By: Ines

Ines — Thu, 28 May 2015 05:49:04 +0000

Thanks for this Duncan. Diane’s Brief is a much needed contribution to these discussions. A couple of points from me, also mindful of Lee Webster’s and Franz Wong’s comments a while back on TWP’s relation to feminist thinking.
I do appreciate Diane putting inverted commas around ‘gender’. I am assuming that it indicates that the word itself needs to be rescued and reclaimed from its current technocratic – non-political – use. The relevance here is that in its original meaning as it emerged from feminist thought into development language and practice, gender was always associated with power, and hence its analysis…an essential element of TWP.
I also want to draw attention to a short sentence in Diane’s Brief: ‘Yet it is important to keep in mind that most of these are developed from Northern perspectives’. This reminds us of the rich – if difficult – debates on the dominance of western feminist thinking (see for example Chandra Mohanty’s Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses). These debates have, among many other things, been instrumental to showing power as multidimensional (the idea of intersectionality). Here too much is useful for TWP.
Finally, I am hoping that in today’s review of ODI women’s leadership programme you may get an opportunity to look at feminist work on transformative leadership for its evident contribution to TWP, and especially the insights of Srilatha Batliwala, which is profoundly informing Oxfam’s approaches to ‘gender’ work and hopefully beyond. looking forward to today’s blog!

Comments on: How does Gender change the way we think about Power?

By: Ines