This is a new book that just came out in June of this year. The UK ordering site is here: http://www.zedbooks.co.uk/book.asp?bookdetail=4301 - it's available in both hardback and paperback.
Zed summarizes the book thus:
Body Politics in Development sets out to define body politics as a key political and mobilizing force for human rights in the last two decades. This passionate and engagingly written book reveals how once tabooed issues such as rape, gender based violence, sexual and reproductive rights have emerged fully fledged into the public arena as critical grounds of contention and struggle. Engaging in the latest feminist thinking and action, the book covers a broad range of key gender and development issues, including women's human rights, fundamentalism, sexualities and new technologies. It describes the struggles around body politics for people living in economic and socially vulnerable communities. The viewpoints are diverse - from the self, family and community to the public at national and international levels. The book's originality comes through the author's rich personal insights, her own engagement in feminist activism, global body politics, women¹s movements, and gender and development policy debates.
The book has been blurbed by Cynthia Enloe, Gita Sen, and Peggy Antrobus among others - all revered authors in the study of women and development.
Thanks to Bernedette Muthien in South Africa for sending out a review of the book from the AWID website, which I quote extensively below. AWID is the Association for Women's Rights in Development www.awid.org. Please also visit the review on the AWID website. There, you will find links to most of the organizations that are listed in this review, and a question and answer session with the author. - FW
http://www.awid.org/eng/Issues-and-Analysis/Issues-and-Analysis/What-have-we-done-to-Bodies-Wendy-Harcourt-s-Reflections-on-Body-Politics
What have we done to Bodies? Wendy Harcourt’s Reflections on Body Politics
AWID shares highlights from Wendy Harcourt’s new book Body Politics in Development and speaks with the author about the implications of her arguments for women’s rights activists, advocates, academics and development practitioners.
by Masum Momaya
[Masum Moyama is the curator of the International Museum of Women www.imow.org]
In Body Politics in Development, Wendy Harcourt re-centers what has become invisible through processes of advocacy and action: bodies. Bodies that are reproductive, productive and caring, violated, sexualized and rendered through technologies.
As Harcourt points out, historically, women’s experiences of their bodies, whether violated, exploited or commodified, have long catalyzed their political engagement; and, in aggregate, “body politics [has been] a key mobilizing force for human rights over the last few decades” (p. 24).
Harcourt argues that unpacking and understanding body politics is particularly important because, in the process of bringing women’s multiple needs and concerns into the development discourse, female bodies have often been essentialized and robbed of their agency - even within the global women’s movement.
To curtail this in the future, Harcourt takes both a retrospective and prospective look at how bodies are taken up in gender and development discourses and practices - and suggests self-reflective, alternate approaches that seek to re-center embodied experiences in development processes and policymaking, without essentializing them.
In Body Politics in Development, the author organizes her discussions of how the female body has been and is positioned in gender and development discourses into five categories of bodies: reproductive bodies, productive bodies, violated bodies, sexualized bodies and techno-bodies. For each category, she traces both how the body is positioned and what this means for activists and advocates working on various issues.
Below are highlights of Harcourt’s arguments for each of the five categories, accompanied by a partial list of organizations** that are working with alternate approaches.
Reproductive Bodies
Historically, policymakers and practitioners have tied the agency, experiences and needs of women to their biological abilities to give birth and their social roles as mothers. In the developing world, women have been targeted as sites of medical and social intervention in policies aimed at curbing population growth.
After decades of lobbying by feminist activists, the 1975 Cairo Programme of Action represented a shift from a longstanding paradigm focused on population control to one that emphasized reproductive rights. Gains were made in terms of reproductive rights agendas, which viewed women as subjects with agency rather than simply as sites of intervention, but social and economic inequities related to reproductive rights and health remained unchallenged and unaddressed.
By the 1980s, neoliberal policies were undermining the reproductive health agenda. Pressured to invest more in growing their economies by international lending institutions, governments in developing countries cut back on spending for social welfare, including health and education. Resources for ensuring reproductive health diminished.
In the late 1990s, women’s rights activists were, for the most part, left out of the construction of the Millennium Development Goals, a set of priorities adopted by United Nations member states to spur development. The Cairo language, based in autonomy and rights, was replaced by technocratic language focused on service provision. An example of this is the emphasis on reducing maternal mortality.
Currently, given the paucity of government money available for service provision almost everywhere in the world, most services have been privatized, opening up a commercial market for biomedical goods and services and potential exploitation of women’s bodies. This includes, for example, the provision of health-related information by corporations rather than governments or civil society organizations and the testing and “dumping” of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines for disease prevention and treatment.
Some feminist and women’s rights organizations are fighting for an approach based in autonomy and rights in which structural inequities, as well as legacies of racism, homophobia, fundamentalism and militarism are considered and addressed.
Examples of Organizations Working From Alternate Approaches
African Partnership for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights of Women and Girls (AMANITARE)
Articulacion Feminista Marcosur
Asian Pacific Resource and Research Centre for Women (ARROW)
Catholics for Choice
Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR)
Engender Health
International Center for Research on Women (ICRW)
International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF)
International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC)
Ipas
Isis International
Reproductive Health Outlook (RHO)
SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective
Productive Bodies
Historically, development practitioners and policymakers highlighted women’s economic contributions in order to position them as agentic subjects in development processes rather than simply as passive recipients of aid. International lending institutions such as International Monetary Fund and World Bank began to view making “investing in women” as important to furthering development and achieving returns on loans and investments. Interestingly, recent language from the United Nations, governments and even NGOs has paralleled this, emphasizing that women are “good investments” in business, government and development projects.
In some cases, this rhetoric reaffirms that “poor women from the South are a source of globally flexible, docile and cheap labor” (p. 69) and that women are valuable as sources of free labor and producers of goods that bring money into economies - but not necessarily as human beings, in and of themselves, with human rights.
Alternatives to this rhetoric include a rights-based approach, in which women and all people are seen as bearers of rights with intrinsic value. Also, community economies, whereby producers and consumers are local and means of exchange can be more closely monitored, provide alternatives to exploitative global production chains where women are trapped in a “race to the bottom.” Furthermore, transnational feminist solidarities, especially amongst workers organizing across borders and economies, serve to resist this rhetoric and its accompanying exploitative practices.
Examples of Organizations Providing Alternatives to the “Investing in Women” Rhetoric
Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN)
Feminist Dialogues at the World Social Forum
Global Women’s Strike
International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE)
WIDE Europe
Violated Bodies
Over the last half-century, sexual and gender-based violence has been mainstreamed into gender and development discourse through its framing as a health issue, causing organizations such as the World Health Organization and government ministries of health to pay attention to it as part of achieving health outcomes.
This framing raised the visibility of multiple forms sexual and gender-based violence, including domestic violence, rape, femicide and honor killings, amongst organizations and the general public, sometimes through shock. It also catalyzed a charity approach, in which people acted and donated to “help poor, pitiful victims over there in that remote, primitive part of the world.” This approach often supplanted an approach that holds perpetrators, governments and legal systems accountable for human rights violations or allows or recognizes agency for those who have been violated.
Furthermore, celebrities made the issue visible via films and campaigns for NGOs. In considering these campaigns, Harcourt wonders if there is a “risk of confusing real life misery and tragedy with the glamour and fictional lives of the stars? (p. 103) And, she asks, “are we just adding one more story to a billion dollar industry based on violence and sexism?” (p. 106)
Moreover, recently, military aggression has been justified in the “guise of protecting subjugated women and bringing civilization and prosperity to natives who are unable to govern autonomously” (p. 115) as is the case of the United States’ military intervention in Afghanistan.
Alternatives to solely health-based, celebrity-driven, charity-oriented approaches to sexual and gender-based violence include rights-based approaches that recognize longstanding legacies of power and domination across lines of gender, socioeconomic status, membership in religious communities, nationality and global positioning.
Examples of Organizations Employing a Rights-Based Approach to Counter Gender-Based Violence
African Partnership for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights of Women and Girls (AMANITARE)
Articulacion Feminista Marcosur
Breakthrough
INCITE Women of Color Against Violence
MenEngage
Pathways of Women’s Empowerment
Shirkat Gah
Women Living Under Muslim Laws
Sexualized Bodies
Within development discourse, black and brown bodies are sexualized and characterized as needing to be saved, rescued and re-educated, e.g. in discussions around FGM and prostitution. Sex, particularly amongst those in the Global South, has been articulated as problematic, i.e. “people are having too much sex,” “people are having unprotected sex,” and “people are engaging in nonconformative sexual practices.” These opinions have validated and legitimated intensified regulation of bodies and sexual practices and harnessed anxieties about sex.
Some governments and NGOs based in the Global North, sometimes in conjunction with some religious institutions in the Global South, have pushed to enact policies that, according to Harcourt, “further advance imperialist ambitions,” for example the George W. Bush administration’s Global Gag rule.
Activists have been working to reclaim the subjectivity of their own sexuality. For example, sex worker rights movements speak of “selling sex as a livelihood choice through which people have agency, including the right to self-determination, to work and to self-express” (p. 141). Some of them fight for erotic justice. According to Harcourt, erotic justice “recasts sexual pleasure as a source of physical, psychological, intellectual and spiritual well-being; instead of othering traditional practices or sexual minorities, [it] conceptualizes everyone as having potential for diversity in sexual desire, including same-sex desire” (p. 154)
Examples of Organizations Employing a Sexual Rights and/or Erotic Justice Framework
BAYSWAN
CREA
Naripokkho
Network of Sex Workers Project
The Pleasure Project
Sexual Policy Watch
Techno-Bodies
Through technologies, bodies are fragmented and commodified. The process of development often entails delivering technologies in ways that are racist, gendered and heteronormative. An underlying assumption is that if money and skills are available, inserting high-tech solutions into the mix is the best option to address any problem, regardless of ethical and environmental consequences. In most cases, given global power inequities, developing countries have no choice but to embrace these technologies if they want to build successful economies.
With the advent of new methods of research and intellectual property laws, life and life forms (e.g. seeds, genes, etc.) are privatized and can be owned. Common heritage is no longer off-limits to either commercial or scientific interests seeking exclusive control.
Moreover, biotechnology has made the entire notion of the body more fluid. A new eugenics and enabling of building the perfect self, body and abilities labels any deviations as deficient. Further research is needed to unpack the gendered dimensions of rapidly developing technologies.
Harcourt asks, “what are the responsibilities of companies, scientists, policymakers and the public in the global north towards poor women and men in the global south who are bearing the brunt of the unregulated and unethical practices of biotech research and industry?” (p. 188-189)
Examples Organizations Monitoring the Technologization of Bodies through a Feminist Lens
Center for Genetics and Society
Committee on Women, Population and the Environment
The Corner House
Generations Ahead
Navdanya
Population and Development Program at Hampshire College
Related AWID Resources
Factsheet on Why New Technology is a Women’s Rights Issue
Factsheet on Facing the Challenges of New Reproductive Technologies
Factsheet on Nanotechnology
Factsheet on Gender Equality and New Technologies
In conversation with AWID, Wendy Harcourt reflects on what her analysis means in practice for women’s rights advocates. [Please visit the AWID weblink to read the interview portion of this review, as well as to find links to the organizations listed above - the original site is:
http://www.awid.org/eng/Issues-and-Analysis/Issues-and-Analysis/What-have-we-done-to-Bodies-Wendy-Harcourt-s-Reflections-on-Body-Politics ]
For more information about Body Politics in Development, see Wendy Harcourt’s website.http://www.wendyharcourt.net/Body_Politics_in_Development.html
