ABSTRACT

In the 1970s and 1980s, the term “gender” increasingly began to be used in (English language) discussions of the different roles of women and men in social processes.1 “Gender” was defined as a socially constructed category that carries with it expectations and responsibilities that are not biologically determined. By the mid-to late 1980s, the gender concept also had become common in writing on development issues and in some circles it replaced the earlier Women in Development (WID) approach. While this move to replace “women” with the more neutral term “gender” has been and continues to be criticized by some feminist analysts of development processes, this chapter argues that the gender approach avoids the pitfalls of economic determinism inevitably linked with the earlier WID approach. Along the lines of the postmodernist critiques discussed by the editors in this volume, the Gender and Development (GAD) approach moves beyond the instrumentalist definitions offered by the earliest Women in Development theorists who attempted to fit women, and most specifically developing country women, into predetermined categories which themselves were based on essentially linear, progressivist, Western views of “modernization.”