The power to subvert?: Beyond North–South dichotomies in gender and development discourse

Increasing support to women’s organisations and networks to facilitate empowerment is a growing strategy amongst a range of Northern agencies, with a particular emphasis on Southern women. This article argues that strategies employed by both Northern and Southern women’s NGOs to promote the ‘empowerment’ of women and subvert hegemonic discourses through information-sharing and privileging Southern voices deny the value-laden nature of ‘information’ and the relative power and universality of dominant gender and development narratives. It will illustrate how these narratives are historically contingent on prevailing power imbalances in social and political spaces and how development discourse and practice tends to privilege both a homogenous Southern narrative as well as a category of Southern woman that simply do not exist.