The politics of everyday life: feminisms and contemporary community development

Abstract

This special issue was inspired by Elizabeth Wilson’s (1977, p. 2) call to ‘inject some feminism into the community work scene’. Wilson argued that community development workers – so focused on political struggles in the workplace or in state structures – ignored the struggle for gender equality and social justice in the home and in the community. By focusing on the politics in public spaces, community development marginalized some women’s experiences of injustice and struggles for equality in the private spaces of the family and the neighbourhood. Although Wilson was writing more than thirty years ago, we wanted to revisit her critiques about the political orientation of community development in order to assess the state of contemporary feminist community development around the globe. Based on the analysis and research by the contributors to this special issue, it seems that feminist community development is still in a precarious position. What ails feminist community development appears to be inextricably linked to a larger crisis in left-wing politics due to neoliberal hegemony. As the left has been in retreat since the 1980s, this has allowed the state to be effectively captured by proponents of free market fundamentalism. From Honduras to South Africa to New Zealand to the United Kingdom, authors are reporting and analysing a similar problem: neoliberal policy processes are subverting feminist community development and activism. As the state is rolled back to allow the market to determine welfare provision, this appears to close down the space for radical critique and action – especially from a feminist perspective. The loss of these free spaces for resistance is not limited to feminist political actors; the ability for a range of socialist and social democratic civil society organizations and social movement actors to propose alternatives to free market economic growth strategies has been severely curtailed. Indeed, the very process of