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Gendered approaches to development have been left wide open to interpretation. This is notable in the way in which gender training and gender planning frameworks have been dished out to “eager development professionals, who instantly declared themselves gender-sensitized” (Porter and Vesghese 1999:131). Words such as ‘gender’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘participation’ became catch phrases that governments, bi/multi-lateral development agencies and various NGOs became exceedingly happy to use. However, in many instances the only change was in the terminology, not the philosophy. In relation to GAD, gender merely replaced woman (Rathgeber 1990:495), and despite proclamations of being gender and class focused the approach remained gynocentric. GAD was still very concerned with women’s positioning vis-à-vis men (Bhavnani et al. 2003:11), rather than seeing women as the actual measure or as needing to define their own measures.

Moreover, various GAD scholars and practitioners tended to also homogenise Third World women in a particular way (Bhavnani et al. 2003:6). Rarely did the gender approach to development challenge the idea that development equated with modernisation and was therefore the answer (Parpart and Marchand 1995:14). The GAD approach also never sought to unpack or challenge how colonial discourse

27 _{Subtle strategies refers to attempts to “achieve profound, positive changes” and are “defined more} by the process by which they are implemented and their outcomes than by their content” (Scheyvens 1998:237).

had impacted on Third World women (Chua et al. 2000:822-23). With their feminist focus on patriarchy it did not go unnoticed that both feminism and patriarchy are Western concepts which may not be applicable in a non-Western cultural context. GAD distracted from the fact that relationships between men and women were much more complex than this (Cleaver 2002, Cornwall 2000).

GAD is still the current development approach used by most scholars, policy planners, and bi/multi-lateral agencies to articulate the relationship between women’s inequity and the development process (Bhavnani et al. 2003:5), however, scholarly debates have recognised the above-mentioned drawbacks with the earlier GAD approaches. Feminist post-development critiques have been of great value to GAD thinking and practice and women’s empowerment, because in accepting and understanding difference and the power of discourse, they have sought to foster:

open consultative dialogue which can empower women in the South to articulate their own needs and agendas. Instead of simply seeing women as a disempowered, vulnerable group in need of salvation by Western expertise (Parpart and Marchand 1995:19).

Critique from the feminist post-development corner required the GAD expert to rethink their approach to development (Parpart and Marchand 1995:19). This critique has been a necessary part to the re-conceptualising, reframing and shifting of GAD along the development trajectory.

Critiques also came from scholars writing about masculinities. Within the GAD literature, they argued, there hadn’t been a critical enough focus on men (Chant and Gutmann 2000, Sweetman 1997, 2001). Attention was drawn to the fact that men had generally been portrayed in a certain way. Explicitly, men had been rendered to the category of powerful oppressor (Cleaver 2002, Kandirikirira 2002). WID and GAD development discourse had constructed Third World men as homogenously problematic. Because Western thoughts, beliefs and values are hugely evident in development thinking:

Differences are presupposed and indeed actively created through practices that define two static and oppositional categories: ‘women and men’. Differences within or between these categories, or indeed the intersection of gender with differences that make more of a difference to the strategies and tactics particular men and women adopt, tend to be disregarded in the process (Cornwall 2000:20).

Until recently, men have remained missing or have been viewed as the problem in gender discourse (Cornwall 2000; also see Chant and Gutmann 2000, Cleaver 2002, (2001) Development 44(3), (2000) IDS Bulletin 31(2), Sweetman 2001). GAD literature, and therefore GAD practice, still made/makes ethnocentric assumptions about the content of the relations between men and women in various societies. More often than not, only exploitation, subordination and conflict have been exposed (see Kabeer’s 1994:51-53 critiques of Mies 1980, 1982 and 1988), while the importance of familial bonds can be overlooked or the importance of working together gets underplayed (Gardner and Lewis 1996:124). Men, as sons, fathers, brothers or husbands, with whom women have healthy, mindful, caring, and supportive relationships can be glossed over (Cornwall 2000:18). As will be demonstrated later in this thesis, the importance of ‘familial bonds’ and ‘co-operation’ are active concepts that are fundamental to many women, therefore any ‘taken-for-granted’ assumptions about men and women, gender relations and indeed the very concept of gender, need to be explored and deconstructed so as to move “beyond the static stereotypes that continue to evade the field” of development and GAD (Cornwall 2000:18).

The gender relations approach had not looked critically enough at the varying, complex and multiple relationships that women have with men or each other that change over space, time and context. Rather “western gender constructs and binaries are often simply imported into contexts where they have little place in the ways that people think about or organise themselves” (Cornwall 2000:20). Women, under the umbrella of gender were often lumped together, regardless of whether they have a common voice or common interests. The GAD approach in presupposing female solidarity (Cornwall 2000:20), presupposed dissonance with men.

GAD in practice also neglected the experience of men in terms of their own powerless positions, inequalities, dependency, or blocked opportunities (Cleaver 2002:1). The categories of ‘women’ and ‘men’ become generalised and are then utilised “to make blanket assumptions about needs, interests, rights and responsibilities” (Cornwall 2000:20). Anything that falls outside these neatly bounded categories of what it is to be a man or a woman in the Third World, for example, same sex relationships, or what it might mean to be a woman in a position of power with a man in the Third World, are swept aside. Third World women were regularly understood to be victims in need of saving from their illiterate, pregnant,

tradition-bound selves, or they are the deserving poor, especially if they have been abandoned by a ‘useless’ husband (Mohanty 1988). In opposition, but still just as reinforcing, Third World women have also been typecast as heroic survivors (Cornwall et al. 2004:1). If they have not been abandoned by their husbands, they are now empowered enough to leave them, and this new found empowering self was generally seen to be because of some GAD intervention (Cornwall 2000:20).

Finally, critique within the GAD literature also noted that there hadn’t been a critical enough focus on ‘culture as the lived experience’. For the most part the issue of culture is applied in two opposing, yet just as debilitating, ways. Firstly, as already noted, it is seen to be a millstone to development because cultural practices hinder the development process or they are not in keeping with ideas about what constitutes being developed, and secondly, culture is used as a rationale for maintaining the status quo. Either way, culture is crudely used to substantiate the trajectory and shape of development. Concerns for maintaining cultural ways have been argued for only when it suits the development project or practitioners. The importance of understanding and applying culture holistically in the development process had not been fully recognised

Building on the work of Braidotti et al. (1994), Marchand (1995), Mohanty (1988), (1991), Sen and Grown (1987), and a number of other Third World feminists and Southern scholars, Bhavnani et al. (2003) have offered a more critical vantage point calling for a new framework for analysis “that puts women at the centre, culture on par with political economy and keeps an eye on critical practices, pedagogies and movements for social justice” (p.2). They argue that simply attending to gender is not enough. Engaging with gender also requires an unconditional engagement with culture, as the two cannot be separated. In this instance culture is understood to be not just about traditions and practices, but a way:

to comprehend how people actually live their lives – a ‘structure of feelings’… culture as the lived experience insists on agentic notion of human beings and is thus understood as a dynamic set of relationships through which inequality is created and challenged, rather than as singular property that resides within an individual, groups or nation (Williams cited in Bhavnani et al. 2003:4).

They go on to argue that culture needs to be viewed as the relationship between production and reproduction in women’s lives, which centres women’s agency and struggles. As I have discussed earlier, all too often culture has been seen to be an

obstacle to development, or the reason that women are disadvantaged. Instead culture needs to be incorporated with gender and seen as a source of information or as a vehicle for change, thus cultural aspects of women’s lives need to be taken seriously when analysing women’s position. Instead of automatically seeing culture as a deficit, consideration needs to be given to the idea that culture may actually be an asset. The possibility that cultural frameworks in action may be models of development in their own right needs to be given due consideration. Adding culture to the women/gender and development question seeks to retain economics, however that might be defined, but not privilege it above other aspects of peoples’ everyday lives; their cultures (Chua et al. 2000:825). Economic issues need to be seen as cultural also, indeed all elements need to be view simultaneously, that is culture, women, men, and economics. It is only then that a more succinct understanding of how inequalities are created, reproduced and challenged will be gained. Adding culture to the debate means that:

the relationship among all categories of inequality can be seen to be locally specific, historically contingent, shifting, enmeshed, rather then mutually inclusive or in competition with each other (Chua et al. 2000:836).

In drawing on culture in this way, a more nuanced understanding of the everyday lives of women in the developing context is likely, including FHHs. The intersection of culture and development may also reveal differing ways of understanding development and open up a whole new world of development options and possibilities.