“ <i>Dona de Si</i> ”: Women’s Empowerment as Affective Economies in Corporate-Sponsored Entrepreneurship Training

The author examines transnational narratives of women’s empowerment in Brazil, highlighting discourses promoting women’s ability to improve society and their incomes by mobilizing emotions and attributes linked to care responsibilities as savvy feminized skills to be used in micro entrepreneurship. On the basis of a case study through ethnographic research conducted between 2019 and 2022 within a national empowerment program for entrepreneurship training, the author argues that such initiatives are grounded in affective economies increasingly reliant on individualized forms of emotional labor as a central strategy to navigate the Brazilian labor market. By analyzing how emotions circulate within the social space of this corporate-sponsored training program, the author explores the role of affects in constituting power dynamics between those “already empowered” women promoting trainings and those yet to be shaped by the required affects to succeed. Drawing on theories of affective economies and governmentality, this study unravels some complexities of promoting empowerment and financial independence among women in the growing context of labor informality in Brazil. The author concludes by demonstrating how these narratives of empowerment create normative affective standards that rely on women’s emotional engagement with entrepreneurial values, often obscuring the precariousness underpinning their labor conditions.