Agency as ‘Smart Economics’: Neoliberalism, Gender and Development

Abstract

The focus of this chapter is the incorporation and transformation of feminist notions of agency within neoliberal discourses on gender and development. The construction of ‘poor women in the global South’ as neoliberal agentic subjects is, I suggest, a process which is not only gendered but also racialised. The influence of these neoliberal formulations of agency, I argue, has not only contributed to the neglect of oppressive structures of material and discursive power in feminist work on development but equally importantly has also rendered invisible expressions of agency which question neoliberal models, and which, while operating in acutely coercive conditions, involve collective visions of transformation.