Producing Value for Social Identities through Microfinance 2.0: Making Bodies Matter?

• In Event: The Globalization of Microfinance and the Promise of "Change"?

Abstract

What bodies are valued and what community practices? How is value for the subalternized body produced through digitality? To what end? What paradigm of "Development" is implicit in the staging of ideal bodies and coding of empowerment practices. I examine a variety of online Microfinance platforms and related community/network formations in global digital space. These sites include kiva.org, Rang de, Milaap, Micrograam and also some visibly google, Facebook and apple app endorsed games for change story lines and visuals.

I argue that subaltern bodies and contexts are staged and supplied (often selectively framed through a political and cultural economy that privileges google searches, Facebook endorsements and Apple App policies for inclusion of games and so on) to mostly first world/Global North based lenders and philanthropist audiences in microcredit exchanges at the web 2.0 interface. This process produces monetary and social value for particular subaltern bodies while privileging specific types of "global" entrepreneurial activities.
What results is a visual and discursive level playing field and a narrative of empowerment and access through microfinance 2.0.

Author

• Radhika Gajjala, Bowling Green State University