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

Bedford, Kate (2008) Holding It Together in a Crisis: Family Strengthening and Embedding Neoliberalism. IDS Bulletin, 39 (6). pp. 60-66. ISSN 0265-5012. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:14755)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided.

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.

Item Type: Article
Subjects: K Law
Divisions: Divisions > Division for the Study of Law, Society and Social Justice > Kent Law School
Depositing User: Amy Parkes
Date Deposited: 28 Jan 2009 16:09 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 09:53 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/14755 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

Bedford, Kate.

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