The Gendered Entrepreneurial Subject: Gender, Development and Informality in India

• In Event: 102 - Regular Session. Development and Gender

Abstract

This paper examines the contradictions of the gendered entrepreneurial subject in the mainstream development paradigm by presenting a case study of women informal workers in India. Rather than focusing on the micro-finance industry (a subject that has been well-researched), I analyze the experiences of women who participated in home-based work. I center the analysis on the home to capture how women’s productive and social reproductive roles reproduce and conflict with the construction of the gendered entrepreneurial subject. I examine two characteristics praised by supporters of micro-enterprises – capital and autonomy – that are found in home-based work, but I argue that women experience these characteristics differently – paying for costs of production and a burden of choosing between work and care. I find that in this setting where women have to invest in their work and have the potential to work (and earn) as much as they are willing to, work and care become an embodied burden in which their sense of providing for their family is impeded by these two roles. Examining women’s experiences with informality in the home reveals the contradictions of the entrepreneurial subject. Findings are based on interviews with female home-based workers, collected during fieldwork in Ahmedabad, India. Research was facilitated with the help of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), one of the first labor unions in India for women in the informal economy.

Author

• Natascia Rose Boeri, The Graduate Center at the City University of New York