Dreaming the Welfare-State: Indian Women-Studies-Movement, Neoliberalism and Feminist Future

Abstract

Through an account of the history of women-studies-movements in India, the paper aims to interrogate the 'temporality' of feminist response to the neoliberal reality. By juxtaposing two dominant narratives situated differently, the paper appeals for a reevaluation of contemporary feminist knowledges that bemoan the loss of 'welfare state' and collective political struggles. Through a critical account of women-studies-movements in India, and the inability of their dominant stories to respond to the current conundrums of responding to the 'neoliberal' subject, the paper argues that it is not just the neoliberal reality which is hegemonic and all too powerful, but also the feminist stories that constitute it.

No Publication, No Degree

“…First, this kind of articulation doesn't find meaningful place in Indian academia except for scattered reflections on the nature of academic work. Second, certain notions such as "precarity" that predominate the discussion globally cannot address the specificity of the postcolonial position and its dreams of a welfare state that never materialized (Arora 2020). Thus, it is not the experience of precarity and its nostalgia for Fordist or social-welfarists configurations (Winn 2015, 4) that interests us.…”

Technology hype: Dealing with bold expectations and overpromising

“…For some time now, the amount of attention social experiments receive has raised suspicions of hype. Critics have worried that many claims about experiments' superiority are epistemically unjustified, politically tendentious, and ethically questionable, because they involve unwarranted generalizations beyond the particular experimental context, promote small problem fixes at the expense of larger socio-economic effects, and are cavalier about people's rights (Kvangraven 2019;Picciotto 2012;Ravallion 2009). Pushing these critiques further, some speak of the emergence of a new 'empire of truth' that crowds out democratic deliberation through technocratic governance (Kelly and McGoey 2018) or an elitist 'global lab' that reduces people to the equivalent of test animals (Fejerskov 2022).…”

Tech hype as a mnemonic process: Misremembering the land problem in India

“…By enacting a critical appraisal of the DILRMP, RLT forecloses a potential critical relation that can "order the entire field of moral and political judgement" (Butler 2001). Instead, it relies on available configurations where the harms ensuing from data, datafication and use of technology can be mitigated through civil society consultations and a promise of a functional social welfare state, an elusive postcolonial dream (Arora 2020) that can domesticate the market while offering, presumably, a democratic alternative to the technocracy of big tech. It remains unclear how this conclusion is any different from the 'efficiency discourse' of tech-solutionism that is critiqued at the beginning The auto-ethnographic account above, when refracted through Lee Vinsel's (2021) argument does not only foreground how "innovation speak distracts us from ordinary problems of technology and infrastructure, including maintenance, repair, and mundane labour."…”