Gender and Neoliberalism

Gender and Neoliberalism
Author: Elisabeth Armstrong
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2013-11-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317911415

This book describes the changing landscape of women’s politics for equality and liberation during the rise of neoliberalism in India. Between 1991 and 2006, the doctrine of liberalization guided Indian politics and economic policy. These neoliberal measures vastly reduced poverty alleviation schemes, price supports for poor farmers, and opened India’s economy to the unpredictability of global financial fluctuations. During this same period, the All India Democratic Women’s Association, which directly opposed the ascendance of neoliberal economics and policies, as well as the simultaneous rise of violent casteism and anti-Muslim communalism, grew from roughly three million members to over ten million. Beginning in the late 1980s, AIDWA turned its attention to women’s lives in rural India. Using a method that began with activist research, the organization developed a sectoral analysis of groups of women who were hardest hit in the new neoliberal order, including Muslim women, and Dalit (oppressed caste) women. AIDWA developed what leaders called inter-sectoral organizing, that centered the demands of the most vulnerable women into the heart of its campaigns and its ideology for social change. Through long-term ethnographic research, predominantly in the northern state of Haryana and the southern state of Tamil Nadu, this book shows how a socialist women’s organization built its oppositional strength by organizing the women most marginalized by neoliberal policies and economics.

Neoliberalism and Women in India

Neoliberalism and Women in India
Author: U. Kalpagam
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2019-07-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1498592252

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.

The Making of Neoliberal India

The Making of Neoliberal India
Author: Rupal Oza
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1136082263

This is an ambitious study of gender and politics in India, and will be of interest to scholars of women's studies, globalization, postcolonialism, geography, media studies, and cultural studies, as well as India more generally.

Changing the Subject

Changing the Subject
Author: Srila Roy
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2022-08-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478023511

In Changing the Subject Srila Roy maps the rapidly transforming terrain of gender and sexual politics in India under the conditions of global neoliberalism. The consequences of India’s liberalization were paradoxical: the influx of global funds for social development and NGOs signaled the co-optation and depoliticization of struggles for women’s rights, even as they amplified the visibility and vitalization of queer activism. Roy reveals the specificity of activist and NGO work around issues of gender and sexuality through a decade-long ethnography of two West Bengal organizations, one working on lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues and the other on rural women’s empowerment. Tracing changes in feminist governmentality that were entangled in transnational neoliberalism, Roy shows how historical and highly local feminist currents shaped contemporary queer and nonqueer neoliberal feminisms. The interplay between historic techniques of activist governance and queer feminist governmentality’s focus on changing the self offers a new way of knowing feminism—both as always already co-opted and as a transformative force in the world.

Logics of Empowerment

Logics of Empowerment
Author: Aradhana Sharma
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2008
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816654522

Bringing much-needed specificity to the study of neoliberalism, 'Logics of Empowerment' fosters a deeper understanding of development and politics in contemporary India.

Dispossession Without Development

Dispossession Without Development
Author: Michael Levien
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2018
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0190859156

Winner of the 2019 Global and Transnational Sociology Best Book Award, American Sociological Association Winner of the 2019 Political Economy of World System (PEWS) Distinguished Book Award, American Sociological Association Received Honorable Mention for the 2019 Asia/Transnational Book Award, American Sociological Association Since the mid-2000s, India has been beset by widespread farmer protests against land dispossession. Dispossession Without Development demonstrates that beneath these conflicts lay a profound shift in regimes of dispossession. While the postcolonial Indian state dispossessed land mostly for public-sector industry and infrastructure, since the 1990s state governments have become land brokers for private real estate capital. Using the case of a village in Rajasthan that was dispossessed for a private Special Economic Zone, the book ethnographically illustrates the exclusionary trajectory of capitalism driving dispossession in contemporary India. Taking us into the lives of diverse villagers in "Rajpura," the book meticulously documents the destruction of agricultural livelihoods, the marginalization of rural labor, the spatial uneveness of infrastructure provision, and the dramatic consequences of real estate speculation for social inequality and village politics. Illuminating the structural underpinnings of land struggles in contemporary India, this book will resonate in any place where "land grabs" have fueled conflict in recent years.

Dalits in Neoliberal India

Dalits in Neoliberal India
Author: Clarinda Still
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2015-07-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317341627

India’s economic growth has brought opportunities for many but to what extent has it benefitted its ethnically-shaped underclass: the Dalits? Have Dalits fared better in a neoliberal India or have structural economic and social changes served to magnify Dalit disadvantage? This volume offers a varied picture of Dalit experience in different states in contemporary India. The essays draw on factual research in rural and urban areas by experts in the field. With case studies ranging from Dalit entrepreneurs in Bhopal to housewives in Tamil Nadu to ex-millworkers in Mumbai, the book contends that radically progressive change and advance is attended by discrimination and exclusion, as well as surprising new areas of stigma. With contributions by political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and economists, the volume will be key reading for scholars and students of Dalit and subaltern studies, sociology, political science, and economics.

Theorizing NGOs

Theorizing NGOs
Author: Victoria Bernal
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2014-03-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822377195

Theorizing NGOs examines how the rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) has transformed the conditions of women's lives and of feminist organizing. Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal suggest that we can understand the proliferation of NGOs through a focus on the NGO as a unified form despite the enormous variation and diversity contained within that form. Theorizing NGOs brings together cutting-edge feminist research on NGOs from various perspectives and disciplines. Contributors locate NGOs within local and transnational configurations of power, interrogate the relationships of nongovernmental organizations to states and to privatization, and map the complex, ambiguous, and ultimately unstable synergies between feminisms and NGOs. While some of the contributors draw on personal experience with NGOs, others employ regional or national perspectives. Spanning a broad range of issues with which NGOs are engaged, from microcredit and domestic violence to democratization, this groundbreaking collection shows that NGOs are, themselves, fields of gendered struggles over power, resources, and status. Contributors. Sonia E. Alvarez, Victoria Bernal, LeeRay M. Costa, Inderpal Grewal, Laura Grünberg, Elissa Helms, Julie Hemment, Saida Hodžic, Lamia Karim, Sabine Lang, Lauren Leve, Kathleen O'Reilly, Aradhana Sharma

Gendered Paradoxes

Gendered Paradoxes
Author: Amy Lind
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2015-11-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0271076364

Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its “free market” strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country’s poor, including women’s groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women’s participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork and employing an approach combining political economy and cultural politics, Amy Lind charts the growth of several strands of women’s activism and identifies how they have helped redefine, often in contradictory ways, the real and imagined boundaries of neoliberal development discourse and practice. In her analysis of this ambivalent and “unfinished” cultural project of modernity in the Andes, she examines state policies and their effects on women of various social sectors; women’s community development initiatives and responses to the debt crisis; and the roles played by feminist “issue networks” in reshaping national and international policy agendas in Ecuador and in developing a transnationally influenced, locally based feminist movement.

Subaltern Movements in India

Subaltern Movements in India
Author: Manisha Desai
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2015-09-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317382781

Social struggles in India target both the state and private corporations. Three subaltern struggles against development in Gujarat, India, succeeded, to varying degrees, due to legalism from below and translocal solidarity, but that success has been compromised by its gendered geographies. Based on extensive field research, this book examines the reasons for the three social movements succeess. It analyses the contradictory reality of the deepening of democracy along with coercive state measures in the era of neoliberal development, the importance of the legal changes in the state, the nature of the local fields of protest, and the translocal field of protest in contemporary subaltern protests. Addressing gender inequalities within and outside the struggle, the author shows that despite subaltern women having symbolic visibility in the public spaces of the struggles – such as rallies, protests, and meetings with government officials – they are absent from the private spaces of decision-making and collective dialogues. This book offers a new approach on the politics of social movements in contemporary India by discussing the nuanced relationship between development and democracy, social justice and gender justice. It will be of interest to academics in the field of Development and Gender studies, Studies of social movements and South Asian Studies.