Development
by
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. Development discourse came into its own during decolonization, as the world order shifted from empires to ostensibly sovereign and equal nation-states. Deeply inflected by Cold War politics, between the 1950s and 1970s, ideological debates over redistribution, growth, and inequality raged across the (post)colonial world. The United States and its allies prevailed: by the 1980s, development came to be synonymous with faith in the ability of a “free” market to deliver national prosperity and individual freedoms (Rist 2008). In this sense,...
This essay may be found on page 63 of the printed volume.