Development

The idea that international development is ideologically innocent and essentially a matter of overcoming technical or cultural deficits persists in popular imagination as well as development thought and policy, despite trenchant critiques over the years (A. Escobar 1995; J. Ferguson 1990; Gupta 1998; Rodney 1972). Especially in relation to gender and sexuality, development thought tends to be premised on colonial logics of cultural and economic backwardness (Mohanty 1988; Wynter 1996). In this short entry, I trace the making of hegemonic development narratives and examine the ideological labor performed by specific figurations of “Third World Women and Girls” in a transnational context. Such figurations are central to securing the story of capitalist progress development institutions and national governments like to tell.