Labouring Women

Aid and Women’s Empowerment in Southeast Asia

Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

1 100 kr

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Beskrivning

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.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2026-10-20
Mått:156 x 234 x undefined mm
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:208
Förlag:Bristol University Press
ISBN:9781529259216

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Mer om författaren

Kelly Gerard is Discipline Chair and Senior Lecturer in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Western Australia.

Recensioner i media

"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

Innehållsförteckning

1. The Rise and Rise of a Big Idea2. 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 Asia6. Valuing Women’s Empowerment in Southeast Asia 7. Gender Experts and the Repurposing of Women’s Empowerment8. Leverage and Resistance