Abstract
Based on the philosophy of Yunus—founder of the Grameen Bank model and Nobel Prize laureate—microfinance has been globally upheld as a neoliberal panacea for addressing poverty and income disparities. Despite these advances, microfinance—as a key policy tool for increasing well-being, social mobility, and capital markets in the underserved communities of the Global South—has not yet been evaluated for its effects in empowering women with disabilities. I draw from disability studies, feminist studies, and social work to examine the ethnographic phenomenon of disabled women who, despite dire poverty, take the unexpected strategic step of collectively refusing to accept microfinance loans. I argue that the individualizing, market-oriented logic of microfinance comports standards of compulsory able-bodiedness that are contradicted by disability as a reality that is experienced through relational kinship ties in rural India. This suggests that approaches to social work in microfinance and disability should attend to cultural aspects of power that manifest through beliefs about gender, ability, and kin-based relationality, beliefs which may sit uneasily with western cultural norms of autonomy, empowerment, and individual agency purported by neoliberal development programs. Finally, this article sheds light on the current development models and social work interventions in the public sphere, which tend to be ill-suited to redress the conditions of impairment that affect disabled women, and invites us to reimagine the domestic sphere as a domain of emergent dependencies and agentive possibilities.
Introduction
Based on the philosophy of Yunus—founder of the Grameen Bank model and Nobel Prize laureate—microfinance has been globally upheld as a neoliberal panacea for addressing poverty and income disparities. Despite these advances, microfinance—as a key policy tool for increasing well-being, social mobility, and capital markets in the underserved communities of the Global South—has not yet been evaluated for its effects in empowering women with disabilities. A disability studies perspective has only recently been critically incorporated in social work research and remains primarily understood through medical and service-oriented frameworks (DePoy & Gilson, 2011; Mackelsprang & Salsgiver, 2015; Marini, Glover-Graf, & Millington, 2011). On the other hand, disability feminist scholarship often has little to say about global peripheries (Meekosha, 2011; Soldatic & Grech, 2014). This article brings together a feminist disability studies perspective in social work and a specific focus on inequality and development in the Global South. It does so by framing cultural understandings of personhood with an intersectional analysis of disability in microfinance-based self-help group (SHG) projects for disabled women who are ambivalently positioned toward socialized practices of borrowing, lending, and collateral in rural South India. I draw from disability studies, feminist studies, and social work to examine the ethnographic phenomenon of disabled women who, despite dire poverty, take the unexpected strategic step of collectively refusing to accept microfinance loans.
Disability in rural India is experienced through collective relationalities and dependencies within the family context (Cohen, 1999; Ingstad & Whyte, 1995; Staples, 2007). I, therefore, explore the effects on kinship as the basis for the social construction of disability through the narratives of those women who choose not to take microfinance loans. Through understanding the lifeworlds of disabled women who were structurally and culturally less privileged, I illuminate the structural biases of the microfinance approach and the norms of embodiment that underwrite this approach. I argue that the individualizing, market-oriented logic of microfinance comports standards of compulsory able-bodiedness that are contradicted by disability as a reality that is experienced through relational kinship ties in rural India. This suggests that approaches to social work in microfinance and disability should attend to cultural aspects of power that manifest through beliefs about gender, ability, and kin-based relationality, beliefs which may sit uneasily with western cultural norms of autonomy, empowerment, and individual agency purported by neoliberal development.
Informed by “intersectionality”—a methodological orientation that identity is not unitary but should be seen instead as an architecture made up of mutually reinforcing dimensions of race, class, gender, and sexuality (Davis, 1983; Hossein, 2013; James & Wu, 2003; Yuval-Davis, 2006)—this article expands the feminist critique of microfinance within a critical disability perspective from the Global South. It does so by offering an ethnographic window into life worlds of disabled women and their struggles with microfinance and market-led development paradigms in rural regions through an ethnographic study of disability SHG projects in South India. I make sense of their struggles by taking into account an intersectional analysis that also incorporates cultural understandings of personhood that shape the domestic-public worlds of disabled women. As I explore in this article, attention to the variable epistemological bases of oppression in precarious contexts demands that “intersectional” theories of identity observe not only race, class, and gender oppression but also differences in privilege, mobility, sexuality, and able-bodiedness (Erevelles, 2010; Hulko, 2009; G. Mehrotra, 2010). In what follows, I present interdisciplinary literature examining neoliberal microfinance models from critical feminist and disability studies perspectives.
Literature: Taking Stock of Microfinance, Gender, and Disability
The contradictory claims of empowerment in microfinance have been widely explored in feminist literature. Feminist scholars have increasingly argued that poverty alleviation and market expansion are linked through gendered forms of power. Nancy Hartsock (2006) observes that the transformation processes aimed at empowering women through microfinance are, in fact, double edged: While they seem to liberate women from “patriarchal oppression,” they also incorporate women into “global capitalism” on “greatly unequal terms” (p. 188). Julia Elyachar (2005) and Ananya Roy (2010) critique the commodification and social ties, observing that finance and development capital are leveraged through socially responsible business and that they generate profit by the labor of those same exploited women and subaltern subjects whom their projects are nominally designed to help. Scholarship in social work that examines microfinance and gender equality has also argued that financial services alone are unlikely to generate empowerment unless coupled with intervention in other areas of socioemotional life (Krenz, Gilbert, & Mandayam, 2013; Shankar & Asher, 2011; Thomas & Sinha, 2009). Exhaustive preoccupation of microfinance with the economic dimension of social life leads to neglecting noneconomic forms of empowerment (Barker, 2005; Bergeron, 2006). Since the focus in microfinance is toward productivity, not necessarily toward addressing gender disparities or understanding the terms of women’s empowerment, efforts to increase the public viability of female businesses through microcredit can overburden and disempower women in societies with fraying social safety nets and changing household gender roles (Vonderlack-Navarro, 2010).
While feminist literature has explored ways in which microfinance operates through gendered forms of power, privilege, and identity, the disability literature on microfinance has only just begun to explore these intersecting phenomena. The few studies that have been conducted in this area focused on pragmatics of microfinance—specifically, ways in which microfinance in its current structure and function can be made more accessible to people with disabilities and tending to overlook the underlying politics and inequalities in market ideology that animate microfinance as a development paradigm. A brief survey of these articles captures themes such as how to create awareness among people with disabilities about microcredit agencies and educating microfinance representatives about the realities of disabled lives (Beisland & Mersland, 2010), as well as including assessment of community support and what market may already exist for viable productive enterprises (Kayser, Lombe, Newransky, Tower, & Raj, 2010), to the importance of training disabled women for challenging employment opportunities such as managerial roles (Lewis, 2004; Naami, 2011).
Microfinance schemes may presume a normative bodily integrity that is germane to neoliberal assumptions of ableism, what Dan Goodley (2014) calls “Neoliberal Ableism.” Probing the issues that disabled women have to face from an intersectional feminist perspective, Thomson & Waxman-Fidducia (2001, p. 1) notes:
Disabled women and girls are of all ages, of all racial, ethnic, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds and sexual orientations; disabled women and girls live at the corner of disability and womanhood—with two minority identities, a double dose of discrimination and stereotyping and multiple barriers to achieve their lifetime goals.
Method: Ethnography, Fieldwork, and Positionality
The research for this article took place through fieldwork conducted between 2006 and 2014, including living for 2 years in the field (2006–2008), with a disability-oriented microfinance project of the World Bank in rural areas of Telangana, formerly part of Andhra Pradesh (AP; a state in South India). 1 Through participant observations and a total of 40 interviews with various stakeholders—including disabled women and men, their family members, and staff of governmental, nongovernmental, and international institutions organizing the microfinance project, AP Poverty Reduction Project (APRPRP)—I examine questions of exclusion, as well as structural, gender, and other intersectional contingencies that are built into the design and process of microfinance. This article is part of a larger project and draws from life stories of four disabled women that capture the interlocking effects of disability, gender, and microfinance. The research followed Institutional Review Board (IRB) protocols for confidentiality, informed consent, and cultural sensitivity, and research subjects were fully willing participants in the research process. As Indian academic institutions do not have an equivalent IRB system, approvals were obtained from the U.S.-based institution overseeing the project.
The ethnographic modes of inquiry entailed in this research utilized what Geertz calls “thick description” (1973). According to Geertz, the object of ethnography as thick description is to understand the “frames of interpretation” (Geertz, 1973) within which behavior is classified and meaning is attributed to it. Ethnography, then, is a matter of interpreting the meaning of behavior with reference to the cultural categories within which it is “produced, perceived, and interpreted.” Extended engagement with my disabled participants in their day-to-day settings in domestic and public spheres allowed me to observe the possibilities and obstacles they experienced in their everyday lives, the manner in which they embodied and resisted disablement processes, and the effects of sangham participation on their material and subjective lives. Yet, ethnography is also a way of writing. Ethnography is not only a method of data collection or analysis but it is also an end product that weaves text (Geertz, 1973) together with concepts and theory. The goal of ethnography is, therefore, to write in a manner that integrates the voices, narratives, and contexts to restore a holistic view.
My interactions with disabled people were based on a hermeneutic approach that underscores intersubjective understanding of experiences achieved through dialogue (Burawoy et al., 1991). As a member of the disabled community and a woman from India, my focus on the co-construction of meaning within the rural Indian context of kinship ties allows for an understanding of social rationalities and emergent norms of embodiment that complicate ideologies of ableism and rational actor theory in microfinance regimes. My visual disability then became a point of rupture, facilitating similitude with my informants. Being with them in their contexts of uneven development and disability allowed for greater critical dialog. It also took them out of the mold of project performativity, the pressure to respond in socially desirable ways that fitted the grand narrative of project empowerment.
In order to align research and analytical frameworks to this cultural reality and to capture such existentially intertwined narratives, I deployed different interactional models in the repertoire of ethnographic methods (including having collective and individual conversations, interviewing at different times and spaces) to get a rich understanding of their lifeworlds. Co-constructive interviewing allowed me to understand the shared “horizon” (Alcoff, 2006, p. 16) through which informants experience and create meaning through the materialities of their disability. In what follows, I trace how disabled subjectivities are shaped and shaped by the world of microfinance in South India.
Framing the Periphery: The Possibilities and Perils of Microfinance in South India
The popularity of the Grameen Bank (of Bangladesh) has resulted in the proliferation of SHGs for savings and credit across the developing world. SHGs are widely viewed as instruments for microfinance which include savings, credit, lending, and borrowing functions for clients (Karmakar, 1999; Premchander, 2003). India has become the fastest growing microfinance market, and AP is the flagship state for neoliberal reforms, receiving more than 40% of the overall microfinance loan portfolio. The government of AP and the World Bank were strong factors in the rise of microfinance in the state. From mid-1990s into the early 2000s, AP became the “state that would reform India” (The Economist, 2000). In line with neoliberal governmentality, AP, with funding from the World Bank, implemented antipoverty policies with an emphasis on microfinance and community-driven development to limit the scope of the state (Bhagwati & Srinivasan, 2002; Dollar & Kraay, 2001).
One of the largest antipoverty initiatives launched during this regime was the APRPRP, locally known as Indira Kranthi Patham. As the single largest poverty reduction project financed by the World Bank in South Asia, APRPRP organizes large-scale microfinance SHGs (locally known as sanghams) for women, disabled people, and other marginalized communities with the goal of reducing poverty based on the Grameen Bank principles. 2 To give an idea of scale, in AP alone more than 11.5 million people have been organized into SHGs from 2003 to 2013 under the APRPRP (Government of AP [GoAP], 2014). Loans are targeted especially toward women and seek to redress the fact that they are a disproportionate majority among impoverished groups that frequently suffers discrimination in labor markets. These groups are mainly organized to receive microfinance, with the goal of reducing poverty based on the Grameen Bank principles; that is, democratizing capital, capitalism from the ground-up, and business with a “human face.” This emphasis is based on the World Bank’s neoliberalized grassroots empowerment, entrepreneurship, and social capital thinking that strengthening network connections, associational relationships, and participation in markets can help people move out of poverty and other disadvantaged positions (Coleman, 1990; Putnam, 2001; World Bank, 2009).
Under the auspices of the APRPRP project, microfinance loans were collateral-free group loans, where the SHG members could borrow small sums of money from the project on an interest rate that was lower than that of private moneylenders. As a form of informal banking, it operated according to what projects called “solidarity lending,” where the group itself acted as social collateral. Group members had to save weekly and monitor each other to ensure the steady repayment of loans so that they could be rotated among others in the group. This mandatory saving itself discouraged disabled people with limited resources from participating in SHGs. Those who did not have assets or a steady source of livelihood often used their disability pension (social security) for weekly savings and leaving them with little for sustenance.
Only once the group savings reached a certain amount was the group eligible to get microfinance loans. These loans had to be invested toward what the project called “productive ends”: an income-generating activity to increase income and to ensure regular repayments—such as through a small enterprise—whereby the seed capital could be converted into a sustainable source of income to pull people out from a spiraling web of poverty and structural disadvantages. To maximize capital gains from microfinance loans, the SHGs underwent “micro credit planning,” by which social workers allocated individuals’ share from the group loan. The distribution of loans was highly contentious and imbued with power dynamics, as people’s share in the pie was contingent upon social positionality and their ability to repay the loan along with the interest in a timely manner. As a result, those who were intersectionally privileged by caste, land, gender, household, and impairment type took the biggest share, while those who could not afford to invest and repay hesitated to come forward.
Those who could not take microfinance loans, took internal loans—high-interest loans given by the SHGs from their internal weekly savings—for immediate consumption purposes. The rate of interest on internal loans was not much less than that charged by the traditional moneylenders. 3 Internal loans were mostly taken by members who belonged to poor and landless households; they usually borrowed for health and rehabilitative emergencies, house repairs, marriage expenses, food, education, and other necessities. Since these were considered “nonproductive” expenses by the project, they came at a price, which was not only monetary but also temporal in the form of deferring their eligibility for Community Investment Fund loans. Different interest rates created a two-tier hierarchical structure, where the relatively better off got cheaper loans than those that were the poorest of the poor. This further reinforced the intersectional disadvantages of disabled people and deepened existing social chasms of inequality.
Unfolding microfinance projects from a disability perspective reveals a paradox, in that their accessibility was structurally elusive. While microfinance brought capital to the doorsteps of disabled people, structural disparities and the materiality of disability made it inaccessible for them. Overlooking market inequities and social disparities, microfinance as a capitalist form of intervention was geared toward providing micro solutions for structural problems. The condition became even more precarious for women with disabilities in the light of intersecting marginalities experienced by them on account of gender, caste, class, sexuality, nature of impairment, and other axes of power in the villages. Oblivious to these complex intersectionalities, the free market ideology espoused by the microfinance approach could not transform disabled people, particularly women with disabilities, into entrepreneurial subjects. I examine responses to these paradoxes of development by turning to the stories of disabled women who navigate circuits of microfinance regimes, seeing within these strategies emergent frameworks for conceptualizing justice, social inclusion, and human rights.
Debt and Fear: The Domestic as a Site of Precarity for Microfinance
In the cultural context of rural Telangana, gender intersected with disability in unique ways that troubled the fundamentals of microfinance. As the positionality of disabled women vis-à-vis gender and generational roles scripted their material and discursive possibilities, they were more constrained with regard to micro-banking than their disabled male counterparts as well as their able-bodied female peers. 4 What follows are the life stories of women who found themselves at the margins, and how they undertake to protect themselves from precarity.
Minakshi’s story is that of extreme hardship as a single blind woman raising two children. She found herself under financial pressure and experienced distress as she tried to make ends meet. The death of her husband, who was the main breadwinner of the family, and of her mother-in-law who was the primary care giver added an extra burden on both Minakshi and her children. Her daughter, who was 15 years old, had taken over the household chores, and the 10-year-old son was expected to start earning income a few years hence. Minakshi’s narrative illuminates the hardships of a single mother with a disability, as she struggled to take care of her young children, while at the same time feeling uncomfortable and even guilty of being sustained by her children’s labor. Her disability troubled and reversed not only gender based but also generational roles that she was expected to perform in her household. These gender and generational roles intersected with impairment in problematic ways to create what scholars have termed the “family experience of disability” (Cohen, 1999).
Minakshi had been a sangham member for the past 8 years and felt grateful to the sangham for helping her to secure the disability pension (equivalent to social security in the United States). Though the pension amount is meager—Rs. 200 per month 5 —it does bring some relief to the family in the context of dwindling caste-based traditional occupations in the village in general. In India, the caste system operates through caste-class stratification; communities are assigned to traditional occupations based on their caste categorization (Srinivas, 2009). Minakshi’s status as a widow has affected her even more because she belongs to the Butcher caste, where meat-cutting work is seen as a traditionally male occupation that is unfit for “respectable” women.
While many took microfinance loans from the sangham, Minakshi refused to take the loan because she felt she could not repay. Yet she was honest about repaying the loan unlike many others who defaulted on their repayments. Recounting her hardships, she narrated:
Everyone took (loans), but I didn’t. They bought cows, bulls, goats, buffalos; they took these things for their business. I cannot repay, so I didn’t take it. ‘Take a loan … ,’ Meera (the grassroots social worker) scolded me. ‘I don’t want it,’ I said. I don’t have the property to repay. They are giving 5000 rupees, but I said no; … managers come monthly and lock up the houses (confiscate the property) if the repayment is not made. If there’s food, I’ll eat, otherwise I sleep hungry. I don’t want debts … every month I’ll have to pay Rs.250 … where should I get that from? … I don’t want anything, I don’t want debts … I am blind and my children are also small, so who will maintain all the things in the shop? And for dairying activity, the dogs in our street may bite buffaloes, and on top of that I am unable to take buffaloes by myself into the fields for grazing.
Disability thus offers a useful lens to interrogate the problematic ways in which the market, normative embodiment, and gendered domestic worlds become complicit in microfinance projects. While in microfinance regimes, women are often favored as stable and reliable lenders (due to stereotypes of women as more nurturing and family-oriented than men; Rankin, 2002), for these same reasons disabled women are often disfavored as “bad bets” (Mahtab & Mokbul, 2011). Because disabled women are excluded from normative gender roles that conflate women’s productive ability and their domestic role as caregivers, disabled women are seen as more suitable for social rehabilitation programs and less so for credit-based business activity (Naami, 2011).The following narrative illustrates this point further.
Lakshmi, a blind woman who lived with her elderly mother, shared similar experiences as Minakshi. Both Lakshmi and her mother were members in their respective SHGs; Lakshmi was in the disabled sangham, and her mother in the women’s sangham. They belonged to the backward caste; they were below the poverty line and lived in a small semi-pucca (half concrete) house with tin roof sheets which became unbearably hot during the summer months. Lakshmi became blind at the age of 5 due to contracting smallpox. Because her family did not have enough money for treatment in the hospital, they took her to a local healer and health practitioner, who gave her local medicine made of herbal extracts of leaves that permanently damaged her eyesight. Her father passed away during her childhood, and her mother raised Lakshmi and her five siblings all by herself. Her siblings were now married and lived with their own families in neighboring villages.
Lakshmi had been married to her brother-in-law for procreative purposes. As luck would have it, as soon as Lakshmi got married to her brother-in-law, her sister became pregnant, and so Lakshmi was sent back to her mother’s house. Lakshmi’s mother was a daily farm worker, and since they did not own any land she worked on the farms of other people. She made Rs. 40–50 ($1) per day as an agricultural laborer in the village and received a widow’s pension (social security) of Rs. 200 (US$5) per month from the government. Lakshmi also received Rs. 200 (US$5) in disability pension, putting their household income close to Rs. 2,500 or $50 per month, an amount which fell grossly below the poverty line. What kept them afloat was the meager but steady source of income that came through their pensions (similar to social security in the United States). They also used the little amount they received in pensions to save weekly in their SHGs in the hope of saving enough to one day get out of poverty.
Living at the edge, the two-woman household was unable to take microfinance loans, as they feared it would deepen the trench of their existing marginality. Disability, gender, and generation intersected in ways to create a household-oriented experience of vulnerability. Even though they saved every week without fail, they were apprehensive about taking loans to invest in a new enterprise. The mother wanted to use her savings to buy some gold
6
for Lakshmi that would provide some security after her death. They did not want to risk their savings by investing in a new enterprise whose success was not assured. Their decision to be “better safe than sorry”—or what the project termed “non-enterprising”—was founded on their concerns for security and survival. Lakshmi and her mother explained:
The loan of [Rs.] 5,500 came under my name also, but we didn’t take it, as we cannot repay it. I (Lakshmi) am blind, what can I do … I (Mother) am also getting old, and my sight is receding. If the shop does not run properly, then we will face difficulty in repaying it. We don’t have the capacity to repay the money, which is why we are not taking the loan.
Stories of Minakshi and Lakshmi challenge the free-market entrepreneurialism espoused by microfinance regimes. Their narratives bring to light the dangers of microfinance as a strategic neoliberal panacea for poverty alleviation. By excluding the poorest, it benefited those who already had assets—material, positional, and relational. The narratives of Minakshi and Lakshmi also challenge widespread assumptions about welfare dependency (Fraser & Gordon, 1994; Morgen & Maskovsky, 2003), as both women were able to productively use their pensions toward savings and investments.
Freedom Deferred: Disentangling Gender, Markets, and Nonnormative Personhood
The family experience of disabled women did not represent traditional expectations of normative womanhood. Since the disabled women did not necessarily fit within the structures and functions of the traditional household, could not marry most of the time, and could not perform many of these productive roles in the domestic spheres as compared to nondisabled women, the microfinance approach excluded them as a productive and gendered category. While Minakshi’s and Lakshmi’s blindness and lack of cultural capital and assets prevented them from participating in microfinance, there were other disabled women who stayed away from taking loans despite the fact they were materially more privileged. I interviewed a group of disabled women who all felt reluctant to use microfinance loans, and this despite being relatively young, educated, self-employed, belonging to households with some assets, and bearing only minor physical disabilities. For them, too, cultural and material realities interacted with their gender, unmarried status, and disabilities in unique ways that made it harder for them to maneuver the roller-coaster of structured loans.
In one of the village sangham meetings I attended, I met a physically disabled woman, Kamla, who was in her early 20s, unmarried, and had studied till 10th grade. Kamla had acquired polio in her childhood due to the treatment at the hands of an untrained health-care professional in the village. Kamla was partly self-employed, earning Rs. 200 ($4) per month, and also received a disability pension of Rs. 200. After high school, Kamla learned sewing and took up stitching work that she could perform from home. Though the nature of her work was physically accessible since it was based at home, it did not fit her educational and aspirational goals. Sewing was also the vocation that most literate women in the village opted for. It was seen as more respectful and less exhausting alternative to the farm sector agrarian work. In villages, supply-demand imbalances affected small enterprises the most. The agro-based, less diversified, and transitional nature of rural economy could not accommodate shifts in market imbalances. These imbalances were particularly problematic for those who did not have any assets and alternative sources of livelihood, which was true for most disabled people in rural Telangana.
For Kamla, the overflow of stitching and sewing services in the village created more supply than the demand that the village economy could accommodate. In addition, the demand for tailored clothes was further diminishing as people in the village were moving toward ready-made bazaar (market) clothes over hand stitched ones. This is reflective of a broader trend toward marketization, which tends to weaken traditional occupations and small enterprises. Reflecting on how supply-demand imbalances in the rural economy affected her, she added:
These days, so many people have learnt stitching, and there are so many machines around … I get maybe one or two blouses per day during season. In the off-season it becomes even fewer. Moreover, our house is at the back of the village, far from the bazaar, so people don’t prefer coming all the way and giving their clothes to me. And I cannot walk that much to the bazaar to take the orders … Because of this also, I can’t take up much work. If I go anywhere by myself (outside the village for work), my parents will be alone, and my mother will be worried about me.
Kamla was neither able to utilize her education to find employment in the village nor was she able to migrate outside the village due to her unmarried status. Her gender, unmarried status, and disability intersected with the village economy in unique ways to reproduce this spiraling web of exclusion. Lack of gainful employment made it harder for her to take microfinance loans, as those had to be invested in income generating activities. As a result, she took several internal loans on high interest rates for the construction and repair of her house. 7 Studies of disability in the global south highlight that disabled women find themselves marginalized in ways that trouble the boundary between the public and private spheres (Ghai, 2007; N. Mehrotra, 2004). Respectability in Indian cultural contexts may demand marriage, yet disabled women’s inability to embody care taking, and also normative sexualized models of femininity more often link their destiny to the domestic sphere as dependents, rather than as nurturers (Addlakha, 2013; Ghosh, 2013). This configuration may make development programs and social work interventions, which are primarily in public sphere, ill-suited to redress the conditions that affect disabled women, and ask us to reimagine the domestic sphere as a domain of emergent dependencies and agentive possibilities (Addlakha & Das, 2001; Friedner, 2008).
A similar narrative was shared by another young disabled woman, Rama, who was actually able to move out of her village for work. I met Rama during field visits with the community-based rehabilitation team. A feisty young woman, Rama had also acquired polio in her childhood due to lack of polio medication. She studied until 12th grade in a boarding school in a neighboring town and learned stitching after that. She lived by herself in a small single-occupancy room, which she had neatly partitioned with a sari into a living and cooking space. Rama was the only disabled woman I met who was living by herself. It was a striking anomaly, since young women mostly lived with their maiden families and after marriage moved in with their husband’s families. Though she was staying by herself, her family was not far from where she lived, and she got to meet her family members every day as they came down to the bazaar to sell their farm produce or to buy other confections. She had moved to become emotionally and materially independent while her parents were still alive.
Since she felt she would not be able to get married owing to her disability, she kept repeating that the need for her to be independent had to do with her being a disabled woman who had only limited chances of getting married. She was resigned to be single, and she felt no one would marry her due to the “visible deformity” in the leg. Since marriage for her was not a possibility, she highly valued the chance to explore living options that offered dignity and independence. Earlier, she had experienced humiliation at her parental home at the hands of her brothers and their wives, and she was concerned that it might worsen after the parents were not around. The only way she felt she could live with dignity was to live on her own.
As a single woman with a disability living alone in a different village than her own, there were cultural constraints on Rama’s financial opportunities and limits to what she could do with the microfinance loans. She did not feel “safe” expanding her stitching work or “starting up a new kirana (grocery) shop with the microfinance loans,” as she felt that might invite unnecessary attention from men in the community. Though to some extent she managed to break away from constraining “geographies of disability,” her status as a single disabled woman posed limits that were hard for sanghams or microfinance loans to overcome. Narrating her constraints, she said:
My group members support me … they say, ‘If you need any support or if you face any problem, then tell us, we will help you. You don’t feel alone. We are all with you. If you want any financial support, we will provide you with a loan for taking up any activity (livelihood enterprise).’ But I am not taking any loan, because if I start earning money by taking up any activity like a Kirana shop, some people may feel jealous—thinking that “this girl from outside is earning more income in their village.” Some harm could befall me. Also, if I take up any activity like kirana shop, people will come to my house to purchase things … It will not be safe for me as a girl staying alone. That’s why I am not taking up any activity.
Respectability, for Rama, carves a negative space of embodiment around ideologies of femininity which may be desired—yet unavailable—for her to pursue. In this way, gendered and political–economic constraints created a double bind that enjoins disabled women to a status of precarity that is ill-matched to the form and function of microfinance loans, and the norms of productivity, circulation, and able-bodiedness that these loans support. For both Rama and Kamla, their disabilities made it harder for them to navigate physical spaces, and their unmarried status made it harder for them to navigate social and public spaces including the market. Their lived experiences challenge the very claims of gender empowerment espoused by the neoliberal microfinance approach. This also demonstrates how participation in the market was not a neutral phenomenon; it was contingent upon, and constructed around, cultural norms of personhood that intersected with caste, gender, kinship, ability/disability, and other axes of power in the village.
The narratives in this article help us to see how disabled women’s SHGs reveal norms of able-bodiedness that underwrite current understandings of gender and development policies. Microfinance projects tried to draw limits around what was possible, feasible, and measurable. Thus, the broader structures of disablement—or for that matter, personal, and relational concerns—were never brought into the fold of the project, as they were considered beyond the domain of interventions. The structural issues, such as access to education, employment, and inclusion in village development schemes, were considered too public; while personal concerns, such as familial, relational, and marital issues, were considered too domestic for the project to intervene. Yet the effects of disability and loan indebtedness were profoundly inter-relational, drawing family members and dependents into a crucible of intersecting vectors of risk, marginalization, and downward mobility.
Conclusions and Implications for Social Work
This article argues for the importance of using a critical disability feminist perspective to gain a deeper understanding of disabled women’s lifeworlds, which has thus far remained marginal within social work research and practice. Analyzing microfinance at the crossroads of gender, disability, and poverty expands our understanding of development and demands a complex incorporation of the disability and gender dimension as they intersect with each other. As demonstrated, these questions can be explored more productively through an intersectional disability and gender perspective. Where a disability perspective can lend a critical lens to examine the nature and claims of gender empowerment espoused by microfinance, a critical gender lens can simultaneously reveal the gendered nature of disability oppression and underscore the need for engendering disability in social work policies and interventions.
Research on the intersection of social work and marginalized identities reveals that there is no single pathway to empowerment through the marketplace. An ethnographic approach to understanding the marginal lives of disabled women challenges current practices of microfinance in India and their complicity in promoting ableist market-oriented interventions. Nonnormative embodiment provides a lens to peer through the conditionality of microfinance as an aspiration and normalizing exercise of power in the current global landscape of neoliberalism. Indeed, approaches to intersectionality must be nuanced to fit the context of practice. Approaches to social work in microfinance and disability should attend to cultural aspects of power that manifest through beliefs about gender, ability, and kin-based relationality that may sit uneasily with Western cultural norms of autonomy, empowerment, and individual agency purported by neoliberal development programs in the global south.
Sustainable development then calls for approaches that incorporate a more expansive notion of time and space than what is standardized within popular microfinance practices. To begin, temporal and spatial reforms are needed vis-à-vis savings and credit norms of microfinance. Reflecting the aspirations of disabled interlocutors, these reforms should include broadening access to credit, lengthening the period of repayment, and incorporating partial loans and partial grants depending upon beneficiaries’ subject position and structural vulnerabilities. Softening stringent regulations with regard to the timeframe of repayment and the terms of interest would more effectively respond to the intersectional hardships experienced by disabled women in particular and marginalized communities in general.
Finally, this article sheds light on the current development models and social work interventions in the public sphere, which tend to be ill-suited to redress the conditions of impairment that affect disabled women, and invites us to reimagine the domestic sphere as a domain of emergent dependencies and agentive possibilities. There is a need to design gender-sensitive disability and development programs accountable to household vulnerabilities co-constitutive of public and private spheres. Macro-disabling barriers must be addressed simultaneously with disability-specific interventions. The dangers of the financialization of development through microfinance risks metastasizing poverty through its shift in focus from structures to individuals and from long-term to short-term interventions. Therefore, there needs to be renewed engagement with social justice approaches toward disability and development that go beyond financialization and rather attend to uneven structures of disablement, that is, health-care disparities crisis of capital, infrastructural barriers, sociocultural exclusions, and foreclosed opportunities to navigate embodied differences. Poverty alleviation policies and practices must be reoriented around the political economy of development with sustainability as a guiding principle, which microfinance fails to account for in its current form. The hegemony of microfinance has foreclosed possibilities that might have been more emancipatory and sustainable. Thus, critical social work must think through those foreclosed opportunities and imagine alternatives that could realize change across all systems.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Anders Wallace for his excellent comments, critical feedback, and generous suggestions on the article. I also want to thank Himika Bhattacharya and Kiran Ponada for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. Finally, I would like to thank various disabled people’s organizations and individuals for their time, patience, and unyielding support.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding and grant details: Fieldwork for this research was supported by research grants from National Science Foundation (Award no. SES-0752982) and the City University of New York (Award no. 66230-00 44).