Powerful or powerless? : the impact of the formal/informal dichotomy on the analysis of women's informal labour in Latin America

Abstract

In most of the general thinking on the informal sector, the informal/formal division marks a distinction between a "modern", capitalist formal economy and a more "backward", subsistent informal economy. Both Marxist and neoliberal approaches to the analysis of the informal sector reify the modernist assumption that "development" is a movement from the informal to the formal. In this dichotomous thinking, those working in the informal sector become typified as powerless "victims" of poverty. While neoliberal approaches suggest that some of these "victims" can become "microentrepreneurs", and in turn, are potentially "powerful", the sector is still assumed to be an economically inferior site. Feminist analyses, particularly the liberalist feminist approach, remain mired in this binary thinking. Feminist analyses argued against the invisibility of women's experience in the informal sector discourse. However, in making women's experience visible, much of the feminist analyses did not address the multiple, contingent, and shifting nature of subjectivity and the importance of language. This thesis proposes an alternative approach to informal sector analyses which draws on postmodern concerns with dichotomies, power, subjectivity, language, experience and voice. The aim is twofold: (1) to deconstruct modernist and dualist thinking in the literature on the informal sector in Latin America, and (2) through the revisiting of various analyses which incorporated the voices of Latin American women, work towards a more nuanced analysis which regards women's informal sector experience as contingent.