Neoliberalism and Women in India : Governmentality Perspectives

This study examines neoliberal strategies of governmentality in India. The author analyzes the effects of globalization and how women's subjectivities are shaped in a variety of sociopolitical contexts.

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.