Neoliberal Vulnerability and the Vulnerability of Neoliberalism

The authors are all part of the Gender, Justice, and Neoliberal Transformations Project at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, Barnard College, Columbia University, USA., 2022

From the rise of far-right regimes to the tumult of the COVID-19 pandemic, recent years have brought global upheaval as well as the sedimentation of longstanding social inequalities. Analyzing the complexities of the current political moment in different geographic regions, this book addresses the paradoxical persistence of neoliberal policies and practices, in order to ground the pursuit of a more just world. Engaging theories of decoloniality, racial capitalism, queer materialism, and social reproduction, this book demonstrates the centrality of sexual politics to neoliberalism, including both social relations and statecraft. Drawing on ethnographic case studies, the authors show that gender and sexuality may be the site for policies like those pertaining to sex trafficking, which bundle together economics and changes to the structure of the state. In other instances, sexual politics are crucial components of policies on issues ranging from the growth of financial services to migration. Tracing the role of sexual politics across different localities and through different political domains, this book delineates the paradoxical assemblage that makes up contemporary neoliberal hegemony. In addition to exploring contemporary social relations of neoliberal governance, exploitation, domination, and exclusion, the authors also consider gender and sexuality as forces that have shaped myriad forms of community-based activism and resistance, including local efforts to pursue new forms of social change. By tracing neoliberal paradoxes across global sites, the book delineates the multiple dimensions of economic and cultural restructuring that have characterized neoliberal regimes and emergent activist responses to them. This innovative analysis of the relationship between gender justice and political economy will appeal to: interdisciplinary scholars in social and cultural studies; legal and political theorists; and the wide range of readers who are concerned with contemporary questions of social justice.

From the rise of far-right regimes to the tumult of the COVID-19 pandemic, recent years have brought global upheaval as well as the sedimentation of longstanding social inequalities. Analyzing the complexities of the current political moment in different geographic regions, this book addresses the paradoxical persistence of neoliberal policies and practices, in order to ground the pursuit of a more just world. Engaging theories of decoloniality, racial capitalism, queer materialism, and social reproduction, this book demonstrates the centrality of sexual politics to neoliberalism, including both social relations and statecraft. Drawing on ethnographic case studies, the authors show that gender and sexuality may be the site for policies like those pertaining to sex trafficking, which bundle together economics and changes to the structure of the state. In other instances, sexual politics are crucial components of policies on issues ranging from the growth of financial services to migration. Tracing the role of sexual politics across different localities and through different political domains, this book delineates the paradoxical assemblage that makes up contemporary neoliberal hegemony. In addition to exploring contemporary social relations of neoliberal governance, exploitation, domination, and exclusion, the authors also consider gender and sexuality as forces that have shaped myriad forms of community-based activism and resistance, including local efforts to pursue new forms of social change. By tracing neoliberal paradoxes across global sites, the book delineates the multiple dimensions of economic and cultural restructuring that have characterized neoliberal regimes and emergent activist responses to them. This innovative analysis of the relationship between gender justice and political economy will appeal to: interdisciplinary scholars in social and cultural studies; legal and political theorists; and the wide range of readers who are concerned with contemporary questions of social justice.

European Journal of Social Theory, 2012

This article presents a blueprint of a feminist agenda for the twenty-first century that is oriented not by the telos of gender parity, but instead evolves as an ‘immanent critique’ of the key structural dynamics of contemporary capitalism – within a framework of analysis derived from the tenets of Critical Theory of Frankfurt School origin. This activates a form of critique whose double focus on (1) shared conceptions of justice; and (2) structural sources of injustice, allows criteria of social justice to emerge from the identification of a broad pattern of societal injustice surpassing the discrimination of particular groups. In this light, women’s victimization is but a symptom of structural dynamics negatively affecting also the alleged winners in the classical feminist agenda of critique. The analysis ultimately produces a model of social justice in a formula of socially embedded autonomy that unites work, care, and leisure.

ex aequo, 2020

GENDER STUDIES AND NEOLIBERALISM: THE LAST 20 YEARS Call for papers ex aequo Journal Editors: Maria João Silveirinha – Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Coimbra (FLUC) and ICNOVA–NOVA Institute of Communication ([email protected]). Cláudia Álvares – University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL) and Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (CIES) ([email protected]) ex æquo invites the submission of papers that fall within the broad scope of issues including, but not limited to, studies on: - university management, scientific policies and the epistemic value of gender studies; - challenges of gender studies in face of post-colonial, decolonial and LGBTIQ perspectives; - implications of feminism critique in the epistemological recognition of gender studies; - contesting gender studies from multiple sources, among others, conservative anti-gender movements and feminist currents of sexual difference; - contesting social sciences and gender studies; - discussion of mainstreaming as a strategy for social change; - political economy, corporatism, leadership; - studies on media, journalism, advertising, social networks, consumption; - studies on post-feminism, popular feminism, and liberal feminism Deadline – May 15, 2020 (to be published in December 2020)

IDS Bulletin, 2009

Alternatives to Privatization: Public Options for Essential Services in the Global South. David McDonald and Greg Ruiters, Eds., 2012

A decade into the 21st century, we face an unprecedented consolidation (and crisis) of social, economic, and political power fuelled by the conjuncture of relentless neoliberalism, masculinist religious fundamentalisms, ram- pant militarisms, resurgent racisms, and the criminalisation of minoritised populations in many countries. This chapter argues that gender equity and women’s agency are core components of envisioning anti-capitalist strug- gles for social and economic justice, in general, and for enacting alterna- tives to privatisation, in particular.

Multiple discontents and the desires materialize from the intersection of gender, class, politics, and culture in everyday life. The contours of these discontents and desires are examined by Lamia Karim, who focuses on NGOs and microfinance in Bangladesh, and Lisa Rofel, who scrutinizes public culture in China. While Karim and Rofel pursue very different objects of inquiry in terms of location and informants, both are interested broadly in the interaction of sex, gender, and sexuality with global neoliberal economics and specifically, the identities and inequalities such interactions produce. Drawing from the theoretical standpoints of Michel Foucault, David Harvey, and Arturo Escobar, Karim primarily focuses on how women experience gender inequality through their involvement with banks and NGOs. For Karim, gender is a site where the ideologies of governmentality, neoliberalism, and development are practiced in ways that significantly affect women in particular. In the rural, often impoverished communities that banks and NGOs target, women's conduct is governed by the notion of purdah: the notion that women guard the integrity of private and domestic life through proper moral and physical comportment.

Development, 2012

It seems incredible in these days of economic crisis that over 2,200 women (and some men) found the time and money to fly to Istanbul for a discussion on gender and economic justice at the AWID Forum 2012. Registrations closed a week before the event opened and the majority of the 800 organizations and individuals who answered the call for sessions and papers could not be accommodated. Like many who attended, I spent months preparing for the event.With AWID, I organized in autumn a special meeting to plan this journal issue. I contributed to designing and participating in three of the sessions. And in the weeks in the run up to the event, I was continually promising my network of colleagues and friends that we would meet up in Istanbul to plot, to listen to each other's sessions, or find a corner somewhere to catch up. Like many others, I came to Istanbul to learn, to find and renew friendships, to be energized and to plan for the future. AWID Forums are special, highly charged, inclusive and exciting. The secret of their success is that, in the end, they are not events but the converging of many processes. The making and attending of an AWID Forum is part of a complex networking process that brings together different generations of feminists in a space to engage, to share and create. The Development journal has been fortunate to publish now three special editions covering the outcome of the AWID Forum 1 working with the ever more international and dynamic AWID team. This journal issue is packed with insights. Cindy Clark and Lydia Alp|¤ zar Dura Ł n give a sizzling overview in their introduction of the main issues of the Forum from the epicentre of the Forum arrangements. The other articles in the Upfront section present highlights from the plenaries and in-depth sessions. Articles based on stirring speeches reflect new forms of activism and urgency in today's crisis hung world. From the defiant revolutionary poem by Marwa Sharafeldin, to the talk of a fierce new world by Gita Sen and Marilyn Waring's crisp critique of economic power; from Rhadika Balakrishnan plea for popular education, and the warnings of the misuse of culture by Yakin Ertu º rk, we sense a new dynamism and activism as women confront economic and social inequalities. Jayati Ghosh completes the section when she argues it is time for feminists to enter into the discussion of alternatives more forcefully in order to define how economic institutions and policies can ensure a gender-just economy and society.

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.

Over the past ten years, 'The Girl Effect'–the discourse and practice of investing in third world girls' education—has ascended to the top of the international development agenda as the 'highest return investment strategy' to end poverty. This paper interrogates the trend by investigating the genealogy of 'The Girl Effect' as The Nike Foundation's flagship corporate social responsibility campaign and the theory of change it is based on. A literature analysis of The Nike Foundation's most recent intervention projects— " The Girl Effect Accelerator " and 'Girl Hub' pilot projects in Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Rwanda—will elucidate the underlying investment logic and serve as a representative sample of the broader emerging practice. While claiming to advance " gender equality " and " women's empowerment " , I argue that The Girl Effect accomplishes the opposite by reinforcing gender inequity on both the micro and macro levels. Feminist grammars are instrumentalized as window dressing to exploit third world females as prospective (1) debtors in the expansion of credit markets, (2) exploits in the expansion of consumer markets, and (3) the 'untapped resource' for cheap labor. An epochal look at second wave feminism will show how 'The Girl Effect Paradigm' is a second wave of neoliberal exploitation—a parallel of its first female-led development era (1980s-1990s). This paper warns that as this phenomenon grows in hegemony it is insidiously displacing feminism as a political project and neutralizing the need for a truly transformational agenda. Without a counterbalance of vigilant public scrutiny and debate, we risk letting it crystallize Western-patriarchal-capitalism even more deeply in an unyielding global glass ceiling.