Political Economy Seminar

Feminist development in eastern India: entangled histories and empowered women

Presenter:  Associate Professor Srila Roy

In person: Social Sciences Building (A02), Room 650

Abstract: In this talk, I will present a snapshot of a quintessentially neoliberal development initiative in eastern India, that constitutes part of the ethnography of my forthcoming book, Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India. In the book, I centre the actions and assumptions of an organization I call Janam, which sought to empower poor, mostly lower caste women in rural West Bengal. Its microfinance institution embodied key global dynamics in attaching the promise of poverty alleviation, through financialization, to human and women’s rights. Janam’s everyday work echoed, however, with multiple genealogies of educating and empowering women. Besides transnational neoliberal development, these included colonial governance and postcolonial state-led developmentalism, and nationally and regionally specific understandings of women’s vulnerability. The density of intimate governance that these lineages produced were manifest in several strategies adopted by the organization; some of which I will present and analyze. My case study and its specific historic and geographic locale provides a rich site for considering the entangled evolution of intimate modes of feminist governance at the grass roots.

Associate Professor Srila Roy is visiting the University of Sydney as the 2022 recipient of the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSSHARC) Hunt-Simes Visiting Chair of Sexuality Studies. Srila is based at the Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Her new book is called, Changing the Subject. (2022). Srilas is Co-editor of Feminist Theory and Principal Investigator of Governing Intimacies (Andrew Mellon Foundation)

Image: Robyn Davie Photography