Neoliberal Feminism Research Articles

Girls and activism in a neoliberal time: How teen girls from Toronto negotiate care, activism, and extraordinary girlhood

Recently, a number of prominent teen girl activist leaders have been gaining the world’s attention, but how do girls not in the public eye and with less social power think about activism? Moreover, how do girls who may not exclusively define themselves as activists, negotiate their own desire to contribute to social change with challenges they identify as holding them back from doing so? Through qualitative research with eight teenage girls in Toronto, I explore the ways these teen girls define the “activist,” their role in activism, and the challenges holding them back from being more active. My methodology is congruent, reflecting my feminist and youth studies commitment to girls leading research, and my findings indicate that such an approach is crucial in order to truly understand how girls with less social power and public visibility experience the world and their roles within it. Doing so also challenge pre-conceived notions and standards of extraordinary girlhood. The findings coincide with what Catherine Rottenberg refers to as neoliberal feminism. The extraordinariness implicit in visible activism framed the girls from my study’s views on what it would take to be a true activist themselves, which was both intimidating and also at times is in contention with their monumental care and concern for loved ones.

Beyond the Carceral #MeToo

In this article, we attempt a radical critique of the #MeToo movement. We do not aim to display #MeToo phenomenon as a molarity anchored to the nobility of its supposed historical origin. Rather we showcase it as a nomadological flow. This is a flow that, on the one hand, resonates with and folds the productive intensities of its supposed historical origin. But, on the other hand, it turns into a dangerous mad line of flight with a potential to stultify the relational dynamics of genders. Secondly, we will argue that what lies behind the metamorphosis of ‘Me Too’ activism into a dangerous line of flight, inclined to devilishly restructure the socius, is its precarious connection with the elusive media images. Thirdly we shall show how as a dangerous line of flight #MeToo activism ends up becoming an ally of neo-liberal carceral feminism and governmental schemes of incarceration and surveillance. And finally, we will focus on explaining the positionality of #MeToo in the light of schizo-aesthetics of body and desire.

Feminisme Neoliberal dan Pseudo-Empowerment dalam Kampanye Kecap ABC “Suami Sejati Mau Masak”

This paper tried to give an in-depth critical view on the Kecap ABC Real Husband Cooks Campaign. The campaign tried to tackle the issues within Hill Asean Reports on Gender Inequality in the Domestic Sphere by encouraging men’s participation in the kitchen. The campaign, though were highly praised to be considered as progressive and pro-equality, also send message of pseudo-empowerment within their Neoliberal Feminist message regarding women’s position in the domestic sphere. This paper founds three issues in related to the topic: first is how this campaign fails to eliminate the stereotype of women as weak and dependent towards men although they tried to present women and men as independent. Second, the campaign over simplify gender inequality and went with the neoliberal feminist understanding on individualization of understanding and defining an issue. Last, by putting men in the kitchen will give a message that men are willing and committed to participate in a pro-equality movement but in reality, it is not more than just a pseudo-empowerment created from adding domestic work as a skill. This paper will use Sara Mills’ Critical Discourse Analysis to describe the message stated before within the campaign. Keywords: Neoliberal Feminism, Discourse Analysis, Sara Mills, Kecap ABC Commercials

Chinese “female force” in an “American Factory”: Women’s identity formation in an English reading club

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the mediated narratives and identity construction of a reading club of female workers in call centers of multinational corporations in Dalian China, where the discourse of an empowering ‘female force' has been popularized and scrutinized on Chinese social media. These professional workers manage and construct their emerging middle-class identities through embodied experiences and mediated discourses fostered by an English reading club that is both online and offline. Responding to recent critiques of neoliberal feminism in the Chinese context, this study uses a mixed-method approach to unpack the complex processes of these women's identity construction and performance through participatory reading practices. This includes ethnographic participant observation in offline reading club activities, in-depth interviews, and a discourse analysis of mediated narratives on social media (WeChat). We argue that Chinese working women's identity construction and performance are shaped by complex intersections of class, nation, gender and workplace/institutions, where their encounters are in flux, given the changing neoliberal globalization process after China’s four-decade long opening up reform. This study challenges and extends the critique of neoliberal feminism and finds evidence of agency and tactical engagement whereby female workers negotiate their emerging middle-class identities and forge possible solidarities within a networked workplace.

On “progressive neoliberalism” from a discursive perspective: “Progress” as an empty signifier

On “progressive neoliberalism” from a discursive perspective: “Progress” as an empty signifier

Raucous feminisms in neoliberal times

There is no shortage of media representations that reinforce the neoliberal order, emphasise individual freedom and self-regulation and downplay structural inequities and systemic oppression. The current paper analyses an alternative representation that works to dismantle the dominant social order. I interrogate the disruptive potential of the ‘unruly woman’ on Broad City by exploring two discursive themes that present robust alternatives to a neoliberal feminist agenda: transgressive representations of female sexuality and desire and the visibility and normalisation of ‘unfeminine’ behaviours. Multimodal critical discourse analysis reveals how these themes highlight the tension between women’s will to act freely and the structural binds that keep groups oppressed beyond any freedom individuals may enjoy. As white women, Ilana and Abbi’s racial privilege is central in scaffolding their gendered freedom; however, self-reflexive critiques and inclusion of diverse, non-tokenised representations show a path forward towards a collective and liberatory intersectional feminism.

Mobilising gender equality: A discourse analysis of bids to host the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023™

After an exciting bidding process featuring competing submissions from Brazil, Colombia and Japan, Australia and New Zealand were chosen to co-host the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023™. Using feminist discourse analysis to examine the narrative strategies employed by the bidding nations, this article demonstrates that bidding nations discursively mobilised themes of gender equality to position their bids favourably. They did so by asserting themselves as leaders in women’s sport and gender equality, and by emphasising strategies for growing women’s football. Bidding nations situate themselves as benevolent rescuers of struggling women’s sport without acknowledging their accountability for policies and practices that disenfranchised women’s football in the first place. This article argues that the mobilisation of gender equality discourses by bidding nations problematically uses neoliberal feminist logics, stripping pro-women messages such as equal opportunity and empowerment of political context and repackaging them in commercially viable ways. Ultimately, although bidding nations use discourses of gender equality to position themselves favourably, existing levels of gender inequality reveal the limits of their positioning.

Neoliberal Film and Feminism

This essay looks at two recent films – Rick Rosenthal’s 2013 Drones and Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2014 A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night – to discuss the intersections between feminism and neoliberalism. It argues neoliberalism promotes images of feminist-influenced independent women in order to advance its ideologies of resilience and public-sector critique as well as to make sense of its policies of privatization, technological expansion, and cuts in workforce supports. Images of women in such films also serve to create narrative and moral meanings that support forms of exploitation in reproductive economies. However, such films also demonstrate that neoliberalism’s citations of feminism cannot help but produce multiple feminist perspectives, some of which cannot be collapsed into – and even contradict – neoliberalism’s constructions.

The Democratisation Myth

Open access (OA) in the Global North is considered to solve an accessibility problem in scholarly communication. But this accessibility is restricted to the consumption of knowledge. Epistemic injustices inhering in the scholarly communication of a global production of knowledge remain unchanged. This underscores that the commercial or big deal OA dominating Europe and North America have little revolutionary potential to democratise knowledge. Academia in the Global North, driven by politics of progressive neoliberalism, can even reinforce its hegemonic power by solidifying and legitimating contemporary hierarchies of scholarly communication through OA. In a critique of the notion of a democratisation of knowledge, I showcase manifestations of OA as either allowing consumption of existing discourse or as active participation of discourse in the making. The latter comes closer to being the basis for a democratisation of knowledge. I discuss this as I issue a threefold conceptualisation of epistemic injustices comprising of testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, and epistemic objectification. As these injustices prevail, the notion of a democratisation of knowledge through OA is but another form of technological determinism that neglects the intricacies of culture and hegemony.

The stigma of feminism: disclosures and silences regarding female disadvantage in the video game industry in US and Finnish media stories

ABSTRACT This article examines how the issue of gender, particularly women’s (under)representation in the video game industry, is framed in US and Finnish media. Building on the notion of stigma surrounding feminism, the article examines discourse practices as acts of managing the image of feminism. The findings illustrate five stigma management strategies that offer the possibility of maintaining socially accepted ways of discussing gender inequality and portraying women in mainstream media. Using critical discourse analysis, the paper addresses how the use of these stigma management strategies connects with different contemporary feminisms. The strategies used and their ideological backgrounds vary between the two cultural contexts. This article contributes to the understanding of the ongoing discussions between postfeminism and neoliberal feminism in contemporary society and organizations by demonstrating how the expression of feminist ideas is managed in different cultural contexts.

Shit talk in shitty terrain: Flushing Indian feminism through YouTube’s comedic conduits

ABSTRACT This article examines the ways in which YouTube’s comedy-driven drama, Ladies Room, set in six women-only toilet sanctuaries across Mumbai, mines the semiotics of unruliness to push against the boundaries of upper-caste Indian feminine respectability. Drawing upon comedy studies and feminist theory, we deconstruct the two millennial protagonists Dingo & Khanna’s transgressive behaviors, body politics, and charged conversations about the sexist and cutthroat environments of corporate and new media branding careers. In conclusion, while Ladies Room’s cultural politics disrupt the agendas of conservative Hindu nationalism and Bollywood’s neoliberal feminism, we also point to the show’s collusion with caste and class hierarchies.

Health Care and the Limits of “Progressive” Neoliberalism: Re-Evaluating the Trade-Health Interface 2006-2019

From 1995 to 2006, Canadian trade policy purported to insulate the Canadian health care system from the effects of trade liberalization, largely through reliance upon key general exclusion clauses in the NAFTA and the GATS and other legal strategies. During the Conservative years 2006-2015 the government de-emphasized these strategies, and (more importantly) the international trade agenda increasingly emphasized investment promotion and patent protection. When the Liberal Party returned to government in 2015, personal, structural, and ideological factors all pointed to the retention of the neoliberal trade agenda, but one which was legitimated by more 'progressive' features, such as side-agreements. This paper traces the evolution of 'progressive neoliberalism' in the trade-health interface and argues that we need to recognize the inherent limitations of an approach that preaches harmony and coherence between domestic health care and international trade law.

The neoliberal university, social work and personalised care for older adults

AbstractThis article critically examines the impact of the neoliberal university upon social work education, research and practice relating to older people. The article appraises market-led pedagogical reforms, including of the training of social workers who go on to work with older adults, such as in support of policies including personalisation. Influence is drawn from the work of Nancy Fraser: specifically, her understanding of ‘progressive neoliberalism’, or the improbable fusion of free market ideals with the politics of recognition to create a rejuvenated hegemonic bloc. This theoretical framework is utilised to analyse the prevalence of emancipatory constructs such as empowerment, participation, anti-oppression, equality, choice and independence within the acutely underfunded, bureaucratic and risk-averse fields of social care and social work. While benefiting some older ‘service users’, it is argued that personalisation policy regularly disadvantages or excludes older people within fragmented adult social care sectors. Progressive neoliberalism has helped to promote supplyled training and policies which envisage participative and asset-based self-care whilst more often excluding or objectifying older adults, especially those with higher-level needs.

Neoliberal postfeminism—or some other sexier thing: gender and populism in the Spanish context

The project of developing a contemporary critical populism requires us to discriminate between uncritical populisms that ultimately reinforce unequal social relations, and popular discourses capable of generating counterhegemonic projects. In the field of popular feminisms, this means discriminating between the pseudo-feminist distortions that saturate popular culture and the feminisms that are radically committed to social justice. From this point of view, what has been called neoliberal feminism or postfeminism are clear examples of culturally populist feminisms can be developed in decidedly uncritical ways. As a new populist narrative, neoliberal postfeminism, has gobbled up feminism to regurgitate it as some other thing, which is sexier and more profitable in political, commercial and symbolical terms, and which adapts the rhetoric of neoliberal entrepreneurial subjectivities – free, empowered, sovereign of themselves and their choices – to these new post-recessionary times of popularised feminism. Against this, and with a particular focus on the Spanish context, this paper makes an intersectional case for a truly critical popular/populist feminism, capable of normalising the values of equality, justice, diversity, wellbeing and freedom, as well as of developing a progressive social project for everyone.

Speaking Pictures, Silent Voices: Female Athletes and the Negotiation of Selfhood

Combining Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1990) theoretical position on Architectonics and Erving Goffman’s (1979) writings on visual content analysis, the aim of this paper is to explore how female athletes are caught in a complex matrix of power, post – feminist neoliberalism, and self – presentation. The visual images they choose to portray are, therefore, perfect for determining how this cohort of women negotiates social discourses around identity and femininity. Appropriating the Bakhtinian notion of architectonic unity, not only provides an alternative theoretical lens for enquiries concerning the body, identity, and selfhood, but also initiates some thought provoking questions around neoliberal feminism and ‘new femininity.’ This paper advances on previous research by exemplifying how Serena Williams (considered the greatest female tennis player of all time) combines both her femininity and strong physicality to self – shape a myth – like persona, setting her apart from traditional stereotypes of femininity and ‘femaleness.’

Neoliberal-neoconservative feminism(s) in Turkey: politics of female bodies/subjectivities and the Justice and Development Party’s turn to authoritarianism

AbstractStudying changes in the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) politics within the general context of the long-lasting history of neoliberalism-neoconservatism in Turkey, this paper aims to provide a new perspective for analyzing the party’s recent drift to authoritarianism from the perspective of its gender politics. For many feminist scholars and activists, the recent changes in the AKP’s gender politics are a matter of an increase in the AKP’s oppression and patriarchal power. These analyses give no explicit account of why there has been an increase or if it is only a matter of an increase in the level of the oppressiveness of patriarchal power. From a perspective that questions this quantitative assumption (i.e. with an argument that the AKP’s politics has been equally oppressive for all women and from the very beginning of its rule), this paper aims to give insights into this complex process which led, first, to the emergence of neoliberal feminism as a new subjective position, and, later, to the modification of this official politics on women’s issue and the emergence of neoconservative feminism along with the AKP’s drift to authoritarianism in response to certain contradictory effects of neoliberalism and its eventual crisis.

Editor’s Introduction

This paper provides a critical analysis of post-humanitarianism with reference to adaptive design. At a time when precarity has become a global phenomenon, the design principle has sidelined the need for, or even the possibility of, political change. Rather than working to eliminate precarity, post-humanitarianism is implicated in its reproduction and governance. Central here is a historic change in how the human condition is understood. The rational Homo economicus of modernism has been replaced by progressive neoliberalism’s cognitively challenged and necessarily ignorant Homo inscius. Solidarity with the vulnerable has given way to conditional empathy. Rather than structural outcomes to be protected against, not only are humanitarian crises now seen as unavoidable, they have become positively developmental. Post-humanitarianism no longer provides material assistance – its aim is to change the behaviour of the precariat in order to optimise its social reproduction. Together with the construction of logistical mega-corridors, this process is part of late-capitalism’s incorporation of the vast informal economies of the global South. Building on progressive neoliberalism’s antipathy towards formal structures and professional standards, through a combination of behavioural economics, cognitive manipulation and smart technology, post-humanitarianism is actively involved in the elimination of the very power to resist.

‘Everyone Has Secrets’: Revealing the Whistleblower in Hollwood Film in the Examples of <em>Snowden</em> and <em>The Fifth Estate</em>

‘Everyone Has Secrets’: Revealing the Whistleblower in Hollwood Film in the Examples of <em>Snowden</em> and <em>The Fifth Estate</em>

Work hard, fit in, and applaud her: Women developers blogging about their lived experiences

Women are under-represented in information technology (IT) professions, globally. It is widely discussed that there is an urgent need to tackle this issue by bringing more women into the IT industry. However, the spotlight is less often put on women currently working as developers in male-dominated environments. How do these women experience their work and deal with problems? International non-profit initiatives such as Women who Code (WwC) aim not only at supporting women in training for and entering IT professions: they also advise them in their daily lives and struggles as developers. Using this network and its blog as a case study, I show that the WwC bloggers are faced with contradictory work norms and experiences. They tend to resort to pragmatic advice, focused on DIY problem solving, and shouldered individual responsibility rather than highlighting systemic failures. This tendency shows similarities to neoliberal feminist rationales and speaks to the need for (re)emphasizing the need for structural changes within the broader discourse concerning women developers.

“The goddess of the room”: Birth as a feminist issue among doulas and mothers

This article focuses on how feminism informs women's birth choices in the U.S. Through twenty-five interviews with doulas (labor support people) and twenty-five interviews with mothers, I look at how feminism affects these women's views and approaches to birth. I found that birth is a feminist issue to most. Both groups described feminism in terms of “empowerment,” and saw doula support as a good way to regain power lost in the patriarchal system of medicine. Most interviewees took a neoliberal feminist approach to systemic issues, whereby participants championed hiring a private service (doula support) to supplement impersonal maternal health care. At this point, doula support remains restricted to women who can access it and afford it. The findings from this study suggest that feminism leads women to challenge male-centered obstetric medicine and seek out individual solutions (like hiring doulas) to systemic issues of patriarchy in contemporary maternity care.