Fortunes of Feminism (37 page)

Boltanski and Chiapello's argument is original and profound. Yet, because it is gender-blind, it fails to grasp the full character of the spirit of neoliberal capitalism. To be sure, that spirit includes (what I would call) a masculinist romance of the free, unencumbered, self-fashioning individual, which they aptly describe. But neoliberal capitalism has as much to do with Walmart,
maquiladoras
, and micro-credit as with Silicon Valley and Google. And its indispensable workers are disproportionately women, not only young single women, but also married women and women with children; not only racialized women, but women of virtually all nationalities and ethnicities. As such women have poured into labor markets around the globe, the effect has been to undercut once and for all state-organized capitalism's ideal of the family wage. In disorganized neoliberal capitalism, that ideal has been replaced by the newer, more modern norm of the two-earner family. Nevermind that the reality that underlies the new ideal is depressed wage levels, decreased job security, declining living standards, a steep rise in the number of hours worked for wages per household, exacerbation of the double shift—now often a triple or quadruple shift—and a rise in female-headed households. Disorganized capitalism turns a sow's ear into a silk purse by elaborating a new romance of female advancement and gender justice.

Disturbing as it may sound, I am suggesting that second-wave feminism has unwittingly provided a key ingredient of the new spirit of neoliberalism. Our critique of the family wage now supplies a good part of the romance that invests flexible capitalism with a higher meaning and a moral point. Endowing their daily struggles with an ethical meaning, the feminist romance attracts women at both ends of the social spectrum: at one end, the female cadres of the professional middle classes, determined to crack the glass ceiling; at the other end, the female temps, part-timers, low-wage service workers, domestics, sex workers, migrants, EPZ workers, and micro-credit borrowers, seeking not only income and material security, but also dignity, self-betterment, and liberation from traditional authority. At both ends, the dream of women's emancipation is harnessed to the engine of capitalist accumulation. Thus, second-wave feminism's critique of the family wage has enjoyed a perverse afterlife. Once the centerpiece of a radical critique of androcentrism, it serves today to intensify capitalism's valorization of waged labor.

3)
Feminist anti-étatism resignified
: Neoliberalism has also resignified the anti-étatism of the previous period, making it grist for schemes aimed at reducing state action
tout court
. In the new climate, it seemed but a short step from second-wave feminism's critique of welfare-state paternalism to Margaret Thatcher's critique of the nanny state. That was certainly the experience in the United States, where feminists watched helplessly as Bill Clinton triangulated their nuanced critique of a sexist and stigmatizing system of poor relief into a plan to “end welfare as we know it,” which abolished the federal entitlement to income support.
¹⁰
In the postcolonies, meanwhile, the critique of the developmental state's androcentrism morphed into enthusiasm for NGOs, which emerged everywhere to fill the space vacated by shrinking states. Certainly, the best of these organizations provided urgently needed material aid to populations bereft of public services. Yet the effect was often to depoliticize the grassroots and to skew the agendas of local groups in directions favored by First-World funders. By its very stopgap nature, moreover, NGO action did little to challenge the receding tide of public provision or to build political support for responsive state action.
¹¹

The explosion of micro-credit illustrates the dilemma. Counterposing feminist values of empowerment and participation from below to the passivity-inducing red tape of top-down étatism, the architects of these projects have crafted an innovative synthesis of individual self-help and community networking, NGO oversight and market mechanisms—all aimed at combating women's poverty and gender subjection. The results so far include an impressive record of loan repayments and anecdotal evidence of lives transformed. What has been concealed, however, in the feminist hoopla surrounding these projects, is a disturbing coincidence: micro-credit has burgeoned just as states have abandoned macro-structural efforts to fight poverty, efforts that small-scale lending cannot possibly replace.
¹²
In this case too, then, the feminist critique of bureaucratic paternalism has been recuperated by neoliberalism. A perspective aimed originally at transforming state power into a vehicle of citizen empowerment and social justice is now used to legitimate marketization and state retrenchment.

4)
Feminist contra and pro Westphalianism resignified
: Finally, neoliberalism altered for better and for worse second-wave feminism's ambivalent relation to the Westphalian frame. In the new context of “globalization,” it no longer goes without saying that the bounded territorial state is the sole legitimate container for obligations of, and struggles for, justice. Thus, feminists have joined environmentalists, human-rights activists, and critics of the WTO in challenging that view. Operationalizing post-Westphalian intuitions that had remained un-actionable in state-organized capitalism, they have targeted transborder injustices that had been marginalized or neglected in the previous era. Utilizing new communications technologies to establish transnational networks, feminists have pioneered innovative strategies like the “boomerang effect,” which mobilizes global public opinion to spotlight local abuses and to shame the states that condone them.
¹³
The result was a promising new form of feminist activism—transnational, multi-scalar, post-Westphalian.

But the transnational turn brought difficulties too. Often stymied at the level of the state, many feminists directed their energies to the “international” arena, especially to a succession of UN-related conferences, from Nairobi to Vienna to Beijing and beyond. Building a presence in “global civil society” from which to engage new regimes of global governance, they became entangled in some of the problems I have already noted. For example, campaigns for women's human rights focused overwhelmingly on issues of violence and reproduction, as opposed, for example, to poverty. Ratifying the Cold War split between civil and political rights, on the one hand, and social and economic rights, on the other, these efforts, too, have privileged recognition over redistribution.
¹⁴
In addition, these campaigns intensified the NGO-ification of feminist politics, widening the gap between professionals and the grassroots, while according disproportionate voice to English-speaking elites. Analogous dynamics have been operating, too, in the feminist engagement with the policy apparatus of the European Union—especially given the absence of genuinely transnational, Europe-wide grassroots movements. Thus, the feminist critique of Westphalianism has proved ambivalent in the era of neoliberalism. What began as a salutary attempt to expand the scope of justice beyond the nation-state has ended up dovetailing in some respects with the administrative needs of a new form of capitalism.

In general, then, the fate of feminism in the neoliberal era presents a paradox. On the one hand, the relatively small countercultural movement of the previous period has expanded exponentially, successfully disseminating its ideas across the globe. On the other hand, feminist ideas have undergone a subtle shift in valence in the altered context. Unambiguously emancipatory in the era of state-organized capitalism, critiques of economism, androcentrism, étatism, and Westphalianism now appear fraught with ambiguity, susceptible to serving the legitimation needs of a new form of capitalism. After all, this capitalism would much prefer to confront claims for recognition over claims for redistribution, as it builds a new regime of accumulation on the cornerstone of women's waged labor and seeks to disembed markets from democratic political regulation in order to operate all the more freely on a global scale.

3. FEMINISM AGAINST NEOLIBERALISM?

Today, however, this capitalism is itself at a critical crossroads. The global financial crisis may mark the beginning of neoliberalism's end as an economic regime. Meanwhile, the associated political crisis (of the Westphalian state, of Europe, of US hegemony) may herald the dissolution of the order of governance in which neoliberalism thrived. Finally, the revival of anti-systemic protest (even if so far fragmented, ephemeral, and devoid of programmatic content) may signal the early stirrings of a new wave of mobilization aimed at articulating an alternative. Perhaps, accordingly, we stand poised at the brink of yet another “great transformation,” as massive and profound as the one I have just described.

If so, then the shape of the successor society will be the object of intense contestation in the coming period. And feminism will feature importantly in such contestation—in two different senses and at two different levels: first, as a social movement whose fortunes I have traced here, which will seek to ensure that the successor regime institutionalizes a commitment to gender justice; but also, second, as a general discursive construct that feminists in the first sense no longer own and do not control—an empty signifier of the good (akin, perhaps, to “democracy”), which can and will be invoked to legitimate a variety of different scenarios, not all of which promote gender justice. An offspring of feminism in the first, social-movement sense, this second, discursive sense of “feminism” has gone rogue. As the discourse becomes independent of the movement, the latter is increasingly confronted with a strange shadowy version of itself, an uncanny double that it can neither simply embrace nor wholly disavow.
¹⁵

In this chapter, I have mapped the disconcerting dance of these two feminisms in the shift from state-organized capitalism to neoliberalism. What should we conclude from my story? Certainly not that second-wave feminism has failed
simpliciter
. Nor that it is to blame for the triumph of neoliberalism. Surely not that feminist ideals are inherently problematic; nor that they are always already doomed to be resignified for capitalist purposes. I conclude, rather, that we for whom feminism is above all a movement for gender justice need to become more historically self-aware as we operate on a terrain that is also populated by our uncanny double.

To that end, let us return to the question: What, if anything, explains our “dangerous liaison” with neoliberalism? Are we the victims of an unfortunate coincidence, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and so fell prey to the most opportunistic of seducers, a capitalism so indiscriminately promiscuous that it would instrumentalize any perspective whatever, even one inherently foreign to it? Or is there some subterranean elective affinity between feminism and neoliberalism? If any such affinity does exist, it lies, I suggest, in the critique of traditional authority.
¹⁶
Such authority is a longstanding target of feminist activism, which has sought at least since Mary Wollstonecraft to emancipate women from personalized subjection to men, be they fathers, brothers, priests, elders, or husbands. But traditional authority also appears in some periods as an obstacle to capitalist expansion, part of the surrounding social substance in which markets have historically been embedded and which has served to confine economic rationality within a limited sphere.
¹⁷
In the current moment, these two critiques of traditional authority, the one feminist, the other neoliberal, appear to converge.

Where feminism and neoliberalism diverge, in contrast, is over post-traditional forms of gender subordination—constraints on women's lives that do not take the form of personalized subjection, but arise from structural or systemic processes in which the actions of many people are abstractly or impersonally mediated. A paradigm case is what Susan Okin has characterized as “a cycle of socially caused and distinctly asymmetric vulnerability by marriage,” in which women's traditional responsibility for childrearing helps shape labor markets that disadvantage women, resulting in unequal power in the economic marketplace, which in turn reinforces, and exacerbates, unequal power in the family.
¹⁸
Such market-mediated processes of subordination are the very lifeblood of neoliberal capitalism. Today, accordingly, they should become a major focus of feminist critique, as we seek to distinguish ourselves from, and to avoid resignification by, neoliberalism. The point, of course, is not to drop the struggle against traditional male authority, which remains a necessary moment of feminist critique. It is, rather, to disrupt the easy passage from such critique to its neoliberal double—above all by reconnecting struggles against personalized subjection to the critique of a capitalist system that, while promising liberation, actually imposes a new mode of domination.

In hopes of advancing this agenda, I would like to conclude by revisiting one last time my four foci of feminist critique.

For an
anti-neoliberal anti-economism
: The crisis of neoliberalism offers the opportunity to reactivate the emancipatory promise of second-wave feminism. Adopting a fully three-dimensional account of injustice, we might now integrate in a more balanced way the dimensions of redistribution, recognition, and representation that splintered in the previous era. Grounding those indispensable aspects of feminist critique in a robust, updated sense of the social totality, we should reconnect feminist critique to the critique of capitalism—and thereby reposition feminism squarely on the Left.

For an
anti-neoliberal anti-androcentrism
: Likewise, the crisis of neoliberalism offers the chance to break the spurious link between our critique of the family wage and flexible capitalism. Reclaiming our critique of androcentrism, feminists might militate for a form of life that decenters waged work and valorizes uncommodified activities, including, but not only, carework. Now performed largely by women, such activities should become valued components of a good life for everyone.