ABSTRACT
Thinking and theorizing about gender and remittances implies thinking about social change in relation to migration and development. In this chapter we would like to focus on how gender is framed in relation to remittances and how it relates to social change. In the literature on gender and migration the image of women as better remitters is a recurrent theme. We would like to know to what extent this image is substantiated by empirical evidence and how, then, it is related to gender analysis and social change. Since the coining of the term ‘gender’ in the 1980s, its meaning has been contested (Scott 2013). Hence it cannot be captured in one straightforward, fixed and comfortable definition. Especially in the case of gender and development, two normative fields of societal inequality, the meaning of gender is used and abused in both theoretical and policy debates (Cornwall et al. 2004, 2007). Too easily gender is limited to the category of women, who are either victims or heroines in the fight against poverty, inequality, conflict and so on (Schwenken 2008). Both at the theoretical and policy level, gender seems to equate to women, and they are then often assumed to stimulate development, fight inequality or establish peace. The translation of feminist goals such as female empowerment, gender equality and female autonomy, among others, into specific virtues of women seems to justify attention for gender in policies.
