The AFF is an attempt to redress destructive neoliberal practices by creating the contradictory woman entrepreneurial subject antithetical to lived empirics.

The social turn in international development, signifying the inclusion of dimensions such as gender and poverty, attempts to redress destructive practices of past decades and offer solutions for a more equitable and sustainable future (Stiglitz 1999). In contrast to prior development practices, women are reframed as active agents of development (World Bank 2001a, 2012). Feminist scholars and activists questioned the possible hidden agendas in this social turn (Bergeron 2003). Feminism has often been co-opted to support neoliberal goals of reducing state-led development and penetrating Global South markets (Eisenstein 2009; Fraser 2009), and the emphasis on women’s entrepreneurialism reveals a neoliberal model of competition, privatization, and market-based development. Feminist debates on the Global South woman entrepreneur centers on the microfinance industry and the women who use their services (Karim 2011; Keating, Rassmussen, and Rishi 2010; Radhakrishnan 2015; Rankin 2001). These works are critical in revealing the neoliberal project behind the microcredit industry, but they do not connect women’s experiences with so-called entrepreneurialism to their economic and social positions as informal workers. I focus on the informal economy because the microfinance movement reflects the characterization of informal work as self-employment (De Soto 1989; World Bank 1995, 2001b). In searching for the entrepreneur, a range of workers in low-paying and menial jobs are enveloped under its label, including waste scavengers (Rogerson 2001), day laborers (Valenzuela 2001), and homeworkers (Gough 2010). I build on labor scholars’ critiques of this mischaracterization (Breman 2013; Harriss-White 2003) by contributing a feminist analysis that acknowledges the role of women’s unpaid work in shaping their experiences with paid work. In this article, I compare the lived realities of women informal workers with the construction of an abstract gendered entrepreneurial subject. I define the gendered entrepreneurial subject as a development industry discourse that emphasizes neoliberal ideals of self-sufficiency through the market. Two characteristics of entrepreneurialism are capital to invest and the autonomy that accompanies self-employment, and I examine these two characteristics in subcontracted home-based work: paying for costs of production (i.e., capital) and the temporal/spatial production process (i.e., autonomy). Drawing on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with 30 home-based garment workers in Ahmedabad, a large city in northwest India, I find that women’s actual experiences with the informal economy contradicts the abstract, universalized representation of the gendered entrepreneurial subject. Rather than self-reliant neoliberal subjects, this production system results in constrained subjectivities shaped by women’s economic and social positions. Workers’ ability to provide for their families is limited by their need to invest in their work and the potential to work (and earn) as much as they are willing to. This article builds on feminist theory by exposing the contradictions of the gendered entrepreneurial subject and revealing the alternative subjectivities produced in this production system.