Revisiting global body politics in Nepal: A reflexive analysis

Abstract

Using the example of a human rights training in Nepal, the author looks at global body politics in a reflexive piece on her engagement in development practices that translate western feminist ideas on gender inequality and empowerment via UN human rights policies into non-western contexts. It firsts look at postcolonial and critical literature on feminist engagement in gender and development processes including a discussion on the concept of global body politics before examining briefly the framing of gender-based violence in Nepal. The core of the paper is a reflexive analysis and interrogation of the training in Nepal in order to bring out the tensions and contradictions around western developmental, feminist and human rights discourses. The discussion looks at how difficult it is for feminist, human rights and developmental discourses and practices to unmoor themselves from the notion of the ‘expert’ and those who do the rights/work/righting rights training and those who are perennially seen as requiring training. The conclusion reflects on possibilities of other epistemic practices found in intercultural dialogues.

Keywords:

• gender
• development
• agency
• health
• Nepal

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to the two anonymous referees, my colleagues Roy Huijsman, Loes Keysers, Rosalba Icaza and Kees Biekart at ISS and Cathy Campbell at LSE for comments on earlier versions of this paper and to Cathy Campbell and Jenevieve Mannell for their invitation to contribute to the special issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author

Notes

1. The paper is not so much an interrogation of a specific training, with comments about a specific donor – in this case, it was a Dutch-based development fund for tertiary education; rather, it is a reflection of over 20 years of engagement in body politics where such trainings have become part. It contributes ‘insider-outsider’ literature that aims to analyse feminist epistemic and ontological in development practices. Such analysis calls attention to the compromises and ambiguities of feminists working inside development and their struggles with developmental violence and the depoliticisation of gender in their work (De Jong, in press).

2. For example, Sylvia Tamale looks critically at western and legal discourses around law and culture in relation to African women's rights (2008, pp. 50–51) and Catherine Walsh's work on inter-culturality critiques the universalism of human rights law and speaks of knowledge ‘otherwise’ (2015).

3. Nepal has ratified the major international covenants, treaties and commitments of international women's rights, health and development commitments and is in the process of putting in place state-level obligations to protect and promote health, women's rights and human development such as the Gender Equality Act passed in 2006 (Kumar, Aakriti, Umesh Raju, & Dudani, 2012; Hawkes et al., 2013).

4. For more on sexuality and human rights issues and the Blue Diamond Society, see Waldman and Overs (2014).

5. The IDS Sussex sexuality, poverty and law programme has generated important research on the links between sexuality, gender plurality and rights see: http://www.ids.ac.uk/idsresearch/sexuality-poverty-and-law-programme

6. See the 2010 discussion between Jane Parpart and Naila Kabeer on ‘Rethinking Voice, Agency and Women's Empowerment’ (Parpart, 2010).

7. Boaventura De Sousa Santos's work calls attention to the issues of silences and translations in what he calls cognitive in justice (2014).