Journal Article: Gender, Mobility and the Financialization of Development

Stephen Young, University of Wisconsin, Madison

This paper questions popular claims about the capacity of microfinance to reduce poverty and empower women in the global South. Instead, I posit microfinance as a contradictory development tool, one that creates possibilities for both the contestation and continuation of unequal social relations at multiple scales. The paper is divided into two major sections. I begin by examining the assumptions embedded in mainstream financial mappings of global space since the 1980s. In particular, I show how they privilege the transnational mobility of corporate capital and elide the everyday, place-based work of social reproduction. I examine the expansion and commercialization of microfinance in this context, as an alternative mechanism for enabling poor households to continue meeting their everyday needs by taking on more debt. In the second section, I draw on fieldwork in Andhra Pradesh, India, to show how these interlocking macro/micro financial flows interact with regional social histories to shape and differentiate people’s mobility ‘on the ground’ according gender, caste, and class. I conclude by suggesting how a critical geopolitics framework can help formulate new questions about microfinance as a development strategy.