Entrepreneurship and subjectivation: meanings of "empowerment" among Brazilian black women

• Grant number: 21/13261-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date: May 10, 2022
• End date: May 09, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Theory of Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Regina Facchini
• Grantee: Gleicy Mailly da Silva
• Supervisor: Elisabeth Prugl
• Host Institution: Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero (PAGU). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Switzerland
• Associated to the scholarship: 18/04929-8 - Contemporary black feminisms and market: the empowerment discourse as a mediator of spaces of enunciation, BP.PD

Abstract

The present project focuses the uses of the category "empowerment" for the formulation of an international agenda of gender equality policies, aimed particularly at in poor countries of the Global South. As an extension of the main project on the relation between discourses of feminism and practices of entrepreneurship among young black college women, it strives to shed light on the role of international women's empowerment projects - involving the partnership between transnational companies and public actors - for the promotion of local development policies. I have two objectives: a) producing an historical reconstruction, already in process, on the origins of the concept of "women's empowerment", in dialogue with the feminist literature on development; b) mapping and investigating projects aimed at the empowerment of women in the last two decades, paying special attention to the articulations between gender and development, which involve the relationship between transnational dynamics, promoted by multilateral agencies' documents, private funding from large companies and social projects at local level, mostly directed to the Global South countries. Alongside ethnographic online and offline research held in Brazil, this project focuses the production and the analysis of a documental frame that encompasses the disputes of the meanings of "empowerment" to engage women from different social classes in an economical language articulated to feminist discourses. (AU)