| Sumario: | How is it that feminist strategies of empowerment and government can come to operate in a regulatory and coercive manner? While this question has been considered in light of the recent carceral turn involving feminist interventions into violence against women, it has not been explicated in the context of women's economic empowerment. This is in spite of increased evidence of nonstate actors, including feminist NGOs, operating coercively toward their target populations, namely poor women of the global South. Beyond the empirical evidence, our conceptual schemes also remain inadequate to capture the multiple workings of feminist governmentalities, rooted in sources of power that we tend to keep separate. A closer reading of governmentality, or "the conduct of conduct," also provides a better sense of its flip side, namely counter-conduct, or the resistance that the governed might pose to the "will to empower." The article probes the interrelated question of feminist conduct and counter-conduct in the unique instance of the governance of early marriage undertaken by a developmental NGO in eastern India. The NGO's campaign to curb early marriage brings into relief the dovetailing of different rationalities and techniques of government and types of power in ways that are currently underappreciated in analyses of feminism's imbrication in power. Marriage in this case serves to mark the limits of feminist governance—at the hands of different actors, discourses, and interests—in embodying and working against women's agency. It additionally shows that while subaltern women's counter-conducts can destabilize dominant governmental rationalities and their underlying relations of power, they do not necessarily constitute a more progressive politics.
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