Human Capital in Gender and Development

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Notes

1 By poststructural feminist political economy, I refer to a diverse body of feminist and gender political economy research that critiques both the production of knowledge in and for the global political economy and the practices of power that shape it. This research challenges the taken-for-grantedness of dominant ideas and assumptions in the global political economy to show how these rest on gendered foundations, such as the myth of Economic Man that underlies modern Economics, or the central figure of the market in the neoliberal globalisation thesis. Poststructural feminist political economy challenges conventional, rationalist accounts of what drives our socio-economic systems while eschewing dichotomised, hierarchical, and essentialised thinking, revealing the constitution and effects of gendered privilege across economic knowledge and practice (in the privileging, for example, of liberal values in the conditionalities and ‘benchmark’ standards of international organisations, or the exploitation of gendered stereotypes to maintain state war machines, flexibilised labour conditions, or corporate globalisation, and so on).

2 Poststructural approaches to gender and development take seriously that the dominant meanings of both gender and development are produced by and through social, cultural, political, and economic relations of power (or the way power is organised and diffuses across societies). These relations include, but are not limited to, the practices and processes of neoliberal restructuring, governmental planning and policymaking, economic organisation, poverty, social reproduction, globalisation, and labour markets. In particular, poststructuralists interrogate critically the formation and effects of Eurocentric and gendered development discourses and assumptions, which means that they examine how development is written and practised in ways that privilege certain types of identity, behaviour, or knowledge, and what the effects of this might be.