NGO afterlives: Hopeful waiting and willful wandering

• In Event: Gender and Education Committee Highlighted Session: Girlhoods in the capitalocene: Investments, negotiations, refusals

Proposal

Girl-focused interventions engage in speculative practice, are imbued with aspirations, and orient participants towards optimistic futures. Programs provide participants with opportunities to learn how to aspire and move them towards new gendered imaginings of post-secondary and career pathways. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography of girl-centered empowerment programs in New Delhi, this paper explores NGO afterlives of young women in two ways. First, I attend to affective states of anticipation where hope and anxiety are conjoined. I illustrate how participant aspirations were often laden with a sense of hopeful waiting where anticipation is weighted by an acute sense of uncertainty. Second, I heed Sara Ahmed’s (2014) call to lend our ears to willfulness by noting participant refusals of empowerment lessons. I attend to participants who question the offer of being empowered, doubting the promise that such skills and knowledge would enhance life outcomes, and therefore the guarantees of empowerment. That is, drawing on her notion of willful subjects, strays or wanderers that refuse to subject their wills and refuse to become willing subjects, I pay attention to how governing projects of female empowerment are refused or de-stabilized by the targets of empowerment, and anticipate that these lines of flight might illuminate feminist re-imaginings of collectivity and new claims to personhood.

Ahmed, S. (2014). Willful subjects. Durham: Duke University Press.

Author

• Karishma Desai, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey