Gender and uneven development

The relationship between gender and uneven development as elaborated in this chapter combines a historical and contemporary lens to focus on three major thematic trajectories in the development of capitalism in the Global South. The first is concerned with the colonial political economy and the regime of gendered labour that had been the primary basis for the stabilisation of colonial capitalist accumulation and dispossession of the colonised. That gendered labour regime raises questions of forced labour, social reproduction, and the uneven (or gendered) integration of workers, nationalities and countries into the neocolonial and global economy. The second related theme is concerned with imperialism and the gendered nature of ongoing primitive accumulation in the Third World. This analysis reinstates the centrality of land in the trajectory of development of the colonised world, and its attendant prerequisites of national sovereignty within an anti-imperialist framework. The final section of the chapter examines the gendered component of national sovereignty, which must be understood concretely in relation to the question of the surplus population, land poverty and the crisis of social reproduction.