Moving Beyond Intersectionality in Development Studies

Author(s): Paul Kramer

Source: St Antony's International Review , Vol. 10, No. 2, The Resurgence of Identity
Politics (February 2015), pp. 168-191
Published by: St. Antony's International Review
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26229192

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168 Assembled Development

Moving Beyond Intersectionality

in Development Studies

Paul Kramer

Feminists originally deployed intersectionality to expose the deep disjunctures be-

tween white and black women’s lives in late twentieth-century America. Notably,
Patricia Hill Collins argued that any analysis of gender or sexuality must also ac-
count for that category’s relationship with the distinctive historical and cultural
implications of race. More recently, Development Scholars and practitioners have
begun incorporating gender and sexuality, as well as geographic, racial, eth-
nic, and other oppressions, into ‘matrices of domination’ that purportedly allow
us to understand and plan for difference. But intersectionality is not without its
shortcomings. The subject is forced to reside within a pre-existing site of differ-
ence, wherein a specifically Western framework governs non-Western ontologies.
Using a range of examples to explore the pros and cons of the intersectional ap-
proach, this article argues that the Deleuzian notion of ‘assemblage’ provides a
more sophisticated means of understanding marginalized subjectivities. In so do-
ing, it considers a future wherein assemblage supplants intersectionality as the
preferred method of involving development-subjects in their own interventions.

Introduction
Academics of Development Studies, concerned with interdiscipli-
nary analyses of socio-economic change in the developing world, in-
creasingly incorporate intersectionality frameworks into their analyses
of Third World subjects. Unique to this discipline, the purpose of this
academic foregrounding of identity is to have tangible impacts on the
efficacy of international development interventions. Black American
feminists originally evolved the concept of intersectionality in the 1970s
in order to reveal how their multiple categories of identity resulted in
unique, intersecting styles of oppression in the US legal system.1 Now,
development academics and practitioners claim that intersectionality is a
novel approach to better comprehend the layered nature of peoples’ iden-

Paul Kramer, “Assembled Development: Moving Beyond Intersectionality in

Development Studies,” St Antony’s International Review 10, no. 2 (2015): 168–191.

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tities in their post-colonial countries of inquiry.2 They propose that the 169
differences between women, women of an ethnic minority, and women
of an ethnic and sexual minority (and so forth) must be articulated and
planned for separately if global development programming wishes to
design meaningful socio-economic interventions. This approach is not
without its limitations. In this essay, I plan to delineate the boundaries
of intersectionality. Intersectionality, I argue, assigns a debilitating ‘vic-
timhood’ status to its subjects. Using examples examining development
programs and dissident sexualities, I will further the notion that the
problems intersectionality attempts to resolve can and should be comple-
mented by means of the ‘assemblage’ framework.3
I begin by historicizing the usage of intersectionality. Here I show
how academics across disciplines use the term, highlighting why it has
been so impactful. I then focus on its contemporary usage within Devel-
opment Studies—and praxis—to suggest that intersectionality opens in-
terventions to certain blind spots. Through case studies, I propose there
has been a neglect of the non-discursive, the material, and the contin-
gent, all of which are particularly vital categories to the success of socio-
economic growth. I focus on the problem of queer subjects in develop-
ing countries in particular. The material bodies that are not apparent in
intersectional accounts, I will argue, can be materialized through the
toolkit offered by assemblage. I end by proposing what such a program
might look like, using examples from Latin American de-colonial stud-
ies. While this essay stresses the significance of an assemblage approach
for Development Studies in particular, I believe that a rethinking of the
centrality of intersectional critiques is increasingly relevant across disci-
plines.

Locating Intersectionality Within Development

In the early 1970s, the Combahee River Collective developed the no-
tion of ‘interlocking oppressions’ to account for the experiences of black
women in America. Their 1979 essay, “A Black Feminist Statement,”
provided the foundation for expanding on this notion throughout the
80s.4 The essay was reprinted in a number of collaborative texts central
to black feminism, including, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are
Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies5 and Home Girls: A
Black Feminist Anthology.6 Since then, intersectionality has remained the
dominant framework by which feminists scholars and queer theorists
approach the layers of marginalization which coexist within subjects
and characterize their social relations. Feminists deployed intersection-

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170 ality to expose the deep disjunctures between white and black women’s
lives in the United States. Moraga and Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My
Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color brought together a number of
disparate voices in its attempt to show how radically the hardships of
women of colour differed from those of white, middle-class women.7
Audre Lorde’s seminal book, Sister Outsider, represented one of the first
expressions of the intersectional concerns of black lesbian women.8
In Inessential Woman, Elizabeth Spellman explores middle-class white
Feminism’s ability to gloss over the distinct problems faced by Jewish or
black women, for example.9 Notably, Patricia Hill Collins argued that
any analysis of gender or sexuality must also account for that category’s
relationship with the distinctive historical and cultural implications of
race.10 The term has permitted both scholars and activists to arrange
class, gender, sexuality, geographic, racial, ethnic, and other oppres-
sions in matrices of domination, which purportedly allow us to truly
understand difference, or, otherness.
It was in “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A
Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist The-
ory and Antiracist Politics,” that Crenshaw proposed intersectionality
as an alternative to categorical conceptions of discrimination in the law.
The term was foremost an attempt to expose how problematically gender
and race operated as categories within the US legal system. Crenshaw
argued that the codification of anti-discrimination laws in the 1960s
actually enabled certain kinds of discrimination against black women.
In the contemporary era, intersectional appreciation of compounding
marginalities have moved well beyond academic writing and into policy
making, health care, social services, and civil society. The positive im-
pact of this body of literature proves its importance in its longevity and
wide uptake by many marginalized groups of people.
Since its initial conceptualization, a number of scholars have taken
issue with the political impact of the term. Jasbir Puar and Rey Chow
both remain unconvinced that the marginal subject is politically produc-
tive, especially when it is used to multiply marginalities via intersec-
tionality.11 Elizabeth Grosz argues that intersectionality fails to account
for the physical relationships between bodies.12 Roderick Ferguson ex-
presses concern over the tendency for intersectionality-based analyses
to establish fixed subjecthoods as a “positivist errand” in an attempt to
supposedly reveal the truth of being a minority.13 Development Studies,
I will show, must avoid these less productive trends by incorporating as-
semblage into its ontology.
Development Studies scholars adopted intersectionality, as scholars
and practitioners have argued it to be a useful tool in comprehending the

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unique problems faced by discrete populations in third world countries. 171
Academics needed a way to approach identity in terms of third world
subjectivities compounded by poverty, racial difference, caste, gender,
and sexuality. Especially within the legalese of development program-
ming, intersectionality provides one way for scholars to complicate in-
ternational social interventions. Notably, when global bodies have at-
tempted to provide generalized solutions to women’s condition across
borders, intersectionality enables academics to critique these programs’
efficacy.14 Such analyses attempt to come to more thorough understand-
ings of who the objects of development programs are. I will argue that
this is problematic, especially given the different socio-cultural gap be-
tween the black feminist usage of the term and its contemporary, post-
colonial deployment.
The corpus of intersectional studies within Development Studies
continues to grow unabated. Here I will detail some of the ways it is
being used before engaging in my critique. In “Gender Mainstreaming
in a Development Project,” Donna Baines uses an ethnographic account
to reason for intersectional approaches to gender mainstreaming within
development organizations:

[…] by promoting gender separately from sexual orientation, class, race and
anti-colonialism, the performance of gender mainstreaming in this development
project acted as a mask for organizational policies that exacerbated gender
injustice and the re-establishment of unequal relations of class, race and sexual
orientation at home and abroad. These axes of domination never exist in
isolation from each other. Developing more sophisticated ways of analysing
axes of oppression, in their connectedness, helps to explain how oppressions
are held in place as well as how they might be resisted and transformed.15

She continues by exploring how certain relations might interact with

each other: an individual might utilize their class background to dislodge
oppression on the gender front; race, gender, heterosexism, and colo-
nialism are mutually inflecting and make it difficult to make headway
against any of these individual categories. Similar studies include Elaine
Unterhalter’s work on the education-related Millennium Development
Goals, wherein she argues that gender, poverty, and access to education
are mutually inflecting sites of power relations.16 Another example is
Leila Harris’ paper on water scarcity in south-eastern Turkey.17 Harris
argues that water-related development challenges result in unique bur-
dens for those who reside at the intersections of the categories of gender,
ethnicity, and landlessness. These are just a few instances where inter-
sectionality has made inroads into Development Studies.

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172 In development practice and policy, intersectionality is being in-
corporated into a range of programmes—especially in bodies such
as the United Nations Development Program and the Commission on
the Status of Women (CSW). The most recent CSW conference re-
sulted in a document demanding intersectional understandings be
developed before practitioners plan for violence against women in
marginalized communities.18 A UN Women Fund for Gender Equal-
ity evaluation of the “Dalit Women’s Livelihoods Accountability Ini-
tiative” in India proposes that programs must be evaluated in terms of
the “complex, intersectional issues in women’s rights.”19 A document
released by the Women’s International Coalition for Economic Justice
contends that the Durban World Conference Against Racism “linked
racism to gender, poverty, and denial of woman’s human rights,”
and criticized the UN’s Millennium Development Goals for ignoring “an
intersectional analysis of multiple oppressions due to gender, race/eth-
nicity/caste, class, sexual orientation, age, and national origin.”20
The 2013–2014 UN Development Assistance Framework for Ne-
pal praised the UN Country Team’s “Intersectional Framework and
Programming Tool on Gender Equality, Social Inclusion, and Human
Rights,” claiming “this framework recognized that, although the issues
of human rights, gender equality and social inclusion are sometimes con-
sidered as separate, they are in fact interdependent and overlapping.”21
A 2013 speech by UN Women Acting Executive Laskhmi Puri on the
topic of the trafficking of women claimed that women at the margins are
predisposed to becoming victims of trafficking: “Whether these causes
lie in the rule of law ruling women out, injustice, or the marginaliza-
tion of women, such as indigenous women, migrant women or women
who have been sexually abused, widowed, abandoned, or divorced, this
intersectional discrimination also prepares the ground for being victims
of trafficking.”22
I argue that, in its current incarnation, intersectionality is used
in both study and practice as little more than a maturation of earlier,
Western-styled modes of essentializing the subject.23 Where development
aid proposes to be mapping more subtle identity positions, I believe it
forms knowledge around ‘authentic victimhoods’—that is, who can be
identified at the corner of the most intersections possible. It reinforces,
but does not dismantle, normative identity constructions of who counts
as oppressed. While intersectionality may prove useful in highlighting
some of the blind spots of development programs, the drawbacks are
multiple and must be carefully weighed before implementing these ap-
proaches.

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 I am not advocating for the outright end of all intersectional ap- 173
proaches, nor attempting to diminish the significance of early inter-
sectional research. However I think that we need to accept these inter-
sectional category groupings as a form of what Gayatri Spivak names
“strategic essentialism.”24 That is to say, there are times at which it is
important to ‘essentialize’ identities in order to come together for a spe-
cific cause, and to acknowledge the artificiality of such essentializations.
Crenshaw and Lorde used intersectionality to essentialize the differences
between black women and middle class white women during their time
to make headway in civil rights law. This battle to gain recognition for
minority women within mainstream feminism won significant advance-
ments in its initial formulation as a critique of anti-discrimination law,
but to suggest a simple translation of intersectional categories onto a mul-
tiplicity of foreign cultures and unknowable identity categories is, at its
worst, a colonialist endeavour.
To maintain essentialist identity standpoints will not be beneficial
especially for long-term development growth. Although intersectional-
ity was initially important to conceiving of the limits of 1980s feminist
thought, it is increasingly used indiscriminately “as shorthand to diag-
nose difference rather than being able to articulate [difference] as a con-
ceptual frame arising out of particular historical and activist contexts,”25
as some of the above literature in development practice shows. It ac-
knowledges that we must attain a more subtle understanding of the inter-
actions between oppressions that inhabit any given subjecthood. It does
not, however, recognize that the creation of knowledge about these inter-
sections is highly contrived. In other words, intersectionality’s weakness
lies in its privileging of ontologies over performativities. It permits us to
talk of identities deterministically: people are rendered collections of es-
sences, which enables development practitioners and academics to form
and expand knowledge as it pertains to these categories.
For instance, the commonly iterated notion that straight men are
the perpetrators of violence, whereas gay men need to be empowered
as the victims, makes gay men even worse off.26 We have already de-
cided which categories of identity are oppressed and what it means to
be that configuration of person. There is, then, something essentially
different between people fitting within these categories in terms of de-
grees of marginalization. Therefore, to plan for ‘men’ makes little sense
if it does not consider the defined discrepancies between straight and
gay, black and white, able-bodied and disabled, and other binaries. It
seems necessary to define every single possible divergence of power be-
tween and within identity categories. This results in solidifying ideas of
what it means to exist in opposition to another identity. At the end of

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174 an intersectional analysis, we are meant to believe that although sub-
jects are complicated, they are nonetheless victims—victims in terms we
can readily comprehend. Anthony Anghie argues that the way colonial
rulers created knowledge about Third World identities is strikingly simi-
lar to the (racialized) knowledge furthered by the global development
regime.27 I argue that intersectionality—the establishment of represen-
tations of marginal subjects—in and of itself does not offer a way out
of this dilemma. The result of this is development programming that
emphasizes negatively constructed subjects, which, created by discourse
alone, leaves absent the space for physical bodies.
Thinking within intersectional frameworks forces development prac-
titioners to make judgments about who fits in where and about which
aspects of a person will benefit to what degree. Any of an endless num-
ber of configurations of outliers will be left out. Men who are victims
of domestic violence wrought by their male partners will fall outside
the traditional anti-domestic violence rhetoric. We are equally unable
to consider figures like the upwardly mobile Dalit politician, Mayawati,
whose low caste seemingly situates her at odds with her own economic
and political fortune.28 Intersectionality fails to account for these outliers,
especially when they contradict our preconceived notions of necessarily
being oppressed. But this is the modus operandi of the approach: inter-
sectionality wants to know, “what does it mean to be this constellation
of identity categories?” But, especially when we are concerned about
development practice, claiming that there is an integral meaning behind
an identity is benign pandering at best and debilitating Westernization at
worst. Questioning what it means to be at the intersection of any of these
categories is politically irrelevant. A more actionable, intelligible ques-
tion is: “what do these corporealities do?” 29
I have three concerns in particular. First, just as Mohanty warned
against the hegemony of a certain, Western perspective of Third World
women, we must extend this critique to how intersectionality upholds
overlapping categories. Being Muslim, or disabled, or an ethnic minority
does not represent singular subjectivities. People laying at those intersec-
tions could also not be seen to exist within a coherent grouping. I argue
that it may be important to essentialize in order to make concrete goals
(e.g. the attainment of recognition that black feminists initially sought
when they established intersectionality). However there is a risk of solid-
ifying these new categories, bringing us back to ‘square one’: a new so-
cial grouping is framed (e.g. black, impoverished, women), but the most
oppressed of that group goes unaccounted (e.g. black, impoverished,
refugee, women). Wholesale promotion of intersectionality would lead

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us to believe the process should continue again and again. I argue this 175
factionalism risks hampering the original intentions of the framework.
Second, the limits of intersectionalities seem to be artificially defined
by what Western eyes see as oppressed. While they readily incorporate
marginalized sexualities and ethnicities into their approach, there are an
unlimited number of other factors that contribute to one’s subject posi-
tion. Ex-convicts, people who have been gravely ill for long periods of
time, heavily indebted students, and other categories seem randomly not
worthy of the cause. Identity categories which are transient, yet mean-
ingful, do not fit within the solidifying practices of subjectivity that in-
tersectionality depends upon. Those enabling intersections which reside
within development subjects (perhaps analogous to the problem of the
“creamy layer” of backward castes in India) are rarely accounted for
in these frameworks.30 This is because intersectionality only emphasizes
oppressions, not complicities. We are therefore ready to speak of how
disadvantaged subjects are, but unwilling to explore the possibility that
they might participate in neo-liberal, misogynistic, or homophobic acts.
Furthermore, as outsiders, our own contribution to the production of
discourses surrounding Third World subjects must be taken into account
as something that is never neutral. Western inquiries into developing
populations shape those very populations, or intersections of inquiry.
An example of this might be the assumptions laden with the highly West-
ern notion of being ‘gay.’ When academics have applied this concept to
non-Western subjects, critics have received this reduction as a form of
cultural imperialism.31 Therefore to talk about the problems of being gay
and an ethnic minority in a development context may have a range of
unforeseen outcomes. Planning for gays may mean people begin to iden-
tify as gay at the expense other forms of identifying, while those who
cannot mobilize the Western gay identity for themselves are left out.32
Finally, I argue intersectionality signals a return to the search for
the native, authentic, victim subject.33 There is a strong appeal in the
development world for ‘victim talk,’ and intersectionality effectively fur-
thers the possibilities for victim talk. As shown above, it is increasingly
common for development to highlight its capacity to plan for the most
marginalized populations—the intersectionality of being a poor, ethnic
minority woman being perhaps the most sought-after positionality in the
field. Some might argue that it is necessary for Development to group
people this way in order to lobby donors for funding and provide coher-
ent, targeted planning. However, the endless bifurcation of the world
into non-victims and victims is regressive. As Minow contends,

To purchase the image of the victim is to purchase the opportunity to be

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176 privately moved by images of victims and their suffering, but to do nothing
about it. The stories of victims are attractive because they arouse attractive
emotions. Possessing some aspect of victims’ lives can engender a sense of
one’s capacity to respond, whether or not that capacity is exercised in any
practical way. Perhaps even more profoundly, though, victimhood is attractive
in the sense that it secures attention in an attention-taxed world. Victims can
get on the agenda, the evening news, and the agenda, the evening news, and
the gossip circuit-victims get time. This of course is a precondition for any
response, including sympathy or help.34

Although Minow explores the problem of victimhood in Western

law, there are clear analogies to the way development renders subjects
knowable by means of intersectionality. Ever dependent on the sympa-
thy of donors, volunteers, and aspirational academics, development re-
quires the production of victim-subjects to draw attention and allocate
resources. It is then no wonder development finds intersectionality such
a useful tool: it is possible to create ever-more marginalized subjects,
wherein essentialist knowledge creation is hidden under the guise of
“account[ing] for the multiple and simultaneous effects of systems of op-
pression.”35

Toward “Assembled” Development

Having explored the origins, expansion, and limits of intersectionality, I
now introduce assemblage as a possible conjunctive framework to push
the discursive toolkit of intersectionality into the material problematics
of development. We should focus not just on the way victims are created
by technologies of knowledge, but on uncovering the material processes
which produce unique subject positions. This refers to the concept of “as-
semblage,” as introduced by Deleuze. “Categories—race, gender, sexual-
ity—are considered as events, actions, and encounters between bodies,
rather than as simply entities and attributes of subjects.”36 This allows us
to step outside of our preconceived understandings of, for example Amer-
ican gay identity, allowing for spatially and temporally relevant analyses
of subject positions. By analysing the genealogical precedents which ‘as-
semble’ subjectivities, we can more subtly account for undefined and
non-Western identites, move beyond victim talk, and acknowledge the
unlimited, expansive, and sometimes complicit discourses which inform
subjects’ lives. This represents a divergence from the intersectional ap-
proach: intersectionality is interested in uncovering the uniqueness be-
hind being increasingly marginal. Assemblage does not believe there is
merit in identifying new, essential meanings beneath subjectivities. It

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instead wants to inquire into the material processes constituting identi- 177
ties, and then understand what kinds of properties emerge from mate-
rially constituted bodies. It acknowledges that social phenomena come
together and fall apart, can be guided by conflicting mentalities, and that
all actors have power as they transform development to meet their own
goals.37
I will first explore the ways assemblage operates with the example of
queer personhood in a development context. An assemblage is defined
as a whole constituted by material and expressive heterogeneous parts.
Many social phenomena can be considered in terms of assemblage: from
individuals to social movements to nation-states. Being a gay man or a
lesbian woman, for example, is an assemblage. Gay as an identity is a
socially constructed process, which has resulted in material forms of
exclusion, unique affects, and particular cultural signifiers. Being gay,
however, is not reducible to any single one of these components. Walk-
ing in a gay pride parade does not make a person gay: but that along
with a string of other acts (coming out of the closet, gay sex, having gay
friends, employing queer slang, etc.) does assemble gay identities.38 The
particularity of these component acts for each individual cannot be uni-
formly generalized across subjects, which means that being gay means
something quite unique to each individual. Being a gay man or a lesbian
woman is the unique, emergent property which results from the totality
of the historically delineated components. Properties of the whole as-
semblage are not reducible to component parts, and the historically con-
tingent nature of these processes precludes enduring, essential identities.
For example, it makes little sense to consider blackness and queerness
and disability as if there was something enduring about each of these
formations—instead, it is pertinent to discuss what historical processes
create these social categories and how they shape peoples’ lives.
The component acts of one assemblage operate with other assem-
blages in unique ways. If a gay couple from New Zealand purchases tick-
ets for a gay cruise to Fiji, we might now start considering the overlaps
between gay subjectivities, “pink” dollars as flows of global capital, and
Fijian military regimes. Thus assemblages can be understood in their re-
lations of exteriority (to other assemblages). Conversely, intersectionality
is characterized by relations of interiority: the component parts which
construct intersectional identities are themselves constructed by the very
relations they have with other parts in the whole. This suggests that
there is a pre-existing set of conditions that applies to certain configura-
tions of identities. However, scholars have argued that it is the institu-
tional cultivation of reductivist ‘knowledge’ about Third World identities
which renders them vulnerable to culturally, socially, and economically

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178 damaging development aid practices.39 But if we accept the constructed
nature of identities—allowing that an identity can never be fully defined
by its relations alone—then discussing the attributes of a category of per-
son becomes moot. Just as it would be impossible to isolate ‘gay identity’
as a category from the subjects’ historical/social context, it is pointless to
speak of gayness and blackness as mutually inflecting referents divorced
from personhood. Instead, let us talk about what acts constitute these
subjects and what emerges when these component acts are brought to-
gether. Then we can start to empirically analyse the encounters between
dominant and subordinate sexualities—as well as with other hegemonic
frameworks, like neo-liberalism or patriarchy. Two relevant case studies
will elucidate this point.
The first study is entitled “Capably Queer: Exploring the Intersec-
tions of Queerness and Poverty in the Urban Philippines” by Ryan
Thoreson. Thoreson promotes intersectionality as a tool to approach
the ways being sexually dissident shapes the lives of the urban poor in
the Philippines. The study has little precedent and demands our atten-
tion, as there has been a dearth of scholarly inquiry given to queer lives
in development practice.40 Notably, the World Bank does not advocate
for sexual minorities’ rights in their countries of intervention and the
Millennium Development Goals refrain from promoting sexual rights.
Thoreson explains that development interventions will only follow after
empirical research on queer populations is conducted. He believes locat-
ing queer people in terms of urban poverty can situate them within the
proper development context. His interviews draw out the experiential
dimensions of poverty in terms of employment, empowerment, safety,
dignity, and meaning and value in his respondents’ lives—in an attempt
to measure the unique problems faced by people who are both queer and
impoverished. For example, in terms of “dignity,” the author found that
sexually dissident persons felt most marginalized when they could not
occupy/perform their roles intelligibly for the community. Queer men
felt the highest amounts of discrimination when they did not behave
effeminately, or if they looked overly masculine, or when they worked
outside of traditionally female employment (beauty parlours, entertain-
ment, flower arranging, etc.). The author argues that their poverty in
terms of their queerness compounds their marginalisation: if they could
afford to look more like what a queer person should look like, then they
would gain greater acceptance. Or if they had better access to “queer”
employment, they would feel more fulfilled and recognized by the com-
munity. Thoreson concludes that queerness and poverty inflect each oth-
er in unexpected ways, which have constraining consequences for Third

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World subjects. He calls on development organizations to recognize the 179
needs of queer populations to reduce their poverty.
I argue that Thoreson’s study, guided by intersectionality, is laden
with fixed presumptions about identity, which hampers the usefulness
of its concluding prescriptions. Thoreson takes for granted the nature of
what it is to be queer in the urban Philippines. He specifically speaks in
terms of bakla (men attracted to men who dress as women) and tomboys
(women who have sex with women and dress as men) and the difficul-
ties these groups face when are restricted (by poverty) to perform their
social roles: “The pressure to be successfully and intelligibly queer was a
recurring theme, as was the ways that poverty thwarted or limited their
capacity to do so.”41 However, his respondents overwhelmingly agreed
they felt free to express themselves and exercise agency in their own
lives, but they fell within the realm of specific material goals. They iden-
tified finding a stable job, supporting their family, having children and
starting their own family, having a good income, becoming rich, own-
ing a house, and so forth. These goals, centred on reproduction within
the family unit, are heteronormative. There is, then, an unspoken com-
plicity between the informants’ heteronormative social demands and the
integration of queers that the author advances. The respondents’ desire
to “perform” their gender for society in terms of heteronormatively-
mandated legibility exemplifies the restrictedness of “queer” as an iden-
tity construct.
Thoreson’s study confirms my points made above. First, intersection-
ality attempts to create knowledge about exponentially oppressed, static
social categories. Here, Thoreson defines queer, urban, Third World
subjects, whose poverty makes it impossible for them to express their
sexuality. I question whether this grouping of people does indeed reflect
a cohesive community subjectivity. If it does, then we are presented with
a new entity that demands the same examination of intersectionalities
given to the dominant population. Between the queer urban poor of
Manila, everyone will not be equally oppressed: disabled people within
this group will have unique problems (so too will migrants, or those
who are do not belong to the dominant ethnic group). The author does
not define why these identity categories alone constitute a cohesive social
grouping that demands scrutiny. Next, the confines of intersectionalities
are arbitrary and reflect Western-consciousness. Although Thoreson ex-
plains that there are range of “kinds” of sexuality in the Philippines, he
readily deposits them all under the heading of “queer” and it is not clear
if tomboys and bakla and lesbians are all to be understood within as fac-
ing the same issues of representation and security. Why these categories
are chosen at the expense of others remains unclear. Finally, victim-

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180 hood rhetoric hamstrings the agency of the subject. It forecloses a more
complicated discussion on whether or not the kinds of power relations
these subjects find themselves within make them complicit with less-
than-desirable heteronormative and/or neo-liberal trends.
What is absent from this discussion is the genealogical formative
social components which construct bakla and tomboys as identities in the
first place. How did we arrive at the point where a bakla person has
to emulate cis-femininity42 in all its socio-economic iterations (includ-
ing norms of feminine beauty and employment-type)? Thoreson does
not inquire into why their demands and acts conform to social expecta-
tions of acceptable gender performance. The point is that fulfilling these
demands via development interventions will fail to liberate them from
the constraints of dominant rationalities of governance. We have already
seen similar articulations of development fail in the early years of Wom-
en in Development inclusion.43 In the 1970s, after Boserup wrote Wom-
an’s Role in Economic Development, the notion that egalitarianism could be
achieved when employers stopped discriminating against women gained
traction.44 However, without considering the social frameworks which
shape and conduct women’s lives, women’s position in the workforce
saw no improvement.
Simply providing targeted economic mobility will not lift queer peo-
ple out of their marginalized positions. We must also undo the complici-
ties between queer lives and dominant frameworks of patriarchy and
heterosociality. Queers in the urban Philippines are highly dependent
upon the family unit for recognition and economic status: what would it
look like if they were not? I argue that we could support the development
of queer lives outside of heteronormativities. This demands an evaluation
of the various stakeholders interested in manipulating these assemblages.
We could consider how the state enforces marginally acceptable position-
alities for queers and ask ourselves how we might lobby against those
policies. How does religion govern queer lives? Can the introduction
of specific markets be said to be queer-friendly, or do market rationali-
ties contradict our goals as queer people? When we start to analyse spe-
cific acts of ‘queerness,’ only then can we really start to understand how
queer peoples’ conduct is governed—and how these assemblages interact
with other dominant frameworks.
We can unravel some of the guiding rationalities behind develop-
ment’s treatment of queer lives in the context of Thoreson’s recommen-
dation to expand ‘empowerment’ for his respondents. His interviews
suggested that 67.5% of queer people believe they are personally respon-
sible for improving their lives, 18.75% suggested parents are responsible,

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and the remainder believed broader forces, such as God or the govern- 181
ment were responsible. Thoreson advises:

A challenge for development practitioners...is to find ways to empower queer

populations by targeting them for development interventions—from access
to education to job and skills training to microfinance—while recognizing
that these may be most rewarding when they are not purely self-interested
pursuits.45

Thoreson concludes that the compounded (or intersectional) experience

of poverty and being queer has led to the unique situation wherein queer
people’s empowerment is tied to social and familial recognition of their
contributions. Development programs which attend to the social/recog-
nition aspect of empowerment—as well as to reducing poverty—will be
most successful in bettering queer lives.
However, there is a great risk here of reading programs of micro-
credit or empowerment as apolitical and desexualized processes. Kath-
leen Staudt explores how various development organizations have em-
ployed a language of empowerment. However, given how little leverage
women have in these societies and the patriarchal nature of these institu-
tions, empowerment has had little effect.46 Keating et al. describe how
microcredit marks a form of “accumulation by dispossession” as a gen-
dered process, which renders women especially vulnerable to strict loan
repayment terms, the broadening of global capital’s financial base, and
an orientation away from a collective focus on welfare to the exchange
of commodities. Academics of international relations propose we must
remain wary of the tendency for organizations of global governance to
hide significant political acts behind the language of techno-bureaucratic
management.47 When the World Bank and other international bodies
champion “best practices” and “good governance” by means of micro-
credit programs, we must consider the ‘governmentalities’ that shape
these assemblages—whether they be neo-liberal, neoconservative, patri-
archal, or heteronormative.48 This allows us to explore their interactions
with other assemblages, such as those of marginal sexualities. We can
begin to see how forces that seemingly ‘empower’ queer lives might be
simultaneously supporting its oppression in other ways.
Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar’s essay, “Dismantling As-
sumptions: Interrogating ‘Lesbian’ Struggles for Identity and Survival
in India and South Africa” further illustrates the usefulness of an as-
semblage rather than intersectional perspective on third world identities
in Development Studies. The essay considers the ways both Develop-
ment Studies and feminist theory have failed to accommodate the lives of
queer women in the Global South. On the one hand, Development Stud-

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182 ies scholars proclaim that homosexuality only exists among privileged
subjects, when people are not embroiled in everyday struggles and can
afford to explore their sexualities. Alternately, Development Studies sim-
ply doesn’t recognize homosexualities as relevant to issues of women’s
socio-economic empowerment.49 Feminist theorists, however, have been
more successful at theorizing the complex contextually constructed ra-
tionalities behind sex/gender systems, but feminist frameworks shy away
from the issues of resource access and mobilisation significant to women
of the development world.50
Like Thoreson, Swarr and Nagar propose that intersectionality is a
necessary framework within which to structure our understanding of
marginal third world identities. Recalling Mohanty,51 the authors argue
that one cannot speak of intersecting oppressions in isolation. However,
the authors propose that intersectionality needs to move beyond simply
identifying the various social categories a subject may fall within. Rather
intersectionality needs to be “extended:”

Extending intersectionality […] necessitates that we reconceptualize difference

as constituted and (re)configured in relation to place-specific struggles over
rights, resources, social practices, and relationships—including sexual and
emotional intimacies—that people enter into with or without labels.52

This need to “extend” intersectionality speaks to the deficiencies of inter-

sectional approaches in favour of assemblages. When feminist theorists
and Development Studies academics use intersectionality to abbreviate
and essentialize difference, certain identity groupings are rendered in-
visible—especially identities that do not ascribe to the established cat-
egories we retain in the West. The “extension” of intersectionality the
authors suggest makes known the contextual nature of identities, the fact
the identities may not even be recognized as such by the people they
describe, or that there might be conflicting complicities and ruptures
between these identitarian frameworks. Swarr and Nagar explain the
inability for lesbianism to be politically, historically, or geographically
neutral, especially where Western, white, middle-class lesbianism is
taken as the referential goal for subjects’ identities.53
Swarr and Nagar demonstrate an important shortcoming in the way
Development Studies conceptualizes queer subjects. In invoking inter-
sectionality, the authors point to the discursive problem of how we talk
about, conceptualize, and create notions of (de)sexualized Third World
subjects: the authors provide evidence of the compounded difficulties
that queer women have in terms of their class. As such, any project

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seeking to alleviate their financial burden must also account for the way 183
sexuality operates in this context.
Simply pointing to this intersectionality is significantly important,
yet incomplete: the discursive does not operate outside of, or hold privi-
lege over the material. For example, if we followed intersectionality’s
prescriptions to discuss and plan for women of dissident sexualities in
the Global South, we run the risk of calling them lesbians and guiding
their cultural practices by Western guidelines of what lesbians ought to
be. That is to say, we might prescribe development interventions meant
to address both poverty and lesbian recognition, such as integration into
markets, to help them become more like our own notions of what (West-
ern) lesbians need or want. However, such an intervention would fail
to account for the deleterious collusions between middle class Western
lesbian lifestyles and the marginalization of outlier practices—a politics
which Lisa Duggan calls “homonormativity:”

[…] it is a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions

and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility
of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture
anchored in domesticity and consumption.54

It is then in the interest of neo-liberalism to permit a space for a very

specific, demobilized kind of lesbianism—one which does not threaten,
but contributes to the production of global capital. For example, a theo-
retical microfinance scheme which targets ‘lesbians’ would operate on
a number of assumptions. First, it has predefined the identity of its con-
stituents, creating a space for an acceptable identity and marginalizing
others—both sexually and economically. Second, it incorporates them
into systems of global capital, where sexuality is permitted as long as
it serves the interests of the market. Finally, it proposes that queer in-
dividuals are responsible for their own successes and failures (if they
work hard enough and can abide by the terms of loans and other forms
of disciplining). However, governmental/institutional heteronormativity
persist to keep them marginalized, especially in privileging the hetero-
sexual family unit.55 Intersectionality runs the risk of glossing over the
connections between sexual identity in its Western configuration, global
economies, and the rationalities guiding them.
Assemblage, on the other hand, makes these relationships explicit.
It does not presuppose identities, but rather asks, “how do these bodies
act?” Instead of attempting to locate lesbians in a development context,
assemblages want to know how people self-identify. It asks to what ex-
tent they act within the scope of the dominant framework of acceptable

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184 sexual conduct. It demands a definition of those material or expressive
acts which constitute their selfhood: how people behave, express soli-
darities, and propose that their identities are legitimate.56 It simultaneous-
ly asks, “how sharp are the boundaries?”: while in some cases women
of dissident sexualities might express themselves solely in anti-normative
actions, others might express their sexualities in concomitance with neo-
liberal capitalist economies. It therefore allows us to see how margin-
alized positionalities sometimes work together and support dominant
frameworks. It is only from this contextually relevant perspective that
we can start looking at directions for intervention and change.
If I were to speculate about what an assemblage approach to devel-
opment would look like, it would first and foremost destabilize essential
identity categories. It would look at the issues shared by many different
kinds of people, from very local to international levels, ask why they
have the interests they have, and look for instances of overlap as points of
departure for mobilization. Planning based upon similarities in peoples’
actions, instead of supposedly shared identities, is key. An intersectional
approach considers which categories a subject falls into and what that
means for them in terms of oppression. An assemblage approach under-
stands that any act that occurs within a development programme will
have to attend to whether or not it remains complicit with dominant
ideologies—and that this process is forever ongoing. It acknowledges
that power manifests itself not within subjects, but through what those
subjects do.
In the Thoreson case, for example, an assemblage approach would
move beyond normatively identifying the attributes of (poor, queer, post-
colonial) subjects. It could recognize that the introduction to markets
and microfinance may empower queer people, but it would ask about
microfinance’s guiding interests: what kind of people are in control of
microfinance, what are their presumptions about queer lives, are queer
people simply an untapped market, are there moral limits to what is ac-
ceptable for queer people to finance, and so forth. One of the strongest
arguments for the assemblage approach is that it recognizes that the task
is never finished: there isn’t simply some quota of people to be empow-
ered. Instead, assemblage continuously asks questions and anticipates
change. It constantly looks for shifts in the guiding rationalities of the
endless number of actors involved, including development practitioners,
theorists, businesspeople, state officials, and development subjects them-
selves. All of these are involved in negotiating the scope and efficacy
of development programmes. There is therefore a fundamental shift:
while intersectionality frames oppressors against the disenfranchised,
assemblage wants to know what motivates every specific material and

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expressive act of all involved actors—knowing that these interactions 185
themselves cause constant, unforeseen change.
I turn to a case study that exemplifies the utility of assemblage in
a development context. In “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes,”57
Marisol de la Cadena argues that Western colonial knowledge upholds
clear boundaries for what can be politically relevant and what falls out-
side politics. Indigenous practices, the environment, the inhuman, and
other categories are all subordinate to the Western, masculine human
subject. The author employs the notion of “equivocation” to reconcile
the distance between these worldviews. Equivocation, she argues, is
the commitment to avoiding a singular, crystallized perspective on any
event. For example, our notion of nature and an indigenous notion of
nature are unlikely to correspond. However, acknowledging the sepa-
rateness of our knowledge shows where knowledge is being privileged
and to what end. It also illuminates possibilities for complicity amongst
regimes of knowledge: because no single way of knowing is complete (or
privileged), it permits unlimited opportunities to contend with “other”
kinds of knowledge. This ambiguity and open-endedness is, as I have
already argued, the political crux of an assemblage-centric paradigm.
Finally, the assemblage permits a movement away from representation
entirely: even if our notions of nature cannot correspond, the acts of
what we do in nature are meaningful.
De la Cadena’s case study illustrates a political body, constituted by
indigenous communities, politicians, activists, and others, as an assem-
blage. She explores the local resistance to the establishment of a mine
in a religiously and culturally significant Andean mountain range. En-
vironmentalists and the Left protested that the mine would negatively
impact land-based livelihoods in the region. However, the indigenous
population protested that the “earth-being” that is the mountain range
would simply not allow mining there. The author’s informants, includ-
ing NGO and state-officials, consider it their duty to respect the earth-be-
ings—or their people would incur inexplicable accidents and hardship.
While the movement could simply be read as another pushback against
neo-liberalism, such a discourse subsumes an incongruent epistemology
into a neo-liberal duality of capitalism against folk politics:

This appearance of indigeneities may inaugurate a different politics, plural

not because they are enacted by bodies marked by gender, race, ethnicity, or
sexuality demanding rights, or by environmentalists representing nature, but
because they bring earth-beings to the political, and force into visibility the
antagonism that proscribed their worlds.58

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186 In acknowledging the “equivocation,” multiple perspectives are not only
permissible, but they are politically capable. The environmentalists and
urban Left act in assemblage with the indigenous movement in protest-
ing the mining operations. No group is defined in any kind of colonialist
discourse. There is no need to essentialize the indigenous population’s
culture, people, or desires. Instead, there is a material assemblage of
bodies (including the inhuman earth-beings) oriented toward the act of
protesting the mine.
Claudia de Lima Costa asserts the concordance between decolonial
“equivocation” alongside the growing base of materialist feminist schol-
arship: “It is through our concepts—always equivocations—that we
know the world. However, the world also acts in the formation of our
concepts, moulding and limiting them, with material/real consequenc-
es.”59 De Lima Costa correctly points out that intersectionality and its
discursive formulations cannot be discarded. There is “intra-activity” (to
use Karen Barad’s term)60 between the way we talk about subjects and
how discourse mediates and is mediated by the acts, desires, and physical
relations of the subject. An appreciation of the assembled subject, there-
fore, exposes dominant socio-natural formations, while showing how
they are connected to other life-worlds—none of which are equivalent.
If intersectionality describes the way we represent subjecthood, and the
assemblage accounts for the material components of bodies, then decolo-
nial equivocation permits our worlds to connect transnationally without
privilege.

Conclusion
The purpose of this essay was to critically consider intersectionality’s
place in Development Studies. I argued that intersectionality assumes
that difference precedes and defines identity. At its worst, intersectional-
ity risks essentializing Western categories of identity onto Third World
subjects and supports relations with hegemonic frameworks. Assem-
blage, however, makes these complicities recognizable. It incorporates
categories that are not immediately visible by focusing not on what iden-
tities mean, but what they do. Assemblages allow us to move away from
strict binaries between straight and queer, woman and man, and rich
and poor, by showing that the components which constitute these identi-
ties are not exclusively dissenting, but also converge with dominant and
other formations in unplanned ways.61

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Paul Gordon Kramer is a PhD candidate in Politics and International 187
Relations at the University of Auckland.

Notes
1
Bell Hooks chronicles a genealogy of the Black women’s oppression in Ain’t I a
Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981): 51–87.

2
Alison Symington, “Intersectionality: A Tool For Gender And Economic Justice,
Facts and Issues,” http://www.awid.org/content/download/48805/537521/file/
intersectionality_en.pdf (accessed June 27, 2014).

3
I use “dissident” as a catch-all term to refer to any non-normative sexual practice.

4
Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” Off Our Backs 9, no. 6
(1979): 6–8.

5
Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, All the Women Are White, All
the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (Old Westbury:
Feminist Press, 1982).

6
B. Smith, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Women of Color
Press, 1983).

7
Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by
Radical Women of Color (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981).

8
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg: Crossing Press,
1984).

9
Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1988).

10
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the
Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000).

11
Jasbir Puar, “‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess’: Becoming-Inter-
sectional in Assemblage Theory,” PhiloSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism
2, no.1 (2012): 49–66; Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in
War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 2006).

12
Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Blooming-
ton and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994).

13
Roderick Ferguson, “Reading Intersectionality,” Trans-Scripts 2 (2012): 91–98.

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188 14
An example: the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goal 3: ‘Promote
Gender Equality and Empower Women’ faces scrutiny in: Zubia Mumtaz, et al.,
“Maternal Deaths in Pakistan: Intersection of Gender, Caste, and Social Exclu-
sion,” BMC International Health and Human Rights 11 (2011): 1–6, as well as in Dina
M. Siddiqi, “The Politics of Sexuality, Morality and Human Rights in the Making
of the MDGs,” Arrows For Change 16, no. 1 (2010): 4–5.

15
Donna Baines, “Gender Mainstreaming in a Development Project: Intersectional-
ity in a Post-Colonial Un-Doing?” Gender, Work & Organization 17, no. 2 (2010):
119–149.

16
Elaine Unterhalter, “Poverty, Education, Gender and the Millennium Develop-
ment Goals: Reflections on Boundaries and Intersectionality,” Theory and Research
in Education 10, no. 3 (2012).

17
Leila M. Harris, “Water Rich, Resource Poor: Intersections of Gender, Poverty,
and Vulnerability in Newly Irrigated Areas of Southeastern Turkey,” World Devel-
opment 36, no. 12 (2008): 2643–2662.

18
Jo Baker, “Report on the Online Discussion on Eliminating Violence Against
Women and Girls,” http://www.unwomen.org/~/media/Headquarters/Attach-
ments/Sections/Library/Publications/2012/10/Online-Discussion-Report_CSW-
57%20pdf.pdf (accessed October 1, 2013).

19
Gana P. Ojha, “Evaluation of UN Women Fund for Gender Equality Economic
and Political Empowerment Catalytic Grant Programme: ‘Dalit Women’s Liveli-
hoods Accountability Initiative,’ India,” http://www.unwomen.org/~/media/
Headquarters/Media/Publications/en/FGEProgrammeEvaluationGenderat-
WorkDSSIndia.pdf (accessed October 1, 2013).

20
Carol Barton et al., “Civil Society Perspectives on the Millennium Develop-
ment Goals,” http://www.undp.org/content/dam/aplaws/publication/en/publica-
tions/poverty-reduction/poverty-website/civil-society-perspectives-on-the-mdgs/
Civil%20Society%20Perspectives%20on%20the%20MDGs.pdf, (accessed Octo-
ber 1, 2013).

21
“United Nations Development Assistant Framework for Nepal 2013-2017,” 2012,
http://www.undp.org/content/dam/nepal/docs/legalframework/UNDP_NP_
UNDAF%202013-2017.pdf, (accessed October 1, 2013).

22
“Laksmi Puri Underlines Urgent Need to Take More Courageous and Decisive
Action Against Human Trafficking,” May 14 2013, http://www.unwomen.org/co/
news/stories/2013/5/lakshmi-puri-underlines-urgent-need-to-take-action-against-
human-trafficking, (accessed October 1, 2013).

23
This argument is rooted in Mohanty’s work on early feminist theory’s under-
standing of non-Western women. See: Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism With-

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out Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University 189
Press, 2003).

24
Gayatri Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Donna
Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader (London: Routledge, 1996): 214.

25
Jasbir Puar, Ben Pitcher, and Henriette Gunkel, “Q&A With Jasbir Puar,” http://
www.darkmatter101.org/site/2008/05/02/qa-with-jasbir-puar/ (accessed May 20,
2013).

26
Michael Kaufman, “Building a Movement of Men Working to End Violence
Against Women,” Development 44, no. 3 (2001): 9–14.

27
Antony Anghie, “Decolonizing the Concept of Good Governance,” in Decoloniz-
ing International Relations, ed. Gruffydd Jones Branwen (Toronto: Lanham, Row-
man and Littlefield, 2006).

28
P. V. Narasimha Rao, “A Miracle of Democracy,” http://archive.tehelka.com/
story_main39.asp?filename=Ne100508a_miracle.asp (accessed 1 October 2013).

29
The term corporeality emphasizes the physical relationships between subjects,
their acts, and the tangible processes ‘governing’ them. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist As-
semblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2007).

30
For example, minority wives of famers with irrigated land vs. wives of farmers
with unirrigated land; or minority children of military officers. See: Pradipta
Chaudhury, “The ‘Creamy Layer’: Political Economy of Reservations,” Economic
and Political Weekly 39, no. 20 (2004): 1989–1991.

31
Joseph A. Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

32
Tarik Bereket and Barry Adam, “Navigating Islam and Same-Sex Liaisons
Among Men in Turkey,” Journal of Homosexuality 55, no. 2 (2008): 204–222.

33
Ratna Kapur, Erotic Justice (London: The Glass House Press, 2005).

34
Mary Minow, “Surviving Victim Talk,” UCLA Law Review 40, no. 6 (1993):
1411–1445.

35
Doug Meyer, “An Intersectional Analysis of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans-
gender (LGBT) People’s Evaluations of Anti-Queer Violence,” Gender & Society 26,
no. 6 (2012): 849–873.

36
Puar, “I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess.”

37
‘Governmentality’ is Foucault’s conception of the practices by which subjects are
governed. Power is not enacted by sovereign decree, but by the establishment of

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190 knowledge about the subject and techniques which act upon that knowledge. For a
thorough discussion on the application of governmentality frameworks to contem-
porary political dilemmas, see William Walters, Governmentality: Critical Encounters
(London, Routledge: 2012).

38
David Halperin, How to Be Gay (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2012).

39
Susan Ilcan and Anita Lacey, Governing the Poor: Exercises of Poverty Reduction,
Practices of Global Aid (Montreal and Kingston, ON: McGill–Queen’s University
Press, 2011).

40
For a general overview of the status of queer Development interventions, see:
Susie Jolly, “Queering Development: Exploring the Links between Same-Sex
Sexualities, Gender, and Development,” Gender and Development 8, no. 1 (2000):
78–88. One (of very few) specific examples about how development aid impacts
upon queer lives is found in Marcia Oliver’s work. See Marcia Oliver, “The US
President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief: Gendering the Intersections of Neo-
liberalism and Neoconservatism,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 14, no. 2
(2012): 226–246.

41
Ryan Thoreson, “Capably Queer: Exploring the Intersections of Queerness and
Poverty in the Urban Philippines,” Journal of Human Development and Capabilities
12, no. 4 (2011): 507.

42
“Cis-gender” refers to individuals whose perception of their gender matches
their birth sex.

43
Eva Rathgeber, “WID, WAD, GAD: Trends in Research and Practice,” The Jour-
nal of Developing Areas 24, no. 4 (1990): 26–43.

44
Ester Boserup, Woman’s Role in Economic Development (Brookfield, VT: Gower
1986).

45
Thoreson, “Capably Queer,” 502.

46
Kathleen Staudt, “Engaging Politics: Beyond Official Empowerment Discourse,”
in Rethinking Empowerment, Jane L. Parpat et al., eds. (London: Routledge, 2002).

47
William Walters, “Some Critical Notes on ‘Governance,’” Studies in Political
Economy 73 (2004): 27.

48
Mitchell Dean, Governing Societies: Political Perspectives on Domestic and Interna-
tional Rule (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

49
Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar, “Dismantling Assumptions: Interrogat-
ing ‘Lesbian’ Struggles for Identity and Survival in India and South Africa,” Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29, no. 2 (2004): 491–516.

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50
Gale Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” 191
in L. Nicholson, The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory (London: Routledge,
1997): 27–62; Swarr and Nagar, “Dismantling Assumptions,” 494.

51
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial Discourses,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Chandra
Talpade Mohanty et al., eds. (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991): 51–80.

52
Swarr and Nagar, “Dismantling Assumptions,” 496.

53
Ibid, 496.

54
Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack
on Democracy. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003): 50.

55
Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subject
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).

56
Manuel de Landa, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Com-
plexity (New York: Continuum, 2006).

57
Marisol de la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Re-
flections Beyond ‘Politics,’” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2010): 334–370.

58
de la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes,” 346.

59
Claudia de Lima Costa, “Equivocation, Translation and Performative Intersec-
tionality; Notes on Decolonial Feminist Practices and Ethics in Latin America,”
Anglo Saxonica 3, no. 6 (2013): 90.

60
Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How
Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3
(2003): 801–831.

61
Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 205.

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