Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay - Feminist Subversion and Complicity: Governmentalities and Gender Knowledge in South Asia

Feminist Subversion and Complicity interrogates a specific form of feminist practice, that which has involved engaging with state and international institutions to insert gender knowledge in their development interventions. Bringing together contributions from eight feminists located in very different kinds of institutions and spaces from Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India, this book is the outcome of a deeply reflexive process to produce a critique from within of this present day feminist practice. An array of experiences and encounters are scrutinised - from bringing feminist perspectives to governmental projects on education, health, and legal reform to transformations in the discourses and practices of women's movements and feminisms as they encountered developmentalisms. The writers show that feminist politics is not merely assimilated in governmental projects but that it interrupts these projects even as it is assimilated; a feminist politics in which complicity is often a subversive activity, is destabilizing and contesting of meaning.

Editor: Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay
Contributors: Firdous Azim, Dipta Bhog, Jashodhara Dasgupta, J. Devika, Kausar S Khan, Chulani Kodikara, Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay, Sohela Nazneen, Rita Thapa

About the Editor

Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay is a feminist activist and researcher who has worked in development for over 30 years in South Asia and internationally. She has worked since 1996 at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam where she helped found the gender and development team and led it for 15 years. A PhD in social anthropology from the University of Sussex, she has been involved in teaching, training, researching and providing advice on gender and development to institutions in the field. She was Visiting Professor (2015) on gender and development for the MA Development Studies course at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. She has several publications, many of which have been collaborative efforts to generate feminist knowledge with others working in the field of development.

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In memory of
Heinz Steingrver
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Contents

Part 1
From the Ideal of Equality to the Administrative Reality of Governmentalities

Acknowledgments

This book owes a huge debt to the work of Kirsty Milward who not only copy edited all the papers with great professionalism but who also was a member of the team of writers who went beyond the confines of her job to help authors in writing their papers, suggesting changes to structure, questioning formulations and adding to their ideas.

The authors would like to thank the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT), Amsterdam for housing and nurturing one of the most innovative projects in gender and development and of which this book is one of the outcomes. This project entitled Gender Knowledge in Development entailed getting feminists to review their own work in gender mainstreaming in development ten years after the iconic Beijing conference in 1995. The process began with the international conference entitled, Revisiting Studies and Training in Gender and Development The Making and Re-making of Gender Knowledge in May 2007 at KIT in Amsterdam; was followed by the conference on Gender and Access to Justice in sub-Saharan Africa in October 2008 organized jointly with the Centre for Legal Studies at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg; and finally, the South Asia Region Conference on Gender Knowledge Production and Dissemination in Development organized jointly with Sahayog, and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in January 2009 in Kathmandu. This book owes its existence to the discussions at the Kathmandu conference in 2009 although we did not start organizing ourselves till a year later in 2010. We would like to thank all the participants and institutions in the three conferences for making this voyage of discovery and learning possible. As an employee of KIT I would like to especially thank my institution and my colleague Franz Wong who worked tirelessly to conceptualise this project, raise the money and organize the first conference. I would also like to thank the many donors who supported this project and in particular the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Netherlands.

As editor I would like to thank the authors who have spent endless amounts of time and effort on this project. In keeping with feminist traditions of collaboration this book was an exercise in co-creation, mutual learning and solidarity. Although it has taken four years of hard work the authors persisted because knowledge is a terrain of struggle and we felt we were contributing to feminist knowledge.

We would like to thank our publisher Zubaan, Urvashi in particular, and her team.

July, 2016

Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay

Foreword

This important book focuses on the myriad consequences of international developments incorporation of gender. It does so by bringing together a unique group of feminist activist-scholars who have lived and breathed struggles to influence development practice, who can draw on their rich and varied experience to reflect and write. This makes for a book that has a powerfully authentic view from inside these struggles, historical depth as well as a compelling and nuanced analysis of the challenges, compromises and conflicts that are necessarily part of these processes of change.