Precarity, aspiration and neoliberal development: Women empowerment workers in West Bengal

Abstract

While there is a long tradition of interpellating poor rural women to carry out the state’s development and modernising goals in local communities, neoliberal development has greatly expanded the remit of this subjective call but without accompanying material changes. In this article, I consider the precarious category of female workers produced by an NGO in West Bengal, out of a surplus population of poor, working-class and, generally, Scheduled-Caste rural women who were themselves beneficiaries of feminist-inspired development. Ambivalently positioned within this institutional site—as volunteers and not as employees—these workers had to manage new forms of risk and precarity over existing ones. Such precarity was not only material. It was especially manifest in new sets of aspirations that sustained the unrealisable promises and potentialities of the related processes of the NGOisation of feminist activism and the restructuring of women’s development under neoliberalism.

Rethinking NGOization as Postfeminist Practice: Interstitial Intimacies and Negotiations of Neoliberal Subjectivity in Violence Prevention

“…These entanglements have had contradictory or paradoxical effects in contexts such as Global South cities. On the one hand, they have led to women's increased participation in the burgeoning social sector workforce, but on the other, they have also made their lives more precarious and even deepened other forms of social marginalization and precarity (Baillie Smith and Jenkins 2012;Jakimow 2010;Roy 2019;also, Sangtin Writers and Nagar 2006;Sharma 2006). And insofar as these developments have led to the "NGOization" and depoliticization of feminisms, they also signal newer and unanticipated forms of postfeminist practices, engendering unique forms of politics that exceed the logics of neoliberal subjectivation and reassert commitment to foundational feminist values and ethics, like care, relationality, and critique of patriarchal power (Roy 2011;Bernal and Grewal 2014b;Roy 2017), as well as intimacy, affect, and desire (Wiegman 2010;Roychowdhury 2016;Freeman 2020).…”

“…I focus on NGOization as a particular form of postfeminist practice, and examine how women's NGOs both re-signify and engender newer forms of femininity and womanhood. My ethnographic materials show how frontline workers navigate complex pressures of communitarian gender norms, disciplinary regimes of professionalization and quantification (Merry 2016;Roychowdhury 2016;Roy 2019), and the vicarious harm of supporting survivors (Haldane 2017).…”

Do Nonprofit Organizations Experience Precarious Employment? The Impact of NGO Commercialization

“…Women and migrants are the most commonly subject to precarious employment in the US; Asian and European contexts alike (e.g. Chernousova 2020 ; Roy 2019 ; Denia and Guillú 2019 ; Goldin et al 2006 ). Findings suggest that entrenched gender expectations around work and family may lead women (regardless of household income) and lower-class men to be most vulnerable to the occurrence of stress (Fan et al 2019 ).…”

Women’s Collectives and State-Led Development in West Bengal: Reimagining Selves During Counterinsurgency

“…It put Sumana in a precarious position and was not the adarsha abastha she hoped for. Roy (2019) has recently written about the contradictions of empowerment for female NGO workers, where the neoliberal agenda of participation fuels their individual aspirations but the unpaid and underpaid nature of this voluntary ‘empowerment work’ also brings about precarity. Sumana’s CSP position was akin to the kind of voluntary empowerment work that Roy describes except that her unpaid position was linked to the local state actors.…”

“…Paradoxically, in the securitized context of counterinsurgency, women began to reimagine selfhoods through state-directed collectives. This argument builds on feminist scholarship that looks at women’s collectives as offering possibilities for social change, through women’s negotiations with dominant neoliberal ideas and forces of capitalist accumulation (Roy, 2019; Sen, 2018; Sharma, 2008). I show that women might not concur with the agendas of the security state, even find themselves in precarious economic positions, and yet they find spaces to rework their lives and livelihoods through state-directed collectives and development programmes.…”