ABSTRACT
The focus on economic policy continues in this chapter, this time drawing on feminist critiques of the relations between gender and development, explicitly juxtaposing the emerging debates about gender and development with discussions of children, especially girl children. The chapter foreshadows later emphases in sociological literature on how the discourse of vulnerability and victimhood is central to Northern discourses of childhood (Christensen 2000; Meyer 2007), but takes these further to draw attention to the practical consequences of this differentiation in terms of the intersection of gender and culture. It focuses on three sets of debates: how the anomalous treatment of the development category of ‘the girlchild’ expresses specific problems about prevailing conceptualisations of the relations between interventions for women and for children; second, how models of psychological and economic development recapitulate and retroactively legitimate each other; and third, how the allocation of particular gendered characteristics map on to other geographically distributed inequalities. In particular the opposition between ‘development’ (for the North), and ‘survival’ (for the South) is explored, while the agenda for changing these models of development is clarified.
