Microfinance, Entrepreneurship, and the Feminist Empowerment Industry

• In Event: Global Trans-Actions: Theorizing Empowerment in a Transnational Context

Abstract

Trumpeted as “empowering women” to rise out of poverty, microfinance is a normalized aspect of development programs in the global South which has largely escaped feminist critique. Efforts to depict and attend to women’s oppression worldwide often ignore the impact of neoliberal globalization on women’s lives, further contributing to marginalization and regulation of gender and sexual minorities. This paper examines how discourses of women’s empowerment and entrepreneurship sensationalize sexuality as the site of the ultimate gender oppression, displacing analyses of women’s labor, particularly within a system that devalues feminized bodies and women’s work.

Presenter

• Heather Montes Ireland, Indiana University