Dilemmas of Difference: Indigenous Women and the Limits of Postcolonial Development Policy by Sarah A. Radcliffe (review)

Sarah Radcliffe’s book presents a challenge to development policy, focusing on the postcolonial intersection of social heterogeneity and the production of social difference as development progresses. By pointing out the geographical significance of positionality, the author shows that power relationships cause multiscalar and overlapping dimensions of exclusion and resistance.

The rigorous and detailed argument examines two very different groups of Ecuadorian indigenous women confronting the multiple disadvantages of being rural women from the global South. The varied histories and spaces show the mobility of the concept of intersectionality provided by Kimberlé Crenshaw in “Mapping the Margins” (1991). Radcliffe’s book is the result of seven years of collaborative research that mobilizes local knowledge to criticize neoliberal development policies.

Following Tania M. Li’s definition of development as the ‘will to improve’ in The Will to Improve (2007), Radcliffe shows that governmental interventions to alleviate poverty incorporate an ambivalent representation of indigenous women. Even as the woman are marked by racial inequity, they are considered culture bearers whose protection is necessary for a modern society (Gayatri C. Spivak, 1993). ‘Indigenous women’ thus appears as a new category of intelligibility for development.

Radcliffe’s genealogy of Ecuadorian policy development begins in the 1950s, when difference began to be managed through selective programs for low-income, racialized populations. The book presents a topographical and positional analysis of both the daily violence and sexism that these women experience, and the reproduction of racialized hierarchies among indigenous and non-indigenous men and women.

Underlying Radcliffe’s analysis is a critique of liberal feminist politics that assume that third-world women will be empowered by individual rights, as well as a critical appraisal of essentializing neoliberal multiculturalism. Her book also shows how indigenous women criticize male-dominated ethnic federations and denounce the coloniality inherent in “gender and development” programs. However, in non-development contexts, the same women use rights as a political language that politicizes injustices and interconnects ethnic identity and gender demands. Indeed, female political participation generates disruptions and uprisings, challenging as it does the fragile boundary between citizenship, sexual and reproductive rights, and national imaginaries of progress.

Radcliffe identifies significant shifts in contemporary development policies. In the Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008, a range of anti-neoliberal and pro-rights agendas based on the ideals of Buen Vivir—living well—represented subaltern understandings of development. The plurinational state was to guarantee a new model of economic growth that would be both environmentally and socially sustainable. Nevertheless, the “socialism of the 21st century” has brought new waves of developmentalism based on the expansion of extractivism, paradoxically causing displacement, impoverishment, and the transformation of the spatial relationships within the territory. In this context, nature has become a new aspect of intersectionality to consider, alongside race, gender, and class. Moreover, ethno-national boundaries and biopolitical reproductive imperatives are maintained at the scale of bodies. State policies that continue to recognize women as caregivers reproduce gendered divisions of labor.

Doubtless, this book is an important attempt to decolonize knowledge production and blur the boundaries between feminist thought and politics, theory and practice, the local and the global. Radcliffe shows women’s diversity, their distinctive viewpoints, and their varied tactics as they demand non-essentialized understandings of intertwined racial, gender, locational, and class differences. Everyone who studies Latin American development policies will recognize the facts presented. A translation of the book would do great service to decolonizing debates.