Interrogating the Relationship Between Corporate ‘Philanthropy’ and the Classification of Human Capability as Human Capital: A Feminist Enquiry into the Biopoliticisation of ‘Resistance’ in the Global South

In this paper, I shall aim to elucidate how the political philosophy of biopolitics strengthens and by that very same token, also dismantles the analytic of feminist resistance in contemporary postcolonial India. In order to do so, I shall engage in an analysis of the manner in which Nike Foundation, the corporate ‘philanthropic’ strand of Nike, the multinational corporation, classifies between “feminist resistance” and “female victimhood” for the Global South. The analysis would comprise of a critical textual and documentary analysis of Nike’s corporate project “The Girl Effect”, its relationship with certain World Bank human development documents and the manner in which this biopolitical endeavour has been projected by the corporation, international financial organisations as well as local Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOS) in India as an epitome of ‘feminist resistance’, a ‘rebellion’ or a ‘revolution’ against ‘3rd world hunger, poverty and sexual violence’. The paper aims to ask, in Nike’s efforts at supposedly ‘recognising’ this universal gendered subject of transnational development, which demographic categories are governed and thus reified as a ‘deviant population’ or as immanent ‘threats’ to the teleological growth of a ‘prosperous’ nation-state? How do affective technologies of control recognise this overdetermined figure of the ‘3rd world adolescent girl’ as a repository of both feminist resistance as well as human capital and thereby constitute the generation of such forms of capital as the pre-condition for the birth of the feminist democratic subject of rights? Also, how does feminist resistance get redefined by such corporate endeavours as a bio-economic site where noted development theories aiming at ‘developing’ adequate human capabilities (drawing from Amartya Sen’s Capabilities Approach) merge with Foucaultian efforts at securitising human capital? Moreover, how does the emergence of biology as an emancipated ‘science of the norm’ (as opposed to natural history), now ensure that the politics of feminist resistance is brought within the fold of statistically ratiocinated probabilities of existence? Here, resistance will be argued to get translated into economised neoliberal discourses of optimisation of both reproduction as well as economic production so that political subjectivity is attributed only to the extent one can be classified as a ‘resource’. The paper aims at addressing some of these research questions dealing with the conflation of the logic of capital and the figure of the citizen primarily by showing how there is a complete shift in focus from laws, acts, governmental regimes to the rendering of the ‘inner psyche’ and ‘internal rationality’ of the ‘3rd world female agent’ amenable to governance. Most significantly, in this biopoliticised process of counting the ‘third world agent’s’ ‘worth’, I shall try to demonstrate how the classical liberal distinction between the democratic rights-bearing subject (politico-juridical subject) and the subject of interest (economic subject) gets dismantled. Under such altered geo-political conditions, the paper tries to analyse through which technological rationalities of governance feminist resistance gets repositioned and biopoliticised as a site where the juridical subject merges with or is cast as the subject of interest, thereby helping in the generation of surplus value and transnational capital.