“The personal is political!”: exploring the limits of Canada’s feminist international assistance policy under occupation and blockade

Abstract

“The personal is political!” This now infamous second-wave feminist slogan highlighted the connections between everyday personal experiences to larger social and political structures. As Enloe ([1990]. Bananas, beaches and bases: Making feminist sense of international politics. University of California Press) reminds us, the personal is political, but the personal is also international and, the international is personal. To this end, in 2015, Justin Trudeau took Canadian politics by storm with a platform promising change and a commitment to make Canadian international assistance explicitly “feminist”. Feminist scholars have long argued that understanding gender inequality requires more than targeted projects, programs, and interventions; it requires a fundamental shift in the way we understand systems of power shaping our complex international political systems (Tiessen, [2007]. Everywhere/nowhere: Gender mainstreaming in development agencies. Kumarian Press). Despite this, the way in which this commitment has been applied by the Trudeau Government is another question altogether. Using Ferguson’s ([1994]. The anti-politics machine. University of Minnesota) concepts of the “anti-politics machine”, this article explores Canada’s FIAP using the case study of Canadian international assistance in Gaza. It concludes that despite having an international assistance policy predicated on feminist values, Canadian development and humanitarian initiatives in Gaza are scrubbed of political dimensions and therefore utterly detached from the reality of the occupation and blockade and the subsequent impact on the lives of women and girls.