Body Politics in Development

Wendy Harcourt is a feminist researcher and activist working at the Society for International Development in Rome Italy as senior adviser and chief editor of the quarterly journal Development. Since 1988 she has built up the journal to be one of the most honest and critical quarterly publications on development. Born in Australia she now lives in Italy and is actively engaged in global feminist politics through her work with Women in Development Europe, European Feminist Forum and the Feminist Dialogues. Her work and commitment to global gender justice has taken her around the world teaming up with UN policy makers, research institutes, women's groups and social justice movements. She has written extensively on globalization and development from a gender perspective. Body Politics in Development is her first full-length book and won the 2010 FWSA Book Prize.

Development has for long assumed a naturalized notion of the body as 'just there,' a passive receptacle for the consciousness of those to be 'developed or 'liberated.' It is this invisibility of the body that this courageous and eminently applicable book seeks not only to unveil but to reverse, proposing in its stead a view of the body as deeply political, one of the main sites where culture and power intersect. Body Politics in Development asks a series of deeply ethical and complex questions. What types of bodies are assumed in gender and development debates? Who speaks for them? Whose bodies matter? How has development functioned as a political technology that normalizes women's bodies? Conversely, what would it take to enable a multiplicity of diverse lived bodies to emerge? Whether we agree with them of nor, all of us will have to contend with the challenging answers emerging from the illuminating pages of this book if we want to move beyond the current 'empowerment lite' gender and development regime. The author has been one of the, if not the most, central figures in the gender and development debate over the past twenty years, and from this theoretical and practical experience that she has given us one of the most compelling accounts of an area of development -gender and the body-that should, if taken seriously, transform our understanding of the field as a whole. This book should be of great interest for development practitioners at all levels, and for courses in globalization, women's, and development studies as well as courses in anthropology, geography, sociology, and international studies dealing with issues of gender in the Global South.

• Introduction: Invisible Bodies1. What is Body Politics?2. Reproductive Bodies3. Productive and Caring Bodies4. Violated Bodies5. Sexualized Bodies6. Techno BodiesConclusion