A feminist critical discourse analysis of Sida’s gender ideology

Abstract: This study offers a feminist critical discourse analysis of how Sida’s discourses can be viewed as consolidating a gender ideology and power asymmetries in gendered social orders. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) and feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA) offer the theoretical and methodological framework to the investigation of gender ideology in Sida’s discourses. Postcolonial theory offers an additional theoretical framework with explanatory understandings of the ideological assumptions identified. According to the findings and in the light of chosen theories, this study suggests that a gender ideology that is underpinned by colonial and capitalist ideologies can be identified in Sida’s discourses. The results show that analyzes of how power systems operate in complex ways to produce gendered inequalities are not accounted for by Sida, whereby their contestation and transformation is hindered. It is also suggested that Sida, in complicity with other actors in the international development arena, has appropriated and distorted feminist concepts in a way that conceals dominant group interest and power dynamics. By shifting the focus away from such, it is further argued that Sida risks reproducing colonial images of underdevelopment and vulnerability as inherent to marginalized groups and as especially inherent to women. This study further suggests that Sida’s consolidating of power asymmetries in discourses is partially explained by the intertwining of institutions and discourses in the international development arena. The reasons behind the power of the identified discourses are argued to serve the maintenance of global hierarchies based on constructions of race and sex, in order to ensure a status quo in the capitalist process of accumulation by dispossession, which continues to benefit wealthy northern countries like Sweden.