This collection brings together leading feminist thinkers who
examine the struggles for interpretive power which underlies
international development.
* Questions why the insights from years of feminist gender and
development research are so often turned into ‘gender
myths’ and ‘feminist fables’: women are more
likely to care for the environment; are better at working together;
are less corrupt; have a seemingly infinite capacity to
survive
* Explores how bowdlerized and impoverished representations of
gender relations have simultaneously come to be embedded in
development policy and practice
* Traces the ways in which language and images of development are
related to practice and provides a nuanced account of the politics
of knowledge production
* Argues that struggles for interpretive power are not only
important for our own sake, but also for the implications they have
for women’s lives worldwide
* An informed analysis of how ‘gender’ has been
transformed in its transfer into development policy and how many
authors are now revisiting and reflecting on their earlier
work
Table of Content
1. Gender Myths and Feminist Fables: The Struggle for Interpretive
Power in Gender and Development (Andrea Cornwall, Elizabeth
Harrison and Ann Whitehead).
2. A Bigger Piece of a Very Small Pie: Intrahousehold Resource
Allocation and Poverty Reduction in Africa (Bridget
O’Laughlin).
3. The Construction of the Myth of Survival (Mercedes
González de la Rocha).
4. Earth Mother Myths and Other Ecofeminist Fables: How a
Strategic Notion Rose and Fell (Melissa Leach).
5. Political Cleaners: Women as the New Anti-Corruption Force?
(Anne Marie Goetz).
6. Resolving Risk? Marriage and Creative Conjugality (Cecile
Jackson).
7. Feminism, Gender, and Women’s Peace Activism (Judy
El-Bushra).
8. Myths To Live By? Female Solidarity and Female Autonomy
Reconsidered (Andrea Cornwall).
About the author
Andrea Cornwall is a Fellow at the Institute of Development
Studies at the University of Sussex, where she works on the
politics of participation, sexualities and development,
masculinities and women’s empowerment. She is Director of the
DFID-funded Research Programme Consortium Pathways of Women’s
Empowerment.
Elizabeth Harrison is an anthropologist at the University of
Sussex. Her work has been broadly within the anthropology of
development, with a particular interest in institutional dynamics
and in the deployment of policies for gender justice. She has
conducted research primarily in sub-Saharan Africa and, more
recently, in Europe.
Ann Whitehead teaches anthropology and gender and development
at the University of Sussex. She has written extensively within the
fields of gender and development, feminist anthropology and the
anthropology of rural Ghana.
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