ABSTRACT
Gender and Development discourse today is replete with imagery of natural resource extraction, imagining women as resources whose potential should be "unlocked", "unleashed", "tapped" or "harnessed". This chapter employs the conceptual categories introduced in the feminist critique of human capital to analyze the 2012 World Development Report (WDR). It analyzes human capital theory by drawing on some of the conceptual categories introduced by Foucault. The chapter shows that a feminist critique of human capital theory can draw the people's attention to a few unexamined dimensions of the "Gender Equality as Smart Economics" frameworks. It argues that in the 2012 WDR, women's economic agency is primarily configured as a feature of their reproductive capacities, which must be managed and harnessed through a series of interventions to instil market mentalities into women. Because women appear in the report as drivers of post-crisis growth who are marginal to markets, the report advocates for interventions to shape their skills and aspirations for economic participation.
