Holding it Together in a Crisis: Family Strengthening and Embedding Neoliberalism

Abstract

This article seeks to intervene in debates about the role of crisis in Post-Washington Consensus (PWC) policymaking. Gender and sexuality are largely absent from that debate. What do experiences of crisis reveal about the inter-connections between crisis, gender, and sexuality? In concrete crisis conditions, which common sense groundworks of the present (Nikolas Rose) get unsettled, which get reentrenched, and what is the role of the development industry in this process? Using policy texts, interviews with World Bank policymakers, and fieldwork on a family strengthening loan in Argentina, the author argues that denaturalisation of free markets in the PWC is articulated partly through the renaturalisation of monogamous heterosexual couplehood. With the injuries of neoliberalism framed as injuries to loving couplehood, the World Bank and its allies resolve to (re)generate intimate partnership as the defining feature of the post-crisis era, raising crucial questions about new regimes of heteronormativity under construction in contemporary development practice.