While there is a long tradition of interpellating poor rural women to carry out the state’s development and modernising goals in local communities, neoliberal development has greatly expanded the remit of this subjective call but without accompanying material changes. In this article, I consider the precarious category of female workers produced by an NGO in West Bengal, out of a surplus population of poor, working-class and, generally, Scheduled-Caste rural women who were themselves beneficiaries of feminist-inspired development. Ambivalently positioned within this institutional site—as volunteers and not as employees—these workers had to manage new forms of risk and precarity over existing ones. Such precarity was not only material. It was especially manifest in new sets of aspirations that sustained the unrealisable promises and potentialities of the related processes of the NGOisation of feminist activism and the restructuring of women’s development under neoliberalism.

中文翻译：

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不稳定、抱负和新自由主义发展：西孟加拉邦的女性赋权工作者

虽然长期以来一直呼吁贫困农村妇女在当地社区实现国家发展和现代化目标，但新自由主义发展极大地扩大了这一主观呼吁的范围，但没有伴随物质变化。在这篇文章中，我考虑了由西孟加拉邦的一个非政府组织产生的不稳定的女性工人类别，这些女性工人的人口过剩，贫穷的工人阶级和一般的附表种姓农村妇女本身就是女权主义发展的受益者。在这个机构站点中矛盾地定位——作为志愿者而不是员工——这些工人必须管理新形式的风险和不稳定性，而不是现有形式。这种不稳定不仅是物质上的。