Indexing alternatives: Feminist development studies and global political economy

Priti Ramamurthy’s 2000 article in Feminist Theory provides crucial methodological and theoretical contributions to feminist development studies and global political economy. As a feminist political economist conducting long-term ethnographic research in South India, Ramamurthy combines grounded fieldwork with critical theory to propose alternative perspectives for understanding development issues in the globalization era.

Feminist Critique of Mainstream Development Discourse

Ramamurthy systematically critiques gender blindness and epistemological limitations in mainstream development studies:

Development as Westernization

Mainstream development discourse equates “development” with Westernization and modernization:

• Presumes a single, linear development trajectory
• Views Western capitalist models as universal goals
• Denies diverse development paths of non-Western societies
• Obscures colonial history and ongoing unequal power relations

This discourse ignores that development itself is a colonial, gendered, and classed process.

Limitations of “Women in Development”

The Women in Development (WID) paradigm since the 1970s, while addressing gender, has fundamental problems:

• Views women as “target groups” rather than agents
• Focuses on “integrating” women into development without questioning development models
• Pursues incremental reforms rather than structural transformation
• Often reinforces rather than challenges gender divisions of labor

Ramamurthy argues that simply “adding women and stirring” cannot solve fundamental problems.

Gender Blindness in Economics

Mainstream economics and development economics systematically ignore:

• Reproductive labor: Domestic work and care excluded from GDP statistics
• Informal economy: Vast amounts of women’s informal work unrecognized
• Unpaid labor: Women’s community work and volunteer labor deemed “unproductive”
• Subsistence economy: Self-provisioning agriculture and small-scale production marginalized

This blindness is not accidental oversight but reflects fundamental biases in capitalist political economy.

Alternative Framework of Feminist Political Economy

Ramamurthy proposes an alternative analytical framework for feminist political economy:

Centrality of Social Reproduction

Drawing from Marxist feminist traditions (like Federici), Ramamurthy emphasizes:

• Social reproduction is the necessary foundation of capitalist accumulation
• Daily maintenance and intergenerational renewal of labor power are core economic processes
• Gendered organization of reproductive labor is a key mechanism of global inequality
• The production/reproduction binary itself needs questioning

Centering social reproduction reveals women’s labor as central to the global economy.

Feminist Reconstruction of Commodity Chain Analysis

Ramamurthy develops “feminist commodity chain analysis” methodology:

• Traces complete paths of commodities from production to consumption
• Reveals gendered labor and power relations at each link
• Attends to gender dimensions in value creation, extraction, and distribution
• Connects Northern consumers with Southern producers’ hidden relationships

Using Indian cotton commodity chains as example, she demonstrates how this method reveals gender and class dynamics of globalization.

Agency and Resistance

Ramamurthy opposes portraying Third World women as passive victims:

• Focuses on women’s everyday resistance and creative survival strategies
• Values women-led cooperatives, self-help organizations, and social movements
• Understands how women negotiate meaning and livelihoods within structural constraints
• Acknowledges contradictions: women are both structurally constrained and agentic

This perspective avoids both romanticizing and denigrating Third World women.

Cross-scale Analysis

Feminist political economy must connect multiple analytical scales:

• Micro: Household, body, everyday practices
• Meso: Community, local economy, social movements
• Macro: State policies, international institutions, global markets
• Transnational: Migration flows, transnational corporations, global governance

Ramamurthy argues only cross-scale analysis can comprehend complex entanglements of gender, development, and globalization.

Methodological Significance of “Indexing Alternatives”

The article’s title “Indexing alternatives” carries multiple methodological meanings:

Politics of Visibility

“Indexing” means making the invisible visible:

• Encoding women’s labor into economic statistics and theoretical models
• Recording and recognizing informal economy and unpaid labor
• Establishing alternative value metrics
• Challenging mainstream economics’ classification and measurement systems

This is epistemological struggle: redefining what counts as “economy,” “labor,” “value.”

Acknowledging Plurality

The plural “alternatives” emphasizes:

• No single feminist development model exists
• Acknowledges diverse survival strategies and development paths
• Values local knowledge and indigenous innovation
• Resists new universalisms and normalizations

Ramamurthy advocates epistemological pluralism, opposing one-size-fits-all development solutions.

Archive Construction

“Indexing” is also archival practice:

• Recording women’s experiences ignored by mainstream history
• Preserving knowledge of resistance and alternative practices
• Building counter-hegemonic knowledge archives
• Providing resources for future action

This archival work is itself political practice.

Feminist Critique of Globalization

Ramamurthy offers sharp critique of neoliberal globalization:

Gender Impacts of Structural Adjustment

World Bank/IMF-driven structural adjustment programs of the 1980s-90s:

• Cut social services, increasing women’s unpaid care burdens
• Privatized public resources, worsening poor women’s livelihoods
• Forced economic liberalization, destroying local production systems
• Exacerbated gender, class, and geographic inequalities

Women often become “shock absorbers” for structural adjustment, bearing social costs.

Traps of Export-oriented Development

Developing countries pushed to integrate into global markets:

• Establish export processing zones (EPZs) employing cheap female labor
• Promote agricultural commodification, undermining food sovereignty
• Encourage remittance economies relying on women migrant labor
• Race to the bottom competing on labor standards and environmental protection

This “race to the bottom” competition is borne primarily by women.

Paradox of Microcredit

Microcredit as development “panacea”:

• Individualizes poverty, ignoring structural causes
• Burdens women with debt and repayment pressure
• Reinforces gender divisions (women engaged in small-scale, low-profit activities)
• Neoliberalizes “empowerment,” replacing collective action with market logic

Ramamurthy warns against romanticizing microcredit, urging attention to its complex power effects.

Challenges of Transnational Feminist Solidarity

The article explores challenges and possibilities of building transnational feminist politics:

North-South Divide

Geographic inequalities within feminist movements:

• Northern feminism dominates discourse and resource allocation
• Southern women’s experiences marginalized or exoticized
• Development aid replicates colonial power relations
• Unequal geographies of theory production

Ramamurthy calls for decentering, building genuinely equal transnational dialogues.

Politics of Difference

How to build solidarity while acknowledging difference:

• Class, caste, race, religious divisions among women
• Different interests and priorities of women in different locations
• Avoiding essentializing “Third World women”
• Constructing coalitions based on shared struggles rather than identity

Intersectional perspectives are key, but must go beyond simply “listing” differences.

Contradictions of Global Civil Society

Role of international NGOs and development institutions in transnational feminism:

• Providing resources and platforms while potentially setting agendas
• Professionalization and NGO-ization weakening grassroots movements
• Tensions between advocacy work and direct action
• Balancing institutional engagement with radical critique

Ramamurthy advocates critical engagement—both utilizing and questioning these spaces.

Implications for Development Practice

Ramamurthy’s analysis has important implications for development practitioners:

Deepening Participatory Methods

Genuine participation is not extracting information or consulting:

• Recognizing local communities as knowledge producers
• Supporting autonomous organization and collective agency
• Long-term accompaniment rather than short-term projects
• Reflecting on power positions of external interveners

Ramamurthy’s own 30-year practice of continuously returning to the same Indian villages embodies this commitment.

Valuing the Informal Economy

Development policies must:

• Recognize and support women-led informal economic activities
• Provide infrastructure and public services, not just loans
• Protect rights of street vendors, home workers, etc.
• Redefine “productive” labor

Informal doesn’t equal marginal—it’s often the livelihood foundation for the majority.

Prioritizing Social Reproduction

Centering social reproduction in development means:

• Investing in public healthcare, education, childcare services
• Shortening work hours, supporting caregivers
• Recognizing and redistributing reproductive labor
• Challenging GDP growth as sole development indicator

This requires fundamentally rethinking development goals.

Disciplinary Dialogues and Methodological Innovation

Ramamurthy’s work facilitates interdisciplinary dialogues:

Feminist Geography

Dialogue with feminist geographers contributes:

• Attention to spatial politics and locality
• Analysis of global-local connections
• Social construction of scale
• Gender dimensions of territorialization and deterritorialization

Development Sociology

Interventions in development sociology include:

• Critiquing linear assumptions of modernization theory
• Valuing everyday life and micro-processes
• Emphasizing dialectics of agency and structure
• Methodological contributions of development ethnography

Political Ecology

Intersections with political ecology:

• Gender politics of natural resource access
• Environmental change impacts on women’s livelihoods
• Gender dimensions of ecological knowledge
• Critical development of ecofeminism

This interdisciplinarity enriches feminist development studies.

Contemporary Relevance

Ramamurthy’s analysis from over 20 years ago remains urgent today:

Ongoing Challenges

• Intensified neoliberalism: Market logic further penetrates all spheres of social life
• Deepening care crisis: Public service cuts, families and women bearing more care responsibilities
• Climate change impacts: Especially severe for women dependent on natural resources
• Feminization of migration: Global care chains continue expanding, new forms of exploitation emerging

New Forms of Struggle

Simultaneously, new forms of resistance and alternative practices emerge:

• Global South women-led social movements (like Via Campesina)
• Transnational organizing of care workers (like International Domestic Workers Federation)
• Alternative economic experiments (cooperatives, solidarity economy)
• Rise of degrowth and post-development thinking

Ramamurthy’s framework helps us understand and support these struggles.

Insights for Chinese Contexts

Ramamurthy’s analysis offers insights for understanding Chinese development:

Gender Dimensions of Chinese Development Model

• Rapid industrialization mobilizing and impacting rural women’s labor
• Women workers in the “world’s factory” and global commodity chains
• Left-behind women bearing agricultural and care labor
• Gendered mobility and exclusion in urbanization processes

Crisis of Social Reproduction

• One-child policy legacy and care pressures of aging society
• Marketization of public services’ impacts on women
• “996” work culture and work-life balance crisis
• Declining fertility and women’s rational choices

Transnational Connections

• Gender impacts of China’s investments in Global South (Belt and Road)
• Relationships between Chinese consumers and global commodity chains
• Dialogues between Chinese feminism and transnational feminist movements

Ramamurthy’s methodology provides tools for critically studying Chinese development.

Conclusion

Priti Ramamurthy’s “Indexing alternatives” provides powerful critique and constructive vision for feminist development studies and global political economy. Her core contributions:

Epistemological reconstruction: Bringing social reproduction, informal economies, and women’s agency from margins to analytical center, fundamentally changing how we understand “development” and “economy.”

Methodological innovation: Combining feminist commodity chain analysis, cross-scale ethnography, and participatory research provides tools for understanding globalization’s complexities.

Political commitment: Insisting on theory-practice connections, academic research serving social justice, allying with women-led grassroots movements.

In the 21st century, as neoliberal globalization deepens, climate crisis intensifies, and care work crisis becomes pronounced, the alternative development models Ramamurthy calls for become more urgent. We need not just “better development” but fundamental rethinking of development itself, building economic systems prioritizing social reproduction, ecological sustainability, and global justice.

Ramamurthy reminds us that “indexing” alternatives is not merely academic exercise but political practice—recording, recognizing, and supporting women and communities creating another world.

This article was written by AI assistant based on Priti Ramamurthy’s 2000 essay in Feminist Theory, incorporating her long-term feminist political economy research in India to explore critical analysis of development, globalization, and gender.