Zentrum für EntwicklungsforschungCenter for Development ResearchUniversity of Bonn

ZEF

Neither Gender Nor Development?Decolonial Options for

Rethinking Gender and Development

 ZEFa Disciplinary Doctoral Seminar

8 December 2014 

Lecturer: Dr. Epifania A. Amoo-Adare

ZEFINTRODUCTIONSIn pairs, interview and report back on the following:•Your name•Your country of origin •Your discipline •Your research topic•Your self-definition•Your expectations for the class

ZEFCOURSE REQUIREMENTS

• Openness in Questioning

• Respect in Listening• Critical Engagement• Committed Participation• reading of the obligatory texts

• class discussions and activities

ZEFCOURSE DESCRIPTION

The premise of this class is that a critical pedagogy on gender and development, especially the forces involved in the production and reproduction of both, is a necessary condition for better comprehension of any society and the effects (physical, social, economic or cultural) of various development interventions in the quest for modernity. Consequently, we will deconstruct widespread understandings of gender as a given analytical construct for interrogating conditions in “developing” societies, which are in turn seen as set in specific places that are bound by fixed categories, e.g., the nation-state as a structure developed for and not a context that is developed by society. We will also look at how the “colonial matrix of power” (Quijano 2000, 2007) is highly implicated in these ideological processes.

ZEFCOURSE OBJECTIVES

• To disrupt normative narratives of gender and development through feminist decolonial critique.

• To formulate a basic understanding of the social construction of the colonial/modern gender system within a linear narrative of development.

• To comprehend the researcher’s role in the re-articulation or the subversion of gender and development narratives.

ZEFCOURSE KEY QUESTIONS• How does decolonial thinking (from

critical, feminist and spatially-oriented perspectives) disrupt normative narratives of gender and development?

• What is the relationship between spatiality, knowledge and power?

• How does (hegemonic) knowledge production arise as a consequence of struggles over (academic) place?

• How is the researcher implicated in appropriating, re-constructing and/or dismantling existing concepts of knowledge and their related structures?

• How can decolonial options inform alternative social constructions of knowledge(s) on “developing” societies?

ZEFCOURSE RATIONALE – False & Unknown Categories

US Shocked Andorra Not in Africa - Onion News (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q_iqrvnC_4 )

ZEFRATIONALE – Reading the World Critically“Reading is not exhausted merely by decoding the written word or written language, but rather anticipated by and extending into knowledge of the world. Reading the world precedes reading the word, and the subsequent reading of the word cannot dispense with continually reading the world. Language and reality are dynamically intertwined. The understanding attained by critical reading of a text implies perceiving the relationship between text and context” (Freire1991, p. 5).

ZEFRATIONALE – Writing the World Critically“Writing can also be dangerous because we reinforce and maintain a style of discourse which is never innocent.” (Smith 1999, p. 36) “When I read texts, for example, I frequently have to orientate myself to a text world in which the centre of academic knowledge is either in Britain, the United States or Western Europe; in which words such as ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘our’, ‘I’ actually exclude me.” (Smith 1999, p. 35)

“My whole struggle is to change the disciplines, to change the genres, to change how people look at a poem, at theory or at children’s books. So I have to struggle between how many of the rules I can break and how I still can have readers read the books without being frustrated.” (Anzaldua 1987/2012, p. 272)

ZEFRATIONALE – Decolonizing Westernized Universities“In the Westernized universities, the knowledge produced by other epistemologies, cosmologies, and world views arising from other world-regions with diverse time/space dimensions and characterized by different geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge are considered “inferior” in relation to the “superior” knowledge produced by the few Western men of five countries (i.e., England, France, Germany, Italy, and the USA) that compose the canon of thought in the Humanities and Social Sciences” (Grosfoguel 2013, p. 75)

ZEFRATIONALE – Decolonizing Westernized UniversitiesGrosfoguel (2013) describes the origins of the epistemic racism/sexism underscoring the ongoing “colonial matrix of power” as being rooted in four genocides/epistemicides of the 16th century as follows:

•Firstly, the Spanish conquest of Muslims and Jews in Al-Andalus during the 15th century. •Next, the conquest of the Americas, after Christopher Columbus’ arrival there on 12 October 1492.•Then, the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of Africans, under the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, for over 400 years. •Finally, in the 16th century, the genocide of Indo-European women, branded as witches due to their leadership, authority and vast indigenous knowledge.

ZEFRATIONALE – Decolonizing Westernized UniversitiesGrosfoguel (2013) proposes that in order to decolonize the westernized university, among other things, we must do the following:

•Acknowledge the provincialism and epistemic racism/sexism of the foundational epistemic structures, resulting from the four epistemicides/ genocides.

•Break with the uni-versalism, where provincial “Western man epistemology” (i.e., now, the Euro-American knowledge production and canon) is assumed to be universal.

•Bring epistemic diversity to the canon of thought in order to create a pluri-verse of meaning and concepts, including having inter-epistemic conversations to produce re-definitions of old concepts and the reconstitution of knowledges on other world-senses and views.

ZEFCOURSE RATIONALE – Your Positionality

This is My Positionality: http://youtu.be/Sz3RPZeqGFk

ZEFEXERCISE – YOUR POSITIONALITY

In pairs, ask each other the below questions and report back to the group.•  As a researcher/ scholar-in-the making:• What brought you to your thesis/ research idea?

• Can you trace when you first became interested in the subject/ research question?

• Why is this topic specifically important to you?

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THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER AND NATION STATES

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A man and his son are traveling 150 kilometers an hour in a blue Lada when their car hits an icy patch in the road, spins out of control, and flips over into a ditch.  They are both taken by ambulance to the hospital.  The boy is rushed into an operating room for emergency surgery.  But the surgeon looks at the boy and refuses to operate on him.  When the nurse asks why, the surgeon says, “Because he is my son.”

HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?

GENDER BRAIN TEASER

ZEFREVISITING SEX VERSUS GENDER

• Sex is considered to be ‘natural.’

• Sex is biological; relating to differences in physicality, physiology and procreative function.

• Sex is considered to be constant; remains the same everywhere.

• Sex is considered to be unchangeable (Bhasin, 2000).

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• Gender is a social construct.

• Gender is socio-cultural; refers to beliefs about masculine and feminine qualities, behavior, roles, responsibilities, dress, etc. (i.e., stereotypes).

• Gender is variable; differs over time, plus between (and within) locations.

• Gender qualities and roles are neither universal nor unchangeable (Bhasin, 2000).

REVISITING GENDER VERSUS SEX

ZEFREVISITING GENDER DIFFERENCES

ZEFREVISITING GENDER DIFFERENCES

ZEF

Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater, Had a wife and couldn't keep her!He put her in a pumpkin shell, And there he kept her very well!

GENDER ORIGINS – THE CULT OF DOMESTICITY

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Discriminatory Space was witnessed in the Global North, for example, through: • Gendered design of urban spatiality in Victorian

England; resulting in the application of sexual-difference to construct hierarchical gender roles, i.e., “the cult of domesticity”.

• Domesticating local space; resulting in the sexualizing and racializing of women, poor and undesirables, plus mapping and ordering of evolutionary progress via the Family of Man Tree.

• Exportation of true womanhood ideas of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity to North America (revival of ideal domesticity in 1950s suburbia with mass advertising).

• Notion of domesticity, middle-class family and true womanhood, then, used to organize global history.

Victorian Ladies (ideal): (http://youtu.be/eO5AuYNWQGA)Victorian Ladies (real): (http://youtu.be/dYW7-guUbL4)

DISCRIMINATORY SPACE – GENDER & RACE

ZEFGENDERED SPACE – TODAY’S NEW DOMESTICITY

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Discriminatory Space was witnessed in the Global South, for example, through: • Projection of ideas of domesticity onto foreign

lands; resulting in “panoptic time” simultaneously “conquering” and “saving by civilizing” the “anachronistic space” and empty “virgin” lands, plus their exotic and “backwards” people (e.g., Orientalism).

• Exportation of ideological hierarchies via domestication and colonization, including the concept of the Family of Man tree.

• Post-independence nation-state building with women as symbolic bearers of tradition and culture, yet simultaneously denied full engagement in political agency.

• War on Terror; continuing the trope of “conquering” but “saving by civilizing” of foreign women (and their men) from their oppressive and backward lived circumstances.

DISCRIMINATORY SPACE – GENDER & RACE

ZEFGENDERED SPACE – COLONIAL DOMESTICATION

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“This intricate and overlapping set of Eurocolonial worlds (first Spanish and Portuguese, later principally English, French, and Dutch) set the basis for a permanent traffic in ideas of peoplehood and selfhood, which created the imagined communities of recent nationalisms throughout the world.” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 28)

NATIONS ARE IMAGINED COMMUNITIES

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• Imagined Communities

• Mythical Notions (common origins, common destiny)

• Political & Socio-Cultural Constructions (gender, race, class, etc.)

• Threatened (both within and without)

• Flexible Category (relational sovereignty)

• Resilient & Adaptable (negotiating)

NATIONS ARE IMAGINED COMMUNITIES

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“All nationalisms are gendered; all are invented; and all are dangerous… in the sense that they represent relations to political power and to the technologies of violence” (McClintock 1997, p. 89)

NATION STATES ARE IMAGINED AND GENDERED

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According to McClintock (1997) and Mohanram (1999), Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias provide us with 5 major ways in which women have been implicated by nationalism, as follows:

1) As biological reproducers of the members of national collectivities (e.g., ethnic groups)

2) As reproducers of the boundaries of national groups (e.g., through restriction on sexual or marital relations)

3) As active transmitters and producers of the national culture.

4) As symbolic signifiers of national difference.

5) As active participants in national struggles.

Women in the Zapatista Movement: http://youtu.be/NkdUs2Dxv4s

NATION STATES ARE IMAGINED AND GENDERED

ZEF

“The reason to historicize gender formation is that without this history, we keep on centering our analysis on the patriarchy; that is, on a binary, hierarchical, oppressive gender formation that rests on male supremacy without a clear understanding of the mechanisms by which heterosexuality, capitalism, and racial classification are impossible to understand apart from each other. The heterosexualist patriarchy has been an ahistorical framework of analysis. To understand the relation of the birth of the colonial/modern gender system to the birth of global colonial capitalism—with the centrality of the coloniality of power to that system of global power—is to understand our present organization of life anew” (Lugones 2007, p. 187).

THE INVENTION OF “THIRD WORLD” WOMEN

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“I would like to suggest that the feminist writings I analyze here discursively colonize the material and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women in the third world, thereby producing/re-presenting a composite singular “Third World Woman”—an image which appears arbitrarily constructed, but nevertheless carries with it the authorizing signature of Western humanist discourse” (Mohanty 1988, p. 334)

“When we are in your world many times you remake us in your own image, although sometimes you clearly and explicitly acknowledge that we are not wholly there in our being with you” (Lugones 1983, p. 576)

THE INVENTION OF “THIRD WORLD” WOMEN

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“I should add here that I don’t consider any society to be primitive. I think there are different spaces/times on our planet, different temporalities, that no civilization is in advance or behind on any another, that I don’t locate myself on a scale of progress and that I don’t consider progress an end in itself nor a political goal. In other words, I don’t necessarily consider progress to be progressive but sometimes, even often, it is regressive.” (Bouteldja 2010)“The [decolonial] question itself is [of importance], for it humbles us, and curbs our imperialist tendencies as well as our interfering reflexes. It prevents us from considering our own norms as universal and trying to make other’s realities fit into our own.” (Bouteldja 2010)

THE INVENTION OF “THIRD WORLD” WOMEN

ZEFGENDERED REALITIES

UNPAID WORK FORMAL WORK

ZEFGENDERED REALITIESPARTICIPATION EDUCATION

ZEF PLUS; WHAT ABOUT MEN AND BOYS?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8BkTY2eK_Y&feature=youtu.be

ZEF GENDER-BIASED RESEARCH

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Discuss how decolonial thinking, as well as our knowledge of gendered realities, might affect our research practice in terms of the following:

1. Literature Review2. Design

a) Methodologyb) Sampling

3. Data Collection4. Analysis5. Dissemination of Data (publication,

presentation, etc. )

REFLECTION ON RESEARCH PRACTICE

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Session Wrap UpTake a moment to reflect on the session we have just had and then write down the following on a piece of paper:• From this session, I liked…• From this session, I disliked…• From this session, I learnt…• From this session, I was confused by…