Feminist criticism sees cap as too powerful to fail – dooms any alternative

These critiques provide a much-needed reminder that feminist aims can be thwarted when they are taken up within the spaces of global governance, as well as a useful counter-narrative to claims that the current approach to gender and development policy constitutes a victory for feminist alternatives when so clearly it is not. But the way that capitalism is presented in these critiques – as a priori determining all outcomes and bending all agendas to its will – makes it difficult to imagine development otherwise. The bulk of feminist criticism of current gender and development policy may therefore give too much power to the capitalist economy, even as these critics acknowledge the existence and value of a diversity of economic practices and motivations outside of it (Gibson-Graham 2006). But what if instead of seeing capitalism as an impenetrable system that determines the course of everything – including the messy business of gender and development – we could imagine these glimmers of economic difference in policy as ‘cracks’ of opportunity for challenging the capitalist neo-liberal order? John Holloway provides an opening to such reimagining in his book Crack Capitalism, which argues that social change can be fostered by the creation of ‘cracks’ and fissures in the supposed logic of capitalism that allow us to move beyond it to a more just world (Holloway 2010, p. 11). Holloway’s idea of cracking open the ‘world that presents itself as closed’ (Holloway 2010, p. 9) can be extended to the knowledge and practice of gender and development. The ‘business case’ approach, as presented by both its champions and its critics, views the world as a closed capitalist system to which all non-capitalist activities and motivations function only as resources for capitalism. An alternative reading could identify the glimmers of alternative economic and social practices that might emerge from the ‘cracks’ of economic diversity in gender and development – rather than presenting them in terms of a closure that gives capitalism a social cohesion and is difficult to break (Holloway 2010, p. 52). Of course not all resistances will create post-capitalist possibilities, and in fact invocations of ‘community’ and ‘care’ and ‘participation’ and ‘women’s empowerment’ and the like may very well be integrated into projects to sustain capitalism, as the critics suggest. But when development is seen as only doing the work of global capitalism, it is itself presented as a unified force rather than a multivocal site of contestation over political projects (Ferguson 2009). Thus we cannot know in advance the effect of these openings, as they occupy the contradictory space between resistance and integration that cannot be entirely co-opted or contained by the state and capitalist system (Holloway 2010; Dinerstein 2012). The question remains, then, as to how these glimmers and openings might allow for activities and motivations that are at odds with the ‘business case’ being pursued by development institutions. By refusing to define capitalism as a determining force, could we be open to imagining ways to take these openings and cultivate economic subjects-in-becoming who are guided by motivations of care, collectivity and ethical concern (Graham and Amariglio 2006)? Might we look to recent shifts in gender and development for spaces to foster projects that decentre neo-liberal subjectification in favour of emerging motivations of solidarity and care through which new conceptions of the self can be created (Gibson-Graham 2006, p. xxv), or what Holloway (2010) might identify as a ‘crack’ or interstitial moment of resistance? Knowing there are no guarantees, we might still consider letting go of totalising stories and adopting an approach that ‘tolerates “not knowing”’ (Gibson-Graham 2006, p. xxxi) and an orientation towards possibility.