Retheorizing Empowerment‐through‐Participation as a Performance in Space: Beyond Tyranny to Transformation

W hile participatory approaches emanate from a range of political per- spectives and traditions and are not inherently feminist, they can offer one means to a practical feminist politics. Participatory approaches aspire to reduce and circumvent the power relations normally involved in research and development and to take the notion of giving the marginalized a voice to new levels by facilitating their involvement in the design, implementation, and outcomes of programs. A substantial literature suggests that by redistributing power and establishing more reciprocal relationships between "insiders" and "outsiders," participatory approaches build ordinary people's capacity to analyze and transform their lives and thus provide one practical means to facilitate empowerment (see, e.g., Amid the plethora of largely positive accounts, Participation: The New Tyranny? (Cooke and Kothari 2001b) stands out as a critical challenge to established interpretations. Contributors argue forcefully that the term participation is being mobilized to serve a wide variety of political agendas, many of which are not very radical; that participatory approaches can impose, not overcome, power relations when "delivered" as a technocratic cargo; that practitioners have erroneously imagined local communities as discrete and socially homogeneous; that "local knowledge" has been romanticized, intracommunity divisions underemphasized, and the positive contribution of external agents under-I dedicate this article to the men, women, and youths of Mhondoro, Zimbabwe, and to colleagues at the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) Southern African HIV and AIDS Information Dissemination Service (SaFAIDS) and Tsungirirai, whom I thank for their continued support and generosity. I would also like to thank the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and British Academy (small research grant SG-29725) for its financial support, three unnamed referees for their insightful comments, the Signs editorial staff for their brilliant editorial work, and friends at the University of St. Andrews for their collegial support.