‘a religious fanatic’ and a ‘mean, hard, and evil woman’. Yet, in preparing Ona for the call to priesthood, Nwapa begins to unnecessarily disengage Ona from normal domestic and economic life. Ona is not interested in motherhood, children or husband. In her determination to reciprocate her husband’s kindness she tries initiating love-making once in a while, which pleases her husband, but at the end of it all this leaves her sleepless while her husband snores with contentment. It is on one such occasion that Ona ‘saw a naked woman standing in front of her. She had very long hair dripping with water’ (Nwapa forthcoming: 172). As Ona recounts, she journeys to the abode of the lake goddess, who tells her, ‘I have waited for a long time for you to be my priestess, I have chosen you. I want you but I don’t want to force you or hurry you. Don’t wait too long. Give this message to the man who lives with you. Tell him that you belong to me’ (184). This is a new individualistic possessiveness and belonging; a new religiosity that will disengage a woman from society. Nwapa contrasts a men’s conversation, in which god is masculinized, with that between two women fish-sellers. The two women seem crucial to the completion of the story, because through them Nwapa recovers the traditional woman-centredness of her narrative, raising feminist issues and giving voice to women in Ona’s words: ‘Ogbuide wants all women to have voices. Women should not be voiceless. Ogbuide hates voiceless women.’ It is not surprising that it is to these women that the beautiful and ageless lake goddess,

b o d i e s a n d c h o i c e s | 147 who is partial to women, gives her message to them through her gifted priestess Ona; the essence of the message is that women should submit themselves to Ogbuide and return to goddess worship! Nwapa, it seems, has come full circle, from individualistic concern with personal freedom and happiness to the collective project. What is achieved in Ona, however, is a dislocated priestess – no domestic duties, no marketing and trading, no women’s organizations. She is only a priestess living in a temple, keeping the ritual rules and taboos of the Woman of the Lake. Ona is, of course, a creation of Nwapa’s imagination. Because part of Nwapa’s argument includes a critique of Christian mission imperialism, the failure to rehabilitate Ona as priestess, as well as a full member of society doing women’s daily chores, indicates to me that Nwapa has not completely escaped her Catholic upbringing and its teaching about the ideal life of a priest. I have a problem with new conceptualizations of a celibate and isolated priestess living in a shrine, because priestesses of traditional Igbo religions were fully integrated into society and the women’s system, in very much the same way as the Nnobi, Bemba and Wakirike ritual matriarchs. Fragments and the matriarchal umbrella Symbols do not speak for themselves; they are dependent on translation and interpretation. So also is Mammy Water not complete in herself. She needs to be placed in relation to other women-embodying goddesses and wider women’s struggles. These two types of discourse are dichotomized, because Mammy Water is represented as an anti-motherhood, anti-kinship goddess: she is the temptress spirit. This is not the case with the more normative fertility mother goddesses such as earth, birth and river goddesses who were seen as central to Igbo religions and social structure. The Nnobi goddess Idemili was a subversive phenomenon in terms of gender–power relations. This matriarchy was tolerant of gender flexibility. The grounding of the goddess Idemili in economic, political and religious dialectics truly made her an embodiment of female solidarity with an ideological message of a collectivist humanism and humane empowerment. The kinship morality of umunne (children of one mother) bound siblings in love and alliance. There are no terms for brother and sister or sisters or brothers. They are children of one mother. There is therefore no need for an Oedipal complex,

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the bane of Western feminist thought, in the matricentric unit. There is no casted blood sisterhood in the familial, but an inclusive eating out of one pot. Since there is no term for sister that is not relational to mother or brother, one could not conceive of a social paradigm based on an exclusive set of sisters. There is a further distinction between the goddess Idemili and Mammy Water, as Mammy Water is seen as a goddess of wealth, but not children. If we look at Igbo traditional conceptual systems, we see that there is a concern about individual women’s isolation. Some tend to think that the choices for feminist roles without the rejection of traditional culture are very limited. This would suggest an assumption that feminism and traditional culture are mutually exclusive, or that African traditions and modernity are dichotomous. Let us look at the options that Flora Nwapa’s Amaka in One is Enough considers open to a married and barren wife. The options are adoption of a stranger, asking for the children of her brothers and sisters, marrying a young girl to have her husband impregnate her, or claiming her pregnant maid’s baby (Nwapa 1995: 20–21).. They include the traditional institution of woman and woman marriage that was widely practised in many societies in Africa until the Christian church and colonial administrators banned it. Native cultures were disqualified and marginalized in official policy and discourse. Yet, these cultures in their authentic, hybridic, reinvented forms remain sources of renewal and enrichment in the modern context of culture wars. The traditional cultures of the matriarchs that I narrate are different from male-invented tradition responses to the colonial encounter (Ranger 1997). We need to understand that these matriarchs, who embody the collective wisdom and power of women and in many ways the society, have a highly evolved understanding of culture and politics, for they use culture to continually redefine biology. They go beyond making a statement about the importance of giving birth and the natural duties of mothers in socializing girls, since they also teach ethics of kinship and social relations. Might we call the relationship between the matriarchs and girl initiates a second giving-birth, thus thinking of them as important players in a whole set of reconfigurations in a rite of passage involving symbolic statements and actions? The rituals achieve fundamental transformations that direct girls into new gendered consciousness

b o d i e s a n d c h o i c e s | 149 as women in the world of women who are situated in the social world and universe of their various societies.5 The relationship of the girls with their mothers might change, because even though there is a continuity of ordinary home life and daily chores, there is a separation, since the new teachers and companions are no longer the biological mothers. They are now a community of women, as young women begin to build their own network of women through the life course. Thus, much more than lessons of wifehood and motherhood are inscribed in the initiation of girls’ rituals. What is achieved is a shared universe, in which signs and objects come to represent a collective memory that is passed on from generation to generation. Women in these systems have agency and a subjective relationship to the processes of construction and regulation of meaning and experience. My point is that matriarchy is not an invention only of the past. Tradition and modernity are not dichotomous. I have used the contemporary Wakirike case study to dispel that supposition. It is a modernist, post-colonial thinking that sees matriarchy as a thing of the past, when the tradition is quite alive, sometimes in old forms, and sometimes in new hybrid forms in church women’s organizations, national women’s organizations and national women’s development mobilization structures set up by wives of politicians and first ladies (Amadiume 1987: 166–71; Amadiume 2000: 43–61, 247). Modern women, it seems, are appropriating and adapting traditional practices to their needs. What is different is the nature of leadership and legitimate authority over women and girls. This was indeed the case in Nigeria, when different national women’s organizations got involved in the case of the murder of the child bride Hauwa in 1987 (Amadiume 2000: 125–31). Hauwa was a nine-yearold girl who was betrothed to a husband and at the age of twelve was forced to live with him. Hauwa resisted this by running away and by hunger strikes, while her supposed husband meted out several punishments by cutting off her limbs. She eventually died from infection to her wounds. One of the national women’s organizations, Women In Nigeria (WIN), went so far as to take Hauwa’s husband to court. The involvement of women’s organizations had come too late to save Hauwa. However, that case inspired a heated national debate and renewed interest in issues of early marriage, sexuality and the abuse of girls, revealing new problems facing girls in modern society.

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All the same, one must admit that in changing conditions in traditional societies as well, girls are no longer so perfect! There probably are more pre-initiation pregnancies, and few girls are able to muster the bravery required to pass some of the ordeals of initiation rites. More importantly, many girls like Florence do not get married after initiation and many do not even get initiated before marriage. However, matriarchitarian structures are present both in traditional societies and in cosmopolitan cities. Though I think that there are no easy answers, I venture to suggest that city girls like Asikiye can be encouraged to join organizations of women’s cultures that continue to demonstrate the power of women’s solidarity, albeit with a dimension of class contradictions (Amadiume 2000). Conclusion In focusing on the dialectic of the collective and the individual woman, I have tried to avoid taking the side of a discourse that makes small gains for women, situating women in small crevices of power and not in the wider contexts of organized forces. I have discussed Mammy Water enchantment in the traditional setting, against the wider organized power of women. When we shift from these women’s worlds, Mammy Water assumes a different significance in the lives of individual women under colonialism and neocolonial capitalism. White women, capitalist goods and Western power become unattainable objects of desire, which are represented in the enchanting goddess, Mammy Water, whose images efface that of indigenous African matriarchs. In closing, it is clear that the disagreements about the meanings of Mammy Water are many, with profound implications for how we read culture and women in the context of African development. For Gore and Nevadomsky, Mammy Water relationships are ‘framed as a sexual attraction’ (1997: 60). For Henry Drewal (1996), Mammy Water is about local conceptualizations of the Other. For Jell-Bahlsen (1997), Mammy Water beliefs are similarly local, but the image is foreign. Thus, the discourse on desire and sexuality completely moves away from women’s histories and women’s systems to a world of patriarchy and capital, in which post-colonial African women, posited purely as individuals, are isolated in their desires and afflictions, consuming imports from Europe and India and in turn dreaming of Whiteness. As the world is being redefined daily by

b o d i e s a n d c h o i c e s | 151 a globalization that centres neoliberalism, it is time for the local to redefine our communities. This can be done through resistance and struggles that create demands for the right of all peoples to decide the bases of a just economic, political and cultural exchange on this planet we share. Notes A version of this chapter has appeared as ‘Bodies, Choices, Globalizing Neocolonial Enchantments: African Matriarchs and Mammy Water’, in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 2 (2) 2002: 41–66. 1. I know that there are problems of generalization posed by the usage of terms such as ‘African women’, ‘Third World women’, ‘women of the South’, ‘Western women’. In this essay the usage is purely strategic, and I feel justified because my analysis and theory are based on a comparison of specific case studies from which I derive general cultural patterns. I therefore operate here at two levels of discourse, the particular and the general, to engage in a global discourse. It is in the context of this global discourse, as it affects responses from Africa, that I also use the general terms Western and Euro-Western culture to refer to African experiences with European and American hegemony. I am of course fully aware of differences of history, culture, class, race, gender, etc. in all of these societies and feel confident that progressive thinkers will accept my usage of these terms and the general criticism that I make. I have, sadly, observed increasingly in Europe and America a certain robust confidence in challenging and silencing African women and diaspora African women when we dare call attention to the crimes of racism, slavery or colonization. Then we are accused of dichotomization or generalization or living in the past! Africa or African obviously refers to the continent itself as a geographical

space and to cultures associated with the continent. It is well understood that within the African continent there are regional, national, ethnic, cultural and language differences. There is also a race question in East, Central and Southern Africa and in North Africa. North Africa is sometimes considered to belong to the Middle East and therefore distinct from so-called sub-Saharan Africa or Black Africa, showing that we do indeed have a race issue in Africa. In Afrocentric perspective, Black Africa includes North Africa, especially Egypt and the huge African diaspora of the world. This is, however, not my concern in this chapter in which the use of generalized terms are purely strategic, employed for dismissing assumptions that Africa’s collective experience of colonialism resulted in the disappearance or a total erasure of all pre-existing cultures. Under globalization, we have seen the power of capitalism and bureaucracy in the shaping and forming of new global identities. We have also had to engage discourses on huge topical issues such as debt, structural adjustment programmes, the environment, HIV/AIDS, etc. The use of generalized categories thus becomes purely strategic, and quite effective when necessary for a solidarity front against persistent and transforming Euro-Western, global economic, cultural

152 | s exua l i t y a n d th e g e n de re d body and political forces. This is the argument of pan-Africanism. 2. Here I am reading a work by a woman who described Africans as savages in her 1932 book Hunger and Work in a Savage Tribe: A Functional Study of Nutrition Among the Southern Bantu. The preface to this book is written by one of the founding patriarchs of British anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski. He too also called his supposed ‘non-western’ people savages in his books The Sexual Life of Savages (1929) and Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927). 3. In their traditional setting, the Bemba of Zambia practised slash-andburn shifting cultivation. There was a gender division of labour, with women in charge of most food provision. Women must know food in the bush, such as wild vegetables, mushrooms, honey and caterpillars. A small girl of ten or eleven knew up to 40 different mushrooms and could distinguish edible ones from poisonous ones (Richards 1992: 26). They were dependent on trees for fertility and had good knowledge of them for economic and medicinal purposes. They had knowledge of at least 40 to 50 different trees and their magical properties. Their understanding of their environment was immense. Like most traditional African cultures, Bemba considered wealth to be in labour and not in goods: labour makes wealth, as the Igbo of Nigeria would say. 4. Unfortunately, The Lake Goddess is still forthcoming. My page numbers are to a MS of The Lake Goddess that was sent to me by Africa World Press, who later also sent me galleys. I was invited to contribute an article to Emerging Perspectives on Flora Nwapa: Critical and Theoretical Essays, edited by Marie Umeh and published by Africa World Press in 1998. The book has quite a few essays on The Lake Goddess. As I understood it

then, the novel was supposed to have been published with the book of critical essays. 5. Oyèrónké Oyewùmí (1997) hardly acknowledges the degree of her indebtedness to my work, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (Amadiume 1987), in which I distinguished biological sex from sociocultural gender, and contrasted rigid Western gender construction with flexible Igbo gender system in language, roles and statuses. I argued that this flexibility in gender construction enabled women’s economic and political power, especially since women and men could play certain key roles and occupy certain statuses, terms for which were gender neutral. At the same time, I argued that gender played a strong role in the social structure, the culture and social relations. Women organized on the basis of gender and defended women’s rights by the same logic. I also argued that colonialism disrupted Igbo women’s traditional systems and imposed European notions of womanhood, but that aspects of traditional women’s systems carried over into the present. Oyewùmí applies the same ideas to her study of the Yoruba, but arrives at a different conclusion. In her view it was colonialism that invented the category women in Yoruba society. In the preface to her book, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, Oyewùmí states: ‘In fact, my central argument is that there were no women – defined in strictly gendered terms – in that society’ (1999: xiii, italics in the original). Thus, Oyewùmí denies gender as a principle of social relations and social organization in pre-nineteenth-century, pre-colonial Yoruba society. There is no doubt that a women’s culture and women’s knowledge system existed and still exist

b o d i e s a n d c h o i c e s | 153 in Yoruba societies. Body did matter as gendered, since Yoruba women were circumcised. There were elaborate lifecycle rituals involving women’s bodies as females through the life course of women from birth to death that are in fact absent in the lives of Western women, who are supposedly bodyfocused. Oyewùmí seems smitten by fear of body. Stuck in exactly the same thing that she is critiquing, she succeeds in imposing a Western fear of being women on Yoruba women. In reality, Yoruba women, like other women in African societies, engage

in issues of body and are comfortable with being women, as they use body symbolism to construct and reconstruct alternative cultural systems that favour women, as, for example, matriarchy. Thus, these women have a pragmatic relationship with many social systems that also include ideal notions of human equality. An ideal notion of the equality of persons or human beings is present in the Yoruba non-gendered concept of Enyo and similarly in Igbo Nmadu, but we still have to face the contradictions of gender that are based on a material reality.

VISIONS TWO

E M P OWE R M E N T : S N A K E S A ND LA DDER S

Jan Nederveen Pieterse

It is not entirely clear when ‘empowerment’ entered the vocabulary. Among feminists in the 1970s, ‘emancipation’ came be to be regarded as too large and ambitious an agenda, while ‘empowerment’ was seen as more practical and enabling immediate action. Over the past decades the term has been working overtime. It has become a totem word in development populism and is widely used in feminism, public interest campaigning, social movements and management. Empowerment, then, is used in both political and non-political contexts; the common denominator is that, at the very least, it refers to individual skills development. Originally, empowerment meant delegation; since the seventeenth century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it has meant ‘to invest legally or formally with power or authority; to authorize, license’; or ‘to impart or bestow power to an end or for a purpose; to enable, permit’ (James 1999: 14). In feminism, empowerment has gradually taken on the reverse of the original meaning: now it is self-empowerment and comes not from above, but from below. Its meaning ranges from having a voice, particularly in decision-making, to having control of resources. Rowlands notes that ‘empowerment as a concept has arisen alongside the strengthening of focus on individualism, consumerism and personal achievement as cultural and economic goals’ (1998: 11). In business-speak, empowerment has several meanings: organizations eliminate middle management and empower employees to supervise themselves and junior staff; it refers to self-management as a corollary of corporate downsizing or as part of corporate identity politics. According to Wendy James, empowerment is ‘an ambivalent word. It is the kind of word that the social sciences should use with extreme care, if at all’ (1999: 26). Is it possible to penetrate the aura of vagueness surrounding ‘empowerment’ to arrive at a critical core? One option is to try to establish a more or less rigorous definition,

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but given the wide variety of uses this is a difficult option. Another option is to view empowerment as an umbrella term for a wide array of ‘progressive’ politics. Then we would still want to know what is distinctive about empowerment, for faced with different forms of collective action, how would we know what is empowering and what is not? That the term empowerment is now so widely used can be taken as a sign of the times itself. That is, empowerment should not offhand be approached as a lesser form of emancipation – emancipationminus – but as a theme in its own right. As such, since empowerment contains ‘power’, it implies a particular angle on power and politics, and capturing this involves exploring the relationship between power and empowerment. Power and empowerment Power has multiple connotations of energy (as in ‘Power and Light’), capacity (as in horsepower) and ‘power over’ (domination, rule, authority, etc.). If we consider how power has changed meaning over time we come across pairs of terms such as domination and emancipation, capital and labour, imperialism and liberation, rule and resistance. The relationship between these terms is typically one of contradiction, opposition, with one logic trying to control or displace the other. Key concepts of power that are currently in use – hegemony (Gramsci) and discourse (Foucault) – do not function in this way. That is, to refer to progressive change we would use the same terms. The point of ‘counter-hegemony’ is to achieve hegemony and an alternative discourse is still discourse. Obviously, this implies a changed take on the nature of power. Empowerment, likewise, does not stand to power in a relationship of contradiction, but we are on a single terrain, presumably dealing with variations of power. These changing understandings may be correlated with other contemporary trends, such as capacitation in economics, enablement in development and governance and the concern with learning. Empowerment is itself a form of power, emergent power. It follows that empowerment can be merely mimesis of power: as Paulo Freire said, the greatest risk for the oppressed is to imitate the oppressor. Similar problems apply to terms such as ‘participation’. Empowerment can obscure conflicts of interest among different categories of women; forward movement is not inevitable and

empowerment | 159 one person’s empowerment may be another’s disempowerment (see Rowlands 1998). To address this problem, we would need to problematize power. In feminist literature, ‘power’ is disaggregated into ‘power over’ (domination), ‘power to’ (capacity), ‘power within’ (inner strength) and ‘power with’ (achieved through co-operation and alliance). In feminist uses of empowerment the emphasis is clearly on ‘power to’ and capabilities, and not on ‘power over’. Capacitation has become a keynote in several fields. In Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach (1985), capability refers both to the ‘freedom to choose’ and to control of a ‘set of commodity bundles’, a conceptualization that shows the imprint of liberal philosophy. Sen developed this theme in relation to ‘functioning’: ‘Capability is primarily a reflection of the freedom to achieve valuable functionings … a set of vectors of functioning’ (Sen 1992: 49, 40). This parallels Martha Nussbaum’s idea of translating rights to capabilities: ‘The right to political participation … the right to free speech – these and others are best thought of as “capacities to function”. In other words, to secure a right for citizens in one of these areas is to put them in a position of capability to function in that area’ (2000: 11). The capabilities approach is the theoretical backbone of the human development approach that defines development as ‘the enlargement of people’s choices’. This is operationalized in capacity building in development projects, which refers to institutional as well as individual capabilities. Capacity building is the mainstream language of the World Bank and donors, while empowerment is associated with bottom-up, alternative approaches. Also frequently used nowadays is the terminology of ‘enabling’, ‘disabling’ and disempowerment. Government has become governance, a shift that refers to an enabling and facilitator role of government. The starting point in progressive politics is usually consciousness: of class (Marx), the subconscious (psychoanalysis), gender (feminism), identity (recognition). Conscientization is the keynote of Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy. Consciousness-raising and ‘awareness training’ function in relation to gender, race and human rights. In political contexts, awareness is usually step one and collective action step two. Another angle is to view learning as the link between consciousness and capacity: capacitation essentially takes place through learning. Nowadays learning is a keynote in fields such as management (the learning organization), local economic development and governance.

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Development can also be redefined as a collective learning process (see Nederveen Pieterse 2001). The rhizome of empowerment One way of approaching the relationship between empowerment and other notions of progressive action is to conceptualize a ‘ladder of empowerment’. A ladder, however, implies a linear progression, suggesting a step-like, cumulative forward movement in modes of collective awareness and action. In reality, collective action and the relations between different modes of collective action are probably much more complex, and more like a rhizome – the metaphor is of a tubular root sprouting in many irregular directions – than a staircase. Key terms such as resistance and empowerment are typically used in many different meanings across a wide register. Attempts to use them in a narrow register with tight definitions easily become artificial. Using loose definitions and understandings, and viewing interrelations between different modes of collective action like a rhizome (à la Deleuze and Guattari), gives us a more complex and realistic depiction, in which consciousness and praxis give rise to many options, as resistance grows in many directions, matching the loose use of language in actual politics and action. Below is a schematic overview of various forms of collective action. The ordering criterion is the degree of social transformation achieved in different forms and conceptions of praxis. The table is structured as a continuum that runs from no social transformation (coping) to maximum transformation (hegemony). This raises several questions. Is it justified to take social transformation as a yardstick of empowerment? In effect this follows a double logic: a rhizome of collective action and a ladder of social transformation. This may help to distinguish the contours of ‘empowerment’. To which unit does this apply: to social groups, societies or the world? If it applies to social groups, then the logical end of empowerment – hegemony – may not apply. For example, for indigenous peoples such as Aboriginals in Australia the maximum achievement is emancipation, not hegemony. As a sequence, would this apply regardless of variety across time and place? In outline, presumably yes, but filled in differently in each situation. To each social formation there are different nodes that are key to refixing power. For example, in the belt of patriarchy, questions such as

empowerment | 161 Rhizome of collective action Mode

Methods

Social transformation

Coping

Awareness of oppression; improvisation

No

Consciousnessraising

Not necessarily Class, ego consciousness, etc.; conscientization; change in discourse, gaze

Resistance

Sabotage, gossip, pilfering; change in discourse

Not structural

Quiet encroachment

Niche opportunism

Better individual or group niches

Participation

In design, decision, implementation, beliefs

Depends on context and mode of participation

Empowerment

More voice, capacity, skill, power to

Better individual and/or group chances; not structural

Emancipation

Group rise in status, position or power

Social structure and values become more inclusive

Hegemony

Change in political, social, cultural, economic discourse and practices

A more inclusive power structure (e.g. social or cultural revolution)

family law are crucial levers of change; in other contexts, questions of ethnicity, patronage, etc. may be crucial power points. How does empowerment compare to emancipation? While emancipation targets ‘power over’, empowerment is concerned with ‘power to’. Like emancipation, empowerment differs from protest because it is proactive; it differs from resistance because it is concerned with transformation. But while emancipation seeks the transformation of social and political hierarchy, empowerment seeks capacitation. This, too, is a matter of social equality but is to be achieved through a levelling of capacities, rather than through a levelling of entitlements or political change. In phase two, the levelling of capacities may translate into claims for economic and

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political equality, but this is not explicitly given in empowerment. Emancipation has a collective dimension, which is not necessarily the case in empowerment. Unlike emancipation, empowerment is ethically neutral, except that since it refers to the capacitation of those who were disabled it has an inherently egalitarian bias. The advantage of ‘empowerment’ is that the terrain is widened (‘liberation’ has political overtones) and unburdened of ideological luggage (‘emancipation’ recalls the Enlightenment legacy); besides, the notion can be used flexibly (empowerment can be personal and collective, etc.), so it is ‘a word of the times’. In contrast to notions such as class struggle, where typically the idea has been that there is one right way of going about it, empowerment does not suggest a single or straightforward logic. In empowerment, as in the Snakes and Ladders game, there are different ways of getting to a ‘higher’ place and several ways up involve falling down and starting over from a different point in the game. To empowerment, there is no single forward ‘line of march’. This enables us to situate empowerment. Since empowerment is used in political and non-political contexts, it straddles a minimum and normative meaning. Rowlands, for example, infuses it with normative content when she speaks of ‘generative rather than controlling power’ (1998: 15); however, what some view as generative others may view as controlling. The point of this reflection is that the minimum meaning of empowerment is interesting in itself. ‘Empowerment’ parallels the language of capabilities, capacitation and enablement in economics, development and governance. The significance of empowerment is that it indicates a shift in thinking about power, which is both subtle and profound: from ‘power over’ to ‘power to’; from power derived from position in an institutional hierarchy to power based on skills, capacities. Institutions themselves matter to the extent that they are capable: this is the point of institutional analysis. Thus, empowerment denotes a turn to capabilities in social action and politics. Therein lies its significance and in this sense it is a welcome notion.

GE N D E R E D S E X UA L I T I E S A N D LIV ED E XP E RI EN CE : R E V I S I T I N G T HE C A S E OF GAY S E X UA L I T Y I N W O M E N , C ULT UR E A ND D E VE LO P M E N T

Dana Collins

Dear Dana, my big sis … You have thoughtfully and lovingly put into words … our love, autonomy, and our attempts at it … I feel like I have aged beautifully. It is humbling to be able to look back. The honesty … is very special. Thank you. BIGLOVE – pk. (text message from PK, a former gay host in Malate, Manila, January 2013)

When I first wrote about gay hosts’ lives for this vision statement 13 years ago, my primary concern with studies of development in the global South lay in the two very different images of everyday reality that were typically projected – one concerned the movement of labourers into the ever more exploitative relations of neoliberal globalization, and the other concerned representations of their resiliency or the lived experience of workers who struggle with development and who offer expressions of pleasure and possibility. I began the research troubled by the images of passive victimization of the ‘Third World’ prostitute in particular, which robbed informal sexual labourers in the global South of their voice, subjectivity, and capacity as actors to change through their struggles with neoliberal globalization. I resisted the treatment of sexuality and desire as only commodities exchanged in the globalized sex and tourism industries. What I was confronting every day in field research was the capacity for gendered and sexually non-normative men to contest the commodification of their sexual relationships with foreign tourists and thereby struggle to create alternative identities, lifestyles and place within a gentrifying gay tourism district in Manila, the Philippines. That piece grappled with the thematic question of the book – ‘Whose development?’ – but from a different vantage point. If

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development has been blind to women’s lived experience, and a women, culture and development (WCD) approach tries to imagine development for women by integrating the analytical insights of lived experience, then where do gay men fit? Much of the research on same-sex desiring communities in the global South that has emerged since then has documented how ‘gay’ men, in their struggle against both normative sex/gender systems and neoliberal globalization, were constituted as gendered Others through these historical relations – very much like women. And, like women, gay men’s lived experience offers us a window onto important forms of resistance and alternative communities that inevitably arise out of their struggle. My goal then and now is to look at the intersection of gender, sexuality and development across gendered sexualities. Gendered sexualities focuses on how sexuality is also an aspect of lived experience – it wrestles with the issue of desire in exploitative neoliberal relations – and how desire is used as a form of resistance. Thus, gendered sexualities pushes gender to the fore as a relational category, and not simply as a category between men and women but also between global North and global South men, and, equally importantly, between gay men and women. Gendered sexualities also raises the question of whether non-normative sexualities can serve as a subject location to resist gendered Othering. The WCD approach offered a key epistemological shift in development studies with its assertion of the importance of lived experience as a framework for understanding the impact of development on women’s lives in the global South. Women were central in this approach because of their historical constitution as a ‘gendered Other’ both in development and due to their triple oppression as women, racialized Others, and workers on the lowest rung of the global economy. The focus on daily life was strategic because development studies had not successfully integrated the everyday thoughts, practices and knowledge of women when assessing the impact of development on their lives. Development studies overlooked lived experience precisely because it elaborated contested relations of gender, culture, sexuality, race and economy that could simultaneously constrain and enable women. Hence, the messiness of daily life and women’s spoken realities presented contradictions for the implementation and evaluation of development as a modernizing project. On the other hand, WCD demonstrated

g e n d e r e d s e x ua l i t i e s a n d l i v e d e x p e r i e n c e | 165 how a focus on lived experience offered an insight into the various strategies women use to struggle against the constraints of neoliberal sex/gender systems as well as a way to reconsider the social structures that impinge upon these forms of resistance without framing them as only exploitative. In other words, how has development helped transform women’s lives in alternative ways and without following the ‘inevitable’ pathway to modernization? I return to this vantage point with a more cautionary tale, which details ‘the love, autonomy, and hosts’ attempt at it’ spoken of so eloquently 13 years later by PK, who became central to my research. I also do so with the hope of integrating a word about the limitations of resistance in the face of neoliberal globalization and its transformative power over time, on urban space and on people’s lives. To start simply, I look at the case of one Filipino gay-identified man who lived in Manila and worked as an informal sexual labourer – a gay host – from approximately 1999 to 2006. Insights into this case are drawn from critical ethnographic research on the production of gay urban spaces in Manila that I carried out in 2000–01, 2005 and 2013. The case of one Filipino gay man’s lived experience of sexuality, desire and work highlights his negotiation of a set of relations that many view as only exploitative – the relations of sexualized tourism within gay spaces of the global South. For instance, men who consciously embrace same-sex desire (irrespective of whether they take on the Western identity of ‘gay’) engage in an everyday active confrontation with normative sex/gender systems in the global South that are deeply imbricated in neoliberal globalization. This confrontation results in the emergence of new forms of gender, sexuality and labour. Despite this fluidity of gendered sexuality, they are also frozen by processes of what Kum-Kum Bhavnani has called re-inscription (1993) – gay sexual labourers are always already within local sex/gender systems as afamistas (prostitutes who seek out commercially lucrative relationships with foreigners) or transnational sex/gender ‘money boys’ (young, attractive Filipino men who go with foreign tourists if the payment is sufficient). Focusing only on lived experience within local sex/gender systems draws attention away from these re-inscriptions, and thus diverts the gaze from the fluidity and possibilities of gendered sexualities. I met PK in 2000 in a coffee shop that was located in one of the many urban malls in Metro Manila. This particular mall is situated on

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the border of the Ermita and Malate districts. Ermita is known as the primary tourist district of Manila, although several prominent hotels and tourist sites extend down into Malate. In fact, by 2013, Malate had become a hub of Japanese and Korean tourism. Ermita housed the primary sex district in Manila until the early 1990s, when city government closures of sex establishments and any other establishments deemed ‘immoral’ by then Mayor Alfredo Lim turned Ermita into what some of my interviewees described as a ghost town. The sex strip of Mabini and M. H. del Pilar extended down into Malate, indicating, again, that the borders between these two districts were and remain porous; these two districts share the industries of tourism, entertainment and sex work, as well as overseas contract work placements, and their proximity encourages the movement of tourists and business travellers between the two neighbourhoods. Malate was known locally as a bohemian entertainment district that historically manifested a strong gay presence and that created a clearly delineated gay urban space. I studied an explosion in entertainment and dining establishments in Malate at the turn of the millennium and the re-emergence of sexual labour, albeit in the more informal shape of gay hosting. The city’s closure of Ermita’s sex strip as well as other statesponsored attempts to deter sex tourism resulted in a shift in the official state position on tourism and its relationship to economic development in the Philippines. Although the state prioritizes tourism as a promising means of economic development, there was a focus on sustainable tourist development that harnessed the support of ‘local’ communities in servicing the industry. Despite these efforts, the Philippines remains a primary sex tourist destination in Southeast Asia. Decades of such tourism have established a social and economic infrastructure whose tentacles run deep into the sex trade. The informal structure of sexualized tourism is doubly unique in the case of gay tourism because it is an unrecorded sector of tourism to the Philippines yet one that is nonetheless culturally visible. Hence, the social and sexual relations that developed out of the contact between gay tourism and gay life in Manila were less formally institutionalized by way of organized sex tours or sex clubs at the time of Malate’s redevelopment. In contrast to heterosexual sex tourism, it was more likely that gay tourists and Filipinos fostered social and sexual exchanges at the level of chance encounters, and within gay spaces and informal communities in

g e n d e r e d s e x ua l i t i e s a n d l i v e d e x p e r i e n c e | 167 Malate. So, among Malate’s urban revival, notions of ‘gay’ and ‘space’ were reworked through the relationships among gay Filipinos, expatriates, tourists and gay business owners. The coffee shop where I met PK, for example, with its tables placed on the mall walkway, served as a strategic cruising location for Filipino gay men who sought relationships with foreigners who stumbled into the mall to escape Manila’s hot afternoons. PK first arrived in Malate in 1999, one year prior to our meeting at Alvina’s; at 18 years of age, back in 2000, he was the youngest and newest host on the scene. He claimed to have run away from his home province of Bataan, a poorer region to the north of Metro Manila. PK explained that he had left in his second year of university there, partly to run away from difficult family dynamics but also because he felt lost sexually and needed to go somewhere to figure out his sexuality. When he landed in Malate, he was taken in by a group of other gay hosts who became his gay family, who taught him how to host to earn a living, and who helped him ‘come out’ as a gay man. PK lived with this family for about two years until he met and moved in with a US businessman who was first PK’s lover and then his boss, and for whom he worked as a personal assistant for several years. After the relationship devolved into a violent one, PK ended it, left hosting and Malate, and secured a position in a Canadianowned call centre. Today, PK has a Filipino boyfriend yet continues to frequent Malate perhaps one day a week to hang out with friends and to drink and dance. PK described his discovery of Malate as a delightfully confusing urban community where, for the first time, he saw openly gay men and bars with a noticeable gay presence. He described feeling drawn to the difference foreigners lent to the neighbouring sex strip. Malate, in fact, felt like a different country when compared with his less developed province of Bataan. Like many of my interviewees, PK saw Malate as the first ‘free’ space where gay men could both accept and develop their alternative gender and sexual expressions. And this development was in part facilitated by the presence of foreigners who led Western gay lifestyles and who sought out relationships with both masculine and feminine Filipino men. Although PK now identifies as ‘gay’, he never saw himself as bakla.1 He felt compelled to limit his gay expression while living in Bataan because one is often assumed to be bakla if one acknowledges

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one’s desire for men, and PK could not abide by the gendered and work restrictions that framed the life of the bakla. In Malate, PK met Filipino gay men who expressed multiple masculinities and femininities and who engaged in a range of sexual practices; they did not necessarily dress or act like women and none held parlorista 2 or seamstress positions. Neither did they have to play the role of the straight-identifying hustler3 to meet clients and boyfriends. Almost all hoped to meet a gay lover who also did not follow the conventions of bakla /heterosexual male relationships; they, too, aspired to meet someone ‘different’. The gay tourists and expatriates who frequented the district, and who asserted their difference in the way in which they displayed their gender as gay men, also served as sources of income, travel, exposure and romance. PK, like a core group of gay Filipinos who frequent Malate, preferred to establish paid companionship relationships with foreigners. These ranged from casual encounters to long-term relationships, like the one that PK entered into and in which he stayed for seven years. Gay hosts worked as escorts for travel, romance, sex and intellectual engagement and primarily formed paid relationships with gay tourists, businessmen and expatriates travelling and living in the Philippines. But when I asked ‘Why foreigners?’, hosts often expressed a genuine desire for these men, highlighting that these relationships were exciting, freeing and desirable for them; they would emphasize what they gained from these relationships (cultural capital, exposure, intimacy, and so on) rather than what they lost. Only in passing did they refer to the economic support that they received from their ‘boyfriends’, and sometimes this support was joked about. But the stories hosts chose to tell about their foreign boyfriends were stories about love, loss and desirable encounters. In 2000, PK did not see himself as a ‘call boy’, preferring to label his relationships with foreigners as companionship and seeing himself as an escort or guide who sometimes had sex with clients. PK spoke at length about the desirable nature of these sexual exchanges and the meaningful relationships he had with the boyfriends who passed through Malate. By not mentioning that these exchanges also involved the indirect transfer of money for sexual companionship, PK could frame them as desirable and loving rather than relationships determined through commodification. And when such relations were viewed as less directly commodified, they became less alienating.

g e n d e r e d s e x ua l i t i e s a n d l i v e d e x p e r i e n c e | 169 From 2000 to 2002, PK had multiple relationships with men, some of which were short term and could involve an evening of hosting and sex, while others could last upwards of two weeks when a boyfriend visited and perhaps had a return visit to the Philippines. From these relationships, PK earned enough money, gifts and food to contribute to his gay family’s household, as five gay hosts lived collectively in a one-room studio and shared living and food expenses. The expectation was that those hosts who secured hosting gigs would help support those who did not. All hosts knew that they would have to hustle to pay their fair share but the family also allowed them to have room and food during times when they could not earn money. PK did not need to send money to help support his family, who lived in Laguna, but this was not the case for other hosts, who often had economic responsibilities to their families of origin. PK is very similar to other hosts in that he credits his relationship with his former US boss (who was first his boyfriend) as teaching him a lot about business, and he claims that it was the skills he learned in this relationship that ultimately allowed him to secure a position at a call centre. Also like other hosts, the nature of his relationship with his boss was complex because it involved aspects of work, companionship, the volatility of an intimate relationship, kinship and business partnership, although this relationship was a highly inequitable one. He moved between describing his boss as an ex-boyfriend, boss, companion, friend and father figure. PK’s work with his boss involved everything from booking hotels, taking him out to gay clubs throughout Manila, helping him negotiate the purchase of a condo, following the stock market, suggesting investments and booking meetings to securing sex workers and drugs. When looking back on this relationship, PK referred to himself as ‘lucky’ (despite the partner violence that became a part of their conflicted relationship) because he was able to stop hosting and move into his boss’s condo at least part time. His boss also put down a deposit so that PK could open a credit card and he paid for PK to attend a ten-week film course at the University of the Philippines. PK recognized that the formation of this more permanent paid companionship relationship that allowed him to stay in Malate was the ideal that most hosts aspire to in Malate and that he lived for a period of time in a luxury that most hosts could not afford.

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PK considers himself an intelligent man who provides challenging and friendly companionship to his clients. He sees his intelligence and ability to move between different classes and cultural circles, particularly his astute ability to read US culture, as a benefit in his service. Although PK performed well in his classes, he felt bored with high school studies and stifled by his home province.4 PK believes that the streets and his hosting have taught him more about the Philippines and life than any official schooling. He claims to have no regrets about his hosting, although he recognizes that his hosting work, his not having a university degree and his age all limit his other work opportunities. In 2013, PK explained that after his relationship ended he realized that he could not return to hosting because he was too old to do so when he turned 28. He recognized that hosting would also be a harsh life now (at 31 years of age) because he would have to do more direct sex work and agree to engage in sexual practices that he would not want to do in order to secure clients. His only other option was to enter into call centre work – a market that had opened and continues to grow in the urban Philippines, employing culturally astute young workers such as PK. In this case, I have remained true to PK’s expression of his lived experience of sexuality and work. Yet PK and other working gays carve their lives out in an urban environment that they also recognize as being harsh and limiting in terms of their access to economic rewards. Nor is Manila a safe city for those who become increasingly reliant upon the streets for establishing their contacts with customers. PK was part of an invisible labour force that facilitates tourism in the Philippines, and it is through these informal channels of playing gay host and through PK’s love, desire and sexual and intellectual labour that gay tourists are cared for in the Philippines and why they want to return. Yet the informal arrangement of these paid companionship relationships also constituted the primary abuse of neoliberal structures on the lives of PK and others. The economic compensation did not economically value his labour – which involved the complex and extensive relationships of companionship, love, desire, hospitality and care work. Further, PK’s employment opportunities, both in and outside the sex trade, decreased the longer he worked as a gay host. Foreigners enter and leave PK’s life due to their easy movement across national boundaries, a movement denied to PK. This movement also allowed travellers global access

g e n d e r e d s e x ua l i t i e s a n d l i v e d e x p e r i e n c e | 171 to men like PK in Thailand, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Vietnam. A far too common statement expressed in the local gay bar where PK and his friends spent much of their time is: ‘They all grow restless. And there’s always someone in Thailand.’ And even as hosts such as PK tried to make Malate ‘their’ gay place, they were increasingly marginalized from its gay spaces as Malate was gentrified. Yet Malate became a vibrant, gentrified gay neighbourhood precisely because of the presence, labour and everyday expressions of hosts such as PK. PK imagined and wanted to craft a life that relied upon urban space and alternative gendered sexualities, and the latter was also key to his resisting a normative and confining sex/gender system in Bataan, the province where he grew up. Moving to and experiencing the pleasures of a gay community where Filipino men come together and construct alternative lives were central to PK’s experience of social change. Malate was an urban centre where gay life took hold and flourished, thanks to the capital of gay business owners, through the labour of gay hosts, and with the consumerism of a new neoliberal class of gay traveller. Making a living from tourism through hosting was part of producing an identity and an alternative life, and was also a way to claim space in this community. PK did not characterize his relationships with tourists as degrading or exploitative; rather, he emphasized his desire, his developing gay identity and his gay host family, his love of travel, and his search for satisfying intellectual engagements and business opportunities. The challenge for a WCD approach, then, is to show how resistance, pleasure and possibility are practised and expressed through the relations that link labourers to normative sex/gender systems and processes of neoliberal globalization. It is precisely through the commodified exchange of sex, love and desire with tourists that gay hosts sometimes imagine and practise non-normative relations and kinship structures that are socially meaningful and transformative. And flirting with the boundaries of normative sex/gender systems often translates into one’s being on the outside – a (temporarily) liberating space in which to be. This is far from a passive picture of women and gay men in development. A WCD approach therefore must now start to grapple with the contradictory nature of the links within normative sex/gender systems between resistance, work, gender and sexuality, and within global capitalism, because these relations are simultaneously confining and transformative.

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This approach can demonstrate that lived experience need not be hidden by macro approaches that focus on exploitation alone; rather, such an approach can elaborate lived experience as a struggle for transformation, even as it takes place within boundaries. Notes 1. Bakla is the traditional Filipino ‘gay’ man who dresses and acts according to the dictates of normative femininity. Baklas are marginally accepted in Filipino society although the gendered, social and economic practices of baklas are narrowly defined. Employment positions are limited to feminized professions such as hairdresser, clothes maker or designer. Some baklas pass as women and work in prostitution. If a bakla takes a lover, it is expected that he will monetarily support this lover (who identifies as

heterosexual) without interfering with his lover’s family life (girlfriends, wives and/or children). 2. Parlorista is a term used to describe an effeminate working-class ‘gay’ who owns and/or works for a local beauty parlour. 3. Many of the self-identified call boys are straight-identified and lead, for the most part, heterosexual lives. 4. This system is also economically limiting, and it was one PK found homophobic and degrading in its own right.

RE V OLUT I O N A R Y W O M E N ’ S S T R UG G LE AN D LE A D E R S H I P : B UI L D I N G LOC A L P OLI TI C A L P O W E R I N R UR A L A R EA S IN TH E AGE O F N E O L I B E R A L G L OBA LIZA T ION

Peter Chua

Revolutionary women are dismantling old habits, social structures and ways of life and are simultaneously forging newer modes of thinking, more sustainable ways of living, and increasingly egalitarian relations of power. These women who are actively resisting the all-consuming gaze of the neoliberal media and government officials live and work far away from advanced capitalist societies. They are mainly based in rural and hard-to-trek areas in far-flung places across the world – from Ecuador in South America to the Philippines in Asia and to Kurdistan in the troubled Middle East. This essay explores the feminist futures embodied in the developing revolutionary ideas and practices of these rural women. In doing so, it highlights the concrete complexity of changes that these women are making possible, against the more prominent political cynicism emerging from reformist-oriented liberalism that opposes revolutionary change, as well as against the less-prominent utopian and romanticist myth-making of women in revolutions. Much can be learned from their visions and the new realities they are making real every day. The liberal push for women’s rights in an age of neoliberal globalization The more recent onslaught of neoliberal globalization through economic policies and political reformism allows the steady rule of old political elites in capitalist countries – albeit, at times, in seemingly new forms such as former US President Bill Clinton and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair – and in maldeveloped countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as in the consolidation of capitalist rule in pseudo-communist and formerly socialist countries. The

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present phase of economic neoliberalism and political reformism has led to an intense disillusionment among political forces about large-scale revolutionary visions, organizations and leadership, a disillusionment that expresses itself through endless critique, cultural nihilism and political paralysis. While a few revolutionary movements have gained popular attention, political struggles of those explicitly calling for national liberation and self-determination seem to be viewed by many as failed projects. In particular, the ‘women question’ has been reduced purely to issues of legislative reforms, the philosophically and political liberal notions of equality, recognition and inclusion, and the promotion of civil and political rights, instead of revolutionary change initiated through the seizure of political and economic power. In short, the liberal push for women’s rights prevails. This is most evident in the continued dominance of economic modernization and neoliberal economic policies, as embodied in the various incarnations of the ‘women in development’ paradigm, and as expressed in several of the United Nations millennium development goals. One example of this has been the increasing use of formal Western education for young women to promote free-market ways of life and skills for employment and small business development in opposition to what are defined as outdated traditional and religious values that limit free-market expansion. Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for example, embodies this liberal push by championing the increase in graduation rates of young women in Afghanistan and other countries. Clinton commented in a television interview on the status of Afghan women since the 2002 US intervention: ‘For a lot of women, life is much better. Girls are in school who never were before. Women are able to practice their professions and pursue their businesses’ (Fox News 2013). My reservation with neoliberal programmes on ‘women’s rights’ is not in contradiction with my support for the educational advancement of women. Rather, I want to reframe the neoliberal logic that presents a limited association between education and women’s rights by raising a broader and more substantive question: education for whom and for what? Is formal education a medium to be used by advanced capitalist economies to allow for new, intensifying forms of economic exploitation (such as sweatshop labour and unequal bilateral trade agreements)? Or is it to be promoted for self-

women’s struggle and leadership | 175 determination, in the interest of the majority nationally, and for the eradication of women’s oppression and exploitation? A new approach in the liberal push for women’s rights globally has been the usurpation of the more academic-centred ‘gender and development’ paradigm, which emphasizes the importance of transforming gender and gender relations to advance Third World women’s rights and economic development. A recent US government call for proposals exemplifies this approach. The call sought to implement programmes totalling US$1.5 million that would increase the ‘engagement of men and boys in reducing gender-based violence in Iraq’ and reduce the ‘pressures on men and boys to conform to harmful, rigid and violent forms of manhood and adhere to more positive definitions of masculinity, honor, and strength’ (US Department of State 2014). Here, the US government is taking seriously the need to reduce what it views as harmful Iraqi masculinity without acknowledging the harmful practices of US masculinity and its tactics of war. Progressive and revolutionary women go beyond this limited liberal notion of women’s rights and its related neoliberal policies to advance more fully the economic and political advancement of the majority of women in Third World countries. Women’s struggles in rural areas Issues related to land are of principal importance for many women across rural areas in maldeveloped countries. In general, landlessness is worsening through greater foreign control and intentional efforts to impede genuine development, depriving many peasant women, men and children of their livelihoods and land to till. For peasant and farm-working women, these issues interweave questions of shared resource ownership, food production and environmental sustainability, family and community well-being, oppression-free gender and sexual relations, and cultural resilience. These issues highlight the ways in which imperialism and neoliberal globalization maldevelop – that is, they ensure stunted progress and worsening hardship by making many economically dependent on global capitalists and politically subservient to leading capitalist states. In many countries, neoliberal globalization generates poverty, hunger and ever worsening conditions. Thus, many peasant, indigenous and farm-working women engage in revolutionary practices, taking part

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in a range of struggles, depending on varying contexts. Let’s look at some specific examples of the resistance movements led by rural women. In rural Kurdistan, women are fighting against feudal, tribal landlords and their patriarchal culture and against other anti-democratic forces in Turkey to advance the Kurdistan freedom movement and to demand land reform from the big landlords (see Hozat 2013). Similarly, along the Niger Delta, militant indigenous Ogoni women have challenged the destruction, displacement and dispossession of their farms and rural communities due to economic and social injustices perpetrated by multinational oil companies such as Shell and Chevron, as well as by the political repression of the Nigerian military and local militias, and, also, by un-kept promises from governmental and international entities (see Ugor 2015). They have organized land occupation protests, demanding corporate and governmental accountability, environmental clean-ups and protection, and genuine economic programmes benefiting women and the indigenous people. In Colombia, revolutionary women, many from peasant backgrounds, are fighting against immiseration in rural areas, the significant loss of economic sovereignty to multinational corporations, and, more recently, large-scale mining and the enactment of free-trade agreements (see Gilbert and Kahlo 2014, Ismi 2015). This resistance is especially noteworthy because it plays out in state conditions that are heavily repressive against those struggling for genuine land and agrarian reforms, for the end of women’s oppression, and for peace with social justice. Similar struggles for the economic and political emancipation of indigenous and peasant women can be seen in remote areas of Peru and Ecuador as well. In Indonesia, peasant women are exposing the debilitating effects of the neoliberal agenda. Grassroots women’s organizations such as SERUNI (Serikat Perempuan Indonesia or Indonesian Women’s Organization) are campaigning against the corporate-led and government-supported land grabbing that removes peasant families from their lands, and are defending their right to till the land. A powerful expression of this resistance can be seen in the evocative poetry of Suryati, a 36-year-old mother and peasant community leader from West Java, published in the Asian Rural Women’s Travelling Journal (2013):

women’s struggle and leadership | 177 I went to the farm field To hoe and plant Don’t know weary, don’t know tired Every day going to the farm field To farm out the struggle land Although many obstacle But rural women always going to the farm field Oh! Rural women Arise united clench your hand To fight anti-people regime As more and more go without land and without food on their family tables, rural women are turning to revolutionary tactics of land occupation for sheer survival. Still, these women continue to face serious challenges to their efforts in resisting feudal and semi-feudal exploitation, patriarchal oppression and foreign domination. The first challenge is that the women are up against state, corporate and security forces and organizations that aim to destroy the gains of revolutionary women’s struggle by fuelling harsh political repression, violating civil liberties, and promoting extrajudicial violence to discredit, imprison and eradicate revolutionary forces, under the guise of promoting peace, economic stability and development. Such actions often work in tandem with manipulated public media campaigns that present erroneous images of revolutionary women as brainwashed sexual victims with outdated ideologies. Second, corporate-polluted soil, air and water that dispossess peasant and farm-working families set into motion greater displacement from rural areas, with people seeking education, healthcare access and employment opportunities in major cities, often overseas. Environmental destruction driven by decades of neoliberal policies and programmes also deprives peasants, fisherfolk and indigenous families of food sovereignty and their cultural ways of life. Flooding and storm surges caused by anthropogenic climate change, for example, have destroyed, among other things, rare musical instruments in remote indigenous areas. The third challenge is that of violence and exploitation arising out of a toxic mix of old feudal, patriarchal and religious ideas together with new global capitalist ones. While under past conditions some

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revolutionaries propagated and tolerated oppression based on gender and sexuality within their ranks, at present many more revolutionary women and men are confronting these issues directly by adopting clear policies that ban these oppressive practices in their localities and organizations. These struggles emerged from recognizing and correcting prior errors and renewing possibilities for a better future. Women as revolutionary leaders forging new democracies in rural areas One of the vital contributions of rural women to revolution has been their active leadership and participation in creating and maintaining liberated territories where more democratic and egalitarian relations are being practised. These territories are remote, scattered across rural areas, and serve as seeds for varying forms of socialism and people’s democracy. In Nepal, for example, hundreds of thousands of members of the All Nepal Women’s Association (Revolutionary) (ANWA(R)) are working to end women’s oppression by launching successful antifeudal, anti-monarchy and anti-imperialist campaigns, despite the rape, killings, incarceration and disappearances of many women. They promote a political programme for the liberation of women and men against exploitation and oppression – including an end to oppressive marriages and ensuring property rights for women through the vigorous formation of new local underground organizations across at least 25 of the country’s 75 districts, and by taking up various leadership positions in regional, district and local United Revolutionary People’s Councils (URPCs) as well as in self-defence militias (see Janagharti 2011 for an overview of ANWA(R)). The cases of the women in ANWA(R) and other revolutionary women’s organizations exemplify their commitment and leadership in fermenting conditions to build more egalitarian societies from the local grassroots level up. In Nepal, the revolutionary village-level people’s councils serve as the starting point for a locally run people’s coalition government with ANWA(R) to address the economic, education, health and defence needs of the community. This coalition also operates as the local people’s court. With setbacks and advances in a revolution that is seeking to advance national sovereignty, people’s democracy and more suitable

women’s struggle and leadership | 179 livelihoods across Nepal, contiguous village-level people’s councils are increasingly sharing economic production and other resources, as well as co-ordinating better ways to develop national infrastructures in the interests of the majority. In particular, the women of ANWA(R) are working to reach more districts in order to address the challenge of rural poverty and to counter the increasing rise of trafficking of women into India. Similarly, members of the Kurdish Women’s Movement umbrella organization (Koma Jinên Bilind or KJB) are integral in building new local revolutionary governments known as the Group of Communities in Kurdistan (Koma Civakên Kurdistan or KCK). The KJB plays a key role in advancing women’s autonomous leadership and in promoting democracy, mutual responsibility and mutual labour through a democratic confederate system. It places women’s struggle at the centre of the national struggle. Copresident of the KCK Executive Council Bese Hozat highlighted this in an interview: Women became the symbol of resistance and the liberation struggle, changed the social fabric of the Kurdish society, transformed the feudal culture and displayed a determining stance in the democratisation of the society. This is a women’s revolution … the Kurdish people have achieved by creating a free society with free women, and a sense and culture of democratic nation against the culture of tribes. (Hozat 2013) Revolutionary women in the Philippines, many of whom are peasants – and whose numbers are in the hundreds of thousands, and expanding – continue to make progress for greater women’s leadership. They are forming clandestine chapters of MAKIBAKA (Makabayan Kilusan ng Bagong Kababaihan or the Patriotic Movement of the New Women) in consolidated liberated bases and in thousands of villages together with the localized pro-people revolutionary government, the Barrio Revolutionary Committees (BRCs). These BRCs are similar in many ways to the URPCs in Nepal and the KCK in Kurdistan. MAKIBAKA chapters and their members are integral to building and participating in the local BRCs, ensuring programmes for livelihood, agrarian production and environmental

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sustainability, for schooling, literacy, health and culture, for selfdefence and the seizure of political power from the current ruling classes, and for a system of revolutionary justice. The BRCs and the people’s courts take seriously cases of crimes against women, such as cases involving women’s oppression or sexual exploitation or opportunism. Moreover, the rights of lesbians, bisexual women and transgender women are recognized and advanced as part of the national liberation struggle. In 2014, the arrest of revolutionaries Wilma Austria and Benito Tiamzon and their companions highlighted the anti-people Philippine government’s efforts to strike against those seeking to push forward the revolution. In a public statement, MAKIBAKA asserted Austria’s role at the time of their arrest: Wilma Austria, in particular, has been concerned [with] the impoverished condition of women and children caused by typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda and was on her way to oversee the rehabilitation efforts in Tacloban [in the rural areas] specifically of women and victims. She was indignant over the continuous neglect of the Aquino government where the relief goods were only rotting in the warehouses while the Yolanda survivors are suffering from lack of food, shelter, and jobs. (MAKIBAKA 2014) Austria and many MAKIBAKA members are making qualitative progress in the Philippine revolution in small, routine and everyday activities such as taking part in rehabilitation efforts in liberated rural areas, and in significant ways through participatory leadership in BRCs in these areas. In short, MAKIBAKA organizers and members – the so-called ‘new women’ – have chosen the revolutionary path and are in the process of emancipating themselves from repressive, feudal and patriarchal authorities in order to shatter them. Much is to be gained from understanding how revolutionary women build political power, emancipate themselves, and make concrete changes to address immediate livelihood, security and development concerns. Their visions of change and possibilities exist not as utopia but as enriching practices that are organized, conscious and systematically planned, and that unite the nation’s majority and revolutionary forces. These practices also emerge from the many

women’s struggle and leadership | 181 difficult lessons learned from the major mistakes of revolutionaries and other revolutions that are incomplete yet continue to advance in Chiapas, Congo, Ecuador, Guinea-Bissau, India, Palestine, Peru, Uruguay and Zimbabwe, among other places. Overcoming liberalism, cynicism and nihilism, these revolutionary women are making real the future in the present.

‘WH AT S HO UL D I S A Y A B O UT A DR EA M? ’: RE F LE C TI O N S O N A D O L E S CE NT G IR LS , AGE N C Y A N D CI T I Z E N S H I P

Gauri Nandedkar

‘Development’ and ‘empowerment’ are highly fraught and controversial terms. Development evokes images of large government ministries or international agencies leading infrastructure building, large-scale construction and water management projects designed to aid Third World countries. These projects too often displace and dispossess the already marginalized, with many interventions demonstrating the power of the state and the resources it can amass. Empowerment, although generally accepted as something ‘one seizes through struggle’ as opposed to having it bestowed upon oneself, is equally tenuous a term (Kabeer 1999, 2005, Mosedale 2005, Mohanty 1995). Often chided as buzzwords, ‘development’ and ‘empowerment’ for many scholars and activists have become vacuous, meaningless terms, equally and happily deployed by opposing ideological groups (Batliwala 2007, 2007a, Cornwall and Brock 2005, Rist 2007). I offer a way to reimagine development and empowerment by reflecting on an apparently unlikely group of actors: adolescent girls.1 My piece reflects on the manner in which adolescent girls are envisioning themselves and their futures in daring, imaginative and realistic ways. Although much of development literature focuses on women and/or children, adolescent girls inhabit a space between childhood and adulthood, girlhood and womanhood, and it is this place where development and empowerment can be reimagined. My vision, therefore, is to encourage reflections on a society in which young women are confident, knowledgeable and active citizens, directing their own destinies and contributing to shaping their communities. The women, culture and development (WCD) paradigm offers a unique and urgent lens through which this understudied group may be examined. The WCD framework, intersecting gender, class,

‘ wh at sh ould i say about a dream?’ | 183 ethnicity and place, allows us to centre the lives of adolescent girls, their lived experiences, struggles and achievements as an avenue for understanding development and empowerment, and opens up spaces for a fuller depiction of complex and dynamic social constructions. No society lives and breathes in neatly delineated structures, and it is in the entangled layers of community that we begin to understand and appreciate adolescent girls, agency and citizenship. Agency and citizenship in marginalized communities First of all, let me give you the context for my current research. I am exploring Millennium Development Goal 3 (MDG3)2 – ‘to promote gender equality and empower women’ – so as to examine the processes of translation from global goals to local initiatives. During my fieldwork in rural Maharashtra, India,3 Deepshikha, a life-skills programme funded and supported by UNICEF,4 was being implemented in three districts in Maharashtra and in four wards (administrative units) in Mumbai. The instructors on this programme, trained and supported by a separate but empathetic non-governmental organization (NGO)5 in India, were themselves inspiring and highly motivated individuals. Their stories transcended tales of success and accomplishment, overcoming structural, familial and circumstantial obstacles. These were young women and men, working within a system of patriarchy in which oppression is not the sole domain of men but often perpetrated by women. There was neither time nor space for feelings of victimization or fingerpointing, but rather a genuine commitment and concern for the growth and development of adolescent girls into active, informed citizens. The mentors of the programme fostered discussions around the girls’ positions within the family and community, encouraging considerations of the prescribed and limiting social constructions of the usual responsibilities and tasks of becoming wives and mothers. Located in the heart of India, Jiwati block in Maharashtra’s Chandrapur district is, in the summer months, a harsh, austere landscape. Water shortage is not uncommon in this remote, rural environment, which seems to epitomize what Tsing (1993: x) refers to as ‘out-of-the-way places’.6 The district borders the infamous ‘Red Corridor’ in which Maoist guerrillas (also known as Naxalites) struggle for political control of a region extending from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana to West Bengal.7 A significant number of

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communities living in this region are known as adivasis, tribal people who find themselves caught in the crossfire of the power struggles between the state and the Naxalites. One such adivasi woman is Rashmi.8 Rashmi’s parents arranged her marriage when she was 17 years old and by the age of 19 she had borne a son. Her husband brought Rashmi home from the clinic in which she had given birth9 and five days later abandoned her for another young woman. She remains a single mother. Her son is now 7 years old (research interview, 2012). In speaking with Rashmi,10 I detected a gentle, quiet determination. She was assertive and yet unassuming. Her circumstances of becoming a prerika 11 (volunteer facilitator) in the Deepshikha programme happened by accident. Rashmi was nominated to take the place of a previous prerika who was not fulfilling her duties. With a small child and now residing with her parents (a sign of disgrace and rejection from her marital home), Rashmi lived with her natal family in an uneasy relationship. Both her marital and maternal families beat her and her son, accusing Rashmi of bringing bad fortune on herself and dishonouring the family name. Despite these circumstances (or perhaps because of them), Rashmi made a decision to take on the role and responsibilities of a prerika (including extended training periods away from her village to travel to other communities) in order to educate young women about their bodies, the significance of delaying marriage, the importance of village sanitation and hygiene, and other urgent issues. Rashmi has become a highly respected and admired woman by the adolescent girls she mentors, her family and peers, the local village council and the community at large. Rashmi’s situation reflects that of many young rural women today who are claiming their agency, and challenging girls’ positions within the family as well as gender roles within wider society. Self-respect and self-sufficiency are not accidental but the result of cross-sectoral, educational efforts such as the Deepshikha programme to provide adolescent girls with spaces to develop self-awareness and criticalthinking skills. Challenging societal norms and values individually (within the family) and collectively (within the village) has resulted in girls leading initiatives within their own households and communities to improve health, education and sanitation. If we attempt an initial analysis of such interventions, they appear successful as they have improved the lives of most villagers through

‘ wh at sh ou ld i say about a dream?’ | 185 the active engagement of adolescent girls. Scratch the surface and we also see the beginnings of behavioural changes in deeply entrenched patriarchal structures. In addition to improving living conditions in the village, the adolescent girls, more importantly, are effecting a cultural shift in the way gender relations are understood at the local level. Sisters ask why their brothers receive the lion’s share of a meal. They hand their brothers the broom to sweep the floor. Girls challenge their parents in questions of education and ask to attend school like their brothers. These changes are not instantaneous and most certainly do not occur in all families. Yet the programme, designed by Indian initiators and implemented by local facilitators, is indeed redefining meanings of development and empowerment. International agencies, such as UNICEF, interlink and interweave discourses of ‘development’ and ‘empowerment’ into their work. Development provides the overarching structure and conceptual design for programme creation. Empowerment, within a framework of development, may take the form of yet smaller building blocks – social, economic and political empowerment – grounded in a local context. In the case of the MDGs, it is the responsibility of countries to incorporate such globally mandated goals into their own national development policies and plans. For Chandrapur district in Maharashtra, one meaning of the overarching goal of development has been translated into empowerment initiatives for adolescent girls. Research data from 2012 shows that Jiwati block had 165 villages with a total population of 63,544. Of those inhabitants, 3,846 were adolescent girls, and of those girls 3,705 participated in the Deepshikha programme. The number of trained prerikas for Jiwati block was 195.12 If we consider the number of adolescent girls in this remote block directly addressed by such a programme, we need only reflect on the number of families, households and villages potentially affected. The possibility for transformational change in its most basic expressions – clean water, adequate sanitation, healthcare – and in conceptually and culturally significant aspects – a change in mindsets, the examination of gender roles, institutional and systemic reform – is enormous. Treating adolescent girls as active agents, providing them with material and non-material resources, valuing their opinions and supporting their engagement would be the first steps in reimagining a different kind of citizenry. Without looking at the broader picture

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and tackling issues of gender equality, human rights and access to education, among other challenges, it will be difficult to break down barriers that impede progress on far-reaching development goals. Systemic and institutional reforms are required, as are shifts in cultural norms and attitudes that perpetuate the low status of, violence against and exploitation of adolescent girls. Envisioning a way forward These changes are slow to come, but they are happening. And many of these changes are being led by adolescent girls. Incomegenerating activities and the securing of livelihoods are crucial components of empowerment and are critical in the daily lives of young rural women. Yet, for my research purposes, empowerment has a broader meaning, encompassing notions of agency, autonomy and citizenship. These notions form the contours of empowerment in non-material ways, highlighting significant change initiated by adolescent girls. Meaningful citizenship includes concepts of agency, autonomy, self-determination and transformational change that make a difference to adolescent girls’ daily lives (Mohanty et al. 1991, Kabeer 2005, Kumar 2012, Lister 2003, 2007). The struggles in which these young women participate shape their interactions with family, villages and the state. Many of these young women now actively engage in village council meetings and provide input to district-planning agendas. The adolescent girl groups are gradually linking across district borders and their knowledge and activism have the potential to alter the character of state and national schemes. Measuring this type of democratic participation as an outcome or success of empowerment programmes is difficult; Kabeer cautions that such benchmarking of successes may meet only the reporting guidelines of donor agencies and unintentionally disregard crucial transformations in social dynamics initiated by participants (Kabeer 1999). In speaking with informants during research interviews, it became clear that adolescent girls gained self-respect and confidence through questioning their position within the family and challenging gender roles in the home and community – not always without resistance. Moreover, adolescent girls demonstrated skills in navigating power relations. This was especially striking during negotiations between adolescent girls and the local police following

‘ wh at sh ou ld i say about a dream?’ | 187 a rape case in Jiwati block (research interview, 2012). The young women apprehended the perpetrator and delivered him to the local police. The rapport established between the adolescent girls and the police, supported through ongoing discussion and strengthened by a small but very important ceremony,13 was critical to establishing trust between villagers and police, leading to the sentencing and imprisonment of the perpetrator. As the Delhi rape case in 201214 and subsequent reports of sexual violence demonstrate, the issue of violence against girls and women is ever present. Far from recoiling, many adolescent girls’ groups are creating their own blueprints for engagement, spearheading education and action plans within their own ‘out-of-the-way places’. Actions such as delaying marriage, shifting deep-rooted cultural norms and attitudes within family and community and organizing for collective change demonstrate facets of self-determination. Like other elements of meaningful citizenship (Kabeer 2005), selfdetermination fosters strength and self-confidence. Having control over one’s body with regards to personal hygiene, nutrition, mental health and sexuality signifies the capacity of adolescent girls to selfdirect and to be autonomous, linking into broader expressions of meaningful citizenship, development and empowerment. As a result, the adolescent girls are able to organize, mobilize and create collectives for community action, becoming active citizens (Kabeer 2005, Lister et al. 2005, Sharma 2008). Hence, these groups of adolescent girls may be seen to constitute a democratizing force straddling strategies of empowerment, neoliberal state requirements and notions of good citizenship in the Indian context. Changing mindsets affects local families and villages as well as regional organizations, state agencies and government ministries. The process of translating international goals to local development programmes ideally incorporates local expertise and is sensitive to village social constructions and dynamics. The task of transformational change lies at the core of the Deepshikha programme. Preparing girls, their families and communities to acknowledge that adolescent girls have agency, to claim their citizenship, to preside over their own lives and to achieve autonomy is an enormous undertaking. In the intersection of these ideas, development and empowerment meet to create a space that is adolescent-girl friendly. It is happening right now in the most remote regions of Maharashtra. As the global

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community debates development, empowerment, sustainability and other goals, adolescent girls are at the forefront of not only envisioning but also reshaping their communities in girlhood and beyond. At the end of my research interview with Rashmi, I asked her about her aspirations and visions for the future. Her response reflected not only her individual dreams but those she holds for her community: ‘What should I say about a dream? That I learn a lot, that I get more education and knowledge and our village will move ahead.’ Notes 1. Adolescence is defined broadly within the literature. In UNICEF documents the age range spans from the youngest at 10 years old to the oldest at 20 years old. In MDG documents the age range is set at 15–24 years. 2. For a full list of the MDGs, see http://www.undp.org/content/ undp/en/home/mdgoverview.html. The MDGs expired at the end of 2015 and were replaced by the sustainable development goals (SDGs). The SDGs, unlike the MDGs, were drafted in consultation with civil society globally. Debate continues around the value of and contributions made by the MDGs in crafting in-country development policies in sectors such as health and education, and in particular the articulation of MDG3. Schech (Visions 4, this volume) argues that Australian aid policy has adopted a discourse of empowerment drawn from MDG3, the result of which is a weaker framework for Australia’s gender and development policy. For further information, see UN Women (2013), Antrobus (2006), Bond (2006), Kabeer (2005a), White and Black (2004) and Unterhalter (2005). 3. I undertook field research for my PhD dissertation from March to June 2012 and visited several districts in Maharashtra state. In addition, I interviewed UNICEF and UNDP staffers in Mumbai and Delhi.

4. UNICEF is the primary driver behind Deepshikha in a tripartite agreement with Barclays Bank and the State of Maharashtra government. 5. SPARSH Alliance is an NGO dedicated to building a network of highly trained, locally engaged and informed facilitators and mentors. 6. For Tsing, ‘An out-of-the-way place is, by definition, a place where the instability of political meanings is easy to see. The authority of national policies is displaced through distance and the necessity of reenactment at the margins. The cultural difference of the margins is a sign of exclusion from the centre; it is also a tool for destabilising central authority’ (Tsing 1993: 27). 7. For further information on the Maoist guerrillas also known as Naxalites, see Gawande (2011) and Pandita (2011). 8. The name has been changed for privacy reasons. 9. In this part of the country, primary health centres are often located at a substantial distance from villages, making travel to and from clinics quite difficult. This is one of the reasons for adivasis giving birth at home without a skilled attendant. 10. I acknowledge the power relationship that was part of the interview process with Rashmi. I am ethnically Indian, non- adivasi, educated and living outside India. I was accompanied by a

‘ wh at sh ou ld i say about a dream?’ | 189 UNICEF staffer and local NGO staffers during the interview. The hierarchy in our relationship did not escape my attention. Yet I felt that Rashmi was relaying her story and circumstances to me in an honest manner and was genuinely enthusiastic to be speaking about her struggles and achievements. 11. Prerikas are the young women trained to become volunteer facilitators within the Deepshikha programme. They return to their villages after training modules, form adolescent girls’ groups and continue the life-skills training through peer-to-peer education for local girls. 12. All data was taken from field research in Chandrapur district, March– June 2012, with the kind support of UNICEF State of Maharashtra. 13. The raakhi-tying ceremony is common in Maharashtra and represents a boy’s lifelong commitment to his sister. The raakhi is a thin or thick, often ornamentally decorated, piece of string that the girl ties around the boy’s wrist during the ceremony. If

the girl is widowed, expelled from her marital household or experiences any adverse circumstances in her life, the boy affirms through his participation in this ritual that he will take care of his sister, tying the girl and boy in a lifelong relationship. This ceremony, normally reserved for blood relatives (i.e. siblings or cousins), was transported by village adolescent girls to male police officers. It was an extraordinary display of trust and responsibility led by the adolescent girls, placing them in a close relationship with the police officers. 14. See ‘Still in fear of sexual violence’, Hindustan Times, 15 December 2013, http://www.hindustantimes. com/comment/still-in-fear-ofsexual-violence/article1-1162962. aspx; ‘Indian media: Has Delhi gang rape changed anything?’, BBC News, 16 December 2013, http://www. bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india25396221; ‘How life has changed for Delhi rape victim’s family’, BBC News, 16 December 2013, http://www.bbc. co.uk/news/world-asia-india-25344403.

PART TWO ENVIRONMENT, TECHNOLOGY, SCIENCE

7 | N E W L E N S E S W I T H L I M I T ED V IS ION: S H E LL SCE N A R I O S , S CI E N CE FIC T ION, S TORY TE L L I N G W A R S

David McKie with Akanksha Munshi-Kurian

Much traditional writing on development tends to cluster around linear projections, foreseeing a future in the singular rather than plural futures, favouring the factual over the fictional and ignoring contemporary popular culture’s multiple, gendered topographies of tomorrow. In the spirit of the editors’ expressed desire to consider the possibilities of new ways of imagining all women and men, this chapter reverses these tendencies by focusing on scenarios, mainly through an analysis of corporate scenarios and science fiction, as a way to open an array of futures. In these speculative realms, space, time and even gender itself can be imagined very differently from contemporary physical and social constrictions. Since the first edition of this book, the multiple futures part of my project has been more effectively and eloquently expressed by Ziauddin Sardar (2006) – ‘In futures studies we always think of “the future” in terms of plural futures. The objective is not so much to predict the future (a highly hazardous exercise) but to anticipate possible futures and work towards shaping the most desirable ones’ (2006: 60) – and his associated call ‘to abandon the idea that a single truth can be imposed on a plural globe’ (Sardar 2008: 457). In the original chapter, I focused on how science fiction creates multifaceted future scenarios, and noted the dangers of recurring eugenic, and genetic, engineering cutting across deeply held religious and secular beliefs (see Mathews 2000). Even in factually absurd film form, masculinist science fiction is usefully shocking in how freely it imagines worst-case scenarios in speculative detail. If the optimistic grand narrative of Western progress is underwritten by science, then science fiction consistently reworks that utopic tall tale with pessimistic, and/or catastrophic, outcomes. Accordingly, as with much literature on development and gender, my starting

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point is the (in)visibility of gender. Mainstream science fiction film from the 1990s, for example, has been largely colonized by macho men strutting across the future, with a focus on problems largely irrelevant to development issues, and has dealt in simplistic, implausible solutions. Yet, in sharp contrast, science fiction authored by women and/or influenced by feminism projects very different perspectives. In the time since the first edition, I have become aware that my original chapter was essentially about stories and storytelling and their impact. I have also learned that, in the dozen years between the first edition and the current one, stories have grown in complexity, significance and visibility in different areas. The complexity, and contradictions, of the stories can be seen in the latest corporate scenario constructions; the significance of the stories has been more powerfully theorized and linked to social impact in fresh ways; and powerful young ‘outsider’ women have become more visible in science fiction. The complexity, significance and visibility have all impacted on, and been impacted by, computer-influenced developments (including social media). But before exploring these developments, let me provide a flashback to parts of the original chapter that remain valid and provide a platform for more recent speculations. Flashes from the 2003 chapter Mainstream Hollywood film has consistently inhabited the low-likelihood areas of the dystopic continuum, and the genre’s relative irrelevance, in terms of probable outcomes, correlates to its neglect of stories of women, just as ‘in most writings about global and international development … the labour, cultures and histories of women are rarely taken into account, or, when they have been, women are most often seen as lacking agency – as merely victims’ (Bhavnani et al. 2000: 3). The genre’s attention to the highly visible matters of masculinity effectively obscures the larger, darker matter of other, more urgent, dystopic possibilities inherent in existing development. How does the topography of this genre reflect or refract the conceptual and material landscapes of the present? How does it use its potential to warp conceptions of gender identities and structures? And do its representations fracture or undergird the longestablished nexus between development and colonization?

n e w l e n s e s w i t h l i m i t e d v i s i o n | 195 The answers to all three questions revolve around traditional masculinity. Independence Day reinforces the worldview of fathers knowing best and mothers waiting, suffering and weeping. In the film’s key speech, the United States President hails the possible victory over alien creatures as the day when Independence Day for the USA will become Independence Day for the Earth to celebrate planetary freedom (from alien colonization). Despite obvious parallels with previous unachieved visions of Western development and freedom as the future for the rest of the world (especially in the rhetoric of the 1950s), the filmmakers ignore that past. Similarly, they ignore how the cultural context that sustained earlier visions has changed irrevocably. Since the success of television’s The X-Files, one threat that has been transmitted to a wider popular consciousness is viral paranoia. This strongly anti-government strain fosters a belief that, by secretly funding huge laboratories, upper echelons of government engage in systematic cover-ups of UFO contact-inspired research. Such labs supposedly cater for everything from biological experiments with captured alien DNA, including alien–human hybridity, to tests with extra-terrestrial technology. The increasing credibility all this has attained in the popular imagination has added to the public paranoia of anything ‘alien’. In fostering fears of alien kidnaps, it causes distractions from pressing questions of diversity relations in neocolonial globalization. At another level, the paranoia can be seen as diverting attention from the set of environmental problems that people have good reason to be paranoid about, as their survival may depend upon them: medical dangers posed by non-computer viruses, risks to sustainable nutrition from transgenetic experimentation, and the continuing difficulties of sustaining decent air, food, housing, health and water for much of the planet. Alongside potential apocalypses and Armageddons, one other recurring late 1990s theme featured aliens already ruling the planet unbeknownst to the original human inhabitants. In this theme, earthlings discover that their belief in human autonomy on a liveable material planet is an illusion along the lines of Rusnak’s (1999) The Thirteenth Floor, with its tag line ‘Question reality. You can go there even though it doesn’t exist’, and Dark City (Proyas 1998), where aliens also rule the Earth. At one point in The Matrix (Wachowski and Wachowski 1999), which is set in what resembles a post-nuclear

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wasteland (in a clear physical representation of a planet beyond development), the rebel leader Morpheus looks around and says: ‘Welcome to the desert of the real.’ In this reality, machines have overtaken the world and humans lie inert in a pod with all sorts of wires pumping lies into their brains. They are used as batteries to sustain the artificial intelligence ruling the world of the late twentysecond century, while nearly the whole of humanity believes they are still living in 1999. Inside The Matrix, and in other films in that thematic vein, promising metaphors and a potentially interesting ontology open the way to project a Chomsky-style vision of manufactured consent to support an unjust world (although on an alien–human, rather than North–South or First World–Third World scale). Moreover, in its conclusion, the film resolves all problems through Keanu Reeves as Neo, a male Alice in Wonderland, who plays a computer hacker recruited as the ‘Chosen One’ to save humankind. And his tools are, of course, guns – lots of them, to blaze his way to the familiar salvation of wasted aliens – and physical hand-to-hand fighting. In short, whatever the problem, the answer is violence. Despite the ending, this subgenre of ‘life as usual’ as a perceptual illusion has considerable potential for questioning linear development and dramatizing an ethnically divisive environmental problematique in which existing development becomes a literal dead end. Unlike mainstream cinema, with its primary audience of teenage males, science fiction books by women, and by authors influenced by feminism, align more closely with a range of contemporary issues connected to future consequences in higher probability areas of the dystopic continuum. These fictions also address, albeit differently, similar issues to literature on development and gender. Mary Doria Russell’s novel The Sparrow (1997), and its sequel Children of God (1998), for example, deal with each of the themes highlighted in Pearson and Jackson’s (1998) edited collection Feminist Visions of Development: Gender Analysis and Policy. In line with Pearson and Jackson’s ‘Historical change and gender relations’ (1998), Russell’s first novel constructs the early fictional biography of Sephardic Jew Sofia Mendes as part of a longer history. Unlike recent NATO strategists, Russell displays a breadth of temporal vision that stretches back before ‘the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492’ to the time when ‘the ancient

n e w l e n s e s w i t h l i m i t e d v i s i o n | 197 Mendes were bankers, financiers to royalty hounded out of Iberia’ and were ‘welcomed into the Ottoman Empire’ (Russell 1997: 81–2). Projecting forwards into the twenty-first century, Russell then describes Istanbul ‘tearing itself to rubble in the insanity that grew out of the Second Kurdish War’ (ibid.: 82). All too credibly (with the hindsight of various Balkan conflicts), her novel also depicts ‘the city, sealed off by UN troops, left to devour itself in isolation’ (ibid.: 82), and how Sofia at 13, ‘alone and destitute in a world of pointless carnage’ (ibid.: 82), turned to prostitution to survive. Sofia’s fictional fate has an interesting real-life overlap with The Daughters of Development: Women and the Changing Environment, in which the Thai writer S. Sittirak’s autobiographical account refers to her ‘hundred thousand younger and older sisters, who are “prostitutes”’ (1998: xix). While relevant to Pearson and Jackson’s ‘Feminist analysis versus women and development’, Sofia’s history, with some geographical licence, would be predictable by journalists or political analysts. That is until the introduction of one of Sophia’s tricks, a Frenchman called Jean-Claude Jaubert. This Frenchman introduces himself as ‘a futures broker’ representing ‘a group of investors who sponsor promising young people in difficult circumstances’ (Russell 1997: 83): He had made his fortune in the Americas, where he’d mined slums and orphanages for bright, determined children … A lively secondary market had developed, a bourse where one could invest in an eight-year-old who’d tested extraordinarily high in mathematical ability, where one could trade rights to the earnings of a medical student for those of a talented young bioengineer. (ibid.: 83–4) Russell’s rational extrapolation of the main economic logic of late capitalism may currently appear an unthinkable scenario but its exaggeration foregrounds a long history of brain drain and the transfer of exploited female labour from undeveloped to developed nations. Moreover, it carries a charge vested in a character who, in Russell’s narrative, invites identification and is associated with rural land reform in the planetary equivalent of the Third World. Russell does not simply provoke thought through micro-histories

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but tackles macro-possibilities in novels that extend three of the major development concerns of recent quality science fiction writers: ecological possibilities (including indigenous–settler interactions), relationships between the human and the non-human, and population control. In advocating that people interested in women, culture and development (WCD) should read Russell, I find myself caught in some contradictions in promoting a novel underpinned by a Christianity that, for me, is part of the problem rather than a solution. Russell’s novels are based on the heroic interplanetary adventures of a Jesuit priest on missionary work and therefore offer very partial possibilities of identification. The head of the futuristic Jesuit order, for instance, debates birth control with a black African pope, Gelasius III: ‘We ourselves have experienced the death of a sister, sacrificed on Malthus’s altar’, Gelasius III pointed out. ‘Unlike Our learned and saintly predecessors, We are unable to discern evidence of God’s most holy will in population control carried out by the forces of war, starvation and disease … ‘There is good to be achieved! The question is how … It will be a matter, We think, of redefining the domains of natural and artificial birth control. Sahlins – you have read Sahlins? Sahlins wrote that “nature” is culturally defined, so what is artificial is also culturally defined.’ (Russell 1998: 53–4) Relevant as such debates are, they pale into insignificance alongside Russell’s description of the systems of population control on the novel’s other main setting, the planet Rakhat. As befits her background as a paleoanthropologist and author of scientific papers on bone biology and cannibalism, Russell offers evolution-influenced speculations on imaginary social relations between the two classes who inhabit Rakhat. Just as on Earth, class, ethnicity and food are strongly associated. In Children of God (1998), Russell’s Sofia Mendes, now a one-eyed Jewish widow, sides with the lower strata, the Runa, and urges them to change the inegalitarian structure of the planet: ‘the Jana’ata have no right to breed you, no right to say who has babies, who lives and who dies. They have no right to slaughter you and eat your bodies!’

n e w l e n s e s w i t h l i m i t e d v i s i o n | 199 (ibid.: 56). In an uncanny prefiguration of the Occupy movement, her instigation of the Runa chanting ‘We are many. They are few’ leads eventually to an armed revolt that threatens the very survival of the Jana’ata as a species. The most powerful population point for Earth, however, emerges near the end of The Sparrow. First, one of the book’s main characters, Father Emilio Sandoz, offers a justification for Rakhat’s cannibalism as ‘the Jana’ata also strictly limit their numbers to those that can be sustained by this system of breeding’ so that their ‘population structure is almost exactly that of a predator species in the wild, about four percent of the prey population’ (Russell 1997: 470). Sandoz claims not to be defending them but makes telling contrasts with an Earth estimated to hold 16 billion: ‘There are no beggars on Rakhat. There is no unemployment. There is no overcrowding. No starvation. No environmental degradation. There is no genetic disease. The elderly do not suffer decline. Those with terminal illness do not linger. They pay a terrible price for this system, but we too pay … and the coin we use is the suffering of children. How many kids starved to death this afternoon, while we sat here? Just because the corpses aren’t eaten doesn’t make our species any more moral.’ (ibid.: 471) For me, the novel’s Christian underpinning – the title and narratives conclude that there is providence in the fall of a sparrow – lacks conviction. Nevertheless, as the population issues extend the brutality of triage to cannibalism in a way that equates these horrors with large-scale death by starvation through unequal resources, Russell connects us firmly to present-day injustice rather than compassion fatigue. In its sophisticated inclusion of the religious as a cultural dimension, Russell reflects the struggle within WCD internationally to accommodate faith and secularity into a vision of environmental and population sustainability. Depictions of the possible topographies of tomorrow engage emotion as well as intellect, and they both complement and challenge current academic approaches to development. In parallel, consciously fictional scenarios of a different sort have been taken up by some corporations. Davis-Floyd (1998) provides a

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fascinating account of how Shell hired an English literature professor and expert on myth to help construct its blueprints of the future. The Shell scenarios1 have consistently extended short-termism (see, for example, Schwartz 1996) – and allowed for the possibility of catastrophic future events. While acknowledging existing emotional investments, scenarios can help us abandon narrow, linear thinking to adopt wider perspectives; develop alternative ways to see beyond the current range of vision; connect seemingly unrelated developments through narratives; and engage with uncertainty in a practical and systematic fashion. The Global Business Network (see Hammond 1998) and diverse others, from tourist boards to management consultants, have contributed to public debates on diverse possibilities. Each set of scenarios provides a sense of how informed business, government and independent thinkers are using scenarios to conceive of plural futures and are preparing, emotionally as well as practically, for widely divergent courses of events. They offer optional routes incorporating differences, ranging from the World Bank’s path of linear hope to versions of science fiction’s different degrees of dystopia, as well as something in between. As McCorduck and Ramsey’s (1996) The Futures of Women: Scenarios for the 21st Century notes: ‘The Official Future Will Not Take Place.’ There is a need to consider the novelistic territory of feelings as well as intellect, since ‘unfinished emotional business will play a much larger role in how the future shapes itself than anyone now believes’ (ibid.: xi). Looking to the futures, arenas of struggle, and views from above Scenario theorists have moved on since 2003. Jefferson and Voudouris justify the importance of these ‘overall paints of plausible futures’ to post-2010 business executives on the grounds of ‘the competitiveness and survival of their organization’, and they set out how to refine them with ‘agent-based computational laboratories, as the new standard’ in order to ‘structure the uncertainty of the future’ (2011: 1). For them, the ‘key concept is that the future should not be regarded as “complicated” but as “complex”, in that there are uncertainties about the driving forces that generate unanticipated futures’ (ibid.: 1). Shell currently publishes much of that research in accessible form (a downloadable PDF and short videos, for example) on an easily accessed and free website.

n e w l e n s e s w i t h l i m i t e d v i s i o n | 201 Yet my chapter’s title contests Shell’s claim to provide ‘new lenses for a new era’, speculating ‘how economic, political and social forces might shape the global energy system and environment over the 21st century’. As the range suggests, the driving forces are similar to those that shape development, especially because the ‘shift in painting plausible futures rather than forecasting a single future required an understanding of the numerous forces which may cause perturbations’ (ibid.: 7). These projections are not neutral. As an energy giant, Shell has an interest in amplifying or dampening forces depending on whether or not these help maintain, or put at risk, its profitability: for example, the rise of environmental or global justice movements could be framed as negative ‘perturbations’ or as resources of hope for more equitable, inclusive and sustainable futures. Shell claims to look at the future with new lenses, but its vision is still limited – women and gender issues are one particularly significant absence – because its reason for existing as a business is to generate returns. For feminists to have better futures, they will need to create or insert their stories themselves. The reduction of Shell’s latest scenarios from three or four to two marks a significant restriction of vision that aligns with its business priorities, as we shall see. Breaking bad: the narrowing of future narrative pathways By breaking with convention and creating only two future pathways, Shell posits an either/or model. The reduction is also strange since even economists tend to a consensus around the notion that the future is increasingly uncertain. Galbraith’s The End of Normal, for example, cites multiple economic authorities who, in the wake of the global financial crisis (and other continuing economic and political instabilities across the globe), see ongoing uncertainty with no return to ‘a normal, noncrisis steady state’ (Galbraith 2014: 3). So why did Shell break convention and its own traditions in the 2010 scenarios? The answer lies in what the two main options offer and in what they exclude. Scenario one – Mountains: A View from the Top – presents a world in which ‘those occupying commanding advantage (at the top) generally work to create stability in ways that promote the persistence of the status quo. There is a steady, selfreinforcing, lock-in of incumbent power and institutions’. At the lower end of the slopes, ‘for the less fortunate, the thinness of social

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safety nets is not completely offset by the growth in philanthropy, characterised by an eruption of foundations endowed by increasing numbers of billionaires’, but what the scenario terms ‘latent opposition to the power of political, business and social elites is minimised through a combination of incentives and sanctions, and social mobility continues to decline’. The smoothness of the transition has some perturbations for the status quo in that ‘[e]ven with new investments … the absence of major structural and financial adjustments in developed countries begins to slow GDP [gross domestic product] and discourage trade’. And, of course, to account for the disturbances, familiar narratives of blame arise, with the prediction that ‘some fast-emerging economies fall into the “middle income trap”, where growth plateaus and stagnates after a significant proportion of the population reaches middle-income levels, largely because institutions cannot adapt to a more complex economy’. Having accounted for those perturbations, there is still the energy environment to explain, but ‘Tight/shale gas and Coal Bed Methane (CBM) enjoy widespread success and grow to form a new “gas backbone” to the global energy system’, although ‘the global average temperature rise [still] overshoots the current 2°C goal’. In compact form, the Mountains scenario sets out some clear winners and losers (albeit ignoring island dwellers with homes submerged by the overshooting of the current 2°C goal). It also discursively dodges the substantial concerns about ‘fracking’ by referring to the more neutral sounding term ‘Tight/shale gas and Coal Bed Methane (CBM)’. This risk is transformed into an unqualified positive by presenting CBM as not only enjoying ‘widespread success’ but growing ‘to form a new “gas backbone” to the global energy system’. Mountains offers – as, in fairness, its name suggests – a clear view from the top and aligns that with the status quo. The assumptions of driving forces can be detected in who is blamed for imagined perturbations: ‘the absence of major structural and financial adjustments in developed countries begins to slow GDP and discourage trade’. This sounds like an all too familiar story with the advantage of favouring the already wealthy, whose growth is mainly threatened ‘because institutions cannot adapt to a more complex economy’, or perhaps because the levels of increasing inequality are not sustainable. But that’s another story altogether.

n e w l e n s e s w i t h l i m i t e d v i s i o n | 203 Navigation points: oceans, think tanks and public space Shell’s second scenario – Oceans – tells a less elitist story, one in which ‘competing interests and the diffusion of influence are met with a rising tide of accommodation. This trajectory is driven by a growing global population with increasing economic empowerment, and a growing recognition by the currently advantaged that their continued success requires compromise.’ Although not presented as a positive, Oceans allows the less-advantaged a better deal as ‘economic pressures strain social cohesion, forcing changes in economic and political structures. Reforms raise aspirations and, when they are successful, also raise expectations for further shifts in welfare, social structures and significant international institutions.’ For the Shell scenarists, this raises aspirations by widening development so that ‘expectations of continued improvements in quality of life become locked in. Globalisation strengthens; developing countries sustain their catch-up growth trajectories; and the key fast-emerging economies move to more balanced growth.’ However, all will not stay well, as ‘increasing stresses around food, water, energy and other resources become a new focus for social and political tensions’ and ‘political churn and the growth in empowered constituencies now hamper policy development, and resource scarcity is addressed almost completely through market forces acting within old policy frameworks that price externalities inadequately’. Shell’s language and mindset are clear in the linkage of democratic growth with what they call policy ‘impediments’ and the assertion that ‘empowered constituencies … hamper policy development’. It is revealing in stating that ‘externalities’ will need to be priced more realistically as tensions surface between Shell’s rationale as a company out to maximize profits and Shell’s research suggesting that the environment be revalued upwards. Shell’s conclusions are bleak for the whole planet: ‘high prices plus crises eventually stimulate strong demand-side investment in utilisation efficiency. These measures are not sufficient to address environmental concerns, as greenhouse gas emissions follow a pathway towards a high degree of climate change and the need for significant adaptation.’ While Shell is easily the best of the energy giants, its approach in keeping back research is to be condemned. Unlike Wikipedia, for example, outsiders have no access to the ‘back office’ where the research is collated and analysed and future projections spun. As a

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result, debates can take place behind closed doors on who counts as agents and who doesn’t and why, and which perturbations are positive and which are not. Shell is among the leaders in transparency with its scenarios, but it neither publishes nor makes available all its research, and so it remains removed from an open-source modus operandi. Moreover, Shell is part of an international network that includes the much more closed future projections of other energy companies, and that also restricts access to knowledge locked in think tanks. While some think tanks are democratically aligned, many have strong right-wing ties and much of their research is available only to already existing power brokers (governments and political parties as well as businesses). Medvetz (2012: 7) usefully tracks how think tanks have come to occupy ‘a new institutional subspace located at the crossroads of the academic, political, economic, and media sphere’ with the selective release of their often highly slanted findings. Writing on the globalization of knowledge, Kennedy adds that, even in a world of fluid information: Knowledge can’t flow so easily … because it must be sifted, reassembled, and assessed. And that means that its nodes of accumulation and transformation matter … As reputations globalize, the distinction of knowledge nodes seems to depend more and more on forms of acknowledgement relatively divorced from knowledge as such. Distinction is dissolved into recognition. Recognition morphs into celebrity. Hit lists of the world’s most important universities and thinkers then become the most visible arbiters of knowledge quality. This globalizing effect transforms … It also hides the abiding knowledge inequalities that shape our sense of the world. (Kennedy 2015: xi–xxi) Medvetz also shows how think tanks differentiate themselves to constitute ‘a semi distinct social universe with its own logic, history, and interior structures, not to mention its own agents’ (2012: 38). They are also well situated in relation to Kennedy’s ‘nodes of accumulation and transformation’ (2015: xi). Indeed, by ‘occupying a crucial point of juncture in between the worlds of political, intellectual, economic, and media production’ (Medvetz 2012: 7),

n e w l e n s e s w i t h l i m i t e d v i s i o n | 205 think tanks have undermined the value of independently produced knowledge. As they relegate more independent social scientists to the margins, they simultaneously promote their own spokespersons and ideas to the forefront of the media. It isn’t just about storytelling but who gets to tell the stories, and in ways that link – often without transparency – to levers of power. In gaining entry as credible ‘idea people’ in the public sphere, these spokespeople are far from the traditional public intellectual ‘whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), [and] to be someone who cannot easily be coopted by governments or corporations’ (Said 1994: 27). Feminist futures need research and public visibility. This current think tank–corporate research axis occupies considerable space on powerful public platforms (especially in traditional media) as evidence-based authoritative voices limit space for more independent – and less well funded – knowledge. The asymmetries of power do not stop there. Corporates can harness ‘agent-based computational laboratories, as … the new way to structure the uncertainty of the future’ (Jefferson and Voudouris 2011: 1). For the agents whom the corporates do not wish to empower, they can access a mass of algorithm-worked data that provides predictive advantages in knowing how the already disadvantaged are likely to act under certain circumstances and what messages and stories are more or less likely to be believed. As a Guardian newspaper headline put it: ‘Algorithms, the key ingredients of all significant computer programs, have probably influenced your Christmas shopping and may one day determine how you vote’ (Naughton 2012). Beyond scenarios: science fiction and story wars My research failed to turn up scenarios for women that moved beyond McCorduck and Ramsey’s (1996) ground-breaking scenarios. This is a pity, as Shell’s reduction of projected futures leaves interesting spaces for challenging future status quos. A WCDOccupy-the-future group would be more than welcome. As it is, status quo challenges keep happening in science fiction, while in business there is fresh awareness of how central narratives are gaining credence. Sachs’s Winning the Story Wars sums up and extends attempts to write futures through stories: ‘We live in a world that has lost its

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connection to its traditional myths, and we are now trying to find new ones … These myths will shape our future, how we live, what we do, and what we buy’ (emphasis in original). But, he continues, although they ‘will touch all of us … not all of us get to write them. Those who do have tremendous power’ (2012: 6): And where there is power, there is struggle for it. That’s why, just below the surface, just beyond what the uninitiated can see, there are wars going on. The soldiers are Tea Party demonstrators and champions of ‘the 99%,’ climate change activists, makers of computers and sneaker brands. They seem to be fighting over ideas and dollars but they are really fighting for control of our stories … I want you to be part of the story wars because our world is badly in need of solutions in so many spheres – economic, social, and environmental to name just a few. The ability to dream up and spread these solutions lives or dies on the ability to tell great stories that inspire people to think differently. (ibid.: 6, emphasis in original) Sachs sees the second decade of the twenty-first century as a battle for survival between competing narratives. He gives force to the view that science fiction is the complementary future narrative to business projections that tend towards optimistic tales of business as usual saving the world. In addition, he draws attention to how others (especially advertisers and marketers) are telling tales of consequence. Science fiction relevant to feminist futures includes Suzanne Collins’ (2008–10) record-breaking The Hunger Games trilogy (comprising The Hunger Games (2008), Catching Fire (2009) and Mockingjay (2010)), which, according to a Wikipedia entry, has sold more than 65 million copies in the US alone and has been made into commercially successful films. For an analysis of Collins, I hand this next section over to Akanksha Munshi-Kurian, who not only cares about feminist futures but is likely to help create them, so her voice is an important one to hear. Hunger Games and feminist futures

Akanksha Munshi-Kurian With a recent wave of young actresses, models, singers and entertainers breaking away from society’s conventional gender roles and redefining ideas about femininity, ‘girl power’ and women’s empowerment have never felt so alive within

n e w l e n s e s w i t h l i m i t e d v i s i o n | 207 the entertainment industry. In terms of popular culture, feminism is catching fire. The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins has sparked a political turning point for contemporary youth. The novels are set in a dystopic society in which wealth, power and privilege are solely in the hands of an aristocracy ensconced in the Capitol, while the rest are subjected to desolation and despair. The power of the elite is epitomized in the lavish entertainment spectacle of a sporting event – the Hunger Games – in which randomly chosen child ‘tributes’ from impoverished districts are forced to fight each other to the death until a single victor remains. A revolution against such an inequitable society is inevitable, and heroine Katniss Everdeen is the face of this revolution. The Hunger Games novels have been a refreshing addition to the traditionally male-dominated fantasy scene: a bold response to the conventional claim that female leading characters cannot appeal to all genders. Initially taking on what is typically perceived as the patriarchal role in her family after the passing of her father, the main protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, shows herself to be a skilled hunter and the sole provider of food for her family. She then transitions to a larger heroic role as a leader and symbol of rebellion as the series progresses. It is a welcome change to find a female character focused on the practicalities of life and able to be effective politically. For once, we are presented with someone strong: a person whose entire character has not been defined by her love interests, but instead by her wit, bravery and drive. Too often we have seen authors create female characters overcome by flimsy emotions and trivial ambitions, garnering half-hearted pity from readers rather than the admiration and adoration that are most often reserved for males. Collins (2008) ventures beyond the safe formulae of traditional bestsellers through her characters. This is certainly a risk. If it were not for the love and affection for her younger sister that drive her throughout the series, Katniss would undoubtedly have been cast by readers as an unlikeable character. Yet it is the unapologetic hardness of Katniss that has come to define Collins’ distinctive, indeed rebellious, approach. Collins thus makes a fierce case against set gender roles. This idea continues through Catching Fire and Mockingjay, with Katniss defining herself as a political leader and the face of a revolution.

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In contrast, Katniss’s two potential love interests through the series, Peeta and Gale, are cast as the more vulnerable characters. There is an aura of quintessential femininity to Gale, defined perhaps by his impulsiveness or by his falling in love and forming relationships despite the crippling reality of day-to-day life in District 12. Unlike Katniss, who places sole importance on the well-being of herself and her family, Gale serves as a dreamier, more romantic counterpart. As he waits on the sidelines and quietly hopes that Katniss will fall in love with him, Gale’s character is not dissimilar to that of the starryeyed Bella Swan from Stephenie Meyer’s (2005) bestselling Twilight series. Peeta is even more different. He is nurturing in an almost maternal sense – his calm, steady persona is reflected in his unfailing championing of the volatile Katniss and in his encouragement for her to talk about her feelings. While he can frost a cake to perfection and coat himself in perfect camouflage, Peeta never stands a chance in the arena where the games are held. Katniss notices this vulnerability in the beginning of the first novel, remarking that ‘Peeta Mellark, on the other hand, has obviously been crying, and interestingly enough, does not seem to be trying to cover it up’ (Collins 2008: 49). Collins’ gender-neutral approach to how the characters behave resonates with modern gender equality campaigns such as the HeForShe initiative led by Emma Watson (2014). Being able to look up to male characters who do not instantly fall under the traditional ‘masculine’ category provides a refreshing change of scene from standard fantasy novels. Conventional perceptions of masculinity and femininity are systematically challenged by Collins through the trilogy’s remaining characters. Cinna, Katniss’s male stylist, is characterized through a distinctly maternal lens. The protagonist’s own mother was someone who had become ‘locked in some dark world of sadness’ (Collins 2008: 32) after the death of her husband, leaving Katniss with the full burden of familial responsibility from a young age. As someone refreshingly natural in the fluorescent world of the Capitol, Katniss feels looked after and comforted by Cinna, who is finally a person who promises to never let her down. Finnick Odair, one of Katniss’s allies in Catching Fire and a boy noted for his striking looks, reveals how he was forced into prostitution as a service to the elite Capitol citizens, paralleling female sexual exploitation in many parts of today’s world. Furthermore, Hunger Games tribute Foxface is distinguished by her razor-sharp smarts and individualism, traits usually associated with

n e w l e n s e s w i t h l i m i t e d v i s i o n | 209 males, while even Katniss’s sister Prim, who started out as a naïve, innocent child, joins the revolution against the Capitol through her work as a doctor in war zones. Finally, Mockingjay, the most intensely political of the three novels, depicts a female as the primary villain, with Collins demonstrating that good or evil has, contrary to customary beliefs, nothing to do with biology. Indeed, a complex form of resistance to both conventional ideas of biology and corporatized experiments with biology comes through powerfully in the trilogy. A recurring symbol in the novels is that of the ‘mockingjay’ – a creature that transcends the boundaries of the real and the virtual. The Capitol had created genetically modified birds called jabberjays as instruments of surveillance but exiled them to the woods after they were no longer of use. However, before these engineered birds died out, male jabberjays mated with female mockingbirds in the woods. This union brought forth the ‘mockingjay’ – a new species of bird with an ability to mimic melodies. Mockingjays stand for resistance, a key feature of feminism. The birth of a fresh species despite the zealous control of the Capitol holds out hope for the oppressed peoples of the districts to break free from the totalitarian regime. Katniss herself identifies with the birds and is known as ‘The Mockingjay’ during the revolt led by her against the Capitol. Despite being set several hundred years into the future, Collins’ work offers numerous parallels between the lives of Panem citizens and the lives of people on this planet today. Her depiction of the districts – desolate, desperate, poverty-stricken areas that can easily be likened to the poorer parts of most big cities of today – contrasts stunningly with the indulged citizens of the Capitol, the ‘1 per cent’ of modern times, so to speak. It illustrates the paradoxical issue of the wealthy being so entirely enveloped in a world of privilege and luxury that they are unable to even begin to comprehend the living conditions of others in their own nation. As Peeta and Katniss sit outside on their first evening in the Capitol, they are astonished by the view: ‘The Capitol twinkles like a vast field of fireflies. Electricity in District 12 comes and goes; usually we only have it a few hours a day’ (Collins 2008: 98). It is easy to distance ourselves from the alarmingly opulent lifestyles of characters in the series, and to reassure each other that we are lucky to live in a world where such injustice would never be tolerated. Yet

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the appalling practices of contemporary corporate firms, whose slave labour-produced goods infiltrate countless kitchens and wardrobes around the world, are not a far cry from what the trilogy depicts. Despite making sure that their workers will stay in a continual cycle of back-breaking poverty, the wealthy persist in exploiting them further. The idea of picking 24 children to fight each other to the death for mere entertainment comes across as vulgar in the modern context, but how far off is it from the cruelty experienced by millions in today’s world? It is along these lines that we can explore the idea of unbridled consumerism in the Capitol. The tonic Katniss is offered at a party, which makes you sick, ‘so you can keep eating’ (Collins 2009: 97), echoes the extravagant lifestyles of well-off families all over the world. Unjust distributions of wealth characterize capitalist regimes of today, relegating millions to extreme starvation while others indulge in overwhelming excess. The Hunger Games illustrates a world of aesthetics and artificialities, serving to distract the public from disturbing issues that lie beneath the surface of their society. The notion of dressing up the 24 child ‘tributes’ like celebrities, holding them in luxurious accommodation before the games begin, and beautifying their hair, faces and clothes deflects attention away from the fact that these games are barbaric. While Collins demonstrates the implications of how such profound consumerism can divert attention from problems that genuinely need attention, it is ironic to see that the commercial success of the trilogy has fallen into the very same trap. Even as bookstores, cinemas and malls across the West have been flooded with Hunger Games fans eager to purchase merchandise associated with the series, we find that this key message throughout the story has been drowned out. This artful case against consumerism has been, in essence, eclipsed by its own success. The Hunger Games trilogy has certainly shown itself to be more than just another craze in popular culture. In order to build a future free from oppressive gender expectations and profound inequality, the need for change has to be recognized and enacted by all members of the community. We require far more people willing to be the ‘mockingjays’ of society and far fewer of the ‘Capitol citizens’ who refuse to open their minds. Feminism is in our future, and the revolution has already begun.

n e w l e n s e s w i t h l i m i t e d v i s i o n | 211 Other lands and other oceans: the work of Paolo Bacigalupi The film versions of The Hunger Games don’t just depict some districts as extreme ghettos, but as sites of devastation in images more akin to TV news coverage of towns in war zones in Africa, the Middle East and former Soviet states. Outside Collins’ trilogy, this globalization of desperate poverty and war in science fiction cuts across current wealth and poverty lines inside (and beyond) individual nation borders. One cluster gathers around futures for parts of the developing world akin to attempts to imagine viable futures for Islam (Sardar, in Inayatullah and Boxwell 2003: 106–117). In science fiction writing, Ian McDonald’s work draws attention to a futuristic India in River of Gods (McDonald 2006) and Istanbul in The Dervish House (McDonald 2010), and follows the other cluster in innovative work that is trending away from cyberpunk to genetics, as in McDonald’s Desolation Road (2009). In covering both clusters, Bacigalupi often merges formerly Third World landscapes with those of leading Western nations. His future images offer a useful antidote to the Shell view from the mountain by focusing on the poor as the main agents. In the young adult genre, Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker (2010) opens with the brutal life of boys and girls condemned to scavenge metals from wrecked ships in hazardous working conditions: Nailer clambered through a service duct, tugging at copper wire and yanking it free. Ancient asbestos fibers and mouse grit puffed around him as the wire tore loose. He scrambled deeper into the duct, jerking more wire from its aluminum staples … The LED glowpaint smeared on Nailer’s forehead gave a dim green phosphorescent view of the service ducts that made up his world. Grime and salt sweat stung his eyes and trickled around the edges of his filter mask. With one scarred hand, he swiped at the salty rivulets, careful to avoid rubbing off the LED paint. The paint itched and drove him crazy, but he didn’t relish finding his way back out of the mazelike ducts in blind blackness, so he let his forehead itch … Despite the filter mask, he started coughing as powder leaked in around the poorly sealed edges. He sneezed, then sneezed again, eyes watering. He pulled the mask away and wiped his face, then pressed it back over his mouth and nose, willing the stickum

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to seal but not holding out much hope. The mask was a handme-down, given to him by his father. It itched and never sealed quite right because it was the wrong size, but it was all Nailer had. On its side, faded words said: DISCARD AFTER 40 HOURS USE. But Nailer didn’t have another, and no one else did either. He was lucky to have a mask at all, even if the microfibers were beginning to shred from repeated scrubbings in the ocean. (ibid.: 1–2) In Bacigalupi’s sequel, The Drowned Cities (2012), Mahalia, a young woman maimed by US fundamentalists who chopped her hand off because her father had been a Chinese peacekeeper, is known as a ‘maggot of war’. She encounters hunger, poverty and crazed boy mercenaries as she crosses jungles to get to a city. As wild as any current city in the poorest spot in the globe, it turns out to be New Orleans. This repetitive transfer of horrors, conventionally seen as African or Third World atrocities, to the developed West suggests a more fearful future for young women than their silent omission as agents in Shell scenarios. Bioengineering also appears frequently in Bacigalupi’s writing. The enhancements are to create genetically improved killers and women genetically designed to serve and be sex slaves. His other work often features the genetic manipulation of food to cause plagues and shortages through the greed of corporates. One review of The Windup Girl (2009) praises Bacigalupi’s: intricately believable portrait of a future Thailand fighting back from environmental collapse. Crops are regularly blighted by genetically engineered blights, cities threatened by rising sea levels. Post-oil, society is powered by calories; springdriven motors are wound up by bioengineered mammoths on treadmills. Merchants still trade, politicians still jockey for position, and fundamentalism still thrives. (Roberts 2010) And the position of women has deteriorated. The windup girl of the title, the genetically engineered Emiko – created as a geisha for Japanese executives but later dumped into a Thai brothel – is exploited through nightly public humiliations. Before the end, Emiko escapes by breaking her training and turning her

n e w l e n s e s w i t h l i m i t e d v i s i o n | 213 genetic strengths against her erstwhile masters. She seeks to join a community of similar ‘new people’ who have rejected control by ‘masters’ in a way that recalls struggles of earlier ‘new people’ to win acceptance and freedom from exploitation. As her escape has parallels in Bacigalupi’s other novels, there is symbolic victory in suggesting how even the most disadvantaged outcasts among ‘alien’ beings can find through their own strengths the ability to join a community of equals. Finally, Bacigalupi’s more recent work, The Doubt Factory (2014), reveals how the story wars are loaded to favour corporate credibility over scientific findings. This young adult fiction’s heroine, Alix Banks, has to come to terms with the dark side of PR as practised by the father she loves, Simon Banks. A bunch of more-than-street-smart but outcast kids – including Kook, a young female skateboarding hacker, Moses, a law-breaking black son of a criminal, and Tank, a ‘frail Latino-looking kid who reminded her of a Hobbit’ (Bacigalupi 2014: 235) – set out to persuade Alix of her father’s PR firm’s unethical and dangerous conduct: ‘… when you absolutely, positively have to confuse the hell out of an issue’, Kook said, ‘call Banks Strategy Partners’. Moses said, ‘You know what they call BSP? The people who hire them? The people who use your dad’s methods?’ Alix didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to hear it. ‘The Doubt Factory’, Moses said. ‘It’s a good name, right? Because, really, that’s what your dad produces. He doesn’t make products. He makes doubt. ‘If you want everyone to ignore those FDA studies that say you’re killing people with your drug, go to Simon Banks and buy a little doubt. You sprinkle it all over the issue. You spread it around. Pretty soon, the Doubt Factory has people so confused that you can go on selling whatever the hell it is for just a little longer. Aspirin, Tobacco. Asbestos. Leaded gasoline. Phthalates. Bisphenol A – the list goes on’. (ibid.: 221) After abducting Alix, the group tries to persuade her to help, as Moses explains the strategy to make the unseen power of PR transparent. At the same time, Bacigalupi brings Kook to life as a vibrant female agent fighting the corporate storylines:

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‘Kook’s good with computers. We just need a little of your help. Your dad trusts you. All you need to do is install a little bit of software, and we’ll do the rest’ … ‘Stuxnet, baby!’ Kook called from where she was making another [skateboard] run at the ramp. ‘It’s a worm. DoDcertified badass wormtastic. I modified it. You just plug it into the USB drive. As long as it gets plugged in while he’s logged in, I can do the rest’. She shot up the ramp, did another handstand, and came whooshing down again. ‘What’s that going to accomplish?’ Alix asked. ‘We want the Doubt Factory’s client files. All of them. Your dad’s clients spend a lot of time denying their products are dangerous. We know they’re lying, but that’s almost impossible to prove. If we can get those files, it would show exactly what they know, and exactly what they’re trying to protect themselves against’. ‘And then’ … ‘And then we’ll put the news up all over the Net. We’ll send the juicy bits to every newspaper and website that still knows how to report a story. We think there are enough smoking guns in your dad’s files to indict a couple dozen CEOs. It would open the door to civil suits, wrongful-death suits, class actions, government investigations’. (ibid.: 233) The novel reinforces its reality effects by naming actual corporates and their unethical behaviours, in line with Oreskes and Conway’s well-documented Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (2010). Story wars can be won and lost in where and how they are situated and in what support they get that is transparent or that is hidden. Conclusion: The Matrix, The Meatrix and social media possibilities My conclusion calls not only for more feminist scenarios and for more feminist science fiction. Other prototypes have been constructed by Sachs in his role as a successful social media storyteller. He tells how he and a fellow third grader set out to remake Star Wars shot for shot and ended up, when ‘in 2005, we finally launched our

n e w l e n s e s w i t h l i m i t e d v i s i o n | 215 own version of Star Wars on the Internet. Within a year it would get more than 20 million views, be screened at film festivals around the world’ but ‘had morphed considerably … into a five minute advertisement for organic food. We called it Grocery Store Wars and it starred a complete cast of bad puns – Cuke Skywalker, Chewbroccoli, and … the infamous Darth Tater’ (Sachs 2012: 2). It has to be seen to be appreciated and it is still available (Grocery Store Wars 2005). The most excited audience, however, were marketing professionals ‘looking for clues as to why Store Wars, and its equally popular predecessor The Meatrix, an exploration of the evils of industrial meat farming, had been so successful’, because these ‘short spoof pieces were an experimental mix between entertainment and advertisement, and they had gotten the Internet to deliver on its promise of explosive results for very little money’ (Sachs 2012: 2). Wikipedia, which lists The Meatrix, as ‘an award-winning short flash animation critical of factory farming and industrial agricultural practices’, acknowledges the film’s popularity through being ‘translated into over 30 languages and watched by more than 30 million people’. It must be the most seen anti-corporate meat production film ever, and ‘two sequels were released in 2006’ (Wikipedia) – all are still online. It provides a prototype for getting more feminist futures made by creatives who have more imagination and social media skills than funding, and who seek to tell stories that not only have a large audience but can be accompanied with all the social media trappings that can help create a movement. The official website (http://www.themeatrix.com/) not only allows free downloading of the trilogy, but offers easily accessible portals to both educational resources and guides to ‘Take Action’ with explicit connections to impact on conventional politics (for example, the US Congress). In the end, I remain attached to narratives, in the plural, in which even gender itself can be imagined very differently from contemporary physical and social constrictions. I also see enough potential in the second part of Sachs’s book title – Why Those Who Tell – and Live – the Best Stories Will Rule the Future (2012) – for WCD activists, who are already productive netizens and citizen journalists, to make liberation animation narratives, circulate them, and articulate them with political action. Sardar argues that: ‘Futures studies try to ensure that all the viable options remain open and pregnant with potentials’ (2013: 131). So too do some stories. Engaging narratives

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have unparalleled power to shift hearts and minds and, following the example of The Meatrix, they can now combine with social media to open portals to activism and movements, enabling an array of inclusive and plural futures. Note 1. For Shell Scenarios, see http:// www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation. html#vanity-aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zaGVsb

C5jb20vZ2xvYmFsL2Z1dHVyZS1lbmVyZ 3kuaHRtbA.

8 | D E V E L O P M E N T N A T I O N A LIS M: S C I E N C E , R E L I G I O N A N D T H E QUES T F OR A M O D E R N I N D I A

Banu Subramaniam

After Independence, India’s hydroelectric dams – erected as they were to a secular faith – came to be known as Nehru’s ‘new temples’. Such projects were to ensure India’s future. Today, many recognize that the wings of modernity were not powerful enough to bear the huge nation aloft … Traditionalists have countered the modernizers with their own Enlightenment. (Kothari 1989) Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist politician, was sworn in as the fifteenth Prime Minister of India on 26 May 2014 (Burke 2014). For the first time in Indian history, Modi’s party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), won a landslide election with enough votes (292 seats out of 543) to form a government, while the Opposition, the Congress party, was reduced to a historic low, winning only 44 seats. The victory of the BJP is seen widely as the victory and success of Narendra Modi, former chief minister of the state of Gujarat (The Economist 2014). Modi ran a powerful media campaign that was organized around the message of ‘development’,1 tapping into the frustration of voters with the previous government and anger against its corruption (EPW 2014). His surging rhetoric during his campaign promised to lead the nation to new heights of prosperity through large-scale ‘development’ efforts. The centrality of ‘development’ as the platform of the BJP and Modi relied heavily on notions of restoring Indian/Hindu tradition to win votes, while still promoting an agenda of promising to ‘modernize’ India. One needs to understand Modi’s victory 67 years after India’s independence, both in what people see as a failure of previous (secular) governments, but more importantly in the steady and sharp rise in religious nationalism. Many share Rajni Kothari’s sentiments that

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India has failed to realize and achieve its potential. With the founders of independent India began a project of imagining India, an India that fulfilled the dreams and hopes of an independent nation and a free people. The founders of India imagined a democratic India, one that was secular in its pluralistic vision to actively include, support and encourage all religions (as opposed to an American model of a separation of church and state). Yet over the last three decades, the rise of religious nationalism has been steady and unmistakable, and what has shifted are the very definitions of secularism and democracy. Rather than disavow either, religious nationalists have redefined both – secularism as tolerance and democracy as majoritarianism (Vanaik 1997). Thus, they argue that while the presence of religious minorities should be ‘tolerated’, it is the majority Hindus who should define and govern India. Religious nationalists imagine a Hindu India for a Hindu people. While Modi toned down his militant brand of Hindu nationalism during the election campaign, his history of militant activism, and particularly his role in the 2002 Gujarat pogroms, worries many.2 What is at stake is who gets to define and imagine ‘India’. The growth of religious nationalism in India over the last few decades has been unmistakable. In 1998, the BJP came to power in India. After 13 months, the coalition government was toppled but the next election brought the BJP back to power (in a coalition government again). The political success of the BJP draws on two other Hindu nationalist movements – the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), an organization of religious leaders, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a militant youth organization (van der Veer 1994). The Hindu nationalist programme stresses Hindutva, or Hinduness. Hindu nationalists have successfully tapped into the overall discontent of Hindu Indians (economic, social and cultural), and transformed it into a problem about religion and the brand of secularism and democracy India’s founders had envisioned. In this essay, I explore how women, culture and development (WCD) have shaped and been shaped by the rise of religious nationalism in contemporary India. Here is a reinvention of India’s past in the orientalist traditions of invoking a grand and ancient Hindu past. It is this Hindu past, religious nationalists argue, that must shape the dreams and imagination of a future India, and which is centrally at stake. The traditionalists, as Rajni Kothari suggests,

de v e lopment nat ional ism | 219 have countered the modernist project with their own enlightenment, one that re-invokes the grand Vedic tradition. Ironically, the tradition invoked is one that is scientifically and technologically advanced – a tradition that anticipated the development of modern science, and is thus in harmony with modern-day science. As a result, the past melds into the present, religion with science, and tradition with modernity. This new imaginary homeland is used to develop a blueprint for the home and the world, public and private culture, the nation and the individual. The co-construction of the public and private spheres through a common ideology of Hindutva is a particular form of the reinvention of India. The secular inclusive ideals many grew up with have been literally recast, and made anew. What is particularly significant is that the nation ‘India’ did not exist before its creation in 1947. The Indian subcontinent has been home to a multitude of religions for centuries, many emerging from within its own soil. Yet the claim for an ‘authentic’ past is, for Hindu nationalists, an exclusively Hindu past. Such reconstructions mean that what was once made can now be remade; one history can be replaced by a revisionist history. This interpretive nature of history and nation-building notwithstanding, what is evident in these recent reconstructions of the past is a deliberate and unscrupulous manipulation of data to arrive at convenient conclusions that serve Hindu fundamentalist political, religious and social agendas. The project of nation-building that the religious nationalists have undertaken is deliberate and intentional. It is a creation of a new vision for India – one that is ancient, modern, scientifically and technologically proficient, Hindu and Indian at once. A case in point is the launch of India’s first Mars orbiter, Mangalyaan, in 2013. On the day before, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), K. Radhakrishnan, offered pujas at the popular Tirupati temple. Indeed, his predecessor had done the same before similar launches (Patrao 2013). Religion and science are not seen as contradictory, but both deeply woven into the fabric of India. As I will explore later in this chapter, by bringing together the archaic and the modern, the religious nationalists have created what I have called an ‘archaic modernity’ (Subramaniam 2000). In this chapter I begin with a brief analysis of the rise of religious nationalism and a description of the ideology put forth by nationalists. Next, I explore the symbolic and ideological role women play in the

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nationalist reinterpretation of Indian culture. Finally, I examine religious nationalism’s use of science, technology and development. What characterizes this archaic modernity, I argue, is a confluence of masculinity, science, technology, development and militarization. Despite the rhetoric of angry, vengeful goddesses, women are relegated to the private sphere as vehicles for the development of masculine agency and for a generation of Hindu men who will work for the recovery of a Hindu India (Pant 1997). To underscore how archaic modernities work in the nationalist imagination, I examine Vaastushastra, the ancient Indian ‘material science’, as a case study of the merging of the archaic and the modern. In exploring the repackaging of this ancient tradition as a ‘modern material science’, I illustrate how archaic modernities function. The confluence of the archaic and the modern works as a metaphor for the home and the individual, and also a larger metaphor for nations and nationhood. The archaic and the modern For who among us, after all – white or nonwhite, Western or not – is not always caught precisely in the space between ‘inherited traditions’ and ‘modernisation projects’? And where else, how else, do ‘cultural interpretations’ come from – ‘theirs’ or ‘ours’, local or global, resistant or complicit as the case may be – other than from the spaces between the two. (Pfeil 1994: 222–3) What, then, is the nature of the modern encounter of science and religion in India, and how are the lives of women and the constructions of gender shaped by these intersections? At its independence in 1947, India embarked on a modernization project – a Nehruvian3 industrial model of development with the conviction that the future of India lay in the promise of science, technology and development. Western science has been a central and powerful force in the visions, dreams and hopes of a post-independent, postcolonial India. Indeed, science has been adopted as ‘the reason of the state’. As Nandy explains: This expectation partly explains why science is advertised and sold in India the way consumer products are sold in any market economy, and why it is sought to be sold by the Indian élites as a cure-all for the ills of Indian society. Such a public consciousness

de v e lopment nat ional ism | 221 moves from one euphoria to another. In the 1950’s and 1960’s it was Atom for Peace, supposedly the final solution of all energy problems of India; in the 60’s and 70’s it was the Green Revolution, reportedly the patented cure for food shortage in the country; in the 70’s and 80’s it is Operation Flood, the talisman for malnutrition through the easy availability of milk for every poor household in the country. (Nandy 1988: 7–8) Development – like science – has been central to the modernizing mission of India. The development of India through large-scale industrial growth, hydroelectric dams, agricultural development and militarization is central to the policies of previous secular governments as well as the current nationalist imagination. India has been pluralistic about religion, but science and development have been untouched by religion. Critics of and protesters against development have enumerated the profound, often irreversible, consequences of development through the disenfranchisement and dislocation of peoples and the costs to the environment. Religious nationalists condemn the critics, questioning their patriotism and love of country (Rawat 2000). Similarly, while postcolonial critics have questioned the effectiveness and appropriateness of the particular forms of science and development institutionalized in India, these critiques have largely been ignored by past secular governments and, more recently, as I will argue, by the religious nationalists. At first glance, religious nationalists seem to have a critique of the harsh impact of colonialism. Seeking to erase and overcome centuries of colonialism, they present the glorious aura of a grand civilization forgotten by its own people. Such a move promises the possibility of decolonization by returning to the progressive possibilities of India’s rich and diverse history and traditions. However, on closer examination, it appears that religious nationalists embrace some of the more regressive elements of both science and religion, a selective record of history, and a promise of a future that serves only the Hindu elite. Religious nationalists in contemporary India have selectively, and strategically, used rhetoric from both science and Hinduism, modernity and orthodoxy, Western and Eastern thought to build a powerful but potentially dangerous vision of a Hindu nation. Rather than characterize Hinduism as ancient, non-modern or traditional, the Hindu nationalists have embraced capitalism, Western science

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and technology as elements for a modern Hindu nation. However, these ideals of a modern Hindu nation exist alongside contradictory visions of a glorious precolonial Hindu past, drawing on the scientific, technological and philosophical scriptures of ancient Hindu India. Religious nationalists thus bring together a modern vision with an archaic vision: that is, an archaic modernity (Subramaniam 2000). By strategically employing elements of science and religion, orthodoxy and modernity, the Hindu right is attempting to create a ‘modern Hinduism’ for a Hindu India. Women, culture, nation The move to a modern or scientific Hinduism began with thinkers such as Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), a central figure in Hinduism. He set out to ‘modernize’ Hinduism by organizing a disparate set of traditions through a systematic and scientific interpretation of the Vedanta (the Upanishads and the tradition of their interpretation) (van der Veer 1994: 69–70). India’s first modern Swami and missionary to the West (Nandy 1995: 46–7), he created a nationalist discourse that is central to Hindu nationalism in all its versions, including the RSS/BJP/VHP brand of Hindu nationalism (Chatterjee 1989). Through nationalism and the creation of the ‘modern’ Hindu, there began a campaign to ‘recast’ women (Sangari and Vaid 1989). Hindu nationalism turned women into a national symbol to create the motif of female power or ‘Shakti’. The myth of Shakti was invoked again and again. The nation, now female and a ‘motherland’, came to symbolize both the powerlessness of the colonial subject as well as ‘the awakening conscience of her humiliated (Hindu) sons’ (Bagchi 1994: 3). The invocation of the Devi – the goddess with her garland of skulls standing on a supine male Shiva – represented both the protectress and the sacred domain to be protected from alien violation (Bagchi 1990). Yet against this image of female power, Hindu leaders relegated women to the domestic and saw men as wage earners. For example, Vivekananda believed that women should not be educated in the modern sciences but should achieve fulfilment within the family (Jayawardena 1988); Dayananda endorsed women’s education for a more disciplined child-rearing process (Sarkar 1994); and Gandhi espoused the ‘complementarity’ of women and men – women in the home and men as wage earners

de v e lopment nat ional ism | 223 (Joshi 1988). Through these essentialized differences between men and women emerged distinct public and private spheres. The recasting of women as ‘authentic’ was seen as one of the surest signs of the superiority of the East, trapping women to participate in the nationbuilding process in particular ways (Bagchi 1994: 5). Women are at once mythologized and empowered, yet subjugated and disciplined. In this archaic modernity, there is a renewed Hindu masculinity, a rhetoric of symbolic female power that in reality perpetuates the redomestication of women. As others have argued, this resurgence of Hindu nationalism today is a resurgence of Hindu masculinity, a reaction to the ‘effeminization’ that was the strategy of Western colonialism and orientalism (see, for example, Jeffery and Basu 1994). Science and religion have proved to be two powerful tools through which religious nationalists have imagined and engaged with this project of ‘masculinization’. Like most nationalisms, Hindu nationalism seeks inspiration from an imaginary past. Both science and religion have been implicated in this process. The religious nationalists’ vision of religion and Hinduism parallels its science policy and is decidedly militaristic and violent. Indeed, this has been a driving force since the freedom struggle, when Hindu nationalists departed from the pluralistic vision of the founders of India.4 They disagreed with the founders’ vision of secularism and their inclusiveness and believed that the majority community of Hindus should dominate. They feared that Gandhi’s ‘effeminacy’ would bring about the further ‘emasculation’ of Hindu men, and this fear culminated in a Hindu nationalist assassinating Gandhi in 1948. Since the rise of Hindu nationalism, there has been an increase in violence against religious minorities through campaigns that target minorities and the destruction and demolition of churches and mosques. Violence, dominance and an increasingly militaristic policy through their vision of science and religion have marked religious nationalists’ quest for a Hindu nation. Religious nationalism breeds sectarian and communal politics and, inevitably, women become markers of the community and synonymous with culture (Butalia 1999). Like other nationalisms, Hindu nationalism implicates women in its growth. Contemporary religious nationalism re-invokes Shakti and the power of women, albeit in strategic ways. Primarily anti-minority, especially antiMuslim, in their stance, women leaders herald the great power of

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women in traditional Hinduism. The president of the all-India BJP women’s organization, Mahila Morcha (Women’s Front), claims that: ‘In the Vedic era, the status of women used to be much higher than it is today … After the Muslim invasion all of this changed: Hindus were forced to marry off their daughters at much younger ages, they adopted seclusion, and women’s role in public life declined’ (quoted in Basu 1998a: 172). During the rise of the BJP and before they came to power, women such as Sadhvi Rithambara and Uma Bharti were among the most violent of leaders, ‘projecting themselves as victims of Muslim men’. By displacing male violence onto Islam and Muslim men, they claimed that their ‘motherland was being raped by lascivious Muslim men’ and they goaded Hindu men to regain their masculinity by violence against Muslims (Basu and Basu 1999). For example, during the Ramjanmabhumi movement that sought to break down an ancient mosque, the Babri Masjid, and build a Hindu temple in its place because it was claimed as the actual birthplace of the Hindu god Ram, Uma Bharti was quoted as saying: The one who can console our crying motherland, and kill the traitors with bullets, we want light and direction from such a martyr, we want a Patel or a Subhash5 for our nation … When ten Bajrangbalis6 will sit on the chest of every Ali, then only will one know whether this is the birthplace of Ram or the Babri Masjid, then only will one know that this country belongs to Lord Ram. (quoted in Nandy et al. 1995: 53) What has been significant is that, once in power, the BJP has sidelined these women and assumed a more moderate stance and ‘channeled their militancy’ by sending ‘women back to their homes’ (Basu 1995).7 In October 1998, the BJP unsuccessfully introduced a Hindutva plank for the national education conference, which included compulsory housekeeping classes for girls. Again, this ‘domestic science’ invokes the traditions of domesticity with the modernism of science. The rewriting of Indian history (Panikkar 2001) and the ‘saffronising’ of Indian education (see The Times of India 2000, Bhushan 2000) are actively in process. Consider the Vidya Bharati paper at the State Ministers’ Conference on Education in September 1998. The texts mentioned glorified motherhood and named the woman’s primary responsibility as

de v e lopment nat ional ism | 225 the home and the ‘turning out of good Hindu citizens’. Stressing images of Sita and Savitri,8 the paper advocates obedience and the selflessness of women in order to take care of their husbands and family. Sati, child marriage and notions of caste and purity of blood are justified and shown as proud elements of Indian culture (Taneja 2000). The re-domestication of women through the power of religion and science is at the heart of this archaic modernity. Amrita Basu’s analysis of the Hindu right’s rhetoric on the role of Hindu women suggests that the central message is on the importance of devotion to their families and the dangers that await those who refuse to conform. Juxtaposing Indian values with Western values, they emphasize the links between women’s reproductive and social roles (Basu 1998a). In this archaic modernity, the past is glorified and selectively re-invoked for current political purposes. While the top ranks of leadership in the Hindu nationalist movement are filled by men, women have played a significant role in its rise. Furthermore, the religious nationalists embrace consumerism, globalization and capitalism. As Tanika Sarkar argues, contemporary religious nationalism does not deny the privileges of consumerist individualism to its women. She persuasively argues that it ‘simultaneously constructs a revitalised moral vision of domestic and sexual norms that promises to restore the comforts of old sociabilities and familial solidarities without tampering either with women’s public role or with consumerist individualism … Patriarchal discipline is reinforced by anticipating and accommodating consumerist aspirations’ (Sarkar 1994: 104). Science, masculinism and the bomb It had to be done, we had to prove that we are not eunuchs. (Balasaheb Thackeray, outspoken Hindu sectarian leader, after the nuclear tests in Pokhran – quoted in Dasgupta 1998: 8) Leaving aside the advocacy of ‘domestic science’, a more violent nuclear science has been invoked by the ruling BJP to bring about a resurgence of Hindu masculinity that further marginalizes women as sustainers and reproducers of Hindu families. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the euphoria that followed the testing of the nuclear fission bomb in Pokhran in 1998, allowing nationalists to

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celebrate India’s revived masculinity. Swapan Dasgupta of India Today wrote: Vajpayee has released a flood of pent-up energy, generated a mood of heady triumphalism. He has kick-started India’s revival of faith in itself. To the west, the five explosions are evidence of Hindu nationalism on a viagra high. To Indians, it is evidence that there is nothing to fear but fear itself. Pokhran is only tangentially about security. Its significance is emotional. The target isn’t China and Pakistan. It is the soul of India … The mood is euphoric. (Dasgupta 1998, emphasis added) This so-called triumph came at the cost of a military budget of US$10 billion, an increase of 14 per cent, twice the amount spent on education, health and social services combined, a female literacy rate of 36 per cent, with women earning 26 per cent of men’s earnings, and with 927 women for every 1,000 men in the population (Basu and Basu 1999). After Pokhran, it was estimated that the cost of the nuclear weaponization programme was equivalent to the cost of primary education for all Indian children of school-going age (Raman 2000). Such is the price of military nationalism. While continuing most of the science policies begun under secular governments, what is striking about the BJP’s approach to science is its nuclear policy. There have been systematic shifts in budgetary allocations to favour military and nuclear research at the expense of agriculture, health, medicine and a general science education (Taneja 2000). It is not accidental that, despite India’s nuclear capabilities for the last 25 years of secular governments, it was the Hindu nationalists who defied the world to test the ultimate destructive weapon of Western science, the fission bomb, in Pokhran in 1998. Indian nuclear scientists and policy-makers form an allmale club. These scientists have been co-opted by the nationalist spirit and have become India’s new heroes. As Balasaheb Thackeray eloquently summarizes, for the Hindu nationalists, the bomb has proved India’s masculinity. In this ‘archaic modernity’, tradition and religion, women and woman-power embrace and come to ironically symbolize what is allegedly a triumph of ‘masculinity’. The bomb, this ultimate destructive weapon, was christened ‘Shakti’ after the goddess of

de v e lopment nat ional ism | 227 power and strength. After the testing of the bomb, the VHP began plans to construct a temple at Pokhran to commemorate the tests and dedicated to the goddess Shakti; the temple was christened ‘Shakti Peeth’ (altar of Shakti). The VHP general secretary invoked women again in suggesting that this was an ideal location for Shakti Peeth, as ‘Baba Ramdev9 is worshipped here for the reforms he brought about in the society, especially for waging a movement for the protection of women’ (Indian Express 1998). Some nationalists also proposed that the sacred soil of Pokhran be carried in sanctified vessels across the country in a set of jubilant yatras10 (Singh 1998). The first anniversary of the tests in Pokhran was declared ‘Technology Day’, and the Human Resources and Development Minister, Murli Manohar Joshi, while laying the foundation for a new technology forecasting centre, stated that ‘Pokhran and all our scientific endeavors have brought glory to India’ (CNN 1999). The nuclear tests in Pokhran have come to symbolize the success of religious nationalism by proving Indian power and might, its strength and scientific capabilities. Central to this model of industrial science and development is a resurgence of Hindu masculinity and the increasing marginalization of women into the cultural role of the sustainers and reproducers of Hindu families. This is the archaic modernity that is to bring glory to Hinduism and India. ‘Development nationalism’ A second example of masculinist rhetoric invoking science, development and nationalism is evident in the rejoicing that met the Supreme Court decision in 2000 to allow construction of the Narmada dam. On 30 October 2000, L. K. Advani, influential nationalist leader and Home Minister in the government of the time, remote control in hand, poured a ton of concrete to resume the Narmada dam construction. This construction had been put on hold by anti-dam activists who had challenged its construction in the Supreme Court. Women have been key players in the activist struggles against the construction of the dam. When asked about what he considered the great triumphs of the BJP government, he named three: the Pokhran tests in 1998, the Kargil war with Pakistan in 1999, and the Supreme Court verdict resuming the Narmada dam construction in 2000 (Rawat 2000). He saw the last as a

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victory of the development process and a triumph of ‘development nationalism’. The nuclear bomb, a military war and a big dam are unarguably the triumphs of science, technology and development. As feminist and postcolonial critiques of science predict, the inevitable connections between science, masculinity and violence emerge (Cohn 1987, Nandy 1988). In his speech, Advani severely criticized the anti-dam protesters, who have spent years fighting the megadam project and its displacement of millions of people as well as its ecological consequences. He questioned their patriotic credentials and wondered if they were being funded by ‘outside’ sources. Thus ‘development’ and the construction of the dam are positioned as a nationalist project while the critique becomes a ‘foreign’ and unIndian response. In the same speech, Advani saw the Narmada dam as a ‘victory of development nationalism’, highlighting the proposition that religious nationalism is developmental nationalism.11 The recent events in India are a strong reminder of the colonized Indian psyche, and the primacy of colonialism within postcolonial, independent India. Despite the rhetoric of decolonization, it is Western science that extends its hegemonic hand to stabilize the Hindu nation. The legacy of Western science lives on as the reason of the state. The revival of the ancient scriptures, the Vedas of the rich history of India, is not an attempt to decolonize the Indian psyche but to reinstate Hindu culture and history as the hub in which the scientific progress of the future is anticipated. There is no epistemological critique of Western science, but indeed an embrace of it – whereby an exaltation of Western science is simultaneously an exaltation of the scientific Vedas and the Vedic sciences, and an exaltation of development is an exaltation of Hinduism. Early signs of the kind of ‘development’ projects that the new BJP government will undertake suggest that the rhetoric of Indian pride cloaks visions of neoliberal logic to include less state-driven and more privatized models of development. The strident politics of nativism and Hindu nationalism that were the hallmark of Modi’s tenure as chief minister in Gujarat (Mehta 2010) portend similar plans for the nation. Soon after coming to power, as predicted by a number of news sources, the Modi government dismantled the national Planning Commission, a powerful force in India’s national planning since independence (Pannu 2014, Hindustan Times 2014).

de v e lopment nat ional ism | 229 Following his campaign rhetoric that ‘Government has no business to do business’, early signs suggest that many efforts are afoot to privatize much of India’s services, such as railways, airlines, mining, and banking (Mantri 2014). In June 2014, a leaked Indian Intelligence Bureau report suggested that the BJP was re-invoking arguments blaming foreign-funded environmental organizations working against nuclear power, coal mining, and large-scale infrastructure projects as being responsible for the significant slowdown of India’s economy (Ramachandra 2014). Thus, the report argued that foreign influences need to be controlled to protect India’s ‘national economic security’. Science, technology and development While religious traditions and practices have always been an important part of the Indian psyche, I want to argue that ‘science’ has also been inscribed deeply within the same psyche. Since India’s independence in 1947, the country has embarked on a model of scientific and industrial development. A series of secular governments over the decades has continued a similar national programme. Although religious nationalists have available a rich set of postcolonial critiques of Western science and development, these have been ignored and we now have a seamless continuation of previous governments’ policies of industrial and scientific development. There is no move to critique modernity or science or to develop indigenous systems of knowledge. Far from rejecting Western science, medicine and technology, as one might expect, Hindu nationalists instead embrace it. Nandy and his collaborators suggest that: Hindu nationalism not only accepted modern science and technology and their Baconian social philosophy, it also developed a totally uncritical attitude towards any western knowledge system that seems to contribute to the development and sustenance of state power and which promised to homogenize the Indian population. There is no critique of modern science and technology in Hindutva, except for a vague commitment to some selected indigenous systems that are relatively more Brahmanic and happen to be peripheral to the pursuit of power. (Nandy et al. 1995: 62)

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When religious nationalists invoke the Vedas or other ancient scriptures in the name of Hindu pride, their vision does not supplant Western science but instead melds with it, appropriating Western science within the rubric of Vedic sciences. Rather than claiming a separate and different past and future for Indian knowledge, they embrace Western science as Indian knowledge. For example, some argue that many developments in modern science were discovered or anticipated in the Vedas. Scholars have interpreted ancient literary texts to argue that ancient Hindu ancestors have discovered and invented the atom, the bomb, the airplane, the evolution of various species, the missing link, the Pythagorean theorem and various technologies (see, for example, Patel 1984). Others use the ancient scriptures as a source of pride in the ancient development of literatures, philosophies and scientific knowledge in ancient India (see, for example, Vivekananda 1992). I want to illustrate this with a few examples of the marketing of Vaastushastra, the ancient Indian material science. Vaastushastra: a case study Vaastushastra, commonly seen as the ‘science of architecture’ (Babu 1998), is believed to have been developed some 4,000 to 5,000 years ago in Vedic Indian culture and codified in the Atharva Vedas. Vaastu is derived from the word vas, which means ‘to live’. Vaastushastra teaches us about ‘living life in accordance with both desire and actuality (Chawla 1997: 1). Like the Chinese feng shui popular in the US these days, Vaastushastra has become immensely popular in India. While feng shui and Vaastushastra have similarities in the existence of positive and negative forces, there are also differences in the principles that guide their arrangement of space. In fact, my interest in the topic came from being astonished at watching relatives and friends in India remodelling their houses using Vaastu principles, often at great financial and physical cost. One rich family with an immense, grand house, cooked in the living room for eight months on a tiny electric stove while the rest of the house was closed off for renovations in accordance with Vaastu principles. Another family that bought a newly constructed apartment took it apart, right down to the tiles on the floor, to renovate it in accordance with Vaastu principles. Living rooms were converted into bedrooms, bathrooms into pooja (prayer) rooms or bedrooms into kitchens.

de v e lopment nat ional ism | 231 While individuals undoubtedly renovate homes for many reasons, and while there is a long tradition of religious ceremonies to bless new houses, the recent trend of renovations in order to create Vaastufriendly homes is an entirely new phenomenon in urban India. What propelled these individuals to refashion their homes, causing so much hardship, I wondered? This rage for Vaastu shapes not only private homes but the public sphere as well. There are now many firms and architects who construct houses, government and office buildings using these principles. Whether they believe in it or not, architects develop an expertise in Vaastu to satisfy the wishes of their clients. The principles of Vaastu are claimed to be described in classical texts and are expected to work in any person’s house irrespective of religion or place. ‘Vaastu’s concern is not only material property, but also mental peace and happiness and harmony in the family, office etc’ (Babu 1998: 3). This project began as an attempt to understand this phenomenon. The philosophy behind the practice seemed to me on one level practical and on another level ethereal. Vaastushastra considers the interplay of the five elements – earth, water, air, fire and space – and maintains equilibrium among them. These elements are believed to influence, guide and change the living styles of not only human beings but also every living being on Earth. It is ethereal because there is no articulation in the literature on exactly how these elements might bring about health, wealth and wisdom. Over the last two decades, this practice has caught on within middle- and upper-class India. As I explored the phenomenon, I went through books that teach you in a straightforward and accessible way the various steps to building or creating a house according to Vaastu principles. There are numerous such books with varying degrees of detail. Second, there are advertisements in newspapers and magazines in which experts offer their services. Ultimately, I found websites promoting and explaining Vaastushastra to be the most useful and engaging. These sites combined the best qualities of the other two sources – like the advertisements, they were concise and short and engaging, and like the books they gave more information and background. I used these websites to analyse the claims and practices of Vaastushastra experts.12 Consider Mr Manoj Kumar, who owns the vastushastra.com site. He describes himself as:

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an electrical engineer, who has worked with engineering and marketing companies. These experiences gave him the opportunity to observe the functional success of various types of units. In time, he began to assess these premises from Vaastu’s viewpoint. His study has included over 3500 industrial, commercial and residential premises … This formed the basis of ‘cause and effect’ relationship in today’s context, involving Vaastu principles. Synergizing his engineering skills and four years association with reputed architects to understand the logistics of modern architecture, he is today recognized as Vaastu Consultant of repute. (See http://www. vastushastra.com/) While his training exclusively heralds his scientific skills – i.e. he is an engineer and has worked with many architects – his web page, entitled ‘Worries, Woes, Wannabes, Winners and VAASTU’, begins with greater claims and lists the conditions that Vaastu can help: If you are disappointed with the ways things are turning out … If you are depressed about the idiosyncrasies of life … If your career graph is plummeting … If your profits are spiralling, but only downwards … If your contemporaries repeatedly hog kudos while you do the lion’s share of work … If you find walking on the cutting edge of technology too sharp a going despite your up-to-date training … If your productivity is suboptimal, and you score only double bogeys in corporate performance when your actual handicap should be under par … If your marriage was made in heaven, but is functional in hell … If you just don’t have that ‘Feel Good’ aura about you … The site lists a long list of problems, all of which, the expert claims, Vaastu can help alleviate. In a section ‘On the Subject of Vaastu’, the site further explains: Vaastu is a complete understanding of direction, geography, topography, environment and physics. It is a study that dictates the form, size, and orientation of a building, in relation to

de v e lopment nat ional ism | 233 the plot, soil, surroundings, and the personality of the owner/ dweller. There is no room for rituals and superstitions. Impulsive planning and unorganized architectural methods, have led to the primary malady mankind faces today – DISHARMONY. Today more and more architects are turning to Vaastushastra, to undo this. In short, an eco-imbalance is prevented by synchronising all the Vaastu elements. While the advertisement begins with claims of improving everything in one’s life – happiness, health, wealth, career plans and marriage – the rest of the description consistently underscores how non-superstitious and non-ritualistic the practice is. It does not invoke God or religion as a way to promise health, wealth and happiness. Instead, it is the promise of science. Ultimately, the consultant directly confronts the scientific evidence. In a section entitled ‘The truth about Vaastu’, he elaborates: There is nothing metaphysical about Vaastu. It is just that the hidden harmony of Nature and the environs around have been defied. Mr. Manoj Kumar in his practice, does not attempt to compare the incomparable or even try to explain it on the basis of magnetic waves, ultra-violet rays, cosmic rays and so forth, as these are but the tips of unknown, unexplored icebergs. The truth is that it works and probably the lower common denominator of any such venture is its repetitive success, as many conglomerates and inhabitants of Vaastu-designed premises will vouch for. May be somewhere, sometime in the future, there will be an explanation for the mechanisms of Vaastu, but to dissect it today is a futile exercise. Indeed, practitioners cite scriptures and ancient records, testimonials from kings, commoners, artists, saints and traders – all of whom have reaped great benefits from the practice. In this last section, the consultant admits that he cannot provide ‘scientific’ evidence to support his case, but instead suggests that it will one day be found, because Vaastu ‘works’ and it can be reproduced, and those are grounds of profound proof. Another website (http://www.indiaenterprise.com/vastu1.htm) takes up the scientific nature of Vaastushastra and argues that

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‘Vaastu is considered rational (based on cause and effect), practical, normative (codified and governed by principle), utilitarian and universal’. Two other websites further consolidate the scientific basis of Vaastushastra. The first (http://www.vastuadvisor.com/Faq.aspx) dismisses the religious overtones by arguing: Vaastushastra is a science – it has nothing to do with religion. It is true that over the years, Vaastushastra has imbibed religious overtones, but that does not seem to have been the original idea. The religious implications were probably inculcated by the proponents of the science, when they realized that the society of that times was a God fearing one, which would not accept norms that seemed like rituals performed to appease the God. The second, and the more interesting (Vaastushastra Home Page, available through http://www.vaastuinternational.com/subject.html), takes the offensive and argues that Western science is much too young to be able to evaluate or appreciate the ancient Vaastushastra: But, the key issue here is, can the modern western science developed over last 300 years can [sic] be used as the only yardstick for assessing super sciences like Vastushastra formulated over 5000 years ago? A time has come when a broader perspective is needed to study the ancient Indian sciences including Vaastushastra … Pythagorus [sic] theorem in geometry was perhaps rediscovered in western world. The principle was successfully applied some 5000 years ago in Indian Vastushastra. Though shrouded in words like cosmic energy, loading, slopes, cosmic harmonly [sic] etc, balance between matter and energy is the essential theme of Vaastushastra. Modern version of energy-matter equivalence is found in Einstein’s famous theorem E = mc2. Constructing the home and the world So what is different about Vaastushastra? After all, different belief systems have always been rampant. Auspicious times have been calculated for jobs, exams and travel. Indians in all walks of life have consulted astrologers, numerologists, palmists and so on.

de v e lopment nat ional ism | 235 Isn’t Vaastushastra an extension of those beliefs, like the priest who blesses the house once it is built? At some level I do believe that it is an extension of a belief system that has long existed in India, but what seem to me to be a departure are the practitioners of Vaastushastra. They are not priests, astrologers or individuals claiming divine inspiration; they are not individuals on street corners or in the recesses of dark, dilapidated homes. Instead, they are engineers and architects, practitioners trained in the sciences.13 The language promoting Vaastushastra is often scientized: for example, an architect might promote the practice because ‘Vaastu is like a vitamin pill; it supports you when your stars are weak and gives you a boost when they are strong’ (Ray 1998). I have heard anecdotal information that many architectural firms and architects have had to learn about Vaastushastra because of a demand from their clients. For example, an architect is quoted as saying, ‘Whether architects may believe it or not, Vaastu makes a serious impact on the life of the occupant. Designing a structure against Vaastu rules can and does cause infinite disturbances in the life of the occupants. Just as in cricket, teams prepare favorable pitches to suit them, one can use Vaastu to prepare a favorable pitch for our lives’ (http://www. vaastuyogam.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/architect_voice_ mr_navin_ghorecha.pdf). Reflecting the broader pattern of the influence of religious nationalism and other aspects of archaic modernity in presentday India, Vaastushastra is literally and figuratively shaping both the home and the world, public and private spaces. Vaastushastra is especially marketed to women for promoting their good health as well as providing beauty and home decoration tips. Vaastu is directed at women to help the ‘gracious lady of the house’ to ‘make it a home’ and to help her deliver healthy babies as a way of fulfilling their roles as good Indian/Hindu wives, mothers and women.14 Numerous websites aimed at Indian women contain instructions and information on rectifying architectural errors (Fernandes 2015). By removing the obstacles of bad luck and spirits through Vaastushastra, women are encouraged to take good care of their families and fulfil their roles as good mothers and wives. Some practitioners argue that Vaastushastra principles themselves are gendered, as the angular placing of plots can have differential impacts on men and women. Certain configurations are argued to make male members of the

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family into rogues, adopt bad habits or earn money in unrighteous ways, while other designs can gain women respect in all spheres, cause mental instability, or result in them being troubled by court litigation (http://www.subhavaastu.com/court-cases-vastu.html)! Many architectural firms actively advertise Vaastu-informed designs and renovations in newspapers and women’s magazines as well as on websites. Vaastushastra has also shaped public space by its visible presence in the public life of Indian politicians. During the 1996 inaugural ceremony of the Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the BJP, 18 scholars of Vaastushastra from all over India were consulted about the presence of a lone neem tree in the compound of the main entrance of the BJP headquarters. BJP sources reveal: ‘Since it was not possible to cut the decade-old tree within an hour, we decided to close the main gate and requested visitors to use the other one. We had no time to get permission from the Union ministry of environment and the directorate of estate to cut down the tree’ (Bhosle 1998). N. T. Rama Rao, former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, refused to function from the state secretariat in Hyderabad until changes were made to correct its Vaastu. Tamil Nadu governor M. Channa Reddy has gone on record that he orders changes every time he moves to a new official residence. B. N. Reddy, former MP and architect, exhorts state governments to correct the Vaastu of sick industries to turn them around (Chopra 1995). Vaastu played an important role in the launch of the Bangalore metro (NDTV 2011). In the recently formed state of Telangana, the chief minister in 2015 hired his trusted Vaastu consultant as an ‘advisor on architecture’ to the government (Shivashankar 2015). All these renovations have been completed at the expense of taxpayers. During the 2014 elections, Vaastu, as well as the blending of science, religion and politics, continued to play an important role. In describing one of candidate Modi’s appearances, a newspaper wrote: ‘A vaastu compliant stage that is 100-feet long, astrologers propitiating the gods and invitations sent through social networking sites – the BJP has pulled out all the stops to make its prime ministerial candidate Narenda Modi’s maiden rally in Uttar Pradesh at Kanpur October 19 a success’ (The Hindu 2013). In courting voters in India’s north-east in Manipur, Modi invoked Vaastu in arguing that: ‘Even

de v e lopment nat ional ism | 237 vaastu-shastra says that the north-eastern part of a house should be given maximum care. India will prosper only when the north-east will’ (NDTV 2014). Vaastu building practices continue to be highly sought after in public and private constructions. Thus Vaastushastra both literally and figuratively continues to shape public and private spheres. Thus, Vaastushastra epitomizes this ‘archaic modernity’. It is the practice that adds ‘soul’ to the architectural sciences, where tradition has infused science with depth, meaning and history. This is analogous to the nuclear bomb touted to add ‘soul’ to India, where science infuses pride, power and strength to a once colonized nation. Within the imagination of science and religion lies the power of this archaic modernity. Science, technology, religion and capitalism have brought Vaastushastra into the market economy of contemporary India. Vaastushastra emerges as another site of rabid consumerism, and as a middle- and upper-class status symbol in urban India today. My aim in using Vaastushastra as a case study of an archaic modernity is not to determine whether Vaastushastra is scientific or not, religious or not, or whether the Vedas do indeed contain all that modern practitioners claim. Instead, I use the case study to illustrate the ways in which Vaastushastra is marketed and consumed as the best merger of the ancient and the modern – a science with soul and tradition. Vaastushastra is a symptom of a visible shift in the social fabric of India, a masculinist vision of India as Hindu and a nation celebrating its ancient wisdom and its new technological breakthroughs. It is frightening to see this Hindu science emerging from nationalism. It is a science that, on the one hand, purports to be anticolonial, a culturally situated science decolonizing India by unearthing old cultural practices eroded by colonialism (Nanda 1997). Yet in reality, the nationalists are seeking to create an India that is a ‘Hindu’ nation. By finding that Western scientific innovations are anticipated in the Vedic sciences, the nationalists give India’s past an aura of Hindu supremacy. Therefore, in order to look to future progress, they say we must delve into India’s glorious Hindu past. This archaic modernity will not take us away from the problems of religion and science, nor from tradition and modernity. We are more deeply implicated in them all. Ultimately, archaic modernity proves to be much too facile a vision, securing the roots and privileges of the

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upper-class Brahmanic elite. Nothing is threatened except the rights of minorities and women. Imagining India Archaic modernities invite new interventions in our theories and practices, new alternatives that wrestle with this oxymoronic imagery. The challenge of these developments in contemporary India lies in creating new frameworks in which to think about science and religion. Most responses to these recent developments have tended to glorify pre-scientific utopias and revive our dreams of a glorious history and our nostalgia for the simple days of yesteryear, a world bereft of scientific and technological innovation, where humanity and technology do not begin to fuse dangerously. Alternatively, secular activists have invoked a defence of science, scientific objectivity and rationality. These critics have historically fought and continue to fight religious nationalism with the rhetoric of science and scientific nationalism. For them, science is our only saviour from the superstition and irrationality of religion. At the heart of many of these critiques is the juxtaposition of science and religion as oppositional and mutually exclusive practices. Perhaps the question is: how have science and religion worked together to create a masculinist vision of an archaic modernity? To explore this, we must address at least three sets of issues. First, social – and especially feminist – studies of science must develop frameworks on science, development and religion. How can we get beyond the binaries of superstitious religion and progressive science? Indeed, our critiques are rich. How can we engage the contentious histories of these two traditions without using them against each other – science to save religion or religion to save science? We must build on the analyses of feminist science studies scholars who have traced the roots of Western science back to the Christian clerical tradition (Noble 1992) and who have explored the ensuing relationships among women, gender, science and religion in the development of Western science, as in the work of Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding and Nancy Tuana. We need to better understand how gender and religion have shaped the shifting contours of science and development. Second, we must find ways to bring the field of science studies and postcolonial studies into conversation with each other. How do

de v e lopment nat ional ism | 239 science and religion feed our growing understandings of secularism, modernity and democracy? Science, it would seem, has become the central driving force of our economies, imaginations and lives. Science has proved to be a powerful political, social and intellectual institution that drives national, global and transnational circuits in this age of globalization. Tracing the global circulations of science through definitions of development, national identity and nationalism, migrations of people and products across national boundaries, the movement and transfer of scientific ideas, products and patents is crucial to our feminist goals. Finally, we must use feminist and postcolonial critiques to interrogate the confluence of science and religious nationalism in contemporary India. Feminists have a long history of pointing to the dangers of nationalism as well as tracing the increasing presence of Hindu nationalism in India (Jeffery and Basu 1994). What I hope we will add to this discussion is an attention to the new configuration of science and religion. We need to understand how religious nationalism appropriates science and religion for a particularly dangerous and oppressive worldview. Contrary to their claims, religious nationalists are not decolonizing India or Indian history but merely overlaying Western science onto a Hindu agenda. But feminist and postcolonial studies have developed rich frameworks from where we can begin to think about decolonization. We need to use these theories to create alternatives to the visions of the archaic and the modern. In this archaic modernity we get to imagine only within the bounded myth of a Hindu India, within a rewritten past, a constructed present and an impoverished vision of the future. However, for centuries India has been a diverse land with multiple religions and the place where several new ones have been born. These centuries of diversity cannot be erased today for a contested mythical version of Hindu India. If we are to imagine India, it must be in its diversity, its contested histories, contradictory pasts and boundless future. The project of decolonization in this age of globalization means taking forward the project of rethinking ‘development’ and its deployment in the archaic and the modern, the religious and the scientific. We can imagine India in all its rich and diverse traditions – Western science, alternative sciences, the rich philosophies and traditions of religions in India, and indigenous knowledge systems – to re-envision

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the progressive possibilities of science and religion. We can imagine a new future in an unbounded imagination beyond the worlds of the archaic and the modern. Notes 1. Right after the election, his mother declared that ‘he will lead the country towards development’ (The Hindu 2014). 2. Modi was chief minister of Gujarat during the 2002 Gujarat riots. There was a systematic targeting of Muslims in mass killings, which many believe was allowed to continue because of the complicity of the state government and law enforcement. 3. Jawaharlal Nehru was India’s first Prime Minister. In addition to secularism, Nehru was deeply committed to science and an industrial model of development. 4. Over the last two decades, religion has become a powerful tool in Indian politics. In fairness to the Hindu nationalists, it must be said that secular governments of the past also politicized religion (certainly since the time of Indira Gandhi onwards) and also played the ‘Hindu’ card. 5. Patel refers to Sardar Vallabbhai Patel and Subhash refers to Subhash Chandra Bose, both well-known figures in the Indian freedom struggle. 6. Bajrangbali refers to followers of Hanuman, the monkey god in the Hindu pantheon. 7. Although Uma Bharati was given a cabinet position, it was as Minister of Sports. 8. Sita and Savitri are both women from Hindu mythology who are especially renowned for their devotion to their husbands and have come to symbolize the ideals of the ‘good’ Hindu wife.

9. Baba Ramdev was a Tanwar Rajput and saint in the early fifteenth century. Worshipped by Hindus and Muslims, he is believed to have advocated the equality of all human beings. Ramdevra village lies 12 miles from Pokhran. 10. Yatra is a spiritual journey usually undertaken as a voyage of discovery or celebration of a significant event, primarily in the role of a witness. However, in its colloquial use, ‘yatra’ simply means a trip or journey. 11. It should be noted that the rhetoric of ‘development nationalism’ is not new. At least since 1987, the patriotism of environmental protesters against ‘development’, and especially against dams, has been questioned. 12. The quotes contain grammatical and spelling errors – all present in the original. The liberal use of colloquial forms of spoken English in India in these websites is interesting. 13. See, for example, http://www.fengshuitoday. com/vaastu-and-feng-shui/. 14. For examples of such websites, see http://www.vaastudoshremedies. com/vaastu-and-women-health/, http:// homeneeds.sulekha.com/simple-vastutips-for-better-health_448959_blog, http://raksha-vastushastrabeautytips. blogspot.com/2008_07_01_archive.html, http://www.rajeshshori.com/VastuWoman, http://www.vaastu-shastra. com/women-to-deliver-healthy-baby. html and http://www.astrospeak.com/ slide-show/15-vastu-tips-for-pregnantwomen.

9 | W H A T W O UL D R A CH E L S AY? Joni Seager

Introduction The 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is universally recognized as a watershed event in the history of modern environmentalism. This book is credited with launching modern environmental movements around the world, catalysing bans in many countries on DDT and cognate pesticides (especially the organochlorines and organophosphates), and framing the first sustained exposé and critique of the depredations wrought by an uncritical embrace of the chemical age. Yet Silent Spring offered even more sweeping and radical critiques: of capitalism, productionism, militarism, the mainstream conduct of science, and corporate control of government agendas. When Silent Spring was released, the pesticides narrative was so dominant and her findings so shocking to most readers that the larger socio-political critical position within which her pesticides findings were embedded went largely unremarked. A few contemporaneous critics muttered about her being a ‘Communist’, but those seemed to be mostly knee-jerk denouncements, not cogent analyses. Mostly, her anti-capitalist and anti-militarist critiques have only received attention more recently, as a 50year anniversary re-reading of Silent Spring has produced more nuanced interpretations. Carson’s broader political analysis in Silent Spring is framed by her proto-feminist environmental analysis; these feminist contributions are often overlooked entirely. There is no evidence that Carson defined herself as a feminist. Few people did in 1962. Nonetheless, Carson prefigures and points the way to the explicitly feminist analyses that would emerge in the 1980s and 1990s. Carson makes several feminist contributions to our contemporary environmental analysis:

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• Her critique of the masculinized ‘control’ of nature, which she saw as the stalking horse for the chemical industry, is a stepping stone for later analyses from feminist environmentalists such as Carolyn Merchant (1980, 2008) and Vandana Shiva (1988a, Shiva and Mies 1993). • She was keenly attentive to the manipulation of gender ideologies deployed by chemical companies in the selling of the wonders of the chemical age. • Carson can only be understood in the context of the challenges of women in science, the direct misogyny she faced, and the contrast of her work set against the masculinist construction of science. Carson embraced a subjective engagement with nature and, as a scientist, argued the necessity of incorporating humility, a sense of wonder, and an appreciation of ‘uncertainty’ into modern science. • Following from all of this, Carson lays the groundwork for what would become the ‘precautionary principle’. This has particularly important implications for current work on climate change • Carson was one of the first environmental scientists to draw attention to the then uncertain but, in her view, foreboding indications of potent chemical hormone disruptions and impairment of nonhuman and human reproductive systems (Seager 2003). Raging against the machine Prior to Silent Spring, Carson had made her reputation as a nature writer, with three books on the ocean environment and marine life. The second book, The Sea Around Us (1951), captured a wide popular readership and established Carson’s place in the pantheon of great nature observers. This book was on the New York Times bestseller list for almost 90 weeks, it won the National Book Award, it was condensed in Reader’s Digest, and it made Carson a household name. The Sea Around Us also gave her the financial independence she needed to resign from her job as chief editor at the US Fish and Wildlife Service to devote herself full time to her writing. In 1955, she followed the success of The Sea Around Us with a study of the coastal Atlantic, The Edge of the Sea, the third in a trilogy constituting a ‘biography of the ocean’. By the time Edge of the Sea was released, Carson was famous. The explosive success of Silent Spring is partly explained by this prior reputation. Because Carson was already a household name

wh at woul d rachel say? | 243 and a trusted science writer, her 1962 book had an eager, pent-up readership. But her readership might not have been prepared for the new Rachel Carson. As an author known for books in the natureappreciation genre, Carson had been associated with an appropriately womanly and genteel version of science. Silent Spring was as sharp a swerve away from genteel nature observation as one might imagine. An unflinching, unrelenting, measured critique of the modernist values emerging in post-World War II America and of the growing corporate control over social priorities and government policy, Silent Spring challenged the ascendant view that human progress depended on ever more powerful control over ‘nature’. Her book was one of the first popularized critiques of what we might now call productionist values. Carson devotes a considerable amount of time in Silent Spring to debunking claims that the use of pesticides increases agricultural production. She was not the first to draw attention to insect resistance and ‘flareback’, but she was one of the first to bring this into public discourse. Once started, the process of developing and applying even more powerful chemicals spirals endlessly upwards driven by its own internal logic – and driven by the biological process of resistance. Insects, in what Carson called ‘a triumphant vindication of Darwin’s principle of the survival of the fittest’ (1967 [1962]: 18), rapidly develop resistance to insecticides – thus, different and more powerful insecticides need to be applied, to which those insects will develop resistance. Carson documents case after case of the resurgence of insects following pesticide spraying – to which, again, even more spraying seems the only resort. Any initial increases in agricultural production were illusory and unsustainable, Carson argues. But Carson was not primarily concerned with charting a better course to increased production. She questioned whether increased agricultural production in the post-war US was itself even a desirable goal: How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind? Yet this is precisely what we have done. We have done it, moreover, for reasons that collapse the moment we examine them. We are told that the enormous and expanding use of

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pesticides is necessary to maintain farm production. Yet is our real problem not one of overproduction? Our farms … have yielded such a staggering excess of crops that the American taxpayer in 1962 is paying out more than one billion dollars a year as the total carrying cost of the surplus-food storage program. (ibid.: 19) Carson’s concern about ‘productionism’ may have been influenced by her friendship with Robert Rudd, a scientist in California who was studying pesticides. Before Carson published Silent Spring, Rudd published two articles in The Nation in 1959, ‘The irresponsible poisoners’ (1959) and ‘Pesticides: the real peril’ (1959a). Rudd, a sophisticated leftist thinker, argued that the overuse of pesticides such as DDT was based on a misplaced prioritization of ‘production’ over other values. He wrote: ‘Overproduction has settled on us like a plague … Chemical use to increase production is continually stressed and few stop to inquire “why?”’ (cited in Foster and Clark 2008). It is clear that Carson shared Rudd’s view that the problem of pesticides is one of ‘values’, and that the privileging of productionism and profit-seeking – regardless of collateral damage – is the root of the problem. Little tranquilizing pills of half-truth from the gods of profit Throughout Silent Spring, Carson focuses much of her critical analysis on the processes of ‘manufacturing consent’ (Lippman 1922, Herman and Chomsky 1988). Carson asks pointedly and poignantly: Who has made the decision that sets in motion these chains of poisonings, this ever-widening wave of death? Who has placed in one pan of the scales the leaves that might have been eaten by the beetles and in the other the pitiful heaps of many-hued features, the lifeless remains of the birds that fell before the unselective bludgeon of insecticidal poisons? Who has decided – who has the right to decide – for the countless legions of people who were not consulted that the supreme value is a world without insects, even though it be also a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight? (1967 [1962]: 118)1

wh at woul d rachel say? | 245 She answers her own rhetorical question with a round condemnation: ‘The decision is that of the authoritarian temporarily entrusted with power; he has made it during a moment of inattention by [the] millions to whom beauty and the ordered world of nature still have a meaning that is deep and imperative’ (ibid.: 118). Decades before political economy analyses became familiar grist for the environmental mill, Carson sounds a presciently radical warning about the dangers of a public policy and science agenda driven by the pursuit of profit by pesticide industries: It is … an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth. We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. (ibid.: 23) Carson saved some of her fiercest criticisms for the cosy collusion she witnessed between industry and supposedly independent university scientists or government officials – the very people who should have provided a firewall against the practices of profit-seeking industries. She decried the influence of money in entomology that drew scientists away from research into non-chemical insect control approaches and that kept them beholden to the chemical companies. Remarking that only about 2 per cent of entomological scientists were then working in the field of biological controls, Carson is palpably pained that most insect scientists are more drawn to the ‘exciting’ work in chemical control. Carson rhetorically asks ‘Why?’, and, in answering herself, points to the influence of funding. She remarks that chemical companies are pouring money into universities and research labs to support work on insecticides, while biological-control studies have no financial champions. There’s no money to be made in biological control, she pointedly remarks. She goes on to make the point that this cosy financial relationship undercuts the integrity of the pursuit of science. She finds it mystifying that entomologists might ever be leading advocates of chemical control, an improbable position she attributes to the

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corrupting influence of the financial support of chemical companies. By the time Carson was writing Silent Spring, chemical companies had insinuated themselves into research institutes and academia, and were starting to produce privately funded science. The entomologists who promoted chemical controls were, Carson said, most likely supported by the chemical industry itself. Perhaps, Carson says ruefully, one couldn’t expect them to ‘bite the hand that feeds them’. But, she warns, this close relationship between industry funding and the research process means that conclusions that insecticides are ‘harmless’ have little credibility. As science cosied up to industry, it undercut its own position. Post- Silent Spring, Carson’s remarks about industry collusion with science became even sharper still. In a 1962 speech to the Women’s National Press Club, she repeatedly warned against the corrupting influence of chemical companies funding basic science and ended with a rousing denunciation of the ‘gods of profit and production’: A penetrating observer of social problems has pointed out recently that whereas wealthy families once were the chief benefactors of the Universities, now industry has taken over this role. Support of education is something no one quarrels with – but this need not blind us to the fact that research supported by pesticide manufacturers is not likely to be directed at discovering facts indicating unfavorable effects of pesticides. Such a liaison between science and industry is a growing phenomenon, seen in other areas as well. The AMA, through its newspaper, has just referred physicians to a pesticide trade association for information to help them answer patients’ questions about the effects of pesticides on man … We see scientific societies acknowledging as ‘sustaining associates’ a dozen or more giants of a related industry … What does it mean when we see a committee set up to make a supposedly impartial review of a situation, and then discover that the committee is affiliated with the very industry whose profits are at stake? … Is industry becoming a screen through which facts must be filtered, so that the hard, uncomfortable truths are kept back and only the harmless morsels allowed to filter through? I know that many thoughtful scientists are deeply disturbed that their organizations are becoming fronts for industry … here the

wh at woul d rachel say? | 247 tailoring, the screening of basic truth, is done, not to suit a party line, but to accommodate to the short-term gain, to serve the gods of profit and production. (Carson 1998a: 208–10) Carson’s warnings about the ‘science-industry’ complex came at a distinctive moment in the way in which Americans were viewing large, powerful institutions. This shift was prompted to some significant extent by President Dwight Eisenhower. It was in 1961, just as Carson would be finishing Silent Spring, that President Eisenhower (a retired general) surprised Americans in his farewell address with his now-famous warnings about the unwarranted influence and ascendancy of the ‘military-industrial complex’. The habit of killing Carson, too, was worried about the military. She was writing Silent Spring in the midst of a post-war technology and power high. The 1950s was an era of unfettered American triumphalism. Boosterism about the triumphs of modern science was ubiquitous. The atomic bomb had won the war (or so it was said). The first patient received a mechanical heart. The polio vaccine was saving lives and lifting a terrifying threat from everyday life. A new-fangled device called a computer was making waves. Middle-class households could suddenly be stocked with refrigerators, televisions, electric ovens, and a car in every garage; optimistic consumerism was the temper of the times. Commercial airline travel was booming and even ordinary people could imagine flying. The Soviets and the Americans were chasing each other into space. There seemed to be no limits to American ingenuity, American power, American know-how; the prevailing wisdom was that there shouldn’t be limits. As the ‘American way of life’ was being redefined in the Cold War that followed World War II, a significant part of that redefinition involved control over nature. This was not only deemed a necessary element of the American project, but, given the tremendous advances in science and technology, it seemed within reach. The US military was the driving force behind much of this post-war, Cold War, enthusiasm for controlling nature. Carson was as worried about the nuclear arms race and radiation in the environment as she was about pesticides. When she was writing Silent Spring in the late 1950s and early 1960s,

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the most disastrous health and environmental consequences of the superpowers’ nuclear programmes were not yet known and the programmes themselves were only in their early years. And yet, alarmed by radiation releases and, indeed, by the whole nuclear enterprise, Carson was an unwavering critic of the Cold War and its atomic age. She was so attentive to the militarized nuclear threat that the first chemical she mentions in Silent Spring is not a pesticide, but strontium-90, a by-product of nuclear explosions. Throughout Silent Spring, Carson draws attention to the silent, similar, mechanisms of both pesticides and radiation. Indeed, it is hard for a reader to tell whether the ‘white granular powder’ that signifies the evil that is visited on her fabled town in her opening chapter is radiation or pesticide residue: it could be either, and that, perhaps, is her point. To Carson, the parallels between nuclear radiation and pesticides are striking: both posed unseen threats that moved through ecosystems as silent killers; both accumulate in human bodies over several years before their deadly effects are evident; both were alarming new artifices of hubris, developed and unleashed by the military. She was alarmed that while there was growing public concern about radiation, there seemed much less interest in the chemical assault: ‘The fact that chemicals may play a [similar] role [as radiation] … has scarcely dawned on the public mind, nor on the minds of most medical or scientific workers’ (Carson 1967 [1962]: 189–90). Further, in Carson’s view, it is not just that pesticides and radiation have similar mechanisms or cause similar damage, it is that they are both products of humans’ reckless over-reach and the untrammelled use of powers beyond our moral capacity – and, indeed, beyond our control. It is only now, in our modern era, Carson says, that humans have acquired the power to actually alter the nature of the environment that surrounds us – and to do so permanently. And with radiation and pesticides, the character of human interference with nature has shifted from a force of assault to a force of fatal evil, changing both in magnitude and character. Carson saw considerable similarity between the ideology of the development and use of radiation and the development of synthetic chemicals, as well as in their similar health and environmental consequences; they were the evil twins of her age. Carson made the unmistakable argument that atomic power and pesticides together

wh at woul d rachel say? | 249 represented paramount threats to all life on the planet – indeed to the very existence of life: Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man’s total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm – substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends. (ibid.: 18) In Carson’s analysis, the ‘habit of killing – the resort to “eradicating” any creature that may annoy or inconvenience us’ (ibid.: 117) is a product of militarized and masculinized ideology. She doesn’t use that terminology, but she comes very close, and an analytical reading of Silent Spring leaves no doubt that Carson lays clear responsibility for developing the most egregious killing chemicals at the feet of the military. To Carson, it was no coincidence that radioactive materials and pesticides were both products of the military. She is not directly critical of what we would today call militarism, but she plainly places accountability for much environmental and health recklessness with the military. In Chapter 3, ‘Elixirs of death’, in which Carson lays out the origins and basic chemical nature of insecticides, she identifies the military origins of the ubiquitous poisoning of humans, animals and the environment by synthetic chemicals. The creation of pesticides was literally a by-product of war. Insecticides were discovered as byproducts of the laboratory development of chemical weaponry. DDT was catapulted into large-scale production, and then into civilian life, by the US military. It was not until the US military saw DDT’s potential as a chemical weapon against typhus in Europe and malaria in the Pacific that it became mass-produced – at first, this was for the exclusive use of the military, and then, as the war was ending, DDT was pushed into the civilian market as an agricultural and household insecticide. In her narrative of the development of the practice of aerial spraying of pesticides, Carson notes that it was the availability of World War II surplus airplanes that made this possible: ‘[Formerly, poisons] were kept in containers marked with skull and crossbones … With the development of the new organic insecticides and the

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abundance of surplus planes after the Second World War, all this was forgotten … they have amazingly become something to be showered down indiscriminately from the skies’ (ibid.: 141). Throughout Silent Spring, Carson underscores the point that pesticides not only derived from an ideology of the ‘control’ of nature, but, true to their military origins, represented an ideological proclivity towards outright war on nature. She introduces this theme within the first few pages of her book: [Pesticides] are used in man’s war against nature … These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes – nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in soil – all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called ‘insecticides’, but ‘biocides’. (ibid.: 18) Carson railed against the idea that modern ‘man’ could and should exert mastery over nature at any cost: The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth. (ibid.: 261–2) Throughout Silent Spring, Carson returns to the ‘war’ analogies used by pesticide promoters to validate pesticides in the glow of postWorld War II American triumphalism. In one stunning paragraph, she invokes a backslide from peace to war (ploughshares being beaten back into guns) and the terrible cost of the trivial pursuit of ‘the new’:

wh at woul d rachel say? | 251 The chemical weed killers are a bright new toy … they give a giddy sense of power over nature to those who wield them, and as for the long-range and less obvious effects – these are easily brushed aside as the baseless imaginings of pessimists. The ‘agricultural engineers’ speak blithely of ‘chemical plowing’ in a world that is urged to beat its plowshares into spray guns. (ibid.: 69) We might say Carson is previewing here the flip modern colloquialism about ‘boys with their toys’. Domesticating the poisons Civilian marketing of synthetic pesticides in the US began in earnest in 1944, starting with DDT. Marketing pesticides to farmers was easy. The ‘need’ for pesticides in the agricultural sector seemed self-evident – then as now. But although farming represented a large sector of the American economy in the 1950s, the pesticide manufacturers had their eyes on another prize, an even bigger one. They wanted to market pesticides to everyone, not just farmers. The newly affluent, expanding, suburbanizing, American middle class offered an irresistible opportunity. Americans had to be convinced to bring pesticides home. Marketing pesticides for household use required their manufacturers to craft a three-pronged approach: first, marketing lawn care to men, persuading them that good lawn care (as defined by the pesticide manufacturers) was a mark of good citizenship and manly responsibility; second, marketing to women on the basis that modern pesticides allowed them to protect their children from illnesses borne by insects, and marked them as caring mothers; and, third, marketing to both men and women (though mostly women) for gardening. The campaign to bring pesticides into American households was a carefully contrived and highly gendered effort. This did not escape Carson’s analytical attention. As soon as DDT was released from the military to the civilian market, manufacturers started their campaign to domesticate pesticides. A typical ad in Women’s Day magazine in 1947, for example, makes, to our modern sensibilities, a horrifying pitch: a photograph shows a typical, white, presumably middle-class woman bending over a crib that holds a smiling baby, under the large-font

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banner ‘Protect Your Children Against Disease-Carrying Insects’. ‘How is she to protect her infant?’ the viewer might wonder. DDTimpregnated wallpaper! In Disney ‘Jack and Jill’ or ‘Disney Favorites’ patterns, no less. The copy says ‘effective against disease-carrying insects for one year’ and promises that this DDT-impregnated wallpaper is ‘certified to be absolutely safe for home use’. This campaign was typical of its time – a direct appeal to the emerging middle class to demonstrate its commitment to family values and a safe modern life by embracing chemicals. Manufacturers of pesticides worked ceaselessly to persuade the American middle class that pesticides would protect their homes and usher their arrival into the American Dream. Carson notes with alarm that the use of poisons in the home was made easy and attractive: Kitchen shelf paper, white or tinted to match one’s color scheme, may be impregnated with insecticide, not merely on one but on both sides … With push-button ease, one may send a fog of dieldrin into the most inaccessible nooks and crannies of cabinets, corners, and baseboards. If we are troubled by mosquitoes, chiggers, or other insect pests … we have a choice of innumerable lotions, creams, and sprays for application to clothing or skin. Although we are warned that some of these will dissolve varnish, paint, and synthetic fabrics, we are presumably to infer that the human skin is impervious to chemicals … an exclusive New York store advertises a pocket-sized insecticide dispenser, suitable for the purse or for beach, golf, or fishing gear. We can polish our floors with a wax guaranteed to kill any insect that walks over it. We can hang strips impregnated with the chemical lindane in our closets and garment bags or place them in our bureau drawers … All these matters attended to, we may round out our day with insecticides by going to sleep under a mothproof blanket impregnated with dieldrin. (ibid.: 158–9) Carson goes on to bemoan the fact that government agencies gave their stamp of approval to domesticating the pesticides. Home and Garden Bulletins from the US Department of Agriculture, she remarks, regularly encouraged people to spray their clothing with oil solutions of DDT, dieldrin, chlordane, or any of several other moth killers. As appalled as Carson was by the campaigns to make

wh at woul d rachel say? | 253 pesticides cosy and convenient, she was even more worried that these advertisements gave no indication that these materials were dangerous. While manufacturers were appealing primarily to women to keep their homes safe through the liberal use of pesticides, a campaign for the outdoors – designed to appeal primarily to men – was just as intense. Carson decried the ‘fad of gardening by poisons’ (ibid.: 160), and the slick advertising campaigns mounted to encourage consumers to bring pesticides home. The use of pesticides in and around the home was marketed as a sign of modernity and of middleclass obligation. Gardening, Carson says, is now linked with the super-poisons that are available in every hardware store, supermarket and garden centre. With very little cautionary advice to consumers who are urged to buy deadly materials: a constant stream of new gadgets make it easier to use poisons on lawn and garden – and increase the gardener’s contact with them. One may get a jar-type attachment for the garden hose, for example, by which such extremely dangerous chemicals as chlordane or dieldrin are applied as one waters the lawn … Besides the once innocuous garden hose, power mowers also have been fitted with devices for the dissemination of pesticides, attachments that will dispense a cloud of vapor as the homeowner goes about the task of mowing his lawn. (ibid.: 159) Carson was dismayed by the trivial uses for pesticides. She remarked caustically on the role of advertising and the manipulation of class and gender identity by pesticide manufacturers in their efforts to mount a campaign against crabgrass on suburban lawns. She and Betty Friedan, who was at the same moment writing her book The Feminine Mystique (1963) about the ways in which distinctive suburban masculinities and femininities were forged, might have had much to say to one another. They were both writing about the toxicities of suburbia, although from different perspectives. Carson literally so: The mores of suburbia now dictate that crabgrass must go at whatever cost. Sacks containing chemicals designed to rid the lawn of such despised vegetation have become almost a status symbol. These weed-killing chemicals are sold under brand

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names that never suggest their identity or nature. To learn that they contain chlordane or dieldrin one must read exceedingly fine print placed on the least conspicuous part of the sack … Instead, the typical illustration portrays a happy family scene, father and son smilingly preparing to apply the chemical to the lawn. (1967 [1962]: 161) Carson was amazed that anyone could walk into a store and purchase, without any question or registration or permit required, death-dealing chemicals. In her 1963 testimony before a congressional committee, she implored lawmakers to restrict the sale and purchase of pesticides ‘at least to those capable of understanding the hazards and following directions … We place much more stringent restrictions on the sale of drugs – [a man made ill by spraying] could buy the chemicals that made him ill with no restrictions, but had to have prescriptions to buy the drugs to cure him’ (Carson 1963: 13). The manufacturers were astonishingly successful in persuading Americans to bring pesticides home. The American ‘home and garden’ sector in 2011, 50 years after Silent Spring, consumes about 70 million pounds of active pesticide ingredients a year, and accounts for almost one-quarter of all pesticide use in the US; of all insecticides, it accounts for 38 per cent (USEPA 2011: 6). The most common pesticide used on home gardens (as a lawn weed killer, used in over 1,500 pesticide products) is 2,4-D, a pesticide that Carson warned about in 1962. Precaution and humility: science reframed In Silent Spring, Carson keeps drawing attention to how much we don’t know about pesticides – their persistence, their synergistic and cumulative effects, their transport and spread through ecosystems and across species, their health effects. As she says repeatedly, no one can tell what will be the ultimate ecosystem and health costs and consequences of intensive and extensive exposure to an unpredictable mix of synthetic chemicals. Recently, scholars tallied Carson’s use of terminology that framed the rhetorical ways in which she foregrounded uncertainty in Silent Spring: they found 14 uses of ‘we do not know’; seven uses of ‘potential for harm’; six uses of ‘little understood’; four uses of ‘more research is needed’; and two uses of ‘lack of consensus’ (Walker and Walsh 2012: 14–15).

wh at wo ul d rachel say? | 255 At several junctures in the book, she reminds us that the pesticide promoters had launched us, unwittingly, into a real-time experiment. She means this with reference to specific pesticide programmes for which the long-term outcome was entirely uncertain (or even unquestioned), but she also means this as a meta-theme: humanity is running full tilt forwards into a yawning unknown, spray-gun in hand. In a 1963, post- Silent Spring lecture, Carson quoted Barry Commoner in pointing out that we often defer an inquiry into ‘impacts’ until it is far too late: The lack of foresight [about introducing harmful substances into the environment] is one of the most serious complications … we seldom if ever evaluate the risks associated with a new technological program before it is put into effect. We wait until the process has become embedded in a vast economic and political commitment, and then it is virtually impossible to alter. (1998a: 232) But even were we to be more foresightful – as Carson argues we must – a second kind of uncertainty is not necessarily assuaged: we may ‘look before we leap’, but when we look, there may be contradictory evidence, or, as in the case of pesticides and human health, often the evidence will emerge only over a long time horizon. What then? Carson answers firmly: And if … we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals; we should look about and see what other course is open to us. (1967 [1962]: 244) In this particular context, Carson’s ‘other course’ was her interest in biological and natural controls. Her warning that too much was at stake to take ‘senseless and frightening risks’ was one of the overarching themes through Silent Spring. Here Carson prefigures the ‘precautionary principle’ – one of the most progressive and complex contemporary environmental policy vehicles. Carson was a trained biologist. She understood the norms of science, and then stepped, self-consciously, beyond those normative

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borders. First and foremost, Carson’s approach to science embraced humility, a sense of wonder, and a certainty that ‘man’ could not and should not control nature. Carson was not anti-science, far from it, but ‘wonder’ was a trait she felt had been suppressed by science and by the privileging of science as the primary lens through which to comprehend the world – to humanity’s considerable disadvantage. She counterposed the clinical investigation of the laws of nature against an openness to revel in the beauty and marvel of the world. ‘Most of us walk unseeing through the world,’ she writes in Silent Spring, ‘unaware alike of its beauties, its wonders, and the strange and sometimes terrible intensity of the lives that are being lived about us’ (ibid.: 220). Carson also talks about a notion related to beauty and wonder: humility. ‘Humility’ often has religious overtones, but Carson’s invocation is not a religious one. She is speaking to the rash overconfidence of humans who act as though they can remove themselves from the inescapable truth that humans are part of nature. Humility was embedded in her ecological message: that we are all part of nature – and that our efforts to put ourselves outside natural cycles (or, more likely, above them) will backfire. Humans are not better than, bigger than, stronger than, or outside nature, Carson would say – and it is when we lose sight of that truth that we get ourselves into trouble. Carson was not a romantic idealist. She knew that wonder and beauty alone would not catalyse the changes in human behaviour that were needed. But she also knew that the prevailing scientific paradigm was implicated in creating the conditions in which environmental and health assaults were normalized as signs of ‘progress’. As a pragmatic matter of science and biology, Carson was certain that there were specific alternatives to the indiscriminate saturation of the environment with pesticides. Chief among those alternatives were natural insect controls, integrated pest management, selective and highly restricted use of chemical controls, and an eagerness to give ‘citizen science’ a seat at the table of science and policy. Carson’s distinctive approach to science may reflect her positionality as a woman scientist in the 1950s – simply by her presence, she was out of step with the scientific mainstream. Her view that attempts to control nature through the indiscriminate use of chemical poisons would produce environmental calamity was a

wh at woul d rachel say? | 257 minority and unpopular one. Feminist scholars of science in the decades after Carson have explicated the gendered implications of this urge to control. Carolyn Merchant (1980, 2008, 2010) argues, for example, that the devaluation of women, long identified with nature, was particularly and specifically integral to the production of the emerging modernist scientific project. As part of the modernist project, Merchant argues, control of nature was inextricably tied to men’s control of women – metaphorically and literally. The scientific quest of the ‘father of modern science’, Francis Bacon, was to ‘wrest secrets from Nature’s grasp’ and to reveal the ‘secrets locked in nature’s bosom’. Bacon talked of dominating and enslaving nature, hounding her, and interrogating her into giving up her secrets (Merchant 2008: 754). In the view of many feminist analysts, this is not just rhetorical excess. Recent feminist environmental analysis makes clear that the association of women with nature – and men’s linked domination of both – is not only a seventeenth-century artefact. For example, Merchant’s analysis of the origins of this ideology of dual dominance is extended and deepened by a large corpus of writings on the sexualized representations of associations between animals and women (see Adams 1990, Donovan 1990, Emel 1995), by Vandana Shiva’s work on contemporary oppressions of women and environment (1988a, Shiva and Mies 1993), by Val Plumwood’s (1993) critiques of the ‘standpoint of mastery’, and by my own work on masculinized structures of environmental agency (Seager 1993), among many others. The masculinized domination of nature and, symbiotically, of women is inextricable from the masculinized structure of modern science. To the extent that ‘men of reason’ structured modern science in their own image as a project to wrest control from a feminized nature, then it follows that women would be placed largely outside the enterprise of science. Feminist historians and philosophers of science such as Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding and Evelyn Fox Keller have contributed important analyses of the ways in which the standpoints of modern science exclude women or frame women as ‘other’. The assumed and structured incompatibility of women and science – and between women and scientific rationality – continues to have enormous salience (Noble 1991)2 – as it did in Rachel Carson’s own life.

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Carolyn Merchant and scholars of science who have followed in Carson’s footsteps not only implicate mechanistic science in creating the most pressing ecological problems of our day, they dare to suggest that women were as much the victims as the beneficiaries of the progress of science. Merchant’s analysis, at its core, throws into doubt the ‘grand narratives’ of science and progress, and questions the previously unexamined ways in which modern science is assumed to have manufactured ‘progress’: The notion of a ‘Scientific Revolution’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is part of a larger mainstream narrative of Western culture that has propelled science, technology, and capitalism’s efforts to ‘master’ nature – a narrative into which most Westerners have unconsciously been socialized and within which we ourselves have become actors in a storyline of upward progress. (Merchant 2006: 517) This analysis owes a considerable debt to Carson. Two decades earlier, Carson was questioning the nature of ‘progress’ and asking ‘big questions’ about the role of science in constructing a false narrative of what constituted progress. Lessons for climate change Carson’s advocacy of precaution in the face of the unknown consequences of human action points the way to the only sound ecological position on climate change: the time for debate is over, the price of our commitment to a fossil fuel economy is too steep, the integrity of planetary systems hangs by a smouldering thread, and we must take an immediate and sharp turn in our understanding of ‘progress’. To paraphrase Carson, ‘if we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept the counsel of those who are advocating the practices that got us into trouble in the first place’. We must also resist the siren call of the experts who tell us that humans can control the processes and outcomes of global warming. In the past decade, an expert class, peculiarly dominated by economists, has taken control of international climate change processes and of much of the discourse of climate change to reassure us that ‘business as usual’ (BAU) can be largely accommodated

wh at wo ul d rachel say? | 259 within what they define as acceptable levels of global warming. In particular, in the late 1990s these experts forged an attachment to a putatively ‘safe’ target of acceptable warming of up to 2°C (on global average). This target is starting to shift as we get uncomfortably close to it, but nonetheless many of the BAU experts remain attached to the idea that ‘man’ can control the degree and effects of climate change. The 2°C target has been contrived and deployed primarily as a policy and economic trade-off point, draped in a flimsy scientific veil, driven largely by political expediencies and economic modelling that is distanced from the actual consequences of ‘even’ a 2°C rise in global temperatures (Seager 2009). The drivers behind the 2°C contrivance have been mostly First World politicians and economists cocooned in a masculinized rationality and a certainty that, in the climate ‘winners and losers’ paradigm they conjure, they will be on the winning side … and that holding global warming below 2°C will somehow ensure this. Global warming of 2°C is not a real geophysical threshold. It doesn’t mark a boundary between little and much danger. It doesn’t demarcate a known tipping point, below which there is minimal threat to the world’s ecosystems and human populations, above which the danger is remarkably higher. In reality, climate science is unable to make such fine distinctions; in reality, geophysical systems don’t work that way. In truth, 2°C represents a notional point on a spectrum of climate consequences somewhere between ‘likely to be quite bad’ and ‘likely to be really catastrophic’. The 2°C conceit is rooted in a prior hubris that frames the climate as a machine that we can control – perhaps like an oven, that we can turn on and off or hold at a more or less steady temperature point. There is neither a historical nor a scientific basis for assuming that humans can ‘stop’ global warming at 2°C – or at any other particular temperature point. This assumption is entirely removed from earth and atmospheric reality, a cultural fabrication constructed wholly of Baconian cloth (ibid.). Carson would have recognized these climate change experts. They are close cousins to the pesticide manufacturers who, for decades, ‘certified’ pesticides to be safe, and who derided Carson as a hysterical female who didn’t understand the ways in which pesticides were making life better. The fossil fuel promoters and the pesticide pushers present uncannily similar arguments about the high cost of

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changing the course of ‘progress’ and the extent to which adverse impacts – if any, they say – could be managed. In 2012, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Silent Spring, Margaret Atwood wrote a riff on the contemporary salience of Carson’s warnings: Carson was blowing the lid off. Had we been lied to, not only about pesticides, but about progress, and development, and discovery, and the whole ball of wax? … one of the core lessons of Silent Spring was that things labeled progress weren’t necessarily good. Another was that the perceived split between man and nature isn’t real: the inside of your body is connected to the world around you, and your body too has its ecology, and what goes into it – whether eaten or breathed or drunk or absorbed through your skin – has a profound impact on you. We’re so used to thinking this way now that it’s hard to imagine a time when general assumptions were different. But before Carson, they were. (Atwood 2012) Notes An earlier version of this paper appears in Routledge International Handbook on Gender and the Environment, 2015. 1. All Silent Spring page references are to the 1967 edition, 5th Fawcett Press printing of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (New York: Fawcett Crest, original work published in 1962 by Houghton Mifflin). 2. The precarious position of women in science continues to be well documented. Two of the most prominent recent studies that detail the particulars of this are the following: a 2012 study at Yale University revealed that science professors at American

universities widely regard female undergraduates as less competent than male students with the same accomplishments and skills, and would pay them less if they were hiring (MossRacusin et al. 2012); a path-breaking 1999 study conducted at MIT on the status of women in the science and engineering faculties exposed widespread bias and marginalization, prompting national introspection about the position of women in the sciences (Committee on Women Faculty 1999).

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| N E G O T I A T I N G H UM A N – NA T UR E B OU N D A R I E S , CUL T UR A L H IER A R C HIES AN D M A S CUL I N I S T P A R A D I G MS OF D E VE LO P M E N T S T UD I E S

Priya A. Kurian and Debashish Munshi

If the world exists for us as ‘nature’, this designates a kind of relationship, an achievement among many actors, not all of them human, not all of them organic, not all of them technological. In its scientific embodiment as well as in other forms, nature is made, but not entirely by humans; it is a co-construction among humans and non-humans. (Haraway 1992: 297) The overwhelming emphasis on ensuring industrialization, economic growth and participation in the globalized capitalist world order by Third World nation-states is such that non-human nature is rarely considered as anything but marginal, an inferiorized Other. Quite like the modern administrative state, which has been the main driver of economic growth, the development project has traditionally ignored the imperatives of environmental concerns and politics, resulting in a ‘crisis of development’ that is yet to be resolved. Indeed, the very success of the environmental movements of the late twentieth century may be seen as a reflection of the failure of the administrative state (see Paehlke and Torgerson 1990) and, by extension, of traditional development. Even critiques of development from the perspective of feminists/Third World poor women ignore the extent to which humans and non-humans are fundamentally dependent on one another – a recognition critical if we wish to create some kind of a socially and ecologically rational society (Kurian 2000). The biospheric context that frames, intertwines with and brings meaning to human existence is too often rendered invisible by development practitioners and theorists. In contrast, environmentalists, more so in the West than elsewhere, tend often to ignore the centrality of humans, their modes of production, cultural contexts and so on, in their quest for ensuring

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environmental protection. Neither is a viable stance. As Raymond Williams has argued, ‘no society is too poor to afford a right order of life. And no society is so rich that it can afford to dispense with a right order, or hope to get it merely by becoming rich’ (1989a: 222). In attempting to define a particular vision of a ‘right order’, this chapter interrogates the ways in which boundaries between humans and nonhumans are created, maintained and policed in the context of the modern development project. Such boundaries will inevitably shape the emancipatory potential of the women, culture and development paradigm that this volume seeks to sketch. We begin with an exploration of anthropocentrism in development theory and practice, arguing for the need for an ecologically and socially rational society encompassing the human and non-human world. Our focus is on challenging the artificiality of boundaries that represents a neocolonial, totalizing vision of development. We explore the need for fluid and more porous boundaries – within the constraints of ecological and social rationality – through an examination of the place of science and knowledge in development (focusing specifically on aspects of the current debate on genetic engineering of foods). What do women, culture and development as both discrete and related concepts mean in a world marked by technoscience, grassroots activism and particular visions of, and relationships with, the non-human world? Anthropocentric development: defining the term When we first started work on this essay, what struck us was how deeply mired development studies has been in masculinist, anthropocentric thought. Yet what is anthropocentrism? Is it just another term for what can be called ‘human centred’? As a colleague pointed out, ‘any approach to ecosystems will be anthropocentric exactly because the decision [on the use of ecosystems] is ultimately made by (and usually for) human beings’ (Rixecker 2000). In this sense, no human action can really be non-anthropocentric. And yet, we think it is a term that does serve a purpose in describing constitutive practices and processes of cultural/political/economic systems that retard the possibilities of an ecologically rational vision. Eckersley defines anthropocentrism as ‘the belief that there is a clear and morally relevant dividing line between humankind and the rest of nature, that humankind is the only or principal source of value

n e g ot i at i n g h um a n – n at u r e b o u n da r i e s | 263 and meaning in the world, and that nonhuman nature is there for no other purpose but to serve humankind’ (1992: 51). In other words, it is not that decisions, policies and actions emanate from human actors but rather the nature of those decisions, policies and actions that warrant the label of anthropocentrism. So is this merely a quibble over semantics? Does it matter what we term it if really what we should be concentrating on is a better way of ‘doing development’? We would argue that the abstract, masculinist discourse of development that is a manifestation of anthropocentrism has very real consequences, both for how we see ourselves in this world and for the possibilities of creating a better world. For, in essence, anthropocentrism is about the creation of a particular kind of boundary, a rigid one that reinforces a division between us and them, where they are the non-human world. And boundaries, not always and perhaps not necessarily, limit us, divide us and ultimately make possible destructive practices that create a less ecologically and socially rational world. Anthropocentrism as an attempt at boundary setting demands to be challenged and transgressed if we are to reclaim the development project. As Fuss (1996: 3) points out, it is ‘sameness, not difference, [that] provokes our greatest anxiety (and our greatest fascination) with the “almost human”’. For most development scholars, ‘sameness’ with nature remains an idea too alien to be considered. Even for those who work in the field broadly known as women and development (and thus active in challenging masculinist development theory and practice), nature and the environment remain merely the fuzzy background against which development practices play themselves out. Maintaining clearly demarcated boundaries between humans and nature thus allows both justification of anthropocentric development practices and reassurance of the dominant position of humans. At heart, then, anthropocentrism is reflective of a particular set of cultural values that sanctions domination over the non-human world and an instrumental understanding of nature as resource. It involves an oppressive structure that Otherizes nature, denying it agency or value (Plumwood 1996); it denies human dependence on, and embeddedness in nature, resulting thereby in a refusal to shape human desires for development in accordance with the limits of nature. Ecofeminists in particular argue that the domination of nature in the West is closely related to the domination of women.

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But the parallels go further than just androcentrism, as Plumwood points out. Plumwood argues that all oppressive ‘centrisms’ – eurocentrism, ethnocentrism, androcentrism and anthropocentrism, for instance – have a similar structure that involves justifying and naturalizing oppressive practices, whereby ‘the experiences of the dominant “centre” are represented as universal, and the experiences of those subordinated in the structure are rendered secondary or are not visible at all’. At work is an ‘otherisation process’ that involves ‘radical exclusion’ of the subordinate object as inferior and separate; homogenization and stereotyping; denial of the significance of the Other’s contribution to any aspect of life; assimilation of the Other into the dominant structure; and denial or downgrading of the Other’s independent agency and value (Plumwood 1996: 134–7). Such cultural values of domination and instrumentalism are manifested in the ubiquitous discourses of globalization – perhaps most prominently in the dystopic possibilities of the ‘biotech century’ (Rifkin 1998) – and are inherently masculinist with specific implications and consequences for women and subordinated others (see Kurian 2000a, Munshi forthcoming). As feminist economists have pointed out, globalization processes are ‘embedded in, and refracted through, power structures grounded in ethnicity, race, gender, class, and age’ (Marchand 1996: 586). In fact, according to Kimberly Chang and Lily Ling (1996, cited in Marchand 1996: 586), there exist two distinct, and often polarized, versions of the globalized world: One is the ‘masculinised high-tech world of global finance, production and technology’; and the other is the ‘feminised menial economy of sexualised, racialised service’. Feminist analyses of neoclassical economics show how the male point of view invariably guides seemingly gender-neutral notions of market relationships. Workers or entrepreneurs, for example, are overtly gender-neutral terms, but women and men (as indeed members of different cultural groups) have very different experiences as workers or entrepreneurs (Bakker 1994). In fact, as Diane Elson (1992: 2, cited in Bakker 1994: 5) points out, a worker or an entrepreneur ‘is most often taken to be a man – creating male bias in both economic analysis and economic policy’. If androcentric economic paradigms promote the uneven nature of participation in the market by women (see, e.g., Brodie 1994, Bakker 1994), the anthropocentric approach to development reinforces

n e g ot i at i n g h um a n – n at u r e b o u n da r i e s | 265 this imbalance at a larger level because of its masculinist character. One example of masculinist anthropocentrism at work is evident in the notion of ‘mastery over nature’, which underpins much of development practice; it is a triumphalist process of appropriation and transformation of the non-human world that has led to some of the devastating environmental consequences the planet faces today.1 Nowhere is this hyper-anthropocentrism more evident than in the developments of recent times, such as the patenting of life forms with ownership of thousands of transgenic organisms, plants and animals vested in a few multinational corporations, and the cloning of animals and humans already underway that will fundamentally transform existing ways of reproduction. It is in naming anthropocentrism as one of the causes of the environmental crisis that we can begin to deal with it. We cannot, of course, just stop with naming. But recognizing the practices and values made possible by anthropocentrism is a necessary first step. It forces us to recognize that the modern development project has resulted in a crisis of the environment and of modernity itself; it is a crisis that Beck has argued requires a ‘reflexive modernisation’ – a wholesale reconstruction of society whereby the old order, the old categories dissolve and blur to result in new forms of global configurations (see Beck 1992, Beck, Giddens and Lash 1994). Far from suggesting that we need to get away from transforming nature – an impossible task – we seek to explore how ecological and social transformations can be geared towards a sustainable society. Although much of the discussion, analysis and critical evaluation of the notion of anthropocentrism has taken place within ecophilosophy, our fundamental concern with this concept is not primarily at the level of ideas and values. The debate within ecophilosophy is robust and vigorous, but less developed are the material consequences of such a masculinist value system for the biospheric context in which we live. As is well documented in the gender and environment literature, anthropocentric development has survival implications for rural, poor, Third World women. Destruction of communally held lands, removal of access to forests, water, herbs and plants, and the promotion of ‘terminator seeds’ genetically engineered to ensure that their offspring will not germinate, all have a direct impact on women (see Agarwal 1992, 1998, Shiva 1988, 1998). Anthropocentrism, in conjunction with other systems of domination (of gender and class,

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for example), brings multiple oppressive structures into women’s lives that are rarely recognized as significant to the development project. Challenging anthropocentrism, therefore, is a process of ensuring that the boundaries we seek to establish are always unstable, rewritten even in the moment of their making. Such a challenge to anthropocentric development theory and practice would allow us to ask in what ways we can rework these definitions and practices to allow for ecological and social rationality. Beck, Giddens and Lash (1994), among others, have argued that self-critical rationality and institutional, as well as cultural/aesthetic reflexivity, are critical for dealing with ecological crises. Equally significant, however, is the need for an ecological democracy that allows for ‘meaningful participation, supportive internal environments, and [institutionalization of] explicit and overt attention to gender, race, class and culture’ (Bartlett and Kurian 1999: 428). An ecologically rational development project would need to seek social justice as one of its major objectives; it would indeed require a transformation of social values to ensure recognition of the reality that ‘there will be no nature without justice. Nature and justice … will become extinct or survive together’ (Haraway 1992: 311). Ecological rationality and the development project Ecological rationality, a form of practical reason, is a rationality of ‘living systems, an order of relationships among living systems, and their environments’ (Bartlett 1986: 229; see also Dryzek 1987). It is the capacity of a system to maintain or increase the life-supporting capabilities of ecosystems consistently (Bartlett 1986, Dryzek 1987). Furthermore, Plumwood (1998: 561–2) argues that in the context of modern societies capable of inflicting significant environmental damage very rapidly, what is needed is ‘the capacity to correct tendencies to damage or reduce life-support systems’, thus allowing it to make ‘consistently good ecological decisions that maintain its ecological relationships’. How does the ecologically rational society deal with the demands of development? Or perhaps, how do we embark on the development project in light of the requirements of ecological rationality? Dryzek (1987: 58–9) points out that ecological rationality is a fundamental kind of reason that ought to have ‘lexical priority’

n e g ot i at i n g h um a n – n at u r e b o u n da r i e s | 267 over other forms of reason. He argues that ‘the preservation and promotion of the integrity of the ecological and material underpinning of society – ecological rationality – should take priority over competing forms of reason in collective choices with an impact upon that integrity’. And, at one level, this is indeed indisputable – the state of the biosphere will ultimately shape the viability of the development project. Yet this is not to argue that social concerns – such as gender equity, social justice and access to resources and power – may be marginalized in order to give precedence to non-humans. Environmental justice movements worldwide, for example, bring to the fore issues of racism, sexism and classism as seen in the differential impacts of environmental degradation. The ‘environmentalism of the poor’ (Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997), unlike mainstream environmental movements of the West, has articulated a vision of society that gives human survival and issues of self-determination pre-eminence along with the goal of local control over environmental resources. Movements such as the Narmada Bachao Andolan in India have not only exposed the role of the World Bank and the state in promoting environmentally destructive development, but also made the issue of social justice central to their cause. The struggle for empowerment, for freedom from oppressive social structures and domination, and for recognition and respect, go hand in hand with the struggle for ecological goals of sustainability in the Third World.2 Fostering an ecologically rational society, therefore, requires enabling some form of an ecological democracy (Dryzek 1998, Plumwood 1998), fundamental to which would be our grappling with the twin problems of ‘redistribution’ and ‘recognition’ (Fraser 1997). By redistribution, Fraser refers to the fundamental problem of socioeconomic injustice, ‘rooted in the politicaleconomic structure of society’ (1997: 13). Juxtaposed against this is the injustice of recognition, namely, discrimination grounded in cultural values and systems – an apt description for what is meted out to the environment in anthropocentric development. Fraser’s analysis is useful in understanding how the economic and social injustices that development seeks to address too often get posed antithetically to the problem of environmental protection. As she points out, the distinction between redistribution and recognition is at an analytical level:

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In practice, [economic injustice and cultural injustice] are intertwined. Even the most material economic institutions have a constitutive, irreducible cultural dimension; they are shot through with significations and norms. Conversely, even the most discursive cultural practices have a constitutive, irreducible political-economic dimension; they are underpinned by material supports. Thus, far from occupying two airtight spaces, economic injustice and cultural injustice are usually interimbricated so as to reinforce each other dialectically. (1997: 15) Environmental destruction, a consequence of a failure of recognition, is fundamentally intertwined with issues of social justice and equality. As a growing literature on environmental racism demonstrates, the poor and the least privileged are likely to face the worst impacts of environmental degradation (see, for example, de Chiro 1996, Bullard 1994). Moving towards an ecologically and socially rational society requires, then, having in place structures, systems, values, ethics and practices that actively undermine those fundamental aspects of modernized societies that allow both oppressive social inequalities and the colonization of an inferiorized nature. Although the concept of ecological rationality may have ‘dubious strategic value … as a resting point for explanation’ (Plumwood 1998: 563), it is unquestionably a sound starting point for exploring the implications of technoscience and the place of non-human nature for societies that seek to make good ecologically and socially rational decisions. To what extent are these twin goals of ecological and social justice met when we look at the technoscientific world? Technoscience and its challenges Many of the environmental problems we confront today may largely be traced to the use of scientific and technological expertise that not only offers new ways of consuming, adapting and transforming nature but also fails in spectacular ways to provide accurate estimates of the impacts of techniques and practices on the biosphere. As Plumwood (1998: 563) points out, ‘dominant forms of science have tended systematically to underestimate … the seriousness and imminence [of environmental problems], and to overestimate the resilience of ecological systems in which we are embedded’.

n e g ot i at i n g h um a n – n at u r e b o u n da r i e s | 269 In the context of the Third World, the impact of science and technology manifests itself in diverse ways. On the one hand, we have the phenomenon of technology transfer that too often translates into the transfer of inappropriate technology creating systems of dependence on the West – for training, spare parts and upgrades. The Green Revolution is just one example of a technology that revolutionized food production while simultaneously undermining subsistence, small-scale agriculture and destroying soil and water quality through excessive use of pesticides and fertilizers. On the other hand, in countries such as India, the state prides itself on its ability to invest in military (including nuclear) science and space science that allow it to claim its place with the ‘big boys’ of the West. What is evident is that these kinds of investments in science and technology have specific impacts on women, the environment and the development project as a whole (see, for example, Sen and Grown 1987, Shiva 1988, Mies and Shiva 1993). The issue at the centre of debates and protests in the Third World and elsewhere in recent years is that of genetic engineering (GE), focusing among other things on ‘terminator seeds’ and cross-species transfer of genetically desirable features. Representing the crossborder movements between nature and the non-natural, genetically engineered products and organisms have aroused more passion, condemnation and activist fervour nationally and internationally than any other issue in recent times. Anti-GE activists and the public have pointed to the range of issues implicated in the business of genetic engineering: • The privatization of nature through the patenting of life forms. • The concentration of commercial profit in the hands of an elite private sector. • The violation of the ‘integrity’ of life and natural forms. • The exploitation of the biological commons. • The increasing dependence of the Third World on the West. • The rapidly expanding division between the haves and the havenots, further aggravating discrimination based on gender and race and class. • The undermining of indigenous and local knowledges and their control over their knowledge bases.

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• The destruction of biodiversity as monoculturalization of both mind and biotic organisms takes place. • The yet-to-be-established health and environmental consequences of ‘meddling’ with nature. • The undermining of democratic decision-making with the marginalization of the public from decisions involving only governments, scientists and corporations (see Haraway 1997, Shiva 1998, Rifkin 1998). Many of these are issues we feel passionately about and, indeed, are in agreement with the activists taking up these causes. Yet we find ourselves caught in a dilemma. Having championed the transgression of boundaries and the need for more porous borders between humans and non-humans, we now are faced with the challenges of a technoscience that has at its heart – in its culture and practice – the breaking down of boundaries. How do we resolve this? Is it possible to align ourselves with the activists on the issues raised above and yet keep open the potential of porous, transgressive boundaries? Perhaps the problem lies in how we conceptualize the issue. At one level is the actual process of modifying aspects of nature through genetic engineering, which does radically challenge the integrity of the boundaries between species, for example. At another level, it is evident that the genetic engineering business reflects a certain dominant discourse of the biotechnology industry – a discourse controlled by scientists and an industry that has appeared impervious to any kind of challenge from civil society. In reaction to this exclusion of the mass public, in the last decade social movements have sprung up reflecting a multitude of resistances to this dominant discourse. As Gottweis comments: ‘Images of Nazi eugenics, Third World exploitation and r-BST-tortured cows invaded the biotechnology discourse creating counterdiscursive ruptures, blurrings, and mixtures’ (1995: 146). Here then is the challenge to a particular boundary-setting attempt by a narrow elite group, which is to be welcomed for its ability in having undermined the ‘truthspeak’ of the industry. But what of the actual developments in biotechnology – the cross-species transference of genes, for instance, that undermines a different kind of boundary, one that seeks to maintain in some form the ‘integrity’ of life forms, as anti-GE advocates argue? We answer this by pointing to the central theme of this chapter: the possibilities

n e g ot i at i n g h um a n – n at u r e b o u n da r i e s | 271 and potentials for the creation of an ecologically and socially rational society. Our advocacy of cross-border movements is balanced, indeed shaped, by our fundamental concerns of seeking environmental protection and social justice. In doing so, we acknowledge the concerns that Haraway has voiced about the opposition to genetic engineering: I cannot help but hear in the biotechnology debates the unintended tones of fear of the alien and suspicion of the mixed. In the appeal to intrinsic natures, I hear a mystification of kind and purity akin to the doctrines of white racial hegemony and U.S. national integrity and purpose that so permeate North American culture and history. I know that this appeal to sustain other organisms’ inviolable, intrinsic natures is intended to affirm their difference from humanity and their claim on lives lived on their terms and not ‘man’s.’ The appeal aims to limit turning all the world into a resource for human appropriation. But it is a problematic argument resting on unconvincing biology … [T]he tendency by the political ‘left’ … to collapse molecular genetics, biotechnology, profit, and exploitation into one undifferentiated mass is at least as much of a mistake as the mirror image reduction by the ‘right’ of biological – or informational – complexity to the gene and its avatars, including the dollar. (1997: 61–2) As Haraway rightly points out, in challenging the many problems with genetic engineering, we need to refrain from using a rhetoric of purity and intrinsic properties that is implicated in the racist discourses and histories of the colonizing First World. There are many other grounds on which to base the challenge, as noted earlier, including especially the accelerating pace of commodification and ownership of genetically engineered products, reflective of ‘hypercapitalism’, as Rifkin (2000) describes it. The repercussions of the large-scale patenting of genetically modified organisms for Third World countries, in terms of indigenous research, local agricultural practices and economic self-reliance, all of which have specific implications for women, are significant. Thus, in looking at the various manifestations of genetic engineering and agricultural biotechnology, we need to ask the

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following questions. What may be the environmental consequences of genetic engineering? What are the implications of agricultural biotechnology for Third World farmers (including rural peasant and tribal women), for existing subsistence agricultural patterns, for local cultures and ways of life, and for the development project as a whole? What are the likely impacts on society of the growing expansion of genetic technologies concentrated in the hands of a few multinational companies? A persistent claim by proponents of biotechnology is that agricultural biotechnology is needed in order to feed the world – to ‘prevent weeds from stealing the sunshine’ (Monsanto literature, quoted in Shiva 2000), to stave off blindness in the Third World with the help of genetically engineered rice, and so on. But critics such as Shiva dismiss the claim that without genetic engineering and the ‘globalisation of agriculture’ the world will starve: Take the case of the … ‘golden rice’ or genetically engineered Vitamin A rice as a cure for blindness. It is assumed that without genetic engineering we cannot remove Vitamin A deficiency. However nature gives us abundant and diverse sources of vitamin A. If rice was not polished, rice itself would provide Vitamin A. If herbicides were not sprayed on our wheat fields, we would have bathua, amaranth, mustard leaves as delicious and nutritious greens that provide Vitamin A. (Shiva 2000: 2) Shiva argues that the ‘monocultures and monopolies’ that mark industrial agriculture symbolize ‘a masculinisation of agriculture’, adding that ‘genetic engineering and IPRs [Intellectual Property Rights] will rob Third World women [of] their creativity, innovation, and decision making power in agriculture’ (1998: 3–4). Claims and counter-claims thus mark the debate on biotechnology, but at a minimum what these show is the deep-rooted distrust of ‘expert’/scientific discourses called on by dominant politicaleconomic groups to dismiss public concerns as ‘irrational’ and ‘ignorant’. The challenge to Monsanto’s crop experiments in India by a growing peasant movement in the late 1990s, for example, may be seen as part of the rejection of ‘expert and professional discourses (and the form of rationality they frequently espouse) that

n e g ot i at i n g h um a n – n at u r e b o u n da r i e s | 273 underlies the search for an alternative rationality … with which to approach environmental hazards’ (Harvey 1998: 345). The danger, of course, lies in the co-optation of the oppositional discourses – their peaceful co-existence with an ongoing scientific and market hegemony. An ecologically rational society, then, must be one where (a) anthropocentric ‘tampering with nature’ seen in genetic engineering – a clear example of the ‘arrogance of humanism’ (Ehrenfeld 1978) – is eschewed at least until more is known about the consequences for nature; and (b) the overwhelming dominance of the technoscientific discourse in determining issues that are ethical at their core gives way to an inclusion of the knowledges of the humanities and local peoples. Testart (2000: 14), for example, points out that the ‘knowledge shared by all humankind – intuition, emotion, common sense, aesthetic sense, a sense of how the world works’ is crucial to arrive at any understanding of complex phenomena (such as GE) being analysed. A recognition of partial perspectives on all sides, across all actors, is ultimately what could allow concerns for ecological rationality, social justice and science to come together in meaningful ways. Thus, instead of the polarized discourses of technoscientific expertise and public scepticism, an acknowledgement of partial perspectives may give rise to a hybridized discourse where scientific analysis aligns with local, indigenous and popular knowledge with a central focus on ecological and social rationality. Transforming deep-rooted values These preliminary observations on the consequences of an anthropocentric development project framed by a globalized economy reveal the reality of environmental destruction that has particular impacts on already marginalized, poor women of the rural Third World. An ecologically and socially rational society can become possible only when we actively move to transform deeprooted cultural values that sanction environmentally destructive development practice – a practice that an extensive literature on WID has demonstrated to be sexist as well. That this must happen in the context of ‘globalizing environmentalisms’, marked by the convergence of ‘environmentalism, the New World Order, global markets’ (Sturgeon 1999: 270), underscores the urgency of feminist

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interventions in such dominant discourses. Only by positioning women as environmental activists, as Sturgeon argues, can activists (such as those working with Third World rural, peasant and tribal women) gain access to critical international political arenas where environmental concerns have acquired currency. In other words, given the hegemonic status of Western-inspired environmentalism that often conjures up neocolonial images of an out-of-control Third World, it may well prove to be in the interests of Third World women to seek control of the environmental agenda by positing a gender–environment linkage. In examining the implications of anthropocentrism for biospheric actors – human and non-human – we challenge the notion of boundaries as being an unhelpful one, for it too often facilitates destructive practices. But as the study of ecology has demonstrated, boundaries are fundamental: to talk about ecosystems at any level is to acknowledge both the necessity and the artificiality of boundaries. What we call for in this chapter is the importance of preserving some boundaries (as our discussion of genetic engineering showed) while selectively destabilizing others. The problem with boundaries comes up most significantly in situating ourselves in the context of (political, economic and cultural) globalization. Champions of globalization offer the promise of the borderless world, ‘of a unified humanity no longer divided by east and west, North and South, Europe and its Others, the rich and poor … These discourses set in motion the belief that the separate histories, geographies and cultures that have divided humanity are now being brought together by the warm embrace of globalization, understood as a progressive process of planetary integration’ (Coronil 2000: 351–2). Yet, as critics have pointed out, the globalized world is one that is not only hopelessly divided between the privileged and the underprivileged, but is also one where dominant, often First World, elites have a lopsided share of the power to shape the world. Although the concept of democracy is enthusiastically espoused by the champions of globalization, it is never followed in spirit, because, as Gray (1998: 17) says, ‘democracy and the free market are rivals, not allies’. Neocolonial institutions such as the World Trade Organization, which see themselves as the epitome of a ‘free’ market, frame rules for the market which are not open to the scrutiny

n e g ot i at i n g h um a n – n at u r e b o u n da r i e s | 275 of any democratic legislature (Gray 1998). These institutions, which idealistically speak of equality for all, actually reinforce what Spivak (1999: 102) calls the ‘continuing narrative of shifting imperialist formations’, because their norms of functioning adhere to social, cultural and legal frameworks that are predominantly Western. Neocolonial narratives, despite their egalitarian-sounding slogans of a ‘free’ market and global ‘equity’, continue to emphasize, overtly or covertly, the managerial authority of elite groups. These groups talk of transcending borders to allow a multinational flow of capital and enterprise, but retain a clearly marked division between Western or West-trained managers and largely non-Western workers. The dominant managerial core, usually comprising Western ‘white males’ (Dozier, Grunig and Grunig 1995: 151), formulates policies for the entire workforce, although in numerical terms white male Westerners are only a small minority. In most transnational organizations in the age of globalization, the control of underprivileged groups aligns closely with the control of disempowered employees, who are most likely to be immigrants, women and people of colour (Sassen 1998). This dual control is exercised by core groups of organizational leaders who are thus doubly privileged: by virtue of their ethnicity, and because of their positions in organizational hierarchies. Such privileged groups are also the ones that build electric fences between humans and nature. ‘The conceptual differentiation of “humanity” from that of “nature”’ is a socio-cultural construction that helps support the claim that humans are morally superior to non-humans, thereby justifying the anthropocentric domination of nature’ (Purser, Park and Montuori 1995: 1057). An example of this domination is the indiscriminate exploitation of nature as a market resource, and the use of advanced technologies not just to discover natural products but to create new ones, changing nature into what Arturo Escobar calls ‘technonature’ (Coronil 2000: 363). A particular form of culture lies at the core of the discourse of technological mastery over nature, one that privileges humans over non-humans. Culture is central to the processes of globalization as well. The market plays a major role in the shaping of cultural identities but, as Firat points out, ‘the power to signify, represent and communicate forcefully what is acceptable, seductive, attractive and meaningful is not evenly distributed’ (1995: 122). It is these

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dominant cultural pulls and pushes that marginalize the Other, leading to a decimation of not only numerous biological species of plants and animals by the creation of high-yielding hybrid varieties, but also a trampling of minority cultures and their languages, food habits and ways of doing things by a universalized T-shirt-jeans-fastfood-digital-television culture. Conclusion Destabilizing boundaries takes many forms – writing about the telescoping categories of culture is perhaps just one. Resolving the tension between challenging and preserving boundaries means grappling with the ways in which the WCD approach can transform development studies and projects. It means conceptualizing and creating development projects which begin to take seriously the cultural and material aspects of environmental protection that are the focus of many grassroots environmental justice movements worldwide, as well as of women’s struggles for social justice. It also means recognizing that the demands placed by the biophysical and sociocultural environments elicit certain responses from both humans and non-humans that are often unqueried. In the case of humans, such responses are shaped by the values of market-driven, capitalist economic systems that remain invisible in terms of their ‘normalcy’. The genetic engineering of food products is an example of how technologies developed in the first instance for limited purposes quickly become ubiquitous in their application and use as their commercial potential becomes evident (see Beck 1995). It is by identifying, explaining and unravelling these takenfor-granted values and relationships that we can begin the process of creating a more ecologically rational society, even in a globalizing world. As Plumwood (1996: 148) notes, recognizing the significance of nature in non-instrumental ways ‘is the ethical equivalent for nature of desegregating the lunch counter, of giving women the vote. And as both anticolonial and feminist activists have good reason to know, this is just the beginning of the journey to liberation, not the end.’ From the perspective of those who do policy – where the material in many ways supersedes the ‘merely reflexive’ turn of late modernity – such an approach helps us actually to begin to do what we say we ought to.

n e g ot i at i n g h um a n – n at u r e b o u n da r i e s | 277 Notes We thank Robert V. Bartlett, Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran and Stefanie Rixecker for thoughtful and incisive feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter. 1. Harvey (1998: 333) points out that ‘It is not fashionable these days, of course, to evoke triumphalist attitudes to nature. But I think it is important to understand this is what we do, whether we care to acknowledge it or not, whenever we let loose the circulation of capital upon the land.’ Indeed, we cannot presume to undo anthropocentric development practice if we do not simultaneously challenge capitalistic transformations

of land and nature which in turn create and transform social relations in contradictory ways. 2. It should be noted, of course, that anthropocentric perspectives do surface in some environmental justice movements where the focus on humans often ends up relegating nature/ environment to the periphery. Ironically, this pits such movements with the very hegemonic structures they struggle against.

11 | TH E I N T E R S E CT I O N O F W O MEN, C U LTU RE A N D D E V E L O P M E N T : C ON VE RS A T I O N S A B O UT V I S IONS FOR TH E F U TU R E – T A K E T W O 1

Arturo Escobar and Wendy Harcourt

Arturo: Let us start by asking how are ‘visions of the future’ in the women, culture and development (WCD) field being crafted? By what groups of people? With what combinations of theoretical and practical action? What are the potential implications of these visions for how power is exercised to maintain exploitation over poor women and men and domination over specific groups or nature itself? What configurations of place, space and culture – what networks – might make of such visions a real turn of events in, say, the first half of the century? Does this way of posing the question of ‘visions of the future’ make sense to you? Wendy: My visions are grounded in what I see emerging among peoples’ movements, specifically women’s groups, who are responding to and shaping resistances to dominant neoliberal capitalist discourses. Such visions are centred on the concept we are exploring together of ‘the politics of place’2 (Escobar and Harcourt 1998). I am looking with hope at the new cultural permutations that are emerging. I think there is a destabilization of power happening and a strong need for a renewal of thinking about what institutions, what forms of governance, what forms of democracy are needed, based on the knowledge people’s groups are building up about how to negotiate (gender, racial, economic, cultural) differences and the sense of the other. We are restructuring cultural meanings incredibly rapidly so that our sense of the other changes with each encounter. In terms of a feminist concern for gender equality and equity and women’s empowerment, even in stating those concerns we are layering what are distinct cultural positionings in diverse cultures with a new sense of what it means to be a gendered being. And at the same

intersection of women, culture and development | 279 time these encounters change our own sense of what being a feminist means. We can no longer talk of ‘cultural’ feminism as predominantly white women did in the 1980s; there are now historically and politically strong black and indigenous women’s movements, which have in fact been taking a lead in many international settings for a number of decades. Envisaging the future becomes much more problematic because we are evolving new forms of politics along what you call lines of localized power; at the same time, due to the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) and other global links, local networks are connected to what were once far-flung places. So we are now – in terms of time and space – much closer to the ‘other’. Just to take one example of a site of political organizing – the struggle for the autonomy and self-determination of women over their bodies. Highly difficult issues such as violence against women in peace and war, the fight against rape, sexual abuse, female genital mutilation, sex workers’ rights, women’s security and sexual orientation and life choices are no longer silent, ‘private’ issues but are at the centre of women’s rights debates in various cultural and economic contexts. Women’s strategies of resistance and struggles for self-autonomy are sometimes carried out in direct support of women who share similar experiences, even when living in different geo-political spaces. Without universalizing issues of violence, across geographic, ethnic and political divides, it is clear that women work in strong solidarity, creating a type of politics that is a very powerful emotive force. It holds out a promise for the future of security that women’s groups are negotiating despite the backdrop for many of severe economic crisis, dire need, and violent conflict. This politics is place-based – with the body being the first site or place for women’s struggles. Women’s varied resistance to violence at all levels has created very innovative and important changes in many women’s lives, changing social, medical, health and demographic scientific discourse and practices. To imagine a future where all women are truly secure is something I work towards. But I see multiple paths. I do not entertain the idea of one blueprint for the achievement of all women’s security, as I see the paths to that achievement as extremely complex, tied to both horizontal and vertical power structures and propelled by local realities and issues that cannot be explained in any universal way.

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In fact, transformative pathways are emerging out of the resistance to universal, essentialist discourses that do not recognize differences among women. For example, the issue of the right to livelihoods is very different for peasant women in Brazil, indigenous women in Colombia, women workers in Bangladeshi factories, migrant domestic workers in the Gulf or young women living in precarity in southern Europe. Yet it is through solidarity and working with resistances that I see the future taking place. You are right to pose the question of whether visions of the future make sense. I have a strong sense that we need visions that embrace the possibility that choice, integrity and security for all women in whatever culture can be found. Are such visions just utopian? I think not. However, I do not think that diverse women’s groups acting in solidarity and in alliance with other civil society groups are going to be able to find solutions to the power imbalances that lead to the violations of their bodily integrity and right to choose. The economic inequities compounded by the vacuum of governance we see today require profound challenges and changes. Take two Wendy: Writing now in the 2010s and reflecting back on my response ten years ago, I see the same issues on the table (around the need for alliance and solidarity and resisting universalism), but there is a shift to stronger intersectional approaches to feminism, as well as the need to break down the divisions between human and non-humans as captured in Haraway’s concept of naturecultures (Haraway 2007). Haraway, in her historically and culturally situated reading of technoscience, asks us to transgress the binary opposition of nature and culture by drawing it into one term (with multiple expressions): ‘naturecultures’. She argues that ‘nature and culture are tightly knotted in bodies, ecologies, technologies and times’ (ibid.). There is also a lot more visible civic resistance to hegemonic discourses (Biekart and Fowler 2013). In engaging with these new civic activisms, I have become interested in discussions of decoloniality and the need to engage in intercultural dialogues around feminism in ways that displace the centrality of the white female Western feminist subject. I have been in conversations with feminist Latin American scholars such as Catherine Walsh (2015), Maria Lugones (2008) and Gina Vargas (2015) around transnational feminist activism and the difficulty of translating across cultures and histories the ways in which solidarity can be built, remaining

intersection of women, culture and development | 281 mindful and respectful of ‘cultural differences in the means and methods of protest employed to challenge unjust or oppressive social and political conditions’ (Harcourt 2014). I am interested in what decoloniality has to say as it challenges hegemonic knowledge and the production and exchange of global capitalism and as it points the way to naturecultures, post-humanism, emotions and the performance of feminism and environmentalism. So I see the future emerging as we rethink and search for cracks and fissures in identities, dualisms, living with other species and changing landscapes (Harcourt and Nelson 2015). Arturo: You summarized very well, Wendy, some of the most important shifts that have taken place in social theory analyses over the past decade, and to which feminists have contributed greatly. Haraway, first, has been among the pioneers of what of late has been called ‘the ontological turn’ – that is, the turn to questions of ontology and not just epistemology. This includes relations across worlds that are different ontologically and yet always partially connected to each other. It seems to me that women activists, by connecting their struggles across those worlds (what you describe as building alliances while resisting universalisms), are pointing at ways forward for a pluriversal politics more clearly than most other groups. Feminists such as Lugones and Gloria Anzaldúa and Chela Sandoval have possibly known all along that all politics is relational because all forms of consciousness of oppressed groups – women of colour in this case – cannot be but relational, thus imagining forms of bridging that take difference seriously nevertheless. The notion of inter-culturality here is important, and today that involves both inter-epistemic and inter-world (across ontologies) dimensions. Some of the contemporary decolonial feminists are also moving in this direction, as you suggest. Those of us who have had the privilege of living in the alleged ‘universe’ of the One-World world, to use John Law’s very useful concept (2011), have a harder time seeing ourselves as being part of these projects, or not feeling excluded by them, precisely because they speak of politics without any universals at all. To the extent that we all live within the pluriverse, however, this is a very inclusive project. Arturo: You mentioned networking and connections through ICTs. Taking up the impact of ICTs on gender and cultural difference, how do you see the engagement with culture among women’s groups on the global level?

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Wendy: I am very interested in ICTs as political tools for women’s empowerment. If we were to unpack that jargon a bit, what I would say is that ICTs allow feminists of varying positions around the world access to diverse knowledge, speed of communication and new ways of networking and of knowing one another, all of which has pushed feminists into new and powerful types of political discourses. We are still wondering where all the interconnectivity could lead feminism. We are trying to understand what barriers (of time, of distance, educational level, language and identity) we are changing or creating, including the very real concern of the majority of women being totally excluded. Another concern is about the issues feminists are unable to change economically and politically because very few feminists make it to the tables where decisions are made over the direction technology is to take. This leads to another strong concern about with whom and with what we are colluding. Nevertheless, there is the sense in which ICT is a means that can give many different women tremendous scope to go far beyond traditional cultural experiences, and allow for new types of gender relations and new types of development. The majority of these negotiations are in the English language and there continues to be varying degrees of access, but the digital world offers scope for navigation and connection. We are still trying to work out what works and what doesn’t, what type of cultures we are creating, and what type of new politics, even new languages across cultures and generations, and new structures of feeling (to take up Raymond Williams’ definition of culture) we are evolving. The web can allow for safe spaces and new forms of creativity and knowledge and connection. I don’t want to celebrate all the hype that is around; clearly ICTs are also producing and creating negative spaces for women (pornography, cyber stalking, and so on). But from my experience feminists are finding that the internet provides a lot of support and puts them in touch with knowledge networks, and women they would not otherwise meet, on issues that a few years ago would not have been discussed or acted upon beyond their own immediate small groups. To throw in some examples from other conversations I’ve had (Harcourt 2000): Arab women are setting up safe cyberspaces where they can converse across geo-political divides in Arabic about religion, rights, body politics – subjects they would not talk about in

intersection of women, culture and development | 283 public. Shirkat Gah, a women’s human rights NGO based in Lahore, Pakistan, uses trusted international websites to mobilize around the prosecution of honour killings. Women working on trade converge first in cyberspace and then in political events at historic moments such as Seattle, Davos, Porto Alegre. What is interesting in these stories (and I could give many examples) is how, in the process of mobilizing support through ICTs, women’s groups have created a series of networks that quickly and strategically link women’s local concerns with the global movement. The ability to speak out and act on violence committed against women in a timely way for me is very important. It shows how feminists are adapting the medium and making it a powerful tool, stretching our experiences and our political terrain in ways that are global yet very closely local. My interest is in how these strategies around the body that are so critical to women’s movements are connected and linked to other political strategies that engage political women both locally and globally around, for example, consumer and workers’ rights, fair trade and equity and health. By way of comparison, how do you see the internet as a useful tool for environmentalists in Latin America, where you mainly work? How are the two arenas of feminism and ecology supporting and working together in alternatives to development and towards a vision of social justice? How do you see ICTs and gender in your political and analytical experience? Arturo: ICTs have worked in a similar way in the realm of the environment as you have described for women. I could mention, for instance, the case of the U’wa, a small indigenous group in Colombia that has mounted a transnational struggle against the Colombian government and Occidental Petroleum to oppose oil exploration in their ancestral territory. Electronic networks of various kinds have been instrumental in the relative success of this struggle. As you rightly caution, however, in these cases one also senses the unevenness and inequalities in terms of connectivity, interactivity and language. This is why Gustavo Lins Ribeiro (1998), for instance, and I have spoken of the need to consider the relation between social movements and ICTs in terms of two parallel struggles: over the character and democratization of the ICTs themselves, on the one hand; and, on the other, over the current restructuring of social and economic conditions fuelled

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in many ways by these same technologies. It is no secret that globalization and contemporary capitalism are enacted and made possible by new ICTs. This is the main argument Manuel Castells (1996) has made in the first volume of his already famous trilogy on the information or network society, and I think he is essentially correct, despite the fact that his view is strictly globalocentric and does not bring in a perspective of place. But I am also thinking: in what ways do the unprecedented projection and complexities of environmental and women’s struggles by or through ICTs differ from, say, the use that right-wing and reactionary groups make of the same ICTs? In the United States, for instance, we have the case of racial supremacy groups for which ICTs have also become essential. This question poses a challenge to our arguments about the politics of place in relation to ICTs; it seems to me that we are just beginning to face this challenge. Marxist geographers such as David Harvey are in many ways correct in suspecting a politics of place and identity that they see as unable to ground a larger spatial politics in terms of, say, broad coalitions of class-based and other social movements. Doreen Massey has, of course, dealt with some of these concerns constructively through her insightful notion of ‘geographies of responsibility’ (2004). For me, all thinking about place has to tackle immediately the question of flows and networks. And what unites place, flows and networks is power. It is in relation to the powers they oppose or the counter-powers they are able to create that we can differentiate between various uses of ICTs that, at many levels (even in their attachment to places, which, as we well know from both feminist and ecological concerns, can be very reactionary), might look quite similar. Which forms of power do these uses oppose and to which struggles do they contribute? It may seem paradoxical to use ICTs for a defence of place-based practices. But the fact is that people rooted in local cultures are finding ways to have a stake in national and global society precisely as they engage with the conditions of transnationalism in defence of local cultures and ecologies. This has clearly been the case, for instance, with Afro-descendant movements that have struggled successfully for the defence of territories and identities in places such as the Colombian Pacific (Escobar 2001, 2008). Power, finally, brings to the fore the issue of theory and practice, because it is in their theoretical and

intersection of women, culture and development | 285 practical action – that is, in the production of alternative discourses – that social struggles form networks. Theoretical and practical action creates a system of relays within a larger space – as Foucault and Deleuze (1977) put it long ago – that destabilizes dominant forms of power. As we have suggested elsewhere (Escobar and Harcourt 1998), the result of this process could be described as the creation of ‘glocalities’ – alternative configurations of culture-nature that also have the potential to be differently gendered. I borrowed this term from geographer Erik Swyngedeow (1997), although I modify it somewhat. In connecting with each other, environmental-ethnic social movements, for instance, circulate identities, visions of the world and practices that result in these parallel networks. I am thinking, for example, about the growing indigenous networks in South America, the struggles of grassroots black communities in the Americas, or rainforest social movements in many parts of the world. As Dianne Rocheleau (Rocheleau et al. 1996) would argue, rightly so in my mind, many of these struggles have to be seen from the perspective of, and in terms of their effect on, gendered rights, responsibilities and activism. But we should not make the mistake of assuming that these networks will necessarily lead to the ‘overthrow’ of the older or newer forms of power in terms of capitalism and patriarchy. This would mean returning to the older model of the political. But if not an ‘overthrow’, then what? Perhaps we can now tackle this question in relation to the difficulties we face in imagining ‘visions’ of the future. First of all, it seems to me that we need to avoid engaging in an exercise of vision making that consists in providing recipes or grand narratives in the manner of, say, ‘sustainable development’. We know from our analyses of development that this grand theorizing is part of the problem, at least at the present moment. (Even if this does not mean giving up the attempt at getting as broad a view of the situation as possible, since at some levels power does indeed effect multiple links among various forms of domination.) We also know, as Donna Haraway (1989) put it in analysing oppositional politics, that ‘reversals won’t work’. Envisioning a world where women are superior to men, or Third World people superior to those from the rich countries, would not mean much in terms of creating a plural world with a measure of social justice and ecological sustainability.

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Take two Wendy: I still see digital realities as critical, but again in more complex ways analytically as we live the contradictions and possibilities of the new imaginaries ‘online’. You just have to walk the streets of any large city to see how many people live on- and off-line simultaneously, speaking and holding mobile phones. Cyberspace is now deeply embedded in our cultural, social and political lives as modern digital interconnectivity enables challenges and resistances to capitalocentric hegemonies as people forge links among different places through meshworks (which we go on to explain below) that are interlocking the real and the virtual. ICT connectivity grows in unplanned directions, even given the threat of state and business surveillance and control in the name of the imperative of economic growth and security. While aware of the negative side of digital connectivity, I see the emergence of intellectual communities as part of our future naturecultures (Shah 2013). Arturo: Reading our respective answers to the question of ICTs made me aware of the absence of the concept that seems to over-determine all discussions of ICTs at present: social media. Bringing social media into the picture is one of the most important elements in the analysis of the contradictions, and the complexity, in this field, as you well say in your ‘Take two’ above. This is a huge topic today that we can barely get into here. I was just at a conference, ‘On Protest’, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (10–12 October 2014), where Zakia Salime (from Rutgers University) did a wonderful presentation entitled ‘New Feminisms as Personal Revolutions: Micro Rebellious Bodies’, in which she analysed how the display of naked bodies on the internet by young women activists in the context of the Arab Spring, although not central to the narratives of the revolts, should be seen as instances of new feminisms in cyberspace that, while making visible the gender traumas of the Arab Spring, operate on different registers of subjectivity, sexuality and self-expression (Butler 2011). This type of analysis, in my view, is a corrective against the celebratory references in the mainstream media, and sometimes in academic analyses, of the role of social media in socalled ‘pro-democracy’ demonstrations. But much remains to be done to understand more adequately the contradictory character of ICTs at present – particularly their re-liberalization by Western discourses that can see only the multiple ways in which they are being used worldwide as so many instances of market and liberal forms of identity. Feminists

intersection of women, culture and development | 287 have a particular stake in unveiling these reductive readings, while coming to terms with the link between ICTs and cultural and economic hegemonies. Wendy: I have been following cyberfeminism in this decade – in relation not only to ICT but also to the body and the state (Harcourt 2014). For example, the difficult intergenerational, intercultural responses and discussions on the actions of the European group Femen – who aim to reverse sexism by deliberately displaying their bodies as political weapons, defying the media to objectify their bodies – have sparked a lot of controversy, including among feminists (O’Keefe 2014). Social media has changed the arena of body politics but naked female bodies have been a site of protest in many other arenas: what is different is the breadth of the gaze. Wendy: All the excitement generated by ‘knowledge networks’ and the sense of possibility to change does not replace the need to challenge Politics with a big ‘P’ and the need to change radically very powerful dominating vertical power structures. You have spoken usefully to me about the asymmetry of globalization. Can the theoretical and practical action you describe change those asymmetries in your ‘visions for the future’? Arturo: Our awareness of the growing complexity of any situation we might be involved in has led to a more nuanced understanding of power and of how reality is shaped asymmetrically, generally speaking. But this complexity should not lead to a paralysis of thought and action, but rather to their continued re-evaluation. And it is here that I want to bring back the sense of utopia in order to build a tension with the more localized and historicized view of political practice we were just discussing. This idea came to me upon rethinking some of the consequences that the new theories of complexity might suggest for a view of the political. From these theories I would highlight the sense of randomness and irreversibility of historical processes (in contrast to the Newtonian deterministic view of a simple world governed by time-reversible laws), the fact that biological and social history are non-linear processes characterized by instabilities, fluctuations and unexpected bifurcations towards unprecedented macro structures that might be radically different from those they evolved from. Complexity theorists highlight the openness of social

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and biological processes and the dynamic of self-organization that is one of their most constitutive features. This view is quite the opposite of the conventional scientific paradigms of classical mechanics, and of any view of history in terms of stages of development, with the concomitant recipes for how to achieve them, whether through technology and economic growth or through revolutionary praxis. It was upon reading a book by the Mexican artist and scholar Manuel de Landa (1997) that the question again came to my mind of the possibility of a radically different world than the one we live in at present. Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson (Gibson-Graham 1996) argue that capitalocentrism has hampered our best attempts at imagining different worlds from a feminist analysis of capital. But what if we were to think that, through complex and unpredictable dynamics, the conditions were to be established for the creation – through fluctuations, autocatalytic processes and non-linear selforganization dynamics – of a different way of organizing markets and the economy (that is, for the formation of what Prigogine and Stengers (1984) call a ‘dissipative structure’, one characterized by a different order and higher level of energy)? De Landa shows how the formation of markets and the economy took place over the past 300 years in the West, and how, little by little, through superior autocatalytic processes, hierarchies of homogeneous elements gained ascendancy over self-organizing, non-hierarchical ‘meshworks’ of heterogeneous elements brought together in terms of their functional complementarity. Meshworks, however, were essential to the formation of markets and cities. In historical terms, and even if meshworks are not necessarily ‘morally superior’ to hierarchies, it is necessary to foster again their formation. And in many ways this is what I see as happening when we speak of networks and glocalities – what we describe as the hybridity of the global and the local (and without implying the existence of ‘pure’ or distinct strands of local and global, or traditional and modern!). These glocalities would be formed through a double dynamic: strategies of localization, which decrease the heterogeneity of each locality (giving localities greater internal consistency) while increasing the heterogeneity between localities; and strategies of interweaving, which tend to increase the heterogeneity of localities while decreasing it between localities (less internal consistency of

intersection of women, culture and development | 289 localities but greater similarities across sites). I am interested in particular in those strategies of localization and interweaving that are set into motion by social movements. I found an intuitive expression of this idea in the remarks of a Russian ecologist at a convergence of social movements against globalization sponsored by IGGRI (International Group for Grassroots Initiatives) in Helsinki in 1998, when he said: ‘If you want to see a place where globalization is collapsing, come to Russia.’ And then he spoke of the rebuilding of economies along relations of barter, reciprocity and the like (what Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson might call practices of economic difference, including women’s work in the caring economy). And also in a quite equivalent way by a Sudanese writer, Abu Gassim Goor, who said: ‘In Africa, nothing works, but everything is possible.’ This phrase always seemed to me a fantastic reversal of the common image of Africa in the development literature as a basket case and a lost cause. What he meant is that Africa might be in a better position to make do with the remnants of traditions and the rubble of modernities to construct a different path and future. And what if everything were to be possible, but in a very different sense than when we thought about utopias in earlier decades? If, through other types of dynamics, markets were to start functioning differently, not only along capitalist lines, and economies were to respond to other demands, and culture and nature and gender equality came to be interwoven along plural, ecological principles? Then perhaps the resulting meshworks would be in the position of holding the big financial and development institutions more accountable for the hierarchies they continue to support. So that a measure of diversity could be reintroduced at the very heart of the processes that are most influential in creating socio-natural worlds today; so that in turn a measure of symmetry could be restored socially and conceptually in the debates about the state of the world. Would we be too foolish in thinking that the social movements’ meshworks that are being created today (some of which could be seen as creating self-stimulating loops among themselves and with sympathetic NGOs and non-human actors such as ICTs and ecosystems), in their strategies of localization and interweaving of heterogeneous elements interlocked in functional complementarity – as complexity theorists would have it – could result in visible alternative orders (‘self-consistent aggregates’ of a different kind)? If this is the case,

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we could finally say, ‘Development is dead, let it rest in peace,’ while culture, nature and the economy would again be alive and free to be articulated to other dreams, such as gender and social equality, material justice and sustainability. Take two Wendy: I have just completed a three-year project that invited transnational feminists to write about transnational feminist movements’ contributions to knowledge production and social change. What was evident in all 38 chapters is that engaged ‘small’ political struggles of feminist movements around peace, rights, sexual autonomy, economic and ecological justice were all caught up in the large politics of neoliberal globalization. In one of the essays, Linda E. Carty and Chandra T. Mohanty interviewed 33 feminists of different generations on how they confront the growth and consolidation of neoliberal states and transnational processes of exploitation in their own place-based struggles for gender justice. They surveyed their thoughts on the significance of difference or power, and the North–South divide, and their reflections on building and sustaining solidarities across colonial, racial, sexual, class and national borders (Carty and Mohanty 2015). It was exciting to me to see in their essay, and in the rest of the book, how both theory and practical action have led to feminist political practices that are unafraid to work with the contradictions, and even the possibilities, of the asymmetries of globalization. Arturo: I think we need to keep an eye on both the processes of domination going on today under the rubric of ‘globalization’ (neoliberal, capitalistic, patriarchal, modern, often coded White, etc.) and how they reconstitute themselves constantly. For instance, some of these processes are advanced today from non-Western locations, particularly China but also the rest of the BRICS, leading to what some call a ‘de-Westernization’ of capitalist globalization. The practices of resistance and reconstruction of worlds and the relation between the two are all important as they shape each other. It is important not to reduce the latter to the former. Some people see the emergence of the ‘commons’, for instance, as a self-organizing liberatory movement that, while in the interstices of capitalism, is freeing up territories for other projects of being in place and of being communal. In our most recent work (with Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser), we speak of struggles in defence of place and territory against the ravages of extractivist development (for example, large-scale mining and agro-fuel plantations) as

intersection of women, culture and development | 291 ‘ontological struggles’: that is, struggles for the perseverance of other (nondualist, relational, non-liberal, non-capitalistic, often communal) modes of being. Relational worlds are, of course, deeply entangled with dominant worlds, yet at the same time they cannot be reduced or completely defined by the latter. Relational worlds are modern, but not only that; they exist within capitalist economies but are more than that. Understanding this ‘more than’ – an excess of sorts, as Marisol calls it, in relation to hegemonic worlds – is crucial today, particularly in the face of the devastating ecological and social crises with which we are confronted. I think this applies to women’s struggles as much as to other oppositional and resistance struggles, such as those of ethnic minorities. Wendy: I want to conclude our conversation by reflecting on two very different observations of social movement meshworks’ interactions with power – even if I would hesitate to call it the death of development. I would see it more positively as hope for new pluralisms that women’s movements and social movements are positing in the defence of place against what you have called ‘the economic and cultural avalanches of recent decades’. The fact that a growing number of people and groups demand the right to their own cultures, ecologies and economies as part of the modern social world can no longer be easily accommodated into any liberal or neoliberal doctrine (Escobar 2001: 169–70). One observation is the vision of Sir Brian Urquhart, the high-level UN policy-maker, writing in the New York Review of Books on the UN’s role to fight evil (his words) – the ethnic conflicts, genocides, wars and tyrannies of the nation-states. He sees civil society ‘through the Internet strengthening the influence of activists and concerned citizens throughout the world’ to reinforce what he describes as the lonely call of the then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to achieve ‘changes in behaviour and attitude of people and nations’ to ensure international and human security with the rights of the human individual as paramount (Urquhart 2000: 22). The UN, in short, would play God’s police, stepping in where the nation-state fails or is itself perpetrating evil with a cyber-charged civil society at its side. Such a vision depicts the UN as the phoenix rising from the ashes of the crumbling states. It is the death of the nation-state, development transformed into an even greater morally charged project with global citizens and global government. It is a worrying vision where

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place-based concerns about globalization are absent, and it forcibly reminded me of the limited number of people with whom we can have this conversation. Take two Wendy: These worries remain, but I am less engaged now in the UN’s by now ‘post-2015’ debates, which seem to be cycling back into the sustainability of the early 1990s in the new proposal for 17 sustainable development goals as opposed to the eight millennium development goals. The UN has certainly not risen to the challenges of the economic crises, increasing militarization and surveillance societies. The numerization and standardization of life, however, are being challenged in many other spaces where alternative views of culture, economy and nature flourish – such as in the continuation of J. K. Gibson-Graham’s work in the community economies research network – and in other places of intellectual and practical engagement in alternatives to hegemonic capitalism on- and off-line.3 We ended our 2003 conversation with reference to Marisa Belausteguigoitia’s work with Zapatista women and the intersection of culture, women and development in her narrative on the silencing of Chiapas women’s demands within the revolutionary movement (Belausteguigoitia 2000). The concluding question we asked remains: why, as we build alliances and seek out solidarity, do gender issues and women’s marginalization inside and outside their communities continue to be seen as an ‘add-on’ rather than integrally connected to the relational asymmetries of power? How do we tackle patriarchal relations, the physical oppression of women as well as the continued confining of women to representations of culture, as we release ourselves from the development project? I would begin to answer that question rather differently with reference to the issue of gender in decolonial discourse, which opens up the question of ‘woman’ as a political category. For many feminists, including myself, abandoning the idea of women as the subject of feminism is both a threat and a challenge, as it opens up debates about the ‘true nature’ of feminist politics. This terrain is emerging as part of ongoing intercultural dialogues among feminists that explore the possibilities of more inclusive forms of feminist engagements and politics that acknowledge the complex interconnections of diverse forms of power and inequality. Learning from my friends and colleagues Rosalba Icaza and Rolando Vázquez, I see the importance of explaining ‘why and in which ways the notion of coloniality of gender calls for a reflection on

intersection of women, culture and development | 293 how we approach the epistemic grounds of white feminism, of development studies and also the modernity/coloniality debate’ (Icaza and Vázquez 2016). They point out that ‘the notion of the coloniality of gender shifts the perspective of knowledge from the abstract disembodied position of male and western centred paradigms to a view from the historical embodied experience’ (ibid.). Like them, I see this shift in the perspective of knowledge as enabling a move beyond the analytic of gender and the subject ‘woman’ towards recognizing coalitional practices of liberation and resistance. Arturo: I couldn’t agree with you more, Wendy. What I hear in your last statement is also a call for resisting the idea that we can understand radical politics only, or even primarily, theoretically. Academics try to find theoretical solutions to problems that can only be partially understood, let alone solved, theoretically. I believe more and more academics and intellectuals are coming to realize the limits of theorizing from within the academy, and the need to step out of the academy into domains of experience, such as the space of social struggles. Feminists have pointed the way in this direction for some time. It is also the lesson many scholars are deriving today from efforts at thinking from those epistemes associated with the profoundly relational ontologies enacted by many groups today worldwide (primarily, but not only, indigenous peoples and place-based groups), from some spiritual traditions, such as Buddhism, or from their engagement with non-humans in various ways. Notes 1. In preparing this revised version, we have preserved most of the original text and added new sections labelled ‘Take two’ and printed in italics. 2. In the early 2000s, the Society for International Development undertook a project ‘Women and the politics of place’, which took as its premise that it is misleading to see globalization as all-encompassing or that concrete places are disappearing

or being rendered inconsequential for women’s lives. Instead, it argued that political struggles around place are a source of strategic vision that provides us with clues about the meaning of politics and development in the global age (see Harcourt and Escobar 2005). 3. See http://www. communityeconomies.org (see also Gibson-Graham et al. 2013).

VISIONS THREE

ALTE RNA T I V E S T O D E V E L O P MENT : OF LOV E , D R E A M S A N D R E V OLUT ION

John Foran

The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. (Che Guevara) To make love means that you have to love and understand love. And that’s what the basis of revolution is about. Who ever said that love ain’t part of the revolution? (stic, rapper, in Blu #8)

This essay evokes and pays homage to several beautiful films which have always inspired me to keep going in the struggle: Love, Women, and Flowers; Chile: Obstinate Memory; Maria’s Story (see further the essay by Maria Navarrete in this book) and Jonah who will be 25 in the year 2000, some of which I will discuss later. I’ve spent most of my scholarly life studying various aspects of revolutions – their causes, who makes them (and why), what role culture plays in them and, finally, what difference do they make? In this essay, I’d like to offer a few thoughts on what they might teach us about alternatives to development, and how we might draw on a women, culture and development understanding to think about how revolutions might achieve better outcomes in the future – a rather large and speculative topic. First of all, I would say that revolutions and development go together: that is, there is something about the inequalities and dependency entailed by Third World development that contributes significantly to revolutions where they have occurred. My own understanding draws on the notion of dependent development, taken from the groundbreaking work of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto (1979). The concept denotes a decidedly doubleedged process: economic growth (as conventionally measured in terms of GNP, trade, industrialization and so forth), accentuated by severe limitations (growing inequality, substandard housing, lack of

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educational opportunities and health care, inflation, unemployment and more). This combination fuels grievances across class, ethnic and gender lines and is found in the structural background of the revolutions I have studied, in Mexico 1910, China 1949, Cuba 1959, Iran 1979 and Nicaragua 1979, among others. Revolutions everywhere have attempted to put in place new forms of development – usually socialist – to solve some of these problems, typically with mixed results. Revolutions have many times improved people’s lives, including women’s, yet everywhere fallen short of the dreams of those who made them. This can be attributed to many things: outside pressures from governments, such as my own country’s unspeakably shameful record of intervention in the Third World; the limits of poverty and dependency which continue to exist in revolutionary societies that lack the resources and time to overcome them; and differences among revolutionaries about how to construct a better society – that is, their inevitable flaws as people, and their enmeshment in structures of patriarchy and racism. Let us recall briefly a few of the twentieth century’s revolutionary moments: • In Russia, in 1917, the feminist Alexandra Kollontai was one of the Bolshevik leaders, calling for ‘free love’, in the sense that one should be able to love whom one chose; that marriage should be both harder to contract and divorce easier to obtain; and that men should take on their share of the emotional work of the family – ideas that were not adopted and for which she suffered great personal and political loss during her long life (see Kollontai 1977). • In revolutionary Cuba in the 1970s, legislation was in fact passed that men do 50 per cent of the housework – perhaps showing the influence of Kollontai? This too was something which proved unenforceable, given prevailing cultural attitudes about gender roles – but it points to the willingness of the Cuban revolutionaries to confront their own contradictions (the film Strawberry and Chocolate affords a poignant glimpse of how this worked out in the realm of sexuality, another vexed issue in Cuba) (see Randall 1993). • In Iran, women stood in the front ranks of the demonstrations which faced down the Shah’s army in 1978 and 1979, only to be hemmed in afterwards by the Islamic regime’s rigid views of

a lt e r n at i v e s to d e v e lo pm e n t | 299 gender roles (it is noteworthy that Iranian women have continued to struggle creatively in many ways for their rights, with some success of late) (see Afary 1997). • In the revolutions of the 1980s in Central America, women participated in growing numbers – most scholars put this at one-third of the guerrilla forces – and took on ever greater responsibilities, yet still suffered so much sexism at the hands of their male comrades that after the revolutions they started their own feminist movements for autonomy in Nicaragua and El Salvador (two superb works on this topic are Shayne 2000 and Kampwirth 2002). What these experiences seem to share is vigorous activism by women; a degree of success for both women and people generally; and a rollback of gains, a falling short of promise, that stands as a revealing measure of the limited outcomes of all revolutions to this day. Of love and dreams What does love have to do with it? H. L. Mencken famously claimed that ‘Revolution is the sex of politics.’ By this he meant that in revolution lay excitement and drama, and the potential for change. Women have long realized this. As Paula Allen and Eve Ensler write in The Feminist Memoir Project: ‘Being an activist means owning your desire’ (Allen and Ensler 1998: 425). And for Alice Walker, in the aptly named Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism: There is always a moment in any kind of struggle when one feels in full bloom. Vivid. Alive. One might be blown to bits in such a moment and still be at peace. Martin Luther King, Jr., at the mountaintop. Gandhi dying with the name of God on his lips. Sojourner Truth bearing her breasts at a women’s rights convention in 1851. Harriet Tubman exposing her revolver to some of the slaves she had freed, who, fearing an unknown freedom, looked longingly backward to their captivity, thereby endangering the freedom of all … During my years of being close to people engaged in changing the world I have seen fear turn into courage. Sorrow into joy. Funerals into celebrations. Because whatever the consequences, people, standing side by side, have expressed who they really are, and that ultimately they

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believe in the love of the world and each other enough to be that – which is the foundation of activism. (1997: xxiii) Latin American women revolutionaries also speak to this vision of love and passion as the basis of revolutionary feminist activism. For Vilma Vázquez, president of Madres Demandientes in El Salvador: Feminism is a struggle that has to see itself with the other struggles … It should have a foundation of love of people. … I do have the critique that feminism becomes elitist, it becomes for those at the top, and it has to have a foundation of love, hope, and freedom, as well as a search for dignity, of human dignity and in this case for women and men. … Changes happen with negotiation, debate, and disputes always struggling with men and women. (as interviewed and quoted in Shayne 2000: 256–7) Love, then, is arguably the emotion that most strongly underlies the vital force that impels many ordinary people into extraordinary acts, across time and place. Expressing hope and optimism, it provides a constructive counterpoint to those other powerful animating emotions, hatred and anger. It is something that the revolutionaries of the future will need to learn to nurture and build upon. Dreams, too, can feed revolutions. In Patricio Guzmán’s remarkable, powerful film, Chile: Obstinate Memory, the former director of public relations for Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity (UP) government, ex-professor Ernesto Malbran, says: The UP was a ship of dreamers propelled by a collective dream, which ran aground. The dream was to carry along and unite the entire country. It was a dream of justice: the right to an education, good health, and shelter. Dreams that don’t come true confirm the saying: ‘Don’t believe in dreams as they are not nourishing.’ That’s wrong. It was a noble dream. The failure of a dream is hard to take. Especially knowing you can’t progress without dreams. Because dreaming is part of the way we apprehend life. (Guzmán 1997, translation from the subtitles)

a lt e r n at i v e s to d e v e lo pm e n t | 301 The film is a powerful meditation on the meanings of remembering such dreams and desires and transmitting them, despite censorship and repression, to a new generation. This process of recalling and teaching memories has profound effects both on those who recall the events they lived through, and those too young to have experienced them. When Guzmán shows his earlier epic documentary, The Battle of Chile, to a group of teenage schoolchildren, many at first try to justify the coup that killed the UP’s dreams, but eventually some weep openly at the dawning knowledge of a historical opportunity missed and of their parents’ world of locked-up secrets. That this dream is still alive, that it did not fail, is suggested by the detention of Pinochet in England and his political eclipse in Chile. As Ariel Dorfman notes of these recent events: ‘It’s only a dream … yet … The Pinochet case will remain a fundamental step in this search for a better humanity, a better mind for a different sort of mankind and womankind, the arduous construction of a universal consciousness’ (Dorfman 2000: 50). The power of love, and of magic, and their connection to dreams of breaking the chain of violence, is underlined fictionally as well in The House of the Spirits (1985), Isabel Allende’s moving account of Chilean history. Of Visions If love and dreams lie at the emotional roots of struggles for ‘real development’ (for the word ‘development’ must be reappropriated and revalued), what forms might they take in the future? I would suggest considering this question under the following aspects.

Love of social justice Mercedes Cañas, a Salvadoran sociologist and president of the Centro de Estudios Feministas, a small co-operative, renders their goals in these terms: We have two fundamental axes though we don’t always put them into practice: one is the struggle against violence and for tenderness, we say for relationships filled with tenderness, and second is the struggle against neo-liberalism, and the right for everyone to have a happy life. (as interviewed and quoted in Shayne 2000: 260)

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Revolutionaries in many places have articulated this goal in terms of social justice, always culturally defined yet remarkably consistent in their insistence that this involves the meeting of basic needs for everyone – a notion embraced of late by the World Bank in a patronizing, if well-intentioned way – increasingly coupled with the realization, in North and South, that this entails ecological sustainability as well. As Gandhi put it long ago: ‘Development is a moral force that does not accept poverty, does not accept the widening disparities between the rich and the poor and does not accept the overexploitation of natural resources’ (paraphrased by Chowdhry 1989: 145). Or as ‘Old Antonio’, the mythical Chiapan character embodied in many of Subcomandante Marcos’s communiqués, puts it: Antonio dreams that the land he works belongs to him. He dreams that his sweat earns him justice and truth; he dreams of schools that cure ignorance and medicines that frighten death. He dreams that his house has light and his table is full; he dreams that the land is free, and that his people govern themselves reasonably. He dreams that he is at peace with himself and with the world … A wind comes up and everything stirs. Antonio rises, and walks to meet the others. He has heard that his desire is the desire of many, and he goes to look for them … In this country everyone dreams. Now it is time to wake up. (Marcos 1995: 50)

Dreams of inclusion This leads into a second key to revolutionary development: what Amartya Sen has termed ‘the freedom to develop our human capabilities’, or ‘development as freedom’ (Sen 2000). For Lorena Peña, FMLN deputy in El Salvador and president of the prominent women’s organization MAM, this would mean cultivation of a broad vision of inclusiveness: Feminism is … a political current that proposes a different society, from women, but not only for women. It’s a women’s proposal for a different kind of society for men and women and I believe it’s of great value for this reason … For me this is what feminism is and it has at its center to break all forms of

a lt e r n at i v e s to d e v e lo pm e n t | 303 oppression and exploitation between men and women, between rich and poor, between old and young, between races. (as interviewed and quoted in Shayne 2000: 258) This resonates closely with her comrades Vilma Vázquez and Mercedes Cañas quoted above. Elsewhere, Peña has said: ‘A proposal of the left that doesn’t integrate the elements of class, gender and race, is not viable or objective, and it doesn’t go to the root of our problems’ (quoted in Polakoff 1996: 22). And, it might be added, a strategy that doesn’t rely on a radical deepening of freedom and democracy into participation across these lines, whatever the difficulties, will fall short. Of hows and mights: the power and magic of love A large question remains, of course: if there are to be revolutions in the future – and I do believe that the era of revolution has not closed with the end of the Cold War; indeed, I believe that the downand undersides of ‘globalization’ will spark struggles of all kinds in the future – how might they have better outcomes? (I take up this question in more detail in Foran 2002.) One of the most touching filmic depictions of the revolutionary life is offered by John Berger and Alain Tanner’s Jonah who will be 25 in the year 2000/Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000, a 1976 look at the aftermath of May 1968 in France. In the film’s final scene, the worker-intellectual Mathieu drives to work in the dreary gloom of winter on his moped, and delivers a moving monologue to his friends and wife, and to his newborn son, Jonah: I want to try to weave the threads of your desires together so that they won’t scatter. I’m returning to work. I’ll be exploited. I’ll try to tie all this together, to unify the field of your desires so that they’ll function as levers. I’m cold. I am the twentieth century, Jonah. All they ask is simply that I accept everything quietly. I can’t touch the goods they pay me for. I’m manual labor, manual labor on my bike … Jonah, the game’s not up. Let’s take it from the moment when you learn to walk. Right to the one when the police and the army fire on thousands like you. From your first reading lesson right up to

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the final democratic decision: to yield nothing more whatever the danger. Will it be better for you? The better is systematically set aside. I’ll say: no one’s going to make decisions for us anymore. The first time maybe nothing will happen, the tenth there’ll be a committee, the hundredth time a strike and the hundred and first time, another reading lesson for you, Jonah. As many times as I’ll get on my bike to go to work. No, more: as many times as the days of my life. (Berger and Tanner 1983: 159–60, translation slightly modified by me) In an earlier scene, set in a greenhouse which Mathieu and the local children have turned into a school, we find him asking them questions concerning the attribution of consciousness to things and to objects: Does the wind feel the clouds? Does the bicycle know it’s moving? Can water feel anything? And what if it’s boiling? Where does the sun’s name come from? Does it know we call it ‘sun’? When we move does the moon move with us? And if we stop? And if we start out again in the other direction? (Berger and Tanner 1983: 120–22) The metaphor-image of stopping the path we are all on and setting out on another is the recurrent dream of revolutions, and a profoundly poignant one. Finally, we might seek concrete answers in the ongoing events in Chiapas, where indigenous women have been struggling to claim the right to define the movement alongside men from the beginning. This is an incredibly creative and dynamic movement, with a real chance of leading to a more democratic, less racist and sexist, and more egalitarian society in Mexico. Love of life, love of people, love of justice, all play a role in its core values. These have been expressed in marvellously poetic ways and strikingly beautiful symbolic acts, as well as in courageous organizing against state violence and for alternative forms of development in the communities of the Lacandón jungle and the Mayan highlands of Mexico (see Foran 2002).

a lt e r n at i v e s to d e v e lo pm e n t | 305 I close with the most famous of the many wonderful slogans of the May 1968 student and worker movement in France: ‘Power to the imagination!’ I believe that it is imagination, coupled with the courage to dream and love, and to transmit these, in many ways, that may yet change the world for the better.

D RE AM S A N D P R O CE S S I N D E V ELOPMENT TH E ORY A N D P R A CT I CE

Light Carruyo

El derecho de soñar no figura entre los treinta derechos humanos que las Naciones Unidas proclamaron a fines de 1948. Pero si no fuera por él, y por las aguas que da de beber, los demás derechos se morirían de sed. ‘The right to dream is not among the thirty human rights that the United Nations proclaimed late in 1948. But if it were not for the right to dream, and for the drinking water it provides, the rest of the rights would die of thirst.’ (Eduardo Galeano 1997: 97–8)

Development as a field of research and practice provides a language to talk about the relationships between nations and economies, but continues to struggle with understanding the complicated relationships between people. Understanding these relationships, as well as people’s hopes, dreams, visions and the meanings that they give to the process of improving their quality of living, is at the centre of understanding development.1 This essay is about a vision for the future of development in Latin America, yet it offers no new theory, only a suggestion: put what people think about, care about and dream about first, and work from there. The women, culture and development approach proposed by the editors of this collection challenges the idea that development looks the same in every corner of the world, and suggests that progress is defined locally. That is not to say that development is agreed on by every member of any given community, for within communities there exist differences of power – such as those based on hierarchies of wealth, sex/gender and race. The emphasis on agency and culture provides not only a way to understand what people think about, care about and dream about, but also a way to analyse these differences in power. Importantly, this approach also proposes a critique of development that is not founded in ‘Third World victim status’. In other words, the critique is not that development is something that is

dre ams and process | 307 ‘done to’ the Third World; instead, there is an acknowledgement that Third World actors, elite and non-elite, male and female, organized and not organized, contribute to the construction of the discourse and practice of development. An integration of these lines of inquiry on women, culture and development challenges conventional understandings of development, because it permits a careful analysis of local level processes without losing sight of their constitutive role in relationships between nations and economies and vice versa. Case study: La Ciénaga de Manabao When I began my research on women organizing for basic needs in La Ciénaga de Manabao, in the Dominican Republic, I was told very few development projects were underway in the area. La Ciénaga is small, about 400 habitations spread across seven small groupings of houses in the Cordillera Central of the Dominican Republic. The local economy relies primarily on the sale of tayota, a consistent squash-like crop, and tourism to Armando Bermudez National Park. The direct recipients of cash in these two areas are men. There are many interests present in La Ciénaga, not only because of the park, but because it is the closest community to the Cuenca Alta del Yaque, the source of water for both the northern and southern regions of the Dominican Republic. As one local farmer and guide explained to me, ‘Everyone depends on this water, even if you buy a plantain from the truck that was grown in the south, you can buy the plantain because we are taking care of this water.’ Given the importance of both the Cuenca and the park as a tourist attraction, the region is eligible for support from national and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and has attracted projects directed at small-scale agricultural production, ecotourism, the arts, reforestation, organic agriculture, soil conservation and park and trail management, to name a few. Yet, when I first arrived and asked local people about the projects that were present in the community, the most frequent responses were ‘none’, ‘very few’ and, most commonly, aquí nunca llega nada – ‘nothing ever comes here’. In my interviews I heard this many times and I believed it. In fact, it is true that much of the funding that is channelled to the Cuenca and surrounding communities radically diminishes, or even disappears in the hands of mediating organizations and local individuals. Nevertheless, aquí nunca llega nada has at least two

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meanings depending on whom one asks. It is used as a way to create and manipulate victim status in order to receive assistance, especially in response to government officials or visitors who are perceived as potentially offering donations or projects. In interviews, when I probed the frequent complaint that ‘nothing ever comes here’, its other meanings began to emerge. For instance: Light: Pero a mi me hablaron de un proyecto de café para las mujeres. ‘But I’ve been told about a coffee project for the women.’ Isabella: Si, llego. Pero como que no le dimos importancía. ‘Yes, it came. But we didn’t really place much importance on it.’ So although projects, such as the coffee project I inquired about, did in fact arrive, it was ‘not given importance’. Therefore, ‘nothing ever comes here’ can also mean, ‘It came but we did not value it, give it importance.’ The project was proposed, but did not fit into local women’s routine, or their vision of what could be worthwhile, enjoyable, profitable. Development NGOs, the government and even individuals pass through La Ciénaga and want to make a difference, want the community to ‘develop’. They feel that a community that is poor – where not every family has a latrine, where babies do not drink milk, where the first thing they notice are children’s bare feet, bare bottoms and bloated stomachs – would be thrilled to partake in any project that comes their way. That is the expectation, and if people do not want to participate they are lazy or ungrateful or ignorant. Several people have said this to me about Ciénaguero/as. In my eight months of fieldwork I have seen a series of projects arrive. Most recently, a Spanish NGO has begun to build a greenhouse to grow vegetables. The greenhouse project has been facilitated by a Dominican NGO that has been working in the community for several years. During planning meetings with the Dominican NGO, I mentioned that I felt we – the residents of La Ciénaga and myself – did not clearly understand the project. However, in the meetings community members said they were in favour of building the greenhouse. When I asked outside the meetings, several said que lo hagan, ‘sure they should build it’ (emphasis mine), and told me it was a way to protect

dre ams and process | 309 crops from the sun and rain. However, not one person spoke of why it would be beneficial. When the women’s association leadership checked with the local agronomist he said he saw no need for a greenhouse in the area. Upon the arrival of the Spanish NGO there was a brief meeting in which the Dominican NGO introduced the crew to the association and reminded people that this greenhouse was de la comunidad ‘of the community’. Therefore, all association members should work with the Spaniards who had come such a long way to support them. In the second week of work, there was only a handful of community members participating in the building of the greenhouse. When I asked other residents about the project, they said they thought it was ‘very important’. The general understanding of the uses of the greenhouse was the same. So while there was funding and labour available from outside the community, the community was not ‘giving importance’ to the project even though, when asked, they spoke of its importance. Money and supplies seem only a part of what a development project means. Communities have hopes about the future of their communities; it is necessary to talk about them, to talk about how and why and whether the project of a greenhouse might be a part of those dreams. The reaction of the local agronomist regarding the greenhouse is also bound to influence how Ciénagueras/ os feel about the greenhouse and to impact directly the level of participation. In an effort to support development in the community the Dominican NGO took the greenhouse project on. But there was no talk about the community’s needs, desires, visions for the future, just the assumption that once the project began it was the responsibility of all to rally support. Several times I heard both the Spanish and Dominican NGOs remind community members – ‘Remember this is yours, this is for you.’ The merits of a greenhouse aside, how and by what process is it of the community? It was neither born nor bred in La Ciénaga; it was handed over full-grown and the community was asked to sacrifice itself to bathe, clothe and love it as its own. I tell this story partly to get it off my chest – it is frustrating to watch this in a community that I have grown to care about – but there are also lessons to be learned. I believe in alliances as a way to

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work towards development. The Dominican NGO and the Spanish NGO share a vision for the future of the community. In La Ciénaga, most people share basic ideas of what they want for the future of La Ciénaga. In fact, what they wish for and dream of is consistent with what many envision – from USAID to Peace Corps and grassroots organizers: education, health care and plenty to eat. In interviews with community members, many people mentioned working with people from outside the community to improve the quality of life in La Ciénaga. For instance: Light: ¿Cual es el deseo suyo para el futuro de La Cíénaga? ‘What is your wish for the future of La Ciénaga?’ Estella: Esta gente están medio fríos, por eso, porque creen que ya todo el mundo se olvido de ellos … El deseo mío es que La Ciénaga eche pa’lante. Que La Ciénaga eche pa’lante, que La Ciénaga crezca en dinero en sensia (sic). Que sepan mucho la gente, y que en el futuro algo se vea porque si uno vive todo el tiempo en la misma, todo el tiempo aplastado, aplastado y nunca se ve nada nunca hay nada. ‘These folks are cooling off, because they think the world has forgotten them. My wish is that La Ciénaga move forward. That La Ciénaga move forward and that it grow in wealth and knowledge. That people know a lot and that in the future we see something because if one lives this way, always squashed, squashed and you never see anything you never have anything.’ Light: ¿Y como se haría eso? Que crezca así [la Ciénaga]. ‘How can this be done? That it grow like that?’ Estella: Adio! La gente luchando. Si la gente no lucha no crece nada. ‘Adio! People fighting. If people don’t fight then nothing grows.’ Light: ¿Cual es el deseo suyo para el futuro de La Ciénaga? ‘What is your wish for the future of La Ciénaga?’ Josefina: Bueno que se halle donde trabajar, que manden que manden algo de comida porque imagínese uno vive flojo, luchando es por la comida es que uno vive. Y siempre que se acuerden de uno que le

dre ams and process | 311 traigan algo a uno. Y que lo traiga para todos. Yo tampoco quiero que me lo traigan a mi, porque como uno necesita otro necesita también. ‘Well, that we be able to find work here, that they send something, that they send food because we live broke, you see – we live struggling to eat. That people remember to bring something for us. I don’t just want stuff for myself, as much as one needs it, so do the others.’ Both of these responses suggest that community members want to work with non-community members to improve the quality of life in the area. The first suggests a more active role for the community members and the second a more passive one. Yet both indicate that working in alliance with organizations such as the Dominican and Spanish NGOs is desirable. To develop an alliance model of development requires knowing, or listening to, what people place importance on and why. A pedagogy of development could provide a way to work towards a mutual understanding of goals and processes for accomplishing them. For instance, it is not that Ciénagueros don’t understand why it is important to use organic fertilizers and pesticides to protect the river, it is that they are afraid it is not viable. It is too risky. La tierra está cansada y hay que usar química. ‘The land is tired and requires chemicals.’ Government and private funds that could be invested in minimizing the risks are used for talks on the importance of protecting natural resources. Development is not only about the rural community effort, but about urban citizens, nations and international trade. Farmers depend on markets, consumers and policies that are far removed from their day-to-day experiences. At the same time, their day-to-day experiences are embedded in a complicated web of interests. In my research on development I am concerned with the ways in which women navigate these webs of interest in their community that make demands on their time. That is to say, the process by which women are working for well-being in their lives and community involves constant negotiation with NGOs, tourists, husbands, mothers and their own sense of what are necessary or appropriate courses of action for them to take as women. It is through this process that women in La Ciénaga become co-creators of what development means in their community, of their daily practices and visions for the future.

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In interviews with both men and women in La Ciénaga I took the opportunity to ask about their visions for the future – education, work and health were all priorities, along with not having to worry so much about where the next meal would be coming from. Many wanted the opportunity to have schooling beyond sixth grade available locally should they opt for it. Visions and dreams for the future are shared by many, but it is the ‘how’, the process, that should be of concern to us. It is ‘how’ and ‘what’ one is willing to give up that is not always agreed upon. Why are students in the United States unwilling to give up shopping at Gap and why are Ciénagueras/os unwilling to give up control over their own time schedule, for instance, even when it is the ‘sensible’ thing to do? A while ago I saw the Cuban film Lista de Espera (directed by Juan Carlos Tabío and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, based on a story by Arturo Arango). The premise is that a group of people gets stuck waiting for a bus in a run-down terminal in rural Cuba and falls asleep. In a collective dream, the group creates a communal living situation. They transform the terminal into a beautiful home, with gardens, libraries, plenty to eat – a place where every member of the group is valued, where gay men, black women, mechanics, engineers and bohemians, the old and the young, become family. When all wake up at the end of the film, each person remembers the dream and values its beauty, but none stick around the terminal to make it a reality; understandably they all have places to go, families to see, jobs to do. The sensible thing for Cienaguéras/os to do in the case of the greenhouse project may be to work collectively to build it in order to generate food for local consumption and cash income. But on the other hand, there are the issues of competing projects, unsupportive husbands, rain (which makes it prime time to clean up the tayota crops) scepticism, mistrust among community members, lack of interest in vegetables. Additionally, the dream of a tourist-based economy has been ingrained into local sense-making in an attempt both to encourage reforestation and make up for the lack of markets for small agricultural producers. My dream for the future of development in Latin America is that we stick around; that we dream of the future and that we commit to the process; that we develop strategies to understand and negotiate what is sensible to whom and why.

dre ams and process | 313 Note 1. I undertake a project in the field of development with many hesitations. I’ve considered expelling the word development from my vocabulary for being too loaded. Loaded with the implication of a linear process that, once accomplished, lets First World nations off the hook and leaves the rest of the world faced with the nowin task of progressing to that level. Loaded like an index finger used to point at the ‘underdeveloped’, either to reprimand or paternalistically offer

assistance. Perhaps development could be replaced with something like sustainable well-being. The ‘well-being’ defined locally, and the ‘sustainable’ defined locally and globally. In this model the United States would not be off the hook, because patterns of consumption on which well-being are based are not sustainable. And moreover, well-being in the United States is directly linked to the lack of well-being in most of the rest of the world.

TH E S U B JE CT I V E S I D E O F D E V ELOP MENT : S OU RC E S O F W E L L - B E I N G , R ES OUR C ES F OR S TRUG G L E

Linda Klouzal

The problem of development contains an existential question: how do people deal with suffering? In every life there is suffering, yet regions that have enormous material problems are characterized by hardship on an everyday basis that is often difficult to imagine. A development focus on suffering privileges a humanitarian agenda, because its implicit concern is the immediate well-being of people. The issue of suffering adds to scholarship by broadening the category of development. To address suffering, the scholar must ask both about material conditions and the experience of hardship, countering a tendency in development research to ignore subjectivity. One important issue raised by this approach is whether scholars can study women’s suffering without contributing to the depiction of women as victims in public discourse. The problem, however, is not that current scholarship and the media pay too much attention to women’s pain, but how they characterize that pain. Attending to emotional pain can heighten awareness of women’s agency. Subjective responses tap into human agency and reflect the complexity and depth of people, a process that involves confronting personalities, values, emotions and relationships as well as the ways psychological needs go unmet. A woman’s experience contains her definition of the situation. Narratives about suffering are stories about women struggling against conditions that threaten their dignity; gaining insight into actors’ internal lives allows audiences to develop a complex and empathic understanding of women’s suffering. Such an approach also prompts scholars to examine the conditions and relations that threaten women’s dignity, attachments, autonomy and self-fulfilment. By looking at what women’s experiences mean to them, scholars gain insight into under-represented perspectives. This approach broadens the definition of resources to include non-material

su bj e c ti v e si de of development | 315 responses such as avenues of self-expression and relationships of trust. It foregrounds the problems of women in a way that facilitates creative solutions. In this essay I reflect on the potential of a women, culture and development paradigm to address subjective issues relevant to development, by drawing on preliminary impressions from research I conducted in 1999 on women who fought in Cuba’s revolutionary insurrection during the 1950s. These women’s struggle, as defined by them, targeted social problems such as poverty, health care and access to education. An impressive aspect of these interviews is the sense of vitality, self-fulfilment and pride the women conveyed in telling their stories. This comes across although more than 40 years have passed. More than moving tales, their recollections are occasions of, and insights into, something that helped nurture and strengthen the women during the fight – memories that still sustain them. Studying women revolutionaries allows one to examine the relationship between politics and development not just at the structural level, but also through an analysis of the experiences of people who pursued a particular vision of development. I treat development here as not merely a set of programmes, policies or a series of historical events, but also as about the preservation of a person’s integrity – material, emotional and physical. It is a lifelong issue for every citizen, for every woman. The issue of what constitutes development thus revolves at least partly around such questions as: • What sustains women at the local level during their struggles for a better life? • What gives one a sense of vitality and self-fulfilment over the long run? • What sustains a person’s sense of self, pride, creativity and humour – evidence of psychological well-being – under conditions of hardship and change? • What enables women as women and as members of specific communities within diverse cultural milieus to confront suffering and to survive and grow? As scholars, we need to address explicitly the non-material aspects of women’s lives, their psychological, relational and emotional wellbeing. There are two general questions I would like to see Women,

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Culture and Development scholars address. First, what forms of suffering are the women we study experiencing, and why? Second, how are women sustaining themselves and what types of changes would contribute to their continued well-being? This essay targets a specific subjective problem that is one aspect of the larger issue of suffering: how women deal with trauma. A trauma refers to the combined affective, physiological and cognitive response to a serious external threat to one’s physical and emotional well-being.1 Trauma is a central issue of psychology. It was a subject of Freud’s early studies. Trauma is currently understood in diverse ways by different schools of psychology; here I use the term trauma in a general, not clinical, sense.2 The ubiquity of traumatic experience in much of the world makes it an important subject for development studies. Trauma in a woman’s life exacerbates her material problems by adding another layer of trouble on top of a precarious situation. A woman who can confront her internal pain is able to seek creative solutions to her considerable external difficulties and take action.3 Studying trauma is consistent with an emphasis on culture in the women, culture and development approach as trauma research highlights women’s subjectivity, lived experience and their means of overcoming the harmful impact of traumatic events. Here, I offer some preliminary observations about resources that appear to sustain women despite externally stressful experiences. The women I interviewed in Cuba, because of the political nature of their struggle, are a valuable source for preliminary discussion about this issue. Virtually all of these women suffer visibly from the loss of people close to them. Their own lives had been in danger at times and they lived with the constant threat of loss of loved ones during the insurrection. Some were on the run for extended lengths of time. A few had been seriously physically hurt or tortured as a result of their participation. What is striking about these women is that although they clearly suffer from trauma, they also appear vital, have a strong sense of self-efficacy and express positive feelings about their actions and the future.4 In assessing the current situation in Cuba, many expressed continued conviction in the importance of their work and the future of the revolution. For example, when asked about the longevity of the achievements of the revolution in the face of Cuba’s current hardships, one woman replied: ‘I have a great

subj e c ti v e si de of development | 317 deal of hope. This is what we fight for and we are not discouraged because we have seen the outcome among the students, the youth … we have seen how they have bettered themselves’ (interview with the author, 1999). Another woman ties her work in the literacy campaign to her confidence in the future. I’m going to give you the example of my own work. We launched the literacy campaign with the government, and all the work associated with this campaign is being continued today, nothing has been lost. We launched the literacy campaign – this is just an example, but it applies to everything else – and we keep on working on that, we won’t go back to illiteracy. We keep on advancing and maintaining our gains. And these are precisely the aspirations you find everywhere else in Latin America, aspirations that have not been achieved yet. (interview with the author, 1999) Despite their advancing years, these women maintain a keen interest in the well-being of their communities. Their demeanour, tone and stories reflect pride in their achievements and the achievements of their revolution. So, what specifically about their struggle and activism has this therapeutic, life-sustaining quality? I will suggest three ways the women sustained themselves in the face of considerable trauma, all connected to insurrectionary activism.5 The first is a sense of one’s place in history, and awareness of a legacy of struggle and suffering similar to one’s own. The second is the importance of community and secure relational ties. The third is the memory, through stories, of empowering acts. There appears to be a positive psychological aspect to trauma victims having a sense of place in some larger history of suffering. Terr’s research (1990, 1994) on trauma documents that the young people she studied experienced improvement by reading histories, news stories or biographies containing incidents in which others experienced similar difficulties. She also observes that when people keep abreast of current events, locally or around the world, they feel more comfortable about what has happened to them, even when their trauma is the result of a random act of violence or parental abuse.

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Insurrection is an instance in which people are aware of a history of struggle involving suffering in the past and present. Revolutionaries learn this history and often feel personally connected to past revolutionaries and martyrs. Several of the women I interviewed, especially those who were most active, had close ties to other revolutionaries in the movement and expressed a vivid awareness of a continuous history of struggle for freedom and social justice in their country. They also had a keen appreciation for the role of women in this history. Community is a key theme in the women’s stories. Relationship ties may be important to reducing trauma in a number of ways. Communities of activists reinforce the fact that one’s feelings of oppression have external causes, shifting the trouble from the internal problems of the person to external conditions in the world. Unlike many instances of trauma in which the individual has no outlet upon which to vent, revolutions involve a clear enemy, which allows a target for negative feelings like rage. Yet, feelings of vulnerability and terror have a paralysing effect on people and are often seen as unacceptable or shameful to the person experiencing them (Scheff and Retzinger 1991, Scheff 1994).6 Feeling and expressing these states require a sense of safety from the immediate external threat and a compassionate listener with whom one has bonds of trust. Uncomfortable affective states such as shame, terror and rage are made bearable by having supportive people whom one trusts. Communities, large or small, which provide caring witnesses to members’ suffering, enable people to feel their pain. Awareness of another’s genuine empathy may alleviate the destructiveness of the traumatic event, reiterating that one’s own emotions are legitimate and that one is acceptable and valued. Miller (1982 and other works) has written extensively about the healing effect of a caring witness in the life of traumatized children. The question is, do women who struggle with humiliating abuse or violence have access to people whom they trust enough to express to and work through with the paralysing emotions of shame, vulnerability and terror? To the extent that communities facilitate the expression of such emotions, they free people from affective states which may otherwise be channelled into depression and anxiety. Scheff and Retzinger have documented that expressing shame can actually have the effect of improving bonds between people (Retzinger 1991,

subj e c ti v e si de of development | 319 Scheff and Retzinger 1991, Scheff 1994). Thus, transforming the external conditions of one’s life may hinge, in part, on an internal transformation involving the expression of negative affective states. Communities empower women not only cognitively, by allowing them to understand their problems better, but emotionally and psychologically by building inner reservoirs of strength. One striking aspect of the interviews I conducted in Cuba was that my interviewees often spoke at length about specific incidents of resistance. I decided to resist treating these stories as anecdotal and instead treated them as insights into something subjectively meaningful to these women. Many of the stories were about incidents in which people whom they knew, usually women, stood up to the military either as individuals or as a group to help others in danger. In one story, a woman describes the scene of a burial procession for a fallen revolutionary in which she marched with a group of women: That same afternoon we participated in Frank’s burial.7 There were some rumours saying that the police were waiting for us at the cemetery with machine guns and all that … but nobody turned a hair. The burial ceremony was majestic. I remember that we were walking at the front of the burial procession and people at their balconies were throwing flowers to us. The people from Santiago had a revolutionary spirit … you could communicate with no words at all. (interview with the author, July 1999) Memories of successful resistance were often told with great emotion, eliciting expressions of pride and awe. What do these stories mean to the women? I believe they serve in part as sources of empowerment in the face of mortal danger, even retrospectively. Confronting a more powerful enemy and feeling shame, vulnerability and terror is traumatizing not just in the moment, but also when remembered years later. Thus, incidents of strength may be relived to remind the person that she is empowered, and to counter the horrible experience of being a victim, in whatever sense that may have occurred (loss of loved ones, torture, repression of expression). To be empowered means to have allies who are strong (brave, crafty, resilient, successful) and who share one’s struggle. The women selected incidents from their past that reveal both the intensity of

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their experiences and how they manage to confront that past. The issue of representation is important to the long-term psychological well-being of people who exhibit the effects of trauma. What counts to the person one studies is how she is represented in her own mind, and how she imagines herself represented in the minds of those whom she loves and respects. As development scholars, we need to take a close look at the people we study, their internal needs and resources as individuals and their roles as members of communities. The women I interviewed provided me with insights into how they sustained a sense of wellbeing in the face of trauma. Community is a momentous component of this: to feel one is part of some larger community of people, living or past, who have experienced similar suffering; to have an intelligent, trustworthy, compassionate witness to one’s pain; and to have a sense of self as empowered through one’s connection to allies who are strong and brave in the face of external threat. A women, culture and development approach seeks to address spheres that impact women’s lives, but are often not defined as part of development. Material well-being is tied to, affected by and affects, psychological well-being. Understanding how material problems have an impact on women’s subjective states and how women sustain a sense of well-being during hardship, enables scholars to identify the priorities of women in their communities as well as the resources – subjective, cultural and material – they have at their disposal. Many such resources have been overlooked in economistic development studies. The approach advocated here encourages thinking more broadly about development problems and development resources. Notes 1. Events frequently associated in psychology with trauma and traumatic symptoms include onetime life-threatening experiences such as accidents, natural disasters and assaults, as well as chronic forms of deprivation and abuse, including repeated beatings, molestation, rape and poverty. 2. Many of the ideas in this essay come from the work of Miller (1982, 1984, 1990, 1990a) and Terr (1990, 1994).

3. In a specific discussion of therapeutic responses to trauma, Miller advocates Stettbacher’s approach (1990) which consists of: ‘(1) describing the situation and one’s sensations; (2) experiencing and expressing emotions; (3) querying the situation; and (4) articulating needs’ (1990a: 179). 4. The existence of trauma is indicated by the nature of the women’s experiences, the expression of intense

subj e c ti v e si de of development | 321 feelings of grief and loss and vivid memories of long past events. These are present alongside pride, humour, a strong sense of having contributed to history and to their communities, and a positive outlook for the future of Cuba (the latter are usually absent in trauma victims). 5. These could apply to other types of activism, such as community development.

6. It is important to note that how emotions are interpreted (that is, whether they are considered shameful) will vary by culture. 7. Frank País was the organizer of the urban arm of the M-26-7, Fidel Castro’s insurrectionary organization, in the eastern province of Oriente. His assassination in 1957 sparked spontaneous protests throughout the island.

PART THREE THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

12 | OF R UR A L M O T H E R S , URBA N WHOR ES AN D WO R K I N G D A UG H T E R S : WOMEN AN D THE CR I T I Q UE O F N E O C OLONIA L D E VE LO P M E N T I N T A I W A N ’ S NA T IV IS T LI TE RAT UR E

Ming-yan Lai

Taiwan’s success in achieving economic growth has become legendary in development studies, contributing to the proposition of an ‘East Asian Development Model’ that supposedly launched the four ‘little dragons’ of Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan into the orbit of newly industrialized stars (Berger and Hsiao 1988). Much has been written about the policies, strategies and role of an authoritarian state that contributed to the island’s economic success. Yet, reflecting the general economistic orientation of development studies, local cultural intervention in the course of Taiwan’s development has been scarcely mentioned. In so far as culture is taken into consideration, it is in the form of a reified notion of Confucianism (or ‘post-Confucianism’ according to some) as the common cultural tradition that enables East Asian societies to maintain a competitive edge in the global capitalist market (see, for example, Tai 1989, Bond and Hofstede 1990, Rozman 1991 and Vogel 1991; for critiques of this argument, see Clegg, Higgins and Spybey 1990, and Dirlik 1995). Aside from controversies over the identification of a common Confucian culture underlying diverse business practices and its putative salutary effects on economic development, this equation of culture with tradition is clearly inadequate to address the dynamic role that culture plays in critiquing, envisioning and shaping the meaning, goals and process of development. In so far as the political economy of development impacts directly and indirectly on people’s daily lives, it informs and even becomes substantive material for cultural production and analysis. In the representation of everyday life, in other words, such cultural productions as fictional

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writing engage the issues of development and probe the meaning of particular development policies and strategies for different social groups and classes. While such engagement may be subtle and subterranean, it can also be deliberate, calling attention to the effects of political economic changes on the lives of particular individuals, and bringing the aspirations and struggles of these individuals to bear on the national debate about the goals and desirable courses of development. To reduce this dynamic cultural interpretation and interrogation to the influence of traditional values and practices on economic activities, then, is tantamount to dismissing the cultural agency of diverse social groups, especially those subordinated in the dominant tradition. By the same token, it obscures the importance of women in cultural discourses and debates on development. To highlight the critical interrogation of development in cultural practices and explore the significance of women to such a project, this chapter examines the practice of nativist literature in Taiwan during the period of rapid economic growth from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. As a deliberate cultural intervention in Taiwan’s course of development, nativist literature of this period advances a nationalist discourse to expose and protest about the neocolonial nature of a development oriented towards the needs and demands of foreign capitalist powers. Unpacking this nationalist discourse, my analysis shows how its oppositionality depends on problematic representations of women that undergird patriarchal traditions. A focus on female figures in major works of nativist literature thus enables us to unveil the ideological construction of its nationalist opposition to neocolonial development. In counterpoint, a consideration of the material reality for women under Taiwan’s development, and women’s own representation of their everyday experiences, casts a different light on the role of women to development and cultural resistance to neocolonial exploitation. Capitalist development and the rise of nationalist discourse The rise of nationalist discourse in Taiwan in the 1970s is arguably an ideological response on the part of male intellectuals to the country’s increasing involvement in global capitalism in pursuit of economic development. Adapting to the global restructuring of capitalism with the introduction of offshore production by multinational corporations, a process which, as Harvey (1989) among

mothers, whores, daughters | 327 others has argued, instituted the system of flexible production that has come to characterize the mode of production in postmodernity, Taiwan adopted an export-oriented industrial development policy in the 1960s and set up its first export processing zone in Gaoxiong in 1966. This policy turned Taiwan essentially into a supplier of cheap labour for the offshore production of foreign companies, which retained control of capital flow, technology and markets while increasing their profit margins with overseas operations. Through such arrangements, Taiwan’s economy became heavily dominated by foreign capital interests, with the United States and Japan effectively controlling the bulk of Taiwan’s industrial development and foreign trade by the early 1970s.1 The domination of American and Japanese capital in Taiwan created a situation in which capital–labour contradictions easily corresponded to a foreign-Chinese opposition. This made possible a displacement and superimposition of social class consciousness onto a desire for national autonomy and independence that remained legitimate and socially sanctioned under the repressive state. The displacement, in turn, allowed a critical reading of Taiwan’s development in terms of neocolonialism, with the ‘nation’ as a whole being exploited and oppressed by Japan and the United States. Such a view became particularly relevant and persuasive in Taiwan’s intellectual circles in the early 1970s, when a series of political events starkly exposed Taiwan’s subordinate position in the international power structure and its dependency on the United States for political survival as a nation-state. Taiwan’s forced departure from the United Nations upon the American withdrawal of support for its representation of China in 1971, and further erosion of its international support after the USA’s de facto recognition of the Beijing regime at the time of Nixon’s presidential visit, and Japan’s severance of diplomatic ties with Taiwan in 1972, generated a sense of national subjugation among intellectuals that reinforced their perception of Taiwan’s economic development as a case of neocolonial domination. It is against this sense of national subjugation and neocolonial domination by foreign capitalist powers that a nationalist discourse found articulation in nativist literature. Featuring a ‘realist’ mode and focusing on the daily struggles of the ‘nobodies’ as they eke out a living in impoverished environments, particularly in the countryside or small provincial towns, this nativist literature was explicitly critical

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of the effects of state-directed importation of Western (capitalist) modernity on the native land and its inhabitants. In the representation of concrete lives, the fictional works bring together issues of national dependence, social disintegration, cultural contamination, moral degeneration and social injustice arising from a Western-oriented capitalist modernity. In particular, some prominent nativist writers sought to resolve these issues in a nationalist discourse that projects the native place grounded in the rural village and its erstwhile traditions as a site of opposition. The link between nationalism and the rural village as the remaining base of traditional culture in modernity is spelt out as follows by Wang Tuo, a leading theorist and writer of the literature: Bombarded by foreign capital and foreign culture, cities in Taiwan have already been westernised to such an extent that they are not much different from the metropolises of Europe and the United States. This is the case with regard not only to the plainly visible physical constructions, but to human thoughts, values and ideas, as well as attitudes towards life. By comparison, villages have retained more of traditional cultural characteristics and simple lifestyles, even though they have also undergone tremendous changes upon the penetration of industry and commerce. At the same time, village people often constitute a sacrificed and neglected group in a society changing rapidly under a policy that vigorously promotes industrial and commercial development. Their incomes are low, standard of living poor and work strenuous. It is, therefore, easy for the public to find fulfilment of both their nationalist sentiments and social conscience in fictions that make rural societies and village people their subject matter. (Wang Tuo 1978 [1977]: 116) This extensive statement makes clear that whether the particular literary text focuses directly on the rural village or not, a hierarchical opposition between the urban and the rural underlies the nationalist discourse of nativist literature. At the same time, this urban–rural hierarchy is mapped onto a Western–native opposition. That is, if the Western-imported hegemonic discourse of modernity valorizes the urban space and the Western values it embraces, the nationalist

mothers, whores, daughters | 329 discourse of nativist literature asserts its oppositionality by reversing the order of valuation and privileging the rural space and its native values. More importantly, in line with the patriarchal nature of both the rural traditions that the nationalist discourse seeks to reclaim and the urban Westernized values that it denounces, the rural–urban opposition is maintained and signified by diametrically different representations of the gendered bodies of women. Urban whores, rural mothers and the moral order of nationalist discourse Feminist analyses of nationalisms around the world have shown the near ubiquity of the symbolic construction of the nation as Woman. In particular, women are typically figured as the biological and cultural reproducers of the nation, whose purity and chastity are thus vital to the nation’s survival and identity, and who therefore need protection by their native sons (see, for example, Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989, Chatterjee 1993, Katrak 1992, Kandiyoti 1991, Marecek 2000, Moran 2000). Central to nationalist discourses, then, are the double moves of valorizing women as mothers and disciplining the female body and sexuality. The nationalist discourse of Taiwan’s nativist literature is no exception to this general pattern. As a critique of neocolonial development, however, it interestingly separates the two gender moves and maps them onto the rural–urban divide. In other words, it grounds its critique on bifurcated representations of women and their gendered bodies in the urban and rural symbolic spaces. Symbolizing the urban space is the Westernized woman associated with foreign institutions and cultures, whose sexualized body becomes the signifier of corruption, decadence and immorality under Western materialism. A paradigmatic figure from a wellknown piece of nativist fiction by the writer Wang Zhenhe serves as a good illustration. Mrs Wang is one of the main characters in the 1973 story ‘Xiaolin came to Taipei’ (1975), which offers a snapshot of urbanites working in an airline office in the capital city from the viewpoint of a recent rural migrant worker who still retains the value system of the native place. As a section chief in charge of the customer counter in the airline office, Mrs Wang is nevertheless not portrayed in her capacity as a worker, even though the workplace is the main scene in the story. Rather, she is graphically depicted as a

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sexualized body and, as such, an unfit mother totally lacking in moral values. Throughout the story, her very demeanour displays an aversion to maternal virtues: ‘Though in her forties, Mrs. Wang sounds like a teenager. … She speaks with an unnatural countenance and an affected manner … “Ka-ji-ka-ji,” [she] laughs with her whole body trembling so much that she seems to have more than two breasts’ (Wang Zhenhe 1975: 224). Instead of a matronly figure that the story implies to befit her maternal status, Mrs Wang here features an over-sexualized body, with her seductive laughs and trembling breasts signifying loose morals and a misuse of the female body that prefigures her utter failure as a mother.2 More specifically, her sexualization and attendant maternal failure are unequivocally attributed to her adoring submission to Western culture and the unruly materialism and compulsory consumption it cultivates. In this configuration of Mrs Wang, then, Wang Zhenhe’s story not only reveals a fear of social and moral disruption in the form of uncontrollable feminine sexuality that Wilson (1992) has shown to pervade (male) representations of urban life as a marker of modernity – a fear underlined by the story’s perverse gaze on the indecently clad female bodies and sexually charged postures of the airline employees. It also establishes a concrete tie between such a fear and the ideological investment in native patriarchal motherhood, of which Mrs Wang’s failure to command the obedience of her daughter serves as a negative reminder. In the nationalist rhetoric of the story, Westernization has turned Mrs Wang into a mindless slave of fashion and made her an undesirable model to her teenage daughter, who, like her, lusts after the latest imported fashion and throws a tantrum when she does not get her way. In fact, every woman working in the airline office features such a blind following of Western fashion, which reduces her to little more than a sexualized body to be gazed at and, at times, even groped. In this way, the sexualized bodies of women under Westernized culture serve as a primary sign of decadence, spiritual corruption and moral degeneration, with which the nation, especially its urban sector, is supposed to have become infested under a modernity directed and dominated by foreign interests. The rural counterpart to this gendered representation of the urban space in the nationalist discourse of Taiwan’s nativist literature is the overworked, sacrificing mother whose exhausted

mothers, whores, daughters | 331 body is worn beyond her age by the demands made on her to support urban, Westernized lives under neocolonial development. In contrast to the consumption-driven, over-sexualized body of the Westernized woman inhabiting the urban space, this rural-based sacrificing mother is thoroughly desexualized and figured into a body of endless toil. Jinshuishen, the title character of an acclaimed 1975 nativist fiction by Wang Tuo (1979), illustrates this figure well. Married to a poor fisherman in a remote village, Jinshuishen is distinguished by her maternal achievement, as she carries out an unfailing daily run around the village peddling household odds and ends. By means of this back-breaking job, she has singlehandedly raised and put through higher education six sons, who are now successful professionals and administrators enjoying wellto-do lives in the city. She herself, however, has to remain in her primitive, broken shed and continue the daily routine she has kept for almost two decades to support her family. Despite their wellpaid jobs and comfortable lives, her sons continue to rely on her to raise money for their sumptuous weddings and business ventures. In the end, all her labours and sacrifices remain unreciprocated and unappreciated. With all her sons abandoning her to face, alone, the debts she has incurred on their behalf, Jinshuishen has to leave the village and become a migrant, temporary worker in the capital city.3 Thus this sacrificing mother in the rural homeland remains an exploited working body even after she has supported her sons through ‘progress’ and development into modern living. With such a gendered figure, Wang Tuo’s story gives the rural homeland a symbolic meaning of the exploited motherland urgently needing conscientious salvation from its native sons. The figure of Jinshuishen is particularly telling of the gender politics of nationalist discourse, because her role as the family’s primary breadwinner seems to defy the domestication of women that bespeaks the patriarchal underpinnings of most nationalist discourses. Like the story’s implicit indictment of irresponsible fathers and unfilial sons, however, this unusual role for a mother serves precisely to underscore the abnormality of the current state of affairs and the need for men to resume their proper duties and relieve their mothers (and motherland) of undue burdens.4 The story’s affirmation of her ability and resilience notwithstanding, Jinshuishen is a paragon of maternal virtues who supports the traditional

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patriarchal order, rather than an example of female independence and personal development. Her positive portrayal may easily be read as advancing the feminist cause of valuing and affirming women’s contribution to society and development. A renowned male writer and critic in Taiwan, Chen Yingzhen, exemplifies this position in his praise for the story’s decentring of the dominant Chinese patriarchal order (1979: 11–12). Against the misogynist tendency of nativist writers such as Wang Zhenhe in blaming women for the woes of the nation, the affirmative representation of Jinshuishen certainly deserves critical appreciation. Yet it must be pointed out that the enduring maternal sacrifices embodied by Jinshuishen are simply the flipside of Chinese patriarchy. Indeed, Jinshuishen’s exemplary compliance with the demands of the patriarchal order on female bodies is precisely what makes her a venerable mother in the text: In this small remote fishing village, Badouzi, there are two names which no one will find unfamiliar when spoken of. One is the Sacred Mother Mazu in the Temple of Heaven Access, the other is the peddler Jinshuishen. Jinshuishen is so famous in Badouzi for two reasons. First … because of [her] occupational convenience, she naturally has a thorough knowledge of family matters, big or small, in every single home of Badouzi … So, imperceptibly, her position appears to be extremely important. Second, she has become a subject of respect and envy among most of the parents in Badouzi, not only because her belly gave her credit, having borne altogether six sons, but also because her sons are good achievers … That is why whenever Jinshuishen is mentioned, people in Badouzi invariably put their thumbs up and praise her from the bottom of their hearts. (Wang Tuo 1979: 190–1) The metaphoric association of Jinshuishen with the Sacred Mother Mazu here and elsewhere in the text highlights and affirms her primary identity as an exemplary mother sacrificing herself to meet the demands of the patriarchal order. Her maternal support of traditional patriarchy is further crystallized in her persistence to justify her existence in relation to her sons and absolve them from blame for her exploited and oppressed life:

mothers, whores, daughters | 333 Every time she suffered from her husband’s irrational kicking and beatings, it was always this son who consoled her, giving her infinite hope, even in the midst of pain, for the future and for her sons, as well as the courage to live on in times when she contemplated suicide or running away from the family. … But now … she thought [about her son’s neglect] over and over again, and still could not understand. How come such a filial son suddenly changed in this way? If it weren’t for someone constantly abetting him close by, how could he become like this? While she was thinking this, the quietly smiling countenance of Axiu [her daughter-in-law] crossed her mind and doubts rose in her heart. (Wang Tuo 1979: 221–2) With this displacement of unfilial behaviour from native sons to urbanized women like Jinshuishen’s daughters-in-law, who value materialistic pleasures over moral responsibilities and filial duties, Wang Tuo’s story simultaneously represents the nation as an overdrawn mother in need of the care of her sons and absolves the native sons from any wrongdoing except for listening to women corrupted by the consumer orientation of modern urban life. This, in effect, constitutes a double call for men to resume their patriarchal duty of controlling women in the name of protecting the mother-nation. Between the sexualized body of the urban Westernized woman and the overworked body of the rural sacrificing mother, then, Taiwan’s nativist literature depicts an immoral social order under neocolonial development that is organized around materialistic values. Against this immoral order, it inscribes a nationalist alternative of returning to native moral traditions that will reverse the hierarchy of value under neocolonial development and restore the national order. In sum, the bifurcated representation of women under neocolonial development enables nativist writers of nationalist persuasions to figure the problem of neocolonial development in terms of the erosion of traditional values, especially familial ethics, and thereby to imagine and articulate an oppositional position in the advancement of a national order that restores the place and power of filial sons and compassionate patriarchs who will look after the exhausted mother (and motherland), as well as control the urban excess of Westernized, sexualized bodies.

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Women and the ideological representation of neocolonial development Based on a gendered figuration of the problem of neocolonial development, this nationalist discourse constitutes an ideological representation and resolution of neocolonial development in two significant ways. First, it is obviously ideological in its feminization of materialistic consumption as a major sign of national malaise under neocolonial development. As feminist scholars such as Felski (1995) have shown, the feminization of consumption has been a common cultural response to the rapid changes of modernity even in the West, encompassing in it the fear of emasculation and weakening of men’s traditional authority over women because of pervasive commodification. In the present case, such a representation has the additional effect of displacing what is essentially a politicaleconomic issue, the loss of national control over the means and ends of production, onto a cultural-moral realm of patriarchal control over the conduct of women. This means that by ideologically representing their sense of loss of national control under neocolonial development in terms of the abrogation of patriarchal authority and responsibility, nationalist intellectuals can find solace in a cultural resolution of the political economic issue of control over the national economy. The ideological representation allows them to imagine that, once the traditional patriarchal order is restored and men resume their rightful place as benevolent fathers, powerful husbands and filial sons, the nation will also regain control of its own destiny and put up resistance against neocolonial domination from foreign capitalist powers. In pointing out this ideological nature of the nationalist critique, I do not mean to suggest that the cultural constitution of national identity is a secondary issue to political economy. Rather, it is a reminder that nationalist sentiments and cultural concerns can be mobilized for ideological resolution of political economic issues over which intellectuals do not have control, leading to a consolidation of oppressive gender traditions. The relation between women, culture and development, then, can be better understood if the ideological construction of the nationalist critique is carefully unpacked. Because of the nationalist subtext motivating its representation of women’s relation to neocolonial development, Taiwan’s nativist literature also renders an ideological representation of the problem of neocolonial development for women. In particular, its bifurcated

mothers, whores, daughters | 335 representation of women under neocolonial development as Westernized urban whores and hard-working rural mothers elides both the significance of women as industrial waged labourers and the specifically gendered exploitation that female workers experience. Especially notable here are the large number of young women drawn from rural villages to work in foreign-operated factories because of their supposed docility and nimbleness, and the urban housewives working under the state-sponsored programme of ‘living room factories’ that sought to exploit family and neighbourhood female labour by bringing factory work to the family living rooms (Hsiung 1996). With the elision of their significance in the production and reproduction of neocolonial development, the complex interaction between gender ideology and women’s exploitation under neocolonial development is grossly simplified and neglected in nativist literature’s nationalist discourse.5 Furthermore, the location of the problem of sexualization in urban Westernized women also obscures the nature of women’s sexual commodification under neocolonial development. The moral order the nationalist discourse inscribes through this representation leaves no room for confronting the issue of women’s reduction to sexualized bodies under neocolonial development as a political economic problem of prostitution, rather than a moral problem of the erosion of traditional values. Hence, although the phenomenon of prostitution is thematized in some nativist fictional works, it is invariably presented as a sign of moral degeneration and national subjugation under neocolonial development. That it constitutes a specific form of female labour intimately tied to the global political economy, and particularly symptomatic of neocolonial development, finds little articulation in the moral rhetoric of the nationalist discourse. In more concrete terms, any critical reflection on the state’s implicit endorsement of the sex trade to enhance local tourist attraction in response to efforts of the United States and international financial organizations to promote tourism as a development strategy for the Third World is eclipsed by the moral orientation of this nationalist discourse (Truong 1990). The ideological limitation of such a moral orientation is particularly apparent in its blindness to the compatibility of an emphasis on cultural traditions and the sexual commodification of women under neocolonial development. As feminists in Taiwan

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have pointed out, Chinese cultural traditions have been actively mobilized to facilitate the development of the sex trade in Taiwan. For instance, promotional campaigns endorsed by government agencies and tourist industries to widen the market of visitors have emphasized the traditional virtues of Chinese women, such as female submissiveness, caring and nurturing, in addition to sexual temptation (Cheng and Hsiung 1992: 246). At the same time, the traditional normatization of feminine self-sacrifice and submissiveness enhances the supply of labour to the sex trade, as dutiful daughters are compelled or forced into prostitution to support the family or finance the education of their brothers. Where women are concerned, then, a continuation of traditional culture and the patriarchal order it legitimizes by no means constitutes an effective opposition to neocolonial development, however strongly the nationalist discourse of Taiwan’s nativist literature asserts otherwise. The inherently phallocentric orientation of this nationalist critique, and its consequent mystification of the material condition and subjective experience of women’s sexual commodification under neocolonial development, can be seen clearly in a story about prostitution by Huang Chunming, one of Taiwan’s foremost nativist writers. Arguably Huang’s most noted work, ‘Shayonala, zaijian’ (1973; the title gives the Japanese and Chinese words for ‘good-bye’) gives a first-person narration of the moral dilemma of a professed nationalist whose boss has ordered him to take a group of Japanese businessmen to visit local whorehouses in his hometown. To fulfil his duty as the provider and protector of his wife and child, this nationalist rationalizes, he has no choice but to do as his boss bids. However, he remains torn over the assignment and the story follows his mental and emotional struggle as he negotiates his way through the role of a reluctant but complicitous comprador in the trading of his female compatriots’ bodies. Given the story’s exclusive focus on the male nationalist’s consciousness, little is said about the young women working in the brothel, and is anyway filtered through the mind of the male nationalist. Thus, in a story that places the sex trade at the heart of Taiwan’s problematic commerce with global capitalism, prostitution is primarily a metaphor for the predicament of the male nationalist caught in the battle of survival. The young women are once again reduced to sexual bodies over

mothers, whores, daughters | 337 which the male nationalist inscribes his own resistance to mental prostitution. However compulsory the male narrator in ‘Shayonala’ considers his selling of himself to global capitalism, he manages to maintain the self-identity of a nationalist and neutralize the power of the Japanese through a surreptitious use of nationalist discourse. Under the pretext of interpreting between a Taiwanese university student and the Japanese businessmen, he interrogates the Japanese about their participation in Japan’s imperialist war against China and challenges them to confront their shameful history. While this does not take away his guilt as a national pimp, it affords him a sense of power and moral victory over the Japanese that is totally denied the female prostitutes. Indeed, if his nationalism enables the male narrator to claim an oppositional subjectivity, it does so partly by usurping the voices of the female prostitutes, appropriating their experiences and representing them as defenceless victims of neocolonial development and symbols of a morally superior nation dominated by the power of economic wealth (see Lai 1998: 45–6 for a more detailed discussion). This is particularly clear in the following scene: when one of the prostitutes jokingly repeats a line from a popular local opera to ward off the groping hands of a Japanese who is not her main client, the narrator turns this clever self-defence of a savvy professional into an unconscious display of national cultural superiority: ‘Of course, Xiaowen said “A friend’s wife is not to be taken advantage of” only casually, allowing none but Ochiai to touch her. Still, I thought, Xiaowen is a Chinese after all. Though she is a prostitute, she is superior to this group of Japanese when it comes to civilization of some sort’ (Huang 1973: 244). Thus the nationalist discourse of the male narrator elides Xiaowen and the other young women’s subjective understanding of their situation and resistance to sexual objectification and commodification, claiming their experiences for its own purpose. Working daughters and the critique of sexual commodification Given such elision of women’s subjective experiences and usurpation of their voices in the nationalist critique of neocolonial development, a recentring of women’s experiences and voices is necessary for and suggestive of a more inclusive and enabling challenge to neocolonial development. Tellingly, there are no

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women among the writers commonly identified with Taiwan’s nativist literature. One who associated closely with nativist writers and was sympathetic to their nationalist sentiments is Zeng Xinyi. Based on her personal experiences and observations of friends and acquaintances, Zeng’s short stories focus on the plights, sacrifices and consciousness of young women struggling to make a living in the harshly competitive urban environment of a country under capitalist development. As working daughters, the protagonists in many of her stories were compelled by circumstances into various forms of the sex trade to support themselves and their families. The most representative of these stories is ‘Yige shijiusui shaonu de gushi’ (‘The story of a nineteen year-old girl’, 1977), which describes the life of a teenager who quits school to work in a dance club. It details the dire poverty and familial pressure that push the young girl onto this path, the exploitation and indignity she suffers at work and the almost insurmountable obstacles against her wish to leave the sex trade and resume a normal life. In an authorial statement, Zeng reveals that the theme of the story has preoccupied her for ten years and she was driven to it by an ‘imminent fact’: For years, I have seen too many teenage girls around me resolutely give up pursuing their personal happiness to enter the sex trade in order to relieve their family destitution. Based on my understanding of the life of a sex worker, I firmly believe that their sacrifice is a cruel tragedy. It can only alleviate the emergency at hand, but cannot solve the fundamental problem. The price they pay for their sacrifice is so tremendous that I have to say: it is not worth it! I absolutely oppose making such a choice because of economic problems. … Through publication, I hope to let more teenage girls facing the same problem read this story, and also let people see a horrible fact through fictional writing. (1977a: 12) Zeng’s motivation and approach to the theme of prostitution are thus firmly grounded in the reality and standpoint of struggling young women. Notably absent from her handling of the theme is the moralistic nationalist rhetoric that characterizes (male) nativist writers’ treatment, though Zeng clearly disapproves of the women’s choices. Instead, her stories on sex workers focus on the exploitation

mothers, whores, daughters | 339 and oppression these women suffer on and off the job, as do her other stories on women working as salesgirls and other petty commercial jobs. Thus, her stories in effect situate the problem of prostitution in the pervasive commodification and exploitation of women under capitalist modernity. That prostitution is but the crystallization of a rampant sexual exploitation and commodification of women in a profit-oriented and money-driven economy is made explicit in one of Zeng’s most noted stories, ‘Caifeng de xinyuan’ (‘Caifeng’s wish’, 1978). Caifeng, the title character of the story, is a salesgirl in a department store which seeks to promote sales by organizing an open beauty-cum-singing contest where customers convert their sales receipts into votes for the contestants. Chosen to represent the store in the contest, Caifeng is ambivalent about her chance of becoming a ‘future star’, vacillating between hope for fulfilling her wish to escape poverty and support her parents and dread of the predatory attention that dogs her as she ‘works’ to muster votes for herself. With rumours that some contestants are willing to exchange sexual favours for votes, she feels pressured at least to go out with some senior managers and big customers who obviously have designs on her. Dining with one such customer tempts her to become his mistress, in exchange for the luxurious living and material comforts that he presents. Another customer, the owner of a ‘restaurant’, offers her an in-house singer position. Naïvely taking this to be an opportunity to embark on a singing career, she accepts the offer and goes to work after a runnerup finish in the contest. What she finds is a covert prostitution ring and a first assignment of spending the night with a Japanese businessman. The story ends on an anti-imperialist note, with Caifeng facing the Japanese as an old picture flashes across her eyes: ‘roadside execution ground / a kneeling Chinese with hands bound behind the back / a leveled neck with head chopped off / Japanese military wielding a crescent shiny sword / head by the sword, hanging in the air / what a painful, silent countenance, that head hanging in the air’ (1978: 42). This plot scheme allows Zeng to show both the female body’s multiple levels of exploitation under capitalist development and the struggle of a working daughter to negotiate her way through the traps of sexual commodification, while suggesting a neocolonial dimension to the plight of women in Taiwan. If nativist literature’s nationalist

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critique of neocolonial development relies on a culturalism that constructs the problem in terms of a feminine disorder of materialistic consumption as discussed above, ‘Caifeng de xinyuan’ implicitly returns the problem to a fundamental issue of power and control over (re)productive bodies. Rather than insatiable consumers, it presents women as exploited workers whose bodies are constantly under surveillance and often sexualized by men in a profit-oriented economy to sell products and spur consumption. To highlight the materiality of women’s exploitation, the narrative begins with a description of the gruelling working conditions of Caifeng and her fellow salesgirls: After punching the time-cards, [the salesgirls] happily put the cards back and are anxious to rush out of the store; but there is still another hurdle. The uniformed male guards are still patiently checking the bags and clothes of each salesgirl … Who would ever think about stealing goods from the store! We are checked everyday going in and out. How lowly they see us! The supervisors keep strict control on the merchandise, checking stocks every month. If anything is missing or broken in any way, we have to pay. Is that not supervision enough? … Huh, we come to work early everyday. The streets are still quiet when we arrive. We stand in the store the whole day, not being allowed to go out or look out even for a minute. We don’t even know if it is sunny or rainy. Soon, we will forget even what the sun looks like. By the time we leave work, it is already so late that people have finished all their goings and bustlings. (1978: 1–4) From the points of view of Caifeng and her colleagues, then, women are indeed intimately caught up in the web of consumption in the capitalist economy – but as workers, not leisured consumers. The indignity and objectification they experience in their strictly regimented work of seducing customers to the glamorous goods offered by capitalism, furthermore suggest that the difference between ‘proper’ employment for women and prostitution may well be a matter of degree rather than substance. In the face of such a reality for women, the moral approach of the nationalist critique of neocolonial development appears lame and ineffectual. A faithful

mothers, whores, daughters | 341 representation of this reality, such as Zeng’s story is, in comparison, a far more powerful and effective critique of the exploitative and oppressive nature of development under capitalism. Conclusion In the 20 or so years since the height of nativist fiction and its nationalist sentiment much has changed in Taiwan. By transforming itself from a struggling developing country to an export powerhouse and importer of foreign workers, Taiwan has achieved the once almost unthinkable in terms of development. With the changing tides, the nationalist outcry against neocolonial development has faded into distant memory. Yet it may be argued that the issues raised here about women, culture and development vis-à-vis the nationalist rhetoric of nativist fiction are no less relevant today in Taiwan, albeit in something of an inversion. Women, once again, are at the centre of cultural imaginings and representations, as the ‘nation’ of Taiwan wrestles with the problem and anxiety of its identity and its relation to mainland China, where the bulk of its investment has gone in pursuit of capitalist profit. This is epitomized in media construction in the mid-1990s of the figure of dalumei (‘mainland sister’), who is typically a mainland woman employed in various forms of sex trade in Taiwan, sometimes in disguise as a native (Shih 1998). The threat of mainland China to the national identity and survival of Taiwan, the moral unease generated by the monetary and materialistic obsession of capitalist development, and Taiwan’s insecurity over its newfound capital and industrial power, all find cultural expressions in this representation of mainland women. With such a familiar displacement, the material reality and subjective experiences of mainland Chinese women in the crossroads of the economic development of Taiwan and China are rendered invisible and inaudible. Similarly elided are the experiences of Taiwanese women, whose desires and struggles for equality are thwarted by the sexual exploits of Taiwanese men with mainland women. This double elision and the opposing interests involved pose a particular challenge to feminist critique of the exploitation and oppression of women under Taiwan’s current phase of development. Confronting the problem, feminists in Taiwan have yet to find a satisfactory way of championing the cause of native sisters and challenging the media representations of

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mainland women. At issue is a problem of (re)configuring global– local relations that feminists will perhaps increasingly face, as global capitalism races furiously along a multicultural track. While an effective strategy to deal with such a problem will no doubt be context-specific, our consideration of Taiwan’s experiences affords a useful lesson. To uncover the intricate complexity of the commonly linked, but apparently opposing, interests of women located across national boundaries under global capitalism, feminists need to go beyond, but remain cognizant of, the territorial and discursive boundaries encoded in the idea of the nation. For feminists in Taiwan, it means that they have to suspend their primary identification with Taiwanese women, and accord equal attention and importance to the experiences of mainland women under Taiwan’s economic advancement into their homeland. Only then can they untangle the web of nationalism and see the structural exploitation and oppression of both Taiwanese and mainland women under the dominant mode of economic development. Without such a transnational vision, which enables a critique of the simultaneous systemic erosion and clever manipulation of national boundaries that facilitate the far-reaching exploitation and commodification of female bodies under global capitalism, feminists may have a hard time building coalitions which can effectively check the divide-and-conquer momentum of the patriarchal capitalist machine. Notes 1. As of 1970, US and Japanese capital accounted for 85 per cent of Taiwan’s investment. See Gold (1986: 76–87) for a summary of the role of foreign capital in Taiwan’s post-war economic development, and Hsiung (1981: 179–87) on the domination of the USA and Japan in foreign trade. 2. It is noteworthy that Mrs Wang’s last name in Chinese signifies a body of water; and with familiar phrases like shuixing yanghua (literally, ‘having the characteristics of water and flowers swaying in the wind’), water when associated with woman often carries the

negative connotation of infidelity and promiscuity. 3. Persistent in its rural focus, the story gives no direct description of Jinshuishen’s life in the city. The information about her working as a domestic help to repay the family debts before returning to the village is related through a villager, who chanced upon her praying in a temple in the city for the well-being of her sons in an inauspicious year. This brief description suggests that she basically continues in the city the old pattern of her life as an overworked and sacrificing mother. Her representation as the quintessential

mothers, whores, daughters | 343 mother(land) in the story is thus reinforced. 4. Whether the unfilial sons of Jinshuishen are up to such duties is another matter. The point of the story, according to this reading, is to call the attention of readers, especially the native sons of Taiwan, to the plight of their mother(land) and their responsibilities towards her. The real hope lies with the readers rather than Jinshuishen’s sons. In this light, how readers view the sons and respond to the call is particularly interesting. Unfortunately, such information is not readily available. 5. The plight of female factory workers is not totally neglected in Taiwan’s nativist literature. Yang Qingchu, a nativist writer who once worked in a factory himself, has written a series of short stories on ‘the circle of factory girls’ (1978), describing the problems of the lack of compensation for work injury, the violation of sick leave benefits, sexual discrimination in employment and promotion, and sexual harassment in the workplace. Notably, however, Yang’s stories do not extend the level of engagement to questions of neocolonial development and nationalist resistance. Thus, they fall outside the framework of nationalist discourse and critique under consideration in this chapter. Without the trappings of a nationalist discourse, the class-based critique of capitalist development that simultaneously

informs Taiwan’s nativist literature in the 1970s becomes rather evident in Yang’s stories about factory workers, for which he was particularly known and from which the series on factory girls was a spinoff. Rather than a nationalist attribution of all the ‘evils’ of capitalist development to foreigners and Western(ized) culture, Yang’s stories focus on ‘native’ factory owners and the local management of foreign-owned factories as the immediate culprits in the exploitation and mistreatment of workers. While most of the stories do not go beyond a phenomenological description of the workers’ experiences and the problems they face, some betray an implicit socialist persuasion, articulating hope for a better future with the establishment of independent unions and even worker-owned factories. As reflected in this focus on class, however, the stories about female factory workers tend to overlook the gender ideology underlying the employment and working conditions of women, and treat gender-specific problems such as sexual harassment as secondary issues that are subordinate to the larger problem of economic exploitation. For this reason, though Yang’s factory girl stories are noteworthy for their exceptional attention to a neglected group and sensitivity to the gender-specific problems that female workers face, they still obscure the complexity of women’s relation to development.

1 3 | RE V I S I T I N G T H E M O S TAZ’AF AN D TH E M O S TAK B AR

Minoo Moallem

You have a gun And I am hungry You have a gun Because I am hungry You have a gun Therefore I am hungry You can have a gun You can have a thousand bullets and even another thousand You can waste them all on my poor body You can kill me one, two, three, two thousand, seven thousand times But in the long run I will always be better armed than you If you have a gun And I Only hunger. (Poem by the Guatemalan revolutionary Otto René Castillo and a song called ‘Allah-o Akbar’ by Iranian artist Habib Mohebian, translated from Spanish to Persian (Ajam Media Collective, 29 July 2014))

Just as it is impossible to separate the project of modernity from colonialism, so movements of resistance from revolutionary to reformist have opposed regimes of inequality and injustice based on colonialism, race, class and gender. In the song ‘Allah-o Akbar’, the Iranian artist Mohebian grasps the power of the ‘Wretched of the Earth’, in Fanon’s terms – those who challenged their condition through a revolutionary movement and broke the silence of a military curfew with the Islamic expression of ‘Allah-o Akbar’ (God is Great) during the revolution of 1979 (for an illuminating study of social revolutions, see Foran 1997b). ‘Allah is Great’ was used

r ev i si ti n g th e mo sta z’af a n d t he mostakbar | 345 as a revolutionary slogan and became an affirmation of the moment when the paradoxical presence of despair and the possibility of rising above it led to the overthrow of the Pahlavi dictatorship and the establishment of an Islamic republic. Borrowed from a revolutionary context, this slogan has been circulated widely and is currently even used by some militarized groups as an affirmative expression of the Islamic political will, even as it continues to give momentum to people’s contestation where a material and mediatic collective will is expressed beyond the state apparatus and its disciplinary regimes. In the context of the Iranian Revolution, such a collective will was mobilized through the notion of mostaz’af and its plural mostaz’afan, or the oppressed, providing space for the emergence of a unified Islamic subject in its opposition to mostakbar or mostakbaran (the Pahlavi regime and its imperialist allies) in a war of position.1 Nevertheless, in post-revolutionary Iran, the concept continues to be invested with power, putting a demand on the Islamic state elite to address the needs of popular classes. While the concept of mostaz’af continues to have a strong appeal for the poor and powerless classes, its oppositional twin – mostakbar – has become more ambiguous, given the power and privilege that comes with the control of state resources by the Islamic elite, sometimes ironically called ‘the new aristocracy’ (ashrafiat-e jadid), as well as its military apparatus, especially the Revolutionary Guards. As I have argued before, there was an intertextual relationship between this Islamic oppositional language and modernist Hegelian and leftist vocabulary describing the class-based oppositional foundation of social conflicts and social antagonism (Moallem 2003). The class-based opposition of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat was reworked and reconstructed by Third Worldist revolutionary language, including Maoism, bringing peasants and rural classes into the equation. In the context of the Iranian Revolution, this language was indigenized through Shia revolutionary concepts, long in production in pre-revolutionary Iran by various oppositional groups and intellectuals.2 In the reinvention of the Islamic tradition – or, more accurately, Shi’ism – as a modern revolutionary movement, this language was mobilized to challenge the Pahlavi dictatorship and contributed to the establishment of an Islamic republic.3 However, it did not take long for the revolutionary investment in the justice of an Islamic state to be challenged by the hegemonic

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power of the state and its transgression of the revolutionary ideals of justice and equality. Some fragments of the Islamic state remained committed to a notion of Islamic equality and justice, to the extent that the nation-state became the agent of intervention in regulating justice and managing poverty. Nevertheless, the Islamic elite soon began to use state institutions to invest in new forms of power and privilege; these included the control of natural resources, especially oil and gas revenues, along with construction, trade and industry. The notion of aghazadeha has emerged in this context to depict the newly powerful family networks of the Islamic elite, especially those with a clerical family background. As I have argued elsewhere, media technologies played a significant role in disseminating revolutionary discourses in the 1970s and 1980s. Furthermore, in the post-revolutionary era, new media technologies, including cyberspace, DVDs, films and TV series, remain crucial sites of representation both in Iran and in various diasporic locations (Moallem 2005, 2011). Such investment in new media technologies has created a transnational mediascape – a concept proposed by Arjun Appadurai in 1990 to describe global cultural flows, including the rise in the production of media including television, radio and film – and so Iranians in Iran and in the diaspora can be consumers of cultural products that are created across the border. The Islamic Republic, even with its massive investment in media technologies and mediatic culture, has made a constant attempt to control and limit the boundaries of what is permitted and what is prohibited in the mediascape. However, with the vast investment of the Islamic elite in new technologies, from blogging and Facebook to websites and Twitter, and with the expansion of the informal market for the circulation and exchange of films and DVDs, such restrictions fail, given their constant undoing and the invention of new ways of breaking through state censorship and control. Also, with the massive displacement of different waves of Iranians since the Iranian Revolution, the Iranian diasporic media along with BBC Persian and the Voice of America have been established in several cosmopolitan locations, including Los Angeles, Washington DC and London. These media networks, sometimes motivated strongly by a desire for regime change in Iran and a systematic opposition to the Islamic Republic, have been competing with the Islamic state media for cultural hegemony (on the politics of Iranian diasporic

r evi si ti n g th e mo sta z’af a n d t he mostakbar | 347 blogging, see Shakhsari 2011). Furthermore, the suppression of the entertainment industry – especially the banning of pre-revolutionary cultural products, including pop culture – has necessitated the creation of a venue for those who are banned in Iran to find space to continue to be active in the cultural sphere. The advent of blogging, Facebook and YouTube and the rapid circulation of cultural products across borders both in Iran and in various diasporic locations have fostered a realm of transnational Iranian cultural representations that go beyond both national and diasporic insinuations of ‘here’ and ‘there’ or daroun marzi (within the borders) and boroun marzi (outside the borders) dichotomies, calling for a notion of cultural citizenship to describe the circulation and exchange that go beyond the boundaries of political citizenship. From taghuti and yaghuti to aghazadeha The concept of mostaz’af was not only in an intertextual relationship with leftist enlightenment vocabulary but also invested with affect by popular classes through a long tradition of cultural production, from Film-e Farsi4 to popular TV series depicting the class gap between the privileged modern urban classes and the depowered lower classes. For example, in Film-e Farsi, the character of the loose woman (the prostitute and the entertainer) was constructed in relation to the emphasized femininity of the modern respectable woman and was complemented by the hyper-masculinity of the lower classes, men still identifying with premodern notions of mardanegi or manhood. This hyper-masculinity relied on an old ethic of javanmardi (masculine altruism) with the contradictory mission of being both the consumer of new urban sexual pleasures offered by female entertainers and prostitutes and the saviour of modern women from the dangers of urban life and the decadence of modern masculinity in its instrumental use of women for pleasure, power and prestige. Most of these films depict men’s anxieties vis-à-vis new modern urban pleasures together with women entertainers’ transgression of sexual and gender roles. The trope of hypermasculinity became a popular site of identification for the lower classes with their ambivalence towards modern urban pleasures and leisure inspired by the premodern ethic of manhood. These premodern concepts of masculinity, defined through the notions of geirat (honour), javanmardi (altruism) and az

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khodgozashtegi (selflessness), were reinvented through urban lowerclass characters in TV series and popular movies. They became an important site of affect and attachment to a subordinated model of masculinity. Some of these films depicted the character of Jahel – an urban thuggish man with an ambiguous class position, mostly outside class structures, with no wealth or regular job but still embodying a dignified manhood – along with the character of an entertainer, a prostitute, or an upper-class woman disgraced by the corrupt culture of the modern nouveau riche, their consumerism, and their abuse of women. The hyper-masculinity of Jahel, who would come across women either as a consumer of sex or entertainment or as a representative of the premodern ethic of manhood that was not tamed by modern gender identities, was needed to save women and to return them to the institution of the family, where they could regain their respectability through marriage. The Jahel character was joined by another character depicting a marginalized masculinity – a man who had difficulty integrating into the modern system because of his ethical grounding in premodern notions of manhood, a masculinity that remained attractive yet failed to fit into the hegemonic masculinity of the modern state. While Jahel displayed a hyper-masculinity with his willingness to become involved in urban violence and fights, the marginalized masculinity of this character meant that he was pushed to fight due to his concern for justice and his desire to rescue women. Among other movies, one could give the example of a series of films called Film-haye Fardini (referring to the popular Iranian actor Fardin, who starred in numerous movies of this kind); these depict the desires, pleasures and frustrations of men of the lower classes who do not fit the hegemonic model of masculinity. The concept of ‘yaghuti’, which depicts the depowered classes, entered the urban and even the revolutionary vocabulary through a well-liked TV series called Morad Barghi, produced in 1973. Morad Barghi told the story of an electrician who owns an old car called yaghut, representing visually his lack of wealth and his struggles to make a living by helping people with an urgent need for an electrician. Morad Barghi falls in love with a young woman from the privileged classes and ends up collaborating with her father to save her and her sisters from falling for the corrupt modern and Western culture and its use and abuse of women. In this context, the inanimate car

r evi si ti n g th e mo sta z’af a n d t he mostakbar | 349 called yaghut animates a subject position for the subordinated classes referred to as yaghuti. The convergence of yaghuti with mostaz’af in their opposition to taghuti (the Islamic concept depicting the rich and powerful in pre-revolutionary Iran) becomes a site of contestation for the popular classes to join the revolution. The affect invested in such popular cultural images and characters converged with the Islamic concepts of mostaz’af and mostakbar and led to the mass mobilization of various classes. The struggle of the yaghutis against the taghutis became a site of attraction and identification for marginalized, oppressed and depowered classes under the Pahlavi regime. The emergence of Islamic nationalism in Iran also appealed to a form of transnationalism distinct from Islamic cosmopolitanism, Islamic universalism or new forms of militarism claiming Islam.5 Islamic transnationalism in this context refers to the mobilization of Islam as a modern political identity in opposition to the colonial project of modernity and the hegemonic power of the secular nationstate and its suppression of Islam in the process of modernization or Westernization. Yet the establishment of the Islamic Republic as a modern nation-state created gaps and fissures between such conceptions of transnationalism and the reliance of the state on the nation.6 As I have argued before, this vocabulary went beyond the oppositional class consciousness of the left and provided space in Ayatollah Khomeini’s discourse for the formation of a unified, Islamic nationalist subject, which led to the revolution in the name of mostaz’afan in their opposition to mostakbaran (Moallem 2003, 2005). However, it did not take long for this subject position to begin splintering after the end of the Iran–Iraq War, when class divisions again challenged the unified notion of the Islamic nation (Moallem 2009). This time the first fissure came from the masses of volunteer forces (mostly from lower or rural classes) that participated in the eight-year Iran–Iraq War and either were killed on the battlefield or became disabled. Indeed, the Mostaz’afan Foundation,7 a non-profit successor of the Pahlavi Foundation, which had been instituted in 1979 to confiscate the money and property of the Pahlavi regime to support the mostaz’afan or the poor, changed its name to Bonyade Mostaz’afan va Janbazan (The Oppressed and Disabled War Veterans) in order to include the families of martyrs as well as disabled war veterans.8

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The crisis of care and the bending of the mostaz’af A number of movies depict the failure of the notion of mostaz’af by displaying both class and gender gaps, especially as they relate to two major events. The first event is the Iran–Iraq War and the impact of that war on those who returned not as martyrs but as bodies affected both physically and psychologically by the war. The second event relates to the deepening of the crisis of care based on gender and class divisions of labour. The reflections of these events on film mark class and gender fissures, taking the homogeneous notion of mostaz’af to its limits. For example, in Gilaneh, the Iranian directors Rakhshan Bani Etemad and Mohsen Abdolvahab depict a mother, Gilaneh, who becomes the sole caretaker of her paralyzed son in a remote village without any kind of support (see Varzi 2008). Bani Etemad and Abdolvahab portray the complexity of care work as it affects war veterans who are now left to their families – their wives and mothers – to be taken care of. In addition to war movies, a number of other films depict gender, sexuality and ethnic hierarchies, continuing to expose relations of power cutting across different classes. While the populists continue to use the mostaz’af category to gain popularity with and support from depowered classes, the crisis of care has made it more difficult for the gender and class gaps to be concealed. The crisis signals the fact that, while women are mainly and formally in charge of care work, the moment they refuse to perform it, the institutions of the family and the state are both in trouble. To illustrate the crisis of care, I focus on two movies that complicate the notion of mostaz’af. One is from a collection of films called ‘Film-haye Jangi’, or war movies,9 made during and after the Iran– Iraq War, and the second is the award-winning movie A Separation. The first film depicts the internal divisions between the war-affected bodies of the disabled and the diaspora. It also displays the division of the Iranian nation-state into three territorial imaginaries: the homeland, the war front and the diaspora. The second film represents the crisis of care managed by the Islamic Republic through the reskilling of patriarchal gender roles, meaning that women’s domestic work was acknowledged as being socially useful and recognizable work. The unintended consequences of such changes have been new problems. Although women from privileged classes have the option to leave the country, the diasporic space in the cinema points

r e v i si ti n g th e mo sta z’af a n d t he mostakbar | 351 to the transnational configuration of space in regulating gender differences while managing class relations. What links such differences more than anything else is the crisis of care and the breakdown of the notion of mostaz’af in the complex web of relations of gender, class, ability and location. While wars are remembered through martyrs and heroes, through those killed in war zones (mostly men) defending or attacking nation-states, what I am interested in here is those who remain, who survive the war, who continue to exist and to be subjected to the social amnesia regarding the war. My interest can be divided into three categories. The first is the dispossessed, those evicted by the violence of war who fall into the cracks of memory, including the masses of dislocated refugees from war zones. In other words, these are the people who have become homeless, diasporic, refugees, stateless, immigrants, strangers, guests, exiled, subjects of imperial humanitarianism, and in debt for the gift of freedom in a liberal empire, as stated by Mimi Nguyen (2012). The second category is the disappeared, or those called the casualties of war, the anonymous, the ordinary, the non-heroic citizens. And the third is the disabled, the chemically poisoned, the physically damaged, those subjected to bombing, chemical weapons, landmines and drowning, with their ghostly presence – those living in the shadow of normality and normativity. If mostaz’af is a concept that depicts all these categories, and each category is unique, collectively they challenge the homogeneous category of mostaz’af.10 The Iran–Iraq War did not affect different classes equally. Many middle and upper-middle classes avoided becoming casualties of war either by leaving the country or by being replaced by voluntary forces from the lower classes, mostly from rural areas. While some of these forces went to war out of patriotism and ideological conviction, others used the war to negotiate a better life for themselves and their families. The tragic consequences of the Iran–Iraq War were not depicted in movies until war veterans, those believing in the Islamic state and its defence, started to criticize the continuation of the war once Iraqi soldiers were pushed out of Iranian-occupied lands. The Iran–Iraq War was imposed for eight years by both the external forces of Saddam Hussein and the internal suppression of dissent in the aftermath of the revolution and of the divisions between those who participated but anticipated different results.

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Recasting the dispossessed: From Karkheh to Rhein Made in 1993 by the well-known Iranian director Ibrahim Hatamikia, a member of the Revolutionary Guards during the Iran– Iraq War who worked in the documentary section at the front, From Karkheh to Rhein depicts an ex- basiji (war volunteer), Saeed, who is sent to Germany for medical treatment for war-related injuries and health problems two years after the Iran–Iraq War. On this journey, he stays with his sister Maryam, who is married to a German man, and her son. Through Saeed’s nightmares and disturbed emotional life, we learn about his family history and the war, including the story of Maryam, a diasporic Iranian woman who left the country during the war, a traitor according to her family (especially her mother, who refuses to talk to her on the phone), who relocated to Germany and married a German. The movie depicts Maryam and Saeed’s family connection as transcending national borders, a transnational story since Saeed becomes a haunting memory for Maryam from which she cannot escape (it is difficult to experience neocolonial amnesia, especially after the advent of new media technologies). Maryam becomes the keeper and guardian of the national memory for Saeed through her husband’s archive of Iranian political life during the war, when Saeed was at the front. Videotapes create continuity in narrating the nation, regardless of the ruptures of war and immigration, and connect Saeed and Maryam to each other through a recounting of this memory. However, the national memory remains gendered, since only Saeed shares the collective memory of the war with the men who fought with him at the front, a memory closed to women both in Iran and in the diaspora. In a small gathering of Saeed and other ex-combatants who are all in Germany for medical treatment, we learn that all of them are indeed casualties of war, those janbaz (disabled soldiers) whose lives were saved at the expense of their emotional or physical health. Saeed is left with a severe lung problem and the loss of his vision due to his exposure to the toxic gas used in chemical warfare in the Western-supported, Saddam Hussein-imposed war. One of Saeed’s friends has lost his legs, and another, severely damaged, struggles to survive. They bond with each other as they talk about their conditions. What they all share is not only a wounded masculinity shattered both physically and emotionally by the violence of war but

r ev i si ti n g th e mo sta z’af a n d t he mostakbar | 353 also their disillusionment with and the demystification of the heroic notions of a warrior masculinity celebrated by the Islamic state. Either sponsored by the Islamic state institution of Bonyade Mostaz’afan va Janbazan or by their wives, mothers and sisters, these men stand for those who have been depowered through an imposed war, first by the Iraqi occupation and then by the Iranian state’s investment in the continuation of the war. Two groups, the janbaz and the diaspora, represent those dispossessed by the war and depowered regardless of their gender or class. While men are represented as casualties of war because of the expectation for them to enact warrior masculinity, women’s assigned role of serving behind the front as supportive mothers and wives, sending their sons and husbands to war, not only conceals their sacrifices but also blames them for their decision to leave the country. Technological devices are extremely important in this film since they connect the territorial space of Iran with the diasporic space of Germany, given the transnational mobility of chemical bombs and medical technologies, as well as fragmented memories together with dislocated and disabled bodies. In addition, videotapes enable the national past to be commemorated in the diasporic location of Germany by depicting Saeed’s presence at the war front as a form of displacement and distance from participation in the history of everyday life. Saeed’s faulty memory – he does not remember or witness what was happening in everyday life – is supplemented by Maryam’s husband’s archives of Iranian TV. The technological devices are there to create connections between all the fragmented and disconnected pieces of social memory in the service of a masculinist nationalism. The damaged bodies of the janbaz men take the notion of mostaz’af to its limit, given that only certain groups of men participated in the war and only certain families (and mostly the women in them) now have to deal with the intensive care required to look after these men. Women’s primary responsibility in the Islamic Republic as wives and mothers and the assignment of care work to women as their main duty, or even as the natural extension of their femininity, make women the best target that the nation-state can use as the reserve army of labour required to provide unpaid care for war veterans. If the category of janbaz is the new mostaz’af, it is complicated by the diasporic sister’s presence as a fragment of the national memory, which is now scattered all over the globe, and by the decision of

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one of the Iran–Iraq War veterans (another ex-combatant friend of Saeed’s) to apply for asylum after being sent by the Islamic state to Germany for medical treatment.11 The depiction of Maryam and Saeed in this film creates a rupture in the continuity of the Islamic nationalist memory as well as in the appeal of the notion of mostaz’af, which includes those who fought in the war but excludes those who were displaced by war both in Iran and in the diaspora. The category of mostaz’af is certainly opened up to the politics of displacement and emplacement by the ambiguous closure in narrating the story of the dislocation of masses of Iranians, especially those from the lower-middle classes who left Iran either after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 or after the Iran–Iraq War, and their experiences of loss, disempowerment and oppression in various diasporic locations. The effects of war shatter the hegemonic masculinity of the warrior; Saeed and the other ex-combatants are still subscribing to the heroic idea of masculinity but are disillusioned with it as both the state and society abandon those who have been dispossessed, emasculated and depowered in the post-war era. The dependency of these war veterans upon women and diasporic Iranians for remembering what they missed during the war, together with their wounded masculinity that has left them incapacitated, unravels the category of mostaz’af not only for those who lost their lives in the war, the janbaz, but also to those who embody the violence of war.12 The film depicts the impossibility of a homecoming for both Saeed and Maryam. In this context, the exteriors, the war front and the diaspora redefine national space. The return of the war veteran and the diasporic would reveal the violence of the family and the state in their co-ordinated effort to impose subjugated gendered positions on citizen subjects.13 From Karkheh to Rhein portrays masculinity as a casualty of the war, marginalized by the commemoration of war martyrs and the normative masculinity of everyday life, and nihilistic in its intentions and its vision of the nationalist notions of warrior masculinity. While the film makes an effort to re-collect the fragmented parts of the nation through its renarration of the tropes of family, belonging and war memory, it also opens up the taken-for-granted space of the nation to its exteriors, to its borders (pushing for what is called ‘border thinking’ in a decolonial option14), where the coherence of the nation-state and its representation of the depowered – the mostaz’af and the janbaz

r e v i si ti n g th e mo sta z’af a n d t he mostakbar | 355 – are unsettled through the performative failure of both masculinity and femininity as unitary identities. Indeed, both the combatant and the diasporic are displaced for life and cannot return to the normative state of the civilian. In addition, the space of Germany, either as a new home for diasporic Iranians or as a technologically advanced society helping treat war veterans, cannot help but reveal the complicity of European countries, together with the United States, in providing chemical weapons for Iraq to use against Iran during the Iran–Iraq War. For example, in the movie’s depiction of chemically affected Iranian war veterans and a group of journalists, one of the veterans reverses the interview by interrogating not only the role of the United States and Europe in providing chemical weapons to Iraq but also the imperialist presence of the West in the region for petroleum rather than for human rights reasons.15 The film also displays the transnational connections that led to the Iran– Iraq War, creating space for an interrogation of the forces involved in the war beyond the boundaries of nation-states. A Separation and the crisis of care A Separation is another film that complicates the binary of the mostaz’af and the mostakbar under the Islamic Republic. The film starts with a scene from a family court in Tehran where a rather odd request for divorce is being processed by the judge. Simin, who is married to Nader, asks for a divorce not because of Nader but because of Nader’s decision not to allow her to leave the country (women can only do this with the permission of their husbands). Simin claims that the process of applying to leave started with Nader’s consent a year and a half earlier but ended with his refusal to leave the country with her and their daughter, Termeh. The reason presented to the judge is Termeh’s future. The judge dismisses Simin’s request and the story starts. From the conversation between the judge and Simin, the audience learns that the family decided to leave in the first place for the wellbeing of their daughter, but Nader changed his mind because his father was diagnosed with dementia and needed to be cared for. With the film concealing Simin’s reasons why her 11-year-old daughter is better off outside the country, the audience starts the journey of the story and is asked to take an active part not only by projecting themselves onto Termeh’s character (for whose good Simin and

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Nader are pressured to end their marriage) but also by collaborating with the screenwriter in figuring out how the film should end. The movie continues with Simin’s performative act of moving in with her parents in order to pressure Nader to change his mind. With Simin’s departure, the family is faced with what I call ‘the crisis of care’, resulting from the rupture of the Islamic Republic’s investment in assigning to women the primary role of housewives, mothers and caretakers, regardless of their level of education or their profession. Simin’s refusal to prioritize the role of housewife and her mothering work of not allowing her daughter to reproduce that role, even at the cost of displacement and exile, expose the difficulties of modern nation-states and their patriarchal ideologies in holding onto the institution of the family in the age of global capital. While a public patriarchy and dislocation, from the point of view of those who live in the diaspora and those who are concentrated in the most feminized and racialized segments of the market, may not be an improvement on the institutions of the family and private patriarchy, the idea of flight continues to appeal to many Iranian women and has done so since the Iranian Revolution of 1979.16 Indeed, the crisis of care is not unique to Iran and the Iranian nation-state, since it is now a well-known fact that as middle-class women have integrated into the job market globally, it is the reserve army of immigrant women as domestic workers and caretakers that is filling the void created for women’s work at home. In Iran, although there is a lot to be said about immigrants and refugees, especially Afghani refugees, and their integration into the informal economy, the work of caring is still largely expected to be provided by Iranian women, especially women of the lower classes.17 Also, the situation has its unique complications in Iran for two main reasons. One is the Islamic Republic’s investment in the discourse of ‘equality in difference’ and the recognition of women’s primary role as wives and mothers and as performing a socially recognizable labour (the work of breastfeeding, bearing and rearing children), compensated to some extent through Islamic marriage laws.18 The second is the state practice of sex segregation, which has caused a lot of problems when it comes to care work within the institutions of the modern nation-state and its modernization of patriarchy (Moallem 2005). For example, while sex segregation has created more opportunities for women in the medical and nursing sector because of the need or

r ev i si ti n g th e mo sta z’af an d t he mostakbar | 357 desire for women to be seen by female doctors, nurses and health workers, especially when it comes to female health issues, the increased numbers of women in medical school and their higher level of success in the konkoor sarasari (university entrance exam) across the country have pressured the state to limit female acceptance rates to medical schools. In A Separation, the crisis starts when Razieh – a woman from the lower classes who is hired by Nader to take care of his father – refuses to continue in the job, even though she has a deep need to make a living because of her husband’s unemployment and debts. She refuses to continue because of the requirement to wash Nader’s father – a namahram (a non-family member). For religious reasons, in Islam a woman should be mahram to a man – a close family member whom one cannot marry – if she is to see or touch a man’s body. The religious morality here is in conflict with the pragmatic everyday need for care work, complicating the situation.19 Razieh does, however, negotiate a position for her husband, Rajab (from whom Razieh has kept her new job secret), before she stops taking care of the father. However, before the husband gets involved, a series of events reveals a more complicated scenario and shows the lack of a simple solution to the problem of an unemployed husband replacing his wife in performing care work. The film not only exposes the spatial mapping of class divisions and the problems of unemployment, both of which hit the urban poor hard, but also reveals the implications of gender segregation and the ethical complications of care work within the domestic sphere when the labour of mothers and wives gets caught up with the work of caring as paid labour. The audience learns that when Razieh takes care of Nader’s father, her young daughter Somayeh goes with her. We also learn that both Razieh and Simin are motivated by ethical values. Razieh’s values are the result of her deep investment in religion and religious morality (beyond the institutions of the state and the family), and Simin’s values are based on her desire not to compromise her family values and their direct ties to the state. Both struggle with and resist patriarchal relations in their own ways, with Razieh prioritizing religious values over patriarchal ones and Simin prioritizing truthtelling over family secrets. Both are limited by making ethical choices. As a middle-class woman with access to cultural and social capital and a liberal husband, Simin is still limited by the patriarchal rule of law

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and the need for permission from her husband to leave the country if she decides to stay married. She is also coerced into caring for the family emotionally while she is trying to distance herself from what is expected or required of her. As a working-class woman, Razieh is limited because of both class and gender restrictions, including her need to find a job while taking care of her young daughter, her fear of her husband resenting her job working for a man who is in the process of separating from his wife and caring for another man (his father), her difficulties in dealing with an unemployed and frustrated husband who turns to physical and verbal violence on every occasion to express his anger and irritation, and her juggling of religious morality and everyday survival strategies that involve transgressing the boundaries of what is required or expected. Simin’s daughter, Termeh, who is asked to choose between leaving the country with Simin and staying in Iran with Nader, becomes the bearer of the situation. There is no argument between Nader and Simin, no violence, no stereotyping of Iranian men as inherently irrational and violent. Indeed, Nader is a good husband and a caring father and son. The institution of the family and the disjuncture of the state and patriarchy cause the separation. A relationship is put in crisis because of the refusal of the subjects to perform the normative gender roles assigned to them – for Simin, playing the role of the caretaker, and for Nader, playing the role of the breadwinner. While Nader is willing to take care of his father, because of work he is unable to provide care for him unless he hires someone to do the job. The plot does not blame men but emphasizes the institutional hierarchy of gender and class divisions of labour and their implications for gendered subjects. The film opens up the possibility of flight despite the unclear future of displacement and exile by providing space for the young woman, Termeh, to reflect upon her decision to either leave or stay.20 This is a divorce imposed upon everyone, a divorce borne out of the crisis of care. The film does not provide much information about the context of Simin’s flight (using Mina Agha’s words). Is it the work of care that is putting too many demands on Simin? Is it women’s condition under the Islamic Republic? The only answer that the film offers is that she does not want her daughter to be raised in Iran and to be subjected to what she has gone through. Simin has made up her mind and no obligation or sense of guilt seems to have the power to

r evi si ti n g th e mo sta z’af a n d t he mostakbar | 359 change her decision. Like the character in From Karkheh to Rhein, Simin represents the large number of Iranian women who have left Iran for their own reasons, mostly gender and sexuality related, and who are blamed for their decision. A few events make the situation even more complicated. After Nader’s father leaves the house while Razieh is busy taking care of the garbage, a car hits Razieh while she tries to find the father. Razieh then attaches the father to the bed so that she can leave to see a doctor about her pregnancy and the pain caused by the car accident. One thing leads to another when Nader and Termeh come back home and discover that the door is locked and the father is tied to the bed. Nader becomes angry and throws Razieh out of the apartment while accusing her of stealing money that he cannot immediately find to pay her. However, when each character relates these events, they are slightly distorted for pragmatic reasons, serving each subject yet making the other responsible. Razieh does not tell her husband that she had a car accident and accuses Nader of pushing her out of the apartment and being responsible for her fall and the loss of her pregnancy. Rajab finds an opportunity to blame Nader and Simin for his wife’s loss of her pregnancy and his bad fortune in life, pushing to get some money out of the situation in order to resolve his financial difficulties. Everyone is responsible for distortion when representing the events; each person also tries to act ethically as long as it is not damaging to his or her own life. We also learn from Somayeh’s drawings that Razieh is the victim of domestic violence, but when Somayeh is asked about it, she denies it. Even Termeh, who had a frank talk with Nader about Razieh, barely escapes the judge’s investigation into Nader’s knowledge of Razieh’s pregnancy. What makes the trajectory of the plot impossible is both the ethical act of Razieh, who takes back her distorted version of what happened when she is asked to swear on the Qur’an, and Simin’s pressure on Nader to tell the truth about his knowledge of Razieh’s pregnancy as he overheard her conversation with Termeh’s teacher. Again, Razieh’s and Simin’s decision not to favour or protect their families interrupts both patriarchy and the state in their investment not only in regulating and disciplining gendered subjects but also in managing the work of caring. At the end, Simin and Nader decide to separate and Termeh is asked to decide whom to live with. The film leaves us guessing

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Termeh’s decision. Termeh is crying but announces that she has already made up her mind. Whatever her decision, the situation is going to be difficult. If Termeh decides to leave, she has to deal with the guilt of abandoning her father, who remained behind because of the care work; if she stays, she has to deal with separation from her mother, who cared for her future and her well-being. Can Termeh make an individual decision beyond the social bonds of affect? Can she think rationally while what bonds her to the others is what she is forced to make a decision about? A Separation displays the continuation of class and gender inequalities and injustice under the Islamic Republic. It also depicts the complications of care work in the context of modernity and the modernization of the patriarchy. This is indeed a global story appealing not only to Iranians but also to international audiences that are also experiencing the crisis of care. It shows how problematic and uneasy is the union of state and religion. The modernization of the patriarchy has become more contradictory since the integration of public and private patriarchies after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Conclusion The concepts of mostaz’af and mostakbar as part of the revolutionary vocabulary have been challenged and changed in the post-revolutionary era. While the concept of mostakbar was used to depict the un-Islamic and unjust classes of the ancien régime and its imperialist allies, its post-revolutionary meaning refers to the Islamic elite and their power and privilege within the Islamic Republic. Mostaz’af as a unifying concept that distinguishes the depowered from the powerful is disrupted because of the intersection of the categories of gender, class and religion and the contradictions and conflicts between citizens and the diaspora, men and women, the upper and lower classes, and the secular and the religious, as well as between those who went to war and those who did not. What takes the concept of mostaz’af and its potential revolutionary meaning to their limits is the work of caregiving, a work that links everyone to everyone else in an economy of dependency in which a belief in Islam, not as a state religion but as an everyday code of conduct, is transgressed and contravened for pragmatic reasons.

r e v i si ti n g th e mo sta z’af a n d t he mostakbar | 361 Through a close reading of two films produced in postrevolutionary Iran, I have shown how the oppositional notions of the mostaz’af and mostakbar are broken down with the territorial expansion of the nation-state to include simultaneously both the diaspora and the war front and the complications caused by care work, which links everything to everything else. While the burden of care work in the Islamic Republic falls within women’s primary role as housewives, mothers or sisters, the unintended consequences of the Islamic discourse of ‘equality within difference’, along with the continuation of class hierarchies, have created a moment of crisis. With the massive investment of women in education as well as their keen participation in the public sphere (even in non-traditional segments of the market), and with the rise of divorce rates and the desire for migration, these crises have deepened. While it is not the only modern nation-state that is facing the crisis of care, given that most care work in our neoliberal and advanced capitalist societies is provided by a displaced and feminized labour force, the case of Iran is unique because of the ways in which the state has put into practice the discourse of ‘equality within difference’ and its related policy of gender segregation. While both public and private patriarchies are regulating this work, the notion of mostaz’af has become not only the signifier of those who are depowered (the wounded, the sick, the disabled) but also a place where the labour of care is concealed and contained by the collaboration of the welfare state and the institution of the patriarchal family. Such collaboration fails when the differences of class are not compensated for by the gender division of labour and are exposed in the crisis of care work. Furthermore, the moral framework of religion (in this case, Shia Islam) becomes an obstacle for the regulation of care by the reserve army of labour (women of lower classes, immigrants, and so on), disrupting the complicity of the nation-state and the modern institution of the family. In this context, the binary of mostaz’af and mostakbar may be replaced by questioning what the concept of mostaz’af exposes and disguises at the same time. Perhaps the notion of power functioning to invest meaning into this category should be extended to include the will to power, expressed by Simin and Razieh in these films, as they refuse to be complicit with the institution of both the family and the state. As for the protagonist Termeh, whatever her decision, the context of crisis within which she is pressured to make that decision

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opens up the possibility of an interrogation of both gender and class – not as categories that are taken for granted but as identities that are imposed socially, culturally and economically. Both films expose the contradictions and limits of patriotism and patriarchy, displaying gender, class and national divides that are impossible to articulate through the binary of mostaz’af and mostakbar. Notes 1. I use the term ‘war of position’ to refer to Gramsci’s concept of the struggle to gain influence and power. As I have argued before, even after the establishment of the Islamic Republic and with the repression and marginalization of the left and of national democratic groups, and because of the heterogeneity of the state elite and its ideological differences, the struggle for power, authority and control continues. Furthermore, while the construction of a unified ‘we’ enabled direct clashes between the Pahlavi regime and the revolutionary forces during the revolution of 1979, in the aftermath of the revolution this unity was split by the different and often contradictory desires and needs of those who participated in the revolution (Foran 1993, Moallem 2003, 2005, 2009). 2. For example, Ali Shariati, an Iranian sociologist who was influenced by Fanon and other Third Worldist intellectuals, brought together what he called ‘Alavid Shi’ism’ (associated with original Shi’ism and confronting oppressive rules) as opposed to Safavid Shi’ism (associated with the Safavid state from 1501 to 1721), and modern revolutionary ideas and ideals (Shariati 1971). The reinvention of Shia Islam as a protest movement continues to provide space for contestation and rebelliousness even within the context of the Islamic Republic.

3. A number of feminists of colour problematize the notion of oppositional consciousness by bringing into the equation issues of sexuality, race and class (Sandoval 1991). The concept of ‘intersectionality’ as well as the articulation of different social relations emerged from a critique of the unitary subject of colonial modernity and its subjection to multiple and rather contradictory relations of power, in both local and global contexts. 4. Film-e Farsi refers to melodramatic, commercial and entertaining films that were produced before the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and incorporated a great deal of dancing, singing and fighting. 5. By Islamic cosmopolitanism and universalism, I mean the ideas of Islam as a monotheistic religion that includes everyone, no matter their race, gender, ethnicity or national belonging. I also distinguish between Islamic nationalism and transnationalism as popular movements and the militarist Islamic groups and ideologies that emerged in the context of the occupation of Afghanistan, Iraq and the civil war in Syria, including the Taliban and ISIS. While a common vocabulary is used to represent these movements or as an affirmation of Islam by some of these groups, their socio-historical and sociopolitical contexts are radically different. Unfortunately, while the mainstream media collapses all these movements

r ev i si ti n g th e mo sta z’af a n d t he mostakbar | 363 and militant groups into one category to otherize Islam and Muslims, it is important to note that each of these movements has its own genealogy as well as its specific historical context. Indeed, the modern racialization of Islam, its othering and its politicization as an oppositional popular movement since colonialism have created a transnational vocabulary, collapsing everything with everything else – this is a serious if not vicious mistake. 6. In Iran, such differences are described by the division between Ahmadinejad and his entourage, who started to claim ‘the Iranian school’ in their reference to a pre-Islamic Iran and its cultural importance, and the Islamists, who continue to emphasize an Islamic Iran. 7. The IRMF (Islamic Revolution Mostaz’afan Foundation): http://irmf. ir/en/default.aspx. 8. The successor of the Pahlavi Foundation in post-revolutionary Iran, the Foundation of the Oppressed and Disabled, owns a number of factories, farms, construction firms and trade and service companies. According to Keshavarzian, the Foundation of the Oppressed and Disabled is one of the largest foundations or charities in Iran, has a quasi-state status, and has expanded its activities into all areas of the economy, including manufacturing, commerce, banking, tourism and telecommunications (2007: 167–8). 9. I define war movies as movies that explicitly and directly focus on the Iran–Iraq War. I also refer to war movies as a series of films that have similar plots. In addition, in these films, not only is the intention of the filmmaker clear, but also the film communities of Iran – including producers, actors and film critics, as well as audiences – refer to them as a particular genre that is distinguished from other types

of film because of their focus on the Iran–Iraq War. As noted by Asghar Naghizadeh, who is known for his roles in this type of cinema, ‘war movies in Iran did not constitute a genre but they followed the war’ (2003: 54). An important characteristic of these movies is that most of them are funded by the state and were made in the context of what the Iranian state calls the ‘sacred defence’ of an imposed Iraqi war. ‘Sacred defence’ war movies include both documentaries and fiction. See Naficy (2012) for a comprehensive description of Iranian war movies. 10. I am unable to expand on these categories in this essay, but I elaborate extensively on these concepts in my new manuscript in progress entitled Filmic Archive, National Memory and Iran–Iraq War Movies. 11. Based on his interview with the director Hatamikia, Said ZeydabadiNejad reports that the depiction of a basiji war veteran applying for asylum in Germany in this film became controversial and provoked a number of basiji to write to the Supreme Leader to request that the film be removed from public screening. Nevertheless, the film was screened and became the bestselling film of the year (2010: 70). 12. Indeed, a number of war movies made in the post-war era depict the hardship and frustrations of this group of men. For example, The Glass Agency by Ibrahim Hatamikia (1997) shows the gap between the needs of these ex-combatants and the priorities of the state and the citizenry in the post-war context. 13. The Iran–Iraq War had a great impact on the mobilization of Islamic nationalism and conservatism in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, when the reinvention of a hegemonic Islamic nation based on gendered citizenship was encountering resistance

364 | t h e cu lt u r a l p o l i t i c s o f r e p r e s e n tat i o n from various groups who participated in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. 14. In Learning to Unlearn, Tlostanova and Mignolo refer to border thinking as emerging in the process of delinking from the colonial matrix and escaping from its control. In other words, ‘border thinking is a specific epistemic response from the exteriority of western modernity, a response from the outside created from the perspective of the inside (that is, the exteriority in building its own identity as humanitas)’ (2012: 6–7). 15. While the weakening of military forces in both Iraq and Iran was crucial for the United States, the anti-Iranian sentiments after the Iranian Revolution and the weakening of the Islamic regime in Iran justified US military support of Iraq. The United States also made secret arrangements to sell weapons to Iran despite an embargo on such sales (this is well-known as the Iran–Contra affair). 16. The desire for migration has influenced several generation of Iranians since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Various reasons contribute to this desire for displacement, including censorship and restrictions imposed by the state, the expansion of new media, the circulation of the idea of the ‘American dream’ or the glorification of life in the West as opposed to Iran’s patriarchal gendered and sexual practices, and the quest for an autonomous and independent life in the diaspora. 17. The space of the family is still xenophobic and therefore closed to Afghani refugees. Afghani refugees are mostly concentrated in construction work and agricultural businesses and a number of other precarious jobs. 18. As I have argued elsewhere, by putting the Islamic jurisprudence notion of equality in difference into marital practice, a woman’s primary

role is considered to be looking after the husband and children while the man’s role is to provide for the woman in exchange for her domestic work and her work of childbearing and rearing. This equality in difference does not follow the modern logic of ‘housewifization’ where women’s work is unpaid and invisible. Women are not forced to work outside the home unless they desire to do so. They are also not obligated to share their income, given that their husbands are legally and financially in charge of the family. Given the contractual nature of Muslim marriage, the marriage contract could include any other mutually agreed conditions and is legally bonding. While in practice many women may not ask for any financial compensation while married or may lose it to be able to exit from a difficult marriage, Iranian women have not been shy in asking for substantial amounts of Mahre or mahrieh (an obligatory sum of money, gold or property that the groom agrees to pay, mostly symbolically at the time of the marriage and practically after a divorce) and Nafaqueh (the husband’s financial obligation to provide for his wife and children during the marriage). These conditions have created a deep crisis in the institution of marriage and have caused an increase in divorce rates in urban and cosmopolitan areas where women can use their Mahre to pursue education or jobs, or simply to rebuild their life after a divorce. The unintended results of the discourse of ‘equality within difference’ have impacted on the desirability of marriage for both men and women. The recent phenomenon of ‘white marriages’ (informal cohabitation of couples instead of formal marriages) and the rise of divorce and marriages between older women and younger men are examples

r evi si ti n g th e mo sta z’af a n d t he mostakbar | 365 of unintended results of the ‘equality within difference’ policy of the Islamic Republic. For an extensive discussion of the discourse of equality in difference, see Moallem (2016). 19. In Islam and Gender, Ziba Mir-Husseini shows how, since the revolution, a number of problems (masa’el) have required the writing of practical treatises by Shi’i jurists to address specific questions; these include

recent progress in medical science and technology, from sex changes to artificial insemination (1999: 35–8). 20. Thinking beyond the framework of nation-states and the emphasis on either political asylum or economic need, Mina Agha uses the notion of flight and exile from a biographic perspective to account for both forced and voluntary forms of displacement (2000).

1 4 | M AR I A M A B Â ’ S S O L O NG A L E TTE R: ‘WOM E N, CUL T UR E A N D D E V ELOPMENT ’ F ROM A F R A N CO P H O N E O R POS T C OLONIA L P E RS P E C T I V E

Anjali Prabhu

Introduction: women, culture and development from here The discipline is a principle of control over the production of discourse. (Foucault 1981: 61) The main argument put forth in favour of the women, culture and development (WCD) paradigm is the urgency to move away from economistic analyses, specifically in the context of Third World women, in order to understand women’s lives and agency in all their complexity. Francophone studies – loosely defined as the study of literature and culture (in or through the French language) generated from outside mainland France and within France’s postcolonial immigrant communities – is, in the US academy, linked closely to the larger field of postcolonial studies, which has been generated and has defined itself with and against, most notably, post-structuralism and postmodernism (see, for example, Appiah 1991, Kadir 1995, Shohat and Stam 1994). The departure from ‘pure’ literary studies (more and more, departments are electing to use the term ‘French studies’ as opposed to ‘French literature’) means that the field is bound up with cultural studies, a field or sub-field under constant redefinition (for a questioning of this field, see Schwartz 2000).1 It is from this position that I come to understand the terms women, culture and development. If ‘women’ is retained over ‘gender’, in order to focus on women rather than men (Chua et al. 2000: 824), I would, in addition, insist that the ‘gendered’ articulation of this category of ‘women’ is what becomes important within the current project: gendered in the sense of socially constructed in relation to the signifying practices at a specific location. Therefore, opting to

mariama bâ’s so lon g a let ter | 367 study ‘gendered women’ implies that ‘women’ act from, define and defy positions that are recognizably those of women in the culture in question, and that significantly affect their daily lives. In that respect, the idea of the ‘feminine’ – mostly suggested from the domain of the literary – as resistant, defying definition, uncontainable and physical becomes ostensibly less significant because the ‘feminine’ is not necessarily tied to ‘women’.2 Since the ‘Third World’ is largely the context in which the paradigm is proposed, I should clarify that my engagement with the Third World is specifically invested in the ‘national’ and the ‘postcolonial’ as they relate to nations formerly colonized by France.3 The purely chronological significance of postcolonial (referring to the period following official independence or the dismantling of the colonial administration), as well as the more complex concerns involving differential sources and forces of power and resistance that the term has come to encompass, becomes important in this study, which is built around the rhetoric of independence.4 Moreover, the term ‘postcolonial’ encompasses the idea that the colonial encounter can account for only part of the structuring force, as newer external pressures as well as older societal and historical realities figure, alongside colonial legacies, in very real ways in the lives of the people of these geographical regions. Further, the manifestation of these different products of colonialism and of newer capitalist imperialisms is not excluded from ‘First World’ settings or from those that are recognizable as former ‘Second World’ locations. Development has been understood, very specifically, within the context of (new) nationhood, with the nationalist rhetoric of development being clearly linked to catching up with the ‘mother’ country and to modernization. While the WCD paradigm quite judiciously calls for a retreat from these simplistic definitions of development, which relate to modernization and measurable economic progress, such definitions have been formative in the resulting policies, procedures, dominant practices and laws in the new nation that, in part, structure – and perhaps often hinder – women’s practices of everyday life. If literature is seen as belonging to the realm of the cultural, then the privileging of the ‘cultural’ over the ‘economic’ can have quite different resonances in other domains. In fact – regardless of location – any extrication of the cultural from the economic quite simply gives renewed pertinence to the old base–superstructure metaphor

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and precludes an understanding of the literary text in its material reality. One of the definitions of the cultural engaged by feminist analysts – namely, as the ‘non-economic’ (Chua et al. 2000: 820, 826) – proves to be less theoretically productive for literary analyses, because it would lead us back to the text as the binding and final authority for its form and content. The approach taken to ‘culture’ delineates the framework within which ‘being’ (and thus agency and resistance) can be theorized and understood. It is useful, for this reason, to consider Homi Bhabha’s notion of culture as ‘enunciation’, where the ‘enunciative is a more dialogic process [than to see culture as epistemology] that attempts to track displacements and realignments that are the effects of cultural antagonisms and articulations – subverting the rationale of the hegemonic moment and relocating alternative, hybrid sites of cultural negotiation’ (Bhabha 1992: 443). We could read this process of generating culture as one that is anchored in the specific social context, but tied closely to disruptions of static ideas of culture and tradition within it. The consideration of these disruptions that are enabled by oppositions and ongoing practices within a circumscribed space upsets the given or accepted understanding of culture that pre-exists action. Such an alternative understanding would then provide the means for questioning purely ‘textual’ interpretations of literary work and open up possibilities for reading culture. These readings can take into account multiple areas that implicate ‘development’, especially those inhabited and generated by ‘women’, and unconventional types of action, with, for example, a new understanding of ‘production’. In the Francophone context, the voices of nationalist movements have largely been male and masculinist. Therefore, the privileging of ‘women’s’ writing immediately complicates these discourses, since women’s concerns were seen as being too ‘narrow’ to be addressed in the urgency of independence movements. These nationalist voices have also stemmed from extremely elite locations, in the language of the elite (in the specifically Francophone context, in French, but also in the all-encompassing sense that Bourdieu gives to language, for example) – in the language of the (ex-)colonizer.5 Class, considered together with gender (specifically women in this case), enters this idea of development when seen through literature, not as entities that have been privileged in previous analyses and need to be done away with, but rather as elements that problematize and question the

mariama bâ’s s o lon g a let ter | 369 unitary nature of the elite nationalist discourses that engaged most prominently with development. Yet, the category of writing ‘women’ hardly fits a priori as an entity that produces a counter-discourse: women (authors and their texts) can reinforce and promote masculinist nationalist causes with efficacy, even if not necessarily with intention, and this is because all writers are ‘significantly situated even before [they] come to write’ (Williams 1989b: 258). If these points call for a slightly different set of tactics, the overall strategy remains: to reach a more complete, nuanced understanding of women in the context of development, which engages their creative resistance to various hegemonic forces.6 Culture is the most problematic by far of the terms implicated in the WCD paradigm. Williams’ term, ‘structures of feelings’, is deployed in the WCD conception as an antidote to the vulgar Marxist and economically determining trends in previous approaches to development. It is difficult to reach a consensus regarding what ‘cultural’ is, and further complexity is added by other relevant terms, such as ‘economic’, ‘material’, ‘gender’, ‘class’, ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’, for example, which interact with the former. This warrants some attention since any understanding of agency or resistance within particular cultures must necessarily relate to the exact way in which ‘culture’ is defined. The idea of culture as developed by Raymond Williams and those who followed in cultural studies has always been closely tied to the idea of class – in particular, working class. For Williams, ‘there is a distinct working-class way of life’, which he goes on to propose as a model for English society as a whole, based on ‘its emphases of neighbourhood, mutual obligation and common betterment, as expressed in the great working-class political and industrial institutions’ (Williams 1989: 8). The type of working through proposed by the WCD project is therefore similar to the one that took place in ‘cultural studies’ and continues to do so. Stuart Hall has summarized its dominant paradigm as follows: It stands opposed to the residual and merely-reflective role assigned to ‘the cultural’. In its different ways, it conceptualises culture as interwoven with all social practices and those practices, in turn, as a common form of human activity: sensuous human praxis, the activity through which men and women make history.

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It is opposed to the base–superstructure way of formulating the relationship between ideal and material forces, especially where the ‘base’ is defined as the determination by ‘the economic’ in any simple sense … It defines ‘culture’ as both the meanings and values which arise amongst distinctive social groups and classes, on the basis of their given historical conditions and relationships, through which they ‘handle’ and respond to the conditions of existence; and as the lived traditions and practices through which those ‘understandings’ are expressed and in which they are embodied. (Hall 1986: 39, emphasis in original) So, while the way in which people live and experience structures of relations is what is privileged, and the emphasis is on creative and historical agency, as Hall continues here in his understanding of Thompson (1963), ‘every mode of production is also a culture, and every struggle between classes is also a struggle between cultural modalities; and which, for [Raymond] Williams, is what a “cultural analysis”, in the final instance, should deliver’ (Hall 1986: 39, emphasis added). In invoking Williams’ term ‘structures of feelings’ (Chua et al. 2000: 821), we might also reflect on the ways in which feelings are structured: feelings of happiness, sadness, competence, powerlessness, ambiguity, fitting in, standing out, complacency, enthusiasm, independence, dependency, desire, repugnance, attraction, love – these are all experienced within and around, in resistance to and complicity with, forces of patriarchy and dominant and accepted ways of being. These in turn are reinforced by laws and supported by relations that might be seen to be ‘culturally’ specific, but which are often incomprehensible without understanding their economic component. The sanctioning of feelings through these forces cannot be discounted. In other words, approaching the problem through structures of feelings raises the question of the structuring of these feelings. Experience and culture thus serve as overarching unities within which specific struggles, feelings, lives and agencies can be figured. ‘This sense of cultural totality – of the whole historical process – over-rides any effort to keep the instances and elements distinct. Their real interconnection, under given historical conditions, must be matched by a totalising movement “in thought” in the analysis’ (Hall 1986: 39, emphasis in the original). This type of analysis recalls Fredric Jameson’s conception of the dialectical

mariama bâ’s so lon g a let ter | 371 method, where everything, as it were, must be figured at once: ‘The peculiar difficulty of dialectical writing lies indeed in its holistic, “totalizing” character: as though you could not say any one thing until you had first said everything; as though with each new idea you were bound to recapitulate the entire system’ (Jameson 1971: 306, emphasis added). The impossibility of this task, from the point of view of systematic study, clearly calls for practical measures. In my view, the first of these is interdisciplinary dialogue, which can provide far more complexity than academic disciplinarity generally permits, and in which this volume participates. Another, suggested elsewhere by Jameson himself, is specific to literary criticism. It involves criticism being able to ‘transform’ statements about aesthetics or form ‘into genuinely historical ones’ (Jameson 1988: 120). Still in the context of such formal analysis, Jameson is interested in pursuing these statements ‘all the way’ until they re-emerge in or as history. Such ‘momentary contact with the real’ can emerge when ‘literary criticism abolishes itself as such and yields a glimpse of consciousness momentarily at one with its social ground’ (ibid.: 120). Our reading of the Senegalese writer Mariama Bâ’s epistolary novel will privilege such forms of contact. Many of the early figures in Francophone writing were also implicated politically on the national scene, whether or not they were endorsed by the ‘official’ nation: Aimé Césaire (Mayor of Fort-deFrance, Martinique until as recently as March 2001); Léopold Sédar Senghor (first President of Senegal, a post he held for 21 years); Frantz Fanon (a radical Martinican, involved in the struggle of the National Liberation Front in Algeria and later associated with the Black Panther movement in the US). All these intellectuals passed through the French school system and went to university in Paris. Most of the figures were involved in the dual processes of representation: as artists and political representatives, or at least as spokespersons with a wide impact in elite national circles and beyond. Literature and WCD Every act of criticism is always literally tied to a set of social and historical circumstances; the problem is in specifying or characterizing the relationship, not merely in asserting that it exists. (Said 1984: 956)

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Can we then assume that a woman writing automatically remedies the masculinist tendencies of nationalist discourse? The author, as the point at which various forces come together to generate the text, is but one point of juncture between the fictional textuality and the other texts or discourses with which the literary text connects.7 Reading is a practice that exploits the ideas of ‘contiguity, metonymy, the touching of spatial boundaries at a tangent’ (Bhabha 1992: 452). In that case, is the subject (content) of the text to be revealing of the corresponding realities? For Williams, a ‘correspondence of content between a writer and his [sic] world is less significant than his correspondence of organization, of structure’ (quoted in Hall 1986: 37). In the following reading, I engage the contiguity of the literary text with its outside reality in terms of both the shared content and the significance of its narrative organization. In fact, the societal structures that are subverted in the story of the text are also inscribed through the structure of the text. ‘Allegorical’ readings – notwithstanding the furore this suggestion caused with regard to the ‘national’ (see Jameson 1986; also Ahmad 1994, Bensmaïa 1999, for example) – provide another effective mode of linking the literary text to its larger reality for the paradigm in question. In this reading, however, we will be identifying ‘moment[s] in which the system as a whole [specifically the postcolonial national],8 or some limit of it, is being touched’ (Jameson in Stephanson 1988: 27, emphasis added). Yet it cannot become a study of women in Senegalese society (for a descriptive study that discusses ‘women in development’ (WID) and ‘gender and development’ (GAD) approaches to ‘social service’ interventions in Senegal, see Sarr et al. 1997, Guérin 2008). Following Lucien Goldmann, Williams suggested the importance of the use of common ‘categories’ between a fictional text and the ‘outside’ world (see Hall 1986: 37). Just as the author provides one of the connections between text and world, the common categories between these two realms provide a conceptual fulcrum for our articulation of one with the other. Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre and WCD This novel takes the form of a ‘letter’ (from Ramatoulaye to her childhood friend Aïssatou) in which the writer of the letter reminisces about her life and that of her friend: shared childhood, meeting and falling in love with their respective spouses, marriage, polygamy, the

mariama bâ’s so lon g a let ter | 373 heartache of the first wives and the very different ways in which each of the two women manages this situation. Published in 1979, this novel, which received the Nouma prize in 1980, remains one of the benchmark texts of Francophone literature, and is taught in virtually every programme. One of the early texts in French by a woman from France’s ex-colonies, its ideas about progress, feminism and modernity are very nicely recuperated into Western understanding of these issues – up to a point (see Champagne 1996: 22–30; for a discussion of how the ‘feminist’ side adequately explains only part of the text, Guèye 1994). The novel is also short, and makes relatively easy reading for introductory courses in literature. While Ramatoulaye’s narrative censures nationalist discourse in various ways, it does not, in fact, offer such a radical departure from nationalist views of development and progress. This debunks any unproblematically radical ascription to women’s writing. Therefore, the practice of writing in French by women in this period, of which Bâ’s text is an example, while in itself radical due to the restricted entry of women into French schools in Senegal at the time, must first be seen in relation to the conditions that reproduce it. This reproduction (of the practice of women’s writing) is inseparable from the reproduction of the social relations in which access to writing (here in French) is restricted to those who entered French schools. This latter possibility is in turn tied to the structural positioning of such individuals and groups in the period just preceding independence in the French colonies.9 Still, the return of the familiar nationalist rhetoric concerning development and modernity, couched in terms borrowed from the colonizer, is destabilized through the uprooting procedure by which the female narrator appropriates it. The discussion of such issues from the perspective of a woman, and a mother, and the weighing of these consequences at the level of the personal and the familial effectively wrench away their significance from ‘objective’ largescale measurement processes, while reinstating them as having consequences at the micro-level. As Mariama Bâ has indicated in an interview, there was not much space for women’s voices in official spheres: she herself preferred to work through non-governmental agencies to promote change (Dia 1979). Ramatoulaye’s fictional engagement with this sphere of education and progress effectively wrests this discourse out of its possession by such figures as Léopold

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Sédar Senghor, then President of Senegal. For example, Ramatoulaye writes to her friend Aïssatou: ‘Did these interminable discussions [around the political career of Ramatoulaye’s husband Modou], during which points of view concurred or clashed, complemented each other or were vanquished, determine the aspect of the New Africa?’ (Bâ 1981: 24). Ramatoulaye and Aïssatou are clearly part of this new ‘we’ that has the ‘privilege … to be the link between two periods in our history, one of domination, the other of independence … With independence achieved, we witnessed the birth of a republic, the birth of an anthem and the implantation of a flag’ (25). As the above passages indicate, the concerns of the larger context of the nation and its society are not merely present, but become, in the narrative, the preoccupations of the personal voice of autobiography of the character. This character is presented as a wife who has lost her husband, whom she had already lost to a second wife. Writing of the idealism of youth of herself and her friend, and of the two couples they formed with their respective husbands, Ramatoulaye notes that they ‘were full of nostalgia but were resolutely progressive’ (19). The young women were educated in the French school, where the aims of the ‘admirable headmistress’ were: ‘To lift us out of the bog of tradition, superstition and custom, to make us appreciate a multitude of civilizations without renouncing our own … to develop universal moral values in us’ (15). Along with the standard, dominant nationalist ideas of Western universalism, the proposition that tradition lives unquestioned as long as it is outside the influence of the colonizer is further suggested by Aunty Nabou, Aïssatou’s mother-in-law: ‘You have to come away from Dakar to be convinced of the survival of traditions’ (27). This is similar to the suggestion that vices were brought from the outside, while in tradition lay virtues: ‘Now our society is shaken to its very foundations, torn between the attraction of imported vices and the fierce resistance of old virtues’ (73). Here, Ramatoulaye struggles in her parental role with her 12 children, especially her girls, three of whom have taken not only to wearing trousers but also smoking cigarettes. As Williams has argued (1960: 320–1) – and subsequently, among others, Hall (1981: especially 227–8) – tradition is born of a process of selection and reworking. Bâ’s text, while overtly subscribing to a rather static understanding of ‘tradition’, does allow for a more nuanced view of it. In describing the rituals that follow Modou’s

mariama bâ’s so lon g a let ter | 375 death, Ramatoulaye remarks on the annoying presence of her cowife, Binetou, who ‘has been installed in [Ramatoulaye’s] house for the funeral, in accordance with tradition’ (Bâ 1981: 3). Then comes the ‘moment dreaded by every Senegalese woman, the moment when she sacrifices her possessions as gifts to her family-in-law’, in her view finally ‘becoming a thing in the service of the man who has married her, his grandfather, his grandmother, his father, his mother’ (4). At this point in this painful recollection is a sharp observation on the functioning of this tradition: ‘[The woman’s] behaviour is conditioned: no sister-in-law will touch the head of any wife who has been stingy, unfaithful or inhospitable’ (4). Without a doubt, this ‘conditioning’ is to be read in Ramatoulaye’s ‘tolerance’, which is narrated in a different chapter: ‘I tolerated his sisters, who too often would desert their own homes to encumber my own … I tolerated their spitting, the phlegm expertly secreted under my carpets … I would receive [Modou’s mother] with all the respect due to a queen, and she would leave satisfied, especially if her hand closed over the banknote I had carefully placed there’ (19). There is a clear suggestion of the structuring of the woman’s propensity for tolerance and her respect for her in-laws – her regard for tradition, as it were. In other words, while women are supposed to be the guardians of tradition, this passage reveals how traditions can become the vested interest of women, who also had to consolidate their own spheres of power in a rapidly changing postcolonial society. ‘Woman’ becomes the site for the playing out of ‘tradition’. If behaviour is conditioned, as seen above, Ramatoulaye’s reputation brings her recognition from society at large: ‘I receive the greater share of money and many envelopes … The regard shown me raises me in the eyes of others’ (6). Yet this recognition is followed by the wives being stripped of it all. The family-in-law leaves them ‘utterly destitute’ (7) after the ritual, discussed in the above paragraph, of the ‘dreaded moment’. This presents a propitious opportunity for a reconsideration of the useful concepts of injustices of distribution and those of recognition that Nancy Fraser presents in her response to Judith Butler’s statement that new social movements have been viewed in recent theoretical discussions as ‘merely cultural’ (Butler 1997). For Fraser, ‘misrecognition’ is ‘analytically distinct from, and conceptually irreducible to, the injustice of maldistribution, although it may be accompanied by the latter’ (Fraser 1997: 280). It also

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includes ‘the material construction through the institutionalization of cultural norms of a class of devalued persons who are impeded from participatory parity’ (ibid.: 283, all emphasis in original). The complexity of the situation described by Ramatoulaye arises from the fact that it is through a recognition of her supposed value that the visitors hand out money to the widow. This recognition is then reaffirmed in the paradoxical way in which her possessions are transferred to the dead man’s family, sanctioning and materially constructing the destitution of widows. That is, even if the outcome is negative and deplorable for the woman, the recognition, as a process, continues and is accredited in that ‘dreaded moment’. None of the above (traditions) would be possible, however, without the injustice of maldistribution (related to laws against women’s inheritance of property, for example) to begin with. In the situation described, I suggest that the injustice of maldistribution functions as an enabling condition of the specific ritual of ‘recognition’ (in the ‘regard shown for [her]’), which actually accomplishes mis recognition (as it is an institutionally accomplished devaluation of this widow and contributes to creating a group of destitute widows) and results in further maldistribution (because she is forced to sacrifice her belongings to her family-inlaw). One is not merely accompanied by the other, and even if they are irreducible to one another, misrecognition and maldistribution become cyclical processes that reinstate each other endlessly. Clearly, Ramatoulaye writes from an elite perspective of French education, available to only a few. The Rufisque boarding school (with the enlightened headmistress) served all of West Africa – it is also the school Mariama Bâ herself attended. Modou’s death, from the perspective of the ‘scavenging’ old woman who is seen at the funeral, is therefore beyond her appreciation: My horizon is lightened, I see an old woman. Who is she? Where is she from? Bent over, the ends of her boubou tied behind her, she empties into a plastic bag the left-overs of red rice … Standing upright, her eyes meeting my disapproving look, she mutters between teeth reddened by cola nuts ‘Lady, death is just as beautiful as life has been.’ (Bâ 1981: 7–8) The meaning of the two questions (Who is she? Where is she from?) requires more than a cursory examination. The narrator

mariama bâ’s so lon g a let ter | 377 cannot know her nor can she understand where she is from, even if she indicates that she might be from the poorer outskirts of Dakar – ‘Ouakam, Thiaroye or Pikine’ (8). This short intervention can become a significant moment immediately following the instant when the widows become ‘utterly destitute’ in the consideration of incommensurable spaces within postcolonial locations. It forces into deliberation spaces within postcolonial worlds that do not share the same ‘language’ in the senses I alluded to, following Bourdieu, in the introduction. It is a moment that problematizes Francophone writing because ‘the area of a culture … is usually proportionate to the area of a language rather than to the area of a class’ (Williams 1960: 320). The text’s silence here, and elsewhere, on the question of language – even, for example, when education is critically evaluated (see Bâ 1981: 17–9) – becomes a matter for productive interrogation, beyond the scope of this piece.10 Nevertheless, the most radical proposal her text offers is the narration of the friendship between Ramatoulaye and Aïssatou, because it challenges the structural stability of heterosexual polygamy (for men) that is held in place by the forces of colonialism as well as by older patriarchal forces, operating in tandem. The form of a letter for the intimate account of the lives of Ramatoulaye and Aïssatou creates a space for critical discourse (as I have shown earlier) between – and, by extension, among – women that excludes the male in the capacity of both producer and receiver in her text. It creates ‘narratively’ (rather than in the narrative) a female–female couple in the form of a new discursive practice within the ‘national’, even if the text is silent about sexual intimacy for these two women after the break with their husbands. At first, Ramatoulaye establishes the endurance of friendship between women compared with ‘love’ in the heterosexual couple: ‘If over the years, and passing through the realities of life, dreams die, I still keep intact my memories, the salt of remembrance [of friendship]’ (1). And later: ‘Friendship has splendours that love knows not. It grows stronger when crossed, whereas obstacles kill love. Friendship resists time, which wearies and severs couples. It has heights unknown to love’ (54). This latter quotation is from the chapter in which Aïssatou purchases a car for her friend, upon learning how difficult it is for her to get about with the children using public transport. It is impossible to ignore how this couple of Ramatoulaye and Aïssatou replaces

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the heterosexual one. Ramatoulaye recounts elsewhere her refusal of offers of marriage from various suitors (appropriate, according to ‘tradition’) because she is still true to her one love, Modou, but also due to a reticence to reproduce a ‘co-wife’. The above quotation is preceded, in the same chapter, by Ramatoulaye’s admission that she has begun to wait for ‘another man’, even though she knows that ‘[i]t would not be easy to get [her] children to accept a new masculine presence’ (53). I believe that the suggestion becomes stronger and is rendered radical, perhaps paradoxically, by Ramatoulaye’s admission that she ‘ha[d] never conceived of happiness outside marriage’ (56). What I am proposing is that it is the structuring of this feeling of the necessity of the couple – through the husband’s repeatedly sanctioned polygamous practice in which the first wife ‘accepts’ her role as secondary for the purposes of financial support as well as through the Western and romantic notion of one true love for one man, to which Ramatoulaye wholly subscribes – that prevents what is otherwise logical and, in effect here, real and materially actualized: that of the female–female couple. One of the categories that Bâ’s text shares with larger society is that of heterosexuality. Following the above proposal, one might ask if ‘it [is] not possible to maintain and pursue heterosexual identifications and aims within homosexual practice, and homosexual identifications and aims within heterosexual practices’ (Butler 1991: 17)? In fact, here the division between aims and practices becomes blurred. This friendship, as it is constructed, could be seen as the accomplishment of an aim (homosexual interdependency, as in the example of the car, and emotional intimacy, as the entire letter testifies), achieved in heterosexual practice (both women are in heterosexual relationships and subsequently deal with separation from their respective spouses, without any explicit reference to homosexual practice for either of them). Or it can be seen as a homosexual practice (in the forming of a couple, whether or not sexual intimacy is implicated) that maintains heterosexual identifications and aims (by not changing the structural relations between men and women, even if polygamy is contested). It is perhaps in this way that the ‘feminine’, which was more or less excluded from this study, could productively re-enter the discussion of women’s agency: the feminine as that which is not contained by practices and that can accomplish aims that are contrary to those suggested by a specific practice, for example.

mariama bâ’s so lon g a let t er | 379 If the liberatory yet masculinist négritude writing and the movement in general were able to radically propose a new understanding and functioning of the ‘black’ man, even through the feminine (see, for example, Smith’s 1994 study on the feminine in Césaire’s poetry), various new material practices contained in the innovative strategies of individuals and collectivities in the Francophone world would demand a reassessment of the understanding of the active being or becoming of women.11 We might consider Bâ’s novel as suggesting a means of producing this woman outside heterosexual married polygamy, and not only, as Jameson writes (of Sartre’s understanding of Flaubert), as a resolution ‘in the imaginary, [of] what is socially irreconcilable’ (Jameson: 1971: 383). What Ramatoulaye suggests is indeed socially possible if linguistically unnameable. In this way, we go beyond ‘remember[ing] the fact of successful revolutions as well, and mak[ing] a place for an art which might be prophetic rather than fantasyoriented, one which might portend genuine solutions underway rather than projecting formal substitutes for impossible ones’ (ibid.: 385). We might thus credit such a discursive forging of female subjectivity as one that is (part of) a solution to women’s oppression in polygamous, patriarchal (here Senegalese) society as well as an articulation of a social resolution to women’s participation in forging (a) national culture. The literary text can become the material from which we work towards that ‘totalizing’ moment in thought inscribed in language, as we seek to approach what, as Hall put it, ‘a “cultural analysis”, in the final instance, should deliver’. While these ideas risk being seen as overextensions of the scope of the ‘literary’, we will see how the concept of ‘languaging’ helps in arguing for them. There is no doubt that by gradually changing a structurally supported feeling, by changing the practice, Ramatoulaye alters the supportive structure. For example, she begins going to the cinema on her own: I overcame my shyness at going alone to cinemas; I would take a seat with less and less embarrassment as the months went by. People stared at the middle-aged lady without a partner. I would feign indifference, while anger hammered against my nerves and the tears I held back welled up behind my eyes. From the surprised looks, I gauged the slender liberty granted to women. (Bâ 1981: 51)

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Yet, it is clear that Ramatoulaye extends the limits of this liberty through her persistent practice. The writing of this novel in the particular form of the letter ultimately reflects the larger extension of liberty that one must both appreciate as agency and problematize with regard to the question of language. This text involves the creation of a discourse (about the future of the nation and of women in it) that disrupts the properly political field as being that of men; it is an appropriation of this discourse and its injection into the sphere of autobiography and women’s lives at the level of ‘story’, and into women’s and men’s personal lives through its readership. Both the act of going to the cinema on her own, as well as the larger action of the writing itself, can be read as acts that effectively question social practices and redefine the aims of the character. Ramatoulaye ends her letter with: ‘I shall go out in search of [happiness]. Too bad for me if once again I have to write you so long a letter …’ (89), thus clearly inscribing any quest for happiness in this discursive search – in between aims and practices, as it were; anchored between herself and her friend. Given the wide readership this text enjoys, I believe its reading in the context of WCD is significant because its framing through this paradigm opens up an exploration of new practices, or, at the very least, an exploration of the same practices in new terms. Yet, the instability of categories such as aims and practices, or misrecognition and maldistribution, must be invited into the field of assessment with much caution. It is one thing to show that categories are not as fixed as we would like, and quite another to completely reject their possible use as tools for research. Also, before the ‘cultural’ shift, one might more rigorously scrutinize the investment in individual agency – or, rather, the pursuit to tell the story of agency.12 In other words, our narrative and the assessment towards which it strives are deeply situated within Western academic discourse. Are we certain that it is from this vantage point that agency in ‘Third World’ contexts can, and should, most appropriately be theorized? Conclusions: literature and ‘languaging’13 If we were to take culture, as proposed through WCD, in its most dynamic and complex conception for analyses of women’s practices in the context of what is seen as development, we would require a radical restructuring of the categories themselves. Therefore, from this perspective, how would considerations of ‘development’ in the

mariama bâ’s so lon g a let t er | 381 ‘Third World’ alter the proposed constituent of ‘woman’? Evidently, the definition of ‘woman’ would be achieved inadequately using the older paradigms through which development has been studied. For example, would we find useful Judith Butler’s call for the understanding of gender as performative, as ‘a kind of imitation for which there is no original’ (1993: 313)? It would follow from this that there is no essential quality or basis for the category of ‘woman’, which would be generated in its entirety by performances that create an image (of woman) for which the ‘original’ is never attainable. We would understand ‘gender [as] performative in the sense that it constitutes as an effect the very subject it appears to express’ (ibid.: 24). How ready and equipped are we, really, to attend to how ‘woman’ is created through processes of performance, by series of individual acts by women in our societies, even as the role in development of the provisional group these acts posit is studied? Butler’s proposal that ‘those ontologically consolidated phantasms of “man” and “woman” are theatrically produced effects that posture as grounds, origins, the normative measure of the real’ (ibid.: 21) would require us to forgo the category of woman as a given from which we can easily analyse its role in development. We would, moreover, be obliged to seek out the conditions that enable such a category to exist, and to exist as such in particular situations. This would destabilize measurement, and preclude, for example, numerous generalizations. The WCD concern with resistance and agency would also have to be re-evaluated.14 Further, the linking of women to production, reproduction and making agency visible that is central to the WCD paradigm also becomes implicated in this ‘cultural’ shift.15 From here, reproduction can be understood in terms of making a copy from an original as well as making a new organism – not a copy – of the same species (see Williams 1995 [1981]: 185). What would the consequences be of considering women’s production to be an innovation in practices by women as they constantly and conditionally define themselves? And of including in reproduction the idea of the reproduction of practices as well as the relations that condition them? Even giving birth will be seen as a practice that reproduces not just the species but the relations underlying this practice – in most cases heterosexual male– female relations, sanctioned and maintained through a complex set of other practices, indubitably tied to relations of production in the economic sense.

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Walter Mignolo explains: ‘The very concept of literature presupposes the major or official languages of a nation and the transmissions of the cultural literacy built into them’ (1996: 188). Its relevance to any study involving spaces demarcated ‘nationally’, or with reference to the ‘nation’, thus becomes important, especially in those instances where the idea of a shared culture is of consequence. Mignolo submits that the concept of literature should move towards ‘the idea of languaging as a cultural practice’ (ibid.: 189), where ‘languaging’ suggests a ‘moving away from the idea that language is a fact (e.g., a system of syntactic, semantic and phonetic rules) toward the idea that speaking and writing are moves that orient and manipulate social domains of interaction’ (ibid.: 188, emphasis added). I have attempted to consider the dual actions of ‘orientation’ and ‘manipulation’ that the text effects through its work on specific categories. It is only by privileging cultural analyses in the context of development that literature can make any contribution to our understanding of specific issues within development. Still, the idea of culture suggested by Stuart Hall – as the meanings and values shared by groups and arising from their historical conditions and relationships and their dynamic relation to their existence, along with the practices that can be read as contingent inscriptions of these different relations – demands that cultural analyses ‘deliver’ an understanding that matches this totalized conception of culture through a similar movement in ‘thought’. Cultural analyses and dialectical thought accomplished through areas that too often have eschewed the logic of the economic within them must necessarily move in that direction. Simultaneously, analyses achieved through domains that have reductively considered economic structures outside experiential and innovative figuring, which is difficult to quantify, for example, must necessarily learn to articulate what generates the ‘culture’ in question. For WCD, both directions become significant because a more complete understanding of women’s lives would mean not just making the very important cultural shift in analyses relating to areas already considered in development studies; it would also involve a parallel enlargement of the field of inquiry itself. Such an expansion would require a legitimization of other bases of information on, and insight regarding, its central questions. Literature, which is the manifestation of desires, creative thinking

mariama bâ’s so lon g a let t er | 383 and hope, is the exemplary form of ‘culture’ to inform a project that seeks to understand women’s lives more holistically. Exploding the limits of the literary text provides numerous avenues for deep insights into its social ground. Notes I gratefully acknowledge Dominic Thomas for his useful comments, particularly those regarding Francophone literature; Tim Watson for his thoughtfully suggested readings on and in cultural studies for a different project, many of which inform this piece or have led to readings used here; Sarah Karim for her excellent research assistance; and the editors of this volume, whose patience and generosity in engaging with my arguments are appreciated and have greatly improved this chapter. 1. The term ‘gender’ ‘suggests that relations between the sexes are a primary aspect of social organisation (rather than following from, say, economic or demographic pressures); that the terms of male and female identities are in large part culturally determined (not produced by individuals or collectivities entirely on their own); and that differences between the sexes constitute and are constituted by hierarchical social structures’ (Scott 1988: 10). Although it does not refer specifically to differences between gendered women, Scott’s definition does move away from an emphasis on the purely economic. 2. Drawing from Hélène Cixous or Luce Irigaray, for example; and in general from psychoanalysis, especially following Jacques Lacan. 3. While it is evident that it is impossible to understand the ‘Third World’ in terms of geographical divisions alone, for the purposes of this chapter, the specific nation of Senegal implicated in the text under consideration as an area of postcoloniality is of significance. 4. See McClintock (1992) regarding the pitfalls of the terminology associated with the ‘postcolonial’, and McClintock (ibid.), Bahri (1995), Michel

(1995) and Li (1995) for considerations of the field. 5. Bourdieu (1994) convincingly shows how language (different languages, but also differently accented or otherwise marked versions of language) is both a marker of social and economic class and also a symbol of status, and thus an important factor in access to material and discursive power. 6. For a discussion of ‘tactics’ and ‘strategies’, see de Certeau (1984: xii–xix). Simplified for my purposes here, tactics are provisional and timebound while strategies visualize a more easily identifiable opposition. So, if my tactics differ from those proposed (for example by engaging more actively the economic or by emphasizing structuring processes rather than those that allow their disruption), due to what is more commonly examined in the discipline in which I write, the overall strategy that aims to reach a more complete understanding of women’s actions in the context of development is shared. 7. ‘The author is what gives the disturbing language of fiction its unities, its nodes of coherence, its insertion in the real’ (Foucault 1981: 58). 8. Indeed, the specific national space would itself be too reductive for Jameson’s conception of the ‘system as

384 | t h e cu lt u r a l p o l i t i c s o f r e p r e s e n tat i o n a whole’. Yet, invoking the postcolonial national space necessarily forces into consideration the larger systems that validate and oppose it. 9. For a discussion of this sense of ‘reproduction’, see Williams’ essay ‘Reproduction’ in Sociology of Culture (1995 [1981]: 181–205). I return to this understanding of ‘reproduction’ in my conclusion to this piece. 10. For a forceful argument regarding the place of indigenous (specifically African) languages, see Barber (1995). See also Alexander, Bamgbose, Obanya, Rabenoro, Rassool and Wolff in the special issue of Social Dynamics (1999) regarding this question of languages in the more recent African postcolonial context. 11. In fact, the disciplinary demarcation of ‘Francophonie’ (and, for example, its separation from other areas of post-coloniality, and its connections to other spaces of post-coloniality in the same areas) also becomes problematized in such a consideration. 12. Clearly, I believe that individual agency and a recognition of this agency by individuals is crucial to any kind of positive self-image; it is essential to survival in many instances. I also see the effect of telling these stories: to combat the essentializing, generalizing theories that label Third World women as victims in need of rescuing. I still think, however, that there is room for further discussion of the investment in the narrative of individual agency. 13. The term is from Walter Mignolo (1996).

14. See, for example, Seyla Benhabib’s objection to this idea of performativity: First, what kind of empirical social research paradigms is Butler privileging in her views of gender constitution as performativity? Are these adequate for the explanation of ontogenetic processes of development? Second, what normative vision of agency follows from, or is implied by this theory of performativity? Can the theory account for the capacities of agency and resignification it wants to attribute to individuals, thus explaining not only the constitution of the self but also the resistance that this very self is capable of in the face of power/ discourse regimes? (Benhabib 1995: 111) See also Butler’s response regarding agency. She argues: ‘To the extent that a performative act appears to “express” a prior intention, a doer behind the deed, that prior agency is only legible as the effect of that utterance’ (1995: 134), underscoring the need to reconsider the consequences of the cultural shift proposed. 15. Note the frequent return of these (linked) terms in Chua et al. (2000). They propose, early in their essay, the fruitfulness of viewing culture ‘as the relationship between production and reproduction in women’s lives, and when women’s agency is made explicit’ (ibid.: 821).

1 5 | TH E P R E CA R I O US M I D D L E C LA S S : GE N D E R , R I S K A N D M O B I L I T Y IN TH E N E W I N D I A N E CO N O M Y

Raka Ray

Introduction Whether in the writings of Nicholas Kristof (Kristof and WuDunn 2009) or in the NIKE film on ‘the girl effect’, it has become evident that women and girls have become discursively the preferred subjects within global discourses of development and neoliberalism. The ideal neoliberal subjects are meant to be entrepreneurs of their lives and to lead responsibilized and self-managed lives through selfapplication and self-transformation (Brown 2003, du Gay 1996, McRobbie 2009). Women are increasingly seen as these ideal, aspiring, subjects. The much touted micro-finance model, for example, inevitably assumes a female entrepreneur (Roy 2010). In the meantime, globally, young men who do not have class advantage are increasingly seen as those the new economy has left behind – the losers in the new global order. The discourse about striving women and failing men is now ubiquitous in India. These discourses about the arrival of women are accompanied by discourses about the arrival of the middle-class subject as the acting subject who will move India to its goal of being a world power. In addition to the middle class in the metropolitan cities, much attention is being paid to the middle classes in what are called Tier II and Tier III towns. Of the middle classes in these towns, market researchers claim: ‘They are on the move. There is a sense of urgency, excitement and confidence as they race ahead. Marketers and their agencies cannot afford to ignore them. They are the future market, not just of India, but the world’ (Knowledge@Wharton 2008). Middle classes of these towns have come to be called ‘Middle India’, and the word ‘aspirational’ seems permanently to be attached to them. Despite the sense of urgency about these Middle Indians, there is little research about them that is not market-driven. My project looks

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at the gendered subjects at the centre of these discourses – young men and women from Middle India – and asks about the ways in which these new subjects of neoliberal development see themselves in these ‘unsettled times’, times of change and promise in large parts of the global South. Who are these ambitious and mobile women from small towns, who conventionally have the lowest rates of workforce participation, who have come to symbolize the promise and anxiety of India today? Who are their male counterparts? I seek to examine the extent to which middle-class young women in smalltown India come to cultivate, in this historical moment, new desires and ambitions – in short, new selves. At the same time, I compare the women with the men who are seen as having little going for them, men who would once have held public-sector lower middle-class jobs, or upper working-class jobs, but who have less space in the new economy. My larger project includes a town from which young women in particular are leaving to work in the travel and tourism industry, and another from which both young women and men have fantasies of leaving, but with less success. In this chapter, I focus on one particular group: 40 young women and men who have already migrated to the city of dreams – Bombay (Mumbai) – to participate in its entertainment industry. But to do this we need to understand a little about Bombay’s changing political economy. The Shakti Mill rape On 23 August 2013, media in India led with the news of a second gang rape, this one all the more shocking because it happened in Bombay, the city that, in India’s common perception, is the only city in India that is genuinely safe for women. Days of media coverage followed, linking back to the Delhi rape case the previous December, commenting on the accused rapists, the courage of the survivor, and the heinousness of the crime. The photograph of the site of the rape appeared again and again in the media, like a haunting. Once a place that had provided both employment and a social world for so many thousands of people who lived in Bombay, Shakti Mill was now a carcass. One of Bombay’s few former mill properties that has not been involved in any redevelopment plans as yet, it stands as a vestige of its industrial history, not yet absorbed into its neoliberal future.1

th e pre c ari o us middl e cl ass | 387 The mill comes into the picture because the survivor was a young woman, a photojournalist for an English-language lifestyle magazine who had been sent to take pictures of it. In most media representations, she stood for the new India, much like the young women I had been speaking with. The alleged rapists were largely unemployed, educated up to sixth and seventh grades – the new underclass, if you will – and they stood for the drag on the new India. The circumstances – the closed mill, the woman journalist for a lifestyle magazine and the unemployed men – led to many discussions about a new India marked by the decline of old male forms of labour and the sociability associated with them (see Prakash 2013) and the rise of new feminized forms of labour, as well as a ‘shift from manufacturing to service, away from the working classes and towards the new middle classes’, as Leela Fernandes (2004), among others, has noted. I suggest that we must understand the lives of the men and women I will discuss against the backdrop of these swirling discussions of striving women, failing men and the decline of male jobs that surrounded these terrible acts of violence in both Delhi and Bombay. These discussions highlight the new forms of work in which women are participants, forms that are gendered and therefore carry with them implications for different labour relations, different sorts of mobility, different risks, and different forms of violence. In what follows, then, I first situate this transition in Bombay by looking at the decline of the mills and the rise of the entertainment industry to set the stage for reflecting on the different sorts of gendered possibilities that cities such as Bombay reveal today. Bombay’s mill economy Shakti Mill is located in Mahalaxmi, within the area that came to be known as Girangaon or the Village of Mills, and it closed 30 years ago; along with the closure of other mills, this marked the end of 120 years at the heart of Bombay’s economy. In 1931, up to half of Bombay’s population depended on the textile industry (Kumar 1983).2 Mill workers were the first migrants to the city. Even in 1921, 84 per cent of the city’s population had been born outside Bombay. In 1975, there were 52 mills employing 250,000 workers, most of whom lived in Girangaon, which stretched over 1,000 acres from Dadar to Byculla and from Mahalaxmi to Elphinstone (Fernandes 2004). Most workers lived in chawls (tenements) within 15 minutes

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of work. Neera Adarkar (2003) describes a vibrant working-class culture in the chawls where mill workers lived and organized – in many ways they were the heart of Bombay itself. Many reasons have been given for its decline, but in general this labour-intensive industry wilted under the forces of globalization (Menon 2013, Adarkar and Phatak 2005). The 1982–83 strike is considered to have precipitated the final decline of the textile industry in Bombay. Mill owners abandoned the industry and workers were left unemployed. By 2000, employment in the textile industry had declined from 250,000 in 1980 to 57,000 (Fernandes 2004). While the literature that discusses insecure jobs in the global South has long referred to them as ‘informal’, recent literature that addresses the concept of insecure, temporary jobs that have increasingly replaced waged work in the countries of the North uses the term precarity. ‘Precarity applies to a specific subjectivity, the lived experience of ambient insecurity’ (Horning 2012). The idea emerges from a post-industrial Italy struggling with the condition of permanently precarious jobs, and has been applied across postFordist cultures of work. In countries such as India, with its vast informal sector, precariousness has long marked most people’s way of life, and so, while the condition is not new to India, I think we can safely say that when the core of waged work that lay at the heart of Bombay’s existence disappeared with the mills, the scale of precarious working and living multiplied exponentially. The former sites of mills are now hot properties in Bombay, and developers have been converting them into recreational venues and high-rise apartment buildings. For example, Hard Rock Café opened at the Bombay Dyeing Mill Compound in 2006, and Palais Royale, the luxury apartment building built at the Shriram Mills property, will apparently be the tallest building in India and will have apartments with floor spaces of 8,000 square feet and 14,000 square feet. In addition to these exclusionary and exclusive high-rises, these mills have been converted to shopping malls, but they also provide office space for dozens of TV and film studios and post-production units – visual evidence of the new economy of India and its shift from waged labour, blue-collar working classes towards the elite and elite aspirants. Since 1980, the share of people working in manufacturing has halved. Mill workers have shifted to the unorganized sector and the service sector. The percentage of women workers has increased, while

th e pre c a ri ous middl e cl ass | 389 70 60

Male

50 %

40 30 20

Female

10 0

1961

1971

1981

1991

2001

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15.1 Work participation rates by gender Singh 2010: 5, Government of India 2011.

that of men has decreased slightly, although, of course, women’s labour force participation rate continues to be low (Figure 15.1). Bombay remains a city of migrants, and migration continues to be male-driven and family-based. Most women migrants in Bombay still accompany their husbands and tend not to work, but when they do work, the economic and occupational profile of migrant men is lower than that of non-migrant men, while that of migrant women is higher than that of non-migrant women. Of working women in Bombay, 23 per cent of non-migrants are in the professions but 33 per cent of migrant women are. Among men, it is the other way around. Migrant men are much more likely to be self-employed. Indeed, among working men, 30 per cent of non-migrants are in the professions but only 24 per cent of migrant men are (NSSO 2012). Bombay’s film industry In this context, why Bollywood? Today, as the hundredth anniversary of the Hindi film industry is recognized, this industry, and the vast network of related industries it has spawned, has emerged as one of Bombay’s core revenue-generating activities and one of its largest employers. While the employment figures for people in the entertainment industry in Bombay are hard to come by, a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers report suggests that the Indian film and TV industry overall had a revenue of US$5.3 billion in 2011 and has been growing at approximately 10.1 per cent a year. In Bombay itself, the industry was responsible for creating 175,000 jobs.3 Recall that in

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2000 the mills employed only 57,000 people – and mill employment numbers today are insignificant. Bollywood became an industry in 1998, whereupon it became eligible for foreign direct investment (FDI) and other forms of corporate financing as opposed to simply relying on the shadowy underworld and kin networks for finance. As Tejaswini Ganti (2012) argues, the industry has benefited enormously from globalization (indeed, more than half its revenues come from abroad) and neoliberalism (in particular, the dismantling of government licensing structures), becoming ever more powerful within and outside India. It is now an enormous investment opportunity with corporate and media sponsors, and constitutes, more than ever, a salient part of India’s global image. At the same time, employment in the industry is difficult. It is an industry that grows by what network theorists would call ‘preferential attachment’ (Lorenzen and Taeube 2007). In other words, it grows by bringing in family members, friends, family friends and friends’ families (the Kapoor, Khan and Bachchan families, for example). It is extraordinarily difficult for outsiders from small towns to get a break. How, then, can we understand the life worlds of the new aspirants to Bombay, those who come to work in the media industry, not the mills? And what can the migrants who work in this industry help us understand about gendered precarity in Bombay? I turn now to these two groups of jobseekers and aspirants in Bombay – young men and young women from small-town India who comprise a new generation of migrant workers whose lives may well put them forever in the ranks of the precariat, except in the unlikely event that they become stars. The aspirants What does it mean for young middle-class women to leave the protection of their middle-class homes to travel across the country for the vision of a new life and utterly precarious work? What does it mean for men to do so? In addition to directors, producers, casting agents and casting directors, I also spoke with 20 young women and 15 men who had come from small towns across the country to seek their fortune as actors, singers and dancers in Bombay.

The women Bina from Tezpur is the daughter of the local high school principal. At 29, she was the oldest woman I spoke with. Her mother

th e pre c ari o us middl e cl ass | 391 did not work outside the home. She had two other sisters who were, in her words, obedient and conservative, but not her. She tells me she would run away so she could dance and sing and her mother would bring her back and beat her – although her father was not so strict. When she left home to go to college she felt suffocated by the women’s hostel’s rules about when she could and could not leave the premises. Yet she began to win attention and acclaim because of her dancing and choreography. She tells me that this was because she could only dance dil kholkey (dance with open heart/with abandon) when she moved away from her family. Eventually, she helped herself to some of her mothers’ jewellery and left home, travelling from the north-east of India all the way across the country to the city of Pune (which is near Bombay), where she knew no one. She survived by her wits and the kindness of a boyfriend. She learned how to walk the catwalk but still could not manage to get to Bombay. So she did odd jobs, saved 5,000 rupees (about US$100 at the time) to give to a photographer for her portfolio, took dance classes, worked writing subtitles, and did an advert here and there. An audition for which she threw off her shoes and danced her heart out allowed her to make a music video that propelled her into the limelight. Today, however, she is restless. She has ‘made it’ as an ‘item girl’ (a dancer in a film song, called an ‘item number’, but without a speaking part), but she bemoans the fact that: item girls aren’t respectable – they don’t come from family backgrounds like mine. My father was a school principal. I want respect, and this I do not have. I do have my own apartment and my own car. But sometimes I think: I am a graduate who topped her class, I was going to be an IPS officer [civil service police job]. How did I become an item girl? For all her rebelliousness, her desire to hurt her mother and her attraction to fame, she now seeks respectability, but she seeks it not through the conventional route of marriage, but rather through an attempt to move to a more respectable part of the entertainment industry – acting. Gauri from Firozabad, was a badminton champion at 14. Her parents, who owned a small bangle-selling business, refused to let her play anymore when she won a scholarship to go away to the

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prestigious National Academy of Badminton. The sport was her joy and her freedom, and once it was forbidden to her, she began to plot her escape from home. Her narrative made it clear that the shutting down of badminton for her was also accompanied by bodily changes she did not like. Gauri struggled with these changes to womanhood because she associated them with the closing of doors, as this is what they had represented for her older sisters. Once she managed to leave Firozabad for Agra, where she went to college, she kept herself going with one job after another – she sold scooters, worked as a guidance counsellor, and offered private tutoring lessons: ‘All I knew was that I could not go back; my small town would just shut everything down inside me.’ After she graduated she moved from Agra to Delhi, where she worked in a call centre. While working there, she took a course in film editing, being aware that she had to have another skill to fall back on should acting fail. She finally managed to come to Bombay and started making a living editing news, while auditioning for acting roles at the same time. By the time I interviewed her, Gauri had made a couple of films in Bhojpuri (a popular regional language) and had bought a car. For her, Bombay was a city where people worked all the time, and therefore, if you worked hard, you would be fine. In trying to describe to me, in a mixture of Hindi and English, why she had left home, she said: ‘At home there was too much boundation.’4 It must be emphasized that the new economies in which these young women insert themselves require mobilities of time and space hitherto forbidden to non-working-class women. All over India, middle-class women have a remarkably low rate of labour force participation. If they move, they move with their families. The women who come to Bombay have come alone, and many have come a very long way. Why did they come? What do they do to make it? The stories are remarkably similar. They grow up like many other girls in lower middle-class or solidly middle-class families in smalltown India. Their mothers do not usually work but their fathers are schoolteachers or principals, small business owners, doctors, or government employees. The stories they narrate have a very particular tone: they tell me resentfully that they received a Hindi (or vernacular) medium education while their brothers received the more prestigious English medium education; or that their brother got to go to college although he received a second division in school while their education was supposed to end even though she received

th e pre c a ri ous middl e cl ass | 393 a first division (honours). One woman said: ‘I was the fourth girl and everybody made it clear that I should never have been born. So I knew I had to make something of myself.’ Another explained her urge to leave her home town thus: ‘I knew that nothing could happen to a woman after marriage.’ I was interested in seeking out women who were trying to make it in ways that did not necessarily require higher education, the normative middle-class path to upward mobility. But there was a surprise in store for me. Almost every one of the young women I spoke to had done well in school, and some had excelled. All of them had completed their BA degrees, some with distinction. In addition to being places where they did well academically, school and college were sites in which they were able to dance, sing and act, or do sports and receive praise for their achievements. Notably, when asked why they thought they were able to come to Bombay at all, their answers referred to their own abilities: ‘There was something in me – I was always a winner’ or ‘I always knew I would be a known person from the first time I walked the catwalk.’ Their narratives are marked by the active, acting ‘I’, which is a markedly new voice for women in India.5 I suggest, in other words, that these women have already been interpellated through the new discourses of self, work and worth. They are the very embodiments of the subjectivity Nikolas Rose describes in the following way: ‘we can become enterprising, take control of our careers, transform ourselves into high fliers, achieve excellence and fulfil ourselves not in spite of our work but by means of our work’ (Rose 1998: 158). While they mark themselves as distinctive and ambitious, the move to Bombay is a complicated one, for middle-class girls in India have not traditionally been mobile. Thus the move is mediated by initial forays into other town and cities – to Bangalore for college, to Pune to a cousin’s house, to Agra or Lucknow, to another town to audition for Indian Idol. For most, both the possibility of going to Bombay and, equally importantly, the idea of Bombay, or the aspiration to Bombay, are only made possible by the first move. One woman’s journey to Bombay took her from her tiny home town of Mukteswar in North India (population 1,168) to college in Nainital (population 48,900), where she was accompanied by her mother; from Nainital to the Bhartendu Natya Academy in Lucknow (2.16 million people); from Lucknow to Pune (2.53 million); and finally, from Pune to

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Bombay (population 12 million). Every step of this journey involved negotiations with her family. The journey is difficult physically and psychologically. Women who have wanted to make it in the entertainment industry have often been prevented from doing so because the early history of women in the industry was marked by a discourse of lack of respectability. The women largely came from Anglo-Indian families or were descendants of courtesans, and those who were not from those families worked in the industry out of sheer economic necessity. The veteran actor Durga Khote’s (2006) autobiography reveals that she was a rarity as a college-educated woman from an upper caste and upper-class Maharashtrian family. To be seen as respectable has long been the urgent and insistent refrain of middle-class femininity, but even as all the young women solemnly rehearse the promise never to do any ‘galat kaam’ (anything wrong) in order to get ahead, the youngest of them, 19-year-old Jhumur from the Hindi heartland, asks me why she is repeatedly warned against being a ‘big slut’ because then no one would want her in their films when it is clear to her that many ‘big sluts’ make it. ‘When escorts like Katrina Kaif and porn stars like Sunny Leone make it,’ says Jhumur, ‘then what am I to do?’ Jhumur and others like her have a pragmatic morality, which leads them to ponder not how they can avoid sleeping with powerful men in the industry, but how they can make it without being considered a ‘big slut’. There are many ways in which these women arrive in Bombay. They may arrive with their bags and stay with someone they know in Pune and start to commute from there, moving to the outer suburbs of Bombay such as Vashi or Thane in six months or so, and hope to make their way to Andheri, where they might live in a small, cramped flat with many other girls. The young women with whom I spoke reported having their belongings stolen from them, or coming back to a rented apartment to find that the door was locked and they were unable to retrieve their belongings. Said 25-year-old Priya from Bihar: ‘When I finally moved into Bombay, within two minutes my laptop was stolen. I went to a paying guest accommodation where before I even put my foot in the door the woman demanded cash. That night I ate vadapav.’ Priya’s evocation of vadapav is significant: when she joins the hordes of people eating vadapav (essentially a spicy potato patty

th e pre c a ri ous middl e cl ass | 395 sandwich) from food stalls on the street, she signals that she has arrived as a working person in Bombay. Sometimes that is the only meal new actors eat – at night when they return from auditions – when they first arrive in Bombay. It is the ideal food for new migrants who may not have access to a kitchen, and it still costs 8 to 10 rupees. Yet, despite their travails, the stories of arrival these women tell are stories of pride. Pride in endurance: ‘I shifted homes 11 times that year.’ Pride in their achievement: a finalist on Indian Idol spent an hour narrating the story of her audition, how she borrowed clothes for it, and how she moved to the next round and the next. Of her arrival in Bombay as an Indian Idol finalist, she said: ‘I realized that I had the capacity to work long hours. I loved all of it and never got tired.’ Pride in having to negotiate the very thing they were warned about: ‘I can’t tell you the number of dirty offers I received.’ Pride in knowing you have only yourself to rely on: ‘So many times I panic because I have only 100 rupees in my pocket but something always comes up.’ When discussing their future, the women exhibit a mixture of ambition and pragmatism. Samina says: ‘In five years I will be on page 3 [the society pages] or a housewife.’ In other words, she has set herself a time limit. If she does not succeed, she will get married while she can still do so. In a study of young women who are newly working in small-town BPOs (business process outsourcing units), Gowri Vijayakumar (2013) suggests that marriage sets the limits to their aspirations. But by moving away, these women have shifted at least for the moment these limits to their aspiration. Marriage symbolizes not their aspiration but its failure. In their wonderful book Why Loiter?, Shilpa Phadke and her co-authors (2011) imagine a world of Bombay streets where women have the freedom and right to loiter – to occupy public space, to eat and chat and ‘hang out’ the way men do. The women I am speaking about may wish to loiter but their mobility is purposeful. They are deliberately moving. Their mobility may well put them at risk of violence – and it does – but while that is the story that makes the news (there were over 300 reports about the New Delhi rape in the media between 16 December 2012 when the rape was first reported and 7 January 2013 (Phillips et al. 2015)), it is not the story they wish to tell. The stories they tell are stories of exhilaration. They are ambitious and take great pleasure in their achievements.

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The men The interviews reveal three critical differences between the men and women aspirants to Bollywood. The men who arrived in Bombay to pursue acting, singing or directing come from a similar range of towns to the women – Rai Baraeli, Madhubani, Shillong, and so on. Some of them are from old but dying lower middleclass families in which their fathers and uncles work as low-level government-sector workers – an immunization officer or a post office clerk – but others are from what I would call upper working-class families: their fathers are unionized factory workers, mess cooks and drivers. The first difference to note therefore is that, while the women come from solidly middle-class backgrounds – although they may be lower middle class (the class that has been absent in most contemporary discussions of the Indian middle classes) – the men come from a more precarious middle class, if they come from the middle classes at all. Jagdish (who comes from a dalit background, the lowest caste) lived in a district in Uttar Pradesh where almost half the population was below the poverty line. His father worked in a sugar factory and his family circumstances were too inconsistent for anyone either to pay attention to him or to train him for anything. Jagdish failed his exams in tenth grade, but then bribed someone to take the exam for him the following year. He started taking a videography class while in eleventh grade and then started working as a wedding videographer because his father could no longer support him. What could he do with his life? He loved to dance and sing so he started participating in jaagarans (religious festivals), for which he was paid a little. After four years he heard about a theatre group in a town nearby and moved there. He worked backstage until he got a break because he had memorized the whole play and was able to step in for someone who was sick. This theatre company was paid to do street theatre for social issues. He managed to get a BA in English in the town of Bisalpur, then found and lost a series of jobs, and tried to get into the police but failed to pass the PE requirement (specifically, he failed the high jump). No one from his home had ever left the district, and therefore he did not know how to leave. He left it to God, praying to be admitted to a theatre academy in Lucknow (he told me that he had been on two religious pilgrimages so surely he should be rewarded); he did get in on a partial scholarship, borrowed the rest of the money (with interest) from his grandmother, and went to Lucknow. He

th e pre c a ri ous middl e cl ass | 397 made friends and developed a network while at the theatre academy in Lucknow and was thus able to come to Bombay knowing that he would have a place to stay. He worries about money constantly and is ashamed to call home because he cannot send them money. ‘I will manage somehow but above all I must help my parents. I pray to God I can bring them some happiness.’ Pradeep’s father was a boiler attendant in a mill in Bihar. He lived with his parents and two siblings in a small rented house. He says that, even though he was never good at his studies, he always felt superior to his classmates because his father was a respected astrologer. He recalls that his father was once given a harmonium as a gift from a grateful client and that, although he never knew how to play it, he would come home from work every night and carefully clean it. They were poor, he notes, but had respect for the arts. His father was disappointed in him because he did not do well in school, and he frequently beat him. Once his father started having financial difficulties, Pradeep began to work selling bales of cotton, keeping 10 per cent of his income to support his drinking and smoking habits, and giving the rest to his mother. After that, his life was a series of attempts to work in factories, and failures to keep those jobs, until he decided that he should go to college. His marks were too low for admission into a college, but that did not stop him. He persuaded a politician of his caste to help him get admitted to a college in a nearby town. In college, he began to excel in theatre as he represented his college in amateur intercollegiate theatre competitions. After graduating, he kept trying to get into various theatre academies and finally did so after a few years. He graduated from a theatre academy but he still could not find the money to go to Bombay. Finally, he earned some money running a youth festival for his alma mater, and he came to Bombay with that money. When he first arrived in the city, he stayed with senior students from the academy who had come to Bombay before him. Since arriving in Bombay he has had a great deal of luck in making commercials and has had some minor film roles, and he has begun making good money. But money does not last in Bombay, he says. One year he had 100,000 rupees in the bank (his father had never been able to accumulate such a princely sum) but he lost most of it almost immediately after getting into a fight with his roommate, breaking a wall and destroying his hand (which took 70,000 rupees

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to fix). But still, things are looking up for him since he is actually receiving calls from directors now. The second major difference between the men and women, as reflected in Jagdish’s and Pradeep’s stories, then, is that if the women who left were ambitious and successful, the men reveal a startlingly different story of repeated failure: ‘All the boys in my house were good at studying except me’, ‘I was sent to do my IAS [civil service exams] but failed’ or ‘My father didn’t have enough money for tuition and classes are barely held in my college so I could not make it.’ Or, as Pradeep put it, ‘I was weak in studies so my father beat me up a lot and said nothing good would come of me.’ The men’s stories reveal a certain abjectness: several of them spoke about falling in love while in school and this being the cause of their inability to focus on their work, but in almost every case the girls with whom they were involved sailed through and sometimes denied their involvement in the relationship – and the boys, at least in their narratives, were heartbroken and failed. But this abjectness is coupled with a hustling willingness to do what it takes. When Pradeep realized he could not get into college with his grades, he enlisted the help of a local politician of his caste who got him admitted to the college. Several tell stories of cheating to graduate school, as Jagdish did, or to get into college. ‘I cheated and passed my BCom exam with the help of the [teacher] who gave me private tuition.’ So these are boys who survive by their wits and through networks. These are also young men whose narratives exhibit the most exhilaration, perhaps not surprisingly, when they discover that they can act, sing or dance; or, to be more accurate, when they are recognized for it, since they have been considered failures in all other parts of their life. In the women’s narratives, their abilities are a starting point. In the men’s narratives, it is a moment of arrival. Bunty, from the town of Madhubani in Bihar, recalls the thrill of receiving acclaim: I got a job in an NGO that did plays on AIDS, abortion, superstitions, etc. I was so excited and afraid. How can I remember all the dialogue? But I realized that actually I can memorize quite quickly! The audience whistled at all of my dialogues. I couldn’t believe it. Then I thought this is what I want to be …

th e pre c a ri ous middl e cl ass | 399 Their initial success in Bombay vindicates them at home. Said Bhagwan, ‘My father and brothers wept when they saw me on TV. Nobody from my mohalla [neighbourhood] had ever been on TV.’ If women’s stories of arrival are of aloneness, men’s stories of arrival reveal far more comradeship than the women – they stay with old friends and rely on networks they can call upon. Since 90 per cent of initial migrants to Bombay are men, it is not surprising that they can find someone to stay with. Yet, unlike the women, they men tend to emphasize their struggles when discussing their years in Bombay. Struggles over money: ‘I knew I had to get a job. I was so ashamed that I had to borrow money.’ Struggles over their class background: ‘When they heard I had come to Bombay with 6,000 rupees in my pocket they shooed me away’ or ‘With my looks I knew it would not be easy to get a good role. I look garib [poor].’ The men, perhaps not surprisingly, focus on their financial worries and responsibility for parents and unmarried sisters. At the same time they speak of borrowing money from their parents quite consistently, much more than the women do. Inhabiting a precarious life Both men and women inhabit a space between an informal, precarious economy and professional success. These are young people, by and large, from the non-English-speaking small towns of, primarily, North India. They seek to be workers in the creative sector, which means that they must constantly seek work and, in reality, work whenever they get it. Work and pay are intermittent and volatile. While they hope, they know well that most stars in the industry are still born, not made. So they survive on sporadic jobs, thankful if they get a recurring part in a TV serial here, or a commercial there, and wait for their break in films, while they invest in gym memberships to keep fit and in products to look good. While they may ultimately prefer film work to television work, television work is more regular and organized, as are adverts, and pay is more certain. The industry is still feudal in structure. Jobs for even the small players come through personal contacts. First jobs are often unpaid in the name of giving a newcomer an opportunity – a ’break’. Thus the newcomers take on other jobs in the industry as they wait for their break. Deepak works as a casting director, worrying that it is killing

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the actor within him; Gauri survives through a canny combination of assisting with production and taking small roles; Jyoti creates what sounded to me like shady investment schemes; Manisha takes renters into the already tiny space she lives in; while Shailendra keeps adding more roommates to his one room tenement. They audition relentlessly. Open auditions, the young migrants have learned, are usually fixed. They therefore must depend on the casting co-ordinators, the most reviled people in the industry, for their break. The casting co-ordinators are the middlemen between the casting agents or directors and the actors. They can recommend you for a role; if you audition and get the role, then you pay them a cut of your earnings. For the men, giving a cut to these co-ordinators rankles. After all, they reason, they get the role because they did a good job at the audition. To give the casting co-ordinator between 25 and 30 per cent seems unfair. For the women, these casting coordinators are the face of the casting couch; they are the ones who, as the women tell me, say to them ‘Compro karna parega’ – they must compromise. ‘When I refused,’ said Pooja, of a casting co-ordinator who propositioned her in return for a possible role, ‘he called me back and said you are young and you refuse me now. You will change your mind when you are 30 but I won’t take you then.’ Yet, the third difference between the men and women, as hinted at in Pradeep’s story, is that despite the determination, qualifications and ambitions of the young women compared with the men who have failed and cheated their way to Bombay, it is the men who clearly have more opportunities. The movie industry is a male industry. While television presents women with a wider range of roles, they have what is called a shorter ‘shelf life’ and fewer opportunities if they are not good-looking. Most of the men with whom I spoke may never get to be stars but they live off ‘character roles’, of which there are only a few for women. Since the late 1990s, there has been a high demand for gangster or vigilante films, which in turn offer a wider range of roles for these men, but not for the women. Many more of the women were in between work than the men with whom I spoke. Conclusion The entertainment industry in Bombay allows me to draw three conclusions about this new generation of aspirational youth from the small towns of India.

th e pre c a ri ous middl e cl ass | 401 First, in the old economy, middle-class migration was largely male-led and related to public sector jobs. The new middle-class migration is a private- or informal-sector migration for livelihoods in business services, hospitality, tourism and entertainment, and while it does not offer job security, it provides new possibilities for both men and women. In the recent past, these men would have joined the ranks of the educated unemployed, given the minimal value of their degrees. A few years ago, these women would not have worked. But they are not only seeking work but are actively migrating in search of a new life – not just following in the wake of their husbands. The mill economy had few jobs for women, and the service economy has many more. However, it is not easy, structurally or affectively, for middle-class women to migrate, and thus the women that we see in Bombay are particularly ambitious and successful while the men are similar to those who migrated previously. Second, while precarity is conceived by Guy Standing (2011) and others as a relationship to the labour market, precarity as the lived experience of ambient insecurity (Horning 2012) is a state of being that has long been a constitutive element of women’s lives in India. Their well-being is dependent on others and, even more so, on other people’s perceptions of their behaviour. My interviews show that the precarity brought about by their move to leave behind the protection of their families for participation in this very risky sector of the economy (the entertainment industry) is welcomed by these women. While I do not suggest that they want to be permanently insecure, I suggest that these women are enjoying, in a deep way, the possibility that their precarious existence is, for the first time, in their own hands. There are two dominant frames through which new economies and the mobilities they enable are understood, particularly with regard to women. The first is exploitation – trafficking and sexual exploitation (against the inevitable backdrop of violence that occupies a great deal of discursive space, as we have seen). The second is empowerment. But exploitation and empowerment are but two sides of the same coin. Unlike analysts who think only of the sordid compromises women in the industry must make, women themselves see their task as figuring out how to be safe, how to make it, and how to make the best life for themselves without so much ‘boundation’.

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Precarity for these men, on the other hand, provokes far more anxiety. They have failed in all ‘normal modes’ of livelihood, and their families back home potentially depend on them. When the mills died, so too did the possibility of a stable social world around labour in Bombay. What is left of skilled blue-collar work holds no attraction for these men who have some education yet do not have the English-language skills to work in a call centre. For the migrant men in Bollywood, then, who sleep in crowded rooms in tenements and shacks, thinking about failure is too terrifying and so they hold onto the hope that if Nawaz Siddiqi (one of the very few poor outsiders who have made it) can make it, perhaps they can too. Third, it is evident that not only are women discursively the preferred subjects within global discourses of development and neoliberalism, but that the neoliberal incitement to transformation is working. What the popular writing on aspiration does not make evident is that aspiration is not necessarily an individual characteristic. These aspirational women have been called into being. As Val Walkerdine and Jessica Ringrose (2006) suggest, for young women, a narrative of escape from traditional familial and domestic arrangements bolsters a neoliberal dream of reinvention through education and work-based identities. Yet there is not only a disjuncture between women’s ambitions and desires on the one hand and their opportunities on the other, where the desires and ambitions that constitute their new subjectivities outstrip their objective possibilities; the disjuncture between the discourse around failed men and successful mobile women is also productive of particular sorts of violence, as the gang rape showed, as dominant narratives about such violence produce their own effects. Notes The original version of this chapter was delivered as the Joseph W. Elder keynote lecture at the South Asia Conference, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2013. 1. While the mill closed in 1981, there is a dispute over property ownership. Today, the property is controlled by the court receiver and no one has responsibility for it. 2. There were women workers in this industry but their numbers plummeted

from a high of 22.9 per cent in 1926 with the introduction of maternity benefits in 1929, which caused mill owners to want women workers even less. 3. See http://www.slideshare. net/sreelal143/bollywood-economy. This can be compared with figures that

th e pre c a ri ous middl e cl ass | 403 show that the entertainment industry in Hollywood employed nearly 162,000 waged and salaried workers in Los Angeles County during 2011. 4. While ‘boundation’ is not really a word in the English language, it accurately reflects Gauri’s sense of being constrained, ‘cabined, cribbed and confined’.

5. I have been interviewing women in urban India for 30 years and the foregrounding of the self is not something I have encountered in the past (see also Smith and Watson 1999 on the complexity of thinking about the female subject and autobiography).

VISIONS FOUR

AN AN T I P O D E A N T A K E O N G ENDER , C U LTU R E A N D D E V E L O P M E NT C O-OP E R A T I O N

Susanne Schech

Introduction Feminist futures are unlikely to become reality without institutional backing and systemic change in the international development arena. For four decades now, multilateral and bilateral development institutions have been working towards gender equality. Since the UN Conference on Women in 1975, most development institutions have come to accept the need to adopt specific policies on gender and development. The Australian government’s development assistance programme was a latecomer, with the first gender policy published 1992. In an article written towards the end of that decade, I argued that the Australian gender and development policy would be more effective if it confronted the hierarchical relationship between development donors and beneficiaries, responded to geographically and historically specific gender relations, and learned from Australia’s own gender, culture and development issues (Schech 1998). Twenty years on it is time to revisit this space and ask whether Australian aid has demonstrated sufficient awareness of gender and culture to be able to advance women’s rights to an equal share of the future. Recent field-based research on various aspects of Australian gender and development practice indicates that the frequent references to empowerment in policy statements hide an ominous silence about gender relations and culture. It is as if women and girls existed in a vacuum and only needed donor encouragement to participate in the world of work, education, politics and peacebuilding. Once they have been added and stirred into the real world, it will become a better – read: more productive, stable and peaceful – place. Oblique references to structural barriers gloss over the fact that these are sustained by institutions and, ultimately, people, who

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are shaped by gender and culture, and it is those relations that need to be changed. From donor–recipient relationships to partnerships One important constraint of development assistance is the inequality it sets up between those who give aid, largely at their own discretion, and those who receive and often come to depend on it. Australia’s Antipodean position as an advanced industrialized country located in the geographical South has inspired ideas of Australia’s place in the region as being outside this binary. In the 1960s, Australia was conceived as a bridge between its powerful Northern allies and its deprived Southern neighbours (Whitlam 1966). In reality, Australia has behaved like most other donor countries, doing little to challenge established donor–recipient hierarchies in the Asia-Pacific region. By the 2000s, the region itself had changed dramatically. Australia’s focus has shifted to enhancing its international position to that of a ‘principled middle power’ able to influence and benefit economically from the rise of Asian economic power (Negin 2010). Donor countries across the global North have been busy relabelling their relationships with aid-receiving countries with a discourse of partnership, a discourse launched by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to revitalize development assistance as a process of dialogue and agreement between North and South, and as one that respects Southern ownership and diversity (OECD 1996: 9). Moving from a hierarchical donor–beneficiary model to more equal partnerships is challenging. This is partly due to the partner countries’ diversity, with some easier to imagine as partners than others. Some, such as Indonesia, have been moving towards democracy and middleincome status though still working to eliminate poverty and curb the rising inequalities that have accompanied economic growth. Others, such as the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, continue to struggle to meet the basic needs of a majority of their citizens despite continuous aid injections from Australia and other donor countries. Like many other donors, the Australian government has responded to criticisms of its aid effectiveness by imposing onerous reporting requirements on development partners that require a great deal of time, money and external expertise. Based on her experience with aid programmes in Papua New Guinea, Martha Macintyre

an ant ipodean take | 409 interprets this approach to accountability as the ‘donor government’s enactment of their power in the relationship and of their distrust in the recipient’s capacity to do what the donor wants’ (Macintyre 2012). With development practice so diametrically opposed to the rhetoric of partnership, it is little wonder that critical calls to abandon the partnership discourse are growing louder (Baaz 2005, Hatton and Schroeder 2007). In its bid to middle-power status and to contribute towards the millennium development goals (MDGs), the Australian government quadrupled its official development assistance (ODA) between 2002 and 2012 (from US$989 million to US$5.403 billion), while ODA from member countries of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC)1 grew by 116 per cent (OECD 2014). But how much of this aid actually goes towards gender equality programmes is unclear, although the Australian government claims to invest at least half of its aid programme funding in promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment (Shepherd and True 2014). In 2011, only 5 per cent of total bilateral aid from OECD DAC countries went to programmes that made gender equality their principal objective, and these mainly concentrated on social sectors while skirting economic issues (United Nations Statistics Division 2014). The reluctance to make gender inequality the top of the agenda of development programmes may be related to aid agencies perceiving gender issues as culturally sensitive, and therefore as matters on which they should defer to their Southern partners. Gender and development policy post-2000 In Australia, the substantial increase in the aid budget has been accompanied by statements to act on behalf of women’s and girls’ equality in the region. However, in 2013, the conservative coalition government abolished the Australian Agency for International Development and incorporated the aid programme in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, thereby effectively putting aid in the service of domestic trade and diplomacy interests. ‘Gender equality and empowering women and girls’ is now mainstreamed into the new Australian aid policy, which focuses on promoting prosperity, reducing poverty and enhancing stability. Women’s political and economic empowerment is deemed necessary to promote prosperity and reduce poverty, and ending violence against women and girls

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and giving them more decision-making power are considered to be essential parts of stabilizing fragile societies and states (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade 2014). Most of these issues have been covered in previous gender policies. Integrating women into the economy has been a focus of Australian gender policy from the start because it has fitted the economic efficiency language of the neoliberal development approach since the 1980s. It has often been couched in terms of making women more productive, rather than addressing the structural barriers that make much of women’s work invisible and deny them access to more secure and better-paid jobs (Kilby and Olivieri 2008). If anything, aid funding is now even more strongly justified in the language of economic rationality. Thus the 2014 aid policy argues for action on gender inequality in accessing employment opportunities and education because women’s limited access costs the Asia-Pacific region an estimated US$77 million annually (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade 2014). Women’s rights were prominent in the 1997 Australian gender and development policy, which took its inspiration from the strong focus on women’s rights at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. But subsequent policy amendments shifted the focus from rights to empowerment, in line with more practical and modest MDGs. MDG3, which aims to ‘promote gender equality and empower women’, continues to frame Australian policy statements. One year before the MDG 2015 deadline, UN Women expressed dissatisfaction with progress for women and girls and acknowledged that critical issues had been excluded from the scope of the MDG (United Nations Statistics Division 2014). Many of these, such as women’s unequal access to assets, their disproportionate share of unpaid work, violations of their health and reproductive rights, and unequal participation in decision-making, had been raised earlier by feminist scholars (for example, Grown et al. 2005). Gender violence and peace-building are the only gender issues receiving new attention in the Australian aid policy. The most important international policy statement on the issue is the 2000 UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325, which calls on governments to take action to protect women and girls from violence and increase their participation in decision-making and peace processes. Despite Australia’s involvement in military interventions

a n ant ipodean take | 411 in Afghanistan and Iraq and its prominent role in peacekeeping missions in Timor-Leste and the Solomon Islands, little has been done to ensure the compliance of these interventions and their related aid programmes with UNSCR 1325 (Australian Senate 2008). The current emphasis on gender violence could redress this failure if prevalent approaches to gender and culture were critically examined. Gender relations and culture The ominous silence about gender relations and culture is perhaps nowhere more evident than in programmes aimed at eliminating violence against women, as some recent publications illustrate. Westendorf’s research on the Australian-led regional assistance mission in the Solomon Islands finds that the ‘add women and stir’ approach did not work to protect women and girls or include them in peace-making. Gender expertise was sought only six years after the mission began, despite evidence that sexual and gender-based violence played an important role in the conflict. In addition to the lack of attention paid to local gender and cultural issues, there was little effort to ensure that Australian operational personnel were adequately trained on gender issues (Westendorf 2013). Attempts to improve local policy and military forces by recruiting more women often do not curb human rights and sexual abuses by these forces. While such ‘quick fixes’ may be favoured by donors, they usually fail to address structural dysfunctions in the security forces and make simplistic and essentialist assumptions about gender and violence (Baaz 2010). Aid programmes that seek to combat violence against women often seek to empower women through information, awareness campaigns and training seminars. Yet years of Australian experience in Papua New Guinea show that awareness and educational programmes alone do not work because they assume that women can change the behaviour of men. As Macintyre points out, the concept of empowerment assumes that women can be given power by donors when in reality they can only gain equality if men ‘relinquish privileges that are currently maintained by the threat of violence’ (Macintyre 2012: 262). These examples suggest that aid programmes aimed at gender equality must work with men as well as with women, even if this proves to be more expensive. And they require a sound understanding of place-specific gender relations.

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Australia’s own backyard One might expect that Australian aid organizations would learn from bitter lessons at home. Indigenous communities in Australia have endured many interventions to address poverty, unemployment and low standards of health and education among a significant proportion of their people. These efforts have largely failed to make significant improvements in living standards (Altman and May 2011), in no small part due to the Eurocentric and narrow economistic approaches to development underpinning them. Since the Australian government’s public apology to its indigenous citizens in 2007, there is now greater public awareness, both domestically and internationally, of Australia’s legacies of colonization and dispossession that have spawned a host of deep-seated social and economic problems. Some development scholars have turned their attention to power relations between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians in order to search for how more equal relationships might be created. Based on their long-term collaborative research in North East Arnhem Land, Lloyd and her collaborators identify patience, reciprocity and respect, and valuing the diversity of experiences and multiple realities as key ingredients to building the sorts of relationships that sustain working together. Drawing on relational approaches to development, ‘the developing is done by all of us … most importantly, the relationships between us all’ (Lloyd et al. 2012: 1090). This approach to partnership, however, remains rare in the Australian Aboriginal policy sector. It certainly does not inform the work of the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), launched by the Australian government in 2007 in response to allegations of child rape and paedophile rings in remote communities in the Northern Territory. Although the protection of women and children was a stated goal of the NTER, closer scrutiny reveals that the NTER measures do not appear to directly address the rights of either group. At the same time as rendering Aboriginal women’s rights invisible, the measures subject them to excessive regulation (Watson 2011: 148). One key measure – compulsory income management – affects women disproportionately, and is often cited as an example of the NTER’s discriminatory and patronizing impact. The intention of income management is to tie welfare income to ‘life essentials’ such as food, clothes and other expenses that are in the interests of children,

a n ant ipodean take | 413 and reduce the amount of funds available to be spent on alcohol, gambling and pornography (Bray et al. 2014: 19). Proponents argue that income management makes women less vulnerable to abuse and harassment for money, and more empowered to care for themselves and their families. Bray et al.’s (ibid.: xxii) evaluation finds little ‘evidence of income management having improved the outcomes that it was intending to have an impact upon’, but notes that women viewed the impacts generally more favourably than men. This indicates the need for a closer analysis of the gender assumptions, politics and impacts of the NTER, which Marcia Langton argues is opposed mainly by ‘big men’ Aboriginal political representatives who have drowned out other Aboriginal voices – both women’s and men’s. Policy-makers are advised to listen ‘to the black woman with the plain dress with the soft voice … and her quietly-spoken sisters and brothers, rather than the noisy bullies’ (Langton 2008: 71), while feminist researchers are urged to overcome their fears of upsetting political correctness and step up to the task of critically analysing the NTER’s impacts on women (Watson 2011). A gender and culture approach can make a significant contribution here, by critically investigating the assumptions in policy interventions about indigenous culture and indigenous people’s capacities, and exposing the impacts of male privilege. Bridging the gap A significant gap remains between rhetoric and practice in Australian development co-operation; this has been observed in policy as well as in programme implementation (Kilby and Crawford n.d.). Australia has adopted the partnership rhetoric in its aid policies, yet, crucially, power differentials and the ways in which these are gendered are glossed over. If ‘Southern ownership’ is respected in development co-operation, it is often male biased and likely to lock women into a time warp of tradition. The potential for synergy and mutual learning between Australia’s domestic gender and culture issues and international gender and development debates has been largely ignored by policy-makers and practitioners. However, there are some hopeful signs that the gap between good intentions and outcomes is being recognized. For example, the Australian National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security 2012–2018 acknowledges the problems of gender stereotyping and systemic gender inequalities. The plan

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pledges to integrate a gender perspective into Australian peace and security policies, and to take a holistic approach domestically and internationally to women, peace and security. Rigorous and inclusive collaborative research into the outcomes of gender policies might help push such high hopes towards their realization. Note 1. The DAC is a forum of the OECD that includes many large funders of aid. The OECD DAC membership consists

of 24 European and North American countries as well as the European Union, Australia, Korea, Japan and New Zealand.

ON AC TI V I S T S CH O L A R S H I P A ND WOMEN, C U LTU R E A N D D E V E L O P M E NT

Julie Shayne

I start this essay by thanking the students in my ‘Women, Culture, and Development’ class (spring 2014) at the University of Washington Bothell. Perhaps the thank you should go in the endnotes as a proper acknowledgement but that would feel inadequate. This chapter is about doing ‘women, culture and development’ (WCD) in the classroom as motivated by my commitment to activist scholarship and pedagogy. As educators, we know we cannot develop effective pedagogy without taking our students into consideration. As a group of about 35, my students and I worked to bring the quarter to a close by reflecting on how teaching and learning from a WCD paradigm is illustrative of activist scholarship. Like many feminist scholars, I was an activist before I was an academic: what I call a ‘pound-the-pavement’ activist. In the 1980s I was part of the Salvadoran solidarity movement. We organized furiously to get the US government to end its funding and training of the Salvadoran military regimes and death squads; to pressure our government to acknowledge the formal refugee status of the Salvadorans fleeing the war, rather than deny them political asylum; and to support the leftist movements in the country seeking to bring democracy and justice. Needless to say, it was a hard and life-changing battle. Several trips to El Salvador and years of meetings, events and socializing with undocumented Salvadoran refugees planted in me a commitment to social justice that has since saturated my worldview. Life took me out of the solidarity movement and I decided to resume my undergraduate studies that I had put on hold while a full-time activist. I enrolled at San Francisco State University, took a women’s studies class, and found my calling. I saw the political space that the college classroom provided and I wanted to seize it. I knew very early on that I wanted to be a professor.

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I have been teaching college students now for more than 20 years. I teach classes about power imbalances and social movements; culture and resistance; globalization and transnational (in)justice; US foreign economic and political policy and imperialism or neocolonialism; women, gender, patriarchy and poverty; feminism and revolution. All of my classes focus on the agency of the history-makers, especially those organizing for change. To me, agency is what is central to a WCD approach. I never really thought about ‘activist scholarship’ in any methodical way. Frankly, I’ve always felt a bit uncomfortable with calling the work scholars do ‘activism’. I have always thought of activism as inyour-face, loud and unwavering. But over the last several years I was fortunate to steer my career trajectory in such a way that I have been able to think about what we mean by activist scholarship and look at how different scholars understand and implement the concept. In the introduction to my edited collection Taking Risks: Feminist Activism and Research in the Americas (2014), my colleague Kristy Leissle and I work from Julia Sudbury and Margo Okazawa-Rey’s definition of activist scholarship. They define activist scholarship as ‘the production of knowledge and pedagogical practices through active engagements with, and in the service of, progressive social movements’ (2009: 3). The explicit mention of ‘pedagogical practices’ is key here, especially when thinking about WCD. How is WCD an activist pedagogical practice? Again, I return to agency. As we know, the editors of Feminist Futures understand WCD to be a way of understanding life via culture as lived experience. They remind us that if we view culture in this way – something that people make and do, and thus as fluid and malleable – we have no choice but to identify the agency of even the most marginalized sectors of our societies. Feminist Futures reminds us, with empirical backing, that the majority of the world’s poor are women, and intersecting structures of power – patriarchy, classism, xenophobia, homo/transphobia, racism, and so on – all collide to make women’s experiences with poverty and neocolonialism that much more challenging. But WCD urges us to not overlook the agency of marginalized peoples; a pedagogical point of departure has the potential to mobilize the classroom ‘in the service of progressive social movements’. What follows are the sentiments my students asked me to share with the readers of this chapter. As I noted, they were a great class.

on ac ti vist schol arship | 417 I work very hard to make my classes discussion-centred, even if they have 40-plus students, as this one did. On this particular day, the last day of class, the students’ contributions were especially energetic and spoke coherently to one another and the class content overall.1 There was great consensus from the students in the room that teaching and learning from a WCD perspective are both forms of activism. And those of us in the room, as part of a university community, have a privilege which some of us feel responsible to mobilize for social justice.2 That is, from the students’ perspectives, learning about the topics presented in my WCD class opened their eyes to issues they never knew existed: for example, transnational maternal mortality rates that result from self-induced abortions, due to highly restrictive abortion laws (read: legalized misogyny). The students also felt passionately that learning about the injustices and how women exercised their agency and challenged injustice made them feel confident and inspired to pass on their newly acquired knowledge – knowledge that motivated them to become activists. Many echoed the sentiment: to be an activist, knowledge must come first, and the WCD approach offered that knowledge. Some students’ discussions of agency were implicit in their larger comments, whereas others explicitly named agency as a thread they will carry with them and reflect upon. One student reminded us that everyone has agency; it is more than just an academic term. She said that learning from this WCD approach made her identify the reproductive and productive labour she witnessed in her own family. She saw the labours of the women in her family in a whole new light, a light that both illuminated their under-acknowledged contributions and hinted at the power of women that is not always explicitly claimed or articulated as such. Students also felt that the WCD approach inspired them to take similar classes, to learn more. Indeed, studying global poverty, patriarchy and resistance from colonialism to the present is a task that demands more than one rushed, academic quarter! For those of us who teach in places with colleagues who work in similar ways, students can move from one class to another. Alternatively, when students do not have other similar classes to choose from, ideally they will use their ‘new-found agency’ and quest for knowledge to pressure the powers that be to expand the course offerings. Students all spoke in virtual unison about not just taking similar classes but

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using the WCD lens to examine other topics. While it is clearer how a global studies major (of which there were many in this class) would link WCD to her other global studies classes, on the surface it may not have been as obvious for the community psychology or nursing and health studies majors. Many of these students articulated that the links are made by understanding agency, regardless of the location of the actors. Other students articulated how studying agency inspired solidarity with the activists they never knew existed. To me, this is incredibly important in all of my classes, but especially the ones that focus on the Third World. To be sure, the poverty and injustice we learn about are heartbreaking. But the activism and activists we ‘meet’ are the opposite. One student said: ‘I think we all left the class feeling inspired by the women we “met” rather than feeling pity. Seeing the people behind the activism put into reality the meaning of agency as being active and fluid.’ I feel I have failed my students and my activist convictions if students end the quarter articulating a Eurocentric rescue narrative: ‘What can we, the advanced, sophisticated people of the First World, do to help those poor, impoverished backwards people of the Third World?’ This approach, of course, does nothing towards undermining the structural power imbalances that perpetuate the poverty, but rather further entrenches them. In my experiences, since the WCD approach forces students to focus on culture, actors and agency, ideally one is inspired towards solidarity, not pity or charity. Solidarity is humbling and centres the Third World activists, whereas charity further emboldens First World peoples as the hegemons and solution-providers, infantilizing Third World peoples. Another twist on this same theme is perhaps what we might consider a counter-rescue narrative. That is, the students found themselves inspired by the activism they learned about in our class and saw that activism translating into self-empowerment and their ability to serve as feminist leaders in their own communities. Some students also explained how the WCD approach fostered their ability to see nuance. They felt that WCD allowed them to see alternatives and to change their views. That is, focusing on agency, identifying the activists as the experts of their own ‘development’ projects and the like encouraged students to think outside the Eurocentric box that had previously assigned them expert status.

on ac ti vist schol arship | 419 While WCD activists, scholars and educators focus on culture and agency, we also seek to interrogate and illuminate the historical and economic structures that serve as the mechanisms for institutionalized injustice: colonialism, imperialism, neoliberalism and patriarchy. Students conveyed that learning about the impact of institutions, for example the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and the ways in which activists challenge said institutions was also key to their learning and potential activism. WCD also offers students a new discourse: a new language and vision of politics and policies. Feminists scholars have long critiqued the limiting and masculinist vision of ‘formal politics’, a category that, transnationally, devalues women’s socio-political contributions. And economic institutions, until very recently, were all too quick to dismiss local or grassroots ‘development’ as futile at best. WCD teaches students to understand political and economic contributions in the same way activists working in those spaces do, and consequently opens up new political options for students in the First World. Two different students offered metaphors worth sharing here. One said she saw scholarship like drops into a body of water, circles that ripple out from professor to student to community. That is, the outward motion of the water’s circles is meant to suggest that WCD does not stay in the classroom. Another student suggested that the class was organized like the moving pavements one might encounter in an airport. The readings build on each other until one becomes so angry at the injustices one no longer has the option to exit the pavement, particularly because it is moving in the direction of activism. Indeed, in the last few sessions of the class, we read about transnational feminist activism. One student pointed out that Aili Mari Tripp’s assertion that ‘the shift in momentum [of women’s mobilization] from North to South is evident in … the extent to which women’s rights is perceived as a universal goal rather than as a Western feminist project’ (2006: 64) is comparable to how the students felt upon leaving the class. That is, WCD encouraged them to decentre the West in a way they had not yet been asked to do. Finally, students noted that learning from a WCD approach will allow them to view and participate in the news and current events in an active and critical manner. The current events that were intertwined into the discussion demonstrated how issues of patriarchy are ‘not

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dead’: women are still systematically targeted today, including in Western nations. In sum, from my students’ collective perspective, a WCD activist pedagogy led them to understand the injustices and institutions that propel social movements, allowed them to ‘meet’ the activists who lead the movements, and inspired at least a handful of them to use these lessons to craft their own activism and social justice projects. Notes 1. I thank Katrina Cohn for taking notes during our discussion and for working with Rebecca Ducharme and Hillary Sanders to check my retelling of the conversation. I apologize to my students if I misinterpret their words. 2. It is worth noting that while I do

not know the demographic breakdown of this specific class, nearly 46 per cent of the students at the University of Washington Bothell are first-generation college students, 42 per cent are students of colour, and 60 per cent are on financial aid.

WOM E N, T R A D I T I O N A L E CO LOG IC A L K N OW LED G E A N D S US T A I N A BLE D E VE LO P M E N T

Sangion Appiee Tiu

While spending more than ten years of my life working with rural and semi-urban communities in Papua New Guinea delivering biodiversity conservation messages, I pondered over questions about the rationale for conservation awareness and education, particularly among those who already have their own traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and other forms of indigenous knowledge that guide the way their communities function. The questions that often come to mind are: what are the perceptions of TEK in the light of increasing demands for development? What is the role of women in all this? The literature on women and development in the Third World often takes a Western perspective that focuses on women as a marginalized group (Bhavnani et al. 2003) needing to be emancipated from their economic, political or social oppression. Kurian highlights examples of such views held by ‘women in development’ (WID) scholars who describe Third World women as ‘affected by lack of education, health care and other services and state that government development plans and strategies need to integrate these concerns’ (2000a: 67). Issues of Third World women go beyond the boundaries of economy, education, health and social justice. They also concern the well-being of women as wives, mothers, sisters and daughters. These women have roles and responsibilities as well as values, aspirations and visions that need to be explored further. What interests me in this debate is the role of women in TEK and the implication this has for sustainable development. Within this context, my vision of the role of women is not as a marginalized group, but as active participants in the production, reproduction and distribution of the knowledge, values and practices of sustainability embedded in TEK. I discuss this vision by sharing a conversation that was part of an interview I had with Nengo, an elderly woman,

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during my fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. This conversation highlights the importance of cultural and social values that support concerns for social justice embedded in TEK practices that promote sustainability. Nengo’s story Nengo was born and raised in a rural forest village in Papua New Guinea. She grew up learning the ways of her ancestors and has a deep understanding of the relationship between humans and the animals and plants of her forest. She knows the types of leaves and herbs to treat various ailments, where to obtain wild fruits, nuts and eggs, and the appropriate hunting methods for different animal types. ‘I will tell you about the bandicoot,’ she said. ‘There are three types of fruits in our area that it feeds on.’ She went on to name each of these trees in her vernacular, with detailed descriptions of each, and then explained that two of these are found on the mountain tops and one in the lowlands. She continued that when the fruit of one of these trees ripens, it gives out a smell that attracts the bandicoot. To capture this bandicoot, people usually make a bush trap that is tied to the ripening fruit. When the bandicoot stretches out to eat the fruit, it triggers the top of the trap, which falls down and covers it. This traditional hunting technique is used when the bandicoots are in season. Before she finished her story, she added: ‘I know this because I have been involved in the hunting expeditions that I have told you about.’ Why did Nengo feel the need to tell me about how she acquired this knowledge? Was she just trying to justify her source? Or perhaps there was a deeper sense of responsibility to remind me that even a woman can be knowledgeable too? Nengo’s story is a reminder about the concerns of Third World women faced with the challenges of making decisions about issues that concern them (Agarwal 1998, Bhavnani and Foran 2008). As a practitioner of TEK, her position is clearly that of a knowledge-holder with a mandate to freely talk about her experiences acquired over the years. The need to explain the sources of her knowledge is culturally motivated as it is associated with gendered roles that are common in collective societies (Tiu 2007, UN 2010). These are also associated with what Chua, Bhavnani and Foran (2000) refer to as ‘lived cultures’, and

tradi ti on a l e colog ical knowl edge | 423 often challenge women with decisions about what they know as the right thing to do and trying to do what their society expects of them. Such perspectives can result from their lived experiences and not necessarily be informed by their traditional cultures and practices. I found this in my conversation with Nengo as she highlighted the use of TEK in her collectivist society. There were two key values that I noted in our conversations. First is the notion of communal work regardless of gender, age or status of a person. Forests are often harsh environments to live in and individuals cannot survive on their own unless they combine efforts with other members of the community to find resources to sustain them. Nengo’s experiences are drawn out of such situations in which collective participation on more than one occasion tended to enable the participant to learn and understand more. Second is the concept of the role of women in TEK. Nengo demonstrates that her knowledge was acquired over time through her lived experiences. How she obtains this knowledge is unquestioned because the traditional rule of kinship groups is that, as one gets older, one gains the position of knowledge-holder regardless of one’s sex. Reta (2010) reinforces this idea when she describes how her maternal female relatives, including her mother, were instrumental in educating her about the traditional cultural values, norms and practices associated with living in her Tolai society of Papua New Guinea. This raises the question of why women today need to gain approval from others if they possess knowledge typically associated with the male gender. While gendered roles did exist to some extent in these examples, they are not restrictive to males or females. The nature of a woman’s situation also determines the kind of knowledge she needs. For example, the death of a male spouse can force a woman to take over most of his responsibilities, such as hunting for wild meat or constructing the village hut, to provide for her family (see Tiu 2007). Such willingness to undergo changes is a demonstration of a woman’s ability to cope with whatever challenges life brings her way. Clearly, this demonstrates the significance of women’s roles in society. The subdivision of roles challenges perceptions of indigenous Third World women who are obliged to account for their actions. Nengo recognizes her role as the holder of the TEK of her people and feels it is her responsibility to disseminate these teachings,

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particularly about types of environmental resources, their availability, use and management; ways to strengthen kinship relationships that promote equitable access to resources; and practices of cultural and social values that promote equitable participation. In her worldview, TEK is essential for survival in her forest community and needs to be known by everyone regardless of gender, age or status. Visions of development The concept of development as a ‘change for better’ (Kurian and Bartlett 2011: 1) resonates well with the debate on women’s role in TEK. Change in this context can be a gradual process that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs (WCED 1987). My vision for development as a change for the better is one that brings about the kind of transformation that ensures equitable participation of all people, regardless of gender and race, through decision-making and economic growth, access to resources, including information, and sustainable living. This type of development needs to engage women and marginalized groups in the production and reproduction of knowledge and skills drawn from their lived experiences so that they can confidently participate in or negotiate their conditions for improved livelihoods. As reflected in Nengo’s story, the role of indigenous and Third World women as knowledge-holders places them in positions of power and enables them to make decisions regarding the type and level of TEK to disseminate to specific learners. The notion of power in this context is unique in the sense that it empowers women and enables them to participate in decisionmaking regarding community or kinship issues where they are also involved in creating and recreating this knowledge and these skills. This vision of development supports the notion of sustainable development as defined by the Brundtland Commission report (WCED 1987), with its emphasis on the equitable participation of women, the integration of cultural perspectives that form the basis of women’s lived experiences, and the desire to alleviate poverty and improve living standards in the Third World. This vision for sustainable development also reinforces the concerns of the women, culture and development (WCD) paradigm, which recognizes culture, in the form of TEK, as an integral component of the Third World as it ‘informs and shapes people’s ideas and values

tradi ti on a l e colog ical knowl edge | 425 of environment, development, technology and science’ (Bhavnani and Foran 2008: 321). What does all this mean for Nengo? What is her vision for development? Nengo’s vision for development would be one that recognizes the values of communal efforts; respect for all components of the environment, including people; sustainable use and management of resources; and involvement of women in various aspects of development. This type of development also needs to acknowledge the role of women as holders of TEK or other forms of knowledge and to create opportunities to involve them in various aspects of development. Such an approach would encourage a wider participation of women across all classes and levels. The lessons of Nengo’s story should remind policy-makers, resource developers, non-governmental organizations and other development partners that sustainable development is a collective effort and that women are an essential component of this process. By drawing on culture as lived experience (Bhavnani et al. 2003) through equitable participation and access to available resources, women can transform development expectations into productive social and cultural achievements that go beyond the immediate economic benefits. In the process, Nengo’s story suggests that WCD should critically explore the rich possibilities of sustainable development among the alternatives to the mainstream discourse of development.

RE I M AGI N I N G CL I M A T E JUS T IC E: WH AT TH E W O R L D N E E D S N OW IS LOVE , H O P E … A N D YO U

John Foran

More than ten years ago, I wrote a visions piece for the first edition of Feminist Futures. It was called ‘Alternatives to development: of love, dreams and revolution’. It was an opportunity to write directly from the heart about the things that were most important to me, and to make connections among them. This past winter, I was supposed to be writing a sequel to my book Taking Power: On the Origins of Twentieth Century Revolutions (itself written around the time of that first visions piece), a kind of update for our times that would be called Taking Power or (Re-)Making Power: Re-Imagining Movements for Radical Social Change and Global Justice. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Among the many reasons for this failure was the most important thing that has happened to me in the interim – the dawning awareness of climate change, a wicked problem and global threat with the potential to undermine all that we optimistically regard as ‘civilization’. The start of it all Climate change insinuated its way into my soul, on the spur of the moment, while living in London. I had already been exposed to the creativity of the Camp for Climate Action, which set itself up for two weeks on Blackheath in the summer of 2009. Pushed by my partner, Kum-Kum, I decided to go to Copenhagen that December for the United Nations (UN) climate summit, the COP 15 (the fifteenth annual meeting of the Conference of the Parties). As Naomi Klein (2014) has said – this happened to her too in Copenhagen – the fact of climate change changes everything. And it does. It forced itself into my consciousness in Copenhagen, and by now, no doubt, has reached into my sub- and unconscious selves as well.

re i mag i n i n g cl imat e just ice | 427 The COP 15 conference was supposed to be the one where world leaders stepped up to this challenge and found the formula for a global climate treaty that would keep the planet from heating past the danger threshold of 2°C that they had agreed to (we have already warmed the Earth by almost 0.9°C, and have emitted enough greenhouse gases to raise that to 1.4°C in due course, so two degrees of warming will be extremely dangerous). These leaders failed utterly as they were completely unprepared to face the hard questions: who would take responsibility for the dangerous warming of the planet? Who should pay the costs of reducing fossil fuel and other greenhouse gas emissions? (And now we have just realized that the global North’s meat and dairy-based agriculture and diet are equally dangerous.) How was the global South going to defeat poverty without burning fossil fuels as it developed? The global North was unwilling to meet its moral and historical commitments, and the UN climate negotiations stalled, a situation that was not substantially remedied in Paris at COP 21 in December 2015, despite the world’s astonishment and relief that the ‘paper heroes’ (Foran 2015a) pulled off a highly self-congratulatory diplomatic coup. Unfortunately, we are little safer (and probably dangerously more complacent) than we were before Paris (Foran 2015a, 2016). But something did take place in the snowy streets of Copenhagen in 2009 (and, more recently, in New York, and at many other locations in 2014 and 2015). Over 100,000 people marched for action on climate change and converged at a two-week-long parallel countersummit known as the Klimaforum. There was a bold attempt to unite progressive delegates inside the negotiations with the social movements and activists outside, only to be broken up by police violence with the sanction of the UNFCCC (the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), which oversees the talks. I witnessed the latter – my baptism of fire. The movement’s wonderfully inventive alternative conference – the Klimaforum – did the rest. I laughed when Naomi Klein presented the ‘Angry Mermaid’ awards to the big fossil fuel industries and lobbyists, and to the governments that obey them for money. I watched with admiring amusement when the somewhat uncharismatic but lovable Bill McKibben had to hold the crowd for an indefinite period while we waited for the arrival of an important guest, who turned out to be Mohamed Nasheed, the President of the Maldives, who

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has a passion for climate justice. He had come to talk to us – the movement – straight from the airport rather than going to his hotel or the negotiating halls. In another part of town, I stood in a crowd of several thousand people of all ages and heard what Evo Morales and Hugo Chávez had to say about the fight for the rights of Mother Earth and for socialism in the twenty-first century. I became an eco-socialist. And a depression I had been feeling for years started to lift. Yes, climate change cured my depression! Or, less facetiously, becoming part of the struggle for climate justice sent it back into the shadows. All of us now dwell in a future marked by gathering shadows, and we have no option other than to fight for a path through the darkening gloom. A new start I returned to my duties at the University of California, Santa Barbara, after two years of living in London, and my life started to change. I created courses such as ‘Earth in Crisis’, where my students engage in a role play of the COP and make a treaty that inevitably expresses the idealism and hope of a new generation that is unafraid to confront climate change with intensity and passion. I formed a research partnership with Richard Widick to conjure up something called the International Institute of Climate Action and Theory, whose fruits can be seen at http://www.iicat.org. We went to COP 17 in Durban, South Africa, and met, or heard, or interviewed Patrick Bond, Pablo Solón, Lidy Nacpil, Ivonne Yanez, Michael Dorsey, Nnimmo Bassey, Tom Goldtooth, Mary Robinson, Des D’Sa, Dessima Williams, Joel Kovel, Asad Rehman, Anne Petermann, Kumi Naidoo, Kandi Mossett, Mohamed Aslam, and many young activists from all over the world. We tried to ‘Occupy the COP’ in the heady days of late 2011. This first encounter with the global youth climate justice movement helped me see very clearly that the young people who were entering this epic fight in growing numbers would be the ones to change everything. Groups including Earth in Brackets, the Canadian Youth Delegation, the Arab Youth Climate Movement, Young Friends of the Earth, SustainUs, Push Europe, Sexify the COP, the UK Youth Climate Coalition and so many others, some without names, were coming together and teaching me hope, and artivism, and the

re i mag i n i n g cl imat e just ice | 429 solidarity that comes from love – something I already knew about, at least in theory. In the autumn of 2013, I joined with Corrie Ellis, Summer Gray, Ben Liddie, Natasha Weidner and Emily Williams in what would become the grandly named Climate Justice Project (https:// climatejusticeproject.com) and we went to bear witness at COP 19 in Warsaw, Poland. This time, because of my younger comrades, we met many more extraordinary, ordinary people, and started to make videos and films of the events.1 We found our voices as we wrote blogs, gave talks, taught new kinds of classes, such as Corrie’s ‘Feminist Climate Justice’, with new kinds of pedagogies, including Summer’s use of Pecha Kucha.2 And we organized a conference that turned into a gathering and gave this essay its title: ‘Re-imagining climate justice: at the crossroads of hope and possibility’.3 We came to one firm conclusion: to cut emissions, we need to stop the fossil fuel industry in its tracks, and only a humongous social movement of a sort never seen before can do that. But how? It’s always that question. By weaving together the most expansive meanings of social justice into the fabric of one broad movement of many parts, ‘climate justice’ is becoming the name of a movement that is rapidly gathering force to confront the obscenity of global inequality, the democracy deficit of ‘politics as usual’, and the violence that seeps into our cultures from the bedroom to the battlefields. Ground zero for climate justice So here we are today, at Year Zero for Climate Justice (Foran 2015; cf. also Foran 2016a). It will always be year zero from now on, of course. As in many things radical, Rebecca Solnit has already given expression to some of my deepest feelings and thoughts, in words that are as relevant today as they were when she wrote them at the end of 2013: Think of 2013 [or whatever year we are in now] as the Year Zero in the battle over climate change, one in which we are going to have to win big, or lose bigger … The gifts you’ve already been given in [the past year] include a struggle over the fate of the

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Earth. This is probably not exactly what you asked for, and I wish it were otherwise – but to do good work, to be necessary, to have something to give: these are the true gifts. And at least there’s a struggle ahead of us, not just doom and despair … If you care about children, health, poverty, farmers, food, hunger, or the economy, you really have no choice but to care about climate change. The reasons for acting may be somber, but the fight is a gift and an honor. What it will give you in return is meaning, purpose, hope, your best self, some really good company, and the satisfaction of being part of victories also to come. But what victory means needs to be imagined on a whole new scale as the news worsens … This is, among other things, a war of the imagination: the carbon profiteers and their politicians are hoping you don’t connect the dots, or imagine the various futures we could make or they could destroy, or grasp the remarkably beautiful and complex ways the natural world has worked to our benefit and is now being sabotaged, or discover your conscience and voice, or ever picture how different it could all be, how different it will need to be. They are already at war against the wellbeing of our Earth. Their greed has no limits, their imagination nothing but limits. Fight back. You have the power. It’s one of your gifts. The year 2014 was the hottest in recorded history, a record soon broken by 2015. Now another year is here. The future is right around the corner. Think of the coming year as year zero of that crucial decade in which our future will be set in motion, for better or worse. And of the many futures that are possible, which one will we make? This year could turn out to be the one in which the gears of the machine are slowed enough for us to imagine that the momentum of the downward death spiral we seem to be on can be stopped. A lot depends now on what we do for climate justice in the months and years after the COP 21 UN climate summit in Paris. In 2014, the fledgling climate justice movement got up on its feet and started to walk and march. In 2015 we started running, once more away from the police, this time summoned by the French government’s state of emergency, cynically decreed just before COP 21 started, which made a gathering of more than two people with

re i mag i n i n g cl imat e just ice | 431 a political purpose illegal! Now we must learn quickly, and on the run – or, as the Zapatistas put it, ‘preguntando caminamos’ or asking as we go along. A character in the film The Imitation Game says: ‘Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.’ And as Robert Reich (2015) reminds us: ‘It’s important to keep in mind how quickly progressive change that seems radical, if not a pipe dream at one point in time, becomes feasible when enough people make a ruckus.’ It’s up to all of us extraordinarily ordinary people. What’s hope got to do with it? Compassion, caring and creativity have big roles to play. To this, we may add the subjective experience of hope, or is it an emotion? In David Solnit’s words: ‘Hope is key. If our organisations, analysis, visions and strategies are lanterns, then hope is the fuel that makes them burn bright and attracts people to them’ (2004). Interestingly, the Zapatistas are sometimes referred to as ‘professionals of hope’. For Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone (2012), hope is active. Our hope must be expressed freely, felt fiercely, and transmitted everywhere. Don’t lose love In ‘The most important thing we can do to fight climate change is try’, Rebecca Solnit reminds us that: We don’t have a map for any of this, which is what all the confident prophecies of a predictable, linear future pretend to offer us. Instead, we have, along with the capacity for effort, a compass called hope: a past that we can see, that we can remember, that can guide us along the unpredictable route, along with our commitment to beings now living and yet to be born, that commitment called love. (Solnit 2015) There’s a Buddhist saying: ‘Understanding is love’s other name’ (Hahn 2015: 10). Love of self. Love of people. Love of the planet. To reimagine climate justice, please bring all of these. The most important thing Oh, yes. The most important thing … is you, and me – us – we are! As Wes Stephenson’s beautiful 2015 book declared, What We’re

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Fighting for Now is Each Other. And as a wise person once said, if you’re reading this, you’re already in the conversation. Notes My thanks to Debashish Munshi for his excellent editorial improvement of this piece, and to the many friends whose actions have made it possible. 1. See Summer Gray’s video of the great civil society walkout, Civil Society Walks Out at COP 19 on November 21, 2013, at http://www.youtube.com/watc h?v=KbtdXFeEUXk&feature=youtu.be. 2. See Summer Gray’s videos of our students: A Message to the World (5 December 2013) at

http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=C5mVCuokAkY; and Climate Justice Is … (March 2014) at https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=mSjePFsSMoA. 3. Captured in part in Reimagining Climate Justice (15 May 2014) at https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=GpJpbnMjiYs.

P OS TS CR I P T | A CO N V E R S A T ION A BOUT TH E F U T UR E O F W O M E N , CU LT UR E AN D D EV E L O P M E N T

Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, Priya A. Kurian and Debashish Munshi

For this concluding postscript, we challenged ourselves to each reflect on women, culture and development (WCD) 12 years or more after the first edition of this book, and to do it in 500 words or less! This is what we wrote, more or less independently of each other. We leave it to the reader to decide how well this provisional ‘conversation’ brings closure to a topic and field as open-ended as women, culture and development! Kum-Kum Bhavnani WCD tries to undermine hypocrisy. The hypocrisy of governments that profess democracy but pander to corporate interests at the expense of the public good. The hypocrisy of states that preach ethical international relations and global peace but arm groups to bring down legitimate regimes. The hypocrisy of men who talk of class politics and its centrality in everyone’s lives, and yet who rarely go out of their way for their own children. Many decades ago, feminists of colour and white feminists pointed to the hypocrisy of those who claimed love for their fellow human beings, but could not say one word of love to the people who nurtured them, who looked after them, and who sustained them. There were – and are – people who speak of loyalty to their politics and their beliefs, and yet can leave intimate partners in the lurch for their individual pleasures. Often it appears to be ‘common sense’ to insist on a primacy for individual desires and needs. Such an insistence can negate the commitment and damage the shared work of caring and nurturing carried out within a household. It can overlook people as human beings who have a deep need for loyalty and genuine love. It is this hypocrisy that a WCD approach is potentially able to challenge.

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Because WCD places women at its centre (and I do not forget the presence of men and many other interlocking constituencies), we are able to see how the thinking and behaviour of women, along with our entanglement in production and reproduction, allow us to offer insights into how to better imagine lives of love, creativity and humour (and dancing, of course!). Imagining those lives requires an understanding about the conditions of our existence: if even one person is not fed or sheltered or otherwise cared for, then we have all failed in our endeavours to imagine and create those lives. While I don’t want to reproduce a woman–man binary, I do want to place the (not-unitary) category of woman at the centre of my thinking. I do this because, for example, we (Bhavnani and Bywater 2009) know that in Plachimada, India, it was the women – who talked as they walked 5 to 8 kilometres to the well – who realized that their water tasted different from before. That realization led them to raise the issue in their communities, and ultimately stop Coca-Cola from using their bottle-washing plant near the village, which had caused hazardous substances to leach into the ground water. More recently, in early 2016, it was one woman, Leanne Walters, who blew the whistle to expose how government officials had switched the source of the water for the working-class town of Flint in the US state of Michigan and left residents, a majority of them people of colour, with a water supply contaminated with lead and other toxins. Simply thinking about the imperfect concept of ‘woman’ allows me to see the world differently, and also makes me prepared to say that I see it differently. Resisting structures of globalized development or undermining the hypocrisy of elite constituencies demands anger. It’s an anger described by Audre Lorde in her 1981 speech as one ‘of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation’ (Lorde 2007). She urged readers not to confuse anger with hate. I do not hate. I refuse bitterness. But I am angry towards all that causes injustice, even as I love, and I also know that people can, and do, change. It is WCD that offers me glimpses into difference, and offers me ways of changing the world at many different levels. John Foran ‘The last 12 years, and the future, of WCD in 500 words or less?’ Easy. It’s now about centring our work and our lives on the

postscript | 435 climate crisis, giving it everything we’ve got, because it requires us to change everything. And, in doing so, it’s about connecting that crisis, in powerful ways, with just about every other key issue we face: inequality, racism, patriarchy, militarism, authoritarianism, austerity, post-colonialism, neo-imperialism, capitalism. And the key to that is building our cultures around climate justice in this big sense, or at least building climate justice into our political cultures of opposition and creation. And women remain at the centre of this project. As do young people. As do front-line communities – on islands, in forests, near deserts, in forgotten slums. And we have to build some new kind of society, on a whole new understanding of that awe-ful word ‘development’. Not the easy fix of ‘sustainable development’, a term beloved of enlightened transnational corporations, the World Bank, and the UN itself, with its aspirational sustainable development goals, and no idea of how to reach them. Instead, something beyond, or after. Mere sustainability. Beyond, and certainly after, capitalism. Towards some new ways of living that permit maximum human dignity, participation and creativity in building a new world without borders, without inequality, without hatred and fear, food insecurity, poor health or violence – everywhere. Based instead on education without limits (except those posed by our own imaginations and dreams), on living better with less (much less, in some cases), on time free of meaningless work. And we have to do this rather quickly, in the lifetimes of all of us living on the planet right now, with a majority in some pretty awful conditions. The times call on our resilience, courage, love, and (as ever) our imagination. The good news? This radical transformation is already underway. A million in the streets all over the planet at the time of the UN climate summit in Paris at the end of 2015, when the French government so transparently betrayed the promise of democratic freedoms in cynical fashion after the 13 November massacres in the city. In the defiant resistance of thousands of others who reclaimed the streets and spaces of Paris to say ‘No’ to a failed treaty made by paper heroes. In the countless creative actions of communities in every corner of the world to counter the extractivism of the fossil

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fuel corporations and countries in 2015 and into 2016, 2017 … In the thousands of co-operatives, transition towns, autonomous zones, new political and social organizations and networks that have sprung up to insist that another world is possible – and necessary – and that are springing up anew in yet more places with each dawning day. We want to do it. We can do it. We have to do it. We will do it. That’s the future of WCD – let’s build it out of the beauty and power and wonder of all our struggles for a future worthy of all of us, because all of us will own it, having made it together. Debashish Munshi As a male management academic living and working in a developed nation, I often get asked by my students how the idea of WCD fits into discussions on organizational communication, change management or leadership – some of the subjects I teach at university. It takes a while but it does sink in as my students and I step out of the confines of the mainstream organizational and management literature to traverse the realms of time and space and discourse and materiality. In charting the morphing of territorial colonization of the past into corporate neo-colonization of the present, and in analysing the man-made crises of war, poverty, climate change and inequity, we begin to see the toxic legacy of masculinized policies of individual rights, capitalist greed and unfettered growth. If we are to shape a just and equitable future, we need to resist the structures of the globalized development project that has wreaked social, economic and ecological havoc on the Earth. WCD is the vehicle of resistance that has the potential to deliver us to such a future. Of late, I have been working with students on building scenarios for the future. Scenarios help project the future by blending data analysis with creative thinking. They draw on information from the past and the present but factor in political, social, cultural and technological issues that could have an impact on future possibilities. One of the characteristics of scenario-building is to get away from narrow, linear thinking and draw on a diverse set of perspectives. Shunning linearity can help us look at development in ways other than those dictated by economic and material growth. Some of my students have shown me that scenarios need not be only about equipping us to face eventualities through processes of risk management. We can see that it is possible to steer human choice and action from a predictable

postscript | 437 future to a desirable future that safeguards the sustainability of our planet and its people. So what would it take to get on track to such a desirable future? I think we could begin by reinterpreting the past through a feminist lens. Instead of seeing history through narratives of wars and conquests and their so-called heroes, we could look at the incredible work done by women and men in resisting oppression and sustaining communities. I can’t help thinking about my grandmother, who, in her own way, combatted the bloodbath of communal violence leading up to the partition of India by the simple act of sheltering people of minority communities in her home. And now I see my daughters organize concerts to raise awareness about the most basic of human rights, such as those of children caught up in the ravages of war or those struggling to get access to clean drinking water. There is hope. There is a future. But we need to work not just as individuals but as organizations and communities, both local and global, to bring about structural changes in the ways in which the planet and its resources are governed and managed. Priya A. Kurian As we bring to a close the second edition of Feminist Futures, I am more conscious than ever that this is not meant to be merely an academic project. It is a project of recognizing new challenges that confront the world; it is a project of building alliances between scholars and activists; and, most importantly, it is a project of hope and change. Rather than being neutral observers and analysts, we (academics) must speak up against a lopsided development agenda driven by hyper-capitalism, an agenda crafted not only by wealthy corporations but also by a new breed of philanthrocapitalists who are undermining democratic institutions by channelling funds into select projects that catch their whims and fancies. Globally, we can see a systemic institutionalization of precarity – marked by job insecurity and the absence of social and material welfare – pushing vulnerable groups of people to the brink. As WCD scholars, we should be able to see through the glossy façade of development and actively explore the overlapping layers of the politics of race, gender, caste and class that shape the meanings of development for individuals, communities and states. In centring

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culture alongside political economy, we can participate in creating the spaces for the interplay between the personal and the structural contexts that can lead to transformative social changes. One example of such an initiative is my own involvement since the early 2000s in working with a group of women to set up and run a voluntary organization for ‘ethnic’ women and their families in Hamilton, New Zealand (the term ‘ethnic’ is used by the New Zealand government to refer to people who are not white AngloAmerican or Celtic, Maori or Pacific Islanders, and includes African, Asian, Latin American, Middle Eastern and East European groups). Shama Hamilton Ethnic Women’s Centre Trust works with ethnic women who are often socially isolated, facing issues of violence, unemployment and/or discrimination, and just negotiating their way in what often seems to be an alien ‘mainstream’ society. At the heart of all the work that Shama does is an embodiment and enactment of diverse understandings of culture – whether it is in the shape of culturally nuanced interventions into domestic violence or the provision of women-only classes that provide opportunities and safe spaces for women to get together, or public submissions on legislative and policy changes. Despite a fragile existence, given the vagaries of funding, the organization represents in many ways the hopes and aspirations of ethnic women in the area. It brings together commitments to social justice, diversity and inclusiveness and distils them into a holistic notion of sustainability that I believe WCD has at its core. I look ahead to the world that awaits, marked by the uncertainties of climate change and the hope of climate justice and action. It seems obvious that we need to pay attention to women, culture and development to create sustainable societies. That means paying attention to, learning from, and participating in intellectual, creative and activist ventures alongside millions of others, locally and globally. A WCD approach, ultimately, embraces fine-grained analyses of structures, processes, institutions and policies, as well as the actions of women, men, youth and children who seek to translate these development visions of justice, equity, creativity, love and hope into reality.

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INDEX

2° degree threshold for climate change, 259, 427 A Separation, 350, 355–60 Aboriginal women, rights of, 412 abortion: access to, 101; and perceived moral corruption, 116–22; death sentence for, 111; decriminalization of, 82, 83; discourses against, 123–9; health implications of, 125; in African culture, 109–31; in case of rape, 110, 124, 125; in Kenya, xxiv (campaigning against, 112–29; legal context of, 110–12; statistics for, 109); men’s attitude to, 127–8; opposition to, xxiv, 68; prison sentences for, 110; reasons for, 124, 125–6; reducing deaths associated with, 111; right to, 82; secrecy of, 127; seen as un-African, 112, 114, 120, 122, 127, 129; seen as Western practice, 119, 122; societal implications of, 117–18; unsafe, 109 Abu-Lughod, Lila, xxi accidents, eventuality of, 63–5 accredited social health activist (ASHA) (India), 97 active, acting ‘I’, 393 activism, inspiration of, 418 activist scholarship, 415–20; definition of, 416 adolescents, sexual programmes for, 101 see also girls, adolescent Advani, L. K., 227–8 afamistas prostitutes, 165 Afghanistan, women of, xxi African morality see morality, of Africa African tradition, 109, 148; male roles in, 128; means of control of women, 122; of sexuality, 128 Agarwal, Bina, 10

agency, 45; of adolescent girls, 182–9; of nature, 263; of women, 3, 6, 8, 9, 12, 21, 107, 108, 132, 264, 306, 314, 326, 381, 417; reproductive, 106 aghazadeha family network, 346, 347–9 agricultural production, promotion of, in USA, 243, 243 aid, imbalance of power in, 408 Akan people, 121 Alarcón, Fabián, 77 algorithms, ubiquity of, 205 Alianza Pais (Ecuador), 68, 81 aliens, paranoia regarding, 195 All Nepal Women’s Association (Revolutionary) (ANWA(R)), 178–9 allegorical readings, 372 Allen, Paula with Eve Ansler, The Feminist Memoir Project, 299 Allende, Isabel, The House of the Spirits, 301 Allende, Salvador, 300 alliances, 23, 319; building of, 281, 292, 309–10 American Dream, 252 American way of life, 247 Amnesty International, reporting on Ecuador, 76 anaemia in pregnant women, 99 anger, need for, 434 Anglican Church of Kenya, 112 Angry Mermaid award, 427 animals, associations with women, sexualized, 257 Annan, Kofi, 291 antenatal care, 96, 99 anthropocentric development, use of term, 262–6 anthropocentrism, 21, 274; a cause of environmental crisis, 265; challenging of, 266 anti-colonial struggles, 137

480 | f e m i n i s t f u t u r e s anti-imperialist struggles, feminist aspect of, 20 anti-natalism, 104–5; performed on women’s bodies, 93 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 281 Appadurai, Arjun, 346 aqui nunca llega nada, 307–8 Arab Spring, 286 Arab women, use of safe cyberspaces, 282–3 Arango, Arturo, 312 archaic, in relation to modernity, in India, 220–2 archaic modernity see modernity, archaic armed struggle, 33, 34 arpilleras art works, 42 assassinations, 32 Association of Grandmothers (Argentina), 42 astrologers, 236 Atieno, Christine, 111 atom bomb developed by India, 22, 225–7, 237; named ‘Shakti’, 226–7; seen as sign of masculinity, 226 Atoms for Peace programme, 221 Atwood, Margaret, 260 aunts, role of, 137 Australia, xxv; apology to indigenous citizens, 412; gender policy in, 409–14; military interventions of, 410–11 Australian Agency for International Development, 409 Australian National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, 413–14 Austria, Wilma, 180 Autonomous Feminists Collective (Ecuador), 80 autonomy, concept of, 186 auxiliary nurse midwives (ANMs) (India), 96; workload of, 102 awareness training, 159 ‘axis of evil’, 1 az khodgozashtegi (selflessness), 347–8 Bâ, Mariama, So Long a Letter, 366–84 Baba Ramdev, 227 Babri Masjid, breaking of, 224

Bacigalupi, Paola, 211–14; Ship Breaker, 211–12; The Doubt Factory, 213–14; The Drowned Cities, 212; The Windup Girl, 212 Bacon, Francis, 257 Baconian philosophy, 229 badminton, 391–2 bakla, figure of, 167–8 balsa wood, 64 bandicoot, catching of, 422 Bani Etemad, Rakhshan, with Mohsen Abdolvahab, Gilaneh, 350 Barrio Revolutionary Committees (BRCs) (Philippines), 179–80 ‘basic needs’ approach, 5, 39, 302; critique of, 20 beauty, 141; ideals of, 138 (white, 142) beauty-cum-singing contest, 339 Belausteguigoitia, Marina, 292 Bemba people, 121, 136–7 Berger, John, with Alain Tanner, Jonah who will be 25 in the year 2000, 297, 303–4 Bhabha, Homi, 368 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) (India), 22, 94, 217, 222, 224, 225, 236 Bharti, Uma, 224 Bhavnani, Kum-Kum, 9–12, 29, 165, 433–4 Bina from Tezpur, 390–1 biocides, use of term, 250 biodiversity, destruction of, 270 bioengineering, 212 biopower, 104 biosphere, concept of, 261 biotechnologies, 17–18 birth control, 50, 198; African traditional, 121; opposition to, 50 birth rates, falling, 104–5 bisexual women, rights of, 180 Blair, Tony, 173 Blaser, Mario, 290 body: as first site of women’s struggles, 279; black, female, in carnival, 143; in development studies, 23; naked, displayed on internet, 286; of girls (culturing of, 137–9; painting of, 138–9, 142); of those disabled by war, 350; of women, 57, 93, 144

index | 481 (can be broken, 66; disciplining of, 329; displayed as political weapon, 287; multiple levels of exploitation of, 339; reconfiguration of, 145; transgressive, 143; Western, sexualization of, 333, owning of, 142); women’s control of, 187 see also gendered body Bolivar, Simón, 84 Bollywood, 389; relation to globalization, 390 Bombay: as city of migrants, xxv, 389; entertainment industry in, 386; film industry in, 389–90 Bonaparte, Laura, 41 Bonyade Mostaz’afan va Janbazan (Iran), 349, 353 border thinking, 354 borderless world, possibility of, 274 borders, transcending of, 275 Boserup, Ester, 5 boundaries: destabilizing of, 276; in ecosystems, 274; meaning of, for feminism, 342 boy preference, 105 boycott, divestment and sanction movement (BDS), xxii boys, prioritised in education, 142 breast feeding, 100 bridewealth, distribution of, 61 Brundtland Commission report, 424 Bucaram, Abdala, 77 buen vivir, xxiv, 69, 71, 74–5, 81, 86–7; querying of, 83–8 Buenos Aires, 42–3 Bunty from Madhubani, 398 burial ceremony, pursuance of, 319 Bush, Laura, xxi Butler, Judith, 381 Cadena, Marisol de la, 290–1 call centres, employment in, 170, 402 Camp for Climate Action, 426 Cañas, Mercedes, 301, 303 cannibalism, 198–9 capabilities, 162 capacitation, 159, 162 capacity building, 159

capitalism, going beyond, 435 capitalocentrism, 288 Cardoso, F. H., 297; with E. Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America, 14 care and caring, 433; complications of, 360; crisis of, in Iran, 350–1, 356–7, 360–1; of disabled war veterans, 353 care economy, 75 caring witnesses, healing effect of, 318 Carroyo, Light, 2 Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring, xxiii-xxiv, 241–60; The Edge of the Sea, 242; The Sea Around Us, 242; speech to Women’s National Press Club, 246 Carty, Linda E., 290 Castells, Manuel, 284 Castillo, Otto René, 344 casting co-ordinators, 400 Catholic Church, 112, 114–15, 115–16, 117–18, 123 censorship, 42; consciousness of, 43 centre, location of, 55 centrisms, oppressive, 264 Césaire, Aimé, 371 Chalatenango (El Salvador), attack on, 33 Chávez, Hugo, 73, 428; declares himself a feminist, 84 chawls (tenements), 387–8 chemical industry: funding of scientific research, 246; gender ideologies in, 242; policy agendas of, 245 Chen Yingzhen, 332 Cherutich, Dr, 112 Chiapas, women in, 292, 304 child rape, 412 childbearing, decision-making regarding, 110 childbirth, institutional, 99, 100, 101 childcare, 11, 120; women’s responsibility for, 124 children: born to unitiated girls, 121–2; involved in fighting, 34 Chile: Allende government in, 13; military dictatorship in, 42 China, 290; relations with Taiwan, 341 chisungu ceremony, 136–7 chlordane, use of, 253, 254

482 | f e m i n i s t f u t u r e s Christian Democratic Party (PCD) (El Salvador), 30 Christian Health Association of Kenya, 113 Christianity, 114, 122, 137, 139, 142, 145, 146, 147, 198; and state policies on reproduction, 113 Ciénaga de Manabao, La, 307–13 cinema, 350–1; going to, 379–80 circles: honouring of, 40–1; use of, 42 circular movement of demonstrations, 42 circumcision, female see female genital mutilation citizenship, 182–9 city, as cultural space, 143 civil society, operating through Internet, 291 civilizing mission, 134 class, 10, 368, 433 class consciousness, 159 class struggle, 162 climate change, 177, 203, 206, 258–60, 430 climate crisis, centrality of, 434–5 climate justice: ground zero for, 429–31; imagining of, 426–32 climate justice movement, 428, 429 Clinton, Bill, 173 Clinton, Hillary, 174 co-operatives, 435; creation of, 11 Coal Bed Methane (CBM), 202 coalitions, formation and fragmentation of, 13, 342 Coca-Cola, bottle-washing plant in India, 434 Cohen, Pamela, 29 Cold War, 247–8, 303 Colectivo Feministas por la Autonomía (Ecuador), 78 collective action, table of, 160–1 Collins, Suzanne: Catching Fire, 206, 207, 208; Mockingjay, 206, 207, 209; The Hunger Games, 206–11 Colombia, revolutionary women in, 176 colonialism, 221 Comisión de la mujer, el niño y la familia (Ecuador), 78

commodification, 334 Commoner, Barry, 255 commons: as self-organizing liberatory movement, 290; biological, exploitation of, 269 community, importance of, 317, 318, 319, 320 complexity, theories of, 287–8, 289 computers, development of, 247 compulsory income management, 412–13 condoms, 119; use of, publicity withdrawn, 112 Confucianism, 325 Congress Party, 217 connectivity, digital, negative aspect of, 286 conscientization, 159 consciousness-raising, 159 Consejo Nacional de la Mujer (CONAMU) (Ecuador), 78 consent, manufacturing of, 244 consumerism, 210, 247, 348 consumption: feminine disorder of, 340; feminization of, 334 contraception, 94, 110, 119, 123; counselling for, 96; promotion of, 96; use of, 99, 101 Coordinadora de la Salud y Género (Ecuador), 78 Coordinadora Politica de las Mujeres Ecuatorianas, 78 Correa, Rafael, xxiv, 68–91 passim; redistributive agenda of, 80–3 corruption, 59 counter-rescue narrative, 418 couple, necessity of, 378 Cuba, 298, 312; achievements of revolution in, 316–17; women revolutionaries in, 315–21 Cuenca Alta del Yaque, 307 Cuenca (Ecuador), arrest of crossdressers in, 76, 80 cultural studies, 7; Third World, 19 cultural turn in social theory, 5 culture, 57, 306; as enunciation, 368; as lived experience, xxiii, 4, 7, 9, 114, 416; as structure of feelings,

index | 483 xxii, 369, 370; as the non-economic, 368; concept of, 16, 369–70, 382–3; definition of, 282, 380 (diversity of, 438); embedded in the everyday, 109; everyday, of resource politics, 59–63; in out-of-the-way places, 54–7; in relation to nature, 275; lived, 422; mobilization of, in revolutions, 22; non-economic factors of, 10; on a par with political economy, 3; reading of, 368; role of, in patriarchal hegemony, 118–19; weight of, 38; women in relation to, 18, 222–5 cyberfeminism, 287 cyberpolitics, xxv cyberspace, embeddedness of, 286 dalumei (mainland sister), representation of, 341 dams, building of, 221 dance: importance of, 434; women’s employment in, 391 Dark City, 195 Dasgupta, Swapan, 226 daughters, working, 337–41 Dayananda Saraswati, 222 DDT: banning of, 241; developed by military, 249; impregnated in wallpaper, 252; marketing of, 251 death squads, 31, 32 decentralized participatory planning (DPP), 96 decoloniality, 280–1 decolonization, 237, 239 Deepak, a casting director, 399–400 Deepshikha programme (India), 183, 184, 185, 187 Deere, C. D., 75 Deleuze, Gilles, 285 Deliverance Church of Kenya, 112 democracy, 47, 203, 274–5, 278, 303; ecological, 266; practice of, 178–81; undermining of decision-making in, 270 democratization, of ICTs, 283 Desai, Morarji, 94 desaparecidos see disappearances desire, as form of resistance, 164 ‘developing countries’, use of term, 55

development, 185; alternatives to, 297–305; as ‘change for the better’, 424; as a moral force, 302; as a set of projects, 45–6; as cultural packages, 47–8; as platform of Bharatiya Janata Party, 217; Australian gender policies in, 407–14; concept of, 380–1, 437; critique of, 47, 261, 306–7; dependent, 14, 297; economic, importance of, 37; in India, 221; need for, 308; pedagogy of, 311; problem of theorization of, 285; reappropriation of term, 301; redefinition of, 70; subjective side of, 314–21; theory and practice of, 306–13; use of term, 182, 435; visions of, 424–5 see also sustainable development Development Alternatives with Women for a New Dawn (DAWN), 6, 14 development nationalism, 217–40, 227–9 Development Project, 266–8 development studies, 3, 8, 164, 193, 261–77; critical, 7, 14, 19; masculinist thought in, 262–3; sexual embodiment of, 67 Devi, goddess, 222 dieldrin, use of, 252, 253, 254 disabled people, through war, 351 disappearances of people, 41; through war, 351 discourse, concept of, 158 discursive field, liberation of, 55 dissipative structure, 288 distribution of wealth, 210 division of labour, gendered, 38 divorce, 355, 358, 361 domestic science, in education system, 225 Dominican Republic, 23, 307–13 donor-recipient relationships, in aid, 408–9 Dorfman, Ariel, 301 ‘double shift’ of women, 9 Doubt Factory, idea of, 213 dreams, 299–301; in development theory and practice, 306–13 Drewal, Henry, 140–1, 150 Dryzek, J., 266–7

484 | f e m i n i s t f u t u r e s duality, prioritization of, 40 Duarte, José Napoleon, 30, 31 East Asian Development Model, 325 ecofeminism, 263–4 ecological rationality, 266–8, 273 economic difference, practices of, 289 ecophilosophy, 265 Ecuador, 68–91; Citizen Revolution, xxiv, 71, 84 (impact of, 84); constitution of 1998, 76, 78–9, 87; constitution of 2008, 68–71, 74–5, 80–3, 84–9; women’s struggles in, 176 education, 129, 137, 226, 310, 312, 315, 401, 411; Christian, 142; costs of, 30; disruption of, 54; French system of, 371, 373, 374, 376; Hindi-language, 392; in traditional culture, 423; of boys, 336 (in India, in English, 392; prioritised, 142); of girls (curtailed, 392–3; in domestic services, 142, 224); of women, 188, 222, 361, 391, 421 (Western, 174); of young women, about bodies, 184; purpose of, 174–5; schooling, 34, 35, 37, 39, 58; supported by chemical industries, 246–7; university-level, 415, 417; without limits, 435; women’s access to, 68; women’s role in, 38; womenonly classes, 438 effeminization, seen as strategy of West, 223 efficiency of development, 5 Egbereremi council, 138, 139 Eisenhower, Dwight, 247 Ekwe system, 135 El Salvador, 29–39; earthquake in, 37; feminist movement in, 299; solidarity action with, 415 Elson, Diane, 264 emancipation, of indigenous peoples, 160–2 emotional pain, addressing of, 314 empowerment, 185, 203, 267; acts of, stories of, 317; ambivalent word, 157; as umbrella term, 158; concept of, 23, 411; in the context of development studies, 23; of self, 418; of women,

97–8, 104–5, 106, 122, 132, 133, 157–62, 186, 206, 278, 401, 407, 409, 424 (in transgression, 143); rhizome of, 160–2; shift from rights to, 410; use of term, 182 entertainment industry, in India, feudal structure of, 399 entomology, 245–6, 250 environment: central to study of development, 16; women’s relationship to, 11 environmental impact assessments (EIA), 16, 17 environmental issues, 1, 2, 8, 15, 19, 177, 195, 199, 273 environmental movements, 241–60, 261–2, 267 environmentalism: of the poor, 267; Western-inspired, 274 ‘equality within difference’, 356, 361 Ermita sex district, Manila, 166 ethnic women, use of term, 438 ethnicity, 10 eugenics, 193; Western, 116, 119 excess, 291 exclusion, of women, 6, 134, 434 execution of Chinese woman, 339 extractive development, 290, 435 Faletto, Enzo, 297 Families of the Disappeared (Argentina), 42 family, 298; as foundation of nation, 77; as miniature welfare state, 84; definition of, 79 (changed in Ecuadorian constitution, 82); diverse models of, 69, 70, 71, 83, 86, 87; European-imposed structure of, 144; heteronormative, 76; legal definition of, 87; link to economic development, 73; men’s responsibility for, 402; neoliberal, 84; normativity of, 72; nuclear heterosexual, 73, 79 (protection of, 78); promotion of, 48–9; solidification of norms, 76; struggles around, 71 family planning, 93, 120; associated with immorality, 110; barriers to, 110; in

index | 485 India, 94–8; promotion of, 102; seen as un-African, 121; seen as Western construct, 120 family-in-law, sacrifice of woman’s possessions to, 375 Fanon, Frantz, 344, 371 Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), 32, 33, 34 Fardin, Iranian actor, 348 female genital mutilation (FGM), 11–12, 118, 121–2, 135, 144–5, 279; banning of, 12 Femen group, 287 feminine, concept of, 367, 378 feminism, 50, 75, 86, 95, 132, 133, 148, 157, 239, 278–9, 280, 286–7, 293, 373, 433; a foundation of love, 300; and science fiction, 194, 196; contribution to knowledge production, 290; criminalized in Indonesia, 49; cultural, 279; in context of globalization, 290; in environmental issues, 241–2, 273–4; in relation to entertainment industry, 207; in Taiwan, 341; Marxist, 6; relation to inclusiveness, 302; science studies, 238–9; Western, 120, 122; white, 293 feminisms, plural, xxiii feminist discourse, appropriated to postneoliberalism, 84 feminist futures, 173, 210, 407; visibility of, 205 feminist scholarship, 7; modernization impulse in, 21 feminist studies, 7; critical, 20–2; Third World, 19 feminized forms of labour, 387 fences, building of, 275 fertility analysis, 58 fertility rates, 104, 105 fertilizers, organic, use of, 311 fictional narratives, working with, 19, 40 Filipina women, migration of, 4 film industry: in Bombay, 389–90; in India, a male industry, 400 Film-e Farsi, 347 Film-haye Fardini, 348 Film-haye Jangi, 350

Flint, Michigan, water supply campaign in, 434 foetal life anti-abortion discourse, 114–16, 118, 123, 124, 127, 129 foetus: ‘right to life’ of, 123; viewed as citizen, 123 food: provision of, 34, 35 food sovereignty, 177 Foran, John, 13–15, 29, 434–6; Taking Power ..., 426 forests: clearing of, 46; survival in, 423; women’s defence of, 11 Foro Permanente de la Mujer Ecuatoriana, 78 fossil fuel economy, 258, 259, 435 fossil fuels, reducing use of, 427 Foucault, Michel, 104, 285, 366 Fox Keller, Evelyn, 257 France, state of emergency in, 430, 435 Fraser, Nancy, 267–8, 375–6 free love, 298 Freire, Paulo, 158, 159 Frente Democrático de Mujeres (Ecuador), 78 Freud, Sigmund, 316 Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, 253 friendship, splendours of, 377 futures, 278; building for, 436–7; complexity of, 200; nonlinear, imagining of, 19; possibility of, 430 see also feminist futures futures studies, 193, 215 Galbraith, J. K., The End of Normal, 201 Galeano, Eduardo, 306 Gandhi, Indira, 94 Gandhi, Mahatma, 222, 299, 302; assassination of, 223 Garcia, John Oscar, 29 gardening, use of pesticides in, 251, 253, 254 Gauri from Firozabad, 391–2, 400 gay, concept of, 73 gay hosts, in Philippines, 163–72 gay sexuality, 163–72 gay tourism see Philippines, gay tourism in

486 | f e m i n i s t f u t u r e s geirat (honour), 347 gender, 10, 20, 21, 83, 140–3; as performative, 381; coloniality of, 292–3; concept of, 6; imagination of, 193; in decoloniality, 292; in development, 4; in India, 385–403; in Vaastushastra, 235–6; invisibility of, 194; related to culture, 411; use of term, 366 see also sexuality, gendered gender and development (GAD), 5–8, 14, 16, 175, 372 gender equity, 49, 85–6, 98, 101, 183, 186, 278, 409 gender flexibility, 147 gender inversion, 137 gender oppression, fight against, 178 gender roles, normative, refusal of, 358 gender segregation, in Iran, 356–7, 361 gender-sensitive programmes, 106 gendered body, 19 gendered values, power of, 17 genetic engineering, 21, 193, 262, 265, 270, 276; issues arising from, 269, 272; opposition to, 271, 272 geographies of responsibility, 284 Germany, 355 Gezi Park, Istanbul, xxii Gibson, Katherine, 288 Gibson-Graham, J. K., 292 girls: abuse of, 149; adolescent, agency of, 182–9; culturing of, 143, 148–9; education of, in domestic services, 142, 224; initiation of, 135; place of, in society, 134–5 ‘global’, use of term, 4 Global Business Network, 200 Global South, use of term, 55 global warming, 259 globalization, 2, 3, 151, 173–81, 203, 290, 303, 388; and matriarchitarianism, 132–6; as planetary integration, 274; as processes of domination, 290; deWesternization of, 290; domination in, 264; political, xxi; resistance to, 24 globalized world, polarized versions of, 264

glocalities, 288–9; creation of, 285 Goldman, Emma, 434 Goldmann, Lucien, 372 Goor, Abu Gassim, 289 gossip, 140 Graham, Julie, 288 Grameen Bank, 12, 46–7 Green Revolution, 221, 269 greenhouse, building of, 308–9 greenhouse gas emissions, 203 Grocery Star Wars, 215 Group of Communities in Kurdistan (KCK), 179 guerrilla fighters: background support for, 34; women as, 32–3, 299 Guevara, Ernesto ‘Che’, 297 Guzmán, Patricio, Chile: Obstinate Memory, 297, 300–1; The Battle of Chile, 301 Hall, Stuart, 14, 369, 374, 379, 382 Hamilton, New Zealand, activism in, 438 happiness, 38–9 Haraway, Donna, 238, 257, 261, 271, 280, 281, 285 Harding, Sandra, 238, 257 Hard Rock Café (Bombay), 388 Harvey, David, 284, 326 Hatamikia, Ibrahim, From Karkheh to Rhein, 352, 359 hate crime language, 82 Hauwa, child bride, murder of, 149 health care, 34, 35, 53–4, 185, 310, 312, 315; gender bias in, 101; reproductive, 111, 113; women’s access to, 68 health workers, induction of, 97 HeForShe campaign, 208 hegemony, concept of, 158 Herrera, Gioconda, 87 heteronormativity, 71–6; central to postneoliberalism, 74; definition of, 71 heterosexuality, 128, 129, 377, 378, 381; African traditional, 127; hypervisibility of, 72–3; institutionalization of, 19 hierarchies, cultural, 261–77 HIJOS organization (Argentina), 42, 43 Hinduism, xxi, 228

index | 487 Hindus, 217, 221–2 Hindutva, 218–19, 229 HIV/AIDS, 1, 79, 96, 126, 143; theatre related to, 398 Hollywood films, 194 homes, construction of, with Vaastu principles, 234–8 homoprotectionism, 80 homosexuality, 68, 122, 378; criminalization of, 80; decriminalized in Ecuador, 76–7; laws regarding, 72, 76 honour killings, prosecution of, 283 hope, importance of, 431 hospitals, public, use of, 101 housewife role of women, 356 housework, men’s role in, 298 Hozat, Bese, 179 Huang Chunming, ‘Shayonala zaijian’, 336–7 Human Life International, 112 human-nature boundaries, 21; negotiation of, 261–77 human rights, 306 humanism, arrogance of, 273 humility, in relation to science, 254–8 Hussein, Saddam, 351, 352 hybridity, 141 Icaza, Rosalba, 292 Idemili, goddess, 134, 135, 147 Igbo people, 134, 144; dual-sex political system, 135; gender flexibility among, 145–6, 147 Igbo women, strategies of, 21 illiteracy see literacy imagination, 435 immunization of children, 99, 101 inclusion, 302–3 income-generating activities, 186 Independence Day, 195 India, 22; Family Welfare programme, 94 (revision of, 95); gender equity in, poor record of, 105–6; imagining of, 238–40; independence of, 218; Joint Review Mission reports, 98, 106; National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), 97, 100; new economy of,

385–403; partition of, 437; Planning Commission, dismantling of, 228; quest for modernity in, 217–40; Technology Day, 227; women’s reproductive identity in, 92–108; Child Survival and Safe Motherhood programme (CSSM), 96 Indian Idol, 393, 395 Indian Intelligence Bureau, 229 indigenous peoples, xxii; in Australia, 412 see also knowledge, indigenous; and religion, indigenous indigenous social movements, criminalization of, 86 indigenous women, in Mexico, 304 Indonesia, 408; New Order regime, 46–7, 49 (birth control under, 50); women’s struggles in, 176–7 infant mortality, 100, 104, 105; reduction of, 98–9 infanticide, 121, 122 infertility, female, stigmatization of, 146 informal sector, 388; women working in, 10–11 information and communication technologies (ICT), 17, 23, 279, 352; as tool for women’s empowerment, 18, 282–3; contradictory nature of, 286; role of, in Iranian revolution, 346 initiation of girls, 150; rites, ordeal of, 150 insect control, approaches to, 245 insecticides see pesticides integrated pest management (IPM), 256 integrity of life forms, 270 Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), 272 inter-culturality, 281 interconnection, use of term, 13 interconnectivity, implications for feminism, 282 interdisciplinary dialogue, 371 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), 95; Programme of Action, 95 International Group for Grassroots Initiatives (IGGRI), 289 International Institute of Climate Change and Theory, 428

488 | f e m i n i s t f u t u r e s International Monetary Fund (IMF), 6, 419 Internet, 56; as tool for environmentalists, 283–6; potential of, 282 intersectionality, 164, 182, 220, 437; in WCD, 278–93; use of term, 13 interstitial liberty, 43 invisibility of women, 5 Iran: diasporic community, 346–7, 353, 354; flight of women from, 356, 358, 359, 361; immigrants and refugees in, 356; revolution in, 13, 344–65 (women’s role in, 298–9) Iran-Iraq War, 349, 350–5; depiction of, 351 Iria ceremony, 138, 139, 143 Islam, xxi, 345, 344–62; concepts of equality and justice, 346; futures of, 211; marriage laws, 356; opposition to, 223 Islamic transnationalism, 349 Israel, occupation of West Bank, 1 item girls, 391 Jagdish from Uttar Pradesh, 396–7 Jameson, Fredric, 370–1, 379 Janani Suraksha Yojana (India), 97, 100 janbaz (disabled soldiers), 352–3, 354 Japan: birth rates in, 105; breaks diplomatic relations with Taiwan, 327 javanmardi (altruism), 347 Jews, Sephardic, 196–7 Jhumur, an entertainment worker, 394 Johnstone, Chris, 431 Joshi, Murli Manohar, 227 Jyoti, an actress, 400 Kaif, Katrina, 394 Karanja, Peter, 117, 123–4 Kasahun, Senait, 29 Kennedy, M., 204 Kenya: abortion in, 109–31; constitution of 2010, 110–12 Kenya Episcopal Conference, 113 Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR), 110 Kenyatta, Uhuru, 112

Khomeini, Ruhollah, 349 Khote, Durga, 394 Kikuyu people, twin-killing among, 121 killing, habit of, 249 King, Martin Luther, 299 Klein, Naomi, 426, 427 Klimaforum, 427 Knight, Chris, 135, 144 knowledge: based on embodied experience, 293; ecological, 421–5; globalization of, 204; in movements, 278; indigenous, 16, 18, 229, 239 (undermining of, 269); networks of, 287; of women (archaeology of, 136; as site of resistance, 133); production of, feminism’s contribution to, 290; shared by all of humanity, 273 see also traditional ecological knowledge Kollontai, Alexandra, 298 Kothari, Rajni, 217, 218 Kristof, Nicholas, 385 Kumar, Manoj, 231–2 Kurdish resistance, women as symbol of, 179 Kurdish Women’s Movement (KJB), 179 Kurdistan, women fighters in, 176 Kurian, Priya A., 15–18, 437–8, 437 Lagarde, Chritine, xx land: issues of, important for women, 175; registration of, 57, 59–60 (involvement of women in, 61) land grabs, 47, 59 land occupations, 176, 177 land reform, 176, 197 land rights, issue for rural women, 10 land tenure, customary, 59, 60 Landa, Manuel de, 288 landlessness, 175 landowners, identification of, 60 languages, 377, 382; English, use of, 282, 402; indigenous, erosion of, 133–4, 133; made of silence, 41; of elites, 368; reappropriation of, 40 languaging, 380–3 Law, John, 281 lawns, pesticide use on, 253–4 Leissle, Kristy, 416

index | 489 Leone, Sunny, 394 lesbian, concept of, 73 lesbians, 145; rights of, 180 LGBTTI people, 69, 70, 74, 77, 80, 81, 87; harassment of, 82 Lia, niece of author, 54, 57 liberation, use of term, 162 Lim, Alfredo, 166 linear thinking, shunning of, 436 Lins Ribeiro, Gustavo, 283 literacy, 11, 36, 37, 105, 226; campaigns on, 317 literary criticism, 371 literary texts, reading of, 20 literature, 380–3; and WCD, 371–2; concept of, 382–3; role of, 367 lived experience, 183, 293; of workers, 163–72 living room factories, 335 Lloyd, K., 412 local: importance of, 55, 133; seen as ugly, 142 localization, strategies of, 288–9 logging, 57, 58, 59–60, 64; in Papua New Guinea, 23 Lorde, Audre, 434 loss of human life, 55–6 love, xxvi, 39, 297–305, 429, 431, 433, 435; power and magic of, 303–5 Love, Women and Flowers, 297 Lugones, Maria, 280 Maathai, Wangari, 8 Macintyre, Martha, 408–9, 411 Macy, Joanna, 431 Madres Demandientes, 300 Maduro, Nicolás, 86 Maharashtra, India, fieldwork in, 183–8 Mahila Morcha, 224 mainstreaming of women, 5 Makabyan Kilusan ng Bagong Kababaihan (MAKIBAKA) (Philippines), 179–80 Malate, gay district of Manila, 166–7; gentrification of, 171 Malbran, Ernesto, 300 maldevelopment, 175 Malicounda Commitment, 12

Mammy Water, 130–53; dichotomy of, 147; negative view of, 140–1; origin of, 141 Mangalyaan, Mars orbiter, 219 manhood, patterns of, 175 Manila, production of gay urban spaces in, 165 Manisha, an actress, 400 Maoism, 345 Marcos, Subcomandante, 302 marginality, concept of, 55 marginalization: model of, reproduced by women, 38; of the Other, 276 Maria’s Story, 297 markets, different functioning of, 289 marriage, 140, 393, 395; arranged, 184; avoidance of, 105; delaying of, 184, 187; early, 105, 149; heteronormative, 83; in Islam, 356; oppressive, 178; rejection of, 378; same-sex, 79, 87, 148 (opposition to, 68; right to, 82) see also polygamy martyrs, remembrance of, 351 Marxism, 9; existential, 13 masculinity, 249, 253; definition of, 175; future of, 355; in négritude writing, 379; in control of nature, 242, 257; in development studies, 262–3; in film, 194–5; in India, 220, 223, 225–7, 238; in Iran, 347, 348, 353 (shattered by war, 352, 354); marginalized, 348; of formal politics, 419, 436; of nationalist movements, 368, 369, 372; paradigms of, in development studies, 261–77 Massey, Doreen, 284 materialist discourse of economic development, 75 maternal mortality, 56, 104, 105, 109; reduction of, 98–9 ‘matriarchal umbrella’, 134, 147–50 matriarchitarianism, 21, 132–6 matriarchy: African, 132–53; living culture, 149; system of, 134–9 matricentric production unit, 134 Matrix, The, 195–6, 215 May 1968, 303, 305 Mazu, Sacred Mother, 332

490 | f e m i n i s t f u t u r e s McCorduck P, with N. Ramsey, The Futures of Women, 200 McDonald, Ian: Desolation Road, 211; River of Gods, 211; The Dervish House, 211 McKibben, Bill, 427 meat and dairy-based agriculture, 427 meat farming, industrial, 215 Medical Association of Kenya, 116 medical school, women attending, 357 Medvetz, T., 204 memory, scattering of, 353 men: and emotional work of the family, 298; aspiring to Bollywood, 396; attitudes to abortion, 127–8; failing, 385, 386, 398; relations with women, 7; responsibilities of, 399; roles of, in African tradition, 128 Mencken, H. L., 299 Mendes, Chico, 11 menstruation, 54, 56; as cause of death, 66; synchrony of, 144 Meratus Dyak people, 54–5 Merchant, Carolyn, 242, 257, 258 Meru people, 121 meshworks, 286, 288, 289, 291 Meyer, Stephenie, Twilight, 208 micro-finance, 11, 385 middle class: in India, 385–403 Middle India, use of term, 385–6 Mignolo, Walter, 382 migrants, rights of, 70 militarism, 223, 349 militarization, 249; in India, 221, 269 military, standing up against, 319 military spending, of India, 226 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), 97, 174, 183, 292, 409, 410 Miller, A., 318 mills, in India, 386–7; converted to shopping malls, 388 mindsets, changing of, 187 misrecognition, 375–6 missionaries, 142, 147 Mitchell, Juliet, 9 mobile phones, 54, 56 mobility, of women, 395 mockingjay, symbol of, 209

modernist project, of controlling nature, 257 modernity, 48, 134, 137, 141, 144, 149, 265, 330, 334, 349; archaic, 22, 219, 226, 227, 237, 239; critique of, 328; quest for, in India, 217–40; relation to colonialism, 344 modernization, 121, 133, 217, 220; reflexive, 265 Modi, Narendra, 217, 228, 236–7 Mohanty, Chandra T., 290 Mohebian, Habib, ‘Allah-o Akbar’, 344–5 Molina, Arturo, 31 Monsanto, crop experiment in India, 272 moon and tides, symbolic value of, 135, 138 Morad Barghi TV series, 348 Morales, Evo, 428 morality, of Africa, 116 Moreno, Rafael, 34 mostakbar (ancien régime), 344–65 mostaz’af (disempowered), 21–2, 344–65; bending of, 350–1 Mostaz’afan Foundation, 349 motherhood, 125, 128, 129, 353; glorification of, 224; timing of, 124 Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, 40–2 mothers: as foundation of Bolivarian revolution, 73; programme focus on, 107; representation of, 330–1, 332; rural, 325–43; women valorized as, 329, 356 Mountains: A View from the Top, 201 movement of movements, xxii Movimiento de Mujeres de Guayaquil (Ecuador), 78 Movimiento de Mujeres de Pichincha (Ecuador), 78 Mujeres Luchando por la Vita (Ecuador), 78 Mujeres por la Democracia (Ecuador), 78 Munshi, Debashish, 436–7 Munshi-Kurian, Akansha, xxv, 206–11 Muslims: in Indonesia, 50; men perceived as lascivious, 224 nacimbusa (ritual matriarch), 137 namahram (non-family member), 357

index | 491 name-calling, 140 naming of victims, 41–2, 43 Nandy, A., 220–1, 229 Napier, Wilfred, 119 Narmada Bachao Andolan movement, 267 Narmada dam, 227–8; campaign against, 15, 17 (role of women in, 227–8) Nasheed, Mohamed, 427–8 nation, portrayed as woman, 329 National AIDS and STI Control Programme (NASCOP) Kenya, 112 National Commission for Gender Equality (Ecuador), 85 National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK), 115–16, 117, 123, 125 National Woman’s Bank (proposed) (Ecuador), 85 National Women’s Council (CONAMU) (Ecuador), 85 nationalism, 373; critique of, 334; feminist analysis of, 329; Islamic, 349, 354; masculinity in, 368, 369, 372; mobilization of, 334; religious, in India, 218, 219, 221, 223, 226, 229–30, 239 see also development nationalism native culture, marginalization of, 148 nativist literature, in Taiwan, 325–43 nature: beauties of, 256; concept of, 261; control of, 243, 250–1, 256, 257, 258; exploited as market resource, 275; intrinsic, notion of, 271; mastery over, 265, 275; othering of, 263; perceived split with humanity, 260; privatization of, 269; recognizing the significance of, 276; sameness with, 263; separation from humanity, 275; war against, 250 naturecultures, 280, 281, 286 Navarrete, Maria Ofelia, story of, 29–39, 297 Naxalite movement, 183–4 neem tree, cutting of, 236 négritude, 379 Nengo, from Papua New Guinea, 421–5 neocolonialism, 132–3, 275, 416, 436; in Taiwan, 327; problematic for women,

334–7; women in representation of, 334–7 neoconservatism, 48 neoliberalism, 68, 71–6, 74, 80, 107, 151, 173–81, 390, 410; politics of, 76–80 Nepal, 178–9 netizens, women as, 23 new, trivial pursuit of, 250–1 Nguyen, Mimi, 351 Nicaragua, feminist movement in, 299 Nie from Wanigela, 65 Nigeria: culturing of girls in, 136–40; operations of oil companies in, 176 Njue, Cardinal, 113, 114 nmadu (person/human), 135 Nnobi people, 134 non-governmental organizations (NGO), 307–8, 308–9; funding of, 49; resistance to, 35 North East Arnhem Land, 412 Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), 412–13 novel, letter form of, 372, 380 nubility rites, 136 nuclear radiation, parallels with use of pesticide, 248 nuclear war, 249 nuclear weapons, 228; arms race, 247–8; in India, spending on, 226 see also atom bomb of India Nussbaum, Martha, 159 Nwapa, Flora, 143–4; One is Enough, 145, 148; The Lake Goddess, 144–7 Occidental Petroleum, campaign against, 283 Occupy movement, xxii Oceania, concept of, grandness of, 66 oceans, 203–5 Oedipal complex, 147 Ogoni people, women of, 176 Okazawa-Rey, Margo, 416 Old Antonio, dreams of, 302 older women, respect for, 137 ontological struggles, 291 ontological turn, 281, 293 Onwurah, Ngozi, Monday’s Girls, 137–9 open source operations, 204

492 | f e m i n i s t f u t u r e s Operation Flood (India), 221 Oreskes, N, with E. M. Conway, Merchants of Death, 214 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 408 orientalism, 223 otherization, process of, 264 out-of-the-way places, 183; tragedies in, 53–67 Pacari, Nina, 79 Pahlavi Foundation, 349 Palais Royale (Bombay), 388 Papua New Guinea, xxv, 53–67, 408; aid programmes in, 411; biodiversity research in, 421–4 paranoia, viral, 195 parloristas, 168 participation, use of term, 158 partnerships, in aid relations, 408–9; rhetoric of, in aid, 413 patenting of life forms, 265, 269, 271 patriarchy, 21, 47, 105, 126, 129, 134, 135–6, 142, 144, 160, 183, 185, 207, 292, 329, 330, 331–3, 356, 357–8, 361, 362, 370, 377, 379, 417, 419; abrogation of, 334; heteronormativity of, 128; modernization of, 356 peace-building, 410, 411 Pearson, R., with C. Jackson, Feminist Visions of Development, 196 Pecha Kucha, 429 pembangunan (development), 46 Peña, Lorena, 302–3 Peru, women’s struggles in, 176 pesticides: aerial spraying of, 249–50; alternative approach to, 255, 256; civilian marketing of, 251; excessive use of, 269; organic, 311; public ignorance concerning, 254; trivial uses for, 253; use of, 243–4 see also DDT Pfeil, F., 220 Phadke, S., with S. Khan and S. Ranade, Why Loiter, 395 phallocentrism of nationalist discourse, 336 Philippines: gay tourism in, 163–72; revolutionary women in, 179–80

‘Pink Tide’ governments, xxiv, xxv Pinochet, Augusto, 301 PK, a gay host, 165, 167–72 Plachimada, India, water campaign in, 434 Plan Nacional del Buen Vivir (Ecuador), 69 Plumwood, Val, 257, 264, 266, 268, 276 pluralisms, new, 291 police, negotiation regarding rape case, 186 political cultures of resistance, 13 political organizing, 279 political struggles, specifying of, 67 politics: of place, 278, 279, 284; with big P, 287 polygamy, 118, 377, 378, 379 Pooja, an actress, 400 poor, agency of, 211 Popular Revolutionary Bloc (BPR) (El Salvador), 31 Popular Unity (UP) (Chile), 300 population control, 119 population geography, 58 population growth, encouragement of, 120 possession, by spirits, 144, 145 possession sickness, 141 post-humanism, 281 post-natal care, 96 post-neoliberalism, 83–8 postcolonial, use of term, 367 postcolonial studies, 366 postcoloniality, 366–84 postmodernity, production in, 327 poverty, 30, 39, 46, 124, 416, 417, 418; feminization of, 2; structural power imbalances in, 418 power: ambiguity of, 140–3; and empowerment, 158–60; concept of, 424; forms of, 284–5; overthrow of, 285 power over, 159, 161, 162, 251 power to, 159, 161, 162 ‘power to the imagination’, 305 power with, 159 power within, 159 Prabhu, Anjali, 17

index | 493 Pradeep from Bihar, 397, 398 precarity, 402; concept of, 401; gendered, 390; inhabiting of, 399–400; of middle class in India, 385–403 precautionary principle, 242, 254–8 preferential attachment, 390 pregnancies, 359; management of, 97; unwanted, 117, 126–7 (increase in, 116; men’s contribution to, 127) preguntando caminamos, 431 prerika volunteer, 184, 185 Presbyterian Church of East Africa, 112 priestesses, 146–7 private, feminist interest in, 47–50 privatization: problem of, 19, 45–50; suffused with political culture, 48 Priya from Bihar, 394 pro-natalist policies, 104–5 process, in development theory and practice, 306–13 productionism, 244 productive activity, definition of, 9 progress: concept of, 260; questioning of, 258 Programa de Bonos de Desarrollo Humano (Ecuador), 85–6 projects, in development, 307–13 prostitutes, 165; Third World, victimization of, 163 prostitution, 197, 335, 336–7, 347; laws regarding, 72 protection: of vulnerable groups, 87; of women, 347, 348 puberty rites, 138 public / private split, 9 Pussy Riot, xxii Pythagoras, 234 queer perspectives, 19 Radhakrishnan, K., 219 radiation, development and use of, 248 rage, feelings of, 318 Rama Rao, N. T., 236 Ramjanmabhumi movement, 224 rape, 66, 178, 279, 395, 402; at Shakti Mill, India, 386–7; in Kenya, 129;

negotiations with police, 186–7; of Indonesian Chinese women, 49; of schoolgirls, 126 see also abortion, in case of rape, and child rape Rashmi, an Adivasi woman, 184 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 218, 222 re-inscription, 165 recognition, 267–8, 375, 376 ‘Red Corridor’, 183 Reddy, B. N., 236 Reddy, M. Channa, 236 redistribution, 70, 80–3, 86, 267 reflexivity, 266, 276 refugees, from war zones, 351 refusing to forget, 41 Reich, Robert, 431 relays within larger spaces, 285 religion, xxi, 10, 357–8; in anti-abortion discourses, 114–16; in India, 218, 239; indigenous, 136 religious right, 82 representation, 320, 326, 341, 346; cultural politics of, 19 reprocentrism, 73, 75 reproduction, 9, 23; among indigenous peoples, 72; central to development, 83–4; of practices, 381; relation to production, 12; social, 69, 70; women’s lack of decision-making power in, 105; women’s role in, 83 (in India, 92–108) Reproductive and Child Health (RCH) policy (India), 92; formalization of policy, 96; India’s paradigm shift in, 94–8, 100; RCH II launched, 97; scholarship regarding, 98–103 reproductive health, 92, 103, 106, 107; as tool for nationalist goals, 108; concept of, 98; seen as Western construct, 120–1 Reproductive Health and Rights Bill (2008) (Kenya), 113, 114 Republican National Alliance (ARENA) (El Salvador), 31 rescue narrative for Third World women, 12 resettlement programmes, 46

494 | f e m i n i s t f u t u r e s resistance, 20, 171, 278, 344, 381, 417, 435; limitations of, 165; of rural women, 176–81; of women, to violence, 279; strategies of women, 145–6; successful, memories of, 319 resource politics, culture of, 59–63 Retzinger, S., 318 reversals don’t work, 285 revolution, 39, 297–305; associated with development, 297–8; concept of, 21; Iranian, 344–5; making of, 13; role of culture in, 297 revolutionaries: need for analysis, 36; women as see women, as revolutionaries rhizome, use of term, 160–2 rice, genetically engineered, 272 Richards, Audrey, 121–2; Chisungu, 136–7 right order, 262 ‘right to life’, 123 rights: claiming of, 103; of indigenous peoples, 86; of pregnant women, 123; of women, 65, 68, 78, 97–8, 107, 123 (as universal goal, 419; liberal push for, 173–5; reproductive, 69); sexual and gender-related, 81; to abortion, 82; to livelihood, 280; to nature, 81, 86; to political participation, 159; to protest, 81; to water, 81; translated into capabilities, 159 see also human rights, land rights, and right to life risk management, 436 Rithambara, Sadhvi, 224 rivers, as deities, 144 Rocheleau, Dianne, 285 Romero, Oscar Arnulfo, 31 Rose, Nikolas, 393 royalties from land development, 62–5 rubber-tappers, women as, 11 Rudd, Robert, 244 rural areas, building political power in, 173–81 Russell, Mary Doria: Children of God, 196, 198; The Sparrow, 196–9 Russia, economic problems of, 289 Ruto, William, 112–13 Ryan, Catherine M., 29

Sachs, J., 214–15; Winning the Story Wars, 205–6 Sáenz, Manuela, 84 salesgirls, working conditions of, 340 Salime, Zakia, ‘New Feminisms as Personal Revolutions’, 286 same-sex households, 82 same-sex parent adoptions, 79 sanctity of human life discourse, 115 Sandoval, Chela, 281 sanitation, availability of, 185 Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP), 15, 17 Sardar, Ziauddin, 193 Sarkar, Tanika, 225 Savitri, 225 scale, matters of, 65–6 Schechner, Richard, 42 Scheff, T., 318 Schuld, Leslie, 29 science, 255–8, 288; alignment with indigenous knowledges, 273; as economic driving force, 239; assumed to be incompatible with women, 257; citizen science, 256; distrust of, 272; dominant forms of, 268; Hindu, 237; in India, 225–7 (promotion of, 220–1); in relation to development, 21; masculinized structures of, 257; technology, and development, 229–30; Western, 220, 228, 230, 234, 239 science fiction, 193–216; authored by women, 194, 196; mainstream, 194 science-industry complex, use of term, 247 Scientific Revolution, 258 scientists: in relation to chemicals industry, 245–7; women as, 256–7 secularism, 239; activism in, 238 Seidman, Steven, 72 self-defence, logic of, 33 Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), 10–11 self-fulfilment, of women revolutionaries, 315 self-sacrifice, feminine, 336 Sem, Kaita, 58 Sen, Amartya, 159, 302

index | 495 Sen, Gita, with Caren Grown, Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions, 14 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 371, 373–4 sense of self, of women revolutionaries, 315 seriality, concept of, 67 Serikat Perempuan Indonesia (SERUNI), 176 sex outside of marriage, 123–4 sex segregation see gender segregation sex trade, in Taiwan, 335–6, 341 sexual abuse, 105 sexual commodification, critique of, 337–41 sexual exploitation of women, 401 sexual freedom, quest for, 145 sexual problems, dealing with, 141 sexuality, 10, 19, 20, 140–3; and capitalism, 143–4; female 128 (disciplining of, 329; defined by men, 126, 129; fears of, 140, 330; silencing of, 127); gendered, 163–72; governance of, 72; in Cuba, 298; women’s lack of control over, 126 sexually aggressive behaviour, 129 sexually transmited diseases, 96 Shailendra, an actress, 400 Shakti, 43, 223; myth of, 222 Shakti Mill, India, 386–7 Shakti Peeth, building of temple, 227 Shama Hamilton Ethnic Women’s Centre Trust, 438 shame, feelings of, 318; giving expression to, 318 Shayne, Julie, Taking Risks ..., 416 Shell company: environmental research by, 203; policy interventions of, 201 Shell scenarios, 200–5 Shia revolutionary ideas, 345 ships, breaking of, 211–12 Shirkat Gah organization, 283 Shiva, figure of, 222 Shiva, Vandana, 242, 257 Sia from Wanigela, 53–4, 57, 62–3, 64–5 Siddiqi, Nawaz, 402 silence, 42, 434; of women, imposed, 43 Simmons, W. P., 104

Singapore, birth rates in, 105 sisters, 148 Sita, 225 Sittirak, S., The Daughters of Development, 197–8 Skocpol, Theda, 13 social justice, 301–2; mobilizing for, 417 social media, 286, 346, 347 social movement, resistance to NGOization, 35–6 socialism, 37, 298 ‘sociology of culture’ approach, 14 solidarity, 39, 75, 132, 134, 136, 150, 279, 280, 292, 418; coming from love, 429 Solnit, David, 431 Solnit, Rebecca, 429–30, 431 Solomon Islands, 408; aid mission in, 411 ‘Southern ownership’ of aid projects, 413 Spivak, Gayatri, xxi, 275 spouse appointments, 49 Sri Lanka, women tea pickers in, 3 stability, creation of, 201 Standards and Guidelines for Reduction of Morbidity from Unsafe Abortion (Kenya), 111, 112 Star Wars, remake of, 214 state: definition of, 81; role of, 23 (in development programmes, 103) Stephenson, Wes, What We’re Fighting for ..., 431–2 sterilization camps, 92 sterilization of women, 94, 119 stic, a rapper, 297 storytelling wars, 193–216 Strawberry and Chocolate, 298 strikes, in India, 388 structural adjustment programmes, 1, 49, 128 subjectivity, complexity of, 133 submissiveness, female, 336 suburbia, toxicities of, 253–4 Sudbury, Julia, 416 suffering: addressing of, 315; narratives concerning, 314 sumak kawsay, xxiv, 74, 81 Supreme Council of Kenyan Muslims, 112 Suryati, a woman poet, 176–7

496 | f e m i n i s t f u t u r e s sustainable development, 16, 75, 285, 292, 421–5; use of term, 435 sustainable development goals (SDGs), 107 Swami Vivekananda, 222 Swyngedeow, Erik, 285 Tabio, Juan Carlos and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Lista de Espera, 312 taghuti (rich and powerful), 347–9 Taiwan: change in, 341; departure from United Nations, 327; nativist literature in, 20, 325–43; urban-rural hierarchy in, 328 Tali, Jackson Namunya, 111 Taliban, xxi tayota, 307, 312 technology, 36; transfer of, 269; transnational mobility of, 353 technolust, 17 technonature, 275 technoscience, 280; challenges of, 268–73 television, representation via, 347–8 terminator seeds, 265, 269 Terr, L., 317 terror, feelings of, 318 Thackeray, Balasaheb, 225, 226 theatre, employment in, 396–7 think tanks, 204–5 Third World, use of term, 55, 367 Third World studies, 8, 14 Third World victim status, 306 Third World women see women, in Third World Thirteenth Floor, The, 195 Thompson, E.P., 14 Tiamzon, Benito, 180 Tier II and III towns, in India, 385 tight/shale gas, 202 time, phallic nature of, 40 torture, 316, 319 Tostan: Against Female Genital Mutilation, 10, 12 total fertility rates (TFR), reduction of, 97, 99 tourism: as development strategy, 335; in relation to forestry, 23

tradition: concept of, 374–5; not dichotomous from modernity, 149; versus modernity, 134; women locked into, 413 see also woman, as site for playing out of tradition traditional cultures, resilience of, 137 traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), 421 trafficking of women, 401 transgender people, 69, 87; rights of, 180 transition towns, 435 transnational mediascape, 346 transparency, 204 trauma: coping with, 316; documentation of, 317 Tripp, Aili Mari, 419 Truth, Sojourner, 299 Tsing, Anna, 54 Tuana, Nancy, 238 Tubman, Harriet, 299 Tuvalu, schoolgirls burned to death, 56 twin killing, among Kikuyu, 121 two, attribute of the Mother, 40 Uganda, abortion in, 127–8 Uhammiri Ogbuide water goddess, 144 umunne children, 147 unemployment, 357, 358; of men, 387 UNICEF, 183, 185; concept of adjustment with a human face, 83 UNIFEM, merges into UN Women, xx Union of Peasant Workers (UTC) (El Savador), 31 United Nations (UN), 292, 306; as God’s police, 291; El Salvador agreement, 34–5 UN Climate Conferences, 426–7, 428, 429, 430–1, 435 UN Conference on Women 1975, 407 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, 427 UN Security Council, Resolution 1325, 410, 411 UN World Conference on Women 1995, 410 United Revolutionary People’s Councils (URPCs) (Nepal), 178

index | 497 United States of America (USA), 30–1; privatization in, 48; provides chemical weapons, 355 unmarried women, fear of, 140 ‘urban whores’, 325–43 urban/rural planning, 37 Urquhart, Brian, 291 Utan Plantations, 60–1 utopias, 23 U’wa indigenous group, 283 Vaastushastra, 22, 220; lack of scientific proofs regarding, 233–4; marketing of, 230–4; principle of equilibrium in, 231; principles of, used in homemodelling, 230–1; usefulness of, 232; websites concerning, 235 Vacarr, Danielle-Somine, 29 vadapav, eating of, 394–5 Vajpayee, Atal Bihari, 226, 236 Vance, Carina, 74 Vargas, Gina, 280 Vázquez, Rolando, 292 Vázquez, Vilma, 300, 303 Vedanta, 222 Vedas, 228, 230, 237 victimization, 163 videotapes, 352, 353 village, rural, as base of traditional culture, 328 violence: against girls, 134; against religious minorities, 223; against women, 36, 68, 139, 184, 279, 358, 395, 409, 410, 411, 438 (extrajudicial, 177; in Iraq, 175; resistance to, 283); between gay partners, 169; displaced onto Islam, 224; domestic, 359; of patriarchy, 135–6; sexual, 126, 187; struggle against, 301 Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), 222, 227 vitality, of women revolutionaries, 315, 316 vitamin A deficiency, 272 voice, of women, 50 (in decision-making, 157; usurpation of, 337) vulnerability, of women, 75, 76, 122 vulnerable groups, 87; definition of, 86

Wakirike people, 138, 140, 143, 149 Wali, Monica, 29 Walker, Alice, Anything We Love Can Be Saved, 299 Walsh, Catherine, 280 Walters, Leanne, 434 Wang Tuo, 328, 333; ‘Jinshuishen’, 331–2 Wang Zhenhe, 329–30 Wanigela, Papua New Guinea, 54, 56–67 war veterans, of Iran-Iraq War, 352–5 washing of body of deceased, 357 water: access to, 185; resources of, 307; struggles over, in Ecuador, 73–4; women’s role in collecting, 434 Watson, Emma, 208 ways of living, new, 435 Wellesley College symposium, xx Western power, object of desire, 150 Westernization, 330, 331, 349; of Taiwan, 328–9 white, colour, use of, 42; for masks, 43 white kerchiefts: of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, 41; use of, 42 white male Westerners, a global minority, 275 Whiteness, desire for, 144, 150 Widick, Richard, 428 widow inheitance, 118 Wikipedia, 215 Williams, Raymond, xxii, 4, 7, 14, 262, 282, 369, 372, 374, 381 witches, 140 woman: as category, xx, 367, 381, 434 women: African, in feminist agendas, 132; and representation of neocolonialism, 334–7; and sustainable development, 421–5; as agents of change, 38; as emblems of national culture, 23; as gendered Other, 164; as guerrilla fighters, 32–3; as reserve army of labour, 353, 361; as revolutionaries, 22, 173–81, 299, 315– 21; as site for playing out of tradition, 375; as subaltern counterpublics, 2; as subject of feminism, 292; as subject of neoliberalism, 385; as writers, 372; associated with nation,

498 | f e m i n i s t f u t u r e s women (cont.): 329; associated with nature, 257; association with culture, 122, 223; association with tradition, 122; at centre of climate project, 435; autonomy of, 103; childcare responsibilities of, 120; Chinese, traditional roles of, 336; devaluation of, 257; domestication of, 224, 225; drawn in as factory workers, 335; ‘ethnic’, 438; forced to take on male responsibilities, 423; immigrant, as reserve army of labour, 356; in entertainment industry, 394; in gaze of media, 173; in nativist literature, 326; in relation to culture and nation, 222–5; in Third World (at centre of inquiry, 4; challenges to, 2; poor, 8; relation with environmental issues, 265; seen as victims, 7; viewed through new lens, 3); in waged labour, 9, 128, 392 (in India, 388–9); independence of, 128; integrated into economy, 410; involvement in land disputes, 61; marginalization of, 225, 292; men’s control of, 257; mobility of, 355, 401; negative representations of, 140; organizations of, 149; overstepping the bounds, 63–4; participation in economy, 5; power of, 65–6 (in Hinduism, 223–4); preferred subjects of neoliberalism, 402; recast as ‘authentic’, 223; reproductive identity of, in India, 92–108; role of, 356 (changing, 128; Christian view of, 142; in family, 417; in Indian nationalism, 219–20, 225; in Iran, 353; in struggle against Narmada dam, 227–8); seen by female doctors, 357; sexual commodification of, 335; sexual independence of, 127–8; social construction of, 43; status of, in Papua New Guinea, 65; stereotypes of (as fragile, 9; as victims, 8, 314); strategic needs of, 102–3; strategies of, 165; struggles of, in rural areas, 175–8; tangled lives

of, 9; target for pesticide marketing, 251; Westernized, 333; writing of, 369; young and middle-class, in India, 390–9 see also agency, of women and netizens, women as women and development (WAD), 5–8, 14, 16, 263 women, culture and development (WCD), xxii, xxiii, xxvi, 5–8, 92, 103, 107, 109, 114, 122, 132, 133, 182–3, 198, 276, 297, 306, 320, 382; acts to undermine hypocrisy, 433; and activist scholarship, 415–20; feminist evaluation of, 103–7; future of, 433–8; gay sexuality in, 163–72; goals of, 18; in context of revolutionary struggles, 29; in Francophone persective, 366–84; in India, 218; intersectionality in, 278–93; introduction to, 1–25; related to subjective issues, 315–16; theorization of, 16; three visions of, 9–18 see also literature, and Women, Culture and Development well-being, 18, 314–21 women in development (WID), 5–8, 14, 16, 174, 273, 372 Women in Nigeria (WIN), 149 ‘women question’, 174 women only classes, 438 Women’s Group of Xapuri (Brazil), 10 women’s liberation, 128 women’s movement, 80 women’s studies, 415 women-headed households, 79 working class, 369 working conditions, of salesgirls, 340 World Bank, 5, 6, 36, 100, 119, 267, 302, 419, 435; commitment to women’s participation, 3; environmental policies of, 15; gender analysis of, 17 World Economic Forum, 105 World Social Forum, 84 World Trade Center, attack on, xxi, 1 World Trade Organization (WTO), 274 X-Files, The, 195 Xapuri Woman’s Group, 11

index | 499 yaghuti (de-powered classes), 347–9 Young, I., 57, 67 Zambia, culturing of girls in, 136–40 Zapatista movement, 431

Zaretsky, Eli, 9 Zeng Xinyi: ‘Caifeng de xinyuan’, 339; ‘Yige sijiusui ...’, 338–9 zero, 40 Zimbabwe, abortion in, 127–8