ABSTRACT
During a meeting of feminist academics and activists at the University of Sussex in 2004, participants lamented the de-politicization of the feminist ideals that had underpinned much of the seminal work in gender and development2 at Sussex, going back to the early 1980s. The meeting followed a watershed workshop in 2003, ‘Gender Myths and Feminist Fables’, which was one of a number of efforts, in the run-up to the 20th anniversary of the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women, that mapped and disinterred what had happened since the conference. Some meeting participants likened the loss of feminist underpinnings of the conference to a ‘wayward daughter’ who had lost her way. Others used the analogy of a ship of which once set sail, there is no way of knowing where it will end up and what will happen to the precious cargo. These metaphors were attempts to understand what happens to transnational feminist ideas once they diffuse across time and space. The focus of attention was on gender mainstreaming which, in some cases, was deemed the culprit behind the de-politicization and co-optation of gender and development (Milward et al. 2015). In part informed by gender and development analysis and feminist advocacy,
gender mainstreaming has become part of mainstream development discourse (Mukhopadhyay 2014) since the Beijing conference which marked the initial widespread endorsement of the approach by governments and the United Nations (UN). While the term is contested and understood in various ways (March et al. 1999), the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC 1997) definition is the most widely referenced and describes gender mainstreaming as:
a strategy of making the concerns and experiences of women as well as of men an integral part of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and societal spheres, so that women and men benefit equally, and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal of mainstreaming is to achieve gender equality.
