Making Women Pay

In Making Women Pay, Smitha Radhakrishnan explores India's microfinance industry, which in the past two decades has come to saturate the everyday lives of women in the name of state-led efforts to promote financial inclusion and women's empowerment. Despite this favorable language, Radhakrishnan argues, microfinance in India does not provide a market-oriented development intervention, even though it may appear to help women borrowers. Rather, this commercial industry seeks to extract the maximum value from its customers through exploitative relationships that benefit especially class-privileged men. Through ethnography, interviews, and historical analysis, Radhakrishnan demonstrates how the unpaid and underpaid labor of marginalized women borrowers ensures both profitability and symbolic legitimacy for microfinance institutions, their employees, and their leaders. In doing so, she centralizes gender in the study of microfinance, reveals why most microfinance programs target women, and explores the exploitative implications of this targeting.

Lobbying Beyond the Legislature: Challenges and Biases in Women's Organizations’ Participation in Rulemaking

This study, which is based on a survey of women's organizations’ staff members, answers two previously unexamined questions about women's groups’ participation in the rulemaking process: (1) How do women's organizations participate? (2) What are the characteristics of the women's organizations that are the most likely to participate? About one-quarter (27%) of women's organizations reported that they lobby rulemakers, often using relatively low-cost methods, such as submitting comments or signing on to comments written by coalitions or like-minded groups. Women's organizations with large staffs that are structured the most like political insiders or influential economic interest groups were the most likely to participate in the process, potentially biasing participation in favor of relatively advantaged subgroups of women. Together, these results suggest that although rulemaking presents unique opportunities to represent women, the most marginalized women may be underrepresented during rulemaking debates.

Deirdre Kinahan’s Unmanageable Sisters: Michel Tremblay’s Belles-sœurs on the Irish Stage

In spring 2018, Deirdre Kinahan’s The Unmanageable Sisters, an adaptation of Michel Tremblay’s landmark Les belles-sœurs (1968), was performed in the Abbey Theatre. A “smash hit” (Abbey programme) with the Irish audience, it was restaged in summer 2019. The Dublin version by a young and accomplished Irish playwright stages the comparability of the language register and of the socioeconomic and cultural circumstances that inspired the original thus underlining the connection between the two theater communities. It also demonstrates theater’s role in voicing the language, lives, and daily traumas of impoverished, undereducated, and marginalized women. This study contends that Tremblay’s and Kinahan’s success is attributable to the dramaturges’ understanding, interpretation, and staging of the intersectionality of the issues addressed. Intersectionality focuses on the layering and interaction of multiple sources of power, oppression, and marginalization. Previous English translations did not capture the intersectionality central to the original.

Women Empowerment in Indonesia: Community Learning Activity Center Programs

One of the factors that support the progress of a nation is the participation of women in community development. Educated women are crucial aspects in improving the quality of human resources. The government together with the community, have responsibilities and play an essential role in facilitating educational activities for women. Community Learning Activity Center (PKBM), as an institution established and managed by the society to increase knowledge, skills, expertise and talents, is responsible for preparing community members to be more independent in meeting their needs, especially in the program for marginalized women empowerment. Among the programs, Women's Life Skills Education Program (PKHP) presents as an alternative solution to provide facilities for women to grow. Many researchers documented the activities in this program and published them in Community Service journals or scientific journals. Therefore, the current study would shed light on the efforts they made by implementing a literature study. By analysing using narrative synthesis studies, the findings reported on diverse activities that were created to develop women’s life skills by utilizing the local natural resource potential as well as the methods of delivery and prospected outcomes. This study also provides some practical implications and future recommendations.

Relocating Colonial Women in Resistance: An Interpretation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Nastanirh and Chaturanga

The Colonial Bengal of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a place of contradictions. For instance, despite certain evident advancements in the resolution of the women’s question, some of the emancipatory attempts of the period marked a rather dubious account of women’s liberation as patriarchal underpinnings hegemonized the efforts. Amid this complex backdrop, the colonial women’s position is further jeopardized by the western feminist scholarship that contrives colonial third world women as perennial victims and beneficiaries of emancipatory actions from the West. The paper attempts to relocate the colonial women and their resistance by negotiating the fissures in their construction. This study, informed by bell hooks’ (1990) postulations on margin and resistance, simultaneously seeks to form a bridge between the experiences of marginalized women beyond borders. Rabindranath Tagore’s Nastanirh (1901) and Chaturanga (1916) are chosen for close textual reading to examine the experiences of colonial women. The author’s women protagonists often embody the social dilemma of the period. Tagore’s Damini and Charu exist in the margin of resistance whilst Nanibala occupies the margin of deprivation. Significantly, Charu and Damini traverse the precarious “profound edges” of the margin to imagine a “new world” free of subjugation. Thus, the resistance offered by these women subverts the predominant conceptions of victimhood of colonial women, and it enables them to be posited as active agents.

Gender and Legitimacy in Personal Service Occupations: The Case of End-of-Life Doulas and Death Midwives

The emerging occupations of end-of-life doula and death midwife are part of a growing sector of personal service jobs. Designed to support, educate, and empower dying people and their loved ones, these new roles entail both the commodification of women’s unpaid labor and a repositioning of the paid work typically done by marginalized women. This study examines the identity talk of 19 occupational pioneers and focuses on the relationship between gender, class, race, and efforts to secure occupational legitimacy. Findings suggest that, in an effort to mitigate tensions stemming from the professionalization of feminized work, these pioneers strategically embrace a feminine occupational identity in ways that code their labor as White and middle class.

Writing in Their Time: A Queer and Feminist Analysis of Vancouver’s 1979 Writing in Our Time Series

The 1979 Writing in Our Time series became Vancouver’s most attended reading series, bringing light to the viability and international status of the city’s literary scene. While it has largely been remembered as a celebration of Vancouver’s literary culture, more marginalized voices of Vancouver’s literary communities have highlighted the series’ implications for gay male and female writers in the city. This article considers whose time was actually represented by the Writing in Our Time series. I suggest that while it gave gay men the opportunity to be onstage and speak about their concerns, including the homophobic attacks against bill bissett in the House of Commons that prompted the series, Writing in Our Time provided women limited opportunities to publicly share their work while relying upon their invisible labour to succeed. Through the production of a new socio-cultural history of the series, including an analysis of printed publications, oral histories, and audiovisual documentation of the events, this article demonstrates that Writing in Our Time was catalyzed by attacks on a gay writer, relied on women’s invisible labour, showcased the androcentric relations of Vancouver’s literary scene, and sparked resistance from feminists to women’s peripheral position in the series. I argue that, due to their proximity to or distance from heterosexual white males in power within the scene, the series simultaneously supported gay writers in Vancouver’s literary scene and further marginalized women by reinforcing sexist social hierarchies. The effects of these androcentric relations led to greater dialogue about issues affecting gay men within the series and by women about sexism within and outside of the series at that time.

Sustaining Women Empowerment Community Extension Project: A Tri-Focal Partnership Model

Grounded from Theory of Change, this study aims to describe the impact of the extension project designed to empower marginalized women in Balamban Cebu, Philippines. Qualitative emerging themes obtained from interviews and focus group discussion revealed that women were empowered by nurturing positive emotions, enhancing self-worth, advancing environmental stewardship, and establishing accountability for sustainability, thereby improving the quality of their lives. A tri-focal partnership model as proposed that illustrates a dynamic interplay of the roles and functions among the University, local government unit, and other government agencies, which builds a sustainable community extension project in the community. Replication of an extension project would yield a good Return of Investment (ROI) to the University, which ultimately leads to a country’s more substantial economic growth and development. Keywords: Women empowerment; a theory of change; extension project; tri-focal partnership model Philippines

Bad debt: The women’s mobilization against the financial industry in Kyrgyzstan

This article offers a first person account of women’s mobilization against banking and microfinance sectors in Kyrgyzstan. It focuses on the key factors for the evolution of the anti-debt movement, and women’s political strategies to problematize interest and to denaturalize the discourse of financial inclusion. For many years, the financial industry has operated a gendered process of neoliberal capital accumulation under the guise of empowerment that has produced tensions between transnational capital and marginalized women. Building upon Bourdieusian ideas on social movements, the study shows the significance of strain and situational definition in the formation of the anti-debt mobilization. The article uses in-depth interviews with the leaders and activists of the anti-debt movement and borrowers to explore how gender, class and capital were intertwined. It contributes to the literature on post-Soviet politics by challenging the dominant elite-centered frameworks, which are inadequate to explain local movements and gendered activism.