Gender Rights and the Politics of Empowerment

Abstract

In this chapter, I explore how rights language is constitutive of capital’s own logic of producing value, paying specific attention to gendered narratives of empowerment featuring the “oppressed third-world woman.” I note that one of the ways these narratives function is by creating a language of empowerment that appears to address inequities and injustice yet simultaneously works to create a subject who is aligned to the interests of capital. I examine two prominent narratives, one presenting “woman” in the Global South as an agent of economic advancement through self-help, and another presenting her as a global citizen. I argue that narratives like these, fashioned by Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), by promoters of microcredit schemes, and by writers and activists, play a particularly important role in marking capital as a force aligned with the democratic and the modern.