Empowered Women, Failed Patriarchs: Neoliberalism and Global Gender Anxieties (original) (raw)

Mothers of the World Unite: Gender inequality and poverty under the neo-liberal state

Much literature on globalization and increasing inequalities has failed to fully acknowledge how women, specifically mothers, are both excluded and included within global markets. Despite the neo-liberal reliance upon the poorly remunerated or unpaid labour of women and mothers, there has been distinctive silence in terms of recognizing this economic and political contribution. This article is an attempt to start a pivotal conversation regarding the specific positionality of women, particularly mothers, within the neo-liberal paradigm, and the ways in which a transformative feminist alternative economic paradigm can be imagined. 'No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged' (Smith, 2010: 88).

Towards a Radical Re-appropriation: Gender, Development and Neoliberal Feminism

Development and Change, 2015

Tracing a complex trajectory from ‘liberal’ to ‘neoliberal’ feminism in development, this article argues that approaches to gender which are currently being promoted within neoliberal development frameworks, while often characterized as ‘instrumentalizing’ gender equality, in fact rely upon, extend and deepen gendered inequalities in order to sustain and strengthen processes of global capital accumulation in several ways. This is explored through development discourses and practices relating to microfinance, reproductive rights and adolescent girls. Drawing on examples from India, the article goes on to reflect on experiences of collective movements in which the assumptions underpinning this ‘Gender Equality as Smart Economics’ approach are challenged. Finally, it highlights several concepts associated with Marxist, Black, Post-colonial and Queer feminisms and underlines their importance to projects seeking to critically redefine development, arguing for a radical re-appropriation of gender in this context.

Globalization and Women’s Rights: Economic Restructuring, Women’s Experiences and Responses to “Neoliberal Shocks”

2021

Globalization is also an external war that is waged against women’s bodies, rights, autonomies and livelihood through the continuation of dispossession and violence. It must be emphasized that the concepts of violence and dispossession are not limited to seen, forceful, physical activities that are exerted towards less powerful groups by more dominant groups but the concepts are also unseen and institutionalized into socio-cultural, economic and political spaces.

Beyond "Empowerment Lite" : Women's Empowerment, Neoliberal Development and Global Justice

An apparent paradox stalks the rise of women’s and girls’ empowerment. The instrumental case for “investing in women” has been persuasively and glossily made. Yet the “business case” is primarily underpinned by feminist research framed by materialist concerns. For them, gender equality and women’s empowerment are framed by a concern with persistent inequality rather than “unleashing potential”, and with structural transformation rather than simply the incorporation of women into segmented labour markets that are deeply inflected by inequitable norms and practices. Paying close attention to the neoliberal appellation of women as the subject of empowerment, I situate some of the contradictions of the current conjuncture and explore the role the academy might play in destabilising the gender myths and conflations that characterise what I call empowerment lite.

Analyzing Globalization from a Feminist Perspective

Travail, genre et sociétés 2011/1 (No 25), p. 81-98., 2011

This article offers a synthetic analysis of neoliberal globalization from a feminist perspective that is influenced by Francophone materialist feminist analyses, theory on interlinked social power relationships, and the Latin American and Caribbean autonomous feminist movement. The debate focuses on four issues: (1) Is capitalism an objective ally of sexual equality, or does it worsen the inequalities of sex, “race,” and class by reorganizing them? (2) women and environmental degradation, the industrial war against the rural world, rural depopulation, and forced urbanization; (3) the imposition of a “development” that is detrimental to women and is based on export-oriented monoculture, the exploitation of subsoil, free zones, and tourism; (4) the neoliberal continuum of masculine military violence, which creates, maintains, and opposes “men in arms” to “service women.”

United by strength or oppression? The problematic domination of gender based approaches to development by a white, middle class and Western model of feminism

This paper makes visible the hegemonic dimension of the white, middle class and Western (henceforth ‘WMW’) model of feminism and its relationship of complicity and convergence with the development-industrial complex in reproducing the ‘imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ (hooks 2004:17). I contend that for a feminist social transformation at both material and ideational levels, there is a need for a cross-border, horizontalist and pluri-versal praxis which has at its core political autonomy, solidarity, reflexivity and recognition of the epistemic privilege of women and populations in the Global South. The argument is constructed as follows. Firstly, I outline the way in which development furthers colonial, capitalist, white supremacist, heterosexist, modernist, patriarchal and classist ideologies and structures of power. I then show that the WMW feminism and its gender based approaches to development are particularistic due to their sole concern to end sexism, misogyny and gender inequality. They fallaciously claim unity and universal solidarity with women in the Global South, masking their complicity with hegemonic systems that colonise and erase agency, contexts and experiences; ‘difference’, thus, is subjugated and used as a negative qualifier of ‘the other’. Secondly, we will see that the interconnection between gender identity, roles, relations and performance cannot be isolated from power relations and material realities. Finally, I discuss possibilities for feminist solidarity and the recognition of commonalities across geopolitical and epistemological locations which can emerge through decolonial, non-hierarchical strategic alliances that focus on strength/possibility, rather than oppression. Recognising one’s positionality and complicity with the neo-colonial matrix of power and acknowledging difference as positive would benefit feminist struggle, enabling a move beyond merely resisting systems of domination, towards creating new social imaginaries and realities.