Precarity, aspiration and neoliberal development: Women empowerment workers in West Bengal

While there is a long tradition of interpellating poor rural women to carry out the state's development and modernising goals in local communities, neoliberal development has greatly expanded the remit of this subjective call but without accompanying material changes. In this article, I consider the precarious category of female workers produced by an NGO in West Bengal, out of a surplus population of poor, working-class and, generally, Scheduled-Caste rural women who were themselves beneficiaries of feminist-inspired development. Ambivalently positioned within this institutional site-as volunteers and not as employees-these workers had to manage new forms of risk and precarity over existing ones. Such precarity was not only material. It was especially manifest in new sets of aspirations that sustained the unrealisable promises and potentialities of the related processes of the NGOisation of feminist activism and the restructuring of women's development under neoliberalism.