gender, violence and the neoliberal state in India

Developing a gendered understanding of the neoliberal state has been, not surprisingly, a preoccupation for much recent feminist praxis in the Global North and particularly in the Global South. Sustained activism and scholarship has addressed a wide variety of questions including the increased reproductive and productive labour demanded of women; the gendered effects of the privatisation of and dispossession from land, natural resources and public services; and the variegated and often apparently contradictory impacts of multiple incorporations into global markets (Elson, 1991, 2002; Sparr, 1994; Wright, 2006; Sharma, 2010; Owens, 2015; Farris, 2017). The state’s role in attempts to produce women as gendered neoliberal subjects who are simultaneously entrepreneurial and altruistic, and the selective appropriation and incorporation of feminist ideas within the neoliberal discourses of states, global institutions and their corporate partners has been explored, and a specifically ‘neoliberal’ feminism has been identified and delineated (Wilson, 2008, 2015; Chant and Sweetman, 2012; Rottenberg, 2014; Purewal, 2015). New forms of biopolitical regulation, intervention and violence inherent in neoliberal governance (Sangari, 2015); of gendered embodied experiences of marketised reproductive, agricultural and environmental technologies (Rao and Sexton, 2010; Tandon, 2010; Fent, 2012); and of military occupations and the policing of bodies and borders (Puar, 2004; Osuri, 2015) have been analysed.