Southern Feminism at the Crossroads of Decolonization and Neoliberalism: The Case of DAWN

• In Event: What is Socialism for the 21st Century? What is the Role of Education in Promoting this?

Proposal

This presentation will recover and critically engage the intellectual-political interventions of DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era), a network of feminist scholar-activists from the Third World, that emerged in the mid-1980s. Transformations of the international system, starting in the 1970s, involved the emergence of neoliberalism and attempts to curtail the decolonizing project, both of which are intimately related. It is in this nexus that the “women and development paradigm” emerges; consolidated in and through encounters between Marxist/Socialist/Liberal feminists from both the Global North and the South/Third World. This paper will draw out the ways that DAWN navigated this terrain and assess its critical interventions, from a Third Worldist, feminist perspective, in light of contemporary debates about feminism, socialism and anti-capitalist critique.

Author

• Ritty Lukose, New York University