Descriptions of Haiti as failed, cursed, or fragile are the target here. Lamour sets them aside and works instead from interviews and life stories with Haitian women, from project documents drawn up for women after the earthquake, and from the talk that circulated about those women in the rooms where decisions were made.

What emerges is a tight relationship between political decision makers of both sexes, NGOs, and the ordering of gender in Haitian society. Reading from inside Haiti rather than from outside it, Lamour reworks governmentality and proposes irresponsibility as a skill that those in dominant positions hold.

Decision makers occupy a traditional place in an unequal society, and that position keeps them from shouldering the population's difficulties; instead those difficulties are pushed into families and onto women, with NGOs assisting. Irresponsibility, on this argument, is a form of politics in its own right, the equal of responsibility, in a state that has long refused to become one.