ABSTRACT
In this first part the authors, Geeta Chowdhry, Mitu Hirschman and Marianne Marchand, address the relevance of postmodernist thought for the Gender and Development literature. As is clear from the Introduction/ Conclusion, postmodern feminism has challenged theorizing within the social sciences on various counts. In its critique of Enlightenment thinking, postmodernist feminism questions the claims to universalism and “truth” embedded in these theories. Various scholars have used postmodernist insights to criticize this literature for its embrace of colonial/neo-colonial discourse(s) portraying Third World women as tradition-bound, passive, voiceless and interchangeable objects (Lazreg, Mohanty, Ong). They argue that the production of knowledge (within the field of Gender and Development) is intricately related to the representation of Third World women as the “other.” Generally agreeing with these criticisms, the contributors to this section go beyond this original claim and explore various related themes.
