norm (see performativity; subjectivity).
Butler does see opportunities to prise perform-
ances of sex and gender apart: the subversive
potential of drag performances, for example,
lies in the disjunction between (an assumed
interiorized) sex and exteriorized gender per-
formances, as well as the performance of the
sexually disallowed or unperformable (e.g.
men acting out conventions of femininity).
The implications of this retheorization of gen-
der and sex are far reaching: gender is recast as
derivative of the regulatory norms of (hetero)
sex and as repetitive and unstable practices
enacted in different ways in different places
and times. This invites close attention to the
persistent deployment of regulatory regimes of
heterosexuality, to the sexualities that operate
at the margins of and exceed the boundaries
of these norms, and to the geographies of both
(seehomophobia and heterosexism;queer
theory;sexuality; Nash, 1998; Hubbard,
2000).
The material limits to social constructivism
and a focus on life that exceedsdiscoursehas
drawn increasing attention. Another approach
to the problem that the sex/gender dualism
replays a phallocentric binary (one that com-
plements rather than contradicts that of But-
ler) has been to emphasize the agency and
dynamism of nature. Grosz (2005) articulates
this strategy when she implores feminists to
attend to ‘matter’ as ‘that which preconditions
and destabilizes gender and bodies, that which
problematizes all identity’ (p. 172). Echoing
Butler, she understands gender to be a con-
tained, represented, socialized, phallocentric
ideal and, following Irigarary, she directs
feminist enquiry away from gender to sexual
difference, which she associates with an
unbounding and proliferation of identifica-
tions, ontologies and ways of knowing.
Ramon-Garcia, Simonsen and Vaiou (2006)
note that the debates about the sex/gender
binary are specific to particular language
communities: feminists theorizing within
languages for which there is no distinction
between sex and gender have developed non-
essentialist arguments about gender without
drawing on this dualism. Even within Anglo-
phone feminism, there have been other ap-
proaches to theorizing the category of woman
outside of the gender/sex binary. Bondi and
Davidson (2003) call upon Wittgenstein’s
notion of ‘family resemblance’ to theorize the
category ‘woman’ as a loose network of simi-
larities rather than essential qualities, and Iris
Marion Young (1997b) has theorized the gen-
der of woman as a series brought together
by context-specific material conditions rather
than as a set of embodied characteristics or an
identification. gpSuggested reading
Bondi and Davidson (2003).gender and development A contested land-
scape of theoretical and political approaches to
gender, orthe woman questionindevelopment,
where Women in Development (WID), Women
and Development (WAD) and Gender and
Development (GAD) emerged as major discur-
sive fields, broadly paralleling liberal, radical
and Marxist/socialist feminist perspectives
(Saunders, 2002). Of these, WID (whose begin-
nings can be traced to the works of Esther
Boserup) has been instrumental in defining the
hegemonic field of feminist development prac-
tices. Although it has enjoyed legitimacy and
integration with major bi-/multilateral devel-
opment agencies and the United Nations,
WID has been critiqued within feminist and
alternative development circles for its assum-
ptions about sisterhood and its erasure of
differences based on class, nationality and co-
lonial histories and geographies.
For WAD theorists, inclusion and exclusion
is related to hierarchical spatialization of the
globalcapitalist economythat shapes the dif-
ferentiated spaces of core, semi-periphery and
periphery; urban and rural; capitalist and sub-
sistence sectors (seeuneven development).
Since peripheral spaces are central to develop-
ment’s local, regional and global formations,
thethird world’s poorest women are seen as
an integral piece of exploitative capitalist
development processes. For many theorists
and collectives from thesouth, this under-
standing translates into a close correspondence
between ‘experience’ and ‘visions’ in their the-
oretical centring of those poor Third World
women whose bodies have become the objects
of developmentalist interventions.
The GAD theorists centre ongenderand
classrelations rather than on womenper se.
They emphasize broader interlocking relation-
ships between the rules, resources, practices
andpowerthrough which social inequalities
(gender,caste, class etc.) are constituted and
played out in specific contexts (Kabeer and
Subrahmanian, 1999). Like WID, GAD is
also gynocentric. Unlike WID however,
GAD’s socialistic orientation is reflected in
a belief in thestate’s redistributive and welf-
are role (see socialism). At the level of
practice, the strategy of gender mainstrea-
ming – particularly NGO-linked women’sGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_G Final Proof page 269 2.4.2009 6:30pmGENDER AND DEVELOPMENT