Feminists Rethink The Neoliberal State

Preface -- Conceptualizing the post-liberalization state : intervention, restructuring, and the nature of -- State power / Leela Fernandes -- What's in a word? : austerity, precarity, and neoliberalism / Nancy A. Naples -- After rights : choice and the structure of citizenship / Ujju Aggarwal -- The production of silence : the state-NGO nexus in Bangladesh / Lamia Karim -- An improvising state : market reforms, neoliberal governmentality, gender, and caste in Gujarat India / Dolly Daftary -- The broken windows of Rosa Ramos : neoliberal policing regimes of imminent violability / Christina Heatherton -- After neoliberalism? : resignifying economy, nation, and family in Ecuador / Amy Lind -- Toward a feminist analytic of the post-liberalization state / Leela Fernandes -- About the contributors -- Index -- Notes

Nancy Fraser’s major new book traces the feminist movement’s evolution since the 1970s and anticipates a new—radical and egalitarian—phase of feminist thought and action. During the ferment of the New Left, “Second Wave” feminism emerged as a struggle for women’s liberation and took its place alongside other radical movements that were questioning core features of capitalist society. But feminism’s subsequent immersion in identity politics coincided with a decline in its utopian energies and the rise of neoliberalism. Now, foreseeing a revival in the movement, Fraser argues for a reinvigorated feminist radicalism able to address the global economic crisis. Feminism can be a force working in concert with other egalitarian movements in the struggle to bring the economy under democratic control, while building on the visionary potential of the earlier waves of women’s liberation. This powerful new account is set to become a landmark of feminist thought.

This volume presents an illuminating analysis of the ways in which normalization processes and practices operate in a welfare state in an age of neoliberalism. This informative book problematizes the meaning of the phrase 'normalization processes and prac

Recently, labor has acquired a re-emergent public relevance. In response, feminist theory urgently needs to reconsider the relationship between labor and gender. This book builds a theoretically-informed politics about changes in the gendered structure of labor by analyzing how the symbolic power of gender is put in the service of neoliberal practices. Goodman traces the cultural contextualization of 'women's work' from its Marxist roots to its current practices. From the income gap to the gendering of industries, Goodman explores and critiques the rise of corporate power under neoliberalism and the ways and whys that femininity has become one of its principle commodities.

Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its &“free market&” strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country&’s poor, including women&’s groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women&’s participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork and employing an approach combining political economy and cultural politics, Amy Lind charts the growth of several strands of women&’s activism and identifies how they have helped redefine, often in contradictory ways, the real and imagined boundaries of neoliberal development discourse and practice. In her analysis of this ambivalent and &“unfinished&” cultural project of modernity in the Andes, she examines state policies and their effects on women of various social sectors; women&’s community development initiatives and responses to the debt crisis; and the roles played by feminist &“issue networks&” in reshaping national and international policy agendas in Ecuador and in developing a transnationally influenced, locally based feminist movement.

From Hillary Clinton to Ivanka Trump and from Emma Watson all the way to Beyoncé, more and more high-powered women are unabashedly identifying as feminists in the mainstream media. In the past few years feminism has indeed gained increasing visibility and even urgency. Yet, in her analysis of recent bestselling feminist manifestos, well-trafficked mommy blogs, and television series such as The Good Wife, Catherine Rottenberg reveals that a particular variant of feminism-which she calls neoliberal feminism-has come to dominate the cultural landscape, one that is not interested in a mass women's movement or struggles for social justice. Rather, this feminism has introduced the notion of a happy work-family balance into the popular imagination, while transforming balance into a feminist ideal. So-called "aspirational women" are now exhorted to focus on cultivating a felicitous equilibrium between their child-rearing responsibilities and their professional goals, and thus to abandon key goals that have historically informed feminism, including equal rights and liberation. Rottenberg maintains that because neoliberalism reduces everything to market calculations it actually needs feminism in order to "solve" thorny issues related to reproduction and care. She goes on to show how women of color and poor and immigrant women most often serve as the unacknowledged care-workers who enable professional women to strive toward balance, arguing that neoliberal feminism legitimates the exploitation of the vast majority of women while disarticulating any kind of structural critique. It is not surprising, then, that this new feminist discourse has increasingly dovetailedwith conservative forces. In Europe, gender parity has been used by Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders to further racist, anti-immigrant agendas, while in the United States, women's rights has been invoked to justify interventions in countries with majority Muslim populations. And though campaigns such as the #MeToo and #TimesUp appear to be shifting the discussion, given our frightening neoliberal reality, these movements are currently insufficient. Rottenberg therefore concludes by raising urgent questions about how we can successfully reorient and reclaim feminism as a social justice movement.

This book offers a materialist critique of mainstream human rights discourse in the period following 9/11, examining literary works, critical histories, international declarations, government statutes, NGO manifestos, and a documentary film. The author points out some of the contradictions that emerge in contemporary rights language when material relations are not sufficiently perceived or acknowledged, and he directs attention to the role of some rights talk in maintaining and managing the accelerated global project of capital accumulation. Even as rights discourse points to injustices—for example, injustices related to labor, gender, the citizen’s relationship to the state, or the movement of refugees—it can simultaneously maintain systems of oppression. By constructing subjects who are aligned to the interests of capital, by emphasizing individual “empowerment,” and/or by containing social disenchantment, it reinforces the process of wealth accumulation, supports neoliberal ideologies, and diminishes the possibility of real transformation through collective struggle.

In Pop-Feminist Narratives, Emily Spiers explores the recent phenomenon of 'pop-feminism' and pop-feminist writing across North America, Britain, and Germany. Pop-feminism is characterised by its engagement with popular culture and consumerism; its preoccupation with sexuality and transgression in relation to female agency; and its thematisation of intergenerational feminist discord, portrayed either as a damaging discursive construct or as a verifiable phenomenon requiring remediation. Central to this volume is the question of theorising the female subject in a postfeminist neoliberal climate and the role played by genre and narrative in the articulation of contemporary pop-feminist politics. The heightened visibility of mainstream feminist discourse and feminist activism in recent years—especially in North America, Britain, and Germany—means that the time is ripe for a coherent comparative scholarly study of pop-feminism as a transnational phenomenon. This volume provides such an account of pop-feminism in a manner which takes into account the varied and complex narrative strategies employed in the telling of pop-feminist stories across multiple genres and platforms, including pop-literary fiction, the popular 'guide' to feminism, film, music, and the digital.