"There cannot be any compromises on the core values of women’s integrity"

International development framing is increasingly ill fitting to a 21st century characterized by globalized capitalism, the challenge of sustainable development, as well as the blurring of North–South boundaries. Patricia McFadden is a sociologist, writer, educator, and publisher from Swaziland who has worked extensively in the African and global women’s movements. She spoke to Natalia Figge on the sidelines of the FES Gender Innovation Network Meeting in Berlin about the search for alternative development strategies, especially from a feminist activist and movement perspective in response to a general dissatisfaction with development efforts in countries in the Global South.

Current economies and political systems (including development aid) reproduce patriarchy and inequality. What are feminist approaches and how can they transform power relations and structures to ensure women's agency?

As a response to patriarchal injustice – founded on the commodification and privatization of women as persons, and their bodies, ideas and creative capacities –feminists are distinctive in that they premise their interactions on the principles of bodily and sexual integrity, dignity, wellbeing and social justice for all.

Therefore, the struggle to transform unequal power relations has to begin with the acceptance that there cannot be any compromises on the core values of women’s integrity.

After almost two centuries of public, organized resistance to patriarchal exclusion and domination, political and social shifts have begun to occur, reflected in the growing numbers of women who have access to education, technical and scientific skills, professional and other public identities and proximities to state power.  Nonetheless, the majority of women remain excluded from these benefits, which is the main feminist challenge.

Can actors from the Global North and international development agencies contribute to global feminism? What feminist principles and values would make feminism truly inclusive?

Today, responses to the crises generated by gendered, raced, sexual and classed inequalities can be mapped in terms of institutional structural systems and policies, largely conceived and implemented through the UN and other globalized financial and technical infrastructures as humanitarian aid, and by large clusters of NGOs and civil society organizations and networks that complement the ideologies and policies of the UN and donor agencies. However, cutting edge feminist ideas and activism have remained outside the wider frame of ‘development policy and activism’ for the following reasons:

• Feminism as an ideology of women’s freedom challenges the very core and myths of democracy and so-called civilization. It disrupts and encourages dissent against the discourses and social inventions that undergird the status quo.
• Feminists insist that women’s struggles are the oldest and most essential expressions of the desire for freedom. This claim runs counter to the dominant claims that struggles for democracy (the ‘human’ face of capitalism) are the markers of contemporary social existence.
• The backlash we are experiencing as women is an expression of rage by the patriarchy that women are eroding their power. But entitlement to integrity in all its forms is inalienable and non-negotiable. Not all feminists adopt this position though, and many tensions among feminists are related to this issue.
• Feminists, particularly from the South, have consistently warned against racism and classism in relationships between women of the North and themselves. This is evident in the debates around feminism, humanitarianism and development in Africa, for example, and touches narratives of anti-colonialism and life in neocolonial societies. 
• Language is a powerful and effective tool. For the longest time, those in power have systematically eliminated the wordsmiths of radical expression, excluding them from the public through various forms of incarceration, denial of paid work, and exile in the hope that their ideas will lose their potency. Status quo institutions deliberately recruit the brightest minds from feminist communities by luring them with financial and social rewards. These ‘recruits’ become the interpreters of feminist language, which is tempered down and re-defined to fit into ‘gender-mainstreaming’ policies and programs. This rhetoric sustains the divide between feminists and those positioned within major institutions, civil society communities and even within personal relationships.

How then do international development agencies and individuals relate to feminism and feminist struggles? 

Let me enter via the issues of history and ideology. The recognition, positioning and articulation of historical injustices in discourses within ‘development’ agencies and with their partners across geo-spatial, classed and raced divides remain the core markers of human relationships. This and a resolution to engage and resolve these dividers is to me a foundational shift that must occur in order to imagine sustainable alternative relationships and societies.

Open, honest and systematic debates and conversations – as well as acceptance and learning on both sides – are the stepping-stones to building alternative relationships that mutually recognize our common humanity.  This is the subjective process that must feed the crafting of different policies and practices, which move humanitarians away from condescending attitudes and behavior, towards their own growth and fulfillment as persons.

Social inclusion, social and gender justice and solidarity are integral parts of FES’s DNA. However, even though inequality is rising globally, social democracy worldwide is on the decline. How could the social democratic project be reinvented and what contributions of women and feminist movements need to be an integral part of this process?

Adopting feminist principles and values would imply a fundamental re-evaluation of:

• The relationship between yourselves and the State and its agencies, its foreign policy intentions and the role that you have played in representing the notion and practice of social democracy. This is a massive issue – raised initially by Rosa Luxemburg.
• Feminist debates around the notion and practice of solidarity and radical humanism are critical to re-imagining the Social Democratic project – in historical terms, class and racial justice terms, and the core issues of women’s centeredness in the building of an alternative world.
• Solidarity is a notion and practice that comes out of the progressive energies and resilience of working people.  The radical agencies and demands of women who struggle and work in alliance with working people, have transformed the essence of solidarity – from being a powerful expression of the political unity and strength of workers as they contest capital everywhere into a more inclusive understanding of the value of women’s ideas, work, creativity, resourcefulness and experience in resisting patriarchy.

I place great value on opportunities to engage and share ideas with women who define their work and lives in relation to struggles for social justice, and I see a shift that is beginning to emerge across our worlds – a leaning towards the progressive inclinations that have always been the motivating force of human progress everywhere. 

While I recognize that the regions where FES engages are faced by particular challenges, the intention is to provoke a sensibility that the struggle against injustice and impunity affects and involves us all. This realization, I think, is crucial to the reimagining and crafting of new and urgent political and policy initiatives.

Does feminism always mean resistance against the status quo?

Yes, most definitely. It also means love and solidarity among women; kindness and empathy (without dependency and degradation); autonomy and lives of joy and sufficiency; and besides all the other ways of celebrating women’s beauty, intelligence, wisdom, knowledge and creativity, courage and indomitable spirit – it means becoming the custodian and defender of human freedom.