This article examines the challenge of feminist engagement in the South today.
The analysis proceeds from the position that feminist engagement has registered multiple successes with a major breakthrough in the ways in which it has made considerable dents into dominant development discourses. However, the author argues that this very success has created inherent vulnerabilities, with success appearing as a double-edged sword whose disintegrative effects are much fiercer and much more anchored, in terms of power regimes. By trying to have a command into the development arena feminism had to reshape itself – even at the basic level of being understood. The efforts to make the gender question understood to bureaucrats and development actors at the international and national levels simultaneously engendered a different uptake on the complexity of gender relations and this is where the author looks at vulnerability, more or less, as success gone wrong.
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This article comes from the IDS Bulletin 39.6 (2008) Vulnerabilities of Feminist Engagement and the Challenge of Developmentalism in the South: What Alternatives?
