Gender Myths and Feminist Fables

This collection brings together leading feminist thinkers who
examine the struggles for interpretive power which underlies
international development.

• Questions why the insights from years of feminist gender and
  development research are so often turned into 'gender
  myths' and 'feminist fables': women are more
  likely to care for the environment; are better at working together;
  are less corrupt; have a seemingly infinite capacity to
  survive

• Explores how bowdlerized and impoverished representations of
  gender relations have simultaneously come to be embedded in
  development policy and practice

• Traces the ways in which language and images of development are
  related to practice and provides a nuanced account of the politics
  of knowledge production

• Argues that struggles for interpretive power are not only
  important for our own sake, but also for the implications they have
  for women's lives worldwide

• An informed analysis of how 'gender' has been
  transformed in its transfer into development policy and how many
  authors are now revisiting and reflecting on their earlier
  work

Auteur

Andrea Cornwall is a Fellow at the Institute of Development
Studies at the University of Sussex, where she works on the
politics of participation, sexualities and development,
masculinities and women's empowerment. She is Director of the
DFID-funded Research Programme Consortium Pathways of Women's
Empowerment.

Elizabeth Harrison is an anthropologist at the University of
Sussex. Her work has been broadly within the anthropology of
development, with a particular interest in institutional dynamics
and in the deployment of policies for gender justice. She has
conducted research primarily in sub-Saharan Africa and, more
recently, in Europe.

Ann Whitehead teaches anthropology and gender and development
at the University of Sussex. She has written extensively within the
fields of gender and development, feminist anthropology and the
anthropology of rural Ghana.

Résumé
This collection brings together leading feminist thinkers who examine the struggles for interpretive power which underlies international development.

• Questions why the insights from years of feminist gender and development research are so often turned into ‘gender myths’ and ‘feminist fables’: women are more likely to care for the environment; are better at working together; are less corrupt; have a seemingly infinite capacity to survive
• Explores how bowdlerized and impoverished representations of gender relations have simultaneously come to be embedded in development policy and practice
• Traces the ways in which language and images of development are related to practice and provides a nuanced account of the politics of knowledge production
• Argues that struggles for interpretive power are not only important for our own sake, but also for the implications they have for women’s lives worldwide
• An informed analysis of how ‘gender’ has been transformed in its transfer into development policy and how many authors are now revisiting and reflecting on their earlier work

Contenu

1. Gender Myths and Feminist Fables: The Struggle for Interpretive
   Power in Gender and Development (Andrea Cornwall, Elizabeth
   Harrison and Ann Whitehead).

2. A Bigger Piece of a Very Small Pie: Intrahousehold Resource
   Allocation and Poverty Reduction in Africa (Bridget
   O'Laughlin).

3. The Construction of the Myth of Survival (Mercedes
   González de la Rocha).

4. Earth Mother Myths and Other Ecofeminist Fables: How a
   Strategic Notion Rose and Fell (Melissa Leach).

5. Political Cleaners: Women as the New Anti-Corruption Force?
   (Anne Marie Goetz).

6. Resolving Risk? Marriage and Creative Conjugality (Cecile
   Jackson).

7. Feminism, Gender, and Women's Peace Activism (Judy
   El-Bushra).

8. Myths To Live By? Female Solidarity and Female Autonomy
   Reconsidered (Andrea Cornwall).