Labouring Women

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

"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

• 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