The Farce of Neoliberal Feminism: Gatekeeping the Glass Ceiling

October 2, 2021

We often hear the call for ‘giving women a seat at the table.’ What we do not hear is how under neoliberal capitalism, the table is only accessible for the privileged stratum of professional-managerial women. There is a need to dismantle the table itself.

Neoliberal feminism depoliticizes and debilitates revolutionary class politics. It focuses on individualized politics of identity while ignoring the collective transformation of institutional structures of power. In tandem with the principles of neoliberalism, third wave feminism espoused, to borrow Elspeth Probyn’s term, ‘choiceoisie’ – a philosophy that envisions all major life decisions as individual options rather than culturally determined or circumscribed by race, sexuality and class.

There is a need feminist libertory work to be rooted in an understanding of different oppressive systems as intertwined and mobilize to articulate an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist agenda based on internationalist working-class solidarity.

Objectives

The objectives of this paper are as follows –

• To examine how neoliberalism has led to feminist empowerment being equated with individualized financial success and market competition, divorced from collective, intersectional struggle.
• To understand neoliberalism’s obfuscation of structural analysis of oppression.

To advocate the need to mobilize international working class women based on anti-capitalistic resistance.

As the world celebrated 21 year old Kylie Jenner for ‘breaking the glass ceiling’ and becoming the youngest billionaire, her clothing line was exposed to be stiffing garment workers in Bangladesh, that reportedly impacted the lives of around 50,000 women who are also ineligible for government assistance due to their immigration status1. Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi, an Indian American, former CEO of PepsiCo, for many is a model of “female empowerment”; the same PepsiCo that evidently exploited factory workers by hiring a majority of subcontracted female workers who worked 12-hour days.2 These situations are representative of the fact that changing the gender of those in power is merely a symbolic gesture, with no material consequences for the vast majority of women – whose bodies and spirits are suppressed by the literal and symbolic weight of heavy machinery used to produce the products that make the likes of Kylie and Nooyi a billionaire.

Bell Hooks in her book, “Feminist Theory: From Margins to Center” defined feminism as “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression.” Exploitation, austerity, imperialism, and state brutality are all systematic features of neoliberalism. It was the ‘90s that witnessed mainstream liberal feminist consciousness shift toward a neoliberal ideology. Since the 1990s, prominent institutions promoting neoliberal capitalism have utilized the concept of “women’s empowerment” to deflect attention away from the structural adjustment programmes’ decidedly disempowering impacts. Third-wave feminism has unwittingly been a handmaiden of neoliberalism, one that reduces feminism to identity politics and demands women’s inclusion in an exploitative capitalistic workforce that continues to devalue her full capabilities and unpaid domestic work and instead is based on her objectification. For example, aligned with conservative neoliberal fundamentals of individualism, personal autonomy, market freedom, and the liberty to consume or commodify goods, third wave feminism advocated for personal sexual freedom, reconceptualized pornography/prostitution as “sex work,” framing it as subversive, sexually liberating, and rooted in choice while completely ignoring how women’s agency faces restriction within oppressive power structures and patriarchal dominance inherent in heterosexual relationships. Moreover, as a part of U.S’s neoliberal strategy, imperialist goals are justified as a means of “saving” colonised women from the patriarchal, “backward” customs of their men.

Feminist outrage was used to justify the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, from national organisations like the Feminist Majority to Condoleezza Rice and Laura Bush. Islamic fundamentalism, on the other hand, is not a part of Islamic tradition. It is a contemporary political movement born of imperialist atrocities and capitalist economic, political, and cultural dominance. In terms of political economies, histories of inclusion into the market, state organisation, and so on, women’s standing differs greatly across the Muslim world.

Feminism should be rooted in working class solidarity united with the movement of other oppressed people- black people, indigenous people, and LGBTQ people. This is incompatible under neoliberalism. Let us consider some of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s comprehensive legacy on the Supreme Court of the U.S.A:

• Ginsburg in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic & Institutional Rights, Inc., consented to allowing the government to pressurise the withdrawal of funding in order to punish universities that ban discriminatory job recruitment by the military.
• Ginsburg agreed with the majority ruling in Chadrin Lee Mullenix v. Beatrice Luna, which provided immunity to a police officer. who gratuitously shot and killed a suspect.
• In Inyo County v. Paiute-Shoshone Indians, Ginsburg joined the majority in rejecting the Bishop Paiute Tribe of California’s claim that their position as a sovereign nation made them free from state proceedings under federal law, claiming that the state had allowed the seizure of tribal records.
• Ginsburg objected to the finding in Salazar v. Ramah Navajo Chapter that the federal government must pay all Native American Tribes that it has a contract with in full even if Congress has not provided enough funds to pay all tribal contractors.

Ginsburg was the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court of the U.S.A and became known as a feminist icon. But how “feminist” is it to keep displacing and undermining indigenous women’s sovereignty? Is it “feminist” to rule in favor of a racist militarized police system? Is it “feminist” to deport women back to countries that are destroyed with U.S. sanctions and military coups?

The same neoliberal feminist ideology that pushed for legislative and cultural changes to give professional/managerial-class women more possibilities has also been used to justify the exploitation, poverty, and marginalisation of working-class women in the United States and elsewhere. While purporting to represent all women, mainstream feminism has exacerbated the class divide. To paraphrase Martha E. Gimenez, as long as class is kept at the margins, feminism will contribute to keeping class outside of the mass consciousness and the limitations of permissible political debate.

Jean Baudrillard’s statement that in order to become object of consumption, the object must become sign; that is, in some way it must become external to a relation that it now only signifies is worth reiterating in this late capitalist consumer society. Feminism fills in for actual political relations as the object of consumption, deferring the political in favour of the idea of the relation between lifestyle practice and political commitment. As early as in 1984, Bell Hooks pointed out ‘[t]he willingness to see feminism as a lifestyle choice rather than a political commitment reflects the class nature of the movement’. The reduction of feminism to lifestyle choices is bourgeois performative activism. Audre Lorde’s famous dictum- ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’- is instructional in this regard. The popular cultural dominance of liberal feminism is thoroughly embedded in the system against which more radical and transformative feminist movement operates and is ineffective in combatting late-capitalist consumerist agendas which rely on the commodification of resistance as a hegemonic strategy- it maintains the integrity of ‘the master’s house’ by not demanding any substantial structural or institutional changes. Kamala Harris, for example, who is deified as a feminist icon specially for people of colour and Asian communities and who ran her presidential campaign on a pro-LGBTQIA+ issues was responsible for putting trans women in men’s prisons as the Attorney General of California State, thereby endangering their lives and making them vulnerable to violence and sexual assault in prison. She was also responsible for denying healthcare to trans inmates. In 2015, her office denied the request for gender reassignment surgery by Michelle-Lael Norsworthy, a trans woman incarcerated in California’s prison system. ‘Hyde amendment’ in US politics is a legislative provision that bars federal funding for abortion unless it’s an extreme case like rape or incest or if it becomes life threatening. Harris voted for it, not once but twice.3 These are some of many instances that only expose neoliberal feminism as a facade that conceals the profound violence of a system that is built on commodifying basic human needs, on exploiting,enslaving, and brutalizing the vulnerable. Clinton who is complicit in American imperialism and prison industrial complex is another example. There is no place in radical feminist politics for a violent and exploitative status quo being reaffirmed and whitewashed in the name of ‘girl power.’ To paraphrase David Harvey’s assertion, neoliberal global capitalism has created feminism in mirror image to itself.

Synthesizing the ideas of antiracist socialist feminist work of the likes of Zillah Eisenstein, Nancy Fraser, it is imperative to shift our focus from individual liberation unto systemic and institutional liberation. There is a need for international mobilization behind a common agenda – anti-capitalist politics that unites the material interests of the working people with fronts of anti-racism and LGBTQA+ struggles because as long as our feminism is not anti- capitalist, it doesn’t matter how many glass ceilings are broken, the working class women will be left in the basement to clean the glass.