Empowering women: The contradictions of feminist governance

Abstract

This chapter looks at a range of governmental and non-governmental discourses and practices-and their underlying rationalities-in the name of ‘saving’ women and upholding their rights, especially in the Global South. Such feminist governmentality-or ‘governance feminism’, as it’s come to be known-includes the use of strategies that are increasingly both punitive and paternal. In considering examples such as the regulation of early and forced marriage and public protests around sexual violence, we see how relations of empowerment can be both voluntary and coercive insofar as they seek to elicit the compliance of women but also to coerce them when they are unwilling to act in their own interests.