Introduction: development and young feminisms

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Notes on contributors

Imogen Davies is the Programme Adviser on Youth, Gender and Active Citizenship at Oxfam GB, [email protected], Oxfam House, John Smith Drive, Oxford, OX4 2GN

Caroline Sweetman is Editor of Gender & Development.

Notes

1 The phrase #MeToo was originally coined by activist Tarana Burke as far back as 2006 to promote ‘empowerment through empathy’ among women and girls – particularly those of colour – who had experienced sexual abuse (Ohlheiser 2017). It was popularised by actress Alyssa Milano, who in late 2017 encouraged survivors to tweet #MeToo, and was joined by other Hollywood survivors of sexual assault, later spawning the #TimesUp movement.

2 Intersectionality refers to a political analysis of the reasons for particular individuals to be excluded and marginalised from power, arising from multiple systems of discrimination and oppression including, critically, gender, race, and class (Crenshaw 1989). As a field, gender and development (GAD) draws on a similar analysis coming up from the experience of poor women in the global South (Sen and Grown 1987).

3 For more information and analysis from a feminist perspective of Agenda 2030, the SDGs and ‘Leave No-one Behind’, see Gender & Development 21(1), The Sustainable Development Goals.

4 This point was made by youth activist Heena Qamar, of First Aid Africa, at the 2018 Scottish International Development Alliance annual conference, during a panel discussion on how young people can use the SDGS to campaign for the change that they want to see.

5 Ironically, the world’s current youth generation – often called Generation Y or Millennials – are often demonised in public discussions as selfish, consumerist and apathetic and such ageist prejudices against the young are nothing new for humanity. Generation Y and the Millennials are terms used to refer to people born between 1980 and 2000. They are part of a series of characterisations of ‘generational demographic cohorts’. They are generalisations that reflect biases from globalised, largely affluent (and heavily Western-influenced) cultures, at odds with the realities worldwide of vibrant activism in this generation.

6 Coe (2015, 889) describes ‘professionalized adult feminism’ as a sector of women’s movements deriving from middle-class, educated women in the 1970s in Ecuador and Peru, which was the first to self-identify as feminist in contemporary history. Professionalisation began in the 1980s to provide training and support to low-income women’s groups, further developing in the 1990s when adopting policy advocacy to effect legal changes. These feminists have provided gender training to mobilise a younger generation of activists in the new millennium.