The economic empowerment of women remains a central feature of development projects worldwide. This article explores these empowerment aspirations by examining various temporal complexities related to two development projects in South India targeting individual cooking and fuel‐collection routines. It argues that three temporal considerations of household labour — polychronic time, collectivized time and hybrid labour/leisure time — are largely overlooked, thus challenging the appropriateness of empowerment strategies from the outset. By highlighting key household dynamics this study argues that efforts to pursue economic empowerment by members of the clean cookstove sector devalue unpaid labour and glorify waged work that is often tedious and mediated by powerful men. Further, waged work can be burdensomely added to pre‐existing unpaid domestic labour responsibilities. This common portrayal of empowerment by the clean cookstove sector can be viewed as facilitating the advancement of a neoliberal vision of rural women's livelihoods where empowerment and agency are reconfigured and incorporated into the problematic wage relations of capitalist economies. This view of empowerment, which privileges market participation, also overlooks many of the actually experienced positive effects of improved stoves; benefits which tend to be domestic, communal, routine, non‐economic and difficult to quantify. The article argues that conventional definitions and visions of ‘empowerment’ should be re‐evaluated to include forms of ‘mundane agency’.

中文翻译：

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家庭劳动的多重时间：评估妇女赋权的挑战

妇女的经济赋权仍然是世界范围内发展项目的核心特征。本文通过考察与印度南部两个针对个人烹饪和燃料收集例程的开发项目有关的各种时间复杂性，探索了这些赋权愿望。它认为，家务劳动的三个时间因素-多时制时间，集体化时间和混合劳动/休闲时间-在很大程度上被忽视了，因此从一开始就挑战了赋权策略的适当性。通过强调关键的家庭动态，该研究认为，清洁炊具部门成员追求经济赋权的努力贬低了无薪劳动力的价值，并荣耀了通常由繁华的人进行繁琐和介导的有薪工作。进一步，有薪工作可能会加重到先前已存在的无偿家务劳动职责中。清洁灶具部门对权力的这种普遍描绘可以被视为促进了对农村妇女生计的新自由主义视野的发展，在那里重新配置了权力和机构，并纳入了资本主义经济中有问题的工资关系。这种赋予市场参与特权的权力观，也忽视了许多实际经历了炉灶改进的积极影响；往往是国内，社区，常规，非经济和难以量化的利益。该文章认为，应重新评估“授权”的常规定义和愿景，以包括“平凡的机构”的形式。