Body Politics in Development: Critical Debates in Gender and Development - Hardcover

Harcourt, Wendy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1842779346 ISBN 13: 9781842779347

Verlag: Bloomsbury 3PL, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Body Politics in Development sets out to define body politics as a key political and mobilizing force for human rights in the last two decades. This passionate and engaging book reveals how once-tabooed issues, such as rape, gender-based violence, and sexual and reproductive rights, have emerged into the public arena as critical grounds of contention and struggle.

Engaging in the latest feminist thinking and action, the book describes the struggles around body politics for people living in economic and socially vulnerable communities and covers a broad range of gender and development issues, including fundamentalism, sexualities and new technologies, from diverse viewpoints. The book's originality comes through the author's rich experience and engagement in feminist activism and global body politics and was winner of the 2010 FWSA Book Prize.

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Wendy Harcourt is a feminist researcher and activist working at the Society for International Development in Rome Italy as senior adviser and chief editor of the quarterly journal Development. Since 1988 she has built up the journal to be one of the most honest and critical quarterly publications on development. Born in Australia she now lives in Italy and is actively engaged in global feminist politics through her work with Women in Development Europe, European Feminist Forum and the Feminist Dialogues. Her work and commitment to global gender justice has taken her around the world teaming up with UN policy makers, research institutes, women's groups and social justice movements. She has written extensively on globalization and development from a gender perspective. Body Politics in Development is her first full-length book and won the 2010 FWSA Book Prize.
Wendy Harcourt is a feminist researcher and activist working at the Society for International Development in Rome Italy as senior adviser and chief editor of the quarterly journal Development. Since 1988 she has built up the journal to be one of the most honest and critical quarterly publications on development. Born in Australia she now lives in Italy and is actively engaged in global feminist politics through her work with Women in Development Europe, European Feminist Forum and the Feminist Dialogues. Her work and commitment to global gender justice has taken her around the world teaming up with UN policy makers, research institutes, women's groups and social justice movements. She has written extensively on globalization and development from a gender perspective. Body Politics in Development is her first full-length book and won the 2010 FWSA Book Prize.

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Body Politics in Development

Critical Debates in Gender and Development

By Wendy Harcourt

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2009 Wendy Harcourt
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84277-934-7

Contents

Acknowledgements, vi, 
Introduction Invisible Bodies, 1, 
One What is Body Politics?, 12, 
Two Reproductive Bodies, 38, 
Three Productive and Caring Bodies, 69, 
Four Violated Bodies, 95, 
Five Sexualized Bodies, 130, 
Six Techno-Bodies, 162, 
Conclusion Empowering Bodies, 197, 
References, 206, 
Index, 220, 

CHAPTER 1

What is Body Politics?

Setting the scene

As someone working in international development I spend a lot of time on planes, mostly on the way to conferences, seminars and workshops, with excursions to countries to observe and discuss other people's lives and bodies. Although the topics are often painful – disease, exploitation, violence, death, inequities and injustice – the conversations are usually conducted in considerable comfort. I listen to rather than experience the pain. I do not feel it on my body, though I may see, imagine and write about it. Often participants in the various meetings raise questions about the incongruity between the actual places where the subjects of development live, and the places and types of policy discussions that are held about them. It can seem incongruous to speak about pain and violation in decorous workshop settings. The contrast between the lived bodily experiences of the violated women and the comfortable lives of women leading gender and development debates evokes an eerie sense of dislocation. And for many it raises questions about whether such gender and development discussions, often held thousands of miles away from the subject of debate, actually contribute to real change for the women and men we so earnestly talk about.

When reading for this book the literature on bodies from anthropology, human geography, sociology, feminist theory and philosophy I was cheered to see that in academia there was no such hesitation about the worth of discussing and writing about bodies. Indeed, unlike when I was doing my PhD twenty years ago, the matter of bodies has become a recurrent theme in many disciplines. Just writing about bodies is deemed a political act in the academy. Yet I still think it is important to focus on the question: whose bodies are seen as worthy of scholarly attention?

How do our embodied realities implicate our understanding of bodies? What is the politics of writing about bodies? To begin with, which bodies are producing knowledge about which other bodies? What are the connections and differences between academic feminist writings and the activities of the people advocating for sexual rights, reproductive rights and health, or those fighting for better public health care, an end to violence against women, and scrutiny of nano- and biotechnologies? Such advocacy and policy conversations usually refer, not to leading philosophers and writers such as Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Gayatri Spivak and Liz Grosz, but to United Nations documents breezily known by the names of the places where the final negotiated documents were signed: Rio, Vienna, Cairo, Beijing, et cetera.

Unlike academic texts such documents do not carry authors' names. The negotiated processes are hard to follow and are steeped in bureaucracy, political plays and power games often completed during late-night and early-morning haggling. The processes that mediate the impact of these statements and policy agreements on embodied experiences of the men and women who are living far away from such discussions are not entirely clear. What is clear is that the subjects of the debates do not have access to the social and economic resources or the languages that would allow them to participate in the negotiation processes. The issue here is that the stated aim of UN discussions is to improve the embodied lives of 'the poor': their health, rights, living conditions and security, and even their intimate, sexual expression. But where do the voices of people defined as poor and marginal fit into a discussion on body politics? There are uncomfortable contradictions at the centre of the body politics of development where those defined as economically poor are treated as objects rather than subjects of their own lives. On paper development is delivered in interventions that are clean, modern, politically free, based on modern technical knowledge, sound public health systems and comprehensive economic planning. The reality is far, far messier.

In this chapter I go deeper into these questions by tracing body politics in feminist texts on the body and gender as well as reflecting on key moments for body politics in gender and development discourse. In this discussion I deliberately keep coming back to the jarring unease I feel about who speaks for whom and to my questions about the methods and proceedings of international development. I try to balance out the positive and negative impacts of the development process. My point is not to decry the efforts to establish good public health systems, education, medical services, reproductive health, functioning economies and prosperity, but to examine the modern development apparatus through which they are meant to be delivered. I hear and see the damage done to local people and places, and the frustrations and difficulties expressed by those involved in the political struggle around the body in gender and development discourse.

The chapter has four main focal areas. After a short introduction on gender and feminism as pivotal terms in the book, I pick out what I see as useful feminist analysis and theory on the body. I then give my version of body politics in gender and development. This leads to an engagement with feminists working in the World Social Forum space who provide some key guidelines to addressing body politics on gender and development. These four main themes set up the key questions and approaches for the rest of the book. If I meander a little in the telling, please bear with me. Given the complexity of the subject, I cross several borders of knowledge and experience as an insider and outsider or, perhaps more honestly, someone trying to reside between feminist theory and politics.

Gender

Gender is a key analytical term in body politics. Gender refers to the psychosocial, political-cultural, scientific and economic reading of sexual difference that informs all human relations. Gender is lived differently in different places, bodies and locations (Connell 2002; Sjoberg 2007). Rather than thinking about gender as a biologically determined division between male and female, it is more helpful to see it as a fluid construct that provides the social inscriptions that enable us to identify, learn and live as male or female in the places we inhabit.

Feminism

I choose to use the term 'feminist'. I recognize from many conversations that the term feminist is not always easily accepted. Sometimes I am asked why I do not use the term 'humanist', for example, particularly as it seems more easily inclusive of men. Feminist for some conjures up images of white elite angry women, and somewhere bra burning hovers in the background. As many stories in this book show, however, a feminist viewpoint excludes neither men nor facets of masculinity, nor is it confined to elite women of the Global North.

Feminism started from struggles against various forms of women's economic, social and cultural oppression (around the world) and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Bloomsbury 3PL
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1842779346
• ISBN 13: 9781842779347
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 234
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland