Sisters unite and fight development
You know every now and then if you’re very good I give you a jolt from the Women’s Studies mailing list. I have one now, fresh in this morning. Someone wanting material for a course she’s going to teach.
the
course is a straight-up political science one on “democracy and
development,” but I’m looking to inject some feminism into it. I
think I’ve got some good stuff on the democracy side, but I’m looking
for:1) articles on women’s/feminist engagement with “development” as a
discourse, or resistance to development projects
2) a film about the conflict between democracy and development–that
is, struggles against state-sponsored development projects that come
from democratic autonomous movements. Off the top of my head, I’m
thinking of action against dams in India, though I’m certain there
are good examples from elsewhere. I also know that women are at the
forefront of many of these struggles, so I’m hoping folks on this
list have some good ideas about where to turn for films on the subject.
I didn’t know resistance to development was feminist, did you? Funny, I thought underdevelopment was not all that good for women. I thought that when there are no schools and no roads and no plumbing that women don’t really thrive all that well. I thought that when there is poverty and resources are scarce, that most of the resources went to men and boys and women and girls got a lot less. I thought schools and books and transport and tools and technology and prosperity were better for women than poverty and backbreaking work and no education. But no – of course – that’s just silly. Development means malls and consumerism and parking lots and consumerism; has to be bad, and imperialist; the feminist thing is to live in a mud wallow and eat fleas for breakfast.
I think that there’s a typing error in your text. You say: funny, I thought that development was not all that good for women. I think that you meant to say that development is good for women. I agree in general, although obviously, there may be situations in which development (a factory which pollutes) harms women.
On the bright side, this academic is clearly resisting the urge to be An Expert with Complete Expertise on her topic. And she has not shut off any romance novels written about the heroines of democracy and development!
Der, yeah. I didn’t mean to say development is good for women, I meant to say I thought underdevelopment was not all that good for women. I was doing about six things at once at the time, and doing at least four of them in a rush.
True about the bright side! Cue Eric Idle…
There you go with that patriarchical logic thing again.
Can’t you just stop thinking and feel the outrage and resentment?!
Stretching very, very hard to be charitable – because I’ve been doing yoga lately, and have become more flexible…
Most of the dam projects in India (and the rest of Asia) have been short-sighted and profit-motivated and generally disastrous for the effected ecosystems, including the humans who live within and depend upon those ecosystems, so her only cited example of resistance to development is focused on resistance to BAD development: That is, development that’s bad for everyone in the “developed” region, especially including women – because women always get the short end of things, as you point out. And I can come up with lots of other state-sponsored “development” projects in the third world that actually amount to projections of corporate power boot-to-neck onto whomever might be in the way – road-building in exploitable rain forests leaps to mind – and many of those are clearly detrimental to women and have sparked women-led political opposition.
But dammitall, I can’t do it! Everything in the way she’s writing the question presumes that ALL development is automatically BAD development, which is question-begging and presumptive and just effing STUPID all over for exactly the reasons you point out!
Oops. I seem to have overstretched and pulled something. No doubt I shall be sore in the morning.
Surely a new dam will provide clean drinking water and electric power for schools and hospitals, that must be good for women?I dont get it.
Unless the aim of the dam is to provide electricity for, say, an aluminum/ium smelter, and will result in the loss by flooding of ancestral farmlands, the forcible displacement of populations, and the pollution by toxic effluents of the remaining lands, all in order to provide a hard-currency income for a few rich investors, corrupt officials and overseas shareholders. It’s amazing how much ‘development’ is actually really crap for ordinary folk nearby. This is one reason [there are many] why billions of western ‘aid’ [and many more billions of nice, fat, profitable loans] poured into Africa has not done much good for almost everyone there… Perhaps the poster OB complains of is merely taking this kind of context for granted?
Dave
That’s all true, but not only is this teacher taking that context for granted, but as per OB’s post, she’s working on the assumption that resistance to such destructive tendancies is primarily a feminist cause. Because development is de facto patriarchal… … blah blah bad men blah… What bothers me is she’s calling for peers to just hand her the evidence to back up a theory that has *already* helped predetermine a course structure. This smacks of intellectual idleness, and of academic riguer giving in to bonheaded, right-on dogma. I pity the students, they’ll just either fail the course, lose interest, or buy the whole line and presto… another load of fresh-faced interns for the bullshit industry.
Richard – Sterilising Gaia’s gift of water rich in the dirt of life is a form of phallocratic opressivation of feminine nature (as conceived of in hegemonic mausculine discourse but we won’t mention that).
Nick, from what OB has posted, your interpretation seems to me to be excessively determined by the spin OB has put on it. Yes there may be some hints of some of these views, but this is a quickie email to a list asking for reading/presentation suggestions, not a developed thesis.
e.g. “articles on women’s/feminist engagement with “development” as a discourse, or resistance to development projects”
Note the “or”.
I don’t object to OB snarking, it’s her blog, but if we have nothing to add but to resnark on the lines of what it “smacks of”, perhaps we are not furthering understanding?
Dave
Yes, fair cop, it is a re-snark – based on my own personal experience of a very left wing a lecturer of mine, a decade and a half back, who often spent time during term abroad campaigning for various causes instead of actually attending class and teaching us. He marked a paper of mine down on the impact of European Objective One funding to Extremadura, in SW Spain, for some reason, it was a perfectly reasonable, articulate well-researched and argued essay that should easily have got a grade above. It had primary research. It had pages of references and bibliography. His criticisms were rather minor ones on presentation I felt. Fine, life’s hard sometimes I thought, get over it, accept the 2:2 mark.
But, a week after that term finished he rang me at home one afternoon and told me, rather excitedly, that if I modified bits of the paper he still had, with a greater spin in favour of his particular campaign against golf course development in the EU, he would get the paper published that summer, in a couple of European journals he was working for !
Pretty much all I had read that year was the LRB and academic journals. I knew the territory. I was very pissed off. The lecturers I knew personally at the university thought he was a massive pain in the arse, and had various theories why he never gave anyone above 63% – as he had done me – so as not to draw too much faculty attention to himself, was one. But when I then complained to the University about this apparent volte-face, the course leader phoned me within minutes at home threatening to have my dissertation mark, which he knew put me easily into the consideration band for a first class honours degree, “re-reviewed”.
Bunch of dogmatic, mendacious unprincipled bastards if you ask me – I admit my first outburst above might have perhaps been tainted by this experience ! Perhaps I’m doomed and I’ll be buying the Telegraph next… but, given the wealth of evidence abounding , I just don’t trust these people to be teaching our kids properly any more.
Don’t worry, they are a dying breed, at least in the UK – I think the US academic market for left-wing loonies may be more self-sustaining, but OTOH it has had to live under conditions of siege for thirty years.
…I’ll accept none of this is of course enough to impugn the Wimmins Studies teacher in question of much at all… quiet day, sorry.
Oh I don’t know, I think there’s enough in what the WS teacher wrote to impugn her of having an overgeneralized preconception and looking for material with which to teach that overgeneralized preconception. I don’t think the ‘or’ saves her since it merely separates two disparagements of development as such.
“articles on women’s/feminist engagement with “development” as a discourse” is a disparagement? Heck, if I’m ever accused of thoughtcrime I hope I don’t get you on my jury…
Sure it’s a disparagement – what else are the scare quotes for?
And saying something is a disparagement isn’t quite the same as saying it’s a thoughtcrime. If I’m ever accused of accusing someone of thoughtcrime I hope I don’t get you on my jury…
But seriously folks. Yeah, I take ‘”development” as a discourse’ to indicate a certain view of the matter. Tell me why I’m wrong.
Dave: It’s a bit more complicated than that. I live in Chile, which has undergone a rapid development process in the last 20 years, a process which is occurring in Peru, a country which you mention, at present.
While it’s certainly true that the banks and the rich have gotten richer, that the local elite is still on top, the masses of people do have better lives, not only in terms of income, but also better health care, more possibilities of education, more access to information (development brings computers and internet), hot water in their homes, washing machines,
refrigerators, things that you probably take for granted, but which the mass of Chileans did not have
25 years ago. It would be nice if development brought more equality too, but I would hardly say that the poor and oppressed should resist development. And if you ask the woman on the street in Chile, I’m sure that she’ll answer that she prefers development (in spite of the banks getting richer) to the good old days without shoes in the winter.
Dave and G. are both quite right–there is a lot of “development” that translates to “cronyism and corruption,” not actual humanitarian benefit.
Sure, there is the occasional lefty who is reflexively Luddite about this kind of thing and thinks running water is imperialist. But without knowing more about the perpetrator of this particular quote, I wouldn’t assume that she is one of these. In fact, I’d say she’s probably not:
struggles against state-sponsored development projects that come from democratic autonomous movements.
This is very clear to me: STATE-sponsored development projects, opposed by DEMOCRATIC movements. Nothing about tradition or the evils of a Western technological mindset or what-have-you, just an observation about how the state sometimes works in developing countries.
I also don’t see where she says “development” is inherently patriarchal, as Nick S. accuses her of saying, or even that development is bad in any way. She says that (1) feminists have opposed some development projects (true), and (2) that democratic movements have opposed state-sponsored development projects (also true). She does not say that all or most development is anti-feminist or anti-democratic, or that all or most feminists or democrats are anti-development.
Dave so what if the dam did supply a aluminium smelting plant, that would provide much needed jobs for local men and women along with power and drinking water.
dirgible thanks for clearing that up for me I was at a bit of a loss to understand the logic behind this womans thought proces.
Drinking water? Smelting aluminium doesn’t produce drinking water. Damming a free-flowing river to create a stagnant lake, besides burying what is often the best land in an area, is more likely, unless actively mitigated, to create the conditions for disease than to alleviate it.
And why do you think everyone in the Third World is sitting around unemployed [presumably eating their own hair or something] just waiting for someone to come along and give them a job in a shiny new factory?
Three words: Union Carbide. Bhopal.
“struggles against state-sponsored development projects that come from democratic autonomous movements.
This is very clear to me: STATE-sponsored development projects, opposed by DEMOCRATIC movements.”
No. State-sponsored development projects, opposed by democratic autonomous movements. You left out the rhetorical nudge of ‘autonomous’ – whatever that’s supposed to mean, apart from right-on. And what’s with the opposition between state-sponsored and democratic? That’s a genuine opposition in many places, but not in many others, so it’s odd to treat it as an essentialist dichotomy. It’s that kind of thing that hints to me she has a romantic woolly sentimental view of the matter – kind of a Bushesqe white hat-black hat view, ironically enough.
Just to be clear – I’m not a fan of inequality or corruption or environmental degradation or mass chemical poisonings. To put it mildly. But I don’t think development as such implies any of that – although ‘developer’ almost does, at least in the US, which is odd; ‘developer’ here generally seems to mean someone who wants to build expensive housing or an upmarket mall, preferably on a wetland. But I think ‘development’ has a much broader meaning and connotation.
“I live in Chile, which has undergone a rapid development process in the last 20 years,”
Amos :From a medical perspective – by investing in health care that is holistic and of which focuses on prevention, Cuba has created one of the most effective systems in the world.
Cuban health care is to die for – and people from Ireland have tremendous admiration for it indeed. Medical people from Ireland go to Cuba to learn from it – as the Irish system in place is absolutely diabolical, despite the Celtic Tiger.
I’m wrong. According to Wikipedia, the U.S. has a longer life expectancy than either Cuba or Chile. Cuba is marginally ahead of Chile, but the difference is minimal.
Maybe you’re thinking of infant mortality? The US has a shockingly high rate of infant mortality, generally attributed (I think) to lack of (free at point of service) pre-natal care etc.
For the record, Chile is 153 in a list of 195 countries regarding infant mortality; the United States 163; and Cuba 168. Sierra Leone is 1, and Iceland 195. Those are UN figures; the CIA gives other figures.
You left out the rhetorical nudge of ‘autonomous’ – whatever that’s supposed to mean, apart from right-on. And what’s with the opposition between state-sponsored and democratic?
Except neither she nor I said that “state-sponsored” or “democratic” are always opposed. Nor did she or I imply it–she merely specified that she was interested in a certain kind of development (state-sponsored) and a certain kind of resistance (democratic) to that state-sponsored development. Of course the two aren’t always opposed.
No – if you say ‘the conflict between democracy and development’ you are indeed at least implying that there is an inherent conflict. Otherwise the way to say it would be ‘conflicts between’ – not ‘the conflict.’
Hmm, possibly, but that’s a fine distinction, particularly for a casual query on a mailing list. Which is why I’m not offended or perturbed by it.
By the way, any comments on the weird Western coverage of China? I figure some of it fits into the anti-universalist nonsense that you criticize so well. For instance, I’ve heard quite a few Westerners condemning those who criticize the Chinese government as being liberal imperialists in outlook and attributing the actions of the Chinese government to “Chinese culture” and “what the Chinese want” and “Chinese values” …as opposed to, you know, what some of the more powerful Chinese nationals can do because they’ve got big guns and money and prisons.
For instance, David Brooks’ two recent columns (from the conservative side, which is relatively unusual): http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/opinion/15brooks.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/opinion/15brooks.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
and the letters in response to him, some of which are quite good:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/opinion/l15brooks.html