Reconceptualizing Empowerment and Autonomy: Ethnographic Narratives from a Self Help Group in South India

Abstract

The paper revisits academics’ conceptualisations of women empowerment as stopping short of autonomy. It departs from the general observation that women empowerment movements by and large have failed to translate the new agency of women outside the domains of socio-economy; that women empowerment movements’ capacity to re-engage with patriarchal structures and ideologies is seriously contained. Through an ethnography of Kudumbashree, an SHG in the South Indian state of Keralam, we question the neat distinctions between empowerment and autonomy that prevail in the academic common sense. The transition of agency from the economic to the political domain is a subtle enterprise and is mediated by a number of factors, including the awareness, economic independence, personal freedom, mobility, decision making capability, and political participation. Socio-economic and political implications of women empowerment could be the first step in challenging and overcoming the relations of oppression in any society. The stereotypical assumptions can be negotiated by solely apportioning responsibilities and re-engaging with the system through everyday practices. The ethnography rearticulates the subversive potentials of socio-economic forms of women empowerment. The nuances of empowered women’s re-engagement with local gender/power regimes lead to changes at the conceptual level that cuts beyond the individual and group level material transformations.