 Mae'r cyfleoedd yn bwrth i'r llunio. Mae'r cyfleoedd yn bwrth i'r llunio? Mae'r cyfleoedd yn bwrth i'r llunio. Mae'r cyfleoedd yn bwrth i'r llunio. Wrth gwrs, wrth gwrs yn fathio ar gael yma. Wrth gwrs, mae'n bwrth i'r llunio! Sssshhh! Ddodd, ddodd, ddodd, ychydig i gweithio'n bwysig. Fynd i gyd, dyfodd, yng nghymgrifennu Ysgrifennu. Ysgrifennu'n bwysig ymlaen yw'r ddwylliant. I'r llain yn ddiweddol i'r llai yn glir i'r llain. Ers yw y ddu di'n gwybod i'n ddweud? Nid yw? Dyma'r mic? Yna, dyna. Yn ymlaen i'r ffordd, yw yw I'r Professor Andrea Cornwall, sy'n gweithio â'r byd yn gweithio. Rwy'n gweithio'r semanaol. Mae'r Professor Cornwall efallai'r mewn ymddangos, mae'r ffordd yn ymddangosol a'r gymuned yn ymddangos ac yn ymddangos ar y cwmddangos. She's Professor of Anthropology and Development at the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, and her work as a social and political anthropologist has seen her write extensively on the anthropology of gender, masculinity, women's empowerment, women's rights and sexualities, as well as on democracy, citizen participation and participatory research. Her work is incredibly influential and her key publications are numerous. They include a recent work with Jenny Edwards, Feminism's Empowerment and Development, Changing Women's Lives, and collections such as Men and Development, Politicising Masculinities, Gender Myths and Feminist Fables, The Struggle for Interpretive Power in Gender and Development, Deconstructing Development Discourse, Buzzwords and Fuzzwords. Tonight she's going to speak to us on neoliberalism and women's empowerment in a talk entitled Beyond Empowerment Light, Women's Empowerment, Neoliberal Development and Global Justice. Adding further to the excitement we have another incredibly influential academic working in this field to discuss these issues. Professor Maxime Molyneux is Professor of Sociology at the Institute of the Americas, University College London. She's written extensively in the areas of political sociology, gender development, human rights and social policy. She was founder of the Feminist Review and her key works include The Women's Movement in International Perspective, Latin America and Beyond, The Hidden Histories of Gender, Gender and the State in Latin America. Together with Professor Cornwall, she's edited the book, The Politics of Rights, Dilemmas for Feminist Practices. It's a real privilege for us to have both of these thinkers with us this evening for what promises to be a really enlightening and important discussion. Once Professor Cornwall has finished with her address, Professor Molyneux will offer her reflections and reactions and then we'll open it up for what will hopefully be an excellent discussion with you all. We'd also like to warmly welcome Baroness Amos, director of SOAS who joins us here for this seminar. Before I hand over to Professor Cornwall, I want to say three quick things. If you want to tweet during the session, please use the hashtags SOAS Dev Studies and ESRC. Jai is going to be taking a few pictures during the event and floating around the room are some sign-up forms which you can use to enter your details to receive updates from the department. So, with no further ado, hand over to you. I'm really quite overwhelmed to see so many of you here and thank you so much for that lovely introduction. I'm also really honoured that Maxine is able to talk about some of these issues because she has considered them in much greater depth than me and has a lot of very important things to say. So, I'll try and keep my presentation. I'm very destructive by this, I'm afraid. Is it? Sorry. I keep my presentation. Yeah, to the length of time that I was supposed to speak for. I came to SOAS as a student in the late 1980s and I stayed here, I did my undergraduate degree here, I did my PhD degree here and whenever I come back I always feel as if I'm coming home, I love SOAS. So, it's really particularly lovely to be able to address you here. So, what I'm going to do is something that's very unusual for me. I don't usually read papers out. I usually talk, I sometimes have PowerPoints or prezzies but with this particular paper I'd like to read it out because there are lots of detailed examples in it and it would be hard for me to convey them so I'm going to read out quotations and long passages from some of the marketing materials of corporates and from some donor ages, seasoned banks. So, actually maybe it's better if I sit down. I'm not going to do that around. So, if you bear with me with my reading out. So, beyond empowerment light, women's empowerment, neoliberal development and global justice. Taken up by international developments banks, bilantro capitalists and a new breed of corporate investors and women. Women's empowerment has become not only a much-vaunted panacea to the persistence of poverty and inequality. It's also come to be valued as much for the part that women play as consumers in stoking the engine of economic growth as for their labour in low-paid precarious jobs created by globalising export-oriented industries and their role in permeating hitherto unreached markets. In this talk, I take the embrace of women as an instance through which to explore the characteristics of the current conjuncture in international development discourse and practice. I draw on participant observation in policy spaces and in academic and activist debates about women's empowerment on digital ethnographic research and on ethnographic field work in a variety of locales including in global policy arenas. Paying especially close attention to the neoliberal appellation of women as the subject of empowerment, I situate some of the contradictions of the current moment in the project of international development that began with colonialism and has come in the last few decades to be harnessed first to neoliberalism and subsequently to what Prodella and Marois termed the new developmentalism. Women's empowerment would, at face value, seem to be an odd vehicle for the development industry to use to pursue the project that began in the era of structural adjustment of the 1980s. Yet it's proven a remarkably successful strategy for enlistment, bringing into embrace actors who might otherwise have found their concerns far distant from each other. For the feminists who advanced the notion of empowerment in the 1970s and 80s, it would have been barely conceivable that a mere three decades later we would witness the leading figures of major transnational corporations and developments multilateral banks extolling the virtues of women, enabling women to enjoy greater economic autonomy and exercise their agency. Hall, Massey and Rustin posit that the concept of conjuncture can help to expand the capacity to act politically by helping to examine the conditions of political intervention in their complexity, that is to trade the displacements and condensations of different sorts of contradictions and thus open up possibilities for action. The disjuncture between feminist definitions of empowerment and their incorporation by the neoliberal development complex isn't itself an instantiation of the very contradictions with which conjunctural analysis is concerned. So in using it here my intention is to move from critique to reappropriation and to identify discursive and political strategies that can help further feminist engagement with transforming power relations for global justice. In doing so I seek to situate certain characteristics of the current conjuncture in order to think with the dilemma that corporate co-optation of women's empowerment poses for feminist engagement with development. So visions of empowerment, women's empowerment occupies a central signifying position in contemporary development discourse. At once an instantiation of the growing significance of the marketing of the development enterprise to reluctant publics in the global north and a continuation of a long run trajectory of imperialism in the guise of the rescue and protection of deserving innocence. The visions of women as agents of change have come to emblazen the promotional glossies of the development industry. Corporations and philanthropic capitalists have enthusiastically embraced the cause of championing women's economic empowerment, harnessing some of development's most agile gender myths. Uplift has become big business. In the process feminist activists have witnessed with some incredulity the transformation of a concept with radical origins in the 70s and 80s into the signature phrase of the movers and shakers of transnational finance. Understanding the rise of women's empowerment in the current conjuncture calls for closer attention to be paid both to the manifestations of the contemporary co-optation of feminist discourses of women's empowerment and to this process of discursive transformation. This in turn calls for an analysis of the shifting and divergent understandings of power as a constitutive part of the process of empowerment. The Indian feminist Sri Lattabadliwala reflects on a report she wrote in 1994 on her experience of a large-scale social mobilisation initiative in India, one that played a decisive part in influencing the feminist embrace of the concept of empowerment as a tool for social transformation, and that, and in her words, defined empowerment as a process that shifts social power in three critical ways. By challenging the ideologies that justify social inequality, such as gender or caste, by changing prevailing patterns of access to and control over economic, natural and intellectual resources, and by transforming the institutions and structures that reinforce and sustain existing power structures, the family, state, market, education, media, et cetera. The document emphasised that the transformative empowerment could not be achieved by tackling any one of those elements of social power, and at that early stage, its architects were clear that there was no one-shot magic bullet route to women's empowerment, such as providing women with access to credit-enhanced income or land titles, and that's from Batliwala 2007. Batliwala goes on to reflect on how completely this approach to power came to dissolve as development agencies took up empowerment as a short-range development objective. In its place, we saw the rise of an individualised notion of self-empowerment through the market. Cecilia Saddenberg draws on the work of Anne Ferguson to make a useful distinction between liberating and liberal approaches to empowerment, writing of liberal empowerment that the focus is on individual growth in an atomistic perspective, that is on the notion of the rational action of social actors based on individual interests. It's an approach that depoliticises the process of empowerment by taking power out of the equation. Instead, the focus is on technical and instrumental aspects that can supposedly be taught in special training courses, for example. Liberal empowerment seeks simply to accommodate women within the market without disrupting existing power and social inequalities. Liberal liberating empowerment, in contrast, places power relations at the heart of a process by which women attain autonomy and self-determination, as well as an instrument for the eradication of patriarchy, a means and an end in itself, and again, quote, to question, destabilise and eventually transform the gender order of patriarchal domination. That's from Saddenberg. Saddenberg continues, such an approach is consistent with a focus on women's organising on collective action, though not disregarding the importance of empowerment of women at a personal level. Revisiting critical feminist writings from the 90s, such as Butler, Kabir and Gita Sen, it becomes evident that in the process of its domestication by the main players in the development industry, empowerment has been eviscerated of controversial or challenging content. At the same time, as feminist concepts such as agency and choice have come to be put to the service of neoliberalism. Accompanying the marketisation of the social that came with a neoliberal retraction of state responsibilities for people living in poverty, the promotion of women's empowerment as a motor for change speaks to a shift in the overarching narrative of international development, to one in which agency trumps structure and in which a version of the American dream is internationalised. My focus here is the work to which discourses of women's empowerment are put by those seeking to legitimate the extension of corporate reach into emerging markets, whether through public policy, corporate social responsibility or corporate marketing. I explore history of the present from Foucault that reappraises antecedents to today's empowerment narratives, especially those emerging from the work of scholar activists and feminist and women's movements in the global south. I highlight the perverse confluence to borrow Evelina Dagnino's phrase of feminist framings and mainstream women's empowerment discourses. I explore the paradoxes evident in the family resemblances of what I call empowerment lights with feminist practices of empowerment. Tracing the pathways through which are focused on consciousness and collective action that animated earlier discourses of women's empowerment have come to be eclipsed, to make an argument for reclaiming the radical possibilities that the term empowerment offers a struggle for global, social and gender justice. In doing so, I identify elements of the current conjuncture that lend themselves to resignification and recuperation as part of the process of radical structural change to which the concept of empowerment was once so powerfully oriented. So to look first at empowerment as a buzzword, the term empowerment has got a long and at turns curious history while it's used by social movements echoes long cherished ideals of the struggle for equality and justice. It's been popularized in recent decades as synonymous with a version of self-improvement that speaks less to enlightenment ideals than to the individualism and consumerism of late modernity. If you put empowerment into Google, you're as likely to be greeted with a profusion of corporate consultants and Christian evangelists as with earnest talk about improving women's lives. Little books like successful empowerment in a week show alongside adverts that beckon consumers to empower themselves with the latest design of sunglasses. Small wonder that for some, empowerment is a term that's become so debased that it's time to consign it to the dustbin and move on. So Trilata Batliwala again speaks of the distortion of good ideas and innovative practices as they're lifted out of the political and historical context in which they evolved and rendered into formulas that are mainstreamed. This usually involves divesting the idea of its cultural specificity, its political content, and generalizing it into a series of rituals and steps that simulate its original elements, but lack the transformative power of the real thing. Three important points emerge from Batliwala's analysis. The first is the extent to which all ideas have their genesis and find their meaning in relation to a particular set of cultural and political reference. This focuses our attention on what happens when these ideas travel and are translated into utterly different social, political and cultural contexts, transmitted into other languages, other idioms, other domains of discourse. The second is a question of the political content of a concept, the ideological projects that they can serve to advance. As Jonathan Fox suggests, a common property of a number of today's development buzzwords is what he calls their trans-ideological character. Trans-ideological properties are not only useful, they're necessary to the process of enlistment that can build a sufficiently extensive discourse coalition to shift policy and practice. But, as Evelina Dagnino remarks, the capacity of concepts to transit different ideologies holds its own contradictions and dangers. What's happened to empowerment is a similar tale to that of other development buzzwords. Ernestola Clough describes how when words are placed together into what he calls chains of equivalents, their meaning becomes contingent on the other words in the chain. So placing empowerment into a chain of equivalents alongside economics, markets, credit and growth lends it some very different signifying properties placed alongside struggle, conflict, rights and power. The sheer discursive power of mainstream development institutions means these chains of equivalents that they construct and disseminate profoundly affect the ways in which these terms come to be read and what's done with them. And from there we find other discursive effects. Moskovici's concept of anchoring makes sense of some of this. The anchoring of policies in the familiar lends them a palatability that can be a key factor in their acceptability, he argues. At the same time as the incorporation of terms within established narratives makes them sound safe, however, it also neutralises them. Lastly, Butler speaks of the transformation of women's empowerment into a series of rituals that simulate the real thing but lack its transformative qualities. This is at the very crux of the ambivalence that some feminists have about the term. That what's spoken about as women's empowerment is such a departure from the real thing it's become a travesty. But there's another angle on this and it's one that I seek to explore in this talk. If empowerment has become a simulacrum in Baudrillar's sense what might it take to recuperate some of the elements it once had to reanimate it, breathe fire in life back into it as a political concept and contest its domestication in the service of neoliberalism? What would it take to lift it out of the current chain of equivalents in Leclas terms, one that aligns it with the language of neoliberal marketisation and the aspiration of producing a legion of individual entrepreneurs whose consumption can drive the expansion of corporate markets and profits? And reposition it in the language of global social and gender justice? So a first step in that is to look at the framing of the term empowerment and to look at its qualities in a bit more depth and then look at how it's been put to use as an integral part of neoliberal development policy. And then at the convergences in contrast with other understandings of empowerment including those used in development from a feminist perspective. And then I look at what might be needed to reclaim empowerment's promise as a term that addresses an agenda for structural change that can make the world a fairer place. So uses of the word empowerment in mainstream international development discourse have come to mirror the insularity of an industry that exists in order to intervene in the lives of others. These narratives have been mobilised in the marketing of a must-have piece of development merchandise tailored to the neoliberal development policy consumer, empowerment light. Paired of any confrontation with the embedded social and political relations that produce societal and material inequities, empowerment light offers the ultimate win-win. Far from rocking the boat, it harnesses a panoply of gender myths to represent women as a precious development asset. Whittling down the characteristics of the idealised empowerment woman, empowered woman, sorry, to those that will best serve the pursuit of development it offers up an image of the hardworking, community-minded, conscientious good mother who can lift her family, community and country out of poverty. I don't know how many of you have seen the Oxfam Lift video. Haven't you seen it marketing video by Oxfam? Literally has people levitating. It's absolutely hilarious. It's the best I think I've ever seen. Anyway, so this idea of lifting. There's a lot of talk about lift and uplift. It's quite a Victorian idea and it's come back into the service of development. Two attributes of the neoliberal appropriation of empowerment and its reduction to liberal empowerment light are worth highlighting here. One is the narrow focus on the economic dimension of empowerment and the way in which the power of money and the nature of the market come to be represented. The other is the kind of causalities that are being imputed to the interventions of development agencies, which appear to offer a huge amount for very little. A rhetorical framing that is in itself not unusual for an industry that's constantly promising what it can't deliver. UN Women, for example, chose the following language for its promotional glossy shortly after it was established in 2010. Entitled a high return investment, it said, hopes are high for UN women, so is the ambition and the need to take bold action. It is possible to imagine the end of discrimination against women if the right investments are made. In a prominent box on UN women's glossy appears the following snippet from the global gender gap report that was produced for the World Economic Forum in 2010. Countries with greater gender equality have economies that are more competitive, grow faster, shown through research in 114 countries. However, Nyla Cabea and Louisa Natali's rigorous examination of the relationship between economic growth and gender equality scotches some of the simple equations that have come to be so lightly bandied around in these discourses. They bind the two together as if one simply led to the other. Cabea and Nathalie show that economic growth doesn't necessarily go alongside gender equality, although gender equality can, under certain conditions, contribute to economic growth. Claims to be empowering women through engaging them in the market conflate power and money and imbue the acquisition of money with almost magical powers as if once women had their own money they could wave a wand and whisk away the social norms, effective relationships and embedded institutions that constrain them. We see the harnessing of feminist findings to the didactic retelling of feminist fables that inscribe and reinscribe in different forms the world over, the empowered woman as economically autonomous. Evocative numbers, women do 70% of the world's work, women own 1% of the world's property, are mobilised in favour of arguments for equality, at which only the bravest feminist would dare balk. These figures and the arguments associated with them become travelling fictions taking on a life of their own as they ripple from website to report to speech to policy. Investing in women we're told over and over again is the best investment development agencies can make. Empowerment light doesn't only sound like the real thing, it also mimics some of the mechanisms that feminist organisations and movements have used to enable women to empower themselves. For instance, the women's movement to the 1970s discovered the power that came out of coming together as women to analyse and reflect on shared experience and using this as a basis for developing political subjectivities as women and mobilising for change. But while feminist consciousness raising groups sought to deepen women's analysis of their position and condition and thereby create and articulate awareness of their oppression, empowerment light envisioned these groups serving as a means of providing social sanctions that encourage repayment, sharing business tips and providing moral support to women entrepreneurs. Even if, as Collette Solomon's study of credit and saving groups in Northern Ghana shows, women may regard these kinds of groups in a highly instrumental way, simply arriving to collect their money and getting on with their lives. Prominent examples of this narrative include an infographic by women deliver as part of their 2014 invest in women everyone wins toolkit. A woman figure is pictured with the slogan women and girls are the heart of development surrounded by four boxes, improve health, strengthen economies, create sustainable nations, reduce hunger, increase productivity and benefit families. The infographic is lightly sprinkled with a magic dust of factoids. When 10% of girls, more girls go to school GDP increases by an average of 3%. Girls and women spend 90% of their earned income on their families while men only spend 30% or 40%. Eliminating barriers to employment for women and girls could raise labour productivity by 25% in some countries. Closing the gender gap in agriculture could lift 100 to 150 million people out of hunger. Investors are indeed increasing by the day. 2015 saw four summits in Stockholm, San Diego, Singapore and South Africa organised by Women Investing in Women who described themselves as a branded coalition and social movement of passionate individuals united to foster economic empowerment for women globally. Their mission to lead a global economic revolution. In a Huffington Post article that typicised the public reach this narrative is garnering entitled Why Invest in Women, self-styled social good enthusiast Amy Schoenberger tells stories of determination that arise out of these impossible challenges. Schoenberger's account has all the ingredients of the American dream and nothing of the structural inequalities that produce and sustain the poverty that she describes women entrepreneurs seeking to leave behind. From philanthropic foundations to western bilateral donors to UN women, the mantra of invest in women and girls has become a clarion call. Goldman Sachs assures us investing in women pays off. As a Canadian women's foundation describes it, it would be investor. Such investment is not only the right thing to do, it's an intelligent investment in a better future. Talk of empowering women implies that power can be transmitted and that women are vessels that can be infused with it. Women's empowerment becomes a destination rather than a journey. At that destination lie a host of good things, better child health, better governance, improved economic outcomes, the holy grail of economic growth. Women become a means to securing those outcomes rather than a commitment for other ends rather than meriting any consideration in and for themselves. Precious wonder then that mainstream developments rendition of women's empowerment appears to have nothing to say or do about the structural relations that preserve patriarchal social arrangements and service the rampant inequality that surrounds us all. Instead the onus is on accommodating women and girls within existing social and gender orders and on putting them to work for development. Where's all of this come from? One line of influence can be traced back to the uptake of the empowerment agenda alongside broader moves to institutionalise community empowerment and participation to serve neoliberal economic policy and second generation governance reform goals by the self-styled Knowledge Bank, aka the World Bank. In 2005 the bank developed an irresistibly brilliant marketing slogan to accompany the promotion of empowerment light. Gender equality is smart economics. As a luring for those driven by international developments disbursement pressures as it is for those charged with delivering on the grandiose promises that the hallmark of the international development enterprise no less than the achievement of inclusive growth. Smart economics sells empowerment as the new must have. Introducing the smart economics programme in the newsletter of the IMF Myra Buvinich and Elizabeth King offer a set of associations that through a series of implied causalities create this narrative that makes poverty reduction a direct outcome of women's empowerment. Greater gender equality can help in the battle to reduce poverty and promote growth directly by boosting women's participation in the labour force and increasing both productivity and earnings and indirectly through the beneficial effects of women's empowerment on children's human capital and well-being. The empirical evidence on these benefits is compelling. Whether self-employed or earning wages, working women help their families to escape poverty. Women are more likely than men to face constraints to access credit markets but when they are the direct users of credit rather than men the impact of credit on several measures of household welfare is greater. When women have more schooling the returns flow not only to themselves but the next generation as well. When they have greater control over resources in the family they are more likely than men to allocate more resources to food and to children's health care and education. A finding from a diverse set of countries as Bangladesh, Brazil, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Indonesia and South Africa. Indeed studies have shown that giving women more access to education to markets land labour credit and to new technology and giving them greater control over household resources often translates into greater well-being for themselves and their families. For women, their families and their communities this is smart economics. There seems little at first sight to argue with here giving women money and education it seems to present an optimal way to return reap returns to efficiency with promising poverty reducing effects. The really smart economist however might look beyond this chain of causalities the bigger macroeconomic picture. Here the story is not quite so rosy. Liberalising reforms in countries that once sought to ensure universal provision of basic social services to their citizens have transformed health and education into consumer goods rather than citizenship rights. Changes in the labour market may have created new opportunities for women but they've often done so through diminishing existing social rights and marginalising the institutions that might otherwise seek to protect workers rights creating ever more fragile and precarious working conditions for working women. In the case of Chile for example, Jasmine Gideon from Birkbeck shows what these reforms have cost poorer women in a context where social sector reforms have left them increasingly vulnerable. The informalisation of labour may have permitted more women to enter the labour market but it leaves them very vulnerable to the vagaries of that market and to exploitation. And as Mercedes de la Roche has argued the rise of a narrative that applauds poor women as those who are able to lift their families out of poverty demands ever more from those who are portrayed in it as heroic survivors. Taking a closer look at the line of reasoning deployed in the bank's smart economic narrative further issues are apparent. Women appear in it as wives and mothers more able to negotiate with their husbands and provide for their children as a result of greater access to employment and education. Far from being oriented at women as individuals women become instruments for enhancing children's social human capital and family wellbeing. The possibility that if women had the means to support themselves independently they would free themselves from unhappy and violent relationships with men is nowhere to be seen. Women's empowerment it seems contributes towards maintaining a residual model of the family in which women are those who do the caring and make good for men's inability or unwillingness to act the role of provider by generating the resources to feed and educate their children as well as doing the bulk of the work of social reproduction. We used to talk about this as a double or triple burden now it's called empowerment. For all the encouragement to get out of there into the labour market empowered women may find that there's no less up when it comes to expectations of unpaid care work at home and as Kate Bedford suggests there's little in neoliberal empowerment programs that offers working women any help with chores or childcare. Indeed there's little scope in discourses of women's empowerment in international development for bringing into question the additional work that's being required of women. Nor is there any room to think through the implications of the reconfiguration of gender relations within and beyond the household especially in relation to men's under-employment in an increasingly fragile labour market. There's a satisfying sense of harmony to the smart economics narrative. Empowering women is good for everyone it runs. It's good for children, it's good for families and it's good for communities and it's good for economic growth and poverty reduction. These empowered women do not make choices that are not part of their script. They don't step out of line by not performing maternal altruism as they're expected to do nor do they rock the vote politically. This is a very individualistic version of empowerment. It's one about compliant conformity rather than about reversing power relations, resistance or other manifestations of agency that challenge the status quo. Srylatur Batliwala yn dipad Danraj evoked the kind of woman that becomes the privileged subject of the neoliberal social imaginary evoked by the world bank's vision of what smart economics might deliver. The neoliberal rules for the new women's citizen are quite clear. Improve your household's economic condition. Participate in local community development if you have time. Help build and run local apolitical institutions like self-help groups. By then you should have no political or physical energy left to challenge this paradigm. But there are also contradictions in this narrative. The liberating effects of individualism seem far distant from the role that's envisaged for women in the smart economics vision of empowerment. Rather women is regarded as so deeply entwined with the fortunes of their families that they become a conduit for development agencies' concern not as women but as mothers and members of households. Y Maxine has done some really interesting work on this. Far from exercising their own prerogative, women are portrayed as hardworking, eminently responsible altruists who devote themselves to their families and communities. For all the talk about agency what this narrative has women actually doing when they're empowered is to seamlessly fit in with a normative social order in which they selflessly and cheerfully consent to restrictive social norms that are precisely what feminist versions of women's empowerment would seek to challenge. This framing is strongly reminiscent of an era prior to the entry of gender into development discourse. Women in development arose out of a critique of the eclipse of women's economic roles in development and the degree to which colonial development and post-colonial modernisation interventions had served to deepen inequalities between women and men. And the work, for example, of Esther Boser up Irene Tinker. We'd sought to integrate women into development giving women opportunities to gain access to development's benefits. We did little to address the underpinning structural inequalities that maintain gender inequality. Simply sought to accommodate women as international development's beneficiaries. This critique is not wildly misplaced today with the reflex we're seeing of ways of working with women that are structurally strikingly similar to those promoted in WID. So we see that empowerment light has got distinguishable continuities with feminist discourses and what makes it so difficult to entirely refute is the hold it has on the imaginations of women in development agencies whose dollars and pounds are so badly needed by women's organisations and movements. And indeed, after three decades of struggling for resources and recognition, women's rights advocates are rightly wary of derailing what appears to be a response to their demands. But I suggest here the paradoxes of mainstream development's enthusiastic promotion of women's empowerment means that empowerment light has come to resemble a poison chalice. So times have changed since the WID days when it would have been difficult to even imagine that the message investing girls and women has been treated today amongst all the corporate philanthropists and corporations who have embraced women's economic empowerment. But the parallels in the degree to which policies are producing rather than reducing poverty are evident. The rollback of the state in the SAP era continues in contemporary neoliberal international development policies. And while the governance reforms that have permitted expansion in labour markets through foreign investment can be credited with creating more employment opportunities, this has rarely been in the form of decent work. Empowerment light is a means of shunting burdens instrumentalising women and girls in the service of neoliberalism. In her account of why women's economic empowerment is important, Mary Esther Iskendrian from Women's World Banking captures quite how much is now expected of women. Women need a way to save for school fees and to reduce economic shocks that can result in removing a child from school. They need access to health care for the whole family because often a woman will make sure everyone else in the family is healthy before tending to her own needs. Women need loans for small businesses or the ability to save for building a business. In short, they need basic financial services. For women who have been shut out of the formal economy these services empower them to become self-directed economic agents for the first time. What some might still regard as the obligations of the state thus become women's needs such as the need to save for fees at the schools that fail to offer free education. For treatment in clinics that fail to offer free health services. Women and girls are required to become self-directed economic agents as part of a vision in which there is no alternative to having to meet their own needs. Men and boys are absent from all this. Rended useless by their invisibility their only role in the story is as bit part players who are a source of potential disruption, hazard and harm. This narrative of female industriousness as the new development panacea appears again and again in the promotional materials of international development agencies. One example is Oxfam's work with the Mars Chocolate Corporation. Promotional blurb on Mars's website tells us, the company understands that women invest significantly greater proportions of their disposable income in family and community well-being. Mars chocolate has learned that the economic empowerment of women is not only a tool for gender equity in its own right but also it has a powerful multiplier effect for the broader well-being of children, families and communities. The Mars Oxfam vision for change program is oriented like Legion other corporate initiatives at training women in developing local enterprises which benefits both the nutritional needs of families as well as the income of women who sell surplus production in local markets. We are it seems back to a familiar story of surplus value. Empowerment light has come to be synonymous not with mobilisation to claim social and economic rights or hold governments to account for their commitments under treaties like CEDOR but with with style projects that enlist women in small-scale business activities. The trickle-up microfinance initiative is one of hundreds of such examples. It describes how weaving, hair-cutting, tailoring, raising pigs, chickens and goats, selling tortillas, hair clips, eggs and panadas, rice, pancakes, couscous and ice cream are just a few of the many activities that women choose that allow them to not only earn more money but take the first step in transforming their lives. The vision for women's economic empowerment however goes beyond this. In a 2014 speech in Japan IMF managing director Christine Lagarde provides us with a macro rationale. The great Japanese writer and feminist Raisho Hirasuku once famously wrote in the beginning, women was truly the sun an authentic person. Today more than ever the global economy needs precisely this kind of radiant sun to provide light and nourishment, to provide healing, to dry out the swamps of poverty and unrest. The reason is obvious. Seven years into the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression the recovery is still too tepid and too turbulent and even after the crisis abates we will face grave challenges to growth as a slower new normal sets in as populations age and economic disparities increase given these challenges we will need all the economic growth, dynamism and ingenuity we can get in the years ahead thankfully a key part of the solution is staring us right in the face unleashing the economic power of women bringing the world's largest excluded groups group into the fold this determined focus on investing in women is truly remarkable against the backdrop of how international development sidelines and ignored women's economic roles in the 70s and 80s in many ways it seems to respond to feminist demands to pay more attention to women but is it actually delivering what they demand empowerment light is far from the transformative promise of the materialist feminist agenda that gave rise to gender and development the incorporation of the female factor into the further expansion of neoliberalism through empowerment light offers little prospect of unsettling the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of small principally male elite nor does it offer much prospect of making inroads into transforming the structural basis of gender orders that produce and sustain inequalities of all kinds rather women are enthusiastically invited into the neoliberal project they're valued to the economy as service providers combining unpaid social reproduction with servicing the expansion of consumer markets through virtuous promotion of consumption they drive a circle of corporate profit and in the paper I've got a range of other examples which I'm going to in the interest of time I should be wrapping up really one of which I think is quite interesting to look at if you're interested in looking further is Project Shakti in India which by empowering women to sell small items they drive a circle of corporate profit to sell small items of lever brothers materials into new markets has raised the profits of lever brothers in India by 20% so this kind of win-win thing so just to conclude I'm going to look at now just lastly and in the paper I go into a critique of the Nike Foundation's Girl Effect and the stories also about sex workers and the way that sex work and trafficking is often used as well as a vehicle for producing a particular kind of category of victim that needs to be rescued so what do we need to do to reclaim empowerment so what we have as I've argued is empowerment light that offers a version of the American dream in which actually existing inequalities melt away all it takes is the will to aspire and to access market opportunities so how do we reclaim it well hegemones are never completed projects they're always in contention there's cracks and contradictions and therefore opportunities and there's not my words they're Stuart Hall during Massey and Rustin the co-optation of empowerment in the service of neoliberalism may have become hegemonic but some of its foundational features present us with cracks of opportunity of these the striking contrasts that emerge between the forms of empowerment like described here and the versions of women's empowerment brought into international development policy by feminist activists in the 1990s are perhaps the most promising if a pervasive feature of the current conjunctio is the fusing of neoliberal marketisation and its concomitant consumerism narratives of self-reliance and the triumph of the individual subject the versions of empowerment mobilised by women's movements disrupt precisely through their insistent evocation of the collective and their mantra of contesting embedded and naturalised inequalities this in turn provides an entry point forms of activism that defuse the elements that neoliberal empowerment has sutured together taking them apart reclaiming empowerment as a feminist strategy calls for reframing it in ways that re-inscribe a concern with changing the structural power relations that produce inequality and oppression we need to see greater use being made of the not inconsiderable body of empirical work that challenges some of the orthodoxies driving economic empowerment programmes like that gender equality produces economic growth including Kabir and Nasserley's ethyl inspection of the evidence we need greater clarity on what exactly these orthodoxies are, why they're problematic and what their implications are for people on the receiving end of development interventions we need a sharpening of tools and concepts for analysis rather than seeing empowerment as a destination to be attained conceiving of it as a journey along a diversity of pathways helps to remind us of the importance of placing the journey itself at the heart of our analysis empowerment is not only about acquiring the capacity to do things differently it's about being able to envisage things differently to critically appraise the way things are and know that this is not the way things need to be this calls for a return to the terrain of the discursive to reposition empowerment in ways that counteract the ways near liberal appropriations have neutralised its association with shifting power relations it calls on the one hand for replacing terms like injustice, power and rights into the chain of equivalents in which empowerment features alongside terms like economic growth, opportunity and choice but it also calls for the larger project of reinscribing a concern with justice into the very term development itself at the same time as identifying those very near colonial tendencies and practices that make some into the objects of intervention of others conjunctural analysis can aid this project teasing apart the constellation of actors and discourses that constitute the current moment and their diverse temporalities as well as the critical fictions and frictions and frictions that offer the cracks in hegemony with which activists can fruitfully work so I'm going to end there interest of having time next week would you like to take a few moments to respond take a few moments to respond I don't know if any of these are working are they they are, I think you just have to have them quite close to your face unfortunately okay okay definitely well Andrea that was a fantastic excoriating critique of the discursive annexation of concepts developed within progressive women's movements by the neoliberal development agenda and focusing on the world the word empowerment I think is very appropriate and it's as many of us have argued it has become completely debased in its usage and its application and I particularly welcomed your focus on the corporate sector moving into the development world and indeed contaminating much of the kind of work of NGOs that used to be progressive with this kind of language of investing in women and doing so in ways that are not empowering in the real sense I did look up how many sites the word empowerment actually got and it's 71 million on google and coming up I think just as quickly but not quite there yet is the word transformative which everybody uses now and it's entered the kind of development debate as a kind of another one of those words that's depending on where you stand and how you define it it can mean something meaningful or it can again be a somewhat disarming debased concept and that also requires a discursive strategy to try to retain the more radical elements in the thinking behind transformative agendas and what really would make them so I'm in complete agreement with you so I'm not going to be criticising you but I want to I want to really have a conversation with you and with others here about a range of issues which perhaps looking at the broader context we might kind of flesh out some of the remarks that Andrea has made and I want to start by commenting on the present focus on women and girls in development over the course of the last four decades international development policy has at different times selectively always selectively appropriated ideas that originated within feminist thought and practice but it is fairly recently that one could say that gender issues have become more mainstream as Andrea said women and girls seem to be everywhere in development and they're most often there because they serve some kind of useful purpose in underpinning the development efforts, governments development agencies as well as supporting the profit making elements efforts of corporations so all of that Andrea is not very clearly but perhaps the instrumentalisation of women and girls by the development industry let's look beyond the development scenario to what lies behind gender being everywhere I would say that all this is occurring not particularly because of the development industry or even because of pressure by women's organisations and NGOs to make development policy more responsive to gender equality demands I would say this has been very important actually but it's because gender issues have been propelled by broader change processes into the global cultural mainstream of course development policy has both reflected and contributed to this cultural shift and on balance and here's a provocation I would rather have women and women's equality issues included in that agenda than left out just as I would rather have efforts to tackle racial or any other kind of equality included than left out looking back at history we shouldn't be surprised that radical ideas are absorbed into the mainstream and we might even be thankful that they are for example there would have been no welfare state without radical ideas becoming part of the common sense of their time no equal rights frameworks and much else besides the fact of this absorption into the mainstream does not of course mean that there is no battle to be fought over the interpretation and implementation of the ideas very much to the contrary but I'll return to that point in a moment so why is this partial and I would insist that it's a partial mainstreaming of gender issues in development and more broadly why is it occurring partial because if you look at the funding given to women's organisations even compare UN women with some of the other agencies you find it's seriously underfunded so there's a lot of discursive centrality but there ain't much in form of real effective delivery of real cash to supporting initiatives to do with women so why is it occurring well part of the answer is that living in a phase of capitalist modernity in which gender relations have become extremely unsettled as a result of the multiple changes brought about by the free market accelerated globalisation of the last three decades this has gone together with a huge rise in populations and phenomena such as mass migration the progressive informalisation of labour and the adverse incorporation of millions of men and women under precarius work under conditions of cheap labour much as Andrea said capitalism undermines where it does not destroy or disrupt established social relations and patriarchal power has been to some degree eroded in these processes women work outside the home they are being educated and they've come to occupy a place in the public sphere as actors with new expectations and aspirations at the same time however patriarchal forces in many parts of the world have reasserted their powers either through reversing legal changes appeals to religion and or in increasingly violent ways supported very often by dispossessed men deprived of their former patriarchal privileges in short social change has brought gender relations into focus talked about discussed everywhere in every medium and from every platform gender has also become an intensely political terrain in which human rights and women's rights advocates are confronted in all sorts of policy arenas by increasingly active and confident conservative forces and states just read Denise Candiotti's postings on Turkey in open democracy so on the one hand women are beckoned into the liberal market as credit worthy debt worthy financialized consumers which offers them the promise of a degree of greater autonomy and on the other face a reincorporation into the imagined securities of a previous lost order in reality of course neither option delivers much to women and to speak of choice for the millions of poor women in particular is to ignore the real constraints that they face so I think the other issue I did want to kind of raise and here it becomes more of a kind of discussion and a question because do we see all of what is going on in this talking women in the development industry as necessarily negative but if not then where are the spaces that can be worked in that positive change and are all the agencies the same in regard to their policies for advancing women's rights or incorporation into the development project and therefore where can one see the space for change not only within the bureaucracies and through the femocrats who certainly do a very good job in trying to hold back the forces of conservatism and advance on some very important issues but also outside those bureaucracies at the grassroots where is it that women can advance and through what kinds of allies and processes to develop their strengths their autonomy and it's interesting that in regard to what can be done or what are the positive examples which Andrea has many I know what came to mind in relation to the kind of point of individualisation and the kind of emphasis on the individual in much of the neoliberal sort of repositioning of the women's movements kind of claims was looking back to some of those very positive collective projects that developed extraordinary ways of organising women and providing them with a degree of power to make progress in the kinds of domains that they wish to I'm thinking of Sewa in India which for a time was I mean it changes over time and so forth but it had a very powerful collective moment which was turned itself into effectively a national organisation run by women for women so there are kind of spaces in which women can achieve considerable advances even under the conditions of this very oppressive macroeconomic policy and state policies that we're seeing in many parts of the world so I think probably I'll stop there there's a lot more to say but maybe it'll come out in discussion Thank you Would you like to take a few moments to respond before we open up? I agree with everything Maxine says and I think something that's interesting from this is that you can say where can you make change happen and I think from I used to be the director of a research programme called Pathways of Women's Empowerment Maxine was involved, lots of other people were involved in it and I think when I reflect on all the cases that we looked at, we worked in 12 countries we looked at lots of different examples of where women's empowerment programmes had been done at changes in women's lives and I think some of the most exciting and successful programmes used some of that feminist consciousness raising so it brought people together to think critically about their lives and we even came across government programmes that did that so in Brazil for example we came across the north-eastern Brazil a feminist bureaucrat got a senior job in the state government and transformed a rural employment training programme into something that was a vehicle for this kind of empowerment so what she was able to do is to introduce a compulsory three month training module for which women would receive stipends took place during the season in which there wasn't much work and so women would take part in this once or twice a week bring some money into there to have money to live on not very much but it was like a sort of a sort of social payment and they would begin to discover a whole series of concepts through which to make sense of their lives they would learn about the history of slavery in Brazil they'd learn about class they'd learn about gender they were taught by feminists they were taught by female workers that changed the women's sense of themselves and changed their horizons of possibility so where women might have originally chosen to do hairdressing sewing these kinds of vocational jobs women after this training course would then ask for what kind of training do you want and they wanted to do jobs that were men's jobs they wanted to do jobs that would give them more status and more money but their consciousness had changed their relationships with their partners had changed a lot of other stuff in their lives was changing it was possible to build into a government program and now tens of thousands of women have gone through that program so there are things that build those feminist principles into social policy, into programs and can go to scale so I think that's really important because there are ways in which you can inject some of that feminist empowerment for real but empowerment light is not interested in people collectively organising or critically reflecting on their lives that we found and something I began to advocate as one of the things that would be a future direction for funding is to put funding through women's funds so women's funds are a tremendously important vehicle for funding the very small scale grassroots work that Maxine is talking about and there are lots of women's funds that do this very effectively and they have been starved of money so I did some work for a women's fund called Mama Cash for example looking at how could they benefit from and also influence philanthropists to invest their money differently to do more of this feminist work so I think there are ways in which development initiatives can make a difference I advocated that DFID should give more of its money to these kinds of funds than to put money through institutions like the World Bank and in order to be able to reach women because they are able to do this transformative work I hate to use the word now actually I think George Bush took the word transformative away from us actually in these creditory ones anyway so I've gone on a bit but I think it's really important to not just get marred in critique to think about what can you do to make a difference and there are things that are really making a difference but they call for that critical consciousness on the one hand and then to really inhabit the notion of impact with something that's more about power Thank you I think we'll open to questions but before we do two quick things there is no seminar next week this is the last one of the term but hot off the press there are some leaflets that you'll be handed as you leave the building with next term seminar program on them the first seminar in that series very aptly will be on the 12th of January Calpano Wilson from LSC will talk to us about contesting the intensification of women's labour in neoliberal India so I hope we'll see lots of you there for that and there'll be an opportunity after this to continue the discussion in the SCR over wine, juice, nibbles etc so please do join us for that okay questions yep should we take 3 and then my question is that you know how you spoke about like you just mentioned women's funds I also feel like the language of gender and gender mainstreaming in gender is very dominated by new liberal underpinnings and new liberalisms definition of what gender and its various aspects are so Diane Elton has done this very interesting she brought out this example about how neutral terminology is like the farmer always makes us envision a man so it's always farmer and his wife and not farmer and her husband so what do you think can be done to tackle this language problem which immediately sort of makes us have certain preconceived notions and immediately has us which in a man supporting his family or a woman and the domestic arena that she's going to well there's been a a struggle for 3 more years should we do a couple more then give some more people a chance yeah I wanted to sort of in contrast to this idea of like empowerment like to talk about empowerment as collective political action by women against women I want to know how you understand such political action that's not necessarily channeled through a gender lens like women just handling their gender depression through sort of resistance to structures but through other movements or for a nation or for that kind of thing and sort of how this obviously is very unsettling to sort of I think why feminisms that sort of see the category of women as somehow taking precedence over sort of other issues of identity so I want to yeah I think we're at a point where they're into the families of gender and I wanted to understand that it's the correct way to engage the feminist group to development because as much as by doing many particular contribution on that as well as the feminist approach coming from the marchings of what we call the West and to understand that this always failed to go down to the UN so can we also talk about in a first election of which type of terms and you know a type of feminism actually has managed to be in policy to ensure very billionaires for that question and relating to that which would be also the responsibility of some parts of the left so that like we would be of course is limiting to look at what type of projects I find in for instance with a big labour when it comes to gender but at the same time they speak a lot about actual vaccines that you find you look at very masculine unions etc etc so to the extent also perhaps it's funny beyond the sort of effect on the responsibilities of neoliberalism and look also at which feminism and at both sides which left Okay Do you want to take a few moments each of you and then can I take one more? Okay later. Also I'm in Harga from Modern Sexual Agenda where the sexual agency of women is often limited so for instance you can see the continuation of sexual work with prostitution so within the setup what is the space for transformation that we have so if you could just do you want to start? Well I mean I'll just say a few things because otherwise we could go on all day Absolutely Discussive struggle to change the language has been going on for 35 years so you know sometimes it has some impact and sometimes it just has to keep going and for example case of looking at poverty for example purely through lens that doesn't actually recognise that poverty is gendered that's actually you know the way that women are poor can be quite different to the way men are poor what about secondary poverty in the household same household men and women maybe in situations where they have far fewer assets and much less capacity for consumption work and so on it's breaking down some of those kinds of broader concepts poverty into the spaces where you can consider these things in their specificity there's been a lot of the work that feminists have done so on that one discussive struggle in language you raised this question very centrally I don't know if you want to I did anthropology here and I was taught by Mark Hobart a part of my anthropology training I was taught a lot of philosophy and a lot of philosophy of language and I became very interested in the ways in which language is used the politics of language the politics of them working with language unsettling some of the language in that kind of way so I think it's Maxine saying struggle of discursive struggles these struggles for interpretive power are really important struggles and they carry on they don't end, they need to be continually re-invoked something that's preoccupied me is the extent to which the incorporation of some of these very mainstream narratives by certain kinds of feminists as of liberal feminists re-instantiate particular ideas about women so the good woman is claimed by liberal feminism and the woman is totally heteronormative there's no space for those women to be single, to be desiring of other women the good woman is the good mother who's in a heterosexual relationship of a particular kind she's normatively managed by that discourse and she's claimed by certain visions and versions of liberal feminism and I think it's very troublesome so unsettling some of those things as well which brings together the other questions about looking beyond a particular white feminist liberal narrative of women's rights and of women and this category woman unsettling that unsettling some of the language around that disrupting some of these ideas about the kinds of women who should be the objects of development assistance and something that I've worked on in recent years is working with film working with films that disrupt these kinds of ideas working with filmmakers and one of the films that we made was a film called Save Us from Saviors which is about sex workers in India who their slogan is Save Us from Saviors we don't want to be rescued we don't want white rescuers coming along and telling us that we're victims and we ought to be rescued we don't want to be used in their promotional materials to get the money for their NGOs we don't want their moral agendas and what they do want is to change society they say we've got no problem with what we do it's you that's got the problem with us and so if they collectivise and they come together with thousands of women and men and transgender working together as a collective movement it's more difficult for them to be abused by the police to be prayed upon by rescuers and to be represented in these ways these are powerful women but they've gained their power by coming together and I think that whole thing about contesting them these normative narratives around sexuality is fundamental to it because otherwise women can not only be sidelined but also be complicit in a set of normative practices that end up constraining their abilities to exercise real choices over their lives fundamental about how they choose to live and what kind of relationships they have I think the point about movements is a very important point and I think it's quite interesting thinking then about we can romanticise collective action we can romanticise movements but whose movements are they and what are they mobilising around and something that again some work that we did with pathways and something I got interested in is where you have for example domestic workers in Brazil, black domestic workers mobilising and then there's a group of people who are the employers who are then also mobilising around their rights and then you look at when do domestic workers' rights ever get taken up into parliamentary spaces where they get blocked by middle class privileged women who rely on cheap domestic work in order to be in parliament in the first place so all of this thing of connecting up these different forms of political mobilisation and manifestation as women where you get these very strongly counteracting claims and the play of power is then also always about race it's always also always about class and these things come together in very contradictory and powerful ways so the single category woman is not a useful category in any way yeah Hi, now we're writing an essay on gender mainstreaming and the neoliberal development power like perfect timing perfect timing one of the things that I found that I think is most important is that gender mainstreaming is about gender equality capitalism is about inequality and exploitation and it seems to me that they're completely incompatible what you've got from that wow, it's a bit good isn't it the unhappy relationship of feminism and Marxism that goes back how do you think they're related, there are a couple of questions what do you think the role of men is in this entire debate on gender how can they be a part of this entire fight not as the fight of women but the fight of those social hierarchies and those relational structures that we need to break and how can they be a part of it and is it time that we start talking about them as well when we speak about gender I want to ask you about this whole transition you spoke about you know, the shift in developing discourses from collective struggle rights to an idea of individual choice so how do you position America's sense of equalities approach within this whole discourse because he does talk about this whole difference between human capitalism and equalities and without a critique of capitalism without a critique of hegemony without a critique of imperialism so just how would you position that idea a couple more and then you wanted to ask a question I will call it from that a bit so they have come the last two years about the formation of the men's engagement symposium and the men's engagement focus on men and boys so how do you think that is there how to change the narrative technically about even within the sort of funding spectrum we have seen examples from Kerala where money was given to women to form a collective for micro-build but then they started to take a particular role and then the donors were not very happy with what they were doing I would like to know more about that within those sort of spaces also which be the instance of resistance so how does the question which is not really linked to what you have talked about but have you seen any similarities between women empowerment and the narratives of LGBT empowerment also the World Bank is doing these studies on economic reformophobia lots of big corporates are investing money and the same similar sort of empowerment language pink money and double income north kids kind of Shall we do that? Yeah lots of things I think we'll just take the last point first I think it's really interesting what's happening with the way in which a kind of global save the gay thing is going on with the US and its LGBT envoy and the kind of openness around sexuality with some of the major agencies Exactly So it's you know the global south is backward it doesn't understand it needs to be modernized it's a version of something that's very familiar and it's particularly ironic I think coming from America given the role, the obstructive role that America played for many years in global policy institutions around these very questions so Christian conservatism from America is exported homophobia is an American and British export it's a historical export of this country has been put historically in practice in laws in many countries that remain on the statute books and homophobia is an export of the American Christian right and yet that's never the focus of attention it's always the backward south that needs to be to enlightened and made modern so there's lots of tropes there very very similar around women and I think something that's interesting is to look if you look back a century and look at Hansard and look at some of the debates that were going on in parliament I looked for example at debates around early marriage and around laws that were being put in place in colonial India around the turn of the 18th 19th century 19th to 20th century 1908 or the 1890s very very similar language a language which is about a moral project, about rescue, about uplift and about tradition and what to do about tradition so you see this running across all of these arenas around sexuality so whether you're talking about sex work and trafficking the construction of trafficking as a narrative that then permits certain kinds of other kinds of interventions that have got economic benefits for certain kinds of actors to stuff about sexuality that's about LGBT and the construction of LGBT persons as categories of people and the ways in which that comes to be superimposed so I think one of the most interesting areas now for contestation is the gender binary itself I think there's been some fantastic and useful politics around this really questioning the gender binary looking at the effects of the gender binary there's also science that now the current incarnations of science that show that the gender binary is an artifact so working with that I think is a very interesting political space I think you know could there's a lot of feminist narratives or these liberal feminist narratives and development that are very binary they're not only kind of naturalize a particular kind of heteronormative version of the subject they're very very binary about what they say so men are everything that women are not and so on so back to the question about men I've worked on some of these issues around masculinity for many years most recently with Nancy Lindisfarne who used to be as a sort of emeritus here was my tutor when I was at SOAS and then a student of mine so the three generations of us working together on a book called Masculinities under neoliberalism and so we've been looking at these new conditions under which male subjects are being created by these neoliberal reforms and where the spaces of resistance are and I think it's in some ways much more interesting to look outside the NGO sphere and the sphere of men training other men to behave differently at the spheres of everyday life where men are starting to resist because of economic these massive economic changes that have completely reconfigured gender relations so there's lots and lots of scope with that I wanted to make one more point and I'll hand over to Maxine or maybe I'll come back to it later let me come back to it later just one point as well on men which is there's been some really interesting kind of expressions of solidarity by men with women in cases of quite serious episodes of violence against women I mean great demonstrations in Turkey recently in Afghanistan when a woman was murdered and also of course in Delhi after those cases of rape and this is something we haven't really seen very much before so I think there is a kind of interesting shift when men are beginning to be able to express solidarity with women and to express their opposition to the kind of treatment that women are given so I think that's a very positive thing I remember the point I was going to make which was about if we reframe some of these issues as issues of justice which is what I was going to in this paper if they become issues of justice and if they become harness to a narrative about global justice that re-invokes human rights principles other kinds of principles that people can buy into no matter what their gender is no matter what it can actually provide a way of bringing together different kinds of movements but also providing a space where men are able to engage because they feel outraged and have been violated rather than I am a man I am now going to participate and there has been a difficult narrative around all of that which hasn't made it very easy for men to participate but also I think has set up unnecessary polarities around it so precisely these kind of manifestations which are actually ultimately about outrage and about activating people's sense of indignation this is wrong, this is bad we don't want to do something about it and working with that great a question then another question then my question actually two quick questions one is about you talk about the the course of development and it seems to me or maybe I am wrong please correct me then if I misunderstood you that the gender and feminism is part of the course of development but maybe I thought that there are some similarities on what you mean about feminism and about women on the discourse of post post development so I would like to ask you if really you think that we are just talking about the discourse of development or development is something something else what about if we change neoliberalism for other kinds of social economic regimes like communism or populism for instance in Latin America there are governments it's quite difficult to define them but for sure they are not neoliberal and they are not socialist but would you say that the same applies what you say for neoliberalism for other kinds of regimes for instance China I would like to take that one please there is another question down there I would really like to take up your point about gender buzzwords and that being a problem what I see happening is that it needs to a separation of ideas and a lack of understanding of the interrelationship of meaning in what people are actually doing in practice for example gender equality poverty reduction not seen as interrelated the thing that's too separate thing so what I'm trying to do is help this agency to see how gender justice and I like to learn from gender justice so I get that when things get clearer how that relates to their actual values of mission of whatever particular organisation I'm trying to help for example recently I was trying to help a program that was aimed at helping people so I said well who's hard to reach it's not just people who do a reflection on that it's also people who are marginalized because of their gender identity etc are there any more hands before we answer those so what is development question that's quite a big one and I think there are many stranded discourses that intersect and overlap and borrow from each other I oversimplified my version of I oversimplified my version of gender and development I oversimplified my critique of development if I'm asked what is development I've come to see development as being about justice global justice I come to see it as being I insist on seeing it as something that ought to be seen as a positive process of transforming inequalities although I realize that the actually existing practice of development is very far from that I think to engage with it at all I personally need to have some normative sense of something I can relate to and I can relate best to an idea of justice in that way and I realize there are lots of critiques of the concept of justice and that everything is permanently under critique but having I had an interesting experience of stepping away from working in a development organization the Institute of Development Studies in Brighton and working and going to the university and I was for the first bit of it I was so happy I was like I've got away from this horrible development world I don't have to take any money off Difford anymore I can be rude, I can say what I like all kinds of things I was just sharing with Maxine an example my moment of freedom was writing an article for the Guardian for the blog online thing where I was very critical of Difford and they've never spoken to me since and yet and then I was teaching first year international development students and they got the full benefit of my cynicism and the term of absolutely excoriating critique of the whole industry which ended the final week was Russ Coggins' development set poem which is his poem taking the piss out of the development set and their fast cars and fancy hotels and I even made a little video of me being Annabelle the consultant it was snowing outside and I was looking for a way of getting myself a nice warm consultancy so I could go and stay in a nice hotel and just really really and actually that didn't do anything at all it just provided a vehicle for me to get angry to jump around a bit and laugh but actually at the end of the day that's partly I think my thing at the end of this is you take apart these notions but actually there needs to be something to put them back together again I can critique development but at the same time I'm not going to give up on the idea of there being the possibility of some kind of radical social change that produces a fairer world because that makes me, it animates me my anger about the inequalities that exist are part of me and I think that thing of inviting people into study development and it being completely rubbish of everything it doesn't give you any energy to go out and try and make things different so I guess there are lots of contradictions in this and for different reasons we might package up bits of it differently but some of it's also about finding a way of connecting with that connecting with those energies and making more energy around us and I think empowerment is a notion that's useful for that because it's fundamentally about power it's about awakening that sense of being able to do things so yeah that's not a very good answer but anyway I was just going to come back on that question of does the economic model make a difference and the answer is it does if you look at even under communism women did better in certain respects than under neoliberal capitalism in certain respects and I think if you want to look at capitalism as a system which is variable in the forms that it takes i.e. the varieties of capitalism arguments you do see that there are forms of capitalism that place more restraint on the activities of the market and are able to limit the damage that is done by free market capitalism so quite a lot of the argument is about in terms of policy has been very critical of the neoliberal model and for good reason because it has generated the kinds of things we've been talking about unrestrained in many ways and the rolling back of the state the lack of the privatisation of the kind of social welfare reasons that needs to exist all of these things expose people to ever-growing levels of risk so there is much to fight for around which model of capitalism one might end up with and you mentioned the Latin American Pink Tide which delivered a centre governments to Latin America and these governments set about distancing themselves in some ways from the Washington consensus they didn't however change macroeconomic policy very much so there is a question about how post neoliberal they are but equally some of them did have a commitment to improving on women's rights but others even socialist states such as so-called socialist states such as Nicaraguas have done very little to improve women's position and indeed so one can't read off the economy or even the declarations of states that women's issues gender relations and so forth are going to be given priority to change in a positive direction so I think one has to be look at this as a kind of set of different kinds of arguments but certainly if you compare the report done by UN women called progress women and it's critique of macroeconomic policy from a gender perspective with what the World Bank failed to do in never critiquing its own macroeconomic policies you can see there's quite again substantial arguments taking place within agencies as well as between them and on the question the World Bank a very good piece by Robin Broad that looks at the ways in which the World Bank's own techniques for massaging data work to shore up their own the neoliberal prescription so the very in a way in which the evaluation department in the World Bank then services this whole kind of self-serving analysis are there any final questions before we oh great okay good talking about the World Bank I read this paper where the World Bank itself is very gendered and very biased but it is pushing the structure it pushed the structural adjustment of all these countries and all of that and what makes it harder and I would want your opinion on this is that the categories of men and women are very blurred in the sense that there's a lot of women who relate to masculine men and would rather masculinity sorry masculinity and would rather have men as possible so at this point it gets very blurred so for gender mainstreaming how is it very hard these categories get blurred and you can't just focus on women and men support it okay I think there was a hand in the back row am I right? can you? yeah I'm a good advisor of the Di-N-Gio we're here tonight is really a bum for my phone but my phone is working in progressive quality team in the NGO that are devoted to working on structural issues on economic justice and I can trade justice movement and that justice and not tax justice what we find is that it's very very very difficult to gender that analysis and that discourse so we are made some progress I think in looking at the sort of gender consequences of some trade agreements or tax arrangements for example but it's really difficult to look at how the structures are gendered in the first place so I think that's another challenge that just to go in the mix in terms of what we see now like the discourse around inequality for example where it seems it's still difficult to break into that I think both of you sorry there's another one here yeah thank you are there any final questions before we draw this section to a close okay okay I think we're good I think this is really interesting these questions because it takes you back to a discussion about gender division of labour and gender analysis what is gender analysis that was the foundation of gender in development and yet looking at that from the perspective of now the limitations of those categories I'm not going to answer your question she'll do much better than me the limitations of those categories now and the contested nature of the concept of gender and I think if we can think of gender as having these contestations about what does gender mean the limitations of gender as a concept and they can be used in many different kinds of ways and I think there's something to be said for the strategic use of these different concepts for different political purposes so for some political purposes simply counting male and female bodies is enough to make an argument that women's bodies are absent in a certain space I've just been, I'm now a bureaucrat and I've just been in a bureaucratic space and there are hardly any women in that space I've just been from two days of an away day senior management away day of Sussex University everybody in that space is white so counting the absence of anybody who's not white and counting the absence of inequality of women is perfectly enough to make an argument but that's not going to get you very far in relation to other things I think some of it's about the tactical deployment of these things for different purposes horses for courses I think there is a real need for the concept of gender in the face of all the work that's been done in feminist theory queer theory and elsewhere and to rethink what the implications of some of those uses are because they're exclusionary uses of a binary concept of gender that are not just implications for people who don't fit the binary but they have broader implications in all kinds of ways so I think that's something that's very important and in relation to this question about work that's also about looking at the significance of cultural representations and cultural changes it's not simply a matter of economics at the end of the day it's changing people's very sense of themselves and what it is that they're obliged to do as well as changing people's ability to negotiate the space to do those things and it's about working working with men, working with women working in such a way that people begin to let go of or revisit some of their assumptions and it's not always that women are being dumped with the work it can very often be the case but this very idea of a woman and what a woman is supposed to do and be, the cultural notions of that can make women more anxious to do all of those things and not provide any space for men to do them so I've met numerous men in field work situations who would find it very difficult to do some of the things that they actually would really like to be able to do so it's also about changing the ways in which those things get to be represented I think I'm a great believer in the use of cultural representation as well in film, music finding ways of alternatively framing things fiction, so you can actually start to get people to imagine themselves differently and then once you get that you can get some change Definitely Capitalism and gender so, go back 35 years it was a lot of engagement in Marxism and in Marxist theories of exploitation surface value and where did women's oppression fit and feminists like me tried to see whether you could actually develop out of Marxism a way of thinking about women's oppression there was a huge debate about domestic labour being a form of exploitation but also being a form of surplus labour that was appropriated by men and then by the capitalist system through men that all didn't come to very much to be quite frank with you but what it did reveal was that gender at least capitalism has gendered effects just as it has racialised effects but it is not purely and simply the cause of gender inequality, racial inequality or any other kind of inequality it's a system that produces all the things that you mentioned inequality enormous inequalities unless it's curved but it doesn't produce particularly assigned forms of inequality so I think that's the critical thing so how do we explain gender inequality, we have to use other concepts, we have to look at history and history tells us that patriarchal forms were very important in reproducing inequality between men and women and those patriarchal forms remain embedded in law embedded in cultural practices embedded in symbolic representations unconscious biases and so on and so forth even in the modern world much more exaggerated, much more serious in their consequences in some other parts of the world but nonetheless you have to have another concept than capitalism to explain the oppression of women or the oppression of black people or disabled people whatever, you need to have other form, you need to understand the social relations that produce these phenomena of inequality and structure them in patterned predictable ways OK, well I think we've reached the end please join me in thank you thank you Take a leaflet on your way out and do think of joining us in the senior common room to carry on the conversation Thank you I left half of my talk at home Did you? I was in such a hurry to my irritation I had to say that That is so funny I'm not just so focused to do that as well