NEOLIBERALISM AND WOMEN IN INDIA: Governmentality Perspectives

In this study, U. Kalpagam examines the construction of women’s neoliberal subjectivities of the entrepreneur, consumer, and citizen in different contexts of their lives. Drawing from Michel Foucault’s idea of neoliberal governmentality, this study acknowledges that neoliberal articulations are entangled in a host of other factors, processes, and institutions that may act as countervailing forces, causing the outcomes of governing conduct to differ from what the governmentality had intended. Neoliberal governmentality is also changing the landscapes of women’s activism. Women as individual and collective subjects of resistance are being refashioned through modes of activism that reveal new forms and themes within women’s movement activism in India today.