Hegemonic feminism, neoliberalism and womenomics: 'empowerment' instead of liberation?

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONIn this essay I want to reflect on a sample of a relatively new literature that has emerged in recent years on the growth of 'womenomics' and what Adrienne Roberts has called 'transnational business feminism'.1 If in the 1970s, we saw the growth of official feminism, femocrats, and state machinery for women, and in the 1980s, a surge of activities around women in development, the 1990s and the 2000s seem to have ushered in a new doctrine, that of so-called 'womenomics', meaning that investment in women and girls is now the key to ending poverty, hunger, and disease.I extend the argument first put forth in my book Feminism Seduced.2 In that study I argued that national governments and international financial institutions were making use of a certain kind of 'hegemonic' feminism, to advance the view that the solution to poverty and underdevelopment was the fostering of education, training and jobs for women and girls. I called this substituting women for development. By this I meant that the highly successful path of state-led development, exemplified by China after 1949, Japan after the Second World War, and South Korea in the 1950s (not to mention the United States after the Civil War), was declared by the United States and other powerful industrialised countries to be obsolete. Instead, state-led development was discredited, and replaced by a new paradigm that required the coerced opening of national economies to an unlimited influx of foreign capital and manufacturing.Under the rubric of neoliberalism, previously underdeveloped countries were no longer going to be permitted to govern their own economic development. Rather, they were forced to submit to the dictates of international investors, through so-called Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). The results of these policies in the 1980s were widely viewed as devastating for countries in the Global South, resulting in the decline of public health facilities, schools, and infrastructure, and a renewed rise in poverty and disease.At the time, I argued that international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund had begun to produce an ideological case for SAPs, namely, the great advantages these policies provided for women and girls, from the creation of Export Processing Zones (EPZs) with predominantly female workforces, to the sharp rise in migration by women from countries such as the Philippines, whose provision of remittances was becoming a chief source of government revenues. I called this an ideological sleight of hand, in which women and girls were presented as the key to development. I quoted then UN General Secretary Kofi Annan as saying in 2006 that 'the world is beginning to recognise that empowering women and girls is key to development' (Quoted in Feminism Seduced, pp137-8).Since that time, the claim that women and girls rather than state-led development are the key to ending poverty, has been extended from governments and IFIs to corporations.3 As noted earlier, this set of ideas has been codified in the notion of 'womenomics'. I develop this analysis below. But first, we need to ask: is this mainstream adoption of a certain version of feminist ideas a triumph for the influence of feminist activists around the globe? Or do we see this as yet another classic attempt by the agents of capitalist globalisation to contain the energies of women and turn them to the advantage of the bottom line? Presumably we should be neither surprised nor shocked that a world-wide movement of women, revived in the 1960s, and bringing its energy, idealism and vision of fundamental social change, should have been derailed by the defenders of neoliberal globalised capitalism.Why has the worldwide women's movement been unable to mount a serious challenge to the hegemony of neoliberalism? A movement to seek equality for the women of the world should have been part of the resistance to globalisation, with its attendant shredding of the safety net and devastation of the public sector. …