Politics of un/re/claiming: critical feminist interventions in Global policy, rights and development

Informed by intersectional feminist sensibilities, this compilation of four critical interventions weaves together existing and emergent threads of women’s studies to interrogate one-dimensional framings of global policy, rights and development in hegemonic discourse. Attending to contemporary geopolitical issues as diverse as they are rich, what interconnects these seemingly disparate sites of complexity and contestation is a politics of un/re/claiming. ‘Instrumental Women or Women-as-Instruments? Assessing Gender Mainstreaming and Claims to Microcredit’ problematises the myriad ways in which economic (dis)empowerment, vis-à-vis the staking of microcredit claims, is constitutive of and constituted by neoliberal globalisation. ‘Medicinal and Aromatic Plants: Territorial Resource Claims and the Feminisation of Global Agricultural Production’ navigates topographies of agricultural supply-chain management to tease out the textured intersections between global(ised) trade, natural resource claims and gendered labour divisions. Straddling the neoliberal epoch’s hyper-precarious borders and boundaries, patient lifeworlds are multiply inflected by their in/capacity to articulate healthcare-based claims - ‘Patienthood and its Dis/claimers: Embodied Citizenship Politics in Neoliberal Welfare Restructuring’ invokes an anthropologically-attuned analytic frame to unearth such ambivalences. Finally, ‘On Wendy Brown’s “Suffering Rights as Paradoxes”: Theorising the Im/possibility of Rights-Based Claims’ offers an incisive, nuanced commentary on Wendy Brown’s seminal scholarship in search of new political and epistemological possibilities for redressing rights-based claims.