Gender and the Political Economy of Development

From Nationalism to Globalization

Shirin M. Rai

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745614915, 9780745614908
• eBook ISBN: 9780745668345
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

"Rai subjects the projects of both national development and globalization to searching scrutiny through a gender lens. Her emphasis on the intersection of gender and other forms of inequality is very timely. An excellent text for a wide range of courses in politics, sociology and development studies."
--Diane Elson, University of Essex

Shirin Rai pushes us to rethink development. She brings us to ear a feminist analysis that grows out of her nuanced understanding of both China's and India's gendered experience. Readers will find fresh ideas and sharp caveats about how patriarchy is sustained and fought over globally.
--Cynthia Enloe, Clark University

This important book ranges across contemporary debates in the study of gender and political economy. It situates differing gender-based theories in the context of wider political and historical processes such as colonialism, post-colonialism, Cold War politics, the New World Order, globalization and democratization.

Shirin Rai focuses on the gendered nature of the political economy of development, and the shifts that have occurred as economies and states have moved from a development process that is state-focused to one that is clearly framed by globalization. Differences between men and women, and differences between women in contrasting social and geographical positions, are explored in relation to their influence on political practice. Rai considers how the structures of economic and political power frame men and women and examines the consequences of these gendered positionings. She makes important connections between the political narratives of different levels of governance and examines the discourse of empowerment at these different levels.

The book concludes by reflecting on the way men and women are coping with the challenges of globalization and argues that women's movements need to re-establish the link between the recognition of difference and the redistribution of economic and social resources if they are to maintain their radical edge.

This will be essential reading for undergraduates and graduates in politics, development studies and gender studies.

1	Gender, Nationalism and ‘Nation-Building’ Discourses of Development

... the relations between the people and the nation, the nation and the state, relations which nationalism claims to have resolved once and for all, are relations which continue to be contested and therefore open to negotiation all over again.

Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments

Introduction

Development¹ has historically been a nationalist project. The edifice of eighteenth-century anti-colonial nationalism, which is a gendered ideology of resistance as well as of power, has included ‘development’ as progress and civilization sustained by religion, culture and tradition as well as by science and technology, capital and markets. The creation of the nation-state, of ‘its world of meanings’ – in other words, nation-building – has been the starting point of what has been called ‘the developmental state’. In this chapter I examine how nationalism and nationalist struggles have framed discourses and strategies of development.² I argue that nationalist ideology framed the development agendas of elites in post-colonial contexts. Some agendas were prioritized and others were deemed of secondary importance, reflecting the gender, class and ethnic biases of post-colonial elites. Ideology, religion and imaging of the nation-state played a crucial part in setting the development agendas in post-colonial nations.³ In the process of nation-building, the ‘economic man’ was the critical player in the development discourse, and his counterpart, the ‘political man’, was the citizen. ‘The citizen’s’ interests were articulated in a universalist language, that allowed only certain issues of economic development to be addressed.⁴ Both women and ‘subaltern’ men – of lower classes and castes and weaker ethnic groups – were co-opted into the elite nationalist programme despite the local struggles waged by them in their own interests (see Guha, 1982: 1–7). While nationalism provided new spaces for women to mobilize in – and even enabled them to use and endorse the universal construction of ‘the citizen’ in particular contexts – at the same time, it framed those spaces, landscaped them through rhetoric and language in particular ways. However, many women, themselves part of the national elites, participated in the construction of nationalist imaginings and programmes, even though the process itself led to their simultaneous co-optation within and/or exclusion from these constructions (see Bereswill and Wagner, 1998: 233). I argue, therefore, that the gendered nature of development discourses can be understood only if we take into consideration the processes of post-colonial state formation, the socio-economic trajectories set by nationalist elites and the struggles of women’s movements against these, as well as their complicity in, them.

Gender and Nationalism

Feminist scholars have made an important contribution to the study of nationalism (Jayawardena, 1986; Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1989; Enloe, 1989; Sangari and Vaid, 1993; Kandiyoti, 1991b; Hall, 1992; McClintock, 1993). They have suggested that women are central to the construction of nationalist discourses as biological reproducers of members of ethnic collectivities, as reproducers of the boundaries of ethnic/national groups, as central participants in the ideological reproduction of the collectivity and as transmitters of its culture.⁵ They are also important to nationalism as signifiers of ethnic/national differences. Ideological discourses often highlight (symbolic) women to construct, reproduce and transmit ethnic/nationalist categories. Finally, women continue to be important as subjects – participants in national economic, political and military struggles. These different roles that women play means that ‘[l]iving as a nationalist feminist is one of the most difficult political projects in today’s world’ (Enloe, 1989: 46).

Gender relations are thus important as a frame for nationalist practices, and nationalism as an ideology is important for the configurations of gender relations within the national space. Biology and culture are key elements in the construction of new political spaces and of new discourses of empowerment. However, as Walby has commented, more work needs to be done on nationalism’s economic consequences for women’s lives such that the division of labour is not simply ‘subsumed under biology or culture’ but is made visible in the public domains of national development (1997:182–3). Moving on from Walby, I argue that the gendered ideologies of nationalism framed the ways in which women’s labour was configured, counted, assessed and rewarded. Masculine pride and humiliation in the context of colonialism had fashioned ‘(colonized) woman’ as a victim to be rescued – first by the colonizers and then by the colonized male elites – and as the centre of the household to be protected and cherished. Thus, she provided a node of self-awareness of a particular kind for men, and hence was made visible in the public arenas in particular ways. As I will make clear below, in decolonized nation-states, policy-making acknowledged some of these complexities only by denying them.

Women’s labour and women’s citizenship are markers of this confusion that we see repeatedly in liberal nationalist discourses as well as in Marxist ones. Whether it is population policies, human rights, conditions of employment or endorsing of monogamous family structures, nation-states have used the discourses of both nationalism and development to circumscribe women’s lives. And because of the history of colonialism, the pain of struggling against the idea of the community, culture and family, women have found it at times hard to oppose the boundaries being drawn around them – sometimes in their own names – by others – largely nationalist, masculine elites. In this way, the power of discourse was systematically used to frame women’s role in development⁶ – whether as reproducers of the nation and markers of its cultural boundaries, or as participants in its economic life.

The Argument

Nationalism is a much theorized concept, as is development. While feminist scholarship provided a gendered critique of the concept of nationalism, interventions in the post-structuralist mode have opened up new spaces within Development Studies that allow us to examine the discursive power of nationalism in the economic agenda-setting of the nation-state (Crush, 1995; Escobar, 1995a; Marchand and Parpart, 1995; Sylvester, 1999). Building on both these sets of literature, I illustrate the importance of the language of nationalism for the construction of the agenda of development, and suggest that women’s particular positionings within the family and society were central to both these projects. I argue that nationalism allowed conversations about development to take place between colonial and nationalist male elites. Women were largely excluded from these conversations, which themselves took place in very different contexts of power. However, I emphasize that these conversations, while exclusionary, were by no means discrete; on the contrary they were untidy, contradictory and allowed spaces for contestation that were utilized by women. The partiality of these conversations and exclusions was also reflected in the unfolding story of development in decolonized states. Nationalism and development, then, were ‘Janus-faced’ creatures (Nairn, 1981) at once mobilizing and excluding women from the project of ‘nation-building’.

After examining the dominant yet unstable gender discourses of the colonial and nationalist elites, I explore the contributions of women activists to national movements and the articulated projects of nation-building, the spaces that women were able to create both within the nationalist movement and within the nationalist discourse, and also the dilemmas that they faced in participating in nationalist movements and discourses of nation-building. I suggest that the trajectory of women’s participation within different types of nationalist movements and different political systems had a profound impact on the kinds of citizenships that they were offered, and their ability to be active in the public sphere. Here, it is important to keep in mind the evolving nature of nationalism, of the nation, and of its development. The particularity of political and economic contexts led to ‘ “rounds of restructuring” of the nation-state’ (Walby, 1997: 190) and posed different issues of evolving social relations for women and for men.

I conclude from this discussion that nationalism and nation-states born of nationalist struggles posed particular challenges for women. While remaining central to the project of ‘nation-building’, women were made ‘invisible’ through universalized discourses of citizenship and economic development. Although the new citizenships allowed women to take their place within the political space of the nation as individuals, the ambivalence that surrounded these roles meant that this individuation remained fragile; the social symbolism of ‘woman’ continued to threaten the civic rights of women. Nation-states as products of nationalist struggles remain fractured and fraught terrains for women. Upon these terrains development was crafted – as means and goal of progressive society and economy, and as emblematic of legitimacy of the new nation-state. I argue that while women remained central to the continuing construction of national identity, they were marginalized in the new discourse of development.

The discourses of nationalism did not disappear with the decolonization of the 1940s to 1960s. They are again with us in complex and contemporaneous forms in the post-Cold War period – through the seeking of nationhood on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion and economy.⁷ The processes of ‘othering’ communities, populations and groups continues to affect the drawing up of development agendas in Eastern and Central Europe, in parts of Africa and of Asia. Women have had to pay a high price for this new wave of nationalism, and have confronted issues that are very similar to those faced by women during anti-colonial struggles – rape, war, homelessness, insecurity, and being constructed without their consent as threats to, and symbols of, the new nations and national identities.

This chapter is divided into three sections: the first explores issues arising from the ‘imaging of the nation’ by political and economic elites: the second focuses on the ways in which this imaging was employed in the service of colonialism and nationalism; and the final section explores how feminist and women’s groups interacted with nationalism, and with what results.

Imaging a Nation

Remembering and Forgetting

‘All nationalisms are gendered, all are invented and all are dangerous ... in the sense of representing relations to political power and the technologies of violence’ (McClintock, 1993: 61; see also Hobs-bawm, 1991). This quotation raises several important issues. In a substantial amount of literature on nationalism the gendered nature of the concept is neither acknowledged nor analysed. So for Ernest Gellner, ‘Men are of the same nation if and only if they recognise each other as being from the same nation’ (cited in McClintock, 1993: 62). By using ‘men’ to mean ‘men and women’ he eliminates the possibility of discussing gender, since he is eliding the very difference (between women and men) that gender-based analysis studies. The gendered nation thus remains unacknowledged while at the same time important to the constructions of nation. It is, for example, in the public space that men encounter each other and need recognizable markers for the nation to be imagined as home for them all (access to the public space is not automatic for women, and this fact affects the nature of nationalism itself). It is also the public space in which they encounter men who are not recognizable, or a threat to the recognizable self. This is because to the nation as an invention danger is an important motif – by naturalizing the nation as a recognizable togetherness, the threat to this togetherness can become central to the concept itself.

This threat can be either of physical violence against the national borders, or of psychological violence by challenging the normative values recognized by the dominant male elites of the nation as important to all, or of social and political violence against the institutions of the nation-state. The danger that lurks becomes the cement that binds men of a nation together in its defence. Danger is central also because it is often invented in order to raise national consciousness, which might be thought to be incipient and in need of mobilization. Political rhetoric becomes important in articulating this danger – to mores, customs, religion, which can find safety only within the political borders of a separate nation. Political rhetoric is at its most effective when it is able to harness the power of historical evidence. As the Greek historian Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos commented: ‘History is not only a science. It is at once the Gospel of the present and the future of the fatherland’ (cited in Ben-Amos, 1997: 129). As Gospel, history provides as well as legitimates accounts of ‘the common possession of a rich legacy of memories’ (Renan, cited in Ben-Amos, 1997: 129). Surendranath Banerjea, one of the founding members of the Indian National Congress in 1885, put it this way: ‘The study of the history of our own country furnishes the strongest incentive to the loftiest patriotism... For ours was a most glorious past’ (Kedourie, 1970: 235).

In this context, another/’s history can become a threat to the unity of the nation – ‘forgetting, and even historical error are essential for the creation of a nation’ (Renan, cited in Ben-Amos, 1997: 129). Memory and nationalism thus are intimately connected and history is crucial to the documentation and erasure of collective memory, to the remembering and forgetting of recognizable commonalties. It is through the writing in or editing out of history that the invention of the nation takes place, and is placed under threat. In the need for creating a commonly (male) accepted history are also the roots of patriarchal compromise between different male elites in order to determine the spaces occupied by women (see below). Political self-determination thus becomes important to the articulation of the self. The growth of republicanism in Latin America, for example, saw struggles over the meanings of the image of ‘the Indian’ – excavated from the past to provide legitimacy to the political aspirations of the nationalists. However, by 1850, once this purpose was served, Earle (2001) suggests, ‘ “the heroic Indian ... had been converted into a wild beast lacking any capacity for civilisation” ... virtually obliterating the brief period when all political factions had fought for the right to present the Indian as their own.’ This gendered nationalist self, in its remembering and forgetting, in the articulations of danger and of nationalisms, remains tied to the notions of purity, of authenticity, which in turn are critically attached to the shadowy figure of the woman in the home. Nationalism in its psychological and political formulations thus posed significant problems for women.

Colonial, Nationalist and Feminist Tropes

There are three different discourses through which the figure of the national woman has been defined. The first was that of colonialism, the second of nationalism, and the third of feminism or the women’s rights movement. In many ways these three were not discrete; they were overlain with the intellectual baggage and historical knowledges of the others. However, the context of power within which they took shape and were played out meant that the colonial discourse remained powerful even in the resistance to colonialism. This was because of the lack of confidence of nationalist elites in their own cultural histories, and in their desire to find acceptance within the dominant structures of power and ideologies (Fanon, 1990; Said, 1978; Nandy, 1983). The contexts of history, political economy and international politics were important to the development of these discourses, in all of which I find a selective engagement with the ‘other’. In the process of drawing new parameters, challenging existing and emerging political forces, and creating visions of future development, nationalism emerges as the dominant discourse in the period of decolonization.

As Hoogvelt points out, ‘Not only was the need for ... colonies argued in economic terms, [increased trade leading to jobs at home], it was indeed often expressed as a vital national interest’ (1997: 19). The competition among European colonial powers in the race for conquest was a competition among nations.⁸ To lose this race was seen as a threat to national survival. As in any process of state legitimization of huge economic investment, the economic rationale was insufficient. The threat to the national integrity of Great Britain, for example, was made the basis for ever-expanding colonial boundaries by political figures like Joseph Chamberlain and Cecil Rhodes: ‘In their speeches and writings they argued that half the population of Britain would starve if... ever the British Empire narrowed down to a “mere” United Kingdom dimension’ (Hoogvelt, 1997: 19). Another aspect of the colonial discourse concerned with threat was that of the barbarity of the colonized. As the English social philosopher Benjamin Kidd wrote at the turn of the eighteenth century: ‘The task of governing from a distance the inferior races of mankind will be one of great difficulty .... But it is one that must be faced and overcome if the civilised world is not to abandon all hope of its continuing economic conquest of the natural resources of the globe’ (in Hoogvelt, 1997: 20). Thus, the ‘task of governing from a distance’ the barbarian nations, though an economic necessity, was cast as ‘the civilizing mission’ of the Christian nations – a cultural trope of colonial expansion. Thus religion and nationalism converged in legitimizing economic interests of the colonial states.

The nation-states of the Third World emerged out of their encounter with imperialism. This encounter encompassed struggles over the cultural, economic and political resources of the state and was extremely bitterly fought. Nationalism was the mid-wife of new nations. There are three main nationalist tropes. The first is concerned with imperialist articulations of modernity⁹ and the nationalist response to it. This was as much a consequence of political economy – that the insertion of new nations into the world economy required functioning within the international capitalist or (after the Second World War) socialist planning framework – as it was of modernization, of the new nations growing out of the chrysalis of ‘traditional’ culture to take their place in the modern world. Nation-building needs to be understood in this context: it was a consciously modernist political term that was employed widely during the period of decolonization. The nation – imagined as well as imaged, remembered as well as forgotten, traditional as well as modern – was to be built through the efforts of mobilized ‘masses’ led by nationalist elites imbued with a vision of the reclaiming of a glorious, if vanished, past. This was the second trope of nationalism. Nation-building was thus a project that encompassed both the firming up of hegemonic cultural discourses through constitutional and legal arrangements, as well as economic and militaristic infrastructures that allowed the knitting together of disparate populations into one stable political entity – the independent nation-state. This was the third nationalist trope.

Feminist discourses were caught between two impulses, and fractured further as the nationalist movements progressed. One impulse was universalist – the r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Gender, Nationalism and ‘Nation-Building’
• 2 Gender and Development
• 3 Globalization
• 4 Global Restructuring and Restructuring Gender Relations
• 5 Gender and Multi-level Governance
• 6 Critical Engagements
• Bibliography
• Index