Working the Spaces of Power

Activism, Neoliberalism and Gendered Labour

Janet Newman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781849664905
• eBook ISBN: 9781780932774
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. This book highlights the way in which contemporary forms of governance, policy and politics have been reframed by women 'working the spaces of power'. It shows how they took activist commitments into their working lives, in the process negotiating the terrain of neoliberal governance. Their work generated new political movements, community initiatives, public policies, organizational logics and forms of 'knowledge work'. Newman draws on over 50 interviews with women from four generations to interrogate, develop and challenge existing approaches to understanding social and political change. In a postscript she traces ways in which the analysis might 'speak to the present' and offer resources for contemporary politics and practice.

1

Introduction: Research as Mapmaking

I want to begin with events and encounters that inspired the research on which this book is based. The first was a retirement party where I realized that the room was full of women who had been part of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and who had taken their politics into different forms of paid and unpaid work. While talking with them it became evident that their work had helped to shape many of the policy innovations and new governing rationalities of subsequent decades. But in the process the changes they sought became subject to what some critics view as governmental processes of incorporation and depoliticization. Feminist claims that ‘the personal is political’ had opened up a range of new government policies concerned with how personal lives are lived. Community activism had been transformed – and in part depoliticized – through successive governmental programmes promoting active citizenship, volunteering and civic responsibility. Anti-racist struggles had been partly deflected through discourses of multiculturalism and social cohesion. Women’s claims for equality had been incorporated through processes of ‘mainstreaming’ that have served to bureaucratize and depoliticize feminism. Struggles on the part of disabled people had been accommodated through consumerist logics of choice. Experiments in cooperative living and working had prefigured new organizational forms geared to promoting the commitment of both workers and stakeholders. And so on.

A second inspiration came from a series of encounters with young women involved in contemporary struggles: mobilizing against cuts, involved in transnational environmental movements, participating in anti-globalization protests and the Occupy movement, engaged in lesbian, gay, bi- and transgender politics, and aligned with revolutionary struggles in India, the Arab nations and South America. Such women were passionate about the movements and struggles in which they were engaged, but faced a much less hospitable environment in which to conduct politics, and much tougher employment prospects, than had the groups associated with the ‘new social movements’ of the 1960s and 1970s. But they were helping constitute new waves of radical protest following the banking crisis and, in Britain, the election of a government committed to austerity and retrenchment. And, like earlier generations, they were also engaged with a more practical politics in which their labour – paid and unpaid, formal and informal – was helping to mitigate the consequences of cuts for particular groups, and to exemplify new ways of living, working and performing politics for the present and future. These new forms and styles of politics were less subject to narratives of incorporation, but were potentially subject to accommodations through the rise of consumerism and expansion of new markets and cultural forms.

These encounters led me to a series of puzzles about the strained relationship between political activism and neoliberal forms of rule, and how this relationship is mediated through gendered labour. I wondered how far the politics that many women carried into their working lives had really been eradicated, how far the energies of social movements had been co-opted and how emerging struggles were being accommodated and contained. Such questions arise in the context of existing narratives that trace the exhaustion of feminism and other social movements in the face of neoliberalism or, conversely, demonstrate their complicity in generating new capitalist logics and neoliberal rationalities (Baggueley 2002; Baker 2008; Eisenstein 2006; Eisenstein 2009; Fraser 2009; Laurie and Bondi 2005; McRobbie 2009; Richardson 2005). Women’s work in a series of unpaid or low paid jobs – in voluntary organizations, partnership bodies, community projects, project teams and in a whole series of hybrid organizations – is viewed as integral to the management of the contradictions of capitalism and to dealing with those ‘left behind’ in the rollout of new neoliberal forms (Katz 2005). Women who moved into more ‘strategic’ roles in central and local government, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and policy teams have been seen as agents of ‘professionalization’ or as the much maligned ‘femocrats’ and ‘governance’ feminists who became complicit with governmental power (Watson 1990; Yeatman 1990). But such accounts do not, it seems to me, satisfactorily solve the puzzles I wanted to explore. What actually happens as multiple rationalities are negotiated and aligned – or not – in particular spaces of power? How can this illuminate the tensions faced by activists and campaigners, workers and students at the beginning of their working lives? How far can their activism be sustained in the current climate of cuts and retrenchment? Might future governments and corporations pick up on their success, draw on their energies and rework their claims in ways that strip them of their politics? In short, might the dominance of neoliberal forms of governance erase the successes of activist politics – or is there a more complicated story to be told?

To engage with such questions this book draws on interviews with over fifty women across four generational cohorts. They had prefigured new ways of living and working across the borders of activism and policy; between ‘community’ or ‘civil society’ and government; between different sectors and services; between research and policy, and between public and personal lives. Some had begun by working in community projects and brought their experience and skills into government and local government. Others had successfully translated campaigning work into jobs in voluntary and non-profit organizations, getting more or less entangled with new governmental pressures and policy opportunities in the process. Yet others had brought political commitments into professional and public service occupations and the academy. And some had served as local or national politicians. One – my oldest participant – moved between the Civil Service, entrepreneurship, philanthropy and policy advice. And across these (rather unstable) groupings many worked – at some point in their life – as consultants, trainers, researchers or social entrepreneurs. All worked the spaces of power generated through contradictions in the ruling relations of their time, mobilizing new spaces of agency, prefiguring alternative rationalities and opening out spaces for those that followed. Their work did not just ‘reflect’ the profound social and political transformations of their day but were generative of them.

The chapters that follow map some of the ways in which spaces of power are both mobilized by and negotiated through women’s labour. They offer a series of stories – snapshots from working lives – about how many women attempted to ‘make a difference’, the decisions they took about where and how to pursue radical change, the dilemmas they faced, and how they reflect on the times they lived through. The accounts of those participating in the research (hereafter ‘participants’) show how they opened up and occupied diverse spaces of power associated with the unsettling of the post-war consensus in British society, the rise of Thatcherism, the development of managerial forms of governance, the emergence of new political projects and state forms under Blair, and the austerity politics of the early twenty-first century. The political struggles that took place in these transformative periods informed the lives and work of women who helped shape, worked within and often struggled against new political projects and shifting governmental practices. The book also, then, says something about the shifting politics and culture of Britain. It is not, however, a history book. It is possible to trace some shifts over time as new struggles arose, as new political tactics developed and as different governmental regimes displaced each other. But as I will show, the picture of change offered is dynamic rather than sequential (see especially Chapter 8). Nor does the book set out to be a history of feminism or address the rise (and, some would argue, fall) of a series of social movements. Rather, the book seeks to engage with contemporary debates on the incorporation or assimilation of activist struggles by the overwhelming force of neoliberalism.

The ‘gendered labour’ of the subtitle reflects my emphasis on how women have acted to bring about social and political change in their working lives – with work defined broadly to include paid and unpaid, formal and informal labour. I argue that such work was generative of a succession of new political, cultural, social and organizational shifts. As I will show, such shifts were often double-edged, opening up innovations that could be aligned with new governmentalities and neoliberal rationalities. But they also produced new forms of organizing and ways of performing politics that are not easily erased, even in the current climate of cuts and austerity.

This generative labour has at least three dimensions. First, it was about making visible: bringing into view perspectives, voices, agendas and issues, and asserting and performing difference. The work of participants was that of overcoming silences (on issues ignored or rendered invisible) and absences (asserting the voices of marginalized and exploited groups). Such work, as I will show, also enacted alternatives to dominant ideologies and practices; it was performative as well as critical. Second, it was about generating public conversations. Such conversations were crucial to winning support for policy or legislative reform, but also generated wider processes of political and cultural change. Participants not only promoted public conversations through relational labour (brokering between different power bases and actors) but also by generating new discursive repertoires within which such conversations could be conducted. Third, it was about creative labour: making new things and generating the possibilities of alternative ways of living, working and practising politics. Examples of each of these three kinds of ‘work’, and their interconnections, are threaded through each of the subsequent chapters, and I offer more substantial commentary on each at various points (see especially in Chapters 6, 7 and 8).

My focus on work, then, is not about traditional concerns about gendered patterns of exploitation and inequality. Although some experienced exclusion and discrimination, many also benefited from the expansion of education and employment opportunities for (some) women in the economic shifts that brought access to higher education and to jobs in the expanding public sector of the second half of the twentieth century. But they tended to work on the edges and borders of mainstream institutions and most had fractured and highly varied working lives. Few talked of ‘glass ceilings’ that impeded their progress: more often the focus was on the ways they had used opportunities created by new governmental projects or shifting organizational forms to redirect their political energies. They spoke of the pleasures of agency – of their pride in and enthusiasm for their work and their capacity to bring about change. But they also frequently spoke of the unsustainability of the places in which they found themselves. Working lives were frequently punctuated by periods of illness, by a shifting balance between ‘public’ and ‘personal’ lives as care and other responsibilities came to the fore, and by decisions to change sectors or to develop a new direction.

I am grateful to those participating in the research for their willingness to share the experience and to open their lives up to the researcher’s gaze. In the chapters that follow I draw on their accounts to better understand shifting formations of governance, politics and power, and to make maps that others might use to make sense of their lives.

Gendering the analysis

The impact of feminist scholarship beyond the cultural and linguistic turns means that it is somewhat unfashionable to focus on women’s experiences as sources of historical knowledge or contemporary political analysis (Downs 2004). Women can no longer be viewed as a distinct category and the assumption that common gender identities can form the basis of political agency has been unravelled (Butler 1999; Butler and Scott 1992; Mohanty 2003). Such arguments inform much of the analysis of this book. Nevertheless, I want to argue that it is women’s embodied agency that has informed – and continues to shape – the political and institutional changes with which I am concerned. I focus on women’s working lives for at least three reasons.

First, changing material conditions of work are gendered in their effects, such that women have often found themselves bridging the boundaries between paid and unpaid labour, between a focus on public and personal lives, between organizations characterized as belonging to state, market or civil society, or between mainstream and marginal organizational spaces. As such they have often taken on the roles of brokers and transactors, bringing skills and resources generated through political activism, civil society engagements or ‘edge-work’ projects into the generation of new political, policy and governance rationalities.

Second, I focus on women’s lives because of the significance of the women’s movement in the formation of contemporary politics and culture. This book is inspired by feminist politics – broadly defined – and the accounts of participants show how a feminist sensibility came to inflect a range of activist struggles: on race and ethnicity, on sexuality, on environmental and antipoverty movements and so on. But the women’s movement is not the only struggle with which I am concerned, and it was not necessarily the foundational politics that shaped the lives of participants. The accounts of their political formation (see Chapter 2) confound any depiction of politics as a series of social movements, all distinct from each other and with individuals ‘belonging’ to one or another. Rather, I use the idea of feminist-inflected ‘activism’ to suggest how politics was lived and practised across a range of struggles. Of co...

Table of contents

• Working the Spaces of Power
• Copyright
• Contents
• Participants
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Research as Mapmaking
• 2 Talking Politics
• 3 Perverse Alignments: Women’s Activism and the Governmentalization of Community
• 4 Close Encounters: Feminism, Policy and the Remaking of Governance
• 5 Modernizing Moments: Work, Organizations and the Entrepreneurial Self
• 6 Critical Engagements: Knowledge-work as Political Practice
• 7 Border Work: Generating Spaces of Power
• 8 Activism, Neoliberalism and Gendered Labour
• 9 Postscript: Speaking to the Present
• Appendix: Conducting the Research – Ethics, Methods and Modes of Analysis
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Subject Index