The Economic Woman: A Critical Reflection on the New Dutch Agenda for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation

Abstract

This thesis analyses and deconstructs the underlying logic and consequences of the new policy agenda of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation. By making use of a discursive approach, thereby drawing on scholars like Wendy Brown (2013) and Nikolas Rose (2000), the author carefully builds a critique on the reorientation of the female Southern subject in the respective policies to that of an ‘Economic Woman’, whose moral orientation is welded to a set of macro-economic ends. She argues that contemporary strategies to empower women, often influenced by ‘win-win’ rhetoric and imbued with neo-liberal market rationality, do not empower women or make them free; on the contrary, the reconfiguration of the Dutch state in entrepreneurial terms means that the female subject undergoes a form of political subjectivization whereby she loses not only her political status but even her guarantee of survival.

The author is currently in the process of anonymizing her thesis; the full-text will soon be available through Igitur.