Skilling Girls in Neoliberal India: Fashioning Entrepreneurial Aspirations Through Empowerment Curriculum

• In Event: 25.013 - Traveling Discourses of "Democracy": Unsettling Stable Promises and Making Difference Transnationally Through Inclusion

Abstract

The last decade has seen a proliferation of girl-centered policies, campaigns, and international non-governmental (iNGO) programs anchored in a development logic, which suggests that empowering girls will uplift families, communities, and nations out of intergenerational poverty (Moeller, 2013). Such discourses position girls in the global South as ideal investments for achieving national progress and building better democracies. It is assumed that through education, girls will be better equipped to participate in increasing economic growth, and contribute to the social and moral development of their nations. Development narratives assume that certain kinds of personhoods are required for contemporary democratization. Empowerment, then, is a technology of citizenship for liberal democracies that promotes self-management (Cruikshank, 1999) reconstituted along neoliberal lines (Sharma, 2008).

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in one such iNGO program on the outskirts of New Delhi, I illustrate how educational empowerment programs targeting girls as objects of reform construct universalized norms for girlhood. The iNGO life skills curriculum orients towards a normative model of empowered girlhood that emphasizes entrepreneurial citizenship, a subject position underscored as critical for neoliberalism (Rose, 1990). By providing lessons on self-confidence, resilience, and flexibility, entrepreneurial girlhood is fashioned as desirable for nation building in neoliberal times. This model of girlhood is derived from a Western psychologized construct of citizenship wherein subjects develop the appropriate dispositions to effectively participate in a changing democratic order. This discourse of empowered girlhood travels to the global South through the iNGO life skills curriculum and evaluation rubrics.

I argue that iNGO participants assemble neoliberal aspirations of empowered entrepreneurial citizenship learned through the curriculum along with aspirations for middle class domesticity, which have colonial reverberations, and are learned from popular culture. Teachings on how to take initiative, and lessons on self-discovery provide iNGO beneficiaries with opportunities to examine their inner drive, recognize their potential, and make calculated plans on how to use their inert capabilities. However, my research illustrates that participants extend ideals of enterprise to construct themselves as future wives and mothers, emphasizing that these new skills will enable them to solve household problems quickly and better manage uncertainty. The active, enterprising domestic subject they aspire towards is normalized, and contrasted with uneducated homemakers, who they believe passively accept their conditions. Thus, the iNGO girls’ education curriculum shapes binaries that fashion the uneducated as empowered girlhood’s Other, and re-sediment colonial differences. Thereby, while skilling girls with the right kind of capabilities and attitudes for inclusion in a neoliberal democracy, the curriculum produces exclusion.

Author

• Karishma Desai, Teachers College, Columbia University