Poor Women as Economic Agents: The Neo-Liberal State and Gender in India and the US

Abstract

Drawing on neo-liberal economic norms, India and the US are increasingly marking and constituting women in poverty as new economic agents. Though based in vastly different socio-economic polities, poor women in both countries are subject to state- led agendas that seek to alter their economic conditions and their subjectivities. Discourse in the US seeks to shift women from welfare to that of workfare and thereby integrate them into the normative structures of dual-parent families. In India the state draws cn the rhetoric of enabling economic empowerment and yet fails to provide the required structural support. Details from the various programmes in the two countries and their impact indicate the extent to which there is a 'serial collectivity' between women in the two countries who share similar shifts in their identities, cul tures and life conditions despite being located in vastly different structural conditions.