Women and microcredit: alternative readings of subjectivity, agency, and gender change in rural Mexico

Abstract

Within the last two decades, the growth of microcredit, or the provision of small loans to poor borrowers, has become a key development initiative in the Global South. This is particularly important for questions of gender relationships, as the majority of microcredit recipients worldwide are low-income women. However, most assessments of microcredit and gender emphasize issues of individual empowerment rather than the large-scale political implications of credit provision. In this article, I critique the use of mainstream empowerment models employed in the assessment of microcredit's ability to provoke changes in gender relationships. I argue that these models often fail to describe microcredit's effects on women's lives due to their epistemological framework, which pushes aside questions of geographical and historical specificity in pursuit of a universally empowered microcredit subject. Examining a mainstream empowerment model I used to conduct research in rural Mexico, I highlight these problems and present an alternative analysis of subjectivity, agency, and gender change as a result of microcredit provision.

Durante las últimas dos décadas, el crecimiento del microcrédito, o la provisión de pequeños préstamos a personas pobres, se ha vuelto una iniciativa de desarrollo clave en el Sur Global. Esto es particularmente importante para cuestiones de relaciones de género, ya que la mayoría de las receptoras de microcréditos en todo el mundo son mujeres de bajos ingresos. Sin embargo, la mayoría de las evaluaciones de microcréditos y género enfatizan temas de empoderamiento individual en vez de las implicancias políticas a gran escala de la provisión del crédito. En este artículo, critico el uso de los modelos tradicionales de empoderamiento empleados en la evaluación de la capacidad del microcrédito para provocar cambios en las relaciones de género. Propongo que estos modelos a menudo omiten describir los efectos de los microcréditos sobre las vidas de las mujeres debido a su marco epistemológico de trabajo, el cual deja de lado las cuestiones de la especificidad geográfica e histórica en busca de un sujeto del microcrédito universalmente empoderado. Examinando el modelo de empoderamiento tradicional que utilicé para una investigación en el México rural, remarco estos problemas y presento un análisis alternativo de la subjetividad, la agencia y el cambio de género como resultado de la provisión de microcrédito.

Keywords:

• microcredit
• gender
• Mexico
• empowerment
• agency

Keywords:

• microcrédito
• género
• México
• empoderamiento
• agencia

Acknowledgements

I thank the women of Cuquío and CAMPO for their support of this project. Funding was graciously provided by the Fulbright Foundation. I additionally thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

 1. All translations are mine. Names have been changed for purposes of anonymity.

 2. While microcredit typically refers to small loans given to nontraditional borrowers, microfinance refers to the host of financial services (including savings and insurance) that target low-income clients. In this article, I use the terms interchangeably when discussing the targeting of female clients.

 3. The Consultative Group to Assist the Poor estimates that 67% of borrowers are women (see http://www.cgap.org), while a survey of more than 200 international microfinance institutions indicated that 82% of clients were women (see http://www.spblog.org/2009/12/defining-mfis-gender-mandate.html).

 4. Johnson (2005) is one of the few who advocates for dismissing the concept of empowerment altogether. She argues that 1995–2005 has been a ‘lost decade’ because the focus on empowerment has diverted attention away from understanding gender dynamics. While I agree with her assessment, I am more skeptical about her solution, which is to focus on market-led approaches to create microcredit opportunities for women.

 5. The Pocantico Declaration made by microfinance leaders in May of 2008 outlines a code of ethics for microfinance institutions' commitments to both social concerns and economic growth (see www.bouldermicrofinance.org). Also of interest is Compartamos' response to its critics entitled ‘A letter to our peers,’ which can be accessed at www.compartamos.com.

 6. These programs included a microfinance initiative, Crédito a la Palabra, and a cash transfer program for producers of basic grains, PROCAMPO. Crédito a la Palabra quickly became touted as the program that increased access to credit for more agricultural producers than ever before (Myhre 1998). However, the amount of credit given was between one-fourth and one-fifth of that previously given by the state-led agricultural bank, BANRURAL.

 7. While Kabeer (1999a) strongly critiques the instrumentalization of ‘empowerment,’ she still embraces the concept as a valuable tool for gender and development. By defining empowerment as the ‘capacity for self-determination,’ which she reads as the ability to make choices, she argues that it can be applied cross-culturally as long as it acknowledges the ‘ways of “being and doing” that are realizable and valued by women in that context’ (1999a, 47). While I appreciate this attention to cultural awareness, I argue that her formulation of empowerment still mostly sees power as manifested in a struggle of resistance versus domination. While she does say that ‘power can also operate in the absence of any apparent agency’ (1999a, 4), she fails to develop what this means for the construction of subjects and alternative forms of agency and gender change.

 8. Kabeer (1999a) also discusses how this formulation is perpetuated within research on development. She writes, ‘Although this portrayal of the “average” disempowered Third World woman was intended to evoke sympathy and action on their behalf, its reductionism reflected the fact that the social distances of location, class, nationality, and language that often separate researcher and “researched” in the social sciences tend to be particularly large in the development field’ (Kabeer 1999a, 41).

 9. The main organization which emerged from the liberation theology movement in the region was the Organización Campesina Independiente de Jalisco, which focused on struggles related to the domination of local strongmen: questions of land, corn production, access to markets, and clientelistic antidemocratic patterns of political patronage (Arellano Gault 2006).

10. Mahmood (2005, 9) insists that Butler's notion of agency still falls into the liberal paradigm of a resistance and subordination. She argues that this means that Butler falls into a ‘teleology of progressive politics,’ which ‘makes it hard for us to see and understand forms of being and action that are not necessarily encapsulated by the narrative of subversion and reinscription of norms.’ She differentiates herself from Butler by writing that she thinks of agency as: ‘(a) more in terms of capacities and skills required to undertake particular kinds of acts (of which resistance to a particular set of relations of domination is one kind of an act); and (b) as ineluctably bound up with the historically and culturally specific disciplines through which a subject is formed’ (Mahmood 2001, 209). While I agree with aspects of this critique, I also insist that we can think about how norms are reinscribed or resignified without necessarily adhering to a framework of emancipatory struggles. Rather, examining a rearticulation of norms (via iteration and citationality) can help us explore the specific political, economic, and cultural conjunctures in which discourse and practices come to have specific meanings and particular possibilities.

11. Although Butler has been critiqued for relying upon an abstract notion of subjectivity (see Nelson 1999), I argue that Butler can be used to explore how subjects are produced within specific geographical and historical relationships of power (see Pratt 2004). In drawing on Butler's conceptualizations of agency, I do not want to reproduce a dichotomy between ‘the masterful (transparent) Enlightenment subject and the subject as a site for compelled, unintentional performance of dominant discourses’ (Nelson 1999, 350). Instead, I use Butler (and Mahmood) to point to the importance of being attentive to the ways in which agency can be enacted differently in different moments and places, and the different political effects this can inspire.

12. It is helpful to think about articulation, its occurrence, and the possibilities in can entail, by drawing on Hart's (2004) geographical reading of Stuart Hall. Hart (2004, 98) quotes Hall as saying: ‘By the term “articulation,” I mean a connection or link which … requires particular conditions of existence to appear at all, which has to be positively sustained by specific processes, which is not “eternal” but has constantly to be renewed, which can under some circumstances be overthrown, leading to the old linkages being dissolved and new connections – rearticulations– being forged’. Hart argues that this notion of articulation is ‘a processual and relational understanding’ which ‘refuses to take as given discrete objects, identities, places and events; instead it attends to how they are produced and changed in practice in relation to one another. From this perspective, articulation can be seen … as a means for envisaging feasible alternatives and alliances that build on the grounds of specific but interconnected historical geographies, but seek to move in new directions’. (ibid.)