This collection brings together leading feminist thinkers who examine the struggles for interpretive power which underlies international development.

• Questions why the insights from years of feminist gender and development research are so often turned into 'gender myths' and 'feminist fables' women are more likely to care for the environment; are better at working together; are less corrupt; have a seemingly infinite capacity to survive
• Explores how bowdlerized and impoverished representations of gender relations have simultaneously come to be embedded in development policy...

The political project of reasserting feminist engagement with development has proceeded uneasily in recent years. This book examines how the arguments of feminist researchers have often become depoliticised by development institutions and offers richly contextualised accounts of the pitfalls and compromises of the politics of engagement. Speaking from within academic institutions, social movements, development bureaucracies and national and international NGOs, the contributors highlight on-going battles for interpretation and the unequal power relations within which these battles take place....