Sofie Tornhill

“A bulletin board of dreams”: corporate empowerment promotion and feminist implications

ABSTRACT This article examines the premises of corporate solutions to gender inequality in the Global South. In feminist debates, businesses’ increasing emphasis on women’s empowerment has been discussed both in terms of increasing feminist impact and the co-optation of feminist demands. To explore the ideological effects of corporate gender practices, focus is placed on the Coca-Cola Company’s global “5by20” campaign, which has the stated aim to empower five million women as small-scale entrepreneurs around the world and, in a “win–win” fashion, to double sales by 2020. Based on interviews and participatory observations in Mexico, this article traces a particular narrative of empowerment, envisioned as a transition from dependency to self-sufficiency and threatened by psychological and cultural restraints rather than material conditions. It shows that self-help and positive thinking are essential affective drives, thus reinforcing market-based, individualized development strategies. In response to feminist debates, the article concludes that corporate gender practices can be seen as part of a neoliberal transposition of equality concerns from a political to an economic domain. In effect, when initiatives such as 5by20 promote the accumulation of “human capital” to enhance gender equality, they simultaneously work to legitimize the inequalities that are necessarily entailed in competitive capitalism.

Pursuing Feminist Radicality

Pursuing Feminist Radicality : Rethinking Contemporary Feminist Politics Jonathan Dean Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2010, ISBN 978-0-230-23892-3 (226 pp.)

Capital visions : scripting progress and work in Nicaraguan free-trade zones

The electoral loss of the Sandinistas in 1990 marked the beginning of a transformation agenda in Nicaragua aimed at dismantling the revolutionary legacy. During the presidency of Enrique Bolaños (2002–2007), efforts to attract transnational capital to tax-exempt free-trade zones intensified. Advertising campaigns directed toward presumptive investors, workers, and the general public attempted to brand Nicaragua as an ideal destination for transnational capital, frame neoliberal restructurings in terms of a “common good,” and depict free-trade zones as a vehicle for female emancipation. Analysis of some of the products of these campaigns highlights efforts to legitimate new forms of the state and citizenship and suggests that the narrative of progress is troubled by intersecting power relations of gender and class that open the way for divergent interpretations of the global division of labor.