“Cripping” the World Bank

Abstract

Using a mathematical measurement called “disability-adjusted life years” (DALYs), the World Bank claims that violence against women is costly. In order to wrestle with representative grammars associated with this technocratic measurement, this article uses crip theory to investigate how the World Bank conceptualizes violence against women as requiring individual adjustments, resiliency and flexibility rather than structural and systemic change. It suggests the DALY measurement fits squarely within World Bank neoliberal economic schemas, especially the promotion of women's labor engagements as empowerment.

Keywords:

• World Bank
• violence against women
• disability
• crip theory
• neoliberalism
• development

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr Kathryn Trevenen, Dr Stephen Brown, Dr Shoshana Magnet and Dr Holly Johnson for their commentary on earlier versions of this article and for their unwavering support. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers for their generous commentary and to the editors for supporting the publication of this article in its best form.

Funding

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributor

Corinne L. Mason is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Gender & Women's Studies at Brandon University. She conducts transnational critical race feminist analyses of development discourses and popular news media, focusing specifically on representations of violence against women, reproductive justice and foreign aid. Her work has been published in Feminist Formations, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Surveillance & Society and Canadian Journal of Communication. She is currently working on a book-length project on “Queer/ing Development,” and exploring digital erotic racisms in relation to the Tumblr “Humanitarians of Tinder.”

Notes

1 In The Cost of Violence, the World Bank does differentiate between impairments and disability, with the former defined as a temporal injury, and the latter as a chronic illness. While the disability rights community and disability scholars, including Clare (1999) define impairment and disability differently, and more politically (so that disability is couched in social and cultural environments and assumptions about normalcy), here I use these terms as the World Bank has employed them.

2 As I have argued elsewhere (Mason 2013) this argument is reflective of a “development and in/security nexus” which couples development issues, such as gender inequality, with security concerns.

3 The term “Third World” suggests a quick brushstroke erasure of the multiple and differentiating characteristics of political, economic and cultural differences within and between countries, however I use the term here because as Mohanty (2003) suggests, “North/South” or “developed/developing” as an alternative lack the explanatory power to theorize about continued colonial legacies and contemporary neocolonial power structures (227). While other terms such as “One-Third World” and “Two-Thirds World” may be a more specific way to conceptualize structural and systemic global inequalities, I use the term “Third World” to specifically point to the discursive differentiation of space and between the “modern” and “pre-modern” worlds, and the way in which the two spaces are presented as disconnected, especially when being compared to one another.

4 Bedford (2009) notes that the Bank used carefully chosen stories of Third World women to quiet critics.

5 According to Adrienne Roberts and Susanne Soederberg (2012), the 2012 World Development Report accords a central role to financial corporations like Goldman Sachs. They argue that the WDR represents a business spin on neoliberal development by centralizing investments in women as consumers and entrepreneurs and represents the further entrenchment of private partnership within the World Bank.

6 While Staudt is clear to separate domestic violence from what can be understood as femicide, it may be more useful to conceive of both types of violent practices as inextricably interconnected.