The politics of mobility and empowerment: The case of self-help groups in India

Within the empowerment literature, "freedom of movement" or "mobility" are frequently used as indicators to assess empowerment programmes or whether women have become socially empowered. As women's self-help groups (SHGs) engaged in saving/lending and livelihood schemes have emerged as the de facto vehicles for women's empowerment over the past two decades, their propensity for increasing women's opportunities for mobility has been an oft-lauded benefit. This has been especially pronounced as the empowerment agenda's prerogative to collectively transform power structures became co-opted by a neoliberal focus on fostering responsible financial subjects with entrepreneurial savvy. In this paper, I draw on multi-year ethnographic research of women's SHG interventions in eastern and central India to critically explore the ways different mobile practices intersect with empowerment goals. I contend it is necessary to examine mobility as more than physical movement and also to analyse it as a meaning-laden and embodied practice intimately bound up in the neoliberal development agenda. Using this analytic, I find that although newfound mobility is often experienced positively by women, it is far from "free," and remains embedded in power relations where women continue to engage on unfavourable terms - exemplified in women's inability to leisurely tour/wander. I conclude by reflecting on how empowerment interventions might more productively engage mobility less as a practice of increased economic and political participation and more as a site where women can experiment with new forms of being.