Paradoxes of Neoliberalism

Sex, Gender and Possibilities for Justice

Elizabeth Bernstein, Janet R Jakobsen, Elizabeth Bernstein, Janet R Jakobsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000517170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

From the rise of far-right regimes to the tumult of the COVID-19 pandemic, recent years have brought global upheaval as well as the sedimentation of longstanding social inequalities. Analyzing the complexities of the current political moment in different geographic regions, this book addresses the paradoxical persistence of neoliberal policies and practices, in order to ground the pursuit of a more just world.

Engaging theories of decoloniality, racial capitalism, queer materialism, and social reproduction, this book demonstrates the centrality of sexual politics to neoliberalism, including both social relations and statecraft. Drawing on ethnographic case studies, the authors show that gender and sexuality may be the site for policies like those pertaining to sex trafficking, which bundle together economics and changes to the structure of the state. In other instances, sexual politics are crucial components of policies on issues ranging from the growth of financial services to migration.

Tracing the role of sexual politics across different localities and through different political domains, this book delineates the paradoxical assemblage that makes up contemporary neoliberal hegemony. In addition to exploring contemporary social relations of neoliberal governance, exploitation, domination, and exclusion, the authors also consider gender and sexuality as forces that have shaped myriad forms of community-based activism and resistance, including local efforts to pursue new forms of social change. By tracing neoliberal paradoxes across global sites, the book delineates the multiple dimensions of economic and cultural restructuring that have characterized neoliberal regimes and emergent activist responses to them.

This innovative analysis of the relationship between gender justice and political economy will appeal to: interdisciplinary scholars in social and cultural studies; legal and political theorists; and the wide range of readers who are concerned with contemporary questions of social justice.

1 IntroductionGender, justice, and the paradoxical persistence of neoliberal times

Elizabeth Bernstein and Janet Jakobsen

DOI: 10.4324/9781003252702-1

In the early months of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic extended its reach, it initially seemed as if the frenzied pace of global capitalist exchange had come to an eerie standstill. By April of 2020, nearly one-third of the world’s population was living under conditions of lockdown, national borders had been sealed shut, and the social organization of both productive and reproductive forms of labor had been radically upended. For many, the abrupt changes brought about by the pandemic made the longstanding inadequacies of public health care systems, social safety nets, and more general relations of care impossible to ignore.

These changes also ushered in a series of bewildering paradoxes: the common designation of some forms of labor as “essential,” whereas the workers in question (disproportionately Black and brown, migrants, and female) were treated as disposable.¹ While vast numbers of people became unemployed and faced conditions of food insecurity, the wealthiest tiers of the population, both across and within nation-states, amassed unprecedented wealth.² With much of the population confined to the home, the importance of caring labor became visible as never before, yet there were few public provisions for domestic work or childcare.³ At the same time, stay-at-home directives, issued in the name of protection, had little to offer those trapped in homes with abusers, or the growing numbers of people who were insecurely or inadequately housed.⁴

This book is dedicated to unraveling paradoxes such as these, and to using this understanding to guide the pursuit of social justice. Our particular contribution is to think through how sex and gender relations contribute to multiple systems of injustice, and, concomitantly, how attending to gender and sexuality – particularly in times as perilous as ours – might also contribute to the creation of a more just world.

The project began as a set of conversations among scholars working in different regions of the world, both in the Global South and the Global North, conversations focused on how to understand gender justice given current systems of economic injustice. These systems are often termed “neoliberalism,” and so we hoped to bring together possibilities for justice across gender and sexual identities with an in-depth analysis of neoliberalism in its various facets. In order to produce such a wide-ranging and complex analysis, the Gender Justice and Neoliberal Transformations research team met together for five years in different contexts and wrote the chapters in small groups to develop a jointly authored book manuscript. As our discussions proceeded, the group moved to add synthetic insights to a comparative method, thus allowing for broad yet focused discussions of the intersections of gender, sex, and political economy in contemporary global relations.

The purpose of the project in contributing to movements for justice had initially seemed clear enough. It turned out, however, that this project of seeking justice in the face of injustice was quite paradoxical. For instance, our conversations were given context as part of a “transnational feminisms” project sponsored by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, but both feminism and transnational activism have paradoxical aspects. As many of the participants have demonstrated in their research and as this book documents, feminist projects can often produce gender regulation along with or even instead of gender justice. For example, as Ana Amuchástegui shows in her study of peer support groups for women living with HIV/AIDS in Mexico (discussed in Chapters 3 and 6), the peer groups produce both a sense of empowerment for the participants and a need to enact the imperatives of a regulatory state and disciplinary capitalism as the conditions of sustaining the participants’ lives. Svati Shah’s research (discussed in Chapter 5) argues that the discourse of sexuality in India produces both an expansion of sexual possibility and a discourse of narrowing nationalism (Shah 2015). Furthermore, project co-director Elizabeth Bernstein has shown how the discourse of sex trafficking can expand state violence precisely through its invocation and development of an anti-violence rhetoric about sexuality (Bernstein 2018). As we will discuss further below, rather than taking up a simple version of feminism with a singular subject (the “global woman,” for example), we approach these paradoxes as the necessarily complicated substance of any feminist project.⁵

We find similar paradoxes in our engagement across locations, an engagement that is at once grounded in specific local contexts and attendant to international relations and transnational discourses that become embodied in complex ways in these localities. It is not simply, for example, that transnational discourses have different effects in different locations, but rather that there is no single relation between the local and the inter- or transnational. The transnational does not directly determine what happens locally, even as it can have profound effects. Those effects are various, and they may be formed by the immediate pressures of local policies and/or the long-standing histories of global relations. Moreover, the transnational is not necessarily made from the top down, simply from the edicts of transnational institutions, but also from thickly woven mats of local policies and practices that hold hegemonic relations in place across localities, even as these patterns may differ from mat to mat and place to place.

Notably, what began as a project under one set of conditions with a set of case studies developed over years of conversation (and, in some cases, decades of critical and ethnographic work by collective members) is being completed under what can seem like a totally different set of material and cultural conditions – thanks in no small part to the profound disruptions that have been wrought by the effects of COVID-19.⁶ When doing work about contemporary social relations, scholarship is always published as the history of the recent past, but the question of the relation between the recent past and the current moment is thrown into high relief by converging crises that include (but are not limited to) the global pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus, accelerated climate change, and the deadly and racist effects of militarization and policing.⁷

As these crises have flared, we have found that some of the case studies in this book seem more pertinent than ever, while others can serve as crucial background and context. Taken together, the cases we consider illuminate the means by which we got here – i.e., how neoliberal policies and practices have created the conditions of these crises. They also reveal both the abrupt changes and the deep continuities between the past and the present that have produced these crises. Some of our case studies show how neoliberal governance was developed transnationally, even as this apparatus is now being used to promote or solidify a phase of “nationalist neoliberalism.”⁸ We also demonstrate that some phenomena that now seem new were already happening in embryonic form, even as so many familiar patterns of social and economic life have been upended. For example, in Chapter 2, through case studies in the Dominican Republic and the United States (US) we document the role of gender (in)justice in the formation of mainstream productive economies, in social reproduction, and in survival economies inhabited by and sustaining many marginalized people. Throughout this book, we focus particular attention on those whose lives have been made most precarious by neoliberal policies and practices, often those disempowered by relations of social difference in the context of neoliberal political economy. By bringing the study of survival economies to the fore as a necessary part of any economic analysis, we also shift understandings of reproductive and productive economies, while focusing on those whose lives have been most affected by the injustice of neoliberal policies and practices. Notably, in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, much of the service sector and informal economies on which marginalized people depend have come to a virtual standstill, even as public discussions of the important and, indeed, essential aspects of service work have moved to the fore.

In tracking these shifts in our case studies, we ask: how is it that the forms of neoliberal governance of the past several decades have produced this set of global responses to current crises? The path has been paradoxical, and we will argue it is particularly worthwhile to attend to those paradoxes. And in our view, it remains necessary to think about possibilities for justice, even in the midst of devastating crises. Disaster capitalism, so clearly named by Naomi Klein (2007), is not the only possible outcome. Tracing paradoxical effects can also point to interstices, interventions, and inter-relations that might provide the ground for something other than the devastating problems of the current moment (whatever they may be when and where you are reading this).

Neoliberalism

As this book will show, there are many paradoxes of neoliberalism, perhaps not least of which is the paradox of its continuation in many areas of the world. The demise of neoliberalism has been repeatedly proclaimed (and we have at different points in this project thought about shifting our point of reference). But the import and, indeed, urgency of analyzing neoliberal governmentality has also persistently reasserted itself. After the financial crisis of 2008, it seemed that perhaps governments would have to respond to the poisoned fruits of neoliberalism by shifting away from such policies and practices. As Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini noted in 2009: “At the World Economic Forum in Davos, for example, one of the panel discussions asked directly, ‘Is Neoliberalism Dead?’ The assembled captains of industry and finance, however, decided (much to their apparent relief) that neoliberalism was very much alive.”⁹ Although there were indeed some shifts after 2008, major components of neoliberal formations, including the dominance of financial markets over industrial production, a focus on shareholder wealth, growing inequality, and the imposition of austerity measures, continued and often intensified.

As discontent with neoliberal policies and practices also continued apace, it seemed that the middle of the next decade might see a major shift in governmentality. Did the installation of new “strongmen” in some countries along with growing nationalist populism point to a profound change in approach? Insofar as neoliberalism is a transnational phenomenon, were different areas of the world shifting in their fundamental political-economic framework? And if so, were they all shifting in the same direction? Did the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president of the US represent a rejection of the neoliberal policies that had dominated US economics and politics for over three decades? Or alternatively, was Trump’s election an intensification of those very same policies as enacted through tax cuts favoring the rich (the major legislative victory of his administration)? Had the world renewed its embrace of neoliberal austerity wrapped in promises of freedom, or had it instead moved into the authoritarian thrall of “thug love”? (Amar 2013, 2016).

The comparative and synthetic work of this project suggests that the answer to such questions is “all of the above.” In some regions, there has been an intensification of existing neoliberal conservatism (e.g., India, South Korea), while other places (e.g., Argentina) have managed the paradoxes of neoliberalism through repeated political change via the early adoption of neoliberalism, a subsequent move to what contributing author Mario Pecheny (2012/2013) has termed “post-neoliberalism,” a recent return to neoliberal practices, and an uncertain political future. Latin American economist James M. Cypher summarizes this complex history as follows: “[S]ince 1973, (excepting the complex case of Venezuela), Latin America has shifted into and out of and then sometimes back into mutating neoliberal economic structures. While in power, left governments have been conditioned by prior neoliberal reforms that they have been unable to shake. Neoliberalism has thrived, died, and been resurrected in a dizzying sequence that defies linear interpretation … . In late 2018, the two largest nations in Latin America – Brazil and Mexico – moved in opposite directions, with Mexico’s new president declaring the end of neoliberalism while Brazil’s burning Amazon became another textbook expression of [Milton] Friedman’s possessive individualism – ‘free’ unregulated land grabbers were left unhindered to clear land to implement ecology-destroying agribusiness operations” (Cypher 2019, 22).

Since the onset of the global pandemic created by the novel coronavirus, however, Brazil and Mexico, despite their political differences, have hewn closer to the same line with a resistance to mitigation efforts driven by economics as well as politics. Up to 60% of people living in Mexico make their incomes through unregistered businesses, street sales, and other survival economies (Linthicum 2020). A natio...