Indigenous Feminisms: Resistance against Culturally Embedded Patriarchies

This paper focuses on three questions: 1. It can be argued that feminist analyses of power and ideology have been marginalized in favour of an emphasis on the individual’s ability to make choices. Do we still need to look at patriarchal ideologies? Is the notion of ‘consciousness’ a useful one? 2. How do we analyse the contested concept of ‘agency’ in the context of gender and development? Why has it become so central to neo-liberal development discourses on gender? 3. Is feminism inherently ‘Western’? Can Black and ‘'Third World’ feminist critiques of mainstream GAD approaches be reduced to questions of ‘cultural difference’? The authors address these three questions in one integrated argument rather than separately.