RNF · The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism

The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism

RNF addresses the puzzling convergence of neoliberalism and feminism, a convergence that has produced a new and increasingly dominant strand of feminism in the Anglo-American world—what I term neoliberal feminism. This feminism has been unmoored from key terms, such as equality, justice, emancipation or autonomy. Indeed, disavowing the socio-economic and cultural structures shaping our lives, neoliberal feminism produces a feminist subject who accepts full responsibility for her own well-being predicated on crafting a happy work-family balance, which is itself based on a cost-benefit calculus. This is the first multidisciplinary perspective on the rise of neoliberal feminism, one which exposes its mode of operations and how it helps produce a new feminist subject whose ideal is a happy work-family balance. It also exposes how neoliberal feminism reifies white and class privilege and heteronormatively, which, in turn, lends itself to neo-conservative and xenophobic agendas. Thus, the project has created new tools for understanding our present neoliberal reality. Finally, RNF has developed new directions and a new conceptual apparatus for reclaiming feminism as a social justice movement. The overall objective of RNF was to give an account for the rise of neoliberal feminism, which posits a happy work-family balance as its ultimate ideal. RNF’s main conclusions are: 1) Neoliberalism currently ‘needs’ feminism to resolve one of its internal tensions in relation to gender. As an economic order, neoliberalism relies on reproduction and care work in order to reproduce and maintain so-called human capital. However, as a political rationality, neoliberalism has no separate political lexicon that can recognize let alone value reproduction and care work. Neoliberal feminism therefore operates at the moment as a kind of pushback to the total conversion of educated and upwardly mobile women into generic human capital. By maintaining reproduction as part of middle-class or so-called aspirational women’s normative trajectory and positing balance as its normative frame and ultimate ideal, neoliberal feminism helps to both maintain a discourse of reproduction care-work while ensuring that all responsibility for these forms of labor falls squarely on the shoulder of individual so-called aspirational women. 2) Neoliberal feminism increasingly produces a splitting of female subjectivity: the worthy capital-enhancing feminist subject who are encouraged to have children and negotiate a happy work-family balance and the “unworthy” disposable female “other” who performs most of the reproductive and care work. 3) Neoliberal feminism should not be considered “faux” feminism but rather one strand among many others.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union