The Rationality of Empowerment: Microcredit, Accumulation by Dispossession, and the Gendered Economy

Microcredit programs are marketed not only as a means of poverty alleviation but as a means of women’s empowerment. Advocates for these programs argue that facilitating women’s greater access to capital will benefit women by enhancing their economic and political power and, in doing so, will make the societies in which they live more equitable politically and more competitive economically. Despite these claims of empowerment, however, recent feminist scholarship has criticized microcredit, suggesting that the programs represent a particularly insidious form of neoliberal policy dressed in feminist clothing. In this article, we analyze microcredit through the concept of accumulation by dispossession, the set of processes by which new subjects are brought into the structure of capitalism in exploitative and often violent ways. In particular, we draw upon Nancy Hartsock’s theorization of the ways that such accumulation is both globalized and gendered in contemporary capitalism to help make sense of microcredit’s ambiguous relationship to empowerment and its role in destabilizing some power relations while further entrenching others. As a mechanism of accumulation by dispossession, microcredit illustrates changes not only in capitalist economic processes but also in contemporary political, ideological, and social life. Examining the political rationality that links these changes, we suggest, helps to politicize microcredit by linking it to the long and violent history of forcible dispossession under capitalism and helps to direct attention to the specific resistances that are engendered by neoliberal formulations of accumulation by dispossession.