The threat to the Indian coastline and the lives and livelihood of communities dependent on it owing to climate change and corporate-state collaboration in exploiting marine resources has led to organized opposition by fishing communities to assert community control over marine resources. Vizhinjam is one such site in the Southwest coastline of Kerala that has witnessed organized resistance by coastal communities to the ‘development from above’ of the controversial Blue Economy regime, against the commercialization and weakening of already vulnerable coastal regions. The anti-mechanization agitations, and the trade union movement of the 1970s-80s, were watershed moments in shaping the political consciousness of the fishing community and were notable for the leadership and wide participation of Mukkavar women. The political mobilizations of the fishing community, accompanied by a radicalized Catholic clergy, and groups of intellectuals, scientists, and anthropologists, demonstrated a new political imaginary of radical democratization for a newly emerging post-colonial society. Mukkuvar fisherwomen, who were historically marked as ‘polluting’, ‘uncouth’, and ‘sexually immoral’ launched themselves to the forefront of a nascent women’s movement, asserting equal rights to resources and dignified labour. These interventions created ruptures within the Kerala women’s movement and reconfigured its orientation towards the problematics of caste, gender, and development. As active participants in the state-sponsored social welfare development efforts and the development initiatives of the Catholic Church, Mukkuvar women have been conceived of as shock absorbers amidst sweeping socio-economic transformations in the coastline. While the ability of the state’s welfare activism to facilitate the entry of women into the public life and politics of Kerala has been contested by feminist scholarship, I argue that Mukkuvar women have mobilized the contradictions inherent in the paradoxical welfare logic of the state and the Church to render themselves ‘destitute’ political subjects with a pedagogy for a radical feminist praxis.