Women’s Day: When the market co-opts the feminist vision

In the three decades since India began to liberalise its economy in the early 1990s, the country has experienced sweeping transformations in its social and cultural landscape. Alongside the privatisation of industries, the rise of global media outlets and increased foreign investment, there emerged a new set of narratives around women’s empowerment and gender equality.

These narratives have undoubtedly opened some previously closed doors for women – particularly among the middle- and upper-middle classes – they have also been critiqued for promoting what is a neoliberal appropriation of the feminist vision.

India’s market liberalisation policies, initiated in 1991, encouraged foreign investment, privatised state-owned enterprises and slowly “opened up” sectors such as telecommunications, banking and the media to global capital. With the arrival of multinational companies and a flood of Western consumer goods, discourses around individual choice, personal success and consumer “empowerment” gained momentum.

At the same time, economic reforms brought more women into information technology, retail and service industries leading to a sense that women could now more actively participate in India’s economic growth story. The flip side of this success narrative was the continued and even intensified informalisation of labour, with lower-class and Dalit women shouldering a disproportionate burden of precarious, underpaid and undignified work.

Individual, market-based...

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