Embodied Territories: The Gendered‐Classed Economies of Entrepreneurship in India

Abstract While women’s entrepreneurship theory and practice have advanced significantly in the last few decades, the persistent challenges women entrepreneurs face suggest the need for novel theoretical insights that illuminate their experiences of entrepreneurship as an everyday, embodied practice. Drawing upon Sara Ahmed’s critical interpretive phenomenological account of affective economies and based on qualitative accounts from 58 entrepreneurs in India, this paper explores how gendered‐classed experiences enable or constrain embodied practices of women entrepreneurs in the Global South. We make two key contributions to women’s entrepreneurship literature within management studies. First, we show how gendered and classed experiences orientate entrepreneurs when navigating the possibilities and restrictions faced in everyday spaces of commerce. Second, we develop a theoretical understanding of the affective and situated negotiation of entrepreneurial work in situ through what we call the embodied territories of entrepreneurship. We discuss how ‘embodied territories’ provides an important counterpoint to cognition‐driven affect literature that dominates management research and advances the broader affective turn in management studies. Overall, this research presents an alternative way of understanding a hitherto overlooked perspective on how women embody, experience, and negotiate entrepreneurial spaces.