Living at the Edge

Disability, Gender, and Neoliberal Debtscapes of Microfinance in India

Bibliographic Data

ID12142303
AuthorsVandana Chaudhry (College of Staten Island, City University of New York, Staten Island, NY, USA, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume31
Issue2
Pages177-191
Publication date2016-01-07
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAffilia (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0886-1099 • E-ISSN: 1552-3020
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0886109915622525
OpenAlexW2228778082
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited43

Based on the philosophy of Yunus—founder of the Grameen Bank model and Nobel Prize laureate—microfinance has been globally upheld as a neoliberal panacea for addressing poverty and income disparities. Despite these advances, microfinance—as a key policy tool for increasing well-being, social mobility, and capital markets in the underserved communities of the Global South—has not yet been evaluated for its effects in empowering women with disabilities. I draw from disability studies, feminist studies, and social work to examine the ethnographic phenomenon of disabled women who, despite dire poverty, take the unexpected strategic step of collectively refusing to accept microfinance loans. I argue that the individualizing, market-oriented logic of microfinance comports standards of compulsory able-bodiedness that are contradicted by disability as a reality that is experienced through relational kinship ties in rural India. This suggests that approaches to social work in microfinance and disability should attend to cultural aspects of power that manifest through beliefs about gender, ability, and kin-based relationality, beliefs which may sit uneasily with western cultural norms of autonomy, empowerment, and individual agency purported by neoliberal development programs. Finally, this article sheds light on the current development models and social work interventions in the public sphere, which tend to be ill-suited to redress the conditions of impairment that affect disabled women, and invites us to reimagine the domestic sphere as a domain of emergent dependencies and agentive possibilities

Economic growth · Economics · Empowerment · Microfinance · Political science · Poverty · Sociology · Disability Rights and Representation · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies · Gender Studies · Microfinance and Financial Inclusion

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