Gender, Mobility and the Financialisation of Development

Abstract

This article challenges popular claims about the capacity for microfinance to reduce poverty and empower women in the global South. Instead, I posit microfinance as a contradictory development tool, one that creates possibilities for both the contestation and continuation of unequal social relations at multiple scales. The article is divided into two major sections. I begin by examining the assumptions embedded in mainstream financial mappings of global space since the 1980s. In particular, I show how they privilege the transnational mobility of corporate capital and elide the everyday, place-based work of social reproduction. I examine the expansion and commercialisation of microfinance in this context, as an alternative mechanism for enabling poor households to continue meeting their everyday needs by taking on more debt. In the second section, I draw on fieldwork in Andhra Pradesh, India, to show how these interlocking macro/micro financial flows interact with regional social histories to shape and differentiate people's mobility 'on the ground' according gender, caste, and class. I conclude by suggesting how a critical geopolitics framework can help formulate new questions about microfinance as a development strategy.

“Low Profile” or Entrepreneurial? Gender, Class, and Cultural Adaptation in the Global Microfinance Industry

“…NOTES 1. Some exceptional studies that place microfinance in a global context and are attentive to the everyday institutional dimensions of making loans to women include: (Ly & Mason, 2012;Young, 2010).…”

“…The interface between microfinance staff and their organizations has been understudied in the existing literature that focuses on staff in any capacity (Kar, 2013;Sagamba et al, 2013;Young, 2010). In the interface between PI and Kanchan's staff, I found that PI held their field staff to high targets and exacting requirements, and individual staff members navigate these pressures in relation to their own positions in class and organizational hierarchies and opportunities.…”

“…Stephen Young's work in Andhra Pradesh suggests that different positions within the microfinance hierarchy are differently gendered, such that mobile men, in their roles as managers or loan officers, transmit specific ideas about being a "good mother" to their clients, ideas that are consistent with the need to extract repayment from women clients. Women borrowers respond to these ideas in unexpected ways, however, sometimes making new claims to resources outside of the loan itself (Young, 2010). Ananya Roy's account of the Grameen Bank suggests that the motivations of diverse stakeholders are linked through parallel transcripts within the organization.…”

The New Washington Consensus: Millennial Philanthropy and the Making of Global Market Subjects

“…Roy ). Its competitive and calculative practices foster a market orientation among philanthropic grantees, many of whom are marginalized by race and gender as well as by poverty (Rankin ; Roy ; Young ). Through the process of winning grants and the rationale behind them, as well as through the funded projects themselves, recipients are encouraged to see the difference‐friendly freedoms and choices offered by the market as solutions to the forms of oppression in which they are mired; moreover, through the management of funds and “return on investment” mindset they are recruited to operate as agents who can become responsible for their own care (cf.…”

“…Female heads of household are, not incidentally, also a “good risk”, providing the double benefit to funders of return on investment and the potential integration of previously marginalized economic subjects. This process relies on a newly delineated subject position Rankin () has termed, “rational economic woman” (see also Roy ; Young ); this rational woman must both learn from and manifest entrepreneurial ambitions and understandings, and be able and willing to take advantage of the opportunities offered to her.…”