Behind Women’s Emancipation and Oppression: Contested Expertise in Global Microcredit Governance

ABSTRACT

Experts often debate global microcredit governance along two opposing spectrums: microcredit as either an emancipatory or oppressive instrument for women. Expert debates about women’s emancipation and oppression through microcredit, however, neither consider the women for whom the debate is staged as experts nor explore in sufficient detail the role and effects of expertise. Drawing on a series of interviews in rural Bangladesh, the article offers expert reflections on microcredit governance of three women, often referred to as ‘poor women’ by experts. It puts the three women’s worldviews in an analytical comparison with those of selected microcredit experts. Far from engaging with women’s agency, the article argues that well-known microcredit experts often overestimate their own knowledge and underestimate the knowledge of women, rendering the latter as docile subjects of social and legal reform. With the help of the three women, the article illuminates the role of expertise in the reproduction of knowledge and social hierarchy in global microcredit governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Poor women
• microcredit
• experts
• normalisation of inequality

Micro-credit has proved itself to be a liberating force in societies where women in particular have to struggle against repressive social and economic conditions … .¹

The other side of credit is debt … the poor are gradually becoming trapped in a web of microdebt … .²

1. Introduction

Microcredit often generates polarised views. As the above quotes illustrate, while the Nobel Peace Prize Committee recognised it as a tool for women’s liberation from structural inequalities, an award-winning filmmaker equated it with debt servitude. Global microcredit governance, that is, the proliferation and consolidation of microcredit beyond Bangladesh, remains a hotbed of expert deliberation and disagreement. From economists to feminists, many have weighed in on microcredit along two opposing spectrums.³ Experts in favour of microcredit initiatives have maintained that microcredit is a useful social programme that addresses radical inequality afflicting the global economy, in particular the large number of ‘poor women’ all across the world.⁴ On the other hand, experts critical of microcredit have identified it with the growth of a global neoliberal order over the past few decades in which ‘poor women’ are subjected to greater exploitation and inequality through microcredit programs.⁵

Behind microcredit’s contested premises about tackling poverty and inequality, I aim to show, is a set of normative claims surrounding women. The brief, archetypal story behind these normative claims is as follows.⁶ When a ‘poor woman’ is offered credit to help manage her family budget and save money, she immediately assumes greater authority in terms of family decision-making: the very first steps towards the empowerment of women. Gradually, as she progresses through her credit history, she ventures into a small business of her own; in other words, she becomes an entrepreneur. Realising the power and choice to do things on one’s own empowers and directs such a woman towards the early stages of entrepreneurship. Upon being successful in her business, she can be a successful businesswoman and can elevate her social status as well as that of her family. The fulfilment of this story implies emancipation of the particular woman not only from the sufferings of poverty, but also from the shackles of patriarchy. Microcredit proponents hinge on these normative arguments to justify the continued relevance of microcredit for ‘poor women’. Critics of microcredit have pointed out, using qualitative and quantitative examples, the sheer falsity of each of the above claims.⁷ Instead, they argue that microcredit governance continues to impoverish and disempower women, and in many instances, enslave women to the discipline of credit.

In this article, I engage with these opposing postures of emancipation and enslavement by microcredit experts. My intuition is that rather than mere normative or governance issues, the contested narratives of microcredit can also be seen as effects of expert knowledge practice. Expert debate about women’s emancipation and oppression through microcredit, I argue, does not just evaluate women’s social and political prospects in the abstract; it also shapes those prospects in the process. I suggest that expert ideas of emancipation and oppression are as much a product of particular expert projects that are predominantly shaped by experts arguing against each other as they are factual and policy assessments of the microcredit’s role in women’s lives.

Put briefly, I recast the ongoing debate about microcredit’s role in emancipating and oppressing women more as a site of expert politics and less as a site of policy innovation or failure. Ananya Roy also studied microcredit in the register of expert politics showing how anti-poverty institutions, experts, and social movements all came to consolidate and advance their own visions of development as authoritative knowledge.⁸ While both Roy and I highlight the elevated positioning of microcredit in global affairs and prioritise analyses of knowledge practices over governance rationality, we have different methodologies and objectives.

While Roy analyses people managing poverty, that is, microcredit experts, I offer an unconventional comparative analysis: blending expert views of proponents and critics of microcredit with those of women borrowers drawing on a series of conversations with three women borrowers. Roy’s study helps explain the making of development logic via contending institutional structures of and expertise on microcredit. My fundamental objective is to understand how women come to be the centrepiece of contending expertise in global microcredit governance. In that sense, I aim to make two-fold contributions to feminist jurisprudence.⁹ First, influenced by the new stream of critical feminist scholarship,¹⁰ I hope to offer a better understanding of women at the centre of microcredit debate as makers of knowledge and politics; and second, I hope to show how contested microcredit narratives surrounding women help normalise legal reform and social justice projects that sustain inequality.

The article has six parts including the introduction and conclusion. Parts 2, 3 and 4 have a common structure analysing contending expert narratives. Parts 2, 3 and 4 examine the key narratives and counter-narratives that experts commonly portray, which are about entrepreneurship, empowerment, and the emancipation of women. In all three parts, the article situates the viewpoints of microcredit’s supporters in narrative one and its critics in narrative two. Narrative three tells stories of three women borrowers drawing on my conversations with them. Each narrative begins with a brief biographical account of the individual whose views form the basis of that narrative. Each expert’s biographical background is helpful to rethink the modes of intellectual hierarchy in knowledge practices, as will be evident later.

The aim of Parts 2, 3 and 4 is to disentangle the orthodoxy of expert narratives from the supposed benefits to, or victimisation of, women. Understanding of the beneficial or harmful effects (microcredit programs being empowering or disempowering), I argue, can best be drawn from the experiences of people who are generally assumed to be the main protagonists of these narratives. Narrative three in each part extracts the argumentative or assertive part of three women’s stories, putting them in conversation with those of the microcredit experts. This article’s analytical method foregrounds the intellectual contributions of formally illiterate field participants, so often disregarded by experts.

Against expert stories of microcredit’s emancipatory or oppressive role, Part 5 looks at the implications of expert narratives for women’s emancipation and oppression. Building on the work of feminist theorists Martha Nussbaum and Nancy Fraser, it shows how experts cast women as docile subjects of social and legal reform and in the process reproduce a new sense of knowledge and social hierarchy. In conclusion, the article calls for a greater scrutiny of expert engagement in global microcredit governance, which is likely to continue to influence many women’s lives in the foreseeable future. Before I proceed to the main discussion, let me clarify the scope and limits of my fieldwork and analysis.

I explain my analytical framework in three steps. First, I elaborate on my fieldwork and the particular approach undertaken to engage with field ‘data’ and ‘participants’. Second, I explain the main ideas at work and how I use and apply them in this article. Third, I situate myself in relation to interviewees and experts in this study.

1.1. Fieldwork and Data

I conducted the substantive part of my fieldwork during March and April 2011 in the Companiganj Upazila in the district of Noakhali in Bangladesh.¹¹ My field site is represented by a local government, namely Upazila Parishad – one of 492 Upazilas in Bangladesh. I conducted fifteen semi-structured interviews as part of my fieldwork and all my interviewees were adult women borrowers. Although insights from all these interviews inform my fieldwork, this article is mainly based on my conversations with three of these interviewees.

The article does not use the conversations with the three women simply as ‘data’ or ‘facts’ substantiating my arguments. They can be seen as ‘expertise’, a key term that I will explain in the next sub-section. Inspired by French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s work,¹² I frame the conversation between myself and my interviewees as a kind of political commentary. This framing of my conversations with field ‘participants’ connects the social with the intellectual and the political and allows me to see authority in people who seem to have no such authority. In short, attention to the distribution of intellectual authority has enabled me to imagine the ‘participants’ in my fieldwork as sharing the same capacity for intellectual and political work.

1.2. The Basis of Expertise and Other Ideas

My understating of expertise and experts have been most prominently shaped by international lawyer David Kennedy’s work.¹³ Combining Bourdieu’s theory of practice with Foucauldian analysis of power, Kennedy shows how knowledge practices by development economists, human rights practitioners, international lawyers and media pundits operate as various modes of power and authority at a global level. For Kennedy, expertise is at once knowledge and governance, both of which remake the world. Experts often govern through technical arguments and assertions in the form of background knowledge and consolidate their expertise through law and policy. Global laws and policies or the existing structures of global governance are often the distributive results of expert contestation. This distributive aspect of knowledge and system-making in Kennedy’s work is particularly instructive for my analysis of microcredit expertise.

Some narrative figures in this article such as two prominent journalists may not necessarily be experts in the strict sense. Kennedy, however, does not maintain the conventional difference between experts and non-experts as he sees expertise as an effect of knowledge practice whereby all kinds of people take on and are influenced by ideas developed by experts. It is in Kennedy’s sense that this article uses the terms experts and expertise. In microcredit debate, these are not necessarily the exclusive domain of people formally endorsed to possess special knowledge and authorised to practice that knowledge. Expertise is rather an artefact of human knowledge and power at the disposal of people struggling to legitimise one or another form of knowledge as authority.¹⁴

Beyond expertise, the article engages with several important ideas, namely entrepreneurship, empowerment, emancipation, poverty, patriarchy, and inequality. I engage with these ideas as they get manifested in expert rendition without necessarily attempting to ‘define’ them in one way or another. The ideas, for example, about entrepreneurship, emancipation and empowerment or poverty and patriarchy have been the subject matter of definitional quagmire in the feminist and development literature. However, my objective is to engage with these concepts in their mundane form as and when experts make stories about and out of them. Poverty and patriarchy or empowerment and emancipation, for the purposes of this article, are at once context-specific and indeterminate ideas that emanate from a specific worldview of experts.

1.3. Positioning the Self

A final methodological point or ambivalence, I should say, is my positionality in relation to the world of experts in this study including the three women.¹⁵ As a tenured Bangladeshi academic based in Australia, I cannot tell stories about expertise without an acknowledgement that I am not outside of expertise and hierarchy. Even though knowledge work has become a vocation for me, poverty is not foreign to me as I grew up as part of a family that struggled to make ends meet in urban Bangladesh.

My identity and position, however, as a Bangladeshi man with upward class mobility not only put me in a relatively privileged position vis-à-vis these women but also expose my biases and vulnerabilities in grasping the social fabric of women’s lives in a postcolonial setting.¹⁶ For example, most of my interviews took place in the presence of women field contacts despite me being relatively fluent in the local dialect. What follows is not necessarily shying away from my biases and privileges but engaging with them with an openness to my own complicities in the reproduction of hierarchy.

As already indicated, I assemble three different groups of people for the comparison. Based on their evaluations of microcredit practices, I arrange the three groups as supporters, critics and commentators. I discuss Muhammad Yunus, Rehman Sobhan and Nicholas Kristof among the microcredit supporters. I present Anu Muhammad, Lamia Karim and Tom Heinemann among the microcredit critics. I bring in the three interviewees Brenna, Lisa and Audrey as commentators,¹⁷ who are typically cast outside of the discussion of expertise. The select people from these three groups are not necessarily representative of global microcredit governance as there are many other experts worthy of consideration. Nonetheless I choose to engage with the above people for they share two important commonalities: First, their narratives are, explicitly or implicitly influenced by Muhammad Yunus’s archetypical story (as discussed earlier) despite being a diverse group of people with different professional backgrounds, institutional orientations and geographical locations; and second, they reflect on microcredit’s emancipatory and oppressive role in a way that brings up questions of knowledge and power, the methodological tools of my analysis. As far as the analytical comparison goes, my own position is perhaps comparable with that of a participant observer. Because Yunus is the central figure of almost all discussions of microcredit, I will use his work as the starting point for my discussion in the next three parts.

2. Three Narratives of Entrepreneurship

[T]he shortcomings of the core economic theories remain unchallenged. Microeconomic theory, for example, which plays a central role in the analytical framework of economics, is incomplete. It views individual human beings as either consumers or labourers and essentially ignores their potential as self-employed individuals.¹⁸

The quote above is taken from Muhammad Yunus’s account of the entrepreneurship inherent in microcredit. The first narrative of entrepreneurship will in some way corroborate this view of Muhammad Yunus – however, with some difference. Pro-microcredit experts advocate a far more entrepreneurial role for ‘poor women’ and men – the creation, for example, of corporations of the poor through which the poor might gain a major share of the market economy. The second narrative of entrepreneurship expresses scepticism about this view. It shows how such corporations of, and for, the poor (such as Grameen Bank) are increasingly eating up the market shares of the poor, albeit in the name of ‘poor women’. The third narrative of entrepreneurship described below takes an approach that in some way vindicates narratives one and two, as well as the above quote from Yunus, but raises interesting questions about what happens when self-employed individuals do operate confidently in a rural society. Let me explain all three narratives fully.

2.1. Entrepreneurship Narrative One

The first narrative of entrepreneurship engages with Rehman Sobhan’s work, an economist and policymaker in Bangladesh and currently the chairman of a non-governmental policy think-tank in Bangladesh, the Centre for Policy Dialogue.¹⁹ One of the central foci of his work is global poverty eradication and the role microcredit plays in eradicating poverty. In the past, he also served as the chairman of Grameen Bank, having been formerly a teacher of Muhammad Yunus at the University of Dhaka.²⁰

Rehman Sobhan approaches poverty as a structural problem and in turn proffers a structural solution to poverty.²¹ His concern is how to address poverty structurally, and microcredit’s role can only have structural impact if its institutions assume the proportions of Grameen Bank or become even bigger than that. For Sobhan, microcredit borrowers would realise the fuller potential of entrepreneurship if microcredit institutions become large corporate organisations. Sobhan praises Grameen Bank’s growth in the size and volume of financial transactions, but expresses his dissatisfaction with the way most microcredit institutions cling to their status as microenterprises, which he calls a ‘ghetto’.²² He speculates that ‘a large number of corporate bodies of the poor’ in the developing world might assemble a powerful political force – a force that could eventually change the current power imbalance that reproduces poverty in developing countries.²³

Sobhan gives examples of what he means when he says that increased participation of the poor into the national economy will have a transforming effect upon the poor. Grameenphone, a telecommunication company registered in Bangladesh, is his poster idea about how to corporatise institutions for the poor. Grameenphone is currently owned jointly by Telenor, a Norwegian company, and Grameen Telecom, a sister company of Grameen Bank. When Sobhan wrote his paper in 2005, Grameenphone had two million subscribers.²⁴ Telenor holds a 51 per cent equity share and Grameen Telecom 35 per cent (the rest of Grameenphone is held by other shareholders). This was the largest corporate joint venture in Bangladesh and the 35 per cent Grameen share, Sobhan suggests, is ultimately enjoyed by ‘2.3 million poor rural women in Bangladesh’.²⁵ In his paper written in 2005, Sobhan also comments that Telenor will ‘gradually divest their equity stake’, allowing ‘poor women’ to own the greater portion of Grameenphone.²⁶ In this way, Sobhan envisions how the poor can become a bigger part of the national economy sometime in the future. However, Grameenphone’s 2020 annual report suggests that Telenor’s current equity stake is approximately 55.8 per cent and Grameen Telecom’s share is 34.2 per cent.²⁷

Sobhan’s vision is to turn ‘poor women’s’ ability to effect transactions within a small social circle into something bigger that will potentially connect with the growth of the market economy.²⁸ A striking feature of Sobhan’s take on microcredit is that he thinks that institutional expansion is unquestionably good for the poor.²⁹ This is because he uncritically takes large NGOs like BRAC and Grameen Bank to be organisations working for the poor alone.³⁰ Inherent in his analytic is a sense that the market is an autonomous and rational space where women’s abilities to do business would be better harnessed. Certainly, there are many who doubt this analytic; one among them is Anu Muhammad.

2.2. Entrepreneurship Narrative Two

Anu Muhammad, a Professor of Economics at Jahangirnagar University in Bangladesh and a prominent social activist, is the expert figure for entrepreneurship narrative two.³¹ His work focuses on alternatives to dominant social, economic and political narratives in Bangladesh from a global perspective. He has written extensively (mostly in Bengali language) on the capitalist integration of Bangladesh into the global economy, and in particular the role of microcredit in this capitalist integration.

Anu Muhammad is opposed to the idea of entrepreneurship by private business venture, especially the one propagated by Grameen Bank.³² His main argument is that business ventures of Grameen Bank do not really help the poor; instead, they accrue benefit for foreign interests and the microcredit institution itself. More importantly, Muhammad also argues that poverty is a matter that can be primarily addressed through responses that come from public institutions – not by Grameen Bank, which hardly caters to the needs of its own borrowers. Muhammad questions the very premise of Sobhan’s vision for financing the poor. If a microcredit system designed for poor people to engage in banking cannot eliminate poverty, he asks, how could the transformation of the same system into something bigger do the same? Growth in size might have brought success for Grameen Bank itself as a corporate entity, but not for the poor with whom it deals. He presents data that suggest that in 2006 about 70 per cent of total microcredit participants were from four microcredit institutions in Bangladesh, namely Grameen Bank, BRAC, ASA and Proshika.³³ Muhammad, it seems, is not quite a critic of microcredit for the poor, but rather a critic of the tycoons of microcredit institutions, especially institutions of the size of Grameen Bank.³⁴

Muhammad particularly shows that Grameen Bank’s success as a microcredit institution is not because it enabled ‘poor women’ to overcome their poverty, but because Grameen Bank was able to make good use of finance capital by incorporating the poor into the capitalist market.³⁵ Muhammad suggests that Grameen Bank’s elevation onto the world stage has never been a carefully planned pro-poor program. Rather, he argues, it was the ‘dismantling of public institutions, privatisation and liberalisation’ all across the world that enabled institutions and people like Grameen and Muhammad Yunus to serve the interests of finance capital.³⁶

Muhammad shows how Grameen Bank has been able to establish and expand businesses that did not actually serve the interests of the poor.³⁷ Grameen Bank, as already noted in Sobhan’s account of the success of Grameenphone, established many organisations of its own alongside its banking operations, which are registered as companies under the Companies Act (Bangladesh) 1994.³⁸ Muhammad lists 21 such companies, which are also separate legal entities.³⁹ Muhammad raises questions about whether and how the benefits from these businesses are transferred to millions of borrowers that Yunus claims to be the ultimate beneficiaries of all its business initiatives.⁴⁰ Overall, Muhammad argues, the expansion of Grameen Bank has little to do with mass entrepreneurship and hence poverty reduction.⁴¹ Instead, all it has meant is a smooth extension of finance capital in poorer territories.

Muhammad’s scepticism about Grameen Bank’s work, however, suggests a certain bias towards the multiplicity of microcredit institutions and towards the diversifying of businesses of those institutions. That bias is evident in Muhammad’s tilt towards public institutions as the ultimate carers of the poor.⁴² But people on the ground seem to be less concerned with such assumptions about private profit and public good. Let us turn to one of them now.

2.3. Entrepreneurship Narrative Three

Entrepreneurship narrative three explores Lisa, who is one of the three interviewees featured in this article.⁴³ Lisa is an informal moneylender and former borrower of microcredit institutions. She is formally illiterate and was aged roughly between 30 and 35 when I met her in 2011.⁴⁴ Born in a village in Noakhali, she never had a chance to go to school. When she was five or six years old, her mother sent her to work as a child domestic worker for a middle-class family in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. She had been borrowing from Grameen Bank for eight years at the time of my interview with her in 2011 and had many productive transactions with Grameen. She also began her own business of lending money to women.

Lisa argues that Grameen Bank really helps some individuals do business, but she also concedes that doing business in Grameen’s way causes hardship for some. Her personal experience with credit has been largely positive; she thinks that carefully managing loan money as a moneylender offers some potential to make money and to be independent.

She related her present financial situation, describing it as largely the result of her intimacy and knowledge-sharing with Grameen Bank staff. In our third meeting, Lisa told me that she and her family (which includes her sister and her mother) had been trying for the past several months to buy a piece of land to build a house of her own. Lisa explained that this demanded skills to negotiate, and she had learned the skills from a Grameen Bank officer and honed them through her personal loan business.

Lisa used to work as a maidservant many years ago for this Grameen Bank officer and gradually met other Grameen bank staff. She recollected that Grameen staff members advised her to understand the nature of people. They said that some people would be trustworthy and that she should charge such persons a decent amount of interest. However, people who may not seem very trustworthy should be charged a higher rate of interest, Grameen staff advised her. Lisa gave me one example, where she collected 22,000 taka in interest payments on a debt of just 7000 taka.⁴⁵

Asked if her entrepreneurial venture in loan business is solely due to the generous help, she received from Grameen Bank, she cited an example of her strong character. One day, while being a child domestic worker in Dhaka, her employer left home leaving a huge amount of money outside the locker. She trembled at the scene of the money, but regained herself quickly and locked the main door in case any robber came. By this example, Lisa wanted to point out that integrity and trust, and understanding whom to trust for business, used to be her instinct, even before she met Grameen people.

At the time I met with Lisa, she said that she had in total 11 clients. I did not have a chance to know how much money she had invested in total. Even though Lisa did not tell me all about her business, her relative comfort in talking about buying a piece of land in the area and her readiness to build a house indicated that she had sufficient funds to do so. In my field setting, this is an achievement that most people simply do not reach in their lifetime.

Lisa’s personal achievement through lending-business, however, came at a price. I realised this when Lisa began talking about her difficult clients. In particular, she told me a story about a client, who in her view, is one of those ‘weaker and unruly’ clients. She brought out a complaint to a certain local ruling party politician against this borrower. Lisa had lent 20,000 taka to this borrower. The woman paid off the principal of the loan but refused to pay the interest. The interest, she said, amounts to 15,000 taka. As this discussion continues, I asked whether she would consider that credit is business friendly for all. She said that the lending business forced her to be harsh on some, such as the client discussed here. Lisa also told that this ‘weaker’ client was actually in a hardship, but Lisa herself was not responsible for it. Lisa mentioned that she was helpless in this situation, in other words, she could not but give up on recovering the interest payment.

Overall, the protagonists of entrepreneurship narratives one and two respectively have a bright and a bleak view of microcredit institutions, especially Grameen Bank. But neither of these experts really explains that growth in size guarantees a national economic solution to poverty, or why poor people’s participation in microcredit institutions should be regarded, instead, as merely a service to finance capital. These issues are implied; both seem to think that market growth or market failure is a proven formula. In narrative three, Lisa’s expectations do not quite endorse either of these views. Lisa’s engagement with microcredit shows that her entrepreneurial role contributed to her upward class mobility but also at the same time pushed her ‘weaker’ client further into misery. It is, however, hard to draw any conclusions from her personal circumstances about the broader national and international economies in the sense of poverty reduction or increase.

Lisa’s elevation through the rank of rural society raises the curtain for the next expert theme, that is, empowerment. The empowerment narratives spell out most succinctly why microcredit continues to operate as a very powerful feminist discourse. My first group of experts was comprised of Bangladeshis. Although those in the next group are mostly non-Bangladeshis, they have very strong views about the empowerment agenda of microcredit in Bangladesh and beyond.

3. Three Narratives of Empowerment

Economists have failed to understand the social power of credit. In economic theory, credit is seen merely as a means with which to lubricate the wheels of trade, commerce and industry. In reality, credit creates economic power, which quickly translates into social power. When credit institutions and banks make rules that favour a distinct section of the population, that section increases both its economic and its social status.⁴⁶

The quotation above is another one from Muhammad Yunus, which sets the basic scene for all three narratives. In this part, once again I discuss three particular narratives about empowerment. The first narrative depicts the power of credit in Pakistani society and how an educated female entrepreneur built up a bank for poor and vulnerable women from scratch, and how her vision of empowering women has changed the socio-economic status of women. The second narrative, however, is thoroughly critical of credit. According to this narrative, in credit there is virtually nothing that poorer population can gain; rather, credit creates cycles of suffering and economic stagnation for poor people. The third narrative reframes empowerment in a different light. It suggests that empowerment is altogether a different question from that of participation in a microcredit program. Let me discuss all three empowerment narratives one by one.

3.1. Empowerment Narrative One

The first narrative of empowerment is developed mainly from Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s co-authored book Half the Sky: How to Turn Oppression into Opportunities.⁴⁷ Kristof has written and spoken widely about microcredit and its potential beyond the above book.⁴⁸ Hence, for the purposes of my analysis, I will discuss this narrative in relation to Kristoff. Kristof is a journalist based in New York and a columnist for the New York Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice and ‘his columns often focused on health, poverty, human trafficking, women’s rights and social justice’.⁴⁹ He has written about how microcredit and the work of Muhammad Yunus have had a positive impact upon disenfranchised women in Bangladesh.⁵⁰

Gender inequality is the central theme of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s best seller book.⁵¹ To present the problem of gender inequality, Kristof draws on his own experiences and tells real-life stories that elaborate the problems around gender inequality. At the same time, Kristof suggests ways in which gender inequality is confronted today, and microcredit is one such inequality-fighting instrument in the book.⁵² Kristof pays attention to means that would empower women to fight poverty and inequality. Among 14 chapters of the book, Kristof dedicates one chapter to microcredit specifically, terming it ‘the financial revolution’.⁵³

The microcredit chapter of the book opens with a story of social change: about ‘an unusually successful’ borrower of an extraordinary microfinance institution, namely Kashf Foundation, an NGO in Pakistan.⁵⁴ Saima, the unusually successful borrower, started with a US $65 loan and was able to set up an embroidery business with this money.⁵⁵ Saima’s business grew and soon she began to hire her neighbours to join the business. However, before Saima became successful in her business, she had a very troubled life. Her husband and brother-in-law beat her, while her mother-in-law threatened her for having two consecutive baby girls and advised Saima’s husband to think of marrying again so that he could have a son. All these events happened while Saima’s husband was both unemployed and unemployable. In Kristof’s words, ‘she was desperately poor’.⁵⁶

Yet a successful outcome with a small loan has brought a sea change not only in Saima’s financial condition, but also in her social status.⁵⁷ Her husband began to work for her, overturning Saima’s earlier subordinated position in relation to him.⁵⁸ Even her mother-in-law radically changed her views about Saima by beginning to appreciate Saima’s work and contribution.⁵⁹ Saima had her third baby girl in the meantime, which brought pleasure instead of complaints from her in-laws.⁶⁰ She has invested in her girls’ education and has good plans for them.⁶¹ As indicated before, Kristof does not regard this success of Saima as typical of microcredit and that is why Saima was an unusually successful participant in his observations.⁶² Kristof acknowledges that microfinance is not successful in Africa but attributes that largely to Africa’s lagging behind in global human and economic development compared to other societies.⁶³

Kristof is nonetheless convinced that microcredit has had significant impact upon the empowerment of women in many parts of the developing world. Microfinance, for Kristoff, despite being an imperfect solution to gender inequality, has revolutionised the idea of finance for women, seeing women as agents of change, rather than passive recipients of assistance.⁶⁴ In short, Kristof weighs in favour of the empowering virtues of microcredit for women. Of course, there are also strong views that see credit as disempowering for women. Let me now turn to one of those views.

3.2. Empowerment Narrative Two

The counter-narrative of empowerment is from Tom Heinemann, an investigative journalist from Denmark. He made a documentary film, The Micro Debt, based on his fieldwork on microcredit in Bangladesh, India and Mexico. According to his personal website, ‘with more than 30 years’ experience’, Heinemann ‘specialise[s] in investigative, in-depth journalism’ and received several awards for The Micro Debt.⁶⁵

Tom Heinemann’s work attacks the central empowerment claim of microcredit institutions – that is, the value of credit to alter the social positioning of ‘poor women’. Compared with that of Kristof, Heinemann’s documentary film focuses on the abject lives of poor people, including ‘poor women’, while they are on various microcredit programs. To reinforce the claims of his documentary, Heinemann published an article in a Bangladeshi newspaper entitled ‘Credit Is a Human Right. Is Debt?’.⁶⁶ He borrowed the heading from Thomas Dichter, a development expert who is a staunch critic of microcredit, including its so-called success stories in Bangladesh.⁶⁷ Heinemann questions whether microcredit ‘really eradicate[s] poverty’, as so often claimed by its proponents and promoters alike.⁶⁸

Heinemann showed that the presence of microcredit did not have a positive impact on the socio-economic status of the people he interviewed. Quite contrary to the story Nicholas Kristof presented, Heinemann revealed stories of people who have lost everything as borrowers of microcredit institutions. He also claimed that poor people were paying between 30 and 200 percent in interest.⁶⁹ His case studies included Indian men who drank poison or burnt themselves to death and Mexican women who lost everything while paying off 200 per cent interest on their loans. Heinemann also highlights a Bangladeshi village in Dinajpur, where he claims that people did not move an inch out of poverty through microloans.⁷⁰ In support of his claim, Heinemann presented data from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which states that ‘almost 81 per cent of the population of Bangladesh lived (survived!) on less than 2 USD a day’.⁷¹ He then laments that three decades of microcredit in Bangladesh have done very little towards the eradication of poverty in the very birthplace of microcredit.⁷²

Heinemann’s work has thus made a case that microcredit fails not only worldwide but also at its place of origin, where it is generally considered to have had enormous success. Showing the inefficacy of microcredit as an anti-poverty model, Heinemann in effect shows that poor people are too unprepared to handle credit.⁷³ By way of a counterproposal, Heinemann suggests that poverty is non-existent in Scandinavian society, where everyone enjoys a quality life under a taxation system that the Scandinavian state has developed over generations.⁷⁴

Heinemann’s views are rooted in Scandinavian welfare state models, which are themselves a century long deliberation of experts. Poor people filled up Heinemann’s evidentiary quota, mostly supporting his data and lacking expert knowledge. He states emphatically that everyone he interviewed in India or Bangladesh was illiterate and did not understand a thing in the loan documents that they had signed.⁷⁵ Under such conditions of ignorance, the borrowers rely entirely on what the loan officer dictates that they should do, Heinemann contends.⁷⁶ However, my encounters with people in the field is not quite what Heinemann claims.

3.3. Empowerment Narrative Three

Empowerment’s last narrative is constructed from my interviews with Brenna.⁷⁷ Brenna is a homemaker. She was between 25 and 30 years old at the time we met in 2011. Brenna studied up to the ninth grade in a Bengali-medium school. She has provided me a sharp account of social reality. Brenna had been borrowing money for a long time and had extensive experience with microcredit institutions in Bangladesh, including BRAC, Grameen Bank and ASA, even before her marriage.

Brenna’s views about the reproduction of hierarchy were also helpful in rethinking my overall approach to this paper. Brenna was very interested in how I work and what in particular I am doing as part of my research project. When this interview (and all others in this paper) was conducted, I was a doctoral candidate in law at the University of Sydney. She was critical of my research question in the sense that I started off with a presumption that Brenna was poor. She thought that if an aspect of my central research question had already been answered, then there must be very little to explore about the questions of poverty – that is, if I had already presumed Brenna to be poor, I would be particularly guided by a set of assumptions, which would heavily constrain my ability as a researcher to understand her viewpoint.

She argued that credit could not be seen as a matter of empowerment. In her view, a woman wants to be happy in life and she wondered why on earth microcredit would be a factor in the equation of a woman living a good life. She suggested that microcredit is one of only a few things that people need from time to time. Had there been some cash provision from the government other than microcredit, she would have been interested in that too. Consequently, for Brenna, there was no question of credit being useful in taking control of one’s life. Credit is neither a matter of assistance to women or anyone else for that matter, nor is it something given for some eternal benefit. It is a deal between creditor and debtor. Credit should not be mixed up with women’s status, she argued, which is a very different thing.

Asked if she had any trouble with managing or repaying instalments while she was in a loan program, Brenna told me the following story. She was not prompt in paying two consecutive loans and, as a result, was excluded from the repayment team of which she had been part. The reason she was dropped from the team was rather simple. Brenna and her husband had been raising five calves over two months. Her husband was not at home for about two months. Among other things, he often worked as a local bus helper, but with the calves being taken care of using the instalment money he decided to devote his time to this and therefore stayed away from his work as local bus helper. It was during this time that she twice had problems paying her weekly instalments on time, although she did ultimately make both payments. She, as another member of her group remarked, was considered a vulnerable member and therefore, to maintain the equilibrium of the group, she was eliminated from the team. In this case, as Brenna and the person standing beside her confirmed, the loan manager concerned was helpful to her. But the stricter imposition of loan recovery rules combined with her very uncertain position vis-à-vis other members of the group eventually led the other members to accept her drop-out.

I asked what usually happens when a member who is not formally literate fails to do the calculation of their loan portfolio properly. She replied: ‘You have two eyes and so do I. You cannot take money from me with your pen. I might be poor but I can understand everything’. Thus, almost at the end of our conversation, perhaps out of my insistence on questions surrounding poverty, Brenna, for once, depicted herself as poor. Yet Brenna’s views clearly indicated that her self-worth is not linked in any way to her long relationship with microcredit.

Empowerment, as a policy intervention, has been a fascination for some experts and an abstract measure for others. The fascination is caught in the depiction of microcredit as having empowering virtues – by Kristof in Narrative One. The second Narrative, that of Heinemann’s, is not only critical of microcredit’s rhetoric of empowerment, but claims that microcredit in fact takes away the power of an individual to decide for herself. Finally, as part of my fieldwork, I presented a mixed narrative that goes beyond the pro- and anti-microcredit narratives of which contemporary scholarship is now well abreast. This third narrative complicates the influential claim that microcredit has an empowering effect upon women while at the same time not aligning itself with the claim that credit in effect controls the lives of women. Rather, it shows that microcredit operations do not automatically transform the social positions of borrowers, even if they enable particular women to gain better financial control over their income. It also indicates that empowerment, or for that matter disempowerment, is perhaps much more an expert mechanism of engaging with microcredit practices than a productive rethinking of existing social inequality.

Microcredit supporters make a yet much broader claim: it can emancipate women from poverty and patriarchy. The next section explores three different takes on the theme of emancipation.

4. Three Narratives of Emancipation

[W]hen I went to the villages I saw how many of our borrowers had not only crossed the poverty line but left it far behind … [t]hough Murshida’s story may strike some as exceptional, it really is a microcosm of what goes on in Grameen – how people are able to reach their full potential much more easily after accessing credit.⁷⁸

Once more, the above quote is from Muhammad Yunus’s Banker to the Poor (2007).⁷⁹ The first narrative of emancipation that I present here emerges from Yunus’s account of the successful life of Murshida, one of many such stories of Grameen Bank. The second narrative, which is of Lamia Karim, fully contradicts Yunus’s depiction of the emancipatory potential of credit. The third narrative is, as usual, drawn from my fieldwork and is a very mixed one.

The first two narratives of this subsection will deal with situations where women either complete the full circle of microcredit indebtedness and repayment or get entangled with a loan forever. The third narrative will provoke our thoughts further about the contesting emancipatory narratives of microcredit. Let me analyse them one by one.

4.1. Emancipation Narrative One

Muhammad Yunus, the protagonist of microcredit’s emancipatory narrative, is the founder of Grameen Bank and is generally considered to be the microcredit guru. Grameen Bank and Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 ‘for their efforts to create economic and social development from below’.⁸⁰ Yunus has had an illustrious career, accumulating numerous awards and accolades.⁸¹

Muhammad Yunus is not only the central figure behind microcredit’s rise as a global phenomenon but also a firm believer of the emancipatory values of microcredit for women. Despite many obstacles in the early years of setting up Grameen Bank, Yunus was always hopeful that initiatives on his part would enable poor people to change their lives. This hope was evident in the late 1970s, as Yunus tells us, when, for the first time, he was able to establish an experimental Grameen branch with the help of the managing director of Bangladesh Agriculture Bank.⁸² At the end of one such meeting, both Yunus and the managing director looked outside of the window of the office of the managing director: ‘Outside, the chaos of the city streamed by. I saw barefoot beggars with babies, women asleep on the sidewalk, children with deformed limbs and emaciated bodies’.⁸³ Yunus reassured the managing director of the problem associated with urban poverty in the following words: ‘If we alleviate suffering in the countryside, that will reduce the pressure on the poor to rush to Dhaka and clog the street’s’.⁸⁴

However, as we move on with Yunus’s account of the poor, poverty began to disappear slowly.⁸⁵ As Grameen Bank began to gain a stronghold, the problems of rural poverty, especially for women in Grameen Bank’s loan schemes, seem to be solved quite successfully.⁸⁶ Yunus provides a stock of success stories of Grameen Bank borrowers throughout his book. One such story is that of Murshida, as mentioned in the opening of narrative three quote, which explains what emancipation roughly entails in the rural setting of microcredit governance.⁸⁷

Briefly, one of eight children, Murshida was born into the family of a landless farmer. She was married at the age of 15 to an ‘unskilled labourer in a factory’.⁸⁸ The relationship between Murshida and her husband got worse when Murshida began having children.⁸⁹ When famine broke out in Bangladesh in 1974, Murshida discovered that her husband had a problem with gambling.⁹⁰ She complained about the gambling and his inattention to the family’s daily expenditure. Her complaints were met with beatings.⁹¹ Murshida tried to earn money by spinning raw cotton for others, but the income from this was too little to fulfil the basic needs of her family.⁹² Then, at a later date, Murshida’s husband returned home after a week’s absence, beating her for not keeping enough food for him.⁹³ The next day, he sold the roof of the house to pay off his gambling debts.⁹⁴ Murshida decided to face her husband head-on and was beaten once again.⁹⁵ Murshida’s husband divorced her immediately and ordered her to abandon his house.⁹⁶

Murshida, along with her three children, took shelter in the house of one of her brothers, who allowed them to reside there.⁹⁷ During this time, she met a Grameen Bank ‘worker’ who was trying to open a Grameen Bank loan centre (Kendra) at her new place of residence.⁹⁸ But the Grameen Bank staff was not particularly interested in lending money to Murshida, fearing that she might return to her husband and would not be able to handle the loan.⁹⁹ Nonetheless, Murshida persisted and sought out another Grameen Bank worker. Finally, she was able to borrow 1000 taka from Grameen Bank.¹⁰⁰ With this money, she bought a goat and in six months she paid off the borrowed sum ‘with the profits from selling the milk.¹⁰¹ Gradually, she borrowed more and more and began manufacturing ‘lady’s scarves’, fully exploiting her skills in spinning.¹⁰² Starting from 1000 taka, Murshida’s business became so big that it generated 25 new jobs for women.¹⁰³ Alongside this, she built a house for herself, bought farmland, helped settle her brother into a business, and also became a leader in her local Kendra.¹⁰⁴

In the story of Murshida’s life, emancipation entails freedom from structural economic and social constraints – that is, doing business independently of the microcredit organisation and of constraints generally imposed by the rural society upon ‘poor women’. Murshida and many other Grameen Bank borrowers simply did not look back in their lives as Yunus tells us in his Banker to the Poor.¹⁰⁵ Their lives of poverty and oppression had left them once and for all. However, the next narrative, which is that of Lamia Karim, will pick up from where Yunus said that his borrowers have left poverty far behind.

4.2. Emancipation Narrative Two

Lamia Karim, a professor and head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon in the United States,¹⁰⁶ is a protagonist of microcredit’s anti-emancipatory narrative. She has closely studied the oppressive outcomes of microcredit governance and written, among other things, an incisive monograph on microcredit, especially unravelling its multifaceted impact upon women in transaction with microcredit institutions in Bangladesh.¹⁰⁷ Originally from Bangladesh,¹⁰⁸ Karim describes her work on microcredit as being intended not to disprove the microcredit organisations, but rather ‘to create more space for alternatives to the microfinance paradigm to emerge’.¹⁰⁹

Karim has presented a nuanced picture surrounding women in interaction with microloans, with many narratives drawn from her ethnographic fieldwork. Far from highlighting the emancipatory effects of credit, Karim has characterised the credit schemes of NGOs (including that of Grameen Bank) as the creation of ‘a surrogate market subjectivity among the majority of women’.¹¹⁰ Women who are in a debt relationship, Karim argues, remain subordinated by the patriarchies of community and capitalism. On the one hand, indebtedness exposes women to increased vulnerability within the household and the larger community in which they live by forcing competition among women and various other interest groups.¹¹¹ On the other hand, male managers use coercion, humiliation, and various forms of power such as local courts and police to force these women borrowers to submit to the dominance of a capitalist work ethic.¹¹² In turn, the women also constantly resist the patriarchy. However, with their limited bargaining power, they cannot overcome the ultimate dominance of the NGOs that run microcredit programs.¹¹³

In several instances, Karim has produced very powerful counter-narratives to what Yunus described as successful transitions of women from poverty-stricken to prosperous lives. One such counter-narrative, which tackles Yunus’s depiction of people doing very well after being inducted into the Grameen Bank microcredit program, is as follows. In 2009 Karim met with the family of Sufia Begum, who was one of the very first microloan recipients of Yunus’s early experiment in 1976.¹¹⁴ Sufia had passed away, but her two daughters were having a very poor life.¹¹⁵ The daughters wanted Grameen Bank to contribute towards a house, but their requests were not entertained.¹¹⁶ They accused Yunus of selling their mother as his poster child, even after he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.¹¹⁷ Karim noted that it was not possible for her to verify all the claims made by the Begum family, but a climate of anger and resentment surrounded the village of Jobra, which was the site of Yunus’s breakthrough.¹¹⁸ She uses her stories to argue that microcredit actually installs a neoliberal subjectivity in women and that accounts like that of Yunus falsely portray borrowers as emancipated women in society.¹¹⁹

Broadly, Karim casts the current problems associated with microcredit programs in Bangladesh as part of a larger issue in social justice. As an alternative to microcredit, Karim calls for a ‘citizen’s movement’.¹²⁰ She suggests that the people of Bangladesh might yet come together, with the positive interventions of human rights NGOs, the media and other social movement organisations, to advance the interests of the Bangladeshi nation rather than the interests of microcredit NGOs.¹²¹ Karim concludes that the role of these social movements would be to hold people in power accountable to their tasks and to find ways to go beyond neoliberal order.¹²²

Karim aims to replace the forces of microcredit embedded in neoliberal developmental projects by the activist citizens in the register of human rights movement. But the so-called human rights movement is no less plagued by its own problems and often no less harmful than that of microcredit institutions.¹²³ Karim also seems to underplay the agency of women in that they are, for Karim, by and large, governed by the microcredit NGOs and their neoliberal ethos.¹²⁴ That the women are also able to play around the system, be that liberal or neoliberal and however subtle that may be, seems to be an underappreciated point for Karim.

Yunus’s narrative began with the late 1970s capital city of Bangladesh and Karim’s ended with the same city, but in the late 2000s. However, the smoke and the chaos of the city, as my own close connection with Dhaka suggests,¹²⁵ simply did not lessen during the intervening years. Beggars, struggling auto-rickshaw pullers, sleeping women and deformed children are everywhere in Dhaka. Let us return for one last time to the rural society to explore if women are emancipated from, or are incarcerated in, poverty and patriarchy.

4.3. Emancipation Narrative Three

The last figure of my analytical comparison is Audrey.¹²⁶ Audrey is a homemaker and was roughly aged 35 years when we met in 2011. She was raised, according to her account, in a family of moderate socio-economic background in the district of Noakhali. She is nominally literate, that is, she can sign through documents but cannot read or write. Her ambition in childhood was to have a strong and prosperous family of her own. However, over the previous few years, she had experienced various forms of direct and indirect violence from her husband. Audrey has borrowed from several microcredit institutions, as well as from private moneylenders, in order to help her husband do business.

Audrey’s view of microcredit’s role in the emancipation of women has something in common with that of Karim but is very distant from what Muhammad Yunus usually portrays of microcredit borrower. Audrey suggested to me that poverty is a momentary thing in life; all that is important in life is to have mutual trust and respect. I met Audrey at an extremely difficult time in her life, while she was about to figure out her divorce.¹²⁷ Settling with divorce meant, for her, going through a series of informal dispute resolution processes in which the Samaji would settle her dispute with her husband. Samaji is comprised of the local chairman and other influential members of the village society. Samaji would decide what Audrey could legitimately expect from her husband, who had just sent a divorce letter to her. But Audrey was already indebted to moneylenders and NGOs at the time of receiving the divorce notice, and she feared that those debts would not be addressed by the Samaji. The fuller details of Audrey’s life and borrowing experiences are analysed below.

I met Audrey twice and the significant part of our discussion took place during our second meeting. This second meeting with Audrey was also a group discussion involving my field contacts – a middle-aged female primary school teacher and a young man who had a close connection with Audrey – and Audrey herself. She had been party to many loan agreements with six microcredit institutions, including Grameen Bank and other local and national NGOs. Audrey had concluded all dealings with these institutions some two or three years before I met her in 2011. She had more recently borrowed 50,000 taka in loans from local moneylending women at her husband’s request. She paid 10 taka interest on each 100 taka of debt. Asked why she had not sought debt from Grameen Bank or other microcredit institutions in this latest instance, she said that borrowing from the NGOs an amount of 50,000 taka would involve a complex procedure. Since she wanted the money quickly, she preferred to borrow from the women moneylenders. At the time she was also in a loan agreement with Jubo Unnoyon Bank, a local microcredit organisation. Audrey was feeling helpless about how she would repay the loan all alone and the following is what I learnt from our discussion.

Audrey informed me that she had been running the family on her own for the last three months, when she began to have the latest round of problems with her husband. In the past, her husband had avoided his family responsibilities on and off and without any notice. She managed everyday life by drawing on networks of neighbours and her own relatives. However, this time it was consistent and for a long period of time her husband had stopped communicating with her. Audrey reported that her husband gave her a great deal of trouble while paying off these loan instalments. He beat her often for the instalment money. While she was recounting these experiences, the young man (my field contact) jokingly commented that he would take away the house since her husband owed him some monies too. Audrey replied in a strong voice, saying that if that transaction needed to be pursued further, then the man should take it up with her husband but not with her, since she has suffered a lot. There was an interruption then as one of Audrey’s brothers called her on her mobile phone. I had a chance to clarify with other discussants the house issue to which the young man had referred. He clarified that Audrey was extremely worried because the house, outside of which our discussion took place, was originally owned by Audrey’s husband. A few years back, her husband had gifted the house to her.

In the meantime, Audrey returned and joined the discussion of her housing issue. She said that people were telling her that her husband had made an arrangement by which he would take back the house. Then the young man joined in again, explaining why, in his view, her husband might be entitled to take back the house. The discussion then turned to the role of the Samaji, as initiated by the young man. He suggested that Audrey would have all her grievances including the house issue heard and properly evaluated by the members of the Samaji. The young man was of the opinion that the entire problem with Audrey was precisely economic, since not only was Audrey’s husband poor but so was she. He suggested that if Audrey could have solved her husband’s economic hardship, he would not have dared to divorce her. Audrey and the primary school teacher together protested against this view on the part of the young man, who had already promised Audrey that he would help her entertain her issues with the Samaji.

This also gave Audrey occasion to reflect on the role of the Samaji in which this young man had a role to play. The Samaji, Audrey argued, played all the ugly tricks by taking sides with her husband – and this included the young man. This was possible because she remained poor and less powerful in response to the actions against her. At this reflection by Audrey, the man countered that he had done nothing against her. Audrey responded with her chin strong: ‘It’s all within you, the divorce, the Samaji, my husband or you, if you like it becomes a divorce order from the court, if you like it remains Ukil’s notice for divorce’.¹²⁸ Audrey thereafter quickly changed the tone. She wanted to take control of the situation, perhaps thinking ahead of the many issues to settle with the Samaji.

After my interview with Audrey was over, my own patriarchal bias, being a Bangladeshi man, was laid bare. Without letting myself think through Audrey’s predicaments, I sought the opinion of my informant, the primary school teacher, about why Audrey would still want to keep an oppressive and violent husband.¹²⁹ My informant’s view was that she wanted to avoid the Samaji, since confronting it entails more suffering for women. The husband, compared to the Samaji, would be less oppressive, and a woman like Audrey in her social milieu would need someone to accompany her, rather than continuing to live absolutely alone.

On the possibility of the emancipation of women through microcredit, Audrey shows that to be emancipated from violence and oppression of the powerful social members is a task far beyond the scope of the microcredit governance. In other words, Audrey’s predicaments and reflections on microcredit illustrate the conditions in which microcredit operates every day and the bigger obstacles that confront its borrowers. While it is true that microcredit programs cannot take care of many personal issues of their borrowers, it is also a striking reminder that Muhammad Yunus actually advocated credit as a social instrument for women to use.¹³⁰ In this instance, Audrey had no existing loan portfolio with Grameen Bank. Even if she had, Grameen Bank might not be any different from smaller microcredit institutions, as the practice of repaying loans irrespective of the personal circumstances of the poor borrower was also Yunus’s invention.¹³¹

The narrative assemblage in Parts 2, 3 and 4, especially that of experts, indicates a set of contested knowledge practices around entrepreneurship, empowerment and emancipation. The next section reflects critically on the implications of this contested expertise for women on the ground.

5. The Implications of Expert Narratives

Expertise is not merely the sum of oppositional binaries of emancipation or oppression. Expertise, as I tried to show, recreates common sense and through assertion, imagination, disagreements, and articulation reinforces a particular way of understanding the place and position of people in the world. In microcredit debates, broadly speaking, it is the plight and position of women located at the margins of the global economy that microcredit debates reinforce.

In most instances of narrative one, experts promoting the virtues of microcredit, bracket out the social context within which an individual woman overcomes personal and family hardship and reasserts her social status by taking advantage of her elevated economic assets. In all cases, social contexts are presented as adverse, but whether that adverse social condition disappears or is changed by the successful individual is kept quite unclear. Since microcredit, as per its supporters, is first of all about fighting social inequality in situations where women hold radically marginalised social status, it is important to investigate further if microcredit alters the local social dynamics or simply reasserts a new bargain where such a question is always unanswered.

In most instances of narrative two, the site of counter-narratives, the question of social context is either made redundant (as in Heinemann’s narrative) or rendered nearly unalterable (as in Karim’s and Muhammad’s). For microcredit critics, social norms are extraordinarily rigid in that women are unable to work out the entrenched nature of systematic practices such as patriarchy, institutional profiteering and social class dynamics. Put differently, experts advancing a counter-narrative rely on the idea that ‘poor women’ are constrained not only by their social situations but also by the overwhelming power of microcredit institutions. According to those experts, to help the women get out of the struggle, they need other forms of external support other than microcredit. For example, this help might come in the form of citizen movement (as in Karim), a robust public system (as in the case of Muhammad) and a solid welfare model (as in the case of Heinemann).

Narrative three, presents, in each case, a more subtle understanding of the social dynamics within which women come to communicate with microcredit institutions, as reported by the third group of experts. Microcredit, as my conversation with Brenna suggested, does not add up to a vision of good prosperous life, but it can, as Audrey’s experience and viewpoints emphasised, get in the way of a decent life. These experts, who have practically waded through the patriarchal maze, always look for the slightest room for negotiation. Microcredit institutions, as Audrey suggests, do not have much to offer these women when things go wrong for them. Audrey does not, however, reach the same conclusions as Karim in that she viewed microcredit as indifferent to her social circumstances, whereas Karim often identified microcredit as directly oppressive of borrowers at large. Quite distinct from Audrey’s situation, Lisa seems very comfortable in her personal life as she goes along with her personal loan business. Yet again, Lisa’s experience does not necessarily align her with microcredit advocates in that her entrepreneurial turn lacks a spirit of collective improvement. Altogether, the third narrative do not resolve the normative contestation around entrepreneurship, empowerment and emancipation. Rather, they are indicative of the inherent indeterminacy of the normative speculations of microcredit. I briefly explain two broader implications of expert indeterminacy and fictions surrounding women and microcredit.

5.1. Normalising Disparity

The debate around microcredit governance has, as I argued, so far been shaped by experts’ abilities to render credit, in its both positive and negative connotation, an instrument of social change. Expert ideas and imagination are also at the same time closely linked to a world to come that the expert envisions through championing, supporting or contesting microcredit. For some time now, expert ideas around microcredit have been heavily influenced by a particular global political vision of poverty elimination and gender equality.¹³² For supporters, microcredit fitted that global vision and for critics both microcredit and its vision are a false reality. While credit did bring about some changes in the lives of people that I studied, my research shows that it did not change the socio-legal status of women in a substantial way that microcredit supporters claim, nor along the devastating projections critics argue. What, however, microcredit debate has done instead, is that it has subsumed different aspirations of women under the binaries of emancipation and oppression. This often results in normalising the enormous disparity of wealth, opportunities and power, albeit in the name of emancipation and oppression. Let me explain a bit further how expert binaries normalise the disparity.

Experts in this article are not only debating the role of microcredit in women’s lives but are also advancing their particular versions of social justice. As part of advancing social justice projects, two prominent feminist philosophers of our time comment on the role of credit in women’s lives. In particular, I highlight the way they too set the tone and boundaries of women’s emancipation and oppression in their work, and the commonalities of their projects with that of the experts in this study. Martha Nussbaum, who, along with Amartya Sen,¹³³ advocated a capability approach, features the emancipatory potential of credit. One of the distinguishing features of a capability approach, Nussbaum suggests, is that it is ‘concerned with entrenched social injustice and inequality’.¹³⁴ Illustrating access to credit as a ‘fertile capability’,¹³⁵ Nussbaum tells the story of an Indian woman, who used credit ‘to protect her bodily integrity (not returning to her abusive husband), to have employment options, to participate in politics, to have a sense of emotional well-being, to form valuable affiliations, and to enjoy enhanced self-respect’.¹³⁶ While Nussbaum’s project is not about microcredit, microcredit aids in her vision of women’s empowerment and emancipation. In turn, for Nussbaum, microcredit helps to make a better world where not just women but also all kinds of non-human beings, live with dignity and equality. Sobhan, Kristoff and Yunus’ valorisation of credit advancing women’s opportunity and equality via narratives of entrepreneurship, empowerment and emancipation,¹³⁷ is close to Nussbaum’s understanding of social justice. Microcredit facilitates their collective projects of a reformed world by enabling women to overcome social and institutional barriers to emancipation.

On the other hand, Nancy Fraser’s theoretical project of social justice touches on the oppressive aspects of microcredit.¹³⁸ Like Nussbaum, Fraser too does not work specifically on microcredit. Nonetheless, Fraser references microcredit in her work as a fitting example of the expansion of global neoliberal capitalist rule in which women are the most oppressed.¹³⁹ For Fraser, powerful global actors such as international financial institutions have used microcredit as the substitute for macro-structural public policy. Fraser claims that microcredit came to serve the very interests of neoliberal marketisation rather than that of women despite its origin as a bottom-up approach to development.¹⁴⁰ Fraser argues that many feminists thought that they were advancing the causes of gender equality and women’s emancipation through microcredit, but in essence they were being complicit in justifying the ‘free-market ideology’.¹⁴¹ Fraser sees the possibility of social justice and emancipation through a sustained movement that would ‘extend and democratise social protection’ for all.¹⁴² Muhammad, Heinemann, and Karim’s identification of microcredit with the violence of privatisation and capital matches well with Fraser’s vision of a social democratic world beyond the domination of neoliberal economy.

In one way or another, both Fraser and Nussbaum, and for that matter most experts in this study, are not just advancing their notions of social justice. They are also drawing boundaries of knowledge. In fostering a more inclusive idea of social justice, Nusbaum advances her own vision of justice via a ‘capabilities approach’, while Fraser does it via emancipatory struggles that seek to go beyond the domination of the market. For Nussbaum and most narrative one experts advancing emancipation of women, microcredit in specific contexts can enable women to be independent and empowered. And for Fraser and most narrative two experts contesting the emancipatory narratives, women’s emancipation cannot be separated from the oppression of the global capitalist and neoliberal rule. For them, microcredit mainly oils the engines of the capitalist economy and is bound to be oppressive for women. Their projects of social justice involve re-drawing the boundaries of the social world: recalibrating women in terms of their position and power in the global economy and society. As Rancière showed in his work, this reorganisation of social groups, however well-intentioned, often ends up reproducing hierarchy albeit in the name of equality and justice.¹⁴³

In short, expert imaginations and the boundaries set by their imaginations, transform women’s aspirations, struggles and suffering into the narrative binaries of emancipation or oppression. The effect of this binary is to convey that the work that needs to be done is to put women on the path of emancipation from their current path of oppression. There seems to be very little space for thinking differently about Brenna’s vision, Audrey’s predicaments and Lisa’s hopes. Expertise in microcredit governance have subsumed these different conditions and aspirations of women under the broad rubric of emancipation and oppression. It raises questions about the responsibility of experts, the second broader point that I am going to discuss next.

5.2. Evading Responsibility

Experts often overestimate what they know and also shield themselves from what it is that they do not know. As Kennedy argues in his work, this is how experts excuse themselves from responsibility for knowledge work that has implications for reproducing an unjust world.¹⁴⁴ The most obvious result of expertise in this mode is the legitimation of expert knowledge as a superior form of knowledge. In most versions of microcredit’s success, it is too often the elevated social status of a few women that gets to be highlighted, instead of the broader social context in which the status gain has been made at the cost of the status loss of someone else. The same can be said about the stories of microcredit’s failures. Too often, these stories focus only on the inefficacy and harmful aspects of microcredit without making it clear that microcredit alone may not necessarily be at the centre of suffering. Cross-individual narratives, which many others and I have relied on, cannot grasp fully the local social and political milieu which reshape the women’s lives. Yet experts seem neither bothered by the unknown nor by the legitimation of knowledge hierarchy.

What makes experts so invincible is their ability to remain in the background of decision making. To paraphrase David Kennedy, experts operate through a semantic interpretation of law, ethics, policy and principles while decisions are made for others.¹⁴⁵ Expertise, in other words, is the background argumentative terrain for what we come to recognise as laws, policies, regulations and compliance. For example, even though Muhammad Yunus innovated the idea that loans must always be repaid irrespective of the borrower’s condition,¹⁴⁶ strict repayment practices of microcredit institutions are guided and implemented by soft institutional policies of microcredit institutions. What technically is left to contest is not Yunus’ innovation but rather the regulatory policy or practices of microcredit institutions. Nothing experts do or say is just expertise, their words or actions are constantly being translated into a package of legal and normative expression such as empowerment and entrepreneurship. And, when women suffer, expertise often evaporates in these modes of translation. As for the repayment policy above, it becomes difficult to hold people like Yunus responsible as their ideas transform into regulations and policies.

This abstraction of knowledge from responsibility is possible because of the apparent weight experts carry and the power they wield behind decisions to be taken. Their educational background, professional network and standing give them power, and encourage them to couch their arguments in certain normative vocabularies as we have seen in Parts 2, 3 and 4. This is part of what enabled Muhammad Yunus to make a case for microcredit practices to be adopted beyond Bangladesh. Although I analysed the voices and experiences of three women in a rural Bangladeshi society, my analysis showed how expert deliberations and disagreements on women and microcredit in most instances tends to be a common vernacular for policy prescriptions to be adopted, adapted and executed in a variety of legal and policy settings.

6. Conclusion

At the risk of being complicit in what Gayatri Spivak would call appropriating the voices of the subaltern,¹⁴⁷ I wrote this paper in a spirit of collaboration with the three women featured in my discussion. I am aware that my attempts to undermine the power of experts and expertise might not necessarily be shared by the very people I claim to be collaborating with. While many experts will continue to project a larger pattern of emancipation or oppression surrounding microcredit operations, my concern is that arguments for, and rebuttals of, women’s empowerment, entrepreneurship and emancipation largely serve to overshadow the knowledge and agency of women.

The crucial point that I tried to advance through this narrative analysis is that the three interviewees can also be seen as ‘experts’ or knowledge makers. Characterising their views as knowledge work does not necessarily make them any more or less experts than others. But it makes it difficult to reduce them to simply objects of study. They are political actors that are enacting their views not just about their own life but also about the role of microcredit in society. Recognising them as experts does not necessarily change the status of women on the ground but hopefully it provides for a more expansive understanding of expertise and its relationship with inequality.

What this paper has shown instead, is that microcredit, in these three women’s renderings, is neither a silver bullet to many of their everyday struggles nor is it necessarily an instrument of any ‘more’ suffering than other forms of social and institutional support system. These women’s lives are also not always as strongly controlled by the powerful forces of market and patriarchy as the critics suggest. They do ‘know’ how to play around the rules of market and patriarchy and it is important to recognise their knowledge and agency not just as an anthropological subject but also as a political subject.

It should come as no surprise that my own knowledge is no more valuable and no less political than that of experts I have engaged with. Experts in this article have engaged in microcredit debates for collective good but their engagements often turn out to be an ambition of a particular sort rather than that of collective. Understanding that experts can neither be the saviours of ‘poor women’ nor can they be the sole proprietors of social justice is an important first step towards a more productive engagement with a social and political instrument like microcredit.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and editors of the Australian Feminist Law Journal for their comments and criticisms. I benefited greatly from Fleur Johns’ guidance and comments on the paper at different stages of its preparation. I cannot thank the three women of my fieldwork enough for sharing their arguments about and insights into microcredit, which have profoundly helped shape my thoughts and arguments in this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mostafa Haider

Mostafa Haider is a Lecturer at the Law School of Curtin University. Mostafa works on topics in international law, global politics and social justice.

Notes

1 Ole Danbolt Mjøs, ‘Award Ceremony Speech’ The Nobel Peace Prize (Oslo, 10 December 2006) <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2006/ceremony-speech/> accessed 8 February 2023.

2 The Micro Debt (Heinemann Media 2011) <https://tomheinemann.dk/the-micro-debt/> accessed 8 February 2023.

3 Notably, leading feminist philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Nancy Fraser, amongst others, refer to microcredit as an example of either a liberal tool for women’s empowerment or a capitalist tool for women’s subjugation. The article will look at their uses of microcredit later in Part 5.

4 See for example, Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (Public Affairs 2007); Marguerite Robinson, The Microfinance Revolution: Sustainable Finance for the Poor (The World Bank 2001).

5 See for example, Lamia Karim, Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh (University of Minnesota Press 2011); Thomas Dichter and Malcom Harper (eds), What’s Wrong with Microfinance? (Practical Action 2007).

6 The theme of this particular story is taken from the biographical account of Muhammad Yunus: Yunus (n 4).

7 Lamia Karim’s rich ethnographic account, in particular, refutes all three normative claims: Karim (n 5). See the discussions in Parts 3 and 4 for my take on Karim.

8 Ananya Roy, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (Routledge 2011).

9 Alongside feminist jurisprudence, there have been several movements and coordinates in law that have studied law and inequalities at a global level including, but not limited to, critical legal studies, law and society, and law and development, Third World Approaches to International Law, and lately law and political economy that I draw inspiration from.

10 See for example, Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2021); Oishik Sircar, Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India (Oxford University Press 2021); Swethaa S Ballakrishnen, Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility among India’s Professional Elite (Princeton University Press 2021).

11 The fieldwork was conducted as part of author’s doctoral work completed at the University of Sydney Law School. The human ethics approval was obtained from the University of Sydney Human Ethics Committee prior to the commencement of the study.

12 See Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor (Duke University Press 2003); The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford University Press 1991).

13 A large body of his work deals with expertise but for his most detailed work on expertise, see David Kennedy, A World of Struggle: How Power, Law and Expertise Shape Global Political Economy (Princeton University Press 2016).

14 Beyond Kennedy, there is also a wealth of resources in critical international law that this article draws inspiration from. For an insightful critique and innovative account of international development expertise on the ground, see Luis Eslava, Local Space, Global Life: The Everyday Operation of International Law and Development (Cambridge University Press 2015) and for an intriguing analysis of law reform experts, see Stephen Humphreys, Theatre of the Rule of Law: Transnational Legal Intervention in Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press 2011). International legal theorisation has long subjected expertise under critical scrutiny. For a more fundamental critique of the modes of colonial and post-colonial governance as legal knowledge, see Antonie Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge University Press 2005) and Sundhya Pahuja, Decolonising International Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality (Cambridge University Press 2011).

15 For an account of ambivalence about positionality, see Mark Fathi Massoud, ‘The Price of Positionality: Assessing the Benefits and Burdens of Self Identification in Research Methods’ (2022) 49 (S1) Journal of Law and Society S64.

16 Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Harvard University Press 1999).

17 These are all pseudonyms. I have changed the real names of my interviewees in order to preserve their anonymity.

18 Yunus (n 4) 50.

19 See Rehman Sobhan’s profile online: Professor Rehman Sobhan (Centre for Policy Dialogue, September 2023) <https://cpd.org.bd/board-of-trustees/professor-rehman-sobhan/> accessed 15 September 2023

20 Amitava Kar, ‘In Conversation with Professor Rehman Sobhan: The Man behind the Economics’ The Daily Star (Online, 30 May 2015) <https://www.thedailystar.net/in-focus/the-economist-and-the-patriot-75436> accessed 5 February 2023.

21 In this article, I focus on a paper written by Sobhan: Rehman Sobhan, ‘A Macro Policy for Poverty Eradication Through Structural Change’ (Discussion Paper No 2005/03, UNU WIDER 2005). However, this premise of Sobhan’s argument is consistent with his major work: Rehman Sobhan, Challenging the Injustice of Poverty: Agendas for Inclusive Development in South Asia (Sage Publications 2010).

22 Sobhan, ‘A Macro Policy’ (n 21) 7.

23 ibid 12.

24 ibid 9.

25 ibid.

26 Contra Karim (n 5) 68–70, 202 (contradicting Sobhan’s point about Grameenphone’s benefit accruing to women).

27 See Grameenphone, Connecting Possibilities: Annual Report 2020 (2020) 24 <https://www.grameenphone.com/about/investor-relations/ir-annual-report/annual-report-2020>.

28 Sobhan, ‘A Macro Policy’ (n 21) 11–12.

29 ibid 7–9.

30 BRAC is the largest non-governmental organisation based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It also runs large-scale microcredit programmes, 87% of whom are women: see ‘Microfinance’ (BRAC, 2023) <https://www.brac.net/program/microfinance/> accessed 9 September 2023.

31 See Muhammad’s profiles online: ‘Anu Muhammad Anisur Rahman’ (Jahangirnagar University, 2023) <https://juniv.edu/teachers/anu> accessed 9 September 2023; ‘Anu Muhammad’ (2023) <https://www.anumuhammad.net/> accessed 9 September 2023 (translated from Bengali by the author).

32 In this article, I pay particular attention to Muhammad’s most incisive writing on microcredit: Anu Muhammad, ‘Grameen and Microcredit: A Tale of Corporate Success’ (2009) 44 (35) Economic and Political Weekly 35. For his more elaborate work on poverty and development see: Anu Muhammad, Development Re-examined: The Construction and Consequences of Neoliberal Bangladesh (The University Press Limited 2021).

33 Muhammad, ‘Grameen and Microcredit’ (n 32) 35.

34 ibid.

35 ibid 41.

36 ibid 36.

37 ibid 36–37.

38 ibid.

39 ibid.

40 ibid.

41 ibid 38–40.

42 Muhammad emphasises this in his more elaborate work: Global Capitalism and Underdevelopment of Bangladesh (n 32).

43 This narrative is fully based on my conversations with Lisa (Noakhali, March–April 2011).

44 In Bangladesh, many people would not remember their exact date and year of birth or keep them as records until 2010s when the birth registration initiatives were undertaken more widely across the country.

45 Taka is the name of the currency unit in Bangladesh. 1 USD is equivalent to 84.9976 BD taka as of 1 February 2023.

46 Yunus (n 4) 150.

47 Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (Alfred A Knopf 2009).

48 Nicholas D Kristof, ‘The Role of Microfinance’ The New York Times (New York, 28 December 2009) <https://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/the-role-of-microfinance/?_r=0>; Nicholas D Kristof, ‘Women Hurting Women’ The New York Times (New York, 29 September 2012) <https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/opinion/sunday/kristof-women-hurting-women.html> accessed 15 November 2022; Nicholas Kristof, ‘Fighting Terrorism: With Microfinance’ Twin Cities Pioneer Press (Online, 15 November 2010) <https://www.twincities.com/2010/11/15/nicholas-kristof-fighting-terrorism-with-microfinance/> accessed 10 August 2023.

49 Nicholas Kristof’s online profile: ‘Nicholas Kristof’ (The American Academy of Diplomacy, 2023) <https://www.academyofdiplomacy.org/recipient/nicholas-kristof/> accessed 15 September 2023.

50 Kristoff, ‘The Role of Microfinance’ (n 48).

51 Kristof and WuDunn (n 47) xi–xxii.

52 ibid xxi.

53 ibid x.

54 ibid 185–92.

55 ibid 186.

56 ibid 185.

57 ibid 185–88.

58 ibid 187.

59 ibid.

60 ibid.

61 ibid.

62 ibid.

63 ibid 191.

64 ibid 192–93.

65 Tom Heinemann’s profile online: ‘Tom Heinemann: About’ (Tom Heinemann, September 2023) <https://tomheinemann.dk/about/> and ‘Tom Heinemann: Awards’ (Tom Heinemann, September 2023) <https://tomheinemann.dk/awards/> accessed 15 September 2023.

66 See Tom Heinemann, ‘Credit Is a Human Right. Is Debt?’ (BDNews24, 4 January 2011) (on file with the author).

67 See Thomas Dichter and Malcom Harper, What’s Wrong with Microfinance? (Practical Action Publishing 2007).

68 Heinemann (n 66).

69 ibid.

70 ibid.

71 ibid.

72 ibid.

73 ibid.

74 ibid.

75 ibid.

76 ibid.

77 This narrative is fully based on my conversations with Brenna (Noakhali, March–April 2011).

78 Yunus (n 4) 199.

79 ibid.

80 Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank, ‘The Nobel Peace Prize 2006’ (The Nobel Prize, September 2003) <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2006/summary/> accessed 15 September 2003.

81 See Muhammad Yunus’ profile online: Muhammad Yunus (September 2023) <https://www.muhammadyunus.org/post/88/cv-of-professor-muhammad-yunus> accessed 15 September 2023.

82 Yunus (n 4) 89–94.

83 ibid 94.

84 ibid.

85 The first few chapters of Yunus (n 4) depict hunger and starvation in Bangladesh. The majority of the book chapters then talk about Grameen Bank’s gradual expansion in Bangladesh and its positive influences worldwide.

86 ibid 199.

87 ibid 199–201.

88 ibid 199.

89 ibid.

90 ibid.

91 ibid.

92 ibid.

93 ibid 200.

94 ibid.

95 ibid.

96 ibid.

97 ibid.

98 ibid.

99 ibid.

100 ibid 201.

101 ibid.

102 ibid.

103 ibid.

104 ibid.

105 ibid 94, 199.

106 See Lamia Karim’s academic profile online: ‘Lamia Karim’ (Department of Comparative Literature, University of Oregon, September 2023) <https://complit.uoregon.edu/profile/lamia/> accessed 15 September 2023.

107 Karim (n 5) xxxiii.

108 ibid xxx.

109 ibid 202.

110 ibid 87.

111 ibid 86–87.

112 ibid 87.

113 ibid 88.

114 ibid 192–93. For Yunus’ account of Sufiya, see Yunus (n 4) 46–50.

115 ibid 192.

116 ibid 192–93.

117 ibid.

118 ibid 193.

119 ibid 199.

120 ibid 204.

121 ibid 204–06.

122 ibid.

123 See David Kennedy, ‘The International Human Rights Movement, Part of the Problem’ (2002) 15 Harvard Human Rights Journal 101.

124 197–99.

125 The author lived in Dhaka for several years until 2008 and has since remained a frequent visitor to Dhaka where his family lives.

126 This narrative is fully based on my conversations with Audrey (Noakhali, March–April 2011).

127 I did not contact Audrey beyond April 2011, so the views and experiences of Audrey expressed here are valid as of April 2011.

128 ‘Ukil’s notice’ here means a formal letter from the lawyer of one party to a marriage intending to serve a divorce notice to another party.

129 I did not even realise that this might be a patriarchal question until a commentator of my draft indicated so.

130 Yunus (n 4) 202.

131 Yunus points out: ‘But no matter what cataclysm, weather disaster, or personal tragedy befalls a borrower, our philosophy is always to get that person to pay back his or her loan, even if it is only at the rate of a half penny a week’. ibid 137.

132 For example, goals 1 and 5 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals championed by the UN harbour a particular vision of poverty elimination and gender equality: The United Nations, ‘The 17 Goals’ <https://sdgs.un.org/goals> accessed 25 January 2023.

133 See Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Alfred A Knopf 1999).

134 Martha C Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Harvard University Press 2011) 19.

135 ibid 44.

136 ibid.

137 See the discussion on Sobhan, Kristoff and Yunus respectively in Parts 2, 3 and 4.

138 See Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (Verso, 2013); Nancy Fraser, ‘How Feminism Became Capitalism's Handmaiden - And How to Reclaim it’ The Guardian (14 October 2013) <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/feminism-capitalist-handmaiden-neoliberal> accessed 15 September 2023; Gary Gutting and Nancy Fraser, ‘A Feminism Where Lean in Means Leaning on Others’ The New York Times (15 October 2015) <https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/15/a-feminism-where-leaning-in-means-leaning-on-others/> accessed 15 September 2023.

139 Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism (n 138) 220–21.

140 ibid.

141 Gary Gutting and Nancy Fraser (n 138).

142 Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism (n 138) 241.

143 Rancière’s The Philosopher and His Poor (n 12) illustrates this point by reference to the philosophical works from the time of Plato through to Bourdieu.

144 Kennedy (n 13) 277–78.

145 ibid 8.

146 Yunus (n 4) 137.

147 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular’ (2005) 8(4) Postcolonial Studies 475, 475–86.