9 - Changing the Subject: From Feminist Governmentality to Technologies of the (Feminist) Self

Summary

Feminists have long been involved in the ‘conduct of conduct’ even as this dimension of feminism's power is only now gaining attention in the context of the key economic and political paradigm of our time, namely, neoliberalism. For feminists in/of the South, a governmentality perspective has enabled a critical mapping of the manner in which women's agency and empowerment in the realm of governance and development has been put in the service of narrow economic interests and ends. As detailed in the first section of this chapter, the concept of neoliberal governmentality is being used in these discussions not only to map an entirely new political context for women's lives and feminist politics, across the North and the South, but also to give voice to abiding anxieties pertaining to the co-option and depoliticisation of feminism at the hands of neoliberal forces.

This chapter shows that feminist deployments of governmentality to study neoliberalism's effects (in development and ‘governance feminism’) offer a partial or even unfinished engagement with Foucault insofar as they do not consider his ethical works as central to his thesis on governmentality. I undertake a more thorough engagement with the late or the ‘final Foucault’ (Taylor and Vintges, 2004) not merely to be a ‘thorough’ Foucauldian. As I argue in what follows, a more rigorous reading of governmentality as involving the conduct of conduct and counter-conduct manifest in technologies of ethical self-formation enables feminists to move beyond worries about the ‘co-option’ of feminism by neoliberalism. It provides a more sophisticated understanding and even critique of neoliberal governmentality than is currently available while enabling feminists, at the same time, to consider the possibility of resistance and freedom within neoliberal regimes of power. The latter is no small task given the tendency in feminist readings of neoliberal governmentality to grossly underestimate if not erase the potential for feminist (and other kinds of) struggle.

By way of empirically fleshing out the conceptual possibility of feminist resistance, this chapter turns, in conclusion, to some of the political practices through which middle-class women in India today are constituting themselves as feminist subjects and how such practices can potentially give rise to non-normative ways of being with respect to the market and capital, and at the intersections of class, caste, gender and sexuality.