Creating contradictions, recreating women: Struggles over meanings and spaces of women's participation in a Rajasthan (India) drinking water supply project

This dissertation examines how images and roles of women fieldworkers are constructed in and through participatory development schemes, and the ways in which, both practically and discursively, women and their work are paradoxically foregrounded and rendered invisible. I argue that when participatory approaches to development are implemented, they simultaneously enable and control women fieldworkers. By investigating the ways in which women fieldworkers create and recreate meanings of participation and the methods they deploy for mobilizing these meanings, I explore women fieldworkers' attempts to make the concepts of development meaningful for their own lives. The key moment within my fieldwork engages with constructions of women fieldworkers' identities as they labor within a development project. I ask: "What are the meanings and experiences of development for those women implementing the plans?" I focus on women fieldworkers' emerging agency through their experiences as facilitators of women's participation and detail their roles in the creation of contested development hegemonies and spaces. My research contributes a new area of inquiry to the field of gender and critical development by undertaking an ethnographic examination of the work of women responsible for implementing 'Women's Participation' components within development projects.;I draw on qualitative data sources to demonstrate that gendered paradoxes both in discourse and practice are inescapable and reproduced. These materials include: interviews with project staff, German consultants, and villagers; project reports, studies and proposals; and notes from participant observation of meetings and trainings. They illustrate in ethnographic detail the problems of implementing participatory approaches due to the multiply-held demands of project staff, donors, and villagers. Central to my study is an analysis of gender-biased labor practices as constitutive of meanings of women's participation, both in the office and in the field. Broadly, I investigate discourses of gender and modernity as part of widely-circulating narratives of development. My research builds upon and challenges current geographic scholarship by ethnographically examining the micro-politics of development interventions, stressing that development projects are sites where negotiations occur among individual actors and across scales, and focusing attention on how they produce new social relations and reproduce the status quo.