Constructing Alternative Epistemes of Development from Gender Perspective: An Ethnographic Study on a Social Experiment in Northern China

Gender perspective is an approach of adopting feminist values to redefine and reconstruct development. By “gender perspective”, we imply a way of seeing and thinking grounded in feminine values such as receptivity, non-violence, living on and tenderness stemming from the nature of “life-protecting”. Rather than adopting an essentialist understanding, we align with Dai Jinhua’s proposal to regard “feminism” as a search for alternative possibilities other than global capitalism. This research, through an ethnographic study, will illustrate how a local NGO explored an alternative development of a rural community in North China based on gender perspective.

Since the marketization reforms of the 1980s, while developmentalism has led to China’s rapid rise, rural areas have experienced declined and rural women have been marginalized. In 2017, a women-based NGO in Henan Province, with the aim of promoting rural gender equality, collaborating with a transdisciplinary team, mobilized villagers in Z Village to renovate abandoned dwelling caves as public space to explore alternative development. This initiative, named the “House of Dreams”, represents a social process of social reconstruction and empowerment, driving by epistemes developed from gender perspective. Our study will unpack four aspects of the epistemic content that underpins this process: 1) Humanization, which encompasses humane care, prioritization of human needs, and community education; 2) Relational philosophy, emphasizing the crucial role of emotion and social bonds; 3)Preservation orientation, which fosters actions such as small-scale and building with upcycled materials; 4) Inner radical struggle, reflecting the inherent resistance of gender-based development.

Through understanding and reworking development from gender perspective, this experiment challenged the conceptual roots of development in practice and demonstrated the possibility of an alternative development. By placing this research within the gender localisation of global context, we will further discuss the implication of this localized and gender-based case beyond China.