Gender a rozvoj: co nás rozděluje, co nás spojuje
Gender and Development: What Keeps Us Apart, What Keeps Us Together

Summary/Abstract: While gender has gained serious credit on the international development research and policy agenda, it is not reflected in Czech development studies. Likewise, the situation of women living in the developing world has been tackled by Czech gender studies only occasionally. This lack of attention from both the Czech academia and Czech civil society is owing to the slow reconstruction of both interdisciplines during the transition and to the prevailing liberalism of Czech society. Even though links between gender and poverty are reflected in the mainstream discourse of international organizations, the author criticizes their underlying liberal assumptions from the viewpoint of feminist economics without acknowledging the capacity of postmodern feminists to tackle lived poverty. While the grassroots women’s movements in the South reveal diverse theoretical backgrounds, in Czech development cooperation gender is only formally reflected in policy and operational documents. The author demonstrates this strong gender blindness through the example of a presumably gender neutral project on agricultural education in Angola. Czech development cooperation has supported only a few gender projects, which were intended especially for at risk women. In conclusion, the author advocates mainstreaming the gender perspective into Czech development cooperation and, by extending the scope of the feminist standpoint theory, argues that the development constituency cannot be genuinely pro‑poor without paying special attention to women and the gender constituency cannot pretend to defend women’s rights without paying attention to the poor living in the South.

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