Fortunes of Feminism Read Online Free PDF Page A

feminism’s evolution in the dramatically changed social context of rising neoliberalism. I explore not only the movement’s extraordinary successes but also the disturbing convergence of some of its ideals with the demands of an emerging new form of capitalism—post-fordist, “disorganized,” transnational. And I suggest that second-wave feminism has unwittingly supplied a key ingredient of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call “the new spirit of capitalism.” 5 Finally, I contemplate prospects for reorienting feminism in the present context of capitalist crisis, which could mark the beginnings of a shift to a new, post-neoliberal form of social organization. I examine the prospects for reactivating feminism’s emancipatory promise in a world that has been rocked by financial crisis and the surrounding political fallout.
    â€œFeminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History” constitutes a provocation of sorts. Contending that feminism has entered a dangerous liaison with neoliberalism, this chapter identifies four major historical ironies. First, the feminist critique of social-democratic economism, undeniably emancipatory in the era of state-organized capitalism, has assumed a more sinister valence in the subsequent period, as it dovetailed with neoliberalism’s interest in diverting political-economic struggles into culturalist channels. Second, the feminist critique of the “family wage,” once the centerpiece of a radical analysis of capitalism’s androcentrism, increasingly serves today to legitimate a new mode of capital accumulation, heavily dependent on women’s waged labor, as idealized in the “two-earner family.” Third, the feminist critique of welfare-state paternalism has converged unwittingly with neoliberalism’s critique of the nanny state, and with its increasingly cynical embrace of micro-credit and NGOs. Finally, efforts to expand the scope of gender justice beyond the nation-state are increasingly resignified to cohere with neoliberalism’s global governance needs, as “femocrats” have entered the policy apparatuses of the United Nations, the European Union, and the “international community.” In every case, an idea that served emancipatory ends in one context became ambiguous, if not worse, in another.
    Where does this argument leave feminism today? In the final chapter, I propose a framework aimed at disrupting our dangerous liaison with neoliberalism and liberating our radical energies. Revisiting a landmark study of capitalist crisis, “Between Marketization and Social Protection” (2010) offers a feminist reading of Karl Polanyi’s 1944 classic The Great Transformation . 6 Eschewing economism, this book analyzed a previous crisis of capitalism as a crisis of social reproduction, as earlier efforts to create a “free market society” undermined the shared understandings and solidary relations that underpin social life. In Polanyi’s view, such efforts proved so destructive of livelihoods, communities, and habitats as to trigger a century-long struggle between free-marketeers and proponents of “social protection,” who sought to defend “society” from the ravages of the market. The end result of this struggle, which he called a “double movement,” was fascism and World War II.
    Without question, Polanyi’s diagnosis is relevant today. Our crisis, too, can be fruitfully analyzed as a “great transformation” in which a new round of efforts to free markets from political regulation is threatening social reproduction and sparking a new wave of protectionist protest. Nevertheless, I argue here, Polanyi’s framework harbors a major blindspot. Focused single-mindedly on harms emanating from marketization, his account overlooks harms originating elsewhere, in the surrounding “society.” As a result, it neglects the fact that social