This essay interrogates the emergence of a new moment in the unfolding of contemporary neoliberal hegemony which sees the political potential in creating strong connections with liberal feminism, updating this while also retaining some of its most salient features dating back to the mid to late 1970s. At the same time this process, which can be traced through the very contemporary entanglements of political culture, visual media and new social media, finds concretisation through the figure of the middle-class mother who is slim and youthful in appearance. This persona, whether in full time work or a ‘stay home Mum’ is accredited a more substantial professional status than was the case in the era of the ‘housewife’. With feminism ‘taken into account’ she is considered an equal partner in marriage and thus charged with making the right choices and decisions for her family needs. In this neoliberal version of past notions of ‘maternal citizenship’ a number of socio-political processes can be seen at work, she is compared favourably for her well-planned and healthy life in comparison to her less advantaged, low income, single parent counterparts. Her lifestyle and childcare choices mark a strong departure, indeed an entirely different trajectory to previous generations of mothers, who across the boundaries of class and ethnicity, benefited from a feminist post-war welfare ethos which regarded nursery provision for pre-school children, toddlers and indeed babies as a social good. And finally her presence and visibility in a number of campaigning and online organisations suggests a stronger class divide than was the case in the past and with this the eclipsing of the egalitarian principles of social democracy. The essay reflects on the film Revolutionary Road (2009) and the recent book by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg as conduits for this new ‘maternal- feminine’.

Feminism, the Family and the New 'Mediated' Maternalism

Social bonding theories argue that marriage has a restraining effect on criminal offending. Given what is known about marriage and union formation in contemporary Western societies, it is realistic to assume that the social and emotional bonding between married partners predates the actual date of marriage. In consequence, if these processes influence criminal behavior, we should expect significant reductions in offending several years prior to marriage. Independently of the social bonding theory, it is possible to treat marriage as an outcome of rather than a causal agent in the process of criminal desistance. An individual who has "cleaned up his act" may be more attractive in the market; marriages may be unlikely to occur at elevated points of the criminal trajectory for this reason. These issues have received limited attention in prior research. In this study we examine criminal offending trajectories using a within-individual design and population-wide register data on Norwegian men who entered marital unions in the years 1995-2001 (N=120,821). Our results show a gradual and substantial decrease in offending levels during the five years prior to marriage, followed by a small but a non-trivial increase after the formalization of the relationship. Overall, the decade around the marital event is characterized by major strides towards criminal desistance. However, the effect of marital event is negligible relative to the amount of desistance that takes place prior to marriage. Earlier research may have overstated the importance of marriage as a discrete life course event as a causal factor in criminal desistance.

https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00870455/document

Understanding the Marriage Effect: Changes in Criminal Offending Around the Time of Marriage

This paper documents the rise of a politico-economic project of what I have termed ‘transnational business feminism’, focused on the need to promote women’s empowerment, particularly in the wake of the most recent global financial crisis. Here, liberal feminists have joined with states, funding institutions, NGOs and MNCs in constructing women as ‘untapped resources’ capable of delivering a high return on (Western) investment. This project has also generated new knowledges regarding both gender and finance, as the ‘excesses’ that led to the 2008 crisis have been linked to an errant masculinity that can be adjusted by incorporating women (and feminine values) into the finance realm. However, a feminist historical materialist reading of this project reveals that gender is used as part of a narrative that seeks to naturalize and depoliticize capitalist crises. Gender also becomes the basis for the re-embedding of capitalist relations that reproduce the exploitation of men and women while creating new markets and sources of profit for capital. While transnational business feminism is rooted in a particular version of Western liberal feminism that seeks empowerment via integration into the market economy, this paper argues that the contemporary moment offers an opportunity for a renewed emphasis on feminist scholarship that is firmly wedded to anti-capitalism, as well as a Marxism that takes gender seriously.

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Financial Crisis, Financial Firms...and Financial Feminism? The Rise of 'Transnational Business Feminism' and the Necessity of Marxist-Feminist IPE

The recent global financial crisis and subsequent recession sparked, among other things, a call for all manner of returns to previous states of existence, both real and imagined. It also sparked fears that this set of events is returning us to certain undesired states. This included the claim that the crisis and ensuing recession, especially increasing rates of job loss for women, threaten the return of the exclusionary sexual contract characteristic of Fordism. In the words of one commentator, the recession threatens to “send women back to the kitchen.” As such, the ongoing recession has been positioned as disassembling the radical transformations in women’s labor encountered in post-Fordism, especially the positioning of that labor as a site of potential and promise. In this essay I suggest, however, that imagining the recession as returning us to an exclusionary sexual contract thoroughly misunderstands the processes of the production of value in post-Fordism. In particular it brackets the process of the folding of the economy into society, a process concerning the movement of productive and value-creating activities away from the formal

Out of Work or Out of Time? Rethinking Labor after the Financial Crisis

This article introduces the thematic section “The co-optation of feminisms: a research agenda,” which brings together contributions that discuss the appropriation, dilution and reinterpretation of feminist discourses, and practices by nonfeminist actors for their purposes. Recognizing the myriad ways in which feminist scholars and activists have shared their concerns with co-optation within their respective subfields, we propose that it is productive to develop a more substantive research agenda around co-optation. In the first section, we seek to contribute to this by synthesizing the scattered literature on co-optation in various feminist subfields. Subsequently, we present a selection of studies on co-optation published outside feminist studies in order to identify concepts and empirical insights that are instructive for developing a feminist research agenda on co-optation. This forms the basis for a set of guiding questions that we propose could be helpful in analyzing co-optation. The article...

/pdf/the-co-optation-of-feminisms-a-research-agenda-38fcvhy235.pdf

The co-optation of feminisms: a research agenda

In this lecture, Nancy Fraser situates the feminist's movement in relation to three moments in the history of capitalism. First, the movement's (...)

Nicolas Duvoux

Papers

Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History