Chapter 4: Feeling, Thinking, Doing: Emotional Capital, Empowerment, and Women’s Education

In the field of international development, women’s education has become the cause celebre in recent years (Vavrus, 2002). The development community’s promotion of girls’ and women’s education in the Global South has been informed largely by variations of “equity” and “efficiency” rationales. Despite their differences and the important critiques of neoliberal instrumentalist assumptions underlying efficiency arguments (see Lazo, 1995; Njeuma, 1993; Parpart, 2000; Stromquist, 1995; and Vavrus, 1997) these approaches share a belief in the relationship between education and women’s empowerment. Debates around women’s empowerment abound in the international development, comparative education, and feminist literatures, frequently revolving around issues of definition, goals, strategies, and assessment (Kabeer, 1999; Mosedale, 2005; and Stromquist, 1995, 1998). What has been less frequently explored is the significance of the embodied nature of empowerment and the ways in which affective, cognitive and material dimensions of empowerment resonate within and emanate from the body.