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Here we provide a critical reading of gender mainstreaming as a potential emancipatory force that has been co-opted within Orientalist-Occidentalist polemics. This remains a critical period in the "mainstreaming" debate, where feminist reappropriation is necessary to repoliticize the concept and reorient development sector focus from tokenistic inclusivity to social transformation. We consider two sides of the debate. In the first scenario, the requirement for gender mainstreaming in international development discourse has not only failed to address its original feminist goals, but has become (or remained) an extension of Orientalist, neocolonial projects to control and "civilize" developing economies. Here, a putative concern for gender equality in development is used as a means to distinguish between the modern, civilized One and the colonial, traditional Other. In the second scenario, gender mainstreaming is held up as all that these "othered" Occidentalist forces stand against; an exemplar of the inappropriate imposition of "Western" moralistic paradigms in non-Western contexts. Ultimately, the co-optation of gendered discourses in development through these Orientalist-Occidentalist polemics serves to obfuscate the continued depoliticization of mainstreaming. A critical question remains: can gender mainstreaming ever transcend this discursive impasse and reassert its feminist transformatory potential?

This article applies a critical femininities perspective to the concept of women's leadership, interrogating the market-oriented instrumentalization of femininity. The author presents empirical research consisting of in-depth interviews conducted with young women leaders in European student organizations. These participants juggle complicity and subversion as they negotiate the divergent expectations of femininity and leadership through interpersonal interactions and sociocultural positionalities. In these narratives the themes of social responsibility, difference, femininity, culture and embodiment are interlaced. The analysis of findings complicates monolithic interpretations of femininity by evidencing intra-categorical fracturing, multiplicity in locations and manifestations of femininities, conflicting attachments and affective relations to femininity, and broader geopolitical contextualization. This theoretically and practically challenges tropes of hegemonic femininity, and presents opportunities for resistance. On this basis the author argues for countering the feminist trouble of engaging with non-transgressive femininity from within strongly normative spaces in the development of critical femininity studies.

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