Paper short abstract:

At this roundtable, I look forward to highlighting the gender dimension of decolonisation, development, and faith, and providing examples of development practitioners who improve development's understanding of the dynamic interactions of religion and gender and rectify the sector’s power imbalances.

Paper long abstract:

Decolonising development must take a ‘gender lens’ because colonialism itself was deeply gendered. Colonialism perpetuated dangerous gendered stereotypes of other religions, many of which linger until today. For example, the portrayal of Muslim women as oppressed served as justifications for the War on Terror and the U.S.’s invasion of Afghanistan. International development policies, such as bilateral aid, are situated within these political spheres and are equally susceptible to prevalent Western-centric notions of gender and religion. In response to this, development literature has started to advocate for a decolonial feminist approach that recognises the intellectual autonomy and decision-making capacity of women in the Global South. Development practice, on the other hand, has been slow to catch up.

Over the past 12 years, I have been working as a gender consultant with multilateral and bilateral development agencies as well as non-government and grassroots organisations. I have observed how both personal and institutional biases surrounding gender and religion deepen hierarchical power dynamics. While complex religion-gender dynamics in both donor and recipient countries are still largely ignored or misconstrued, today’s development aid continues to impose ideological values through its gender programming. This puts the religion-gender nexus at the centre of the struggle to decolonise development and the challenge to overcome cultural imperialism. Since 2013, I have focused my work on engaging practitioners in a collective process of unlearning gender stereotypes in the context of religion and to develop a consciousness of their personal and institutional vantage points (e.g. Western, Christian, heteronormative, patriarchal etc.).