“ Dona de Si ”: Women’s Empowerment as Affective Economies in Corporate-Sponsored Entrepreneurship Training

Abstract

The author examines transnational narratives of women’s empowerment in Brazil, highlighting discourses promoting women’s ability to improve society and their incomes by mobilizing emotions and attributes linked to care responsibilities as savvy feminized skills to be used in micro entrepreneurship. On the basis of a case study through ethnographic research conducted between 2019 and 2022 within a national empowerment program for entrepreneurship training, the author argues that such initiatives are grounded in affective economies increasingly reliant on individualized forms of emotional labor as a central strategy to navigate the Brazilian labor market. By analyzing how emotions circulate within the social space of this corporate-sponsored training program, the author explores the role of affects in constituting power dynamics between those “already empowered” women promoting trainings and those yet to be shaped by the required affects to succeed. Drawing on theories of affective economies and governmentality, this study unravels some complexities of promoting empowerment and financial independence among women in the growing context of labor informality in Brazil. The author concludes by demonstrating how these narratives of empowerment create normative affective standards that rely on women’s emotional engagement with entrepreneurial values, often obscuring the precariousness underpinning their labor conditions.

When you are in control of your money, you are in control of your decisions. This is extremely important. The second issue is that when a woman succeeds, the business succeeds, she supports her family. . . . That’s why we say that entrepreneurship is transformative for everyone, but especially for women. . . . And women, when they succeed, not only they improve their family’s condition, but they also transform their community and surrounding environment. It’s not that men are bad, but it’s our way of seeing the world has a more human, caring, collaborative perspective [emphasis added], and that is important for our society. Women generate more jobs for other women. So, we are creating a virtuous circle! (Field notes, 2019)

Over the past three decades, women’s empowerment has increasingly occupied a significant position on the global agenda, viewed as a vehicle for alleviating poverty, fostering development, and stimulating economic growth (World Bank 2012). Particularly women situated in the “Global South” ¹ have garnered considerable attention from corporate sectors, international organizations, national governments, and nonprofit entities (Bedford 2009; Calkin 2016; Moeller 2018) as powerhouses for economic development and market integration.

Building on the insights provided in the epigraph and the expanding field of critical studies on gender, emotional labor, and governmentality, in this article I examine how a nonprofit program targeting women in Brazil is built upon affective economies to shed light on the complex ways in which gender norms, neoliberal developments, and corporate social responsibility intersect to shape opportunities for women’s empowerment in the Global South. Addressing a research gap identified in Machado’s (2024) literature review on gender and entrepreneurship in Brazil, this study advances an emerging research agenda by critically analyzing how public and private institutions—including investors, incubators, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—actively influence and construct new gendered norms within entrepreneurial discourses. Studies in Machado’s review challenges commonsense assumptions by reframing female entrepreneurship not as a deficit of skills but as a political ethos, wherein women are now positioned as ideal archetypes of entrepreneurial success. This narrative metaphorizes empowered women as transformative agents tasked with self-regulating techniques to mitigate structural inequalities. However, this framing ties women’s opportunities to succeed to their ability to conform their subjectivities to predefined market-driven objectives, effectively commodifying the concept of equality and reducing it to individual choices within neoliberal marketplace logics.

Through an ethnographic case study analysis, this work provides insights into the gendered dimension of affective economies and their interconnectedness with broader political and economic processes, highlighting how class and race becomes obscured. The data presented stem from participant observations of an entrepreneurship training program for women conducted between 2019 and 2022 called Ela Pode (She Can). The program had the ambitious goal of empowering more than 200,000 Brazilian women deemed “vulnerable” for entrepreneurship.

Seeking to delineate the nuances of the empowerment category within the Brazilian context, I followed many public training sessions organized by a nationally operating nonprofit organization called Instituto Rede Mulher Empreendedora, or Women’s Entrepreneurs Network Institute (WENI), a three-year project sponsored by Google. Approximately 300 entrepreneur women conducted the training sessions on voluntary basis, having been previously selected and trained by WENI to disseminate its contents. The program offered free training in modules of 1, 4, 8, or 12 hours on topics such as leadership, self-knowledge, time management, networking, finances, sales techniques, negotiation, personal branding, and digital tool usage to present the sponsor’s available tools for entrepreneurs.

Under the premise that women are unjustly excluded from labor opportunities and mobilizing a discursive framework suggesting they can bring valuable gendered attributes to build more profitable and “humanized” markets for the future, I illustrate how the training sessions set forth a series of gendered statements invoking women to succeed by engaging in continual exercises of self-awareness, self-esteem improvement, and emotional management (Hochschild 1979). Corporate philanthropic efforts from Google were, however, limited to sponsoring training sessions to promote a set of behavioral and psychological practices guided by ideals of entrepreneurship and self-management, without involving any form of microcredit or financial support for its participants. ² Consequently, achieving women’s behavioral change was the determining factor for empowerment to pursue their own personal, economic, and business opportunities.

The statements presented throughout this article reveal a regime of truth (Foucault 1980) in which each woman is believed to have autonomy to exert full control over their lives, thus enabling to overcome any challenges or dependency from others (Garcia, 2023). Through the pedagogical framework of empowerment practices introduced by the training sessions, every woman was expected to learn and adopt a set of normative behaviors and emotions as crucial tools to succeed as entrepreneurs, while challenges linked to class and race remain rarely explored. This process constituted an ongoing endeavor aimed at cultivating new attitudes and beliefs aligned with market logics, ultimately intended to foster freedom and financial autonomy.

Throughout five sections, I analyze how transnational narratives of women’s empowerment are rooted in contemporary Brazil, giving rise to numerous discourses that advocate for “making the world a better place” by mobilizing emotions as a feminized attributes associated with care (Hirata and Guimarães 2012) and ability to perform emotional management (Hochschild 1979, 1983). I argue that women’s empowerment projects led by corporate social responsibility are founded on affective economies, increasingly evoking individualized forms of emotional labor.

Thus, in the first part of this article I briefly present the affective economy theoretical framework, followed by a methods section and two sections on ethnographic scenes. In the fifth part I analyze data through the lens of governmentality theories (Foucault 2008; Freeman 2011, 2014) and their affective dimensions (Ahmed 2004; Freeman 2014). I conclude pointing to how affects operate as a means to conduct conducts (Foucault 1991), mobilized to create subjects commensurable to neoliberal demands through particular ways: the prone ability to perform emotional management as a feminized attribute, in which feelings and emotional resilience must operate to deal within very adverse entrepreneurial market conditions.

The Affective Economies of Entrepreneurialism

Narratives portraying women as inherently altruistic, hardworking, and virtuous have increasingly populated transnational discourses of multinational corporations, NGOs, investment banks, and organizations (Calkin 2014; Cornwall 2018; Garcia, 2023; Tornhill 2019). By extolling their supposedly naturalized abilities to promote sustainable economic development through more collaborative means, these discourses highlight what women can do for others: their agency is thus implicitly relational, tied to their families and the vital role prescribed by motherhood and maternal attributes (Calkin 2014; Cornwall 2018:26). As Lewis (2014) and Duberley and Carrigan (2013) conceptualized, a “relational entrepreneurial femininity” produces role models of entrepreneurship emphasizing women’s supposedly caring, nurturing, and collaborative propensity. A relational type of entrepreneurial femininity refers to the concern with the welfare of others, exhibiting kindness, sensitivity, and compassion, to help people—whether customers, clients, or family members—and a keen capacity to maintain relationships must be part of their entrepreneurial identity.

This universalization warrants close attention: Scott (1990:28) proposed recognizing “woman” as a category simultaneously empty and overflowing. The entrepreneurial training arena discussed in this article is built mainly upon gender, evoking the category “woman” as a foundational commonality among participants while relegating other axes of difference—such as race, class, age, and ethnicity—as secondary issues.

However, these markers are central to reflect about which structures of opportunities are available to women. As Wingfield (2010, 2021) emphasized, emotion work is shaped not only by gender but also by class and racial differences, producing nuanced variations in its performance. In the expanding service-based economy of the late twentieth century, Arlie Hochschild’s (1983) seminal work on emotional labor demonstrated how service workers were increasingly required to regulate their emotions for both themselves and customers, reinforcing gender inequalities in the labor market. Although Hochschild’s analysis was focused primarily on gendered dimensions of emotional labor, Wingfield (2010, 2021) highlighted the importance of taking into account the racialized aspects of this phenomenon, particularly within increasingly racially diverse service sectors. She argued that feeling rules and emotional expectations are not only gendered but also implicitly racialized, showing how Black workers in predominantly white organizations navigate distinct emotional demands that differ from those imposed on their white counterparts.

During the field research, I frequently encountered demands for women to expand their “inherent” characteristics or even “energies” perceived as feminine, such as the capacity to better manage their emotions, to influence clients’ emotions, and so forth. Although feminine and masculine “energies” were distinctly classified, and racially neutralized, the former was associated with caregiving, collaboration, and a prone desire to help others. The latter, on the other hand, was seen as individualistic, rational, and objective and therefore less functional in the current capitalist context, in which corporate sectors supposedly seek more collaborative, flexible workers better equipped to adapt to new social demands toward “humanizing the economy” (Restakis 2010).

I would like to take the cue on the idea of such feminine “energies” and attributes as something that circulates in societies, as forms of affects that “stick” to particular subjects—women, most particularly. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s (2004) seminal theorization of affective economies, I challenge the notion of emotions as individual, primarily psychological dispositions subjects “have.” According to this conceptual framework, rather than residing in objects or subjects, emotions are “effects of circulation” (p. 8), a type of social infrastructure of political and economic actions. Affective economies are thus invested in hierarchical positions in which some affects and emotions are valued, whereas others are devaluated over time.

In the context of neoliberal productive restructuring (Harvey 2008), the renewed demands for capital flows and labor deregulation across most countries have rendered flexible citizen-subjects essential (Ong 1999). This shift necessitates workers’ cultivation of specific psychological and emotional dispositions to adeptly navigate these evolving demands. Professionals are increasingly expected to be attentive to customer needs and translate them into tangible services and products, a skill set frequently characterized as inherently feminine because of a supposedly ontological ability for relationality attributed to women (Castro 2016). Beyond any form of ontological ability, Hochschild’s (1979) concept of “feeling rules” highlights the socially convened character of guidelines that dictate how (certain) individuals should feel, act, and express emotions. These feeling rules are derived from cultural norms and societal expectations in given historical and social contexts and learned through socialization processes.

In line with the social production of feeling rules, Hardt (1999:99) argued that labor is not solely a form to produce capital but “the creation of life precisely in the production and reproduction of affects”; labor then directly operates on affects, producing subjectivities and the social life. In this sense, affective labor is ontological, as living labor is constitutive of forms of life and biopolitical production, composing what Freeman (2014:181) described as the “neoliberal ethic of entrepreneurialism,” in which the omnipresence of a therapeutic culture (Illouz 2007) renders self and business intertwined, inseparable dimensions of life.

Thus, certain affects imprint themselves upon subjects and objects, becoming integral to the production of norms and materialization of our worlds, in which individuals are socially expected to perform particular types of emotions and behaviors. In Ahmed’s framework, affective economies are those shaped by the ways in which emotions circulate in societies to maintain and construct a certain social order, particularly concerning gender, race, and sexuality. In shedding light on how emotions “stick” to certain bodies, this perspective allows us to interpret the role of emotions as mechanisms through which subjects become invested in particular social structures and dynamics and, moreover, how female subjects become bounded to the demands of performing emotional management in the labor market in particular ways.

Returning to the idea of feminine and masculine “energies” as affects, we can then argue how affects work “as atmospheric forces, act on the bodies, for example, in shaping their direction, intensity, and strength, and how bodies relate to affects in an emerging correlation identified through the language of emotions” (Fontefrancesco 2023:6) and are organized through acts of emotion management, as the “work it takes to cope with feeling rules” (Hochschild 1979:551). Therefore, some psychological traits inherent in flexible production are translated into expected qualities of workers, who then must translate these traits as professional skills (Castro 2016) but also as personal skills (Freeman 2014; Garcia 2023; Scoz 2018), in which entrepreneurial dispositions—drive to succeed, flexibility, excellent time management, self-confidence—become crucial strategies of insertion in the world or work.

In the following sections, I present the methodology and ethnographic scenes illustrating how these empowerment economies evoke an intense affective labor by valorizing certain desirable and normative forms of femininities for entrepreneurship. They articulate a prescription of gender performances that enable self-governance to break free from any sort of financial dependency and, perhaps more crucially, to the intensification of work as a necessary feature of female empowerment. These economies constitute a specific set of subjective technologies to be managed by participants, manifested in the strict limited conditions for women’s autonomy, which must align, at all times, private life, thoughts, and feelings with market logics. I argue how empowerment economies are affective economies, framed through the naturalization of competencies and skills associated with femininity, such as multitasking, organization abilities, attention to detail, sensitive listening, and negotiation skills (Castro 2013) as potent means to add value to women’s entrepreneurial endeavors.

Methods

In this article I present a case study of the She Can program through a multisite ethnography (Marcus 1995). After obtaining approval from the ethics committee at the host university, I requested and was granted permission by WENI to conduct participant observation in the public training sessions. Most data were collected during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic through attendance at webinars, which required prior registration. Before attending the trainings, I contacted the volunteers to introduce myself as a researcher interested in exploring the corporate participation in women’s economic empowerment; during these events, I took extensive field notes, which are analyzed in the subsequent sections.

Created in 2018, the aim of She Can was to “capacitate” 135,000 participants by 2020, targeting “women in situations of socioeconomic vulnerability,” particularly those located in the northern and northeastern regions of Brazil. The program thus constructs a geographical, classed, gendered, and racialized understanding of vulnerability, framing the social inequalities—rooted in colonial exploitation, racialized exclusion, land concentration, and uneven access to public policies—in Brazil’s North and Northeast as issues to be addressed through the personal empowerment trainings.

According to WENI’s 2022 annual report (IRME 2022), their activities “impacted” 73,566 women, with the majority falling between the ages of 25 and 49 years. Of these, 72 percent self-identified as Black or Pardo, ³ and most did not own their homes. Most participants (63 percent) were located in the northern and northeastern regions of Brazil. Additionally, 61 percent had education levels up to high school, 55 percent belonged to class C ⁴ with monthly incomes between R$545 and R$1,900, and 30 percent were unemployed or not engaged in formal economic activities. ⁵

The program provided a fertile ground for observing the circulation of meanings of women’s empowerment, in which the content presented to participants granted access to a particular discursive framework, largely shaped by narratives of leadership and personal drive forged in the “up” spaces (Nader 1972), that is, the sponsor and the promoting NGO. Through the trainings, it was possible to spot the production of entrepreneurial subjectivities as highly individualizing disciplinary pedagogies. I argue that the interplay among the corporate world, international organizations, and local NGOs creates a new category of “Third World women”: ambiguous subjects seen as both deserving of and requiring intervention to better adapt to capitalist markets. These narratives delineate what constitutes empowerment and prescribe specific trajectories within this framework. Such articulations operate on two dimensions: (1) the biopolitics of international organizations and corporate interventions targeting women as a population to be governed and (2) the regulation of conducts and production of entrepreneurial subjectivities through discursive practices in expert-led trainings, and capacity-building programs emphasizing self-esteem, resilience, and financial autonomy.

Acknowledging the limitations of the study, particularly with respect to the absence of beneficiary perspectives, in this article I focus on the public dimensions of empowerment notions widely circulated within the ethnographic field of the trainings. By privileging the program’s perspective, my intention is not to deny participants’ critical agency regarding what is presented to them. Rather, following Rancière (2012), I propose considering spectators as positioned within the “blurring boundaries between those who act and those who watch” (p. 23). This approach highlights the public dimension of the program that shapes discourses of visibilities and invisibilities that are central to my analysis, offering a dynamic framework to explore how these elements are constructed, even though always remaining open constructs to be accepted and/or critically contested by the participants, as well as the volunteers.

In in-person events, participants’ reactions and interactions were central to my observation. However, in online settings, assessing their impact became significantly more limited. As Góralska (2020) noted, many social scientists had to adapt their methodologies in response to the pandemic, shifting from traditional ethnographic methods to digital ethnography, as was the case for this study. Although the absence of embodied presence in the field restricted the observation of nonverbal cues, spatial dynamics, and informal interactions, it also reshaped the nature of this research. Notably, the expanded geographical reach of online engagement allowed me to connect with volunteers and attend to events across all regions of Brazil. Given the limited funding available for field research, the initial scope of the study was restricted to the South and Southeast, whereas access to the North and Northeast would have been unlikely because of high travel costs and an important limitation to comprehend a national program. In this context, digital ethnography (Hine 2015) not only enhanced the inclusivity of the research by capturing a broader regional spectrum but also reflected the accelerated digitalization of everyday life in which participants were embedded. Although the loss of face-to-face interactions cannot be overstated and significantly limited access to participants’ perspectives, digital ethnography emerged as a legitimate method for understanding the impacts of the pandemic on the program dynamics, participants’ lives and the evolving discursive frameworks surrounding emotion work in this new context.

The data analyzed in the following sections derive from observations of approximately 50 training modules covering topics such as leadership, self-knowledge, time management, networking, finances, sales techniques, negotiation, personal branding, and the use of digital tools to introduce the sponsor’s resources for entrepreneurs. While the in-person trainings took place monthly or weekly according to the volunteers’ availability, the online trainings happened daily during the COVID-19 pandemic and were announced at the WENI’s Web site as well as in their social media. All names used in this study are pseudonyms to ensure the anonymity of participants.

Embodied Soft Skills: Becoming “Dona de Si”

On a Friday morning, at 9 a.m. with about 20 women present, Gabriela, a volunteer entrepreneur of the program She Can, welcomed the participants, explaining that the purpose of the training session was to develop the “socioemotional skills” and “soft skills” of each woman. These skills were aimed at enhancing their “affective and communicative abilities” to entrepreneurial practices to the purpose of improving their performance in areas such as sales, leadership, and finance. Gabriela emphasized that the program’s focus would be on financial empowerment: how to earn more money and organize finances, but above all, how to manage the individual and psychological capacities to “deal” with them. The language of the event, thus, was based on forms of financial self-help, where self-analysis and self-perception become increasingly ubiquitous in relation to professional and financial life (Fridman 2017).

According to Gabriela, the event was

a feminine moment, just for women. . . . Our main mission is female empowerment, reducing the impact of women’s inferiority in the labor market, their fragility and vulnerability, and our role here is to impact you. But what you need to understand is that entrepreneurship is a study – in addition to putting your dream into practice, it is [demands] an ongoing study. It is to show that we all can be entrepreneurs, we can be our own bosses, and more than that, we can succeed. . . . And women united are like embers: when we encounter each other, we catch fire! (Field diary 2019, emphasis added)

Gabriela’s presentation emphasized that the means to reduce women’s vulnerability in the labor market involved a pedagogical dimension: participants must allow themselves to be “impacted” by the event. This meant listening, internalizing, and following the principles presented to them, thereby fulfilling the program’s mission of “governing at a distance” (Foucault 2008; Rose and Miller 1992) to promote empowerment. Understanding that entrepreneurship demands “study” and a daily practice of (self) investment was one of the key missions the training aimed to fulfill. Beyond facilitating the presentation of practical content on business management, which the program mostly lacked, the trainings sought to promote a type of governance of conduct that should be adopted as an essential part of an entrepreneur’s mindset. Consequently, those who adhered to these principles would be closer to the presumed goal of becoming “their own bosses.”

Next, Gabriela engaged the participants in a “warm-up exercise” designed to be used whenever they needed to “feel empowered.” The exercise involved all participants’ standing up and assuming a Wonder Woman pose: feet slightly apart, head held high, chest open, and hands on hips. According to Gabriela, “scientific studies” suggest that adopting a superhero pose for five minutes before a job interview or meeting an important client could result in increased self-confidence and, consequently, a “measurably” superior performance due to the cultivation of a positive mindset. She explained the pose held significant symbolic value. As society often discourages women from pursuing their goals, the pose would serve as behavioral “reprogramming” to help “internalize” the belief that women can achieve anything they desire. The exercise was illustrated with a scene from the popular TV show Grey’s Anatomy, in which one character appears performing the exercise before entering a delicate surgical intervention, thus mitigating her feelings of insecurity. Gabriela then played upbeat music at a high volume, encouraging everyone in the room to replicate the pose, repeating the mantra: “I can, I want, I achieve!” After a few minutes in this position, participants laughed, and some affirmed that doing the pose had been “very enjoyable.”

Based on positive behavioral reprogramming, the exercise was presented as a technique derived from positive psychology that aims to “reprogram” the mind by identifying insecurities and mental models considered “limiting,” to propose behavioral changes aiming for new optimistic mental conditioning. In other words, through a set of rituals involving body postures, speech, mantras, and repetition of affirmative phrases, it would be possible to engage in an “economy of motivation and action” (Mahmood 2005:130) necessary to enter the world of entrepreneurship, which requires subjects conditioned to optimism and self-confidence.

Throughout the events, a series of bodily and imaginative exercises such as the one described above were invoked to guide emotions and direct everyday practices toward specific and positively evaluated behaviors. As suggested by Mahmood (2005), drawing from her analysis of the women’s pietistic movement in Egypt, the self can take on particular forms through the performance of a set of bodily acts, and prescriptions of bodily conduct become necessary attributes in shaping an ideal self. While inviting to perform a specific pose, the event highlights how dispositions toward an embodied, ritualized, and imaginative behavior integrates a set of practices necessary to achieve the objectives of guiding emotions through the body in order to achieve the empowered self.

After the exercise, Gabriela articulated the program’s overarching objective of facilitating “financial freedom” for participating women, encouraging them to perceive themselves as entrepreneurs rather than merely self-employed individuals, fostering their identification with the entrepreneurial ethos. However, she underscored the program’s intent was primarily to serve as an “initial kick start,” enabling participants to further seek pertinent information for their self-development as well as for business administration. Consequently, the training sessions were reduced to a gateway to entrepreneurial values and dynamics, leaving participants responsible for furthering their knowledge acquisition in more practical and technical domains, often marginalized within the program’s framework. As such, the trainings’ role was circumscribed to incite the adoption of new conducts and mindsets, thereby tasked solely with imparting foundational values in which each woman should undertake individual responsibility to shape their own trajectory within the purview of the entrepreneurial culture.

Starting the presentation of the standardized slides for the program’s finance module, Gabriela asked us to impart a deep reflection on our first encounter with money, classifying it as either positive or negative. To understand how each participant managed their finances, she introduced an introspective exercise: what was each participant’s earliest memory of their relationship with money? What memories did the word money evoke, and what role had it played in their lives? What had each participant done with their first salary or allowance? Thus, a detailed internal scrutiny was necessary to “listen to ourselves” and understand both inner selves and the significance of money in one’s life, evoking a type of self who is “reflexively made” (Giddens 1991:3), where individuals can adapt to insecure contexts by reframing and rationalizing feelings in terms of freedom and flexibility.

Recognizing the challenges inherent in the Brazilian labor market, where companies might offer bids of R$5 (approximately U.S. $1) for a 500-word text, Gabriela insisted on the necessity of knowing how to “price,” by valuing one’s work. Therefore, self-knowledge became a central tool of emotional intelligence, a crucial competency for both personal and professional life. Self-knowledge is an affect that can enable women to identify their own value, “sabotaging fears,” thus helping them to better value themselves and manage market problems through the reconfiguration of feelings of self-valorization.

The notion of a personal relationship with money was associated with shaping an emotional disposition that must be molded to handle finances, potentially resulting in either flawed or adequate approaches. The premise that everything requires financial resources—whether for food, housing, transport, or education—reframed the issue of accessing money not as a problem but as a matter of good or bad management. In other words, it was not about having a surplus or a shortage of money, but rather about knowing how to manage it “correctly.” While recognizing that there is no universal way of managing finances, given that each individual experiences distinct financial realities and inherently unequal access to resources, it was about making even the scarcer income received adequate to meet a living standard.

The stereotypical idea that women are prone to consumerism was evoked to indicate it should be curbed and managed according to the distinct financial reality each one experienced. This idea refers to a type of “scarcity management,” as discussed by Freire (2019), where the population’s infinite demands in face of finite resources must be governed in a way that reproduces the living conditions and social locations of individuals, particular the poorer. Those with scarce resources are always managed (and must self-govern) on the basis of the conditions of possibility presented in precarious scenarios. Thus, when discussing the notion that women’s independence relies on acquiring financial autonomy, learning to manage resources, both financial and emotional, toward the ideal of being “in charge of one’s own life” works as the ultimate expression of enlightened free choice, despite the scarcity of resources available and different positions women might occupy in a classed and racially structured society such as Brazil.

Gabriela shared her personal experience with money. Raised in a typically “patriarchal family,” in which her father managed all the household finances, she grew up aspiring to financial independence, making it her primary life goal, “more than getting married,” which led her to start working at the early age of 14. At the time, Gabriela, a 38-year-old white middle-class woman with a bachelor’s degree in public relations, married and with no children, owned a small business of marketing consultancy. She stated that she “could not imagine herself” without working and managing her own finances, attributing a very important part of her identity to the independence provided by owning her money. In other words, for Gabriela, independence involved rejecting any kind of dependency on others—spouse, father, state, family—expressing a state of personal fulfillment that allowed her to embody the notion of a morally upright person committed to the work ethics (Weeks 2011) and master of her own destiny (“dona de si” in Portuguese).

A recurring recommendation in the She Can training sessions emphasized the importance of systematically recording all income and expenditures as a fundamental practice for effective business management. Through the notes, it would be possible to understand the macroeconomic context, such as the overall economic environment and market trends, as well as the micro perspective: “how am I handling finances?” (emphasis added). Self-awareness appeared again within a narrative framework that emphasized the need for a constant exercise of inner listening, enabling women to identify their personal values and relationship with the world, where money management was a self-reflexive exercise to ensure financial freedom.

Emphasizing that for many women money is associated with “sacrifice and suffering,” when the work is tied to activities that do not bring personal fulfillment, Gabriela suggested that it was necessary to conduct a deep self-analysis of what the participants really “enjoyed” doing, what were their passions, and to recognize their potentialities. One must ask oneself, “What do I really like to do? What brings me pleasure? What am I good at?” The conjunction of personal interests and skills would allow women to create a virtuous cycle of pleasure regarding money, resulting in an expression of one’s “essence” in their businesses. Gabriela asserted that money was an outcome of “what we do with love,” rhetorically asking, “Has anyone ever heard of someone succeeding by doing something they don’t like? Money is the result of what we love and do well.” Once again, self-awareness emerged as a prerequisite for aligning what one loves with generating an income: one must know oneself toward fulfilling an idealized affective economy in which work must be pleasurable and profitable to produce the empowered women. Consequently, “being successful” in this economy appeared directly dependent on working “with joy,” implying that engaging in activities one loves could make them work more, as pleasure would allow women to intensify work hours “every day, overnight, on weekends.”

Transforming work into nonwork refers to what Abílio (2014) identified in her research among cosmetics saleswomen in Brazil as a contemporary phenomenon whereby consumption and work become intertwined. The ubiquity of new technologies and ideals of flexibility contribute to the loss of historically and socially recognized forms of work, while keeping workers in full labor activity. The idea of “amateur work” (Abílio 2013) or intermittent work is somewhat associated with fun and leisure, as suggested by “doing what you love,” resulting in the absence of a professional identity or any clear separation between private and public life, work and nonwork. In other words, these forms of flexible work promote modes that are unaccounted for and/or unrecognized as labor in the traditional sense, masking the recognition of capital and labor relations while intensifying and extending them into nonwork hours and spaces. Thus, by circulating statements that associate success, pleasure, and “working with joy” with forms of nonwork, the training sessions promoted expanded notions of work as an inseparable personal activity, which must become an integral part of the women’s entrepreneurial lives.

This aligns with what Freeman (2014) themed as “entrepreneurialism,” which implies

observably new structural arrangements of work and life and subtle new subjectivities in formation. The intensity of a new structure of feeling, a neoliberal emphasis on emotion, intimacy, and the introspective self is, I think, a critical marker of these times. These desires are meaningful in both enriching and disciplining ways; they represent both newly sought pleasures and burdens; they can unleash new desires and also become sources of alienation. (p. 212)

I would like to briefly discuss how the new structural arrangements of life and work brought by Freeman (2014) are socially and historically situated in Brazil. Labor informality is a foundational characteristic of the Brazilian labor market (IBGE 2018; Guimarães 2007; Vaclavik, Oltramari, and Oliveira 2022), representing nearly 39 percent of the employed population (IBGE 2023a, 2023b). Predominance of informality is linked to historical characteristics of the country’s labor relations, where overlapping factors such as low education levels, excess labor supply, and lack of opportunities in the formal market are particularly important for women and Black women (Biderman and Guimarães 2004; de Freitas Fernandes, dos Reis, and Guimarães 2023). These traits are currently stabilized by the phenomenon of “entrepreneurial informality” (Vaclavik et al. 2022), what Abilio, Amorim, and Grohmann (2021) conceptualized as “processes of informalization,” in which the condition of informality permeates the entire labor process. In face of growing flexibilization of labor laws and neoliberal policies in Brazil, workers are more and more turned into the sole responsible for managing their own social reproduction, while technical-political means for the efficient and informal use of labor are being refined. In the absence of socially established and regulated limits on working hours, wages, and social security, entrepreneurial informality creates new spaces for individualized management, appearing as a form of “subordinated self-management” (Abilio et al. 2021).

Moreover, although the program claimed to be inclusive to all women, Murphy’s (2024) study on Black women entrepreneurs in Brazil raises critical questions about the feasibility of universal success. The Brazilian labor market is deeply shaped by interlocking mechanisms of gendered racism, which position Afro-Brazilian women in low-status economic roles. As Murphy demonstrated, entrepreneurship often emerges as a logical response to these structural exclusions, leading many Black women to work for themselves as an effect of labor market barriers.

In the acute processes of neoliberalization of the Brazilian economy and particularly of its labor market, entrepreneurialism sets out as a way of life, marked by a middle-class ethos and subjectivity (Freeman 2014) in which an entrepreneurial self growingly shapes the meaning of women’s lives, even though the program aimed to achieve women considered to be “in situation of socioeconomic vulnerability.” Such a claim for all participating women to adhere to middle-class values of self-realization through work can raise questions about what is being proposed by the program: how viable working with what one “loves” can be for the majority of racialized, working-class women in the Brazilian context? In an interview I conducted with one of the volunteers (Gallo Garcia, 2022), she observed that middle-class participants tended to achieve better outcomes after attending the training sessions, raising critical questions about the class-based nature of the program’s content and its potential challenges for Black, nonwhite, and working-class women. The solutions presented by the program point to practices of running their own business by requesting a constant psychological engagement, in which erasing boundaries between work and nonwork spaces should be welcomed to work day or night, weekdays and weekends, as an entrepreneurial lifestyle that comes with the promise of being “dona de si”: their own bosses.

Life Purpose as Empowerment

Knowing one’s life goals was a recurrent theme in the training sessions. Having clear purposes and determined goals to guide one’s life was directly connected to the notion of empowerment, which should be expressed as the capacity to fulfill objectives, orientate actions and choices through calculations and life strategies. The rationalization of personal and professional life purposes was to be achieved through self-knowledge technologies, and then “measuring results” was presented as a strategy for assessing the current state of the business, to determine whether such goals were progressing toward a predetermined ideal, as well as to create improvement strategies. Thus, “learning quickly from mistakes,” through active practices of monitoring daily actions, revenue, income as well as thoughts and behaviors would allow the swift correction of one’s own faults, in a constant effort of vigilance to “improve what needs to be improved” (Field diary, 2020).

The ability to learn from mistakes was considered a crucial leadership trait, a normative adaptive capacity to entrepreneurial discipline. This perspective held that individuals “only make mistakes when they are in motion,” as failures are inherent to action, but it was the lessons learned that facilitated growth. Personal experiences of frustration, such as being laid off or the bankruptcy of a previous business should then be seen as catalysts for improvement. In fact, any action that did not turn out as desired should not be discouraging, but always as an opportunity for enhancement. In this context, failures become opportunities where the value is placed on the capacity for resilience and avoiding passivity in face of challenges, be it in business or in personal life. This required participants to cultivate a subjectivity capable of navigating the uncertainties of a volatile economic environment, always subject to crises, be it the COVID-19 pandemic, political or economic hurdles.

As noted by Scoz (2018) in research conducted with start-up entrepreneurs in Brazil, failures should be disclosed and celebrated as integral parts of past narratives, within a rhetoric of overcoming obstacles as a formative character experience of entrepreneurial subjects who learn from their mistakes. This observation aligns closely with what Scharff (2016) identified as the prevalence of “survivor discourses,” connected to the neoliberal logic of self-regulation and the underlying concept of the entrepreneurial self, wherein the influence of broader sociopolitical contexts tends to be erased from discussions.

Knowing how to handle adversities was, therefore, an intrinsic psychological capacity of a leader’s personality to overcome the unexpected. According to Maria, a 42-year-old Black woman, mother of two, and one of the program’s volunteers, the proper conduct of a successful woman should follow her own strategy:

I wasted many days of my life because of situations that were beyond my control. I might initially react—suffer, curse, get irritated—but then, I move on! Let’s move on! Now, as someone with better emotional management, I get down to the bottom, I “explode,” but nowadays I find it easier to move on from that moment. Let’s go! What’s the next activity? Get dressed, have breakfast, and continue your day, right? I’m not going to lose a good, productive day just because I stubbed my toe, something didn’t go right or if I got stuck in traffic, whatever the situation may be.

Dealing with the unexpected was deeply associated with managing “the emotions that women have,” based on the understanding that they possess keen ability to deal with emotions, be them positive or negative. Balancing emotions was seen as a crucial skill encapsulated by the concept of “emotional intelligence,” which denotes the specific competence of exerting control over one’s emotions and thoughts. The investment in acquiring more self-knowledge as a tool for self-development represented a higher form of knowledge that the program could provide in comparison with any technical knowledge about business management. Maria asserted that technical skills could be easily acquired through research on Google and tutorials available online (e.g., on YouTube), whereas the self-knowledge techniques promoted in the training sessions was a unique opportunity that only each woman could explore for herself.

Nonetheless, Maria announced “good news” to the participants: although it was not possible to choose what happens to us and how we feel, everyone could invest in managing their emotions, handling what they feel through intentional and calculated rationalization of inner scrutiny. Emotions were recognized as guiding how decisions were made, drawing from the neurolinguistic programming framework, to explain how our brains have both the “emotional” and “logical-mathematical” sides. It was necessary, then, to perform careful emotional work to learn how to “dose” them by finding an ideal balance point, crucial for a successful life.

In similar vein of Hochschild’s (1979) studies, in which research respondents characterized their emotions through several verbal forms, Maria framed “getting irritated” and then “moving on” as her emotional ability for self-reflection and shaping inner feelings, a capacity that is itself distributed along lines of class, age, racial, local and historical contexts. Once again, Wingfield’s (2021) evocation to consider how different expectations and requirements of emotional labor from racial minority allow us to question how such statements could perpetuate forms of gendered, racialized and classed inequalities, given that emotion management requirements can be unevenly distributed often placing greater burdens on Black individuals and working-class workers compared with their white and middle-class counterparts.

In the rise of a therapeutic culture, the emphasis on interior life is expressed as a middle-class ethos (Illouz 2007); however, the cultivation of emotional skills appeared in the training as a rationalizing process that must be performed by every woman who wants to succeed. Here, following Ahmed (2004:6) once again, rationality is an affect, rather than the absence of affects. By rejecting the possibility to separate body, mind, feelings and thoughts, emotions bring together “thought and evaluation, while it is “felt” by the body” (Ahmed 2004) and becomes part of one’s apprehension of the world.

Such rationalizations were clear in another training led by Maria, in which she asserted the importance of understanding emotions: they can either propel us forward or paralyze us. We become paralyzed when we feel fear, which was presented as one of the five universal emotions that produce feelings: anger, fear, disgust, love, and sadness. In fact, Maria claimed that we can manifest more than 1,000 different feelings as responses from our emotions. Understanding what one is feeling was the basic premise for seeking solutions and applying decision-making processes regarding how we manage and take responsibility for them. In this sense, emotions were not separated from economic rationale for decision making, but something that must be carefully measured, calculated and managed as integral to women’s entrepreneurial activities.

The environment fostered by WENI aimed to be a “safe space” where sharing failures could strengthen future entrepreneurial plans, becoming a source of learning and emotional support through the circulation of stories about common adversities in the volatile world of entrepreneurship. Knowing that other women face similar situations and challenges was intended to provide psychological comfort, enabling them to “move forward,” inspired by the success stories of others. Therefore, adopting a positive attitude toward the setbacks of entrepreneurship was crucial, as only those “brave enough to take risks can make mistakes.”

Narratives such as the valorization of failures, the necessity of investing in self-knowledge and self-confidence, and the consequent reflection of a “personal value” to the business was seen as essential for thriving in the Brazilian context of economic instability, intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, in which many of the trainings took place. Creating a strong brand for the business meant engaging people (e.g., clients), and self-knowledge was required to produce a unique brand connected to the life story of each woman, who needed to engage customers in their narrative. As Hochschild (1979) noted, emotional work can be done not only upon the self but by the self upon others. Telling engaging stories was central to (personal) branding, often through creating narratives of overcoming challenges. Women were then encouraged to write their own stories, positioning themselves as leaders—as “the protagonists of their own lives” as a branding strategy. Being the protagonist of one’s own story demanded self-knowledge to effectively narrate one’s life in a way that engaged clients or potential business collaborations. In other words, crafting narratives about oneself meant producing markets and forming relationships that were simultaneously affective and economic (Zelizer 2005). The “contamination” of affects (Ahmed 2004; Fontefrancesco 2023) must become a central technology for business creation, as an integral part of the feeling rules promoted on women’s entrepreneurial trainings.

Discussion: Emotional Intelligence as an Antidote for Inequalities

The training programs brought the question of self-development as a tool to address two connected factors: social and personal. On the social sphere, internalized “limiting beliefs” constituted sets of patriarchal norms in which women were constructed as inherently emotional beings, socialized to be caring and nurturing, and therefore not properly prepared to be rational or competitive market agents. Such limiting beliefs were reframed in this affective economy in which women’s supposed capacity to access their emotions more easily than men would represent an asset, a market opportunity, thus encouraging participants to balance their emotions to better channel them for entrepreneurial purposes.

It is notable how frameworks of feminist discourses were mobilized by addressing gender inequalities as social constructs, which could, therefore, be modified through individual and collective desires to transform the society. These narratives coexist ambivalently within the discursive space of the trainings, where essentialisms fixate on a supposedly shared female “social” nature, such as the beliefs that women “are more humane” and caring for others’ needs, which were constantly reiterated. Overcoming the place that “society” reserves for women implied, in this view, a reading that all women, regardless their differences of class, race, age, educational background and so on, still shared a common social space based on their “feminine” condition. Questioning this space should then be a locus of constant activity, where accessing one’s own subjective domain to counter the supposed female insecurity in handling money or a business could be achieved through a profound inner dialogue. The disadvantageous social position of women could thus be transformed first and foremost by the individual investment in themselves: if women suffered from “impostor syndrome,” the most efficient solution was to develop self-knowledge and emotional intelligence to internally refute such feelings. Women’s disadvantage, however, has been challenged by a growing body of research on how racial and class differences shape variations in emotion work individuals can perform (Ipsa-Landa and Thomas 2019; Murphy 2024; Wingfield 2010, 2021) exposing the paradoxes of assuming a universal feminine standpoint without accounting for these interlocking structures.

Although the challenges to accessing a stable income were acknowledged through examples of predatory practices, such as the offer of $1 for a 500-word text mentioned by Gabriela, this did not equate to recognizing the widespread precarity in the labor market. If changing the world of work was not seen as feasible in the short term, then it should be addressed through individual conditioning that refuses to accept such working conditions, thereby shifting the burden of overcoming existing exploitative practices onto women’s shoulders. As Gill (2016) noted, these iterations locate the solution to social injustices upon the self rather than on sociopolitical structures, prioritizing an individual problem-solving approach as a much more effective way to address inequalities and exploitation. Here, it seems crucial to follow Martinez Dy, Marlow, and Martin (2016:6) in using gender as an important “initial framing category” to further explore how intersections of class, race, age, disability, and other differences interplay to produce unequal opportunity structures for empowerment.

By framing finances as a matter of self-care (e.g., valorizing one’s work, accessing a living income), the trainings fostered discourses of intensive emotional and psychological labor to be performed by women while silencing the self-exploitation (Duberley and Carrigan 2013) implied in such norms of shaping the entrepreneurial self. Many volunteers of the project framed themselves as already empowered (Dosekun 2015) through their newfound autonomy as entrepreneurs while intensifying the material and emotional labor demanded to cope with the instability of labor conditions, for which only a resilient posture could encompass the challenging context to make ends meet. By stating her lifelong goal of being financially autonomous, Gabriela framed her experience as an entrepreneur as a pleasurable way of life centered on self-fulfillment, where “real barriers do not exist (‘just’ stereotypes), obstacles can be surmounted (with persistence) and ambitious personal career aspirations are the norm” (Byrne, Fattoum, and Diaz Garcia 2019:21). Disregarding how class, race, and regional differences play an important role in distributing the opportunities to accept or decline these exploitative working conditions in Brazil, the predominant “fix the women to fix the world” (Chant and Sweetman 2012) approach does very little to challenge systemic barriers that can hinder women’s possibilities to overcome them.

The answer to such problems is then placed on emotional and bodily work as cognitive capacities to transform the social status of women through feeling management as the most effective way to “change the world” around them. Connecting with the inner self involves a careful scrutiny of one’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, where economic well-being becomes a matter of technical adjustment that must be rationalized and brought to consciousness as a practice. Self-care and self-confidence were constantly affirmed as “tools” to be “acquired” and then “employed” to strengthen one’s capacity to live a full life, even in the most adverse scenarios. The Wonder Woman pose and mantras of “I can and I achieve” become techniques that reinforce these self-governance frameworks, through the control of behaviors and thoughts deemed capable of unlocking each individual’s “internal potential,” which would allow “the world” to be transformed through the formulae of frustration-perseverance-success, as a linear pathway to empowerment. I argue that these efforts to universalize women’s experiences result in producing an essential category to the affective economies of empowerment: the self-knowledge that emerges as a universal solution, enabling narrow boundaries for women to gain visibility and intelligibility as “empowered.”

The circulating normative emotions shape the social space of the trainings, wherein the identities (as “empowered” women) and power dynamics reproduce uneven power relations between those who teach (the volunteers, normally middle-class women) how to become empowered, and those yet to be reached (the deemed “vulnerable” participants) through emotional norms forged by the affective flows operating within these structures. As Ahmed (2004) noted, affective economies operate through processes of attachment and detachment, where certain emotions are desired while others must be marginalized. These affective valuations are constantly reiterated by power relations in the social space of the trainings, in which women become empowered in patriarchal societies by efficiently rationalizing emotions: a feminine capacity to manage, improve, and tailor feelings to deal with an unstable business and work environment, therefore contributing to the maintenance of such social order of labor precarity.

These dynamics can be characterized as what D’Aoust (2014) called “neoliberalism as a regime of emotional governance,” in which the neoliberal mandate for entrepreneurial flexibility requires “technologies of the self” (Foucault 2004; Freeman 2014) to perform new ways of being to cope with an unstable political-economic context. Although trainings intensified discourses of turning crises into opportunities, the crisis in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic emerged as something to be leveraged through the mobilization of attributes considered feminine, which had gained increased value because of the heightened demand for care, an inherently feminine capacity, be it self-care or care for clients’ needs. Empowerment thus became highly dependent on psychological resilience to navigate a world permeated by uncertainties, requiring adherence to circulating affects as a means to achieve the predetermined forms of autonomy advocated by WENI’s program.

Conclusion

In this article I sought to present a case study analysis of an entrepreneurship program sponsored by a transnational corporation and executed by a Brazilian NGO with the aim to economically empower “vulnerable” women. Analyzing the promotion of socioemotional capacities, embedded in transnational gender and development discourses for women’s empowerment (Calkin 2014; Cornwall 2018), was central to exploring how a particular affective economy is being constructed by the program. This involved the dissemination of norms to control and manage emotions as a central ability to acquire visibility as an “empowered woman.” By understanding that affective economies can reproduce, maintain, or challenge existing power structures, I argued that the emotions required by the social space of training sessions contribute to reinforcing social hierarchies between those “already empowered” and those yet to be reached by the ability to perform adequate emotional work.

Concerns for emotional work were intensified by conditions of labor precarity in which women were required not only to produce “positive” affects to counter them but mainly to subordinate and manage “negative” emotions that can arise amid socioeconomic insecurity. Such demands for positive affects and emotional management emerge because of the productivity of such affects under a neoliberal context and crucially operate ideologically to normalize precarious working conditions (Veldstra 2020). From a critical feminist and race studies standpoint, this article echoes Tonelli’s (2023) critique of the “everything changes to remain the same” dynamic by analyzing the limitations of dominant liberal feminism discourses in corporate-sponsored programs. The She Can program overlooks the inseparability of gender, race, and class in addressing the diverse labor experiences of participants, yet these factors remain central to understanding how capitalist exploitative dynamics sustain economic systems (Davis 1981), particularly in a racially and gendered stratified society such as Brazil (Carneiro 2003). These initiatives emphasize individual self-making for market integration, reflecting a middle-class ethos aligned with neoliberal capitalism, an approach that perpetuates narrow visions of women’s participation in the labor market while sidelining more radical, intersectional perspectives to address systemic inequalities rooted in racial capitalism and global power structures in which women from the Global South must navigate (Mohanty 1984).

While this article is focused on the discourses promoted by these programs, which leaves little room to contest the affective economies at play, my analysis elsewhere (Gallo Garcia, 2022) explored how volunteers can adopt more critical stances toward the very content they are tasked with delivering. Through individual interviews, some volunteers expressed more ambivalent and nuanced views about the content being taught, often grappling with their own challenges in meeting these standards of constant self-improvement as entrepreneurs. For instance, Luna, a white, middle-class volunteer, shared her doubts about imposing these norms on “vulnerable” women, noting that even she found them difficult to apply in her own life and business, even questioning her capacity to mentor others under such expectations. However, as highlighted in this article, the overarching message of the training programs ultimately promotes a less critical, more idealized vision of individual solutions as the best approach to overcoming labor market exclusions and adversities.

These affective economies are reflexive of significant structural shifts in global and national economies, where labor relations increasingly need to be negotiated and managed individually, in a context where “the exchange of emotion is itself a form of value in both the formal marketplace and outside it” (Freeman 2014:209). As women are increasingly portrayed as untapped resources of labor because of their supposed capacity to perform care work, the naturalization of mastering emotional management to overcome and deal with life challenges becomes heightened. The loud silence on how the emotional labor required by such empowerment programs may be shaped by classed and racialized dynamics embedded in society and institutions remains largely unaddressed and should be a focal point for further research inquiry.

The training sessions served as a space for constant reinvention and creating awareness of the rapid transformations of the business environment. Perhaps most important, the trainings were a privileged space to advocate for deep inner work as a tool to adapt to crises, lack of income, and dispositions to become subjects who not only accept crises as part of life but revere them as opportunities. As Hochschild (2011:32) noted, emotional work is a “way of regulating capitalism from the inside” through the development of actions and adaptation to feeling rules as a way of self-making. As researchers, we must continue to question and examine whether disciplinary forms of self-regulation, like those promoted by the She Can program and many similar initiatives worldwide, truly offer sustainable and transformative pathways to all women’s empowerment or merely reinforce the structural challenges they aim to address.