Enacting/Disrupting the Will to Empower: Feminist Governance of “Child Marriage” in Eastern India

Abstract

AbstractHow is it that feminist strategies of empowerment and government can come to operate in a regulatory and coercive manner? While this question has been considered in light of the recent carceral turn involving feminist interventions into violence against women, it has not been explicated in the context of women’s economic empowerment. This is in spite of increased evidence of nonstate actors, including feminist NGOs, operating coercively toward their target populations, namely poor women of the global South. Beyond the empirical evidence, our conceptual schemes also remain inadequate to capture the multiple workings of feminist governmentalities, rooted in sources of power that we tend to keep separate. A closer reading of governmentality, or “the conduct of conduct,” also provides a better sense of its flip side, namely counter-conduct, or the resistance that the governed might pose to the “will to empower.” The article probes the interrelated question of feminist conduct and counter-conduct in th...