Love, K: The Politics of Gender in a Time of Change

Gender and development projects ultimately aim to change the lives of men and women in a particular society. Yet often these projects are so deeply rooted in underlying gender normativity that they reinscribe gender hierarchies rather than challenge them. This book explores the nature of change - ideational, insitutional, and embodied - focusing on the gender policies of the Indonesian state, substantiated with a case study of UNFPA programmes in West Java. Through a multi-level, multi-vocal framework, the work analyses how discourses circulate to construct the Indonesian woman (ideas), how discourses are translated into programmes (institutions), and how discourses enter the home and the body (identities). Critically, this book argues for renewed emphasis on a ‘politics of the body‘, as the site of structural and symbolic power. It is relevant for all those interested in analysing the relationship between discourse and practice, the question of power, and the way men and women embody social structures and experience social transformation.