Introduction: Gender, Media, and Developmentalism

This co-authored introduction reflects on a feminist conceptual and methodological framework developed through our experience of co-editing a special issue of Feminist Media Histories based on an ongoing international workshop on Media, Gender, and Development. Grounded in sustained collective discussion across film and media studies, development studies, and feminist theory, the presentation addresses how audio-visual production designated as "development media" functioned as a key site of negotiation within the postwar “global dream space.”
Rather than treating development media as a coherent institutional project or a marginal category of sponsored production, the framework we offer emphasizes zones of friction in which international organizations, state agencies, NGOs, and grassroots actors intersected with frequently internally contradictory developmentalist, feminist, Marxist, and anti-imperialist agendas. It proposes methodological tools for holding together institutional complicity and radical possibility, foregrounding and repositioning gendered labor, authorship, and circulation across North–South and South–South networks, as well as drawing attention to our own institutional positionality vis-a-vis the study of development in media.
By drawing on feminist approaches such as informed speculation and collaborative historiography, the paper argues for rethinking developmentalist audio-visual archives as contested epistemic terrains whose afterlives continue to shape contemporary media scholarship. In doing so, it speaks directly to the symposium’s call to reassess how scholars engage the legacies of internationalism and imagine alternative forms of global media history and world-making.