Book launch: feminist engagement in development

Last month, the new book ‘Feminist Subversion and Complicity: Governmentalities and Gender Knowledge’ was launched. The book is part of a wider project of KIT Gender, reviewing fifteen years of feminist engagement in development on the basis of feminists’ own experiences. The book was edited by KIT advisor Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay.

Feminist Subversion and Complicity brings together the experiences from eight feminists from Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India, and interrogates the form of feminist practice that engages with state and international institutions to insert gender knowledge in their development interventions. This book is the outcome of a deeply reflexive process to produce a critique from within of this present day feminist practice.

An array of experiences and encounters are scrutinised; from bringing feminist perspectives to governmental projects on education, health, and legal reform to transformations in the discourses and practices of women’s movements and feminisms as they encounter developmentalisms. It shows that feminist politics is not merely assimilated in governmental projects, but that it interrupts these projects even as it is assimilated; a feminist politics in which complicity is often a subversive activity.