Neoliberalism and Women in India: Governmentality Perspectives

(Hardback)

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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 Foucaults 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 womens 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 womens movement activism in India today.

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Neoliberalism and Women in India explores a complex subject with expertise and insight. Dr Kalpagam assembles a range of theoretical perspectives on governmentality, which are brought together with empirical analyses of womens lives in five key areas, namely microcredit, urban reconstruction, health, aging and consumerism to offer a lucid and thoroughly researched analysis of globalization and its effects in contemporary India. This is likely to become an indispensable reference book for those working in gender, development and studies of neo-liberalism and globalization in the Indian sub-continent. -- Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, New York University

Author Bio

U. Kalpagam is professor at the Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute of the University of Allahabad. She has authored Rule By Numbers: Governmentality in Colonial India.