“How feminism became capitalism’s handmaiden — and how to reclaim it”
At the Guardian, a fantastically clear piece from critical theorist and New School professor Nancy Fraser on the exact way that late-stage capitalism poisoned the women’s movement against solidarity:
As a feminist, I’ve always assumed that by fighting to emancipate women I was building a better world — more egalitarian, just and free. But lately I’ve begun to worry that ideals pioneered by feminists are serving quite different ends. I worry, specifically, that our critique of sexism is now supplying the justification for new forms of inequality and exploitation.
In a cruel twist of fate, I fear that the movement for women’s liberation has become entangled in a dangerous liaison with neoliberal efforts to build a free-market society. That would explain how it came to pass that feminist ideas that once formed part of a radical worldview are increasingly expressed in individualist terms. Where feminists once criticised a society that promoted careerism, they now advise women to “lean in”. A movement that once prioritised social solidarity now celebrates female entrepreneurs. A perspective that once valorised “care” and interdependence now encourages individual advancement and meritocracy.
Fraser goes on to say that these sea changes occurred “not because we were passive victims of neoliberal seductions,” but because, “on the contrary, we ourselves contributed three important ideas to this development”: first, trading the male-breadwinner ideal for a two-earner mandate; second, (rightfully) politicizing the personal, but escalating this aim to a “one-sided focus on ‘gender identity’” at the expense of larger issues of cultural and political economy; third, mounting a (rightful, again) critique of welfare-state paternalism that has resulted in “state retrenchment” and a marketization of social issues that still need to be conducted on a macro scale (she gives the simultaneous rise of microcredit and fall of large-scale poverty reduction efforts as an example).
The current crisis affords the chance to pick up its thread once more, reconnecting the dream of women’s liberation with the vision of a solidary society. To that end, feminists need to break off our dangerous liaison with neoliberalism and reclaim our three “contributions” for our own ends.
First, we might break the spurious link between our critique of the family wage and flexible capitalism by militating for a form of life that de-centres waged work and valorises unwaged activities, including — but not only — carework. Second, we might disrupt the passage from our critique of economism to identity politics by integrating the struggle to transform a status order premised on masculinist cultural values with the struggle for economic justice. Finally, we might sever the bogus bond between our critique of bureaucracy and free-market fundamentalism by reclaiming the mantle of participatory democracy as a means of strengthening the public powers needed to constrain capital for the sake of justice.
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