In person icon Gender and the State in Contemporary India

Abstract

As the Indian state has reorganized itself in the neoliberal era, developmental agendas emphasizing women's "agency" and "empowerment" have come to the fore. Foucauldians have argued that these statist discourses of empowerment produce docile subjects and strip development of its inherently conflictual and contested nature. However, in rural India today, the state's "will to improve" has produced a range of subjectivities among poor women that defy Foucauldian expectations. This panel examines these understudied subjectivities and paves the way for a more complex understanding of the multifaceted relationship between women and state-directed development.