Moving beyond Co-optation: Gender, Development, and Intimacy

Development discourse has centered a female entrepreneur as the savior of the developing world, while feminist development studies has been ambivalent about the focus on women as ideal development agents, as well as of market-based approaches as solutions to inequality. This dilemma has fueled debates regarding the co-optation of feminist politics for a series of state, transnational and corporate interventions that are antithetical to feminist principles of social justice. This study examines how a women's cooperative in Costa Rica that works on entrepreneurship and technology challenges boundaries between autonomy and co-optation through a series of organizational practices and loving relationships among themselves, as well as with the communities they serve. The research is based on in-depth interviews with the cooperative's associates, collaborators, and workshop participants, with Costa Rican government officials and administrators at national technical universities, and participant observation at the organization in San José. I found that solidarity-based organizational practices enable a feminist technopolitical praxis that challenges market-centered strategies by forging collectivized ways of living and working, and that in this context technology is localized, collectivized, and felt. These findings suggest that examining process and implementation defies fixed narratives on the relationships between gender, entrepreneurship, technology, and development.