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Offering a powerful critique of contemporary visions of women’s empowerment, this book traces the shift from its radical feminist roots to a market-driven model of inclusion.
Focusing on Southeast Asia, where women’s labour has long underpinned economic growth, it examines how empowerment projects intersect with the privatization of development and the rise of gender expertise. Once a collective agenda to support women in exerting greater control over their lives, empowerment is now framed as integrating women into markets. Backed by donors, corporations and development institutions, this model has only persisted and expanded, despite extensive scholarship highlighting its limits.
Through extensive analysis of interventions, funders and the micropolitics of aid and corporate actors, the book demonstrates how gender programming can simultaneously disempower and create space for resistance.
"Labouring Women tackles the key empirical puzzle of why attenuated, market-driven approaches to women’s empowerment persist and grow, despite the plethora of scholarship and activism that proves they do not work and indeed, increase women’s burdens. As many scholars have observed, this contradiction has driven processes of co-optation and resistance. This book explains how this co-optation has happened: through the uneven political opportunities for feminists, resulting in the contortion of their agenda, and via structural inequalities for women’s labour that has seen the ‘efficiency argument’ for women’s empowerment become a kind of fundamentalist commonsense.
Combining careful work with the feminist canon to recover radical roots with a feminist revisioning of Southeast Asia’s economic development, Labouring Women offers historically grounded evidence for scholars and practitioners doing the difficult work of structural gender transformation. But more than that, through its careful emphasis on gender experts’ voices and agency, the book documents how this fundamentalist commonsense is being overturned."
Melissa Johnston, University of Queensland
"After two decades of ‘smart economics’ and ‘gender mainstreaming,' a rigorous reckoning is well and truly overdue, and this book delivers it with clarity and astuteness. Labouring Women offers a detailed and insightful account of the achievements and limitations of both these approaches, cutting through a seemingly crowded field to identify what are actually glaring gaps and silences. Using a systematic analysis of the evolution of gender equality in development programming, and by centring the priorities, expertise, and resistances of gender specialists themselves, Gerard makes a powerful intervention in feminist political economy and gender and development debates. Crucially, it goes beyond critique, offering insights into how dominant models can be disrupted."
Susan Engel, University of Wollongong
1. The Rise and Rise of a Big Idea
2. The Business of Development
3. Constructing Knowledge on Women’s Empowerment
4. Locating Women’s Labour in Southeast Asian Development
5. Funding Women’s Empowerment in Southeast Asia
6. Valuing Women’s Empowerment in Southeast Asia
7. Gender Experts and the Repurposing of Women’s Empowerment
8. Leverage and Resistance