This article looks at how the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) has participated in, contributed to, and been shaped by debates around gender and sexuality. Through interviews with key participants in the gender and sexuality research story of IDS, we explore certain periods and themes over the last four decades. These are the introduction of gender research at IDS in the 1970s, the development of the MA Gender and Development (GAD) in partnership with the University of Sussex in the late 1980s; the co-construction of knowledge with the development of BRIDGE in the 1990s; and the Pathways of Women's Empowerment programme, gender myths and sexuality, and the emergence of work on men and masculinity from 2000. These selected stories highlight the particular strength of IDS' convening role in creating the spaces for academics, activists and others to come together to politicise the dialogues by revealing normative assumptions often taken for granted in gender and sexuality.
Thirty years of feminist engagement with development has led to the distinctive and plural field of inquiry and practice of gender and development.'
Cornwall, Harrison and Whitehead (eds), Feminisms in Development: Contradictions, Contestations and Challenges, 2007: 2
The Institute of Development Studies (IDS) turns 50 in 2016. To celebrate this important milestone, this article looks back at how the Institute has participated in and contributed to debates around gender and sexuality – in all their distinctiveness and plurality – through the decades. Beginning in the mid to late 1970s we track the progress of gender and sexuality issues within IDS and how the engagement of IDS' scholarship with them shaped, and was shaped by, external thinking.
Through interviews with key participants, we examine particular points in that narrative, exploring their contributions to the debates of their time. We have selected certain critical periods and themes from the last four decades, starting with the introduction of gender research and networks at IDS in the 1970s and the development of the MA Gender and Development (GAD) in partnership with the University of Sussex in the late 1980s, before we go on to explore the ways in which knowledge was co-constructed with the development of BRIDGE1 in the 1990s. Moving into the early 2000s we discuss the development of the Pathways of Women's Empowerment programme, as well as gender myths and sexuality and the ways in which IDS helped challenge the development sector to critique 'heteronormativity'2 – leading to the development of programmes with international partners both for sexuality and gender. We then trace the emergence of work with and on men and masculinity from 2000 to the present – work developed as a way to break out of women-centric and individualist approaches to development.
There are many others we could also have included, but these particular stories have been selected to show how the international convening power of IDS has acted as a catalyst for debates to pose
provocative questions. This has been done through creating the spaces
for academics, activists and others to come together to politicise the dialogues by revealing normative assumptions often taken for granted. Working within IDS enabled its gender specialists to create
international networks and fields of thought at a time when the
Institute had unparalleled global reach. The importance of gender at IDS can be seen in the creation of a body of gender specialists that work in countries all over the world and in numerous international organisations, as well as its role in helping to connect international feminists. It is this fusion of people, space and creativity of thought that
has been the particular strength of IDS' convening role in the field of
gender and sexuality.
The 1970s marked a significant era of change for women's organising.
Second-wave feminism was well under way in the US and the UK. Amid a wave of feminist reform in areas such as abortion and contraception, the United Nations (UN) declared 1975 to be International Women's Year. A dynamic mix of global and local feminisms was ushering in a new focus on women in development activism and research. Ester Boserup's (1970) pioneering work on women's role in economic development was taken up enthusiastically,
and the 1975 first world conference on the status of women held in
Mexico led to the creation of many new institutions. Among them were the development of the African Training and Research Centre for Women (ATRCW) in Addis Ababa (1975), the founding of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) in 1976, and the
establishment of local women's movements including one of the first
Africa-wide networks of women, the Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD) in 1977 (Berger 2007).
With the women in development (WID) approach, social movements were aiming to 'visibilise' women (Kabeer 1994). It was, however, still an uphill struggle. As Kabeer notes: 'development [had] been [up until then] about men, by men and for men' (1994: ix). This struggle was paralleled in the struggle to get gender included both as a research focus and teaching programme within IDS.
Initially, this was spearheaded by a small group of feminist graduate
students and early career staff from IDS and the University of Sussex,
who advocated for the establishment of a Fellow in Gender at IDS (Whitehead pers. comm.). Kate Young, appointed to this post in 1977, worked to establish a research programme at IDS and to make contacts with key international scholars and academics. More informally, she was part of a group of multidisciplinary feminist researchers who came together to establish the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings to issues of gender in contexts of social and economic transformation. Kate was successful in getting funding for a major international workshop which was planned by this Subordination of Women (SOW) collective and took place at IDS in 1978. The empirical and conceptual papers given at the 'Continuing Subordination of Women in the Development Process' conference by activists and researchers from
many different countries succeeded in 'developing an interdisciplinary
socialist feminist approach to examine development and social change' (Rai and Waylen 2013; Young 1979a).
As Shirin Rai and Georgina Waylen write in New Frontiers in Feminist Political Economy, the SOW conference's 'debates on GAD [gender and development], production and reproduction are now legendary and are still as relevant today as they were then' (2013: 3). The SOW collective
and the 1978 conference played an important role in critiquing
the WID approach. WID was seen as isolating and tokenistic in its approach to women, without taking into account the existing gender power relations which impeded women's progress (Moser 2014). SOW called for a shift in focus to gender which would take into account the restrictive social relations and hierarchies.
Getting gender to be seen as an integral issue within research in IDS, however, was a struggle. Richard Jolly cites Kate Young as recalling that 'the work was treated as marginal to the central concerns of the majority of IDS Fellows' (Jolly 2008: 35). Interviewees we spoke to for this article related the struggle to get the MA Gender and Development
– a cooperation between IDS and the University of Sussex, led by Ann Whitehead – into existence. Initial attempts to establish an MA in Gender and Development as a collaborative teaching programme
between IDS and the University of Sussex were met with stiff opposition. It was several years before the first students enrolled for what in 1987 was the first UK MA in Gender and Development. Resources
and readings from the conference and issues of the IDS Bulletin from 1978 and 1979 provided a valuable grounding in feminist theory and GAD debates for the students on this course.
The struggle to make gender visible at IDS is also evident from the experience of a former IDS Fellow, Naila Kabeer, who has been hugely
influential in shaping the field of GAD. Kabeer arrived at the Institute
in 1985 after these several years of collaboration by Young, Whitehead and others. Her research and consultancy work markedly strengthened the gender focus at IDS and led it in new and fruitful directions.
When Kabeer first came to IDS, as Whitehead observed in her
introduction to Kabeer's 2013 inaugural lecture at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, 'the invisibility of gender and women within development studies was chronic, nowhere more so than at IDS despite the little enclave of gender work that had
been fought for there' (Whitehead 2013). This is a significant point as in the late 1980s and through the 1990s, IDS was playing 'a crucial role in the evolution and application of theoretical ideas about development… [and] had some of the brightest and best development thinkers' (ibid.).
Kabeer's role in challenging the male bias in development studies is evident from her 1994 book, Reversed Realities, which 'contains incisive analysis on the ways in which economics was unable to address gender issues'. Further, it 'develops a distinctive array of gender relational conceptual tools and explores the development practice of a wide array of development actors' (Whitehead 2013).
One significant vehicle for disseminating IDS' gender analysis during
this period is the three-month residential training course on 'Women, Men and Development' which Young established in 1984 and which
Kabeer worked on in her first years at IDS. The course was aimed at
intermediary-level government policymakers, women's organisations and activists among others, giving them the opportunity to share
experience from the field and to learn from the theory. As Whitehead (2013) further points out, it led to 'a highly influential gender training
framework… which showed practitioners at all levels how to analyse gender power within a structured framework of key social institutions'.
The framework was subsequently used by Kabeer and other IDS
colleagues for gender training within development institutions of all kinds, from the World Bank, to local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and grass-roots feminist organisations. Conversely, however, an analysis by Poats and Russo (1989) found that it still had 'limited impact' on getting gender issues incorporated within the rest of IDS.
The struggles researchers faced in integrating a gender focus within research at IDS at this time has clear parallels with the global struggles faced by global feminists in getting women visibilised in development.
The SOW collective successfully questioned development thinking
on WID, played a convening catalyst role in establishing a network of
feminist thinkers as well as laying the basis for subsequent more diverse
gender research in IDS. Almost 60 participants took part in the innovative 1978 'Continuing Subordination of Women in the Development Process' conference – 26 from the global South and 31 from the North, which
was 'very important in establishing the field' (Whitehead pers. comm.).
The residential training made long lasting connections to Southern partners, with, for example, Sri Lankan alumni taking part in the IDS 40 round-table discussions in Colombo in 2006.3 Alumni from the MA Gender and Development have gone on to influence feminist thinking
and policymaking in a whole range of roles. This period provided a strong basis for the future gender and sexuality work of IDS.
In thinking about IDS' convening role, it has not only been about bringing people together, but also about collating knowledge. Indeed, Kate Hawkins notes that for the Sexuality and Development Programme, which we discuss later in this article, 'knowledge services had a lot to do with [sexuality] gaining currency in terms of power' (pers. comm.). One of the most important examples of this for IDS gender work is BRIDGE, a specialised GAD research and information service. BRIDGE was established in 1992 to provide background information for basing gender-related policy decisions on. The concept came about through a coordination between Rosalind Eyben who was then Chief Social Development Adviser at the Overseas Development Administration (ODA, later the Department for International Development (DFID)) and IDS Fellow Susan Joekes. Following four
years of trying to get WID onto the ODA's agenda, Rosalind's staff were being inundated with requests for information that they couldn't respond to quickly. Thus the idea for BRIDGE was born. Managed by Sally Baden, it initially acted as a response unit for the requests being
received by Development Assistance Committee members, providing studies on a range of issues relating to WID.
Subsequently, BRIDGE moved from a more reactive to a proactive
model. In 2001 its Cutting Edge Programme was launched with a Cutting Edge Pack on the topic of Gender and Participation. The Cutting Edge Programme brings together examples of practice, lessons and recommendations from BRIDGE's partners and wider networks.
The BRIDGE team identifies themes through conversations with their
stakeholders and develops a pack for each which provides a map as to who is doing what and how. The spirit behind it is one of co-construction
– an assemblage identifying with the IDS strength of convening. As Hazel Reeves, former BRIDGE manager notes, the Cutting Edge Packs '… developed into building a community of practice. With people working together to collect learning on an issue' (pers. comm.).
The 'politicising of knowledge' in terms of co-construction and promotion of hidden voices has been an important progressive step in development communications (Datta 2012). BRIDGE has advanced this not only in their sharing of knowledge from around the world via Siyanda and their shared development of the Cutting Edge Programme, but also through their multilingual work. The multilingual resource programme has brought a democracy of knowledge with it – an opening out of the traditional routes of development knowledge.
There is an undeniable dominance of the English language in development. To counter such dominance and increase the visibility of research, case studies, good practice and experiences across languages are needed. Gender research and good practice that is conducted and
disseminated in non-English countries is insufficiently represented or
valued at global levels where the main language remains English, thus creating silos and missed opportunities. It also prevents English-speaking
researchers and practitioners from benefiting from a wealth of very
valuable studies and experiences carried out in non-English regions. For this reason, BRIDGE engages with a number of partners in non-English-speaking regions so that those voices are heard and their multiple knowledges are integrated within the GAD discourse. BRIDGE works in collaboration with its partners to promote and generate knowledge on the gender dimensions of key development issues by facilitating the exchange of ideas and information, and by building learning in ways
that integrate multiple knowledges expressed in different languages.
BRIDGE's democracy of knowledge is echoed in the Pathways of Women's Empowerment programme's (Pathways) approach to research and communications. Pathways was a research and communications programme developed in response to DFID's call for a programme on women's empowerment in 2005. The 1990s through to the 2000s saw an increasing development industry preoccupation with women's empowerment, shaped particularly by the instrumentalist direction of
Goal 3 of the Millennium Development Goals: 'Promote gender equality
and empower women' (Cornwall, Harrison and Whitehead 2004). Women's empowerment had originally been 'a rallying cry' for Southern feminists in the early 1990s (Cornwall, Gideon and Wilson 2008a: 3). Conversations around how change happens within the Gender Working Group, an important cross-IDS group that worked together over the course of the 2000s on gender, fed into the development of Pathways. Anne-Marie Goetz, an IDS Fellow at this time, was a key participant in these conversations. Her work on gender and governance at IDS in the 1990s and early 2000s provided some of the underlying thinking to the Pathways approach (see, for instance, Goetz 1997). Pathways was convened at IDS with partners based in Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia and West Africa.
The early design of Pathways, led by Andrea Cornwall together with members of IDS' Gender Working Group, notably Anne-Marie Goetz,
Naila Kabeer and Rosalind Eyben, was shaped by a critique of the
normative framing of WID and research and publication practices that maintained the hegemony of the global North in shaping what counts as knowledge. Two international conferences held at IDS drew together
leading figures in global debates on GAD. The first in 2003 on 'Gender
Myths and Feminist Fables: Repositioning Gender in Development Policy and Practice' was co-organised by Andrea Cornwall, and Elizabeth Harrison and Ann Whitehead, University of Sussex, and explored how the appropriation of feminist language in development, such as the adoption of the term 'women's empowerment', had divested it of its nuances and meaning, reducing it to essentialisms which lost the complexity of women's lives. Although it was noted that at times reducing
issues such as women's inequality to easily memorable slogans could have benefits in order to draw in attention and much needed resources, the stereotyping of women as victims in need of development's beneficence
meant them losing identity and voice (Cornwall et al. 2004; Win 2004).
The second conference, in 2007, on 'Reclaiming Feminism: Gender and Neoliberalism', co-organised by Andrea Cornwall, Jasmine Gideon from Birkbeck, University of London and Kalpana Wilson from the
London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), critiqued
the neoliberal development discourse engagement with empowerment (Cornwall et al. 2008a). Discussions at the conference focused on how neoliberalism had reproduced conservative notions of womanhood, straitjacketing women into a nurturing role within the family. These instrumentalist ideas cast women with the responsibility for ensuring
economic growth – 'a weapon in the fight against poverty' (DFID 2007:
31 cited in Cornwall et al. 2008a).
In individualising women in this way and associating 'empowerment' with self-improvement, the collective and relational aspect of women's empowerment had been lost. Original conceptions of the term by Southern feminists referred to a collective challenging of power relations (Batliwala 1994). In this new language women's empowerment interventions became 'magic bullets' expediently bestowing
empowerment – interventions such as women's quotas for parliamentary
seats – neglecting to take into account context and restrictive ideologies which persist (Tadros 2011; Cornwall and Goetz 2005). In the words of Cecilia Sardenberg (convenor of the Pathways Latin America Hub) it was liberal rather than liberating empowerment (Sardenberg 2008), minimising the importance of women's organising which was a key focus of the Pathways programme. As Kate Young noted in 1979, 'only where women's organisations are strong and not merely an adjunct to the
progressive political party, do such questions [on women's subordination]
become a central part of the political debate and struggle around the priorities to be adopted in the planned development of society' (1979b: 4).
IDS played an important convening role in the development of these conference conversations in terms of bringing together leading feminist thinkers through networks and connections forged in the early years of the SOW collective. The fundamental design of Pathways based on feminist thinking in terms of a democracy of research and budget control, however, was the product of the strong partnership of feminist activists and academics from countries across Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia and West Africa. The programme held the joint decision-making of all voices to be a core value and placed an emphasis on publishing Southern feminist academics (Pathways 2011).
The use of creative communications in Pathways was strongly linked to its research and the ethos of challenging norms. Communications were used as a way of changing the conversation and bringing in new voices.
This included the early adoption of digital storytelling methodology;
film production which teamed researchers with film-makers to shed new
perspectives on the research and to focus on the complexity of women's lives; and facilitating research participants to tell their own story through photography.
One particular example of this amplifying of marginalised voices is the film,
Save Us From Saviours (www.saveusfromsaviours.net) which Pathways members worked on with the VAMP [Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad] collective in India to put forward the perspective of sex workers and how they mobilised to claim their rights and support each other. As well as a way of challenging development myths and stereotypes such as the poor, powerless African woman (Win 2004; also see Cornwall, Harrison and Whitehead 2008b; Lewin 2010), incorporating visual and storytelling methodologies is a way of promoting empathy and understanding for an issue.
In talking about gender-based violence in conflict, Anne-Marie Goetz remarks:
The most powerful tool for changing hearts and minds is, first, direct exposure to women who have experienced violence and conflict, and second, clever media work that brings women's experience of conflict to life for policymakers… It is critical to expose policymakers to an alternative perspective, which is most effective when there is an emotional element. Policymakers have to feel differently in order to act differently (Goetz in Hudson 2014: 341–2).
Indeed, thinking back to the IDS Sexuality and Development Programme, for Kate Hawkins a critical moment in the work was a 2010 event held at DFID. The event featured '10 panels, one short
quote and gripping photos illustrating the connections between people's
material wellbeing and sexual rights' (pers. comm.). The visual aspect helps to make the connections more tangible.
Moving next to the theme of sexuality, which the sexual rights
movements and queer theorists were engaging in from the late 1980s through the global HIV response, IDS joined the debates in the first decade of the 2000s by critiquing the development industry for not
paying attention to pleasure and linking sex to death and disease.
As with gender as a broader issue in the early 1970s, work coming out of IDS argued that development had side-lined sexuality (Cornwall and Jolly 2006). In a landmark IDS Working Paper, which placed sexual minorities and/or dissidents in development, Andil Gosine (2005) argued that the 'reduction of sexual rights to reproduction (for women) and/or AIDS (for men)' (2005: 12) undermined the fact that sex can also be 'a
pleasurable activity' (2005: 13). For Gosine, reconfiguring conversations
about sex in development to focus on 'eroticism, recreation and pleasure' (2005: 13) could advance debates on and reveal new strategies for
realising sexual rights. Through this critique – along with critiques from
Susie Jolly, Andrea Cornwall and others – the heteronormative nature of development was challenged, with a 2006 IDS Bulletin showing 'why sexuality matters' (Cornwall and Jolly 2006).
Since the early 2000s when IDS was first engaging with issues of sexuality and development, the visibility of this nascent field has increased. Interviews with Susie Jolly, who first convened the Sexuality
and Development Programme, reveal how this came about. When
Jolly first arrived at IDS as a student in 2000, she organised a seminar
series called 'Queering Development', which she explains 'opened the discussions in IDS' (pers. comm.). Getting from Jolly's 2000 seminar series to where IDS is now – moving beyond the 'straitjacket' of heteronormativity, opening up discussions on sexual rights beyond a narrow focus on health and getting recognition for the pleasure factor
– was not easy due to assumptions that 'the development industry shouldn't be interfering with people's lives' (Jolly pers. comm.).
Yet the influence of a series of people and events led to the discourse
being shaped in a more 'pleasurable' way, such as 'an advisory group which decided sexuality should be a topic' (Jolly pers. comm.) and funding, which Andrea Cornwall and Susie Jolly were able to secure from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency
(Sida) and DFID 'to develop initial working papers, and to hold the first
Sexuality and Development workshop, which gave rise to the 2006 IDS Bulletin 'Sexuality Matters' (pers. comm.). Indeed, for Kate Hawkins – who convened the Sexuality and Development Programme after Susie Jolly left in 2010 – 'progressive donors' such as Sida have been critical to sexuality's increased visibility within IDS as this 'laid the foundation for the direction of work we were going to do' (pers. comm.). This in turn has contributed to wider discussions on the larger-scale struggle to take sexuality seriously in development work. Debates have explored issues such as redressing the marginalisation of sexuality in development policies and programmes, and the importance of recognising the
significance of sexual wellbeing for all dimensions of development.
Building on this momentum, Jolly cites another major turning point in the work on sexuality: the workshop, 'Development's Marginalisation of Sexuality' held at IDS in 2005. Described as 'a joined up sexual rights movement' (Jolly pers. comm.), the workshop 'brought together people from the global South working on a whole range of sexuality issues
– researchers, activists, policymakers, donors, government, national organisations'. As detailed in a report drawing on discussions from the workshop, the conversations – which centred on placing the issue of sexual rights on the development agenda – were also taking place at IDS, which 'represents, to many, the very heart of the development mainstream' (Cornwall 2006: 284) and was exciting:
There was a tangible feeling of exhilaration at being able to bring issues of sexuality into an arena that has remained so impervious to its significance. To see the corridors of IDS lined with the provocative art of Peruvian travesti activist Giuseppe Campuzano, and decked with brightly coloured declarations of sexual rights, was something in itself. To engage people who have led development thinking on poverty and power, like Robert Chambers, in debate on the connections between sexuality and development was something again (ibid.).
This further indicates the strength of IDS as a convenor to create a space which brings various actors together to discuss the centrality of sexuality in development discourse.
It is vital to mention here, from Jolly, Cornwall and Hawkins' point of view, that similar to getting gender on the agenda in the late 1970s, was the crucial role IDS MA and MPhil gender students have also played. Hawkins pointed out that we should 'give credit where it is due' as 'students at IDS are very progressive and a helpful constituency in thinking some of these issues' (pers. comm.). For Jolly, 'it was students' that were one of the most interested groups – in addition to scholars, such as Andrea
Cornwall and Alan Sinfield, who led the Sexual Dissidence programme at
the University of Sussex. Correspondence with Cornwall echoes this:
When I arrived at IDS in 1998, there was no work on sexuality at all: it was with my students on the MPhil – Andil Gosine, Susie Jolly, Divya Bajpai – that the first contributions to the debate on sexuality and development were made. I invited Andil to write what became our first sexuality and development working paper, and Susie and I worked together to develop a proposal for a programme that secured funding from DFID in 2007, with which we were able to launch the Sexuality and Development Programme at IDS. We also integrated sexuality into the Pathways RPC [Research Programme Consortium], despite internal and external opposition (Cornwall pers. comm.).
Since then IDS has seen its work in this area expand with the Sexuality, Poverty and Law (SPL) programme that launched in 2012. Building on the earlier work of Jolly, Cornwall and others, such as tracing the
linkages between inequality, poverty and sex, the SPL programme
continued to take this agenda forward by generating robust evidence on the link between poverty and sexuality. Additionally, the earlier work on sexuality and development in the Institute created a powerful network of partners around the world who, together, brought sexuality into focus in the areas of law and development policy and practice. The SPL programme built on that through the co-creation of innovative
tools based on the existing evidence to equip activists, civil society
organisations and national and international policymakers to create
equitable and inclusive societies.
As Stephen Wood, Research Officer on the SPL programme, writes in
a blog post, it has 'from its inception [aspired] to redress the historic
paucity of evidence to show that sexual minorities suffer a double-bind
of prejudice and exclusion from economic security' (Wood 2014). This can be seen in a number of outputs that it has produced. Through a Sexuality and Social Justice Toolkit,4 five policy audits, seven legal case studies and nine poverty case studies (among others), the programme has worked with a network of country-partners to reveal empirical evidence that demonstrates – to national governments, donors and civil society organisations – that discrimination has a cost, not only for individual wellbeing, but for national prosperity. To this end, in addition to country-level output, the SPL programme has also been working with donors, international civil society organisations and academic institutes to lobby for international agencies to integrate (among other points) sexuality-sensitive indicators into the data that is collected and reported through development programmes at a country level.
Now, decades later, through its work on sexuality, IDS has generated over 40 reports and briefs that trace the socioeconomic impacts of discriminatory policies and laws on the lives of people marginalised because of their gender identity and sexuality. This body of work calls attention to the socioeconomic implications of legal and policy marginalisation. This is particularly crucial as we move into the next development era under the Sustainable Development Goals. Moreover, as Elizabeth Mills, the convenor of the SPL programme since 2013,
writes, the evolution of the GAD field has paved the way for IDS' work
on sexuality in two main respects:
First, the evolution of evidence on inequality informed a
corresponding evolution in development policy approaches, showing the importance of policy change that is agile, able to take up and respond to robust evidence. As we build up an increasingly robust evidence base on the links between poverty and sexuality at IDS, we see a real commitment within the UK, and in other countries around the world, to ensure that development practice takes up and responds
to the challenges posed by these emerging findings.
Second, the evolution the GAD field was driven by researchers,
policymakers and activists who insisted on thinking at the edge of the mainstream; people like Naila Kabeer, who pioneered novel
ways to quantify household-level inequality. The field was pushed
even further by people like Andrea Cornwall, Susie Jolly and Kate Hawkins, who started to challenge the very notion of gender as a binary and as about heterosexuality. In doing so, they opened a new
era of work in the field of development, akin to that era – 40 years
previously, when gender entered development (pers. comm.).
A final example of IDS' convening and provocative questioning can be
seen in its men and masculinities work, which was initiated by Andrea Cornwall in 2000 – building on the original GAD intention to be relational and structural – before being jointly convened by Cornwall and Jerker Edström from 2007 and then solely by Edström until today. In that time IDS research has contributed significantly to the field of knowledge on engaging men and boys in gender equality initiatives,
initially in contexts of addressing HIV/AIDS and tackling gender-based violence to the most recent work on 'Engendering Men: Evidence on
Routes to Gender Equality' (EMERGE).5
This stream of work, over a period of more than a decade, has also
seen the publication of a number of influential texts, including Men and Development: Politicising Masculinities (Cornwall, Edström and Greig 2011) and three issues of the IDS Bulletin – 'Men, Masculinities and Development' (2000), edited by Andrea Cornwall and Sarah White; 'Undressing Patriarchy' (2014), edited by Jerker Edström, Abhijit Das and Chris Dolan; and the virtual IDS Bulletin, 6 'Challenging Patriarchy: Unsettling Men and Masculinities', edited by Andrea Cornwall and Jerker Edström. These issues of the IDS Bulletin helped in shaping the discourse around the issues by, for instance, bringing attention to the structural implications of male privilege (Cornwall and White 2000) and exploring the shifting roles of men and masculinities and their engagement with feminism (Edström et al. 2014). The recognition of the importance of including men and not just women in gender research for IDS goes back
to the original SOW collective and their critique of the WID narrative.
Since 2007 IDS, along with crucial partners in the field, has been supporting 'fine-grained research, innovative programming and critical self-reflection' (Shahrokh et al. 2015: 4) within the field of engaging men
and boys in work for gender justice. That same year, IDS convened researchers, activists and donors to chart a course for 'Politicising Masculinities: Beyond the Personal' (Esplen and Greig 2008) in a Sida-supported international symposium in Dakar, Senegal to challenge the ways in which masculinities and work with men and boys had been taken up in policy and in discourse (Hawkins et al. 2013).
Organised, led and facilitated by IDS researchers Andrea Cornwall and Jerker Edström, and Alan Greig, an independent consultant, Edström explains in the workshop report (Esplen and Greig 2008: 6) what motivated him to organise the symposium:
When I joined IDS last year [2006], I soon engaged with Andrea Cornwall and others on this topic [HIV, gender and sexuality]. We started discussions about how the AIDS world was reverting back to more medicalised and simplistic service-provision frameworks, de-sexualising and often 'mis-gendering' HIV under the weight of increasingly right-wing hegemonic masculine US power brokers, backed up with massive resources for a global response to AIDS. We also lamented the fact (or perception) that 'gender' is no longer really offering us many exciting or helpful conceptual tools, but rather seems to be inadvertently stuck in reconstructing or reinforcing essentialist and 'heteronormative' gender binaries.
Certainly, a lot has been learned about HIV from work with men, as well as from work with women – particularly sex workers. But the issues are not being heard loud enough and some of the lessons are not being considered critically. So we wanted to engage more directly with those most engaged with the issues and try to make a contribution to advancing our collective thinking. We thought the best way to start would be to call a big meeting of some of the best people we knew from around the world, who are dealing with these issues in their work and lives.
The Dakar symposium, as noted in a recent Stories of Influence report, brought up the important need in the field of GAD to 'engage men in
addressing the structural determinants and institutional manifestations of gender injustice' (Shahrokh et al. 2015: 4). During the discussions participants challenged the idea of the gender binary, explored the
multiple contexts that give rise to gender inequalities and tried to find ways of stimulating creative alliances between like-minded social
movements (Hawkins et al. 2013). The symposium led to three outputs: (1) an event at the AWID Forum in Cape Town in 2008, organised by Andrea Cornwall, Alan Greig and Jerker Edström, 'Women's Empowerment: What Do Men Have to Do With It?', which was one of the only events at the forum to address the issue of masculinities, and was voted one of the top ten sessions of the forum (AWID 2009); (2) a meeting, 'Heteronormativity: Untying the Straight-jacket of Development', which took place in Cape Town in 2010; and (3) a book – Men and Development: Politicising Masculinities (Cornwall et al. 2011).
In an effort to take this agenda forward, Edström also undertook work
with civil society partners to mobilise men to challenge sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) within institutional settings. This saw the development of the 'mobilising men to challenge SGBV in institutional settings' project in 2010 (Greig with Edström 2012). Partnering with civil society organisations in India, Kenya and Uganda, this project
identified, recruited, trained and supported teams of male activists to
work with women in developing campaigns to challenge and change the
policies and cultures of specific institutional settings that condone or
even fuel SGBV. This project, supported by the UN Population Fund, was sustained and strengthened within the Gender, Power and Sexuality (GPS) Programme, constituting the work of its men and masculinities stream, as well as the Empowerment of Women and Girls' programme with the work on collective action and SGBV which continue to look at
the roles of men in the process of achieving gender equality.
Six years after the Dakar symposium, the 'Undressing Patriarchy:
Redressing Inequalities' symposium was held in 2013 in Hove (Brighton,
UK). Edström, one of the symposium organisers, provided an introduction as to why he felt it was important to 'undress patriarchy',
to be able to 'explore the patriarchal features of different systems of
power… to revitalise and advance conversations and thinking about
gender inequality in relation to patriarchy and other structures of power
[and] to make patriarchy – which is certainly problematic, complex and oppressive – more comprehensible and visible' (Hawkins et al. 2013: 7). It can then be seen that from 'Politicising Masculinities' in 2007 in Dakar to 'Undressing Patriarchy' in 2013 in Hove, there have been a number of symposia convened by IDS that have argued for the
important need to engage men in efforts for gender justice.
In general, IDS' work in this area has sought to challenge the 'simplistic binary of "women" and "men"', such as stereotypes of women as passive/victim and men as active/perpetrator. It has, instead, sought to 'understand and undertake gender justice work in relation to people's complex experiences of power and oppression' (Shahrokh et al. 2015: 4) and to re-politicise 'gender in development'.
In reflecting back over the 50 years of IDS and with the particular focus
on over 40 years of gender and sexuality research, what has come out strongly in the interviews we conducted is the fusion of creative people
and spaces which permitted a healthy questioning of the development discourse. People like the first IDS academics to work on gender issues
such as Kate Young and Naila Kabeer who showed persistence in advancing the cause of gender research, despite internal IDS struggles which mirrored external global struggles, the MA Gender students who have maintained a progressive activism in their approach to studies at IDS, those working on communications and knowledge who have
experimented in creativity and promoted equality of voice, and the many networks and partners who have challenged and influenced
ways of thinking. Spaces, which have been created due to IDS' global
convenorship, have been afforded in ways such as progressive funders, the working with people outside academia who could bring a different
perspective, and the many conferences and meetings which brought dynamic groups of people together.
In this time, IDS has played a role in the conceptual shift from WID towards a GAD approach, while also critically bringing sexuality and masculinities into gender theory, research and practice. It has come a long way since the early days when gender was a very marginalised topic. Issues which were invisible such as sexuality and pleasure have become visibilised and those not previously on the agenda such as masculinities have moved to the agenda. In 2014, IDS took a new step in underlining the importance of gender and sexuality research by forming the Gender and Sexuality Cluster.
Work continues to be provocative, creative and progressive, such as the Love Matters Music Awards which encouraged young Kenyan students to produce music on topics of love and sexuality which mattered to them (IDS 2015); the Who Cares animation, which highlights the key issues of women's unpaid care work and provides practical solutions to address this (IDS 2013); and the Sex Work Law Map which provides an overview of legal frameworks on sex work around the world.
Now almost 40 years since the appointment of IDS' first Gender Fellow, the Institute continues to play a significant role in creating those necessary
spaces – in research, teaching, knowledge and communication – needed to politicise the dialogues and reveal normative assumptions around gender and sexuality in development debates. Debates, such as the relationship between sexual pleasure and wellbeing, that are taken for granted.
Looking forward, there are certainly some challenging questions that
could shape the focus on gender and sexuality research, teaching, knowledge and communication at IDS. What do shifts in development, such as increased global migration, urbanisation, new technologies, resurgent fundamentalisms and so on mean for gender and sexuality research? We have revealed in this article how the ways in which previous and current work and researchers at IDS have sought to put gender and sexuality on the development agenda through research, dialogue
and communication. Reflecting on the history of IDS is significant for
the generation of research and knowledge that continues to challenge gender and sexuality 'myths' and stereotypes, while contributing to transformative policy, practice and activism in the future.
* The authors would like to thank Andrea Cornwall, Elizabeth Harrison, Kate Hawkins, Susie Jolly, Hazel Reeves and Ann Whitehead for agreeing to be interviewed for this article and for kindly giving up their time for the interviews. We would also like to thank Paola Brambilla, Andrea Cornwall, Jerker Edström, Elizabeth Mills and Ann Whitehead for their helpful comments on previous drafts. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the work of all the many researchers on gender and sexuality at IDS over the years. For reasons of space we have had to be selective about the work we touched upon, but we recognise that there is a greater body of work which combines to create the IDS gender and sexuality research story. All errors and omissions are the responsibility of the authors.
1. BRIDGE is a specialised gender and development research and information service based at IDS (www.bridge.ids.ac.uk).
2. The term 'heteronormativity' grew out of 'queer theory' and is the
assumption that heterosexuality is the norm and any other form of sexual desire, expression or relationship is 'abnormal' or 'wrong'. It is underpinned by the assumption that there are only two sexes, men and women, which exist in a binary. See www.eldis.org/go/ topics/resource-guides/gender/key-issues/heteronormativity#. VsHCyvmLTIU (accessed 15 February 2016).
3. One of a series of 46 round-table events convened for the Institute of Development Studies' 40th Anniversary.
4. Launched in 2014, it is 'an interactive platform that synthesises much
of the reflexive, collaborative learning undertaken with partners so
far in the Programme' (Wood 2014).
5. See http://menandboys.ids.ac.uk.
6. See www.ids.ac.uk/publication/challenging-patriarchy-unsettling
men-and-masculinities.
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© 2016 The Authors. IDS Bulletin © Institute of Development Studies | DOI: 10.19088/1968-2016.135
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International licence, which permits downloading and sharing provided the original authors and source are credited – but the work is not used for commercial purposes. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode
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This article is part of IDS Bulletin Vol. 47 No. 2 May 2016: 'Development Studies – Past, Present and Future' 105–122; the Introduction is also recommended reading.