Description
Book SynopsisIn 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.
Trade ReviewNeoliberalism 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 women’s 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
Table of ContentsChapter 1: Neoliberalism and Women in India: A Framework Chapter 2: Microcredit and the Making of Entrepreneurial Selves Chapter 3: Neoliberal Urbanism, Governing Practices and Women Chapter 4: The Neoliberal Citizen and the Gendered “Medical Subject” Chapter 5: Aging and the Governmentality of the Aged Chapter 6: Lifestyling Feminism: Fashion, Consumerism and Women Chapter 7: Mapping the Women’s Movement in India Today Chapter 8: Conclusion
