ABSTRACT
The dramatic changes in power relations brought about by the globalization of financial and labor markets and by critical reinterpretations of modernity provide fertile ground for rethinking changing gender relations and development practice in the Third World. This chapter shows how initiatives to enhance gender equity have tended to homogenize the needs of women by embodying meanings that are constructed in the narrative of the generic woman. The women-in-development (WID) nomenclature embraces analyses of women in development to indicate efforts to add women to those who are affected by changes in the political and social economy. Drawing upon poststructuralist and postmodernist critiques of determinism, the politics of empowerment stresses the salience of power, personal experience, and agency as sources of change: People act as subjects who constitute their worlds, rather than as objects of structural demands placed upon their time and interests.
