What of Gender 30 Years on - Plus Ca Change...?

Over the thirty years since Beijing there have been concerted efforts to address gender inequalities worldwide. Although there have been some gains, much still remains to be done, as indicated by the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. Many of the challenges and setbacks to achieving these goals, in particular Goal 5, have been related to the economic and social excesses of neoliberalism and the ways these produce, sustain and deepen inequalities globally.

While neoliberalism has been widely critiqued, liberal thought, on which neoliberalism is founded, has evaded critical scrutiny. In this presentation, with reference to gender, we explore how the foundational principles of liberalism frame, shape and inform development. Our discussion will refer to decolonial critiques of development, its liberal assumptions of western superiority and linear models of social and economic progress. Highlighting gender, we critique how liberal assumptions of the human agent as autonomous, masculine and agentic remain entrenched within the SDGs and development discourse.

We argue that while gender has been recognised as a social construction, the SDGs and development discourses continue to assume and reinscribe gender as a decontextualised female/male dichotomy. Further, these understandings are integral to measures of development and their deployment as indicators of progress. We argue that these technologies of power radically constrain deeper and more fluid conceptions of gender that would enable us to attend to the social processes through which it has been produced. In this presentation we call for an embrace of theories of gender that go beyond its liberal framing and attend instead to its intersections within specific social and cultural contexts.