The Megarhetorics of Global Development

Chapter 7. Turning the Tables on the Megarhetoric of Women’s Empowerment

174 In August 2009 the New York Times Magazine published a special issue devoted to women’s global development and human rights, titled “Saving the World’s Women.” The release of the book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, written by humanitarian journalists Nicolas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, inspired this issue, which focused on the plight of women and girls from so-called developing countries. The articles—which, among other things, discuss the lesserknown pernicious effects of gender equality policies in China and India, explore the ways that wealthy women can invest in lower-income nations, present an interview with Liberia’s first female president, and announce how the “world-wide oppression of women is the cause of our time” (Kristof and WuDunn, “Saving the World’s Women” 16)—are positioned alongside charity and microlending advertisements that employ a rhetoric of empowerment. This side-by-side placement demonstrates both how economic development is connected to the concept of empowerment and how the material results of economic investment rhetorics depend upon presumed affective links between individual philanthropists-investors and women from poor nations. Rebecca Dingo Turning the Tables on the Megarhetoric of Women’s Empowerment 7 Turning the Tables on the Megarhetoric of Women’s Empowerment  175 For example, within the issue the charity organization the American Jewish World Service reminds readers that it has been “empowering women and girls in the developing world to take charge of their own lives by challenging violence, inequality, poverty and injustice” (American Jewish World Service). The arts organization Haute Couleur describes how “in a world where everything from tragedy to the quality of the air we breathe is tied to global market forces, [they] empower . . . women with the tools to unite with others into a global market force” (Haute Couleur). Special issue editor Gerald Marzorati points out in his editor’s note that “wealthy women are using their money to empower those who are less fortunate than they are” (8). And in their feature article, Kristoff and WuDunn celebrate how microlending has been a core tool for women’s empowerment, particularly in Southeast Asian countries (“Saving the World’s Women”). “Empowerment” is a term that has deep roots in feminist grassroots organizing and, as such, signals a pro-woman ideology whereby a group of “enlightened” and already “empowered” people reveal, mainly through consciousness-raising, how empowerment might be found from within individual people and communities. Yet these examples deploy the term “empowerment” in more complex and varied ways. Empowerment is at once intangible and something that is given, exchanged, felt, or taught. Its connotation does not point to an absolute outcome (although certainly the UN attempts to measure empowerment by tracking, for example, the economic, political, and professional participation of women compared to men).1 Rather, empowerment is both affect and feeling—indeed, one experiences empowerment and then that feeling is supposed to enable action, and predominantly, as in these earlier cases, personal economic change for the “third world” female citizen. One could read the aforementioned rhetorics of empowerment as being bound up in a traditional colonial power relationship whereby power is wielded from one (wealthy/“developed” citizen or organization) onto another (poor/“underdeveloped” citizen). Indeed, the title of the special issue “Saving the World’s Women,” which elicits questions about from whom or what we (i.e., the New York Times Magazine audience) are saving these women, suggests that empowerment can be transferred from one group to another. In each of these examples, the rhetoric of empowerment serves to establish not only an economic relationship but also an affective relationship . The donor not only lends or gives money to a poor woman but also presumes to connect to and then extend intangible support that will seemingly enable some form of financial agency for her. This presumed affective connection supports the common and taken-for-granted mega- 176  Rebecca Dingo rhetoric that women’s empowerment equals individual and national financial security. Following the work of political philosopher Brian Massumi, I define affect as a “synesthetic” bodily intensity that involves the “participation of the senses in each other” (35). Massumi describes affect as a sort of pre-speakable bodily intensity, and in this way it is different from emotion. Massumi explains emotion as “qualified intensity . . . [as affect translated] into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized” (28). I relate Massumi’s definition...