Kalpana Wilson

‘Race’, Gender and Neoliberalism: changing visual representations in development

Abstract This article examines the increasing use of ‘positive’, active images of ‘poor women in developing countries’ by development institutions, in relation to several interlinked factors: critiques of earlier representations of ‘Third World women’ as an essentialised category of ‘passive victims’; the appropriation—and transformation—within neoliberal discourses of development from the 1990s onwards of concepts of agency and empowerment; and changes in the role of development NGOs in the same period. Through a discussion of recent publicity campaigns by Oxfam Unwrapped, the Nike Foundation and Divine chocolate, the article examines the specific and gendered ways in which these more recent visual productions are racialised, exploring, in particular, parallels and continuities between colonial representations of women workers and todays images of micro-entrepreneurship within the framework of neoliberal globalisation. The article concludes that, like their colonial predecessors, contemporary representations obscure relations of oppression and exploitation, and work to render collective challenges to the neoliberal model invisible.

Agency as ‘Smart Economics’: Neoliberalism, Gender and Development

The focus of this chapter is the incorporation and transformation of feminist notions of agency within neoliberal discourses on gender and development. The construction of ‘poor women in the global South’ as neoliberal agentic subjects is, I suggest, a process which is not only gendered but also racialised. The influence of these neoliberal formulations of agency, I argue, has not only contributed to the neglect of oppressive structures of material and discursive power in feminist work on development but equally importantly has also rendered invisible expressions of agency which question neoliberal models, and which, while operating in acutely coercive conditions, involve collective visions of transformation.

Re-centring ‘Race’ in Development: Population Policies and Global Capital Accumulation in the Era of the SDGs

Abstract This article argues that contrary to some recent theorizing of contemporary development interventions, ideologies of race and discursive and material processes of racialization remain central to development and are embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals. This is explored through an examination of current population policies, and in particular the ‘global family planning strategy’ initiated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in partnership with the British government. Population concerns are now routinely invoked in the context of neo-Malthusian discourses which relate migration, climate change, and conflict. This article argues however that contemporary population policies represent more than a discursive smokescreen for the destructive impacts of global capital accumulation—they are in fact deeply enmeshed in strategies for its expansion. As such, they rely upon embodied coercion and violence which is racialized and gendered, even as they invoke narratives of reproductive rights and choices.

For reproductive justice in an era of Gates and Modi – the violence of India’s population policies

abstractThis article addresses India’s contemporary population control policies and practices as a form of gender violence perpetrated by the state and transnational actors against poor, Adivasi and Dalit women. It argues that rather than meeting the needs and demands of these women for access to safe contraception that they can control, the Indian state has targeted them for coercive mass sterilisations and unsafe injectable contraceptives. This is made possible by the long-term construction of particular women’s lives as devalued and disposable, and of their bodies as excessively fertile and therefore inimical to development and progress. It further considers how population policy is currently embedded in the neoliberal framework of development being pursued by the Indian state. In particular, it argues that the violence of population policies is being deepened as a result of three central and interrelated aspects of this framework: corporate dispossession and displacement, the intensification and extension of women’s labour for global capital, and the discourses and embodied practices of far-right Hindu supremacism. At the same time, India’s population policies cannot be understood in isolation from the global population control establishment, which is increasingly corporate-led, and from broader structures of racialised global capital accumulation. The violence of India’s contemporary population policies and the practices they produce operate at several different scales, all of which involve the construction of certain bodies as unfit to reproduce and requiring intervention and control.

Gender, Violence and the Neoliberal State in India

Developing a gendered understanding of the neoliberal state has been, not surprisingly, a preoccupation for much recent feminist praxis in the Global North and particularly in the Global South. Sustained activism and scholarship has addressed a wide variety of questions including the increased reproductive and productive labour demanded of women; the gendered effects of the privatisation of and dispossession from land, natural resources and public services; and the variegated and often apparently contradictory impacts of multiple incorporations into global markets (Elson, 1991, 2002; Sparr, 1994; Wright, 2006; Sharma, 2010; Owens, 2015; Farris, 2017). The state’s role in attempts to produce women as gendered neoliberal subjects who are simultaneously entrepreneurial and altruistic, and the selective appropriation and incorporation of feminist ideas within the neoliberal discourses of states, global institutions and their corporate partners has been explored, and a specifically ‘neoliberal’ feminism has been identified and delineated (Wilson, 2008, 2015; Chant and Sweetman, 2012; Rottenberg, 2014; Purewal, 2015). New forms of biopolitical regulation, intervention and violence inherent in neoliberal governance (Sangari, 2015); of gendered embodied experiences of marketised reproductive, agricultural and environmental technologies (Rao and Sexton, 2010; Tandon, 2010; Fent, 2012); and of military occupations and the policing of bodies and borders (Puar, 2004; Osuri, 2015) have been analysed.

Worlds beyond the political? Post-development approaches in practices of transnational solidarity activism

Abstract This article considers some ways in which one strand of post-development thinking has influenced non-governmental organisation (NGO)-led activist discourses and practices of transnational solidarity. It argues that there has been a tendency for these discourses and practices to rearticulate racialised constructions of unspoiled and authentic ‘natives’ requiring protection which are historically embedded in colonial practices of governance. In turn, this has meant the failure to acknowledge indigenous histories of political organisation and resistance. Further, the characterisation of development in binary terms as both homogeneous and always undesirable has meant the delegitimisation of demands for equality as well as the neglect of the implications of the decisive shift from developmentalism to neoliberal globalisation as the dominant paradigm. Drawing upon a discussion of aspects of the local, national and transnational campaign to prevent proposed bauxite mining in the Niyamgiri hills in Odisha (India), I argue that given that international NGOs are themselves embedded in the architecture of neoliberal development and aid, their campaigning activities can be understood as facilitating the displacement and marginalisation of local activists and silencing their complex engagements with ideas of development. This potentially defuses and depoliticises opposition to neoliberal forms of development, while transposing collective agency onto undifferentiated publics in the Global North, processes which, however, continue to be actively resisted.