Feminism and Neoliberalism, a dangerous liaison?

Even the most devoted believers in the neoliberal paradigm will have had their convictions shaken in recent times, as the world's markets have played havoc with their faith. For those who have long questioned the purported benefits of neoliberal economic policies and highlighted their injurious consequences, it comes as little surprise that this 'grab-bag of ideas based on the fundamentalist notion that markets are selfcorrecting, allocate resources efficiently and serve the public interest well', as Stiglitz (2008) well describes neoliberalism, is in freefall. The focus of this IDS Bulletin is therefore particularly apposite at a time when much-cherished axioms are being re-inspected and where new possibilities and directions are so badly needed.

There recently has been an avalanche of critiques of the way in which feminism has gone to bed with neoliberal capitalism and become an instrument of governmentality. In this paper, I look at these phenomena as processes of a ‘neoliberalisation of feminism'. I illustrate such neoliberalisation by introducing women's empowerment projects run by transnational consumer products companies, typically in partnership with public development actors. Under the label of ‘corporate social responsibility', these companies invest in women in their supply and marketing chains, seeking to empower them within a neoliberal rationality of government. The paper is an effort to go beyond the critiques of feminism as co-opted. Rather than inventing new feminisms or taking a break from feminism – as some have suggested, I propose that it is more fruitful and necessary to examine, in concrete contexts, the way in which select feminist movement ideas are being integrated into neoliberal rationales and logics, what is lost in the process and what is perhaps gained.

Cultural Studies, 2013

In this paper, I argue that we are currently witnessing the emergence of neoliberal feminism in the USA, which is most clearly articulated in two highly publicized and widely read feminist manifestos': Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In (a New York Timesbest-seller) and Anne-Marie Slaughter’s ‘Why Women Still Can't Have It All’ (the most widely read piece in the history of the Atlantic). Concentrating on the shifting discursive registers in Lean In, I propose that the book can give us insight into the ways in which the husk of liberalism is being mobilized to spawn a neoliberal feminism as well as a new feminist subject. This feminist subject accepts full responsibility for her own well-being and self-care, which is increasingly predicated on crafting afelicitous work– family balance based on a cost-benefit calculus. I further pose the question of why neoliberalism has spawned a feminist rather than a female subject. Why, in other words, is there any need for the production of aneoliberal feminism, which draws attention to a specific kind of inequality and engenders a particularly feminist subject? While this new form of feminism cancertainly be understood as yet another domain neoliberalism has colonized by producing its own variant, I suggest that it simultaneously serves a particular cultural purpose: it hollows out the potential of mainstream liberal feminism tounderscore the constitutive contradictions of liberal democracy, and in this way further entrenches neoliberal rationality and an imperialist logic. Indeed, neoliberal feminism may be the latest discursive modality to (re)produce the USA as the bastion of progressive liberal democracy. Rather than deflecting internal criticism by shining the spotlight of oppressive practices onto other countries while overtly showcasing its enlightened superiority, this discursive formation actually generates its own internal critique of the USA. Yet, it simultaneously inscribes and circumscribes the permissible parameters of that very same critique.

2019

Within the past five years, a flurry of feminist manifestos have garnered intense mainstream media attention and reenergized feminist debates in the US, most trenchantly around the question of why middle-class women are still struggling to cultivate careers and raise children at the same time. Two of these, Anne-Marie Slaughter's Why Women Still Can't Have It All (2015) and Sheryl Sandberg's best-seller Lean In: Women, Work and The Will to Lead (2013) might well be said to have initiated this trend of high-power women publically and unabashedly identifying as feminists. Considered together with Emma Watson's September 2014 speech at the UN Women #HeforShe campaign launch, Beyoncé's "spectacular" appropriation of Chimamanda Adichie's talk We Should All be Feminists, and other widely publicized feminist enunciations, it seems safe to say that we have indeed moved from an arguably

IDS Bulletin, 2009

Gender and Society, 2018

Neoliberalism has been one of the most used concepts as a short-cut reference for the growing socioeconomic inequalities over the past two decades, which dramatically worsened in the aftermath of the 2008 finan- cial crisis. In framing the edited volume Feminists Rethink the Neoliberal State: Inequality, Exclusion, and Change, Fernandes carefully examines the term neoliberal in order to avoid ahistorical uses of the term and chal- lenges the term becoming an overdetermined and empty signifier that presumably explains everything (chapter one). Fernandes conceptualizes neoliberalism as an extension of long-standing historical processes and a useful analytical marker of discontinuity.

Fraser’s political philosophy creates a “thick,” nuanced understanding of justice as embodying a range of normative principles meant to inform political, economic and cultural practices. She considers what constitutes just social relations and values, who ought to be involved in such discussions, and how to deliberate to achieve justice within a globalizing world. Here Fraser is particularly concerned with the ways that various feminist theories and movements, have helped—and sometimes hindered—efforts to think about and organize movements of justice by and for women. In short, Fortunes of Feminism represents an ambitious re-theorizing of political philosophy from the standpoint of feminist concerns and struggles over the last four decades, offering up a universal political philosophy of justice informed by and informing women’s emancipation in the midst of a global crisis of world capitalism. The book is not without lacunae, however, and I conclude with two suggestions towards a more truly egalitarian—and ecological—feminist political philosophy, largely compatible with Fraser’s own framework.

Political Studies, 2014

This article engages with the influential narrative about the co-optation of feminism in conditions of neo-liberalism put forward by prominent feminist thinkers Nancy Fraser, Hester Eisenstein and Angela McRobbie. After drawing out the twin visions of ‘progressive’ feminist politics that undergird this narrative – couched in terms of either the retrieval of past socialist feminist glories or personal reinvention – we subject to critical scrutiny both their substantive claims and the conceptual scaffolding they invoke. We argue that the proleptic imaginings of all three authors, in different ways, are highly circumscribed in terms of the recommended agent, agenda and practices of progressive politics, and clouded by conceptual muddle over the meanings of ‘left’, ‘radical’ and ‘progressive’. Taken together, these problems render the conclusions of Fraser, Eisenstein and McRobbie at best unconvincing and at worst dismissive of contemporary feminist efforts to challenge neo-liberalism. We end the article by disentangling and redefining left, radical and progressive and by sketching a contrasting vision of progressive feminist politics enabled by this re-conceptualisation.

Radical Philosophy Review 17(2): 2014, 493-497, 2014

Nancy Fraser's book is a collection of essays written from 1985 to 2010 by the American socialist feminist philosopher and critical theorist. It is a rich and complex text that aims at dissecting the "drama in three acts" that according to the author is the thread of second-wave feminism. If act one is the moment when the feminist movement joined radical movements to transform society through uncovering gender injustice and capitalism's androcentrism, in act two Fraser highlights with regret a switch from redistribution to recognition and difference and a shift to identity politics that risk to support neoliberalism in its efforts to build a free market society. In act three, still unfolding, the problem of justice is reframed and the relationships between a feminist movement meant to be radical and the changes in act in present times has the potential to open new unpredictable scenarios. This is an important contribution because it provides a clear frame to rethink issues related to labour, emancipation, identity, rights claims at the core of political demands of justice in the contemporary context of neoliberism. The historical phases of the recent feminist movement are retraced through its critical tangles in a constant debate with political theory.