“Let them sing!” The paradoxes of gender mainstreaming in urban policy and urban scholarship

The early twenty first century has been a defining period for urbanization at a global scale. There is an urgent imperative to bring a gender analysis into debates on urbanization in this period of rapid urban growth and change. This article examines the potential of intergovernmental and scholarly spaces for gendering approaches to urbanization. We do so by reflecting on our experience of attending the 9th World Urban Forum (WUF 9), held in Kuala Lumpur in February 2018, as well as a series of academic conference sessions held in Toronto, New Orleans, and Montreal in 2018 on the theme of social reproduction and the development of a feminist urban theory for our time. We ask, to what extent do the discursive and performative strategies used in these different institutional settings serve to substantively center gender in transformative visions of the urban?