Description
In Making Women Pay, Smitha Radhakrishnan explores India's microfinance industry, which in the past two decades has come to saturate the everyday lives of women in the name of state-led efforts to promote financial inclusion and women's empowerment. Despite this favorable language, Radhakrishnan argues, microfinance in India does not provide a market-oriented development intervention, even though it may appear to help women borrowers. Rather, this commercial industry seeks to extract the maximum value from its customers through exploitative relationships that benefit especially class-privileged men. Through ethnography, interviews, and historical analysis, Radhakrishnan demonstrates how the unpaid and underpaid labor of marginalized women borrowers ensures both profitability and symbolic legitimacy for microfinance institutions, their employees, and their leaders. In doing so, she centralizes gender in the study of microfinance, reveals why most microfinance programs target women, and explores the exploitative implications of this targeting.
About the Author
Smitha Radhakrishnan is Professor of Sociology and Luella LaMer Slaner Professor of Women's Studies at Wellesley College and author of Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class, also published by Duke University Press.
Reviews
"Smitha Radhakrishnan's compelling and important study of women in the world of microfinance is one of the best books I've read in several years. No other book on the market features this kind of data, access, or methods of triangulation. With its clear writing, rich stories and nuance, Making Women Pay will challenge readers to think more critically about how microfinance is deeply gendered. Engaging, moving, and powerful." -- Kimberly Kay Hoang, author of * Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work *
"While the scholarship on microfinance has become increasingly nuanced over the past three decades, we still lack critical information about the very people who put microfinance into practice-namely, the loan officers, educators, and field-workers who directly interface with clients and act as brokers between clients and administration, as well as upper-level administrators. Smitha Radhakrishnan fills this critical gap, offering readers a new analysis of microfinance that takes seriously microfinance workers at all levels as social agents. Reading this book is a breath of fresh air and a true delight." -- Erin Beck, author of * How Development Projects Persist: Everyday Negotiations with Guatemalan NGOs *
"...[T]he book is fascinating and does well to showcase how markets hurt women. Recommended. Undergraduates and faculty."
-- J. Bhattacharya * Choice *
"Smitha Radhakrishnan combines a novelist's eye with a sharp, feminist analysis. By sympathetically bringing to life the people she encounters in her research in southern India and the USA, she illustrates the serious underlying issues. . . Making Women Pay offers a disturbing but rewarding read." -- Deborah Eade * Gender & Development *
"Compelling. . . ." -- Kevin P. Donovan * Boston Review *
"Her scholarly analysis can serve as a textbook for graduate students and upper-level undergraduates, and her comprehensive bibliography offers multiple entry points to anyone interested in a deep exploration of microfinance practices." -- Nancy Nyland * Resources For Women And Gender Studies *
"In Making Women Pay, Smitha Radhakrishnan, a prominent voice in the studies of gender, neoliberalism, and globalisation, uncovers the complex chains of individuals, domestic and international institutions, and regulatory environments that constitute the Indian microfinance industry. . . . With its focus on social inequalities that underwrite the everyday work of MFIs in urban India, Making Women Pay is a valuable addition to the growing scholarship at the crossroads of gender and economic sociology." -- Anna Wozny * Asian Studies Review *
Book Information
ISBN 9781478014874
Author Smitha Radhakrishnan
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 386g
About the Author
Smitha Radhakrishnan is Professor of Sociology and Luella LaMer Slaner Professor of Women's Studies at Wellesley College and author of Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class, also published by Duke University Press.
Reviews
"Smitha Radhakrishnan's compelling and important study of women in the world of microfinance is one of the best books I've read in several years. No other book on the market features this kind of data, access, or methods of triangulation. With its clear writing, rich stories and nuance, Making Women Pay will challenge readers to think more critically about how microfinance is deeply gendered. Engaging, moving, and powerful." -- Kimberly Kay Hoang, author of * Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work *
"While the scholarship on microfinance has become increasingly nuanced over the past three decades, we still lack critical information about the very people who put microfinance into practice-namely, the loan officers, educators, and field-workers who directly interface with clients and act as brokers between clients and administration, as well as upper-level administrators. Smitha Radhakrishnan fills this critical gap, offering readers a new analysis of microfinance that takes seriously microfinance workers at all levels as social agents. Reading this book is a breath of fresh air and a true delight." -- Erin Beck, author of * How Development Projects Persist: Everyday Negotiations with Guatemalan NGOs *
"...[T]he book is fascinating and does well to showcase how markets hurt women. Recommended. Undergraduates and faculty."
-- J. Bhattacharya * Choice *
"Smitha Radhakrishnan combines a novelist's eye with a sharp, feminist analysis. By sympathetically bringing to life the people she encounters in her research in southern India and the USA, she illustrates the serious underlying issues. . . Making Women Pay offers a disturbing but rewarding read." -- Deborah Eade * Gender & Development *
"Compelling. . . ." -- Kevin P. Donovan * Boston Review *
"Her scholarly analysis can serve as a textbook for graduate students and upper-level undergraduates, and her comprehensive bibliography offers multiple entry points to anyone interested in a deep exploration of microfinance practices." -- Nancy Nyland * Resources For Women And Gender Studies *
"In Making Women Pay, Smitha Radhakrishnan, a prominent voice in the studies of gender, neoliberalism, and globalisation, uncovers the complex chains of individuals, domestic and international institutions, and regulatory environments that constitute the Indian microfinance industry. . . . With its focus on social inequalities that underwrite the everyday work of MFIs in urban India, Making Women Pay is a valuable addition to the growing scholarship at the crossroads of gender and economic sociology." -- Anna Wozny * Asian Studies Review *
Book Information
ISBN 9781478014874
Author Smitha Radhakrishnan
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 386g
