ABSTRACT
Thus far I have focussed on the impacts of the marketing campaign for a ‘new’ British national narrative which deploys the twin figures of poverty-as-degeneracy and Africa as feature, which both defines the British nation as developed and consolidates its role in the ‘new’ international development agenda by simultaneously attempting to create the right subjectivities at home by selling the idea of subject production abroad. I have intimated that, like the nineteenth-century humanism that animated the British civilizing mission, this marketing campaign is racialized, inscribing a new, not necessarily ethnicized sense of race into the twin figures of the global citizen and poverty-as-degeneracy that I have described at length. I have argued that this process is not simply a path dependency from older modes of liberalism which bear the mark of colonial culture, but that the marketing campaign itself explicitly bears the mark of empire and that the replication of these tropes is part of what makes this legible in both its aims and modus operandi. While the production of imperial subjectivities is inevitably racialized, needing to institutionalize a bio-political process of differentiation however variously deployed, it is also inevitably gendered. Picking up on a consistent feature of postcolonial feminism which examines the relationship between gender and empire, what follows examines the centrality of gender both to the new development agenda as articulated by the Millenium Development Goals and to the marketing campaign for development. I begin with a brief review of the feminist literature in relation to development which is situated according to the criticisms from Gayatri Spivak and other postcolonial feminists that Western feminism is complicit with imperial/colonial interests, before moving on to show with respect to Developments magazine and the new development agenda generally that women in development discourse function in precisely the same way that postcolonial feminists describe for nineteenth-century liberal empires in that they are still signifiers of civility. This marks my third and final thread of continuity between development and colonial discourse. This chapter makes use of the theoretical framework of Spivak, with help from Anne McClintock and Homi Bhabha, to show that the notion of civility threaded throughout the marketing campaign is gendered, and that with respect to nation and empire, women inscribe the border between development and un (under) development and signify, as contested sites of meaning, as markers of development-as-civility.
