Paper short abstract:

Drawing on data from Plan International UK’s longitudinal research with girls in nine countries, this paper explores how researchers can use qualitative methods to unsettle dominant discourses in development and respectfully engage with girls’ own visions of what it means to be empowered.

Paper long abstract:

Girls’ empowerment has become a must-have component for international development campaigns and programming in recent years. The ways in which this ‘girl powering’ is conceptualised in, and has grown to dominate, development discourses has increasingly been the subject of postcolonial feminist critique. Scholars such as Khoja-Moolji (2016) have problematised the way that research with girls in the Global South is used in the development sector as evidence or justification for a vision of ‘empowerment’ established by the Global North. In this way, ‘girl powering’ discourses can serve to reinforce neocolonial power structures that enable Northern development actors to decide what it means for a girl to be ‘empowered’ or ‘disempowered’. By amplifying selected voices that fit a certain narrative, development researchers risk contributing to the silencing of girls in the Global South.

We will explore how qualitative research can help to unsettle this dominant delineation of girls' empowerment in development discourse, by reflecting on recent analysis of data from a longitudinal, qualitative study undertaken in nine countries across the Global South. This analysis investigated adolescent girls' everyday acts of resistance to gender norms and, crucially, identified acts of resistance based on the girls' own descriptions of restrictive norms or expectations of behaviour that they experience in their lives. Through this reflection, we seek to contribute to efforts to develop methods for qualitative research that do the 'work of hearing’ girls (Khoja-Moolji, 2016), are open to girls’ own conceptualisations, and ultimately open up more possible ways for girls to be empowered.

Paper short abstract:

Because today's G&D discourse is an incoherent one, it opens up windows of opportunity for Southern-borne resistance to development. The paper shows how these opportunities are ceased by Jordanian women's organisations to claim equality in their cooperation with their Northern-based donors.

Paper long abstract:

During the past decades, the international development cooperation, which functions through a Western-dominated neo-liberal global discourse, was the target of various critiques. Among others, from the 1970s onwards, especially feminists reproached the development cooperation for the unequal North/South divide and global patriarchal structures it has been relying on and which it continues to reproduce.

Instead of rejecting the feminist critiques, the development discourse incorporated some of their main concepts such as gender equality, gender mainstreaming and women empowerment and evolved into a G&D discourse. As the development discourse has absorbed, but not neutralized its feminist critique, this has led to a certain discursive incoherence. This incoherence provides windows of opportunity for further critique and subversion of, as well as resistance to development.

Up to now, there are no studies available that show how especially Southern development actors use these feminist windows of opportunity to challenge the inequalities and power imbalances of the international development cooperation. This paper aims to fill that gap. It uses the example of the cooperation between Jordanian women's organizations and their Northern-based donors, studied during several months-long field visits in Amman between 2017 and 2021.

The paper illustrates how Jordanian women's organizations and their staff members use the opportunities opened up by the incoherencies of the G&D discourse in order to gain spaces of independence, claim equality in development collaboration as well as to influence donor strategies and even international development policies.

Paper short abstract:

Linking northern to southern debates on backlash, we argue that this can be understood as complex crisis management, to mitigate volatility in gender orders, threatening elites and capitalism. It is used to manage crises with fixes in; binary ‘bodies’, heteronormative ‘families’ and ethnic ‘nations’

Paper long abstract:

Twenty-five years after the Beijing Conference we should be celebrating but are facing a tide of misogyny, homo/trans-phobia, attacks on sexual and reproductive rights and more. Terms like ‘patriarchal backlash’ have increased in use to describe similar trends in different settings, yet mainly focused on Europe and the Americas. The concept remains contested as variably; an expression of male ‘resistance’, a pro-active patriarchal ‘restoration’, or a mode for a broader ‘reactionary’ politics to play out and coalesce. Common narratives behind these trends comingle ideas of gender, ethnic, class, racial and sexual hierarchies, stoking and exploiting majority groups’ fears – of losing privilege, of porous borders and alien bodies. Linking this literature to a broader set of southern debates we explore how best to understand such backlash and how masculinity figures in its operations.

We argue that these phenomena are better understood as forms of complex crisis management. A confluence of crises – political, economic, climate and (now) pandemic – operating at different timescales and paces creates volatility in gendered social relations, threatening the reproduction of elite rule and capitalist growth. Forms of 'patriarchal backlash’ are thus being used to manage such complexes through a series of spatial fixes in; the individual space in the binary sexed ‘body’, the privatised space of the heteronormative ‘family’, and the bordered and ordered space of the ethnic ‘nation’. In better understanding the patriarchal nature and machinations of these forces we can seize opportunities presented by this confluence of crises to expose and resist backlash.