Kalpana Wilson

With a background in Political Economy and South Asian Studies, Kalpana Wilson has been a lecturer of gender studies and international development at LSE and SOAS. She has published extensively on race relations, gender justice, women’s agency, reproductive rights, and rural labour movements, with a particular focus on the South Asian region.

She is the author of the first book that clearly identifies racism in the context of development paradigms: Race, Racism and Development: Interrogating History, Discourse and Practice. With a post-colonial, feminist and critical perspective Wilson not only offers provocative analyses of contemporary development theories and practices but addresses broader questions of injustice. Indeed, she tackles issues relating to imperialism, ethnic conflict, human rights, and diasporas, highlighting how an understanding of relationships between Global South and North is essential for conceptualizing development.

In her publication Towards a Radical Re-appropriation: Gender, Development and
Neoliberal Feminism, Wilson explores the historical evolution from liberal to neoliberal feminism in relation to development. She highlights how both approaches instrumentalize gender equality, while extending and deepening patriarchal structures and gendered relations of power. Moreover, these perspectives reinforce processes of global capital accumulation. In this sense, contemporary development practices relating microfinance, reproductive rights and adolescent girls are critically examined by investigating several case studies from India.

Wilson explains how neoliberal practices of gender and development promote the extension and intensification of women’s labour based on their greater efficiency, altruism, and productivity. This approach seems to erase questions of structural violence and discrimination, as well as being deeply racialized by not fully challenging the interpretation of woman in the Global South as passive and powerless. Further, the author explains how this current development practice (that we see for example in the Gender Equality as Smart Economics World Bank approach) is precisely functional to the expansion of capital accumulation. Contrarily, a feminist perspective which extensively recognizes women’s contribution to social reproduction could promote structural transformation and gender justice.

Furthermore, Wilson’s research includes population control policies as a consequence of specific targets imposed by international organizations to countries in the Global South during the 70s and 80s. She explains how these policies were shaped by neo-Malthusian theories about population and resources, as well as eugenicist concepts of ‘race’. In particular, she stresses how coercive sterilisations have remained central to population policy in India, where they constitute 75 percent of total contraceptive use and caused an average of twelve deaths a month between 2003 and 2012 (Wilson, 2015). In this context, Wilson explains how since the 1990s neoliberal development discourses have increasingly formulated population policies in terms of reproductive rights and choices by strategically incorporating feminist critiques. Overall, this emphasis on reproductive rights seems to further intensify gender inequality and constraint women’s choices and fertility.

Kalpana Wilson calls for the inclusion of concepts of social reproduction, heteronormativity and intersectionality in development analysis and policy frameworks. Throughout her career she carefully highlights the historical dynamics of power, domination and resistance around the world while advocating for rethinking development and transnational solidarity.

References and Further Readings

Wilson, K. (2011). ‘Race’, Gender and Neoliberalism: changing visual representations in development. Third World Quarterly, 32(2), 315-331.
Wilson, K. (2013). Race, racism and development: Interrogating history, discourse and practice. Zed Books Ltd.
Wilson, K. (2013). Agency as ‘smart economics’: neoliberalism, gender and development. In Gender, agency, and coercion (pp. 84-101). Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Wilson, K. (2015). Towards a radical re‐appropriation: Gender, development and neoliberal feminism. Development and Change, 46(4), 803-832.