This book discusses women-oriented microfinance initiatives in India and their articulation vis-à-vis state developmentalism and contemporary neo-liberal capitalism. It examines how these initiatives encourage economically disadvantaged rural women to make claims upon state-provided microcredit and connect with multiple state institutions and agencies, thereby reshaping their gendered identities. The author shows how Self-Help Group (SHG)-based microfinance institutions mobilise agency and create channels of empowerment for women as well as make them responsible for alleviating poverty for themselves and their families. The book also brings out the importance of factoring in women’s dissenting voices when they negotiate developmental projects at the grassroots level. Rich in empirical data, this volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of development studies, gender studies, economics, especially microeconomics, politics, public policy and governance.

This book discusses women-oriented microfinance initiatives in India and their articulation vis-à-vis state developmentalism and contemporary neo-liberal capitalism. It examines how these initiatives encourage economically disadvantaged rural women to make claims upon state-provided microcredit and connect with multiple state institutions and agencies, thereby reshaping their gendered identities. The author shows how Self-Help Group (SHG)-based microfinance institutions mobilise agency and create channels of empowerment for women as well as make them responsible for alleviating poverty for themselves and their families. The book also brings out the importance of factoring in women’s dissenting voices when they negotiate developmental projects at the grassroots level. Rich in empirical data, this volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of development studies, gender studies, economics, especially microeconomics, politics, public policy and governance.

In this study, U. Kalpagam examines the construction of the neoliberal subjectivities of entrepreneur, consumer, and citizen among women and girls in different contexts of their lives, such as employment and livelihood, urbanization, and migration, health and well-being, consumerism, and ageing in India. Drawing from Michel Foucault’s idea of neoliberal governmentality, it acknowledges that neoliberal articulations are entangled in a host of other factors, processes and institutions that being governed by different logics and rationality may act as countervailing forces to it such that the outcomes of governing conduct may differ from what governmentality had as its objective or had expected. Neoliberal governmentality is also changing the landscapes of women’s activism such that women as individual and collective subjects of resistance are being refashioned through modes of activism that reveal new forms and themes within women’s movement activism in India today.

This book explores the relationship between the state, development policy, and gender (in)equality in India. It discusses the formation of state policy on gender and development in India in the post-1990 period through three key organising concepts of institutions, discourse, and agency. The book pays particular attention to whether the international policy language of gender mainstreaming has been adopted by the Indian state, and if so, to what extent and with what results. The author examines how these issues play out at multiple levels of governance – at both the national and the subnational (state) level in federal India. This comparative aspect is particularly important in the context of increasing autonomy in development policymaking in India in the 1990s, divergent development policy approaches and outcomes among states, and the emerging importance of subnational state development policies and programmes for women in this period. The author argues that the state is not a monolith but a heterogeneous, internally differentiated collection of institutions, which offers complex and varying opportunities and consequences for feminists engaging the state. Demonstrating that the Indian empirical case is illuminating for studies of the gendered politics of development, and international debates on gender mainstreaming, the book highlights the politics of negotiating gender equality strategies in the contemporary context of neo-liberal development and brings together complex issues of modernity, postcolonialism, identity politics, federalism, and equality within the broader context of the world’s largest democracy. This book will be of interest to scholars interested in the politics of gender equality, state feminism, and gender mainstreaming; federalism and multi-level governance; and development studies and gender in South Asia.

Women and Microfinance in the Global South is a grounded exploration of the intersections of neoliberal ideology and feminism.

This book tracks the trajectory of gender in the social sciences and humanities through an exploration of the challenges and contradictions that confront contemporary feminist analysis as well as future directions. Drawing on research in India, the essays in the volume engage with the subject in imaginative ways, each one going beyond documenting the persistence of gender inequality, instead raising new questions and dilemmas while unravelling the complexities of the terrain. They also interrogate extant knowledge that has ‘constructed’ women as ‘agentless’ over the years, incapable of contesting or transforming social orders – by taking a close look at gendered decision-making processes and outcomes, sex for pleasure, health care practices, content and context of formal schooling or the developmental state that ‘mainstreams’ gender. Do existing feminist methodologies enable the understanding of emerging themes as online sexual politics, transnational surrogacy or masculinist ‘anti-feminist’ sensibilities? The feminist methodologies delineated here will provide readers with a toolkit to assess the criticality of gender as well as its nuances. The work foregrounds the importance of intersectionality and builds a case for context-specific articulations of gender and societies that destabilize binary universals. This volume will be useful to scholars and researchers across the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities, especially gender studies, women’s studies, feminism, research methodology, education, sociology, political science and public policy.

This timely Handbook collates a range of evidence from top scholars in the field to help readers understand who microfinance reaches, how it helps, and why clients come back. It offers updated views on important concepts that enable a broader framework for understanding poverty and the corresponding financial needs of poor households.