Feminist Media Histories, Spring 2026: "Gender, Media, and Developmentalism," Guest Edited by Dalila Missero and Masha Salazkina

Our Spring 2026 issue—"Gender, Media, and Developmentalism," guest edited by Dalila Missero and Masha Salazkina—is now live!

For all its ubiquity, development remains a conceptually elusive category. Wolfgang Sachs describes it as an idea of “monumental emptiness [that] can be easily filled with conflicting perspectives,” encompassing practices as divergent as “putting up skyscrapers” and “putting in latrines.” In 2025, as we concluded work on this issue, the news of the closure of the USAID reignited the ideological divides that have characterized the history of international aid. Given the scale and importance of this organization on the global level, its dissolution may signal a turning point away from development as a global practice and as an institutional and professional field, which over the decades has served as a diplomatic tool with its own distinct media apparatus. Yet USAID’s closure, whether temporary or permanent, does not erase the historical impact of these institutions, nor resolve the contradictions they have reflected and reproduced over the past century, as the concept of development underwent several crucial transformations.

Initially tied to the economic theories of modernization, development prioritized state-led initiatives designed to spur industrial growth and address internal inequalities. By midcentury, through the rise of the Bretton Woods institutions, development had evolved into an international policy framework aimed at redistributing resources from the Global North to alleviate the “troubled” economies of the Global South. By the 1970s, impacted by the increasing political role of Thirdworldism and the rise of the New International Economic Order, the emphasis on market-led growth was challenged by dependency theory and structuralist critiques, aimed at recasting development as necessitating global structural transformation. With the neoliberal turn of the 1980s, the Structural Adjustment Programs triggered by the IMF and World Bank imposed market liberalization, privatization, and deregulation as conditions for receiving loans and other forms of financial assistance (what became known as the Washington Consensus), making them into major markers for international development policies.

More recently, development has expanded once again, moving beyond economic redistribution to incorporate new indicators such as the Human Development Index and the Gender Development Index, and away from international organizations such as the United Nations to a broader network of NGOs. These frameworks increasingly integrate metrics of governance and human rights, reflecting liberal ideals of democracy, self-expression, and entrepreneurship combined with what in many ways still amounts to various “antipoverty measures.”

But while the postdevelopment critiques of the 1990s sought to dismantle development’s epistemological authority, more recent English-language scholarship has turned toward a granular reconstruction of its heterogeneous genealogies and material practices. Today, the field has opened to a proliferation of minoritarian and critical perspectives, including those advanced by queer and Indigenous scholars, which collectively reframe development as a dynamic terrain of conceptual and political negotiation. Responding to these perspectives, the case studies gathered in this special issue follow Corinna Unger’s call for sustained “historical analysis in place of meta-critique.” In doing so, we draw from a combination of “informed speculation” and “pragmatic theorization” that rejects essentialism in favor of multifaceted experiences of gender and sexuality.

Contributors to this special issue engage examples that traverse continents and decades, from 1920s Mexico to contemporary India, exploring specific local historical articulations of global paradigms, foregrounding distinctly feminist methodologies as well as attention to medium specificity.

Editors' Introduction (OPEN ACCESS for a limited time: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2026.12.2.1)

For the entire issue: https://online.ucpress.edu/fmh/issue/12/2