Tracking figurations of empowered entrepreneurs: a postcolonial feminist reading of gendered othering and epistemic violence in women’s microentrepreneurship

Over the past decades, microentrepreneurship and microfinance programmes have become primary strategies for empowering women in the Global South and in contexts of extreme poverty. Transferring the focus from evaluating the mixed outcomes of these programmes, we critically examine women’s microentrepreneurship programmes and the discourses that frame them from an epistemological point of view. Grounded in postcolonial feminist thought, we analyse how texts reporting a development project aiming to empower poor women through microentrepreneurship in Uganda construct entrepreneurship and empowerment, and what kinds of figurations of women entrepreneurs they produce. With deconstructive reading, we track three figurations – the neoliberal entrepreneurial woman, the transformed woman and the debt-bearing woman. These figurations provide empirical evidence of gendered othering and epistemic violence in the reporting practices. Making visible how patriarchal norms, neoliberal economic rationalities and neocolonial power structures converge in these figurations, we discuss the interlocking structural dimensions of these findings and their relevance for rethinking entrepreneurship knowledge in contexts of gender inequality and marginalization.