Under Development: Gender

Despite various decades of research and claim-making by feminist scholars and movements, gender remains an overlooked area in development studies. Yet, without gender it is impossible to understand development – and the development of under-development. This collection brings together specialists from different parts of the world and various disciplines, who look at various key issues in development studies through the prisms of gender and feminism. Gender, as an expression of power, is an indispensable analytical category for social change. It reveals invisible realities and socio-political struggles, giving voice to the subaltern. It contributes to renewing methods, deconstruct and build innovative categories and concepts, challenging dominant paradigms. Thinking about gender can raise new controversies and encourage discussions on policy changes. While the current global crisis and growing inequalities urge us to find alternatives to globalised capitalism, feminist theory offers a fresh way to think and achieve social change.

Christine Verschuur is Senior Lecturer at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Switzerland, and Head of the Gender and Development Programme. Her research interests include social reproduction, migration, rural development and urban social movements, and she is the editor of the collection Cahiers Genre et Développement.

Isabelle Guerin is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Research Development (CESSMA), France. She is interested in researching processes of exclusion, discrimination and exploitation and at alternative and solidarity-based economic practices. She has edited a number of books including India's Unfree Workforce: Old and New Practices of Labour Bondage (with Jan Breman and Aseem Prakash, 2009); Microfinance, Debt and Over-Indebtedness: Juggling With Money (with Solene Morvant-Roux and Magdalena Villareal, 2013).

Hélène Guétat-Bernard is Professor of rural sociology at the National School of Agronomic Formation (ENFA), France. She works on familial agriculture, agroecology, links between agriculture productive system and food system. She has edited several volumes including Genre et savoirs: pratiques et innovations rurales au Sud (with Magalie Saussey, 2014) and Feminin/masculin. Genre et agricultures familiales (2014).

Introduction: Gender, a Necessary Tool of Analysis for Social Change; Isabelle Guérin, Hélène Guétat-Bernard and Christine Verschuur

PART I: DISCIPLINES
1.A History of Development through a Gender Prism. Feminist and Decolonial Perspectives; Christine Verschuur
2.Feminist Anthropology Meets Development; Fenneke Reysoo
3.Gender and Demography. A Fertile Combination; Agnès Adjamagbo and Thérèse Locoh
4.The sociologist and the 'poor Third World woman', or how an approach focusing on gender relations has helped sociology of development; Blandine Destremau and Bruno Lautier
5.Feminist Development Economics – an Institutional Approach to Household Analysis; Irene van Staveren and Olasunbo Odebode
6.Feminist Legal Theory as an Intervention in Development Debates; Isabel Cristina Jaramillo
7.Feminist Interventions in International Relations; Elisabeth Prügl

PART II: SPECIFIC ISSUES
8.Labour, family and agriculture: gender and development issues, a North-South perspective; Hélène Guétat-Bernard
9.Revisiting the Migration/Development Nexus from a Gender Perspective. Articulating Production and Reproduction; Christine Catarino and Laura Oso
10. Ambivalent Engagements, Paradoxical Effects: Latin American Feminist and Women's Movements and/in/against Development; Sonia E. Alvarez
11. Neoliberal Capitalism: an Ally for Women? Materialist and Imbricationist Feminist Perspectives; Jules Falquet
12. Neoliberalism and the Global Economic Crisis: a View from Feminist Economics; Lourdes Beneria
13. The solidarity economy revisited in the light of gender: a tool for social change or reproducing the subordination of women?; Isabelle Guérin and Mariam Nobre

14. Conclusion. Body politics and the making and unmaking of gender and development; Wendy Harcourt