Fortunes of Feminism Read Online Free PDF

protections are often vehicles of domination, aimed at entrenching hierarchies and at excluding “outsiders.” Preoccupied overwhelmingly with struggles over marketization, Polanyi occults struggles over injustices rooted in “society” and encoded in social protections.
    â€œBetween Marketization and Social Protection” aims to correct this blindspot. Seeking to develop a broader critique, I propose to transform Polanyi’s double movement into a triple movement . The key move here is to introduce a third pole of social struggle, which I call “emancipation.” Crosscutting his central conflict between marketization and social protection, emancipation aims to overcome forms of domination rooted in “society,” as well as those based in “economy.” Opposing oppressive protections without thereby becoming free-marketeers, emancipation’s ranks have included feminists as well as the billions of people—peasants, serfs, and slaves; racialized, colonized, and indigenous peoples—for whom access to a wage promised liberation from traditional authority. By thematizing emancipation as colliding with marketization and social protection, the triple movement clarifies the political terrain on which feminism operates today. On the one hand (contra Polanyi), this figure discloses the ambivalence of social protection, which often entrenches domination even while counteracting the disintegrative effects of marketization. On the other hand, however, (contra mainstream liberal feminism), the triple movement reveals the ambivalence of emancipation, which may dissolve the solidary ethical basis of social protection and can thereby foster marketization even as it dismantles domination. Probing these ambivalences, I conclude that feminists should end our dangerous liaison with marketization and forge a principled new alliance with social protection. In so doing, we could reactivate and extend the insurrectionary, anti-capitalist spirit of the second wave.
    A compilation of essays written over a period of more than twenty-five years, this volume’s orientation is at once retrospective and prospective. Charting shifts in the feminist imaginary since the 1970s, it offers an interpretation of the recent history of feminist thought. At the same time, however, it looks forward, to the feminism of the future now being invented by new generations of feminist activists. Schooled in digital media and comfortable in transnational space, yet formed in the crucible of capitalist crisis, this generation promises to reinvent the feminist imagination yet again. Emerging from the long slog through identity politics, the young feminists of this generation seem poised to conjure up a new synthesis of radical democracy and social justice. Combining redistribution, recognition, and representation, they are seeking to transform a world that no longer resembles the Westphalian international system of sovereign states. Faced with the gravest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s, they have every incentive to devise new, systematic critiques that combine the enduring insights of socialist-feminism with those of newer paradigms, such as postcolonialism and ecology. Whatever helpful lessons they can glean from this volume will pale in comparison with those its author expects to learn from them.
----
    1 The phrase “Golden Age of capitalism” comes from Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 , New York: Vintage, 1996.
    2 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action , esp. Chapter VIII, “Marx and the Thesis of Internal Colonization,” in Volume Two: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason , trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.
    3 Judith Butler, “Merely Cultural,” Social Text 52/53, 1997, 265–77.
    4 Ulrich Beck, “Toward a New Critical Theory with a Cosmopolitan Intent,” Constellations: An