Estudos de Género e Neoliberalismo - os últimos 20 anos
ex æquo n.º 42
APELO A CONTRIBUTOS/CALL FOR PAPERS
Coordenação: Maria João Silveirinha – Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra e ICNOVA.
Cláudia Álvares – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa – ISCTE‑IUL e CIES‑IUL
Data de Submissão – 30 de junho de 2020
(a publicar em dezembro de 2020)
APRESENTAÇÃO
Ainda que o pensamento e as práticas neoliberais sejam temas de considerável debate, parece consensual que o enfatizar da intervenção mínima do Estado e a extensão das relações de mercado em todos os aspetos atividades económicas e sociais são centrais ao seu projeto. David Harvey (2005) fez notar como estas ideias exerceram considerável influência sobre um grande conjunto de instituições e organizações norte-americanas e internacionais, incluindo a educação, os media, as indústrias financeiras e bancárias e as agências reguladoras governamentais. Tocando todos os aspetos das nossas vidas, conscientes e inconscientes «o neoliberalismo tornou-se, em suma, hegemónico como um modo discursivo. Ele tem efeitos alargados sobre as formas de pensamento a ponto de se incorporar no modo de senso comum em como muitos de nós interpretamos, vivemos e entendemos o mundo» (Harvey 2007, 23). Nesse sentido, transformou-se num regime quase total e globalizante que sustenta tanto as lógicas dos investimentos e da distribuição dos recursos públicos quanto os incentivos à formação de um «sujeito neoliberal», que otimiza a governação do indivíduo segundo regras do mercado balizadas em termos de eficácia, trabalho individual esforçado e performance.
Brown descreve o neoliberalismo como uma «ordem de razão normativa» que «transmogrifica todos os domínios e empreendimentos humanos, juntamente com os próprios humanos, de acordo com uma imagem específica do económico» (2015, 10). No seu centro, a retirada do Estado da responsabilidade pela segurança económica do conjunto dos seus cidadãos e cidadãs, além de ter o efeito de transferir os riscos do coletivo para o indivíduo, afeta claramente a segurança social e os serviços públicos. Ora, dada a forma como os mercados e as relações económicas são gerados pelo género, são as mulheres que sofrem mais o impacto dessas políticas. Torna-se, assim, fundamental pensar as relações entre neoliberalismo e género, numa articulação que cedo as feministas sentiram de modo urgente.
No início dos anos 80, Zillah Eisenstein previu que o feminismo liberal tinha um futuro radical, que as contradições das mulheres que ingressam na força de trabalho tornariam a subordinação privada insustentável e a discriminação pública visível, gerando um impulso para a mudança estrutural (Eisenstein 1993). Trinta anos depois, diferentes feministas, incluindo a própria Eisenstein (2007), reconhecem que o feminismo caminha pelos corredores do poder corporativo e estatal, mas que, em vez de desafiar o capitalismo, parece ter-se tornado íntimo dele. Por isso, na última década, em particular, as ligações entre o feminismo e os esforços neoliberais de construção de uma sociedade de mercado livre e a cooptação do próprio feminismo pelo neoliberalismo começaram a ser particularmente questionados. Estava assim aberto o debate sobre até que ponto o mainstreaming do feminismo serviu para remover qualquer vestígio da política feminista (McRobbie 2009) e as formas pelas quais o feminismo seria cúmplice do neoliberalismo no seu foco sobre as exigências de «reconhecimento» à custa de um foco mais socialista na redistribuição (Fraser 2009).
Recorde-se, a este propósito, que o Mainstreaming foi adotado como estratégia fundamental de mudança social na IV Conferência Mundial sobre a Mulher: Igualdade, Desenvolvimento e Paz, realizada em Pequim, cujos 25 anos se assinalam em 2020.
A ligação entre o feminismo e o neoliberalismo tem sido designada de diferentes formas. Kantola e Squires (2012) falam de um «feminismo de mercado», Eisenstein (2009) de um «feminismo de mercado livre» ou «feminismo hegemónico», Roberts (2012) de «feminismo transnacional de negócios», Rottenberg, (2017) de «feminismo neoliberal», Elias (2013) de «pós-feminismo». No domínio específico dos estudos da comunicação e dos media, as ligações entre o neoliberalismo e os media recebem a designação de «pós-feminismo» (McRobbie 2004, 2009; Gill 2007), Banet-Weiser (2018) de «feminismo popular», ou ainda de uma combinação de tudo isto (Banet-Weiser et al. 2019). De um modo mais amplo, a literatura sobre o ativismo feminista na era neoliberal preocupa-se predominantemente com a cooptação do primeiro pela segunda e, correspondentemente, com a incapacidade do feminismo servir como vetor de resistência às políticas e lógicas neoliberais.
Ao interpelar as mulheres no sentido de se assumirem como sujeitos desejantes, potenciando novas – e múltiplas – identidades através do consumo, até que ponto é que a lógica neoliberal está a fazer recair a responsabilidade de alteração do status quo sobre o indivíduo e não o coletivo? De facto, o movimento feminista, na sua prática intelectual e compromisso político, depende de uma coletividade mobilizada em torno do objetivo de mudar a sociedade segundo os interesses de todas as mulheres, ao invés de indivíduos particulares. Como é que um contexto liberal, que privilegia o direito a ser-se livre da intrusão do Estado e que coloca a ênfase na responsabilidade pessoal de cada pessoa no seu próprio melhoramento e bemestar, se concilia com todo um legado feminista que aponta para as mulheres enquanto
coletividade «essencialista»?
Nesta edição da revista ex æquo, reposicionamos a questão em torno dos estudos de género na era neoliberal e olhamos para os últimos 20 anos do amplo campo dos estudos de género.
É precisamente da academia dos Estudos sobre Mulheres/de Género/Feministas (ESM/G/F) que têm vindo importantes contribuições que procuram pensar como, por exemplo no contexto português, «a atual lógica neoliberal promoveu a mercantilização no ensino superior, individualização, cargas de trabalho excessivas e performatividade na academia» (Augusto et al 2018, 107; ver também Oliveira & Augusto, 2017) ou como «crescente valorização da produtividade na ciência gerou oportunidades para os EMGF, mas também criou um ambiente de exaustão e depressão que está a ter impactos muito nocivos nos corpos, relações e trabalho científico de quem trabalha em EMGF» (Pereira 2019, 171).
No centro do nosso olhar, neste número, estarão as implicações para os ESM/G/FE da forma como a racionalidade económica neoliberal procura transformar as sociedades capitalistas e como, sob o seu regime, os governos deixam de ter uma responsabilidade prática ou ética perante o seu coletivo de cidadãs e cidadãos, abdicando das obrigações de nivelar o campo de ação para todas as pessoas prejudicadas pela discriminação sistémica e apelando à escolha individual e à responsabilidade pessoal como antídotos para as barreiras de preconceito e discriminação.
Mas será o neoliberalismo um projeto ou coisa singular, ou «um campo de forças cujas articulações imperfeitas criam espaços para formas inesperadas e potencialmente perturbadoras de agência»? (Newman 2017, 99)
Percorrer os últimos 20 anos da interceção entre género e neoliberalismo poderá dar-nos algumas respostas que toquem não apenas os estudos de género, mas os caminhos dos feminismos nessas últimas duas décadas. Talvez, como indica Prügl (2015, 615), precisemos de pensar «a ‘neoliberalização do feminismo’, reconhecendo a diversidade e a natureza mutável dos vários feminismos e a fluidez das suas fronteiras».
Por isso, será importante pensar a articulação entre as questões de emancipação das mulheres e neoliberalismo pressupondo «que políticas são as melhores políticas feministas, que questões e formas de democracia precisam de ser enfatizadas, que compromissos são precisos na luta pela justiça de género e contra o neoliberalismo, são questões que as mulheres ativas em cada região e país precisam de decidir» (Funk 2013, 194).
A ex aequo convida, assim, à submissão de trabalhos que se enquadrem no amplo âmbito das questões que aqui levantamos, incluindo, mas não se restringindo a, estudos sobre:
- gestão das universidades, políticas científicas e valor epistémico dos estudos de género, em Portugal
- desafios dos estudos de género em face das perspetivas pós-coloniais, descoloniais e LGBTIQ;
- implicações das críticas ao feminismo no reconhecimento epistemológico dos estudos de género;
- linhas de contestação dos estudos de género de múltiplas origens, entre outras, nos movimentos conservadores antigénero e nas correntes feministas da diferença sexual;
- contestação das ciências sociais e os estudos de género;
- discussão do mainstreaming enquanto estratégia de mudança social.
- economia política, corporativismo, lideranças;
- estudos sobre media, jornalismo, publicidade, redes sociais, consumo.
- estudos sobre pós-feminismo, feminismo popular, feminismo liberal.
Referências
Augusto, Amélia, Catarina Sales Oliveira, Emília Araújo e Carla Cerqueira. 2018. «The Place for Gender Research in Contemporary Portuguese Science and Higher Education Policies within the Context of Neo-liberalism». In Gender Studies and the New Academic Governance,107-128. Wiesbaden: Springer.
Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2018. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Banet-Weiser, Sarah, Rosalind Gill e Catherine Rottenberg. 2019. «Postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism? Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg in conversation». Feminist Theory, p 1464700119842555.
Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Eisenstein, Hester. 2009. Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Eisenstein, Zillah R. 1993. The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Eisenstein, Zillah. 2007. Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy. London: Zed Books.
Elias, Juanita. 2013. «Davos Woman to the Rescue of Global Capitalism: Postfeminist Politics and Comptitiveness Promotion at the World Economic Forum», International Political Sociology, 7 (2), pp. 152–69. «
Fraser, Nancy. 2009. «Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History», New Left Review (56): 97–117.
Funk, Nanette. 2013. «Contra Fraser on Feminism and Neoliberalism», Hypatia, 28 (1), pp.179–96.
Gill, Rosalind. 2007. «Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility». European Journal of Cultural Studies 10 (2): 147-166.
Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press.
Kantola, Johanna e Judith Squires. 2012. «From State Feminism to Market Feminism», International Political Science Review, 33 (4), 382–400.
McRobbie, Anagela. 2004. «Post-feminism and popular culture». Feminist Media Studies 4 (3): 255-264.
McRobbie, Anagela. 2009. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change,London: Sage
Oliveira, Catarina Sales, & Augusto, Amélia. 2017. «El gender mainstreaming en la academia portuguesa». In Ciencia, Técnica y Mainstreaming Social (1): 17-27. Universitat Politècnica de València.
Pereira, Maria do Mar. 2019. «You can feel the exhaustion in the air around you»: The mood of contemporary universities and its impact on feminist scholarship. Ex aequo 39: 171-186.
Prügl, Elisabeth. 2015. «Neoliberalising Feminism», New Political Economy, 20(4): 614-631.
Roberts, Adrienne. 2012. «Financial Crisis, Financial Firms … And Financial Feminism? The Rise of ‘Transnational Business Feminism’ and the Necessity of Marxist-Feminist IPE», Socialist Studies/Études socialistes, 8 (2), pp. 85–108.
Rottenberg, Catherine. 2017. «Neoliberal Feminism and the Future of Human Capital», Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42 (2): 329-348.
Gender Studies and Neoliberalism: the last 20 years
ex æquo n.º 42
CALL FOR PAPERS
Dossier: GENDER STUDIES AND NEOLIBERALISM: THE LAST 20 YEARS
Editors: Maria João Silveirinha – Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Coimbra (FLUC) and ICNOVA–NOVA Institute of Communication.
Cláudia Álvares – University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL) and Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (CIES)
Deadline – June 30 2020
(to be published in December 2020)
Introduction
Although neoliberal thinking and practices are subjects of considerable debate, most literature agrees that the emphasis on minimal state intervention and the extension of market relations in all aspects of economic activity are central to its project. David Harvey (2007, 23) noted how these ideas have exercised considerable influence over a wide range of US and international institutions and organizations, including education, the media, financial and banking industries and government regulatory agencies. Touching all aspects of our lives, both conscious and unconscious «Neoliberalism has, in short, become hegemonic as a mode of discourse and has pervasive effects on ways of thought and political-economic practices to the point where it has become incorporated into the commonsense way we interpret, live in, and understand the world». Neoliberalism has thus become an almost total and globalizing regime that supports both the logic of investment and the distribution of public resources and incentives for the formation of a «neoliberal subject», optimizing the subject’s governance according to market rules in terms of efficiency, individual effort and performance.
Brown describes neoliberalism as a «normative reason order» that «transmogrifies every human domains and endeavour, along with humans themselves, according to
a specific image of the economic» (2015, 10). As a consequence, the withdrawal of the state from responsibility for the economic security of all its citizens, besides
transferring risks from the collective to the individual, clearly affects social security and public services. Given the ways in which markets and economic relations are generated by gender, it is women who suffer the most from the impact of these policies, which is why it is key to consider the relationship between neoliberalism and gender, articulated in a way that early on feminists took as an urgent task
.In the early 1980s, Zillah Eisenstein predicted that liberal feminism had a radical future, that the contradictions emerging from women’s participation in workforce would make private subordination unsustainable and public discrimination visible, generating an impetus for structural change (Eisenstein 1993). Thirty years later, other feminists, including Eisenstein herself (2007, 2009), recognize that feminism walks the corridors of corporate and state power, but instead of challenging capitalism, it seems they have become more intimate with it. For this reason, particularly in the last decade, some feminists questioned the links between feminism and the neoliberal efforts to build a free market society as well as the cooption of feminism itself by neoliberalism. The debate was open on the extent to which mainstreaming feminism helped to remove any trace of feminist politics (McRobbie 2009) and about the ways in which feminism was becoming complicit with neoliberalism through its focus on ‘recognition’ claims at the expense of a more socialist focus on redistribution (Fraser 2009). In this regard, it should be reminded that Mainstreaming was adopted as a fundamental strategy for social change at the Fourth World Conference on Women: Equality, Development and Peace, held in Beijing, celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2020.
The link between feminism and neoliberalism has received different names. Kantola and Squires (2012) speak of a «market feminism», Eisenstein (2009) of a «free market feminism» or «hegemonic feminism», Roberts (2012) of «transnational business feminism (TBF)», Rottenberg (2017) of «neoliberal feminism», Elias (2013)
of «post-feminism». In the specific domain of communication and media studies, the links between neoliberalism and the media are called «post-feminism» (McRobbie 2004, 2009; Gill 2007), «popular feminism» (Banet-Weiser 2018), or even a combination of both (Banet-Weiser et al. 2019). More broadly, the literature on feminist activism in the neoliberal era is predominantly concerned with the cooption of the former by the latter and with the inability of feminism to act as resistance to neoliberal policies and logics.
When questioning women in the sense of assuming themselves as desiring subjects, enhancing new - and multiple - identities through consumption, to what extent is the neoliberal logic making the responsibility to change the status quo on the individual and not the collective? In fact, the feminist movement, in its intellectual practice and political commitment, depends on a collective mobilized around the objective of changing society according to the interests of all women, instead of private individuals. How is it that a liberal context, which favors the right to be free from State intrusion and which places the emphasis on each person's personal responsibility for his/her own improvement and well-being, is reconciled with a whole feminist legacy that points to women as an «essentialist» collective?
In this edition of ex æquo , we reframe these issues taking a look at the last 20 years of the broad field of gender studies under neoliberalism.
It is precisely from the field of women’s, gender, feminist studies (WGFS) that important contributions have sought to consider how, for example in the Portuguese context, «the present neoliberal logic has promoted commodification in higher education, individualization, excessive workloads and performance in the academy» (Augusto et al 2018, 107; see also Oliveira & Augusto 2017) or how «the growing emphasis on productivity has created opportunities for WGFS but also produced a mood of exhaustion and depression that has extremely detrimental impacts on WGFS academics’ bodies, relationships and knowledge production» (Pereira 2019, 171).
At the centre stage of our issue will be the economic rationality that seeks to transform capitalist societies through the promotion of competition and individual freedom. Under the neoliberal regime, governments cease to have a practical or ethical responsibility towards their collective of citizens and relinquish the obligation to level the living conditions of all people harmed by systemic discrimination. Furthermore, instead of instituting policies to promote social and economic equality, neoliberalism calls for individual choice and personal responsibility as antidotes to the barriers of prejudice and discrimination.
But is neoliberalism a singular project or thing, or a «field of forces whose imperfect articulations create spaces for unexpected and potentially disturbing forms of agency»? (Newman 2017, 99)
Going through the last 20 years of the interception between gender and neoliberalism may give us some answers that concern not only gender studies, but the paths of feminisms in the last two decades. Perhaps, as indicated by Prügl (2015, 615), we need to think «the ‘neoliberalisation of feminism’, recognising the diversity and shifting nature of various feminisms and the fluidity of their boundaries». It will therefore be important to consider the articulation between the issues of women’s emancipation and neoliberalism, assuming «which policies are the best feminist policies, which issues and forms of democracy need to be stressed, which compromises need to be made in the struggle for gender justice and against neoliberalism, are questions that women active in each region and country need to decide» (Funk 2013, 194).
ex æquo thus invites the submission of papers that fall within the broad scope of the issues raised here, 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 antigender 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.
References
Augusto, Amélia, Catarina Sales Oliveira, Emília Araújo e Carla Cerqueira. 2018. «The Place for Gender Research in Contemporary Portuguese Science and Higher Education Policies within the Context of Neo-liberalism». In Gender Studies and the New Academic Governance,107-128. Wiesbaden: Springer.
Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2018. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Banet-Weiser, Sarah, Rosalind Gill e Catherine Rottenberg. 2019. «Postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism? Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg in conversation». Feminist Theory, p 1464700119842555.
Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism”s Stealth Revolution. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Eisenstein, Hester. 2009. Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women‘s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Eisenstein, Zillah R. 1993. The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism .Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Eisenstein, Zillah. 2007. Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy .London: Zed Books.
Elias, Juanita. 2013. «Davos Woman to the Rescue of Global Capitalism: Postfeminist Politics and Comptitiveness Promotion at the World Economic Forum», International Political Sociology, 7 (2), pp. 152–69. «
Fraser, Nancy. 2009. «Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History», New Left Review (56): 97–117.
Funk, Nanette. 2013. «Contra Fraser on Feminism and Neoliberalism», Hypatia, 28 (1), pp. 179–96.
Gill, Rosalind. 2007. «Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility». European Journal of Cultural Studies 10 (2): 147-166.
Harvey, David. 2007. «Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction». The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 610(1): 21–44. doi:10.1177/0002716206296780
Kantola, Johanna e Judith Squires. 2012. «From State Feminism to Market Feminism», International Political Science Review, 33 (4), 382–400.
McRobbie, Anagela. 2004. «Post-feminism and popular culture». Feminist Media Studies 4 (3): 255-264.
McRobbie, Anagela. 2009. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change, London: Sage
Newman, Janet .2017. «The politics of Expertise: Neoliberalism, Governance and the Practice of Politics». In: Higgins, Vaughan and Larner, Wendy eds. Assembling Neoliberalism: Expertise, Practices, Subjects. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 87–105
Oliveira, Catarina Sales, & Augusto, Amélia. 2017. «El gender mainstreaming en la academia portuguesa». In Ciencia, Técnica y Mainstreaming Social (1): 17-27. Universitat Politècnica de València.
Pereira, Maria do Mar. 2019. «You can feel the exhaustion in the air around you»: The mood of contemporary universities and its impact on feminist scholarship. Ex æquo 39: 171-186.
Prügl, Elisabeth. 2015. «Neoliberalising Feminism», New Political Economy, 20(4): 614-631.
Roberts, Adrienne. 2012. «Financial Crisis, Financial Firms … And Financial Feminism? The Rise of ‘Transnational Business Feminism’ and the Necessity of Marxist-Feminist IPE», Socialist Studies/Études socialistes, 8 (2), pp. 85–108.
Rottenberg, Catherine. 2017. «Neoliberal Feminism and the Future of Human Capital», Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42 (2): 329-348.
Gender Studies and Neoliberalism: the last 20 years
ex æquo n.º 42
CALL FOR PAPERS
Dossier: GENDER STUDIES AND NEOLIBERALISM: THE LAST 20 YEARS
Editors: Maria João Silveirinha – Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Coimbra (FLUC) and ICNOVA–NOVA Institute of Communication.
Cláudia Álvares – University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL) and Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (CIES)
Deadline – June 30 2020
(to be published in December 2020)
Introduction
Although neoliberal thinking and practices are subjects of considerable debate, most literature agrees that the emphasis on minimal state intervention and the extension of market relations in all aspects of economic activity are central to its project. David Harvey (2007, 23) noted how these ideas have exercised considerable influence over a wide range of US and international institutions and organizations, including education, the media, financial and banking industries and government regulatory agencies. Touching all aspects of our lives, both conscious and unconscious «Neoliberalism has, in short, become hegemonic as a mode of discourse and has pervasive effects on ways of thought and political-economic practices to the point where it has become incorporated into the commonsense way we interpret, live in, and understand the world». Neoliberalism has thus become an almost total and globalizing regime that supports both the logic of investment and the distribution of public resources and incentives for the formation of a «neoliberal subject», optimizing the subject’s governance according to market rules in terms of efficiency, individual effort and performance.
Brown describes neoliberalism as a «normative reason order» that «transmogrifies every human domains and endeavour, along with humans themselves, according to
a specific image of the economic» (2015, 10). As a consequence, the withdrawal of the state from responsibility for the economic security of all its citizens, besides
transferring risks from the collective to the individual, clearly affects social security and public services. Given the ways in which markets and economic relations are generated by gender, it is women who suffer the most from the impact of these policies, which is why it is key to consider the relationship between neoliberalism and gender, articulated in a way that early on feminists took as an urgent task
.In the early 1980s, Zillah Eisenstein predicted that liberal feminism had a radical future, that the contradictions emerging from women’s participation in workforce would make private subordination unsustainable and public discrimination visible, generating an impetus for structural change (Eisenstein 1993). Thirty years later, other feminists, including Eisenstein herself (2007, 2009), recognize that feminism walks the corridors of corporate and state power, but instead of challenging capitalism, it seems they have become more intimate with it. For this reason, particularly in the last decade, some feminists questioned the links between feminism and the neoliberal efforts to build a free market society as well as the cooption of feminism itself by neoliberalism. The debate was open on the extent to which mainstreaming feminism helped to remove any trace of feminist politics (McRobbie 2009) and about the ways in which feminism was becoming complicit with neoliberalism through its focus on ‘recognition’ claims at the expense of a more socialist focus on redistribution (Fraser 2009). In this regard, it should be reminded that Mainstreaming was adopted as a fundamental strategy for social change at the Fourth World Conference on Women: Equality, Development and Peace, held in Beijing, celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2020.
The link between feminism and neoliberalism has received different names. Kantola and Squires (2012) speak of a «market feminism», Eisenstein (2009) of a «free market feminism» or «hegemonic feminism», Roberts (2012) of «transnational business feminism (TBF)», Rottenberg (2017) of «neoliberal feminism», Elias (2013)
of «post-feminism». In the specific domain of communication and media studies, the links between neoliberalism and the media are called «post-feminism» (McRobbie 2004, 2009; Gill 2007), «popular feminism» (Banet-Weiser 2018), or even a combination of both (Banet-Weiser et al. 2019). More broadly, the literature on feminist activism in the neoliberal era is predominantly concerned with the cooption of the former by the latter and with the inability of feminism to act as resistance to neoliberal policies and logics.
When questioning women in the sense of assuming themselves as desiring subjects, enhancing new - and multiple - identities through consumption, to what extent is the neoliberal logic making the responsibility to change the status quo on the individual and not the collective? In fact, the feminist movement, in its intellectual practice and political commitment, depends on a collective mobilized around the objective of changing society according to the interests of all women, instead of private individuals. How is it that a liberal context, which favors the right to be free from State intrusion and which places the emphasis on each person's personal responsibility for his/her own improvement and well-being, is reconciled with a whole feminist legacy that points to women as an «essentialist» collective?
In this edition of ex æquo , we reframe these issues taking a look at the last 20 years of the broad field of gender studies under neoliberalism.
It is precisely from the field of women’s, gender, feminist studies (WGFS) that important contributions have sought to consider how, for example in the Portuguese context, «the present neoliberal logic has promoted commodification in higher education, individualization, excessive workloads and performance in the academy» (Augusto et al 2018, 107; see also Oliveira & Augusto 2017) or how «the growing emphasis on productivity has created opportunities for WGFS but also produced a mood of exhaustion and depression that has extremely detrimental impacts on WGFS academics’ bodies, relationships and knowledge production» (Pereira 2019, 171).
At the centre stage of our issue will be the economic rationality that seeks to transform capitalist societies through the promotion of competition and individual freedom. Under the neoliberal regime, governments cease to have a practical or ethical responsibility towards their collective of citizens and relinquish the obligation to level the living conditions of all people harmed by systemic discrimination. Furthermore, instead of instituting policies to promote social and economic equality, neoliberalism calls for individual choice and personal responsibility as antidotes to the barriers of prejudice and discrimination.
But is neoliberalism a singular project or thing, or a «field of forces whose imperfect articulations create spaces for unexpected and potentially disturbing forms of agency»? (Newman 2017, 99)
Going through the last 20 years of the interception between gender and neoliberalism may give us some answers that concern not only gender studies, but the paths of feminisms in the last two decades. Perhaps, as indicated by Prügl (2015, 615), we need to think «the ‘neoliberalisation of feminism’, recognising the diversity and shifting nature of various feminisms and the fluidity of their boundaries». It will therefore be important to consider the articulation between the issues of women’s emancipation and neoliberalism, assuming «which policies are the best feminist policies, which issues and forms of democracy need to be stressed, which compromises need to be made in the struggle for gender justice and against neoliberalism, are questions that women active in each region and country need to decide» (Funk 2013, 194).
ex æquo thus invites the submission of papers that fall within the broad scope of the issues raised here, 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 antigender 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.
References
Augusto, Amélia, Catarina Sales Oliveira, Emília Araújo e Carla Cerqueira. 2018. «The Place for Gender Research in Contemporary Portuguese Science and Higher Education Policies within the Context of Neo-liberalism». In Gender Studies and the New Academic Governance,107-128. Wiesbaden: Springer.
Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2018. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Banet-Weiser, Sarah, Rosalind Gill e Catherine Rottenberg. 2019. «Postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism? Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg in conversation». Feminist Theory, p 1464700119842555.
Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism”s Stealth Revolution. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Eisenstein, Hester. 2009. Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women‘s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Eisenstein, Zillah R. 1993. The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism .Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Eisenstein, Zillah. 2007. Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy .London: Zed Books.
Elias, Juanita. 2013. «Davos Woman to the Rescue of Global Capitalism: Postfeminist Politics and Comptitiveness Promotion at the World Economic Forum», International Political Sociology, 7 (2), pp. 152–69. «
Fraser, Nancy. 2009. «Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History», New Left Review (56): 97–117.
Funk, Nanette. 2013. «Contra Fraser on Feminism and Neoliberalism», Hypatia, 28 (1), pp. 179–96.
Gill, Rosalind. 2007. «Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility». European Journal of Cultural Studies 10 (2): 147-166.
Harvey, David. 2007. «Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction». The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 610(1): 21–44. doi:10.1177/0002716206296780
Kantola, Johanna e Judith Squires. 2012. «From State Feminism to Market Feminism», International Political Science Review, 33 (4), 382–400.
McRobbie, Anagela. 2004. «Post-feminism and popular culture». Feminist Media Studies 4 (3): 255-264.
McRobbie, Anagela. 2009. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change, London: Sage
Newman, Janet .2017. «The politics of Expertise: Neoliberalism, Governance and the Practice of Politics». In: Higgins, Vaughan and Larner, Wendy eds. Assembling Neoliberalism: Expertise, Practices, Subjects. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 87–105
Oliveira, Catarina Sales, & Augusto, Amélia. 2017. «El gender mainstreaming en la academia portuguesa». In Ciencia, Técnica y Mainstreaming Social (1): 17-27. Universitat Politècnica de València.
Pereira, Maria do Mar. 2019. «You can feel the exhaustion in the air around you»: The mood of contemporary universities and its impact on feminist scholarship. Ex æquo 39: 171-186.
Prügl, Elisabeth. 2015. «Neoliberalising Feminism», New Political Economy, 20(4): 614-631.
Roberts, Adrienne. 2012. «Financial Crisis, Financial Firms … And Financial Feminism? The Rise of ‘Transnational Business Feminism’ and the Necessity of Marxist-Feminist IPE», Socialist Studies/Études socialistes, 8 (2), pp. 85–108.
Rottenberg, Catherine. 2017. «Neoliberal Feminism and the Future of Human Capital», Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42 (2): 329-348.
Gender Studies and Neoliberalism: the last 20 years
ex æquo n.º 42
CALL FOR PAPERS
Dossier: GENDER STUDIES AND NEOLIBERALISM: THE LAST 20 YEARS
Editors: Maria João Silveirinha – Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Coimbra (FLUC) and ICNOVA–NOVA Institute of Communication.
Cláudia Álvares – University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL) and Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (CIES)
Deadline – May 15 2020
(to be published in December 2020)
Introduction
Although neoliberal thinking and practices are subjects of considerable debate, most literature agrees that the emphasis on minimal state intervention and the extension of market relations in all aspects of economic activity are central to its project. David Harvey (2007, 23) noted how these ideas have exercised considerable influence over a wide range of US and international institutions and organizations, including education, the media, financial and banking industries and government regulatory agencies. Touching all aspects of our lives, both conscious and unconscious «Neoliberalism has, in short, become hegemonic as a mode of discourse and has pervasive effects on ways of thought and political-economic practices to the point where it has become incorporated into the commonsense way we interpret, live in, and understand the world». Neoliberalism has thus become an almost total and globalizing regime that supports both the logic of investment and the distribution of public resources and incentives for the formation of a «neoliberal subject», optimizing the subject’s governance according to market rules in terms of efficiency, individual effort and performance.
Brown describes neoliberalism as a «normative reason order» that «transmogrifies every human domains and endeavour, along with humans themselves, according to
a specific image of the economic» (2015, 10). As a consequence, the withdrawal of the state from responsibility for the economic security of all its citizens, besides
transferring risks from the collective to the individual, clearly affects social security and public services. Given the ways in which markets and economic relations are generated by gender, it is women who suffer the most from the impact of these policies, which is why it is key to consider the relationship between neoliberalism and gender, articulated in a way that early on feminists took as an urgent task
.In the early 1980s, Zillah Eisenstein predicted that liberal feminism had a radical future, that the contradictions emerging from women’s participation in workforce would make private subordination unsustainable and public discrimination visible, generating an impetus for structural change (Eisenstein 1993). Thirty years later, other feminists, including Eisenstein herself (2007, 2009), recognize that feminism walks the corridors of corporate and state power, but instead of challenging capitalism, it seems they have become more intimate with it. For this reason, particularly in the last decade, some feminists questioned the links between feminism and the neoliberal efforts to build a free market society as well as the cooption of feminism itself by neoliberalism. The debate was open on the extent to which mainstreaming feminism helped to remove any trace of feminist politics (McRobbie 2009) and about the ways in which feminism was becoming complicit with neoliberalism through its focus on ‘recognition’ claims at the expense of a more socialist focus on redistribution (Fraser 2009). In this regard, it should be reminded that Mainstreaming was adopted as a fundamental strategy for social change at the Fourth World Conference on Women: Equality, Development and Peace, held in Beijing, celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2020.
The link between feminism and neoliberalism has received different names. Kantola and Squires (2012) speak of a «market feminism», Eisenstein (2009) of a «free market feminism» or «hegemonic feminism», Roberts (2012) of «transnational business feminism (TBF)», Rottenberg (2017) of «neoliberal feminism», Elias (2013)
of «post-feminism». In the specific domain of communication and media studies, the links between neoliberalism and the media are called «post-feminism» (McRobbie 2004, 2009; Gill 2007), «popular feminism» (Banet-Weiser 2018), or even a combination of both (Banet-Weiser et al. 2019). More broadly, the literature on feminist activism in the neoliberal era is predominantly concerned with the cooption of the former by the latter and with the inability of feminism to act as resistance to neoliberal policies and logics.
When questioning women in the sense of assuming themselves as desiring subjects, enhancing new - and multiple - identities through consumption, to what extent is the neoliberal logic making the responsibility to change the status quo on the individual and not the collective? In fact, the feminist movement, in its intellectual practice and political commitment, depends on a collective mobilized around the objective of changing society according to the interests of all women, instead of private individuals. How is it that a liberal context, which favors the right to be free from State intrusion and which places the emphasis on each person's personal responsibility for his/her own improvement and well-being, is reconciled with a whole feminist legacy that points to women as an «essentialist» collective?
In this edition of ex æquo , we reframe these issues taking a look at the last 20 years of the broad field of gender studies under neoliberalism.
It is precisely from the field of women’s, gender, feminist studies (WGFS) that important contributions have sought to consider how, for example in the Portuguese context, «the present neoliberal logic has promoted commodification in higher education, individualization, excessive workloads and performance in the academy» (Augusto et al 2018, 107; see also Oliveira & Augusto 2017) or how «the growing emphasis on productivity has created opportunities for WGFS but also produced a mood of exhaustion and depression that has extremely detrimental impacts on WGFS academics’ bodies, relationships and knowledge production» (Pereira 2019, 171).
At the centre stage of our issue will be the economic rationality that seeks to transform capitalist societies through the promotion of competition and individual freedom. Under the neoliberal regime, governments cease to have a practical or ethical responsibility towards their collective of citizens and relinquish the obligation to level the living conditions of all people harmed by systemic discrimination. Furthermore, instead of instituting policies to promote social and economic equality, neoliberalism calls for individual choice and personal responsibility as antidotes to the barriers of prejudice and discrimination.
But is neoliberalism a singular project or thing, or a «field of forces whose imperfect articulations create spaces for unexpected and potentially disturbing forms of agency»? (Newman 2017, 99)
Going through the last 20 years of the interception between gender and neoliberalism may give us some answers that concern not only gender studies, but the paths of feminisms in the last two decades. Perhaps, as indicated by Prügl (2015, 615), we need to think «the ‘neoliberalisation of feminism’, recognising the diversity and shifting nature of various feminisms and the fluidity of their boundaries». It will therefore be important to consider the articulation between the issues of women’s emancipation and neoliberalism, assuming «which policies are the best feminist policies, which issues and forms of democracy need to be stressed, which compromises need to be made in the struggle for gender justice and against neoliberalism, are questions that women active in each region and country need to decide» (Funk 2013, 194).
ex æquo thus invites the submission of papers that fall within the broad scope of the issues raised here, 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 antigender 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.
References
Augusto, Amélia, Catarina Sales Oliveira, Emília Araújo e Carla Cerqueira. 2018. «The Place for Gender Research in Contemporary Portuguese Science and Higher Education Policies within the Context of Neo-liberalism». In Gender Studies and the New Academic Governance,107-128. Wiesbaden: Springer.
Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2018. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Banet-Weiser, Sarah, Rosalind Gill e Catherine Rottenberg. 2019. «Postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism? Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg in conversation». Feminist Theory, p 1464700119842555.
Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism”s Stealth Revolution. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Eisenstein, Hester. 2009. Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women‘s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Eisenstein, Zillah R. 1993. The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism .Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Eisenstein, Zillah. 2007. Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy .London: Zed Books.
Elias, Juanita. 2013. «Davos Woman to the Rescue of Global Capitalism: Postfeminist Politics and Comptitiveness Promotion at the World Economic Forum», International Political Sociology, 7 (2), pp. 152–69. «
Fraser, Nancy. 2009. «Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History», New Left Review (56): 97–117.
Funk, Nanette. 2013. «Contra Fraser on Feminism and Neoliberalism», Hypatia, 28 (1), pp. 179–96.
Gill, Rosalind. 2007. «Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility». European Journal of Cultural Studies 10 (2): 147-166.
Harvey, David. 2007. «Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction». The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 610(1): 21–44. doi:10.1177/0002716206296780
Kantola, Johanna e Judith Squires. 2012. «From State Feminism to Market Feminism», International Political Science Review, 33 (4), 382–400.
McRobbie, Anagela. 2004. «Post-feminism and popular culture». Feminist Media Studies 4 (3): 255-264.
McRobbie, Anagela. 2009. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change, London: Sage
Newman, Janet .2017. «The politics of Expertise: Neoliberalism, Governance and the Practice of Politics». In: Higgins, Vaughan and Larner, Wendy eds. Assembling Neoliberalism: Expertise, Practices, Subjects. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 87–105
Oliveira, Catarina Sales, & Augusto, Amélia. 2017. «El gender mainstreaming en la academia portuguesa». In Ciencia, Técnica y Mainstreaming Social (1): 17-27. Universitat Politècnica de València.
Pereira, Maria do Mar. 2019. «You can feel the exhaustion in the air around you»: The mood of contemporary universities and its impact on feminist scholarship. Ex æquo 39: 171-186.
Prügl, Elisabeth. 2015. «Neoliberalising Feminism», New Political Economy, 20(4): 614-631.
Roberts, Adrienne. 2012. «Financial Crisis, Financial Firms … And Financial Feminism? The Rise of ‘Transnational Business Feminism’ and the Necessity of Marxist-Feminist IPE», Socialist Studies/Études socialistes, 8 (2), pp. 85–108.
Rottenberg, Catherine. 2017. «Neoliberal Feminism and the Future of Human Capital», Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42 (2): 329-348.
