“Tapping” Women for Post-Crisis Capitalism

Abstract

Girls and women have become the public faces of development today, through the success of “Gender Equality as Smart Economics” policy agendas and similar development narratives that mediate feminist claims through market logic. Women, these narratives assert, are more productive, responsible, and sustainable economic agents for future growth in the context of global financial crisis and therefore their empowerment is economically prudent. In this article, I provide a feminist reading of Foucault's critique of human capital to examine the discursive terrain of the “Smart Economics” agenda and to understand the knowledge it produces about female bodies, subjectivities and agency. Through a discussion of the World Bank's 2012 World Development Report on gender equality, I argue that the current narratives of women's empowerment are premised on a series of gender essentialisms and their “activation” through biopolitical interventions. The activation narrative of human capital appears, under feminist eyes, to reflect the notion that the supposedly intrinsic responsible and maternal nature of women can be harnessed to produce more profitable and sustainable development outcomes and, by extension, “rescue” global capitalism.

Keywords:

• gender and development
• women's empowerment
• smart economics
• World Bank
• financial crisis

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Audra Mitchell, Carole Spary, three anonymous reviewers and the editorial board of IFjP for their helpful feedback and suggestions on this article.

Notes on Contributor

Sydney Calkin is based in the Department of Geography at Durham University. She was awarded her PhD in Politics from the University of York (UK) in 2014. Her current research explores the role of corporate partnerships in global development and the impact of corporatization on the governance of Gender and Development. Her work has recently appeared in Third World Quarterly, Feminist Review and Global Discourse.

Notes

1 “Smart Economics” appears less frequently in the report than in earlier Bank documents, but it appears conspicuously in the most-read sections of the report, including the covers, main messages and overview sections (see Chant 2012). Moreover, although the language of Smart Economics within the Bank declined somewhat between 2007 and 2012, its core messages related to corporate partnership in gender equality policy and the need to “make the case” to the private sector was strengthened and became more widespread across different organizations in the World Bank Group (see Roberts and Soederberg 2012).

2 See Bedford (2009, xxiv–xxvii) for a discussion of the “institutional writing codes” employed within the World Bank. It is not unusual for World Bank publications to contain contradictory messages or different emphases at various points in the text: this is sometimes a product of conflict or contestation between researchers, writers and supervisory boards. Bedford also points to the importance of the positioning of messages: reports are often read briefly or partially by busy World Bank staff, so headlining messages in executive summaries will be particularly influential, relative to details included deeper in the body of the document. For example, the positioning of Smart Economics messages in the 2012 WDR is typical of the Bank's institutional writing codes Bedford describes, because although “Smart Economics” does not appear frequently throughout the entirety of the very long report, it does headline its most-read portions.