Feminism and neoliberal governmentality

Foucault Studies

Volumn , Issue 16, 2013, Pages 32-53

  Oksala, Johanna ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI   (Finland)

Author keywords

Feminism; Feminist subject; Neoliberal governmentality; Socialism

Indexed keywords

EID: 84886576284     PISSN: None     EISSN: 18325203     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.22439/fs.v0i16.4116     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. See e.g. Hester Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced. How Global Elites Use Women's Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2009);
2. Sylvia Walby, The Future of Feminism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011).
3. In French in 2004, Naissance de la Biopolitique
4. and in English in 2008, The Birth of Biopolitics.
5. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-79, edited by Michel Senellart (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008).
6. Hereafter The Birth of Biopolitics is referred to as BB.
7. see e.g. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005);
8. Heikki Patomäki, The Political Economy of Global Security: War, Future Crisis and Changes in Global Governance (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). Heikki Patomäki emphasizes the importance of the closing of the gold window by Nixon in 1970. (Patomäki, 135-136) According to him, this decision to delink the dollar and gold was one of the nodal points that generated a new set of global competitive trends that point forty years later to an immanent rupture in global history.
9. see Johanna Oksala, "Foucault's Politicization of Ontology", Continental Philosophy Review, 43(2010), 445-466.
10. see e.g. Alison M. Jaggar, "Saving Amina: Global Justice for Women and Intercultural Dialogue", Ethics & International Affairs, vol. 19, no. 3(2006), 55-75;
11. Eisenstein; Nancy Fraser, "Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History", New Left Review, 56(2009), 97-117.
12. See Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 56.
13. William Connolly, "The Dilemma of Legitimacy", in Legitimacy and the State, edited by William Connolly (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 227-31.
14. Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism. Gender, Culture and Social Change (London: Sage, 2009).
15. Natasha Walters, The New Feminism (London: Virago Press, 1998).
16. Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs. Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (New York: Free Press, 2005).
17. Lois McNay, "Self as Enterprise: Dilemmas of Control and Resistance in Foucault's The Birth of Biopolitics", Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 26, no. 6(2010), 55-77, 60-61, for example, notes that one of the most interesting aspects of Foucault's discussion neoliberalism is that the generalization of the enterprise form is conceived so exhaustively that it is not confined to social institutions but intended to encompass the individual itself. For illuminative analyses on Foucault's account of the neoliberal subject
18. see also e.g. Sam Binkley, "The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality: Temporality and Ethical Substance in the Tale of Two Dads", Foucault Studies, no. 6(2009), 60-78;
19. Trent Hamann, "Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics", Foucault Studies, no. 6(2009), 37-59;
20. Jason Read, "A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity", Foucault Studies, no. 6(2009), 25-36;
21. Andrew Dilts, "From 'Entrepreneur of the Self' to 'Care of the Self': Neo-liberal Governmentality and Foucault's Ethics", Foucault Studies, no. 12(2011), 130-146.
22. Foucault, BB, 241.
23. See e.g. Sandra Lee Bartky, "Foucault, Feminity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power", in I. Diamond and L. Quinby (eds.), Feminism and Foucault: Paths of Resistance (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 61-85.
24. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 157.
25. See also e.g. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).
26. see e.g. Christina Morini, "The Feminization of Labour in Cognitive Capitalism", Feminist Review 87(2007), 40-59, 41-44.
27. Rutvica Andrijasevic, Migration, Agency and Citizenship in Sex Trafficking (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 5.
28. Arlie Hochshild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (San Francisco and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997, 1983)
29. and Elizabeth Bernstein, Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) who have made important contributions to mapping out the new emerging configurations of intimate life and emotional labour. They have studied customer-oriented relational work and sex work, respectively, and shown how emotional labour has been transposed from the sphere of domesticity to that of commerce.
30. Axel Honneth and Martin Hartmann, "Paradoxes of Capitalism", Constellations, vol. 13, no. 1(2006), 41-58, 45.
31. Judith Butler, "Merely Cultural", Social Text, 52/53, vol. 15, nos. 3 and 4(1997), Queer Transexions of Race, Nation, and Gender, 265-277.
32. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the "Postsocialist Condition" (London: Routledge, 1997).
33. See Karl Marx, Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin, 1965), 471-514.
34. (Nancy Fraser, "Heterosexism, Misrecognition, and Capitalism. A Response to Judith Butler", Social Text, no. 52/53, Queer Transexions of Race, Nation, and Gender, 279-289, 282)
35. See e.g. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 74.
36. Fraser, "Heterosexism, Misrecognition, and Capitalism. A Response to Judith Butler", 287.
37. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 83, also interprets Butler to be arguing that the economy/culture distinction is "a kind of ruse of capitalist liberal discourse."
38. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-78, edited by Michel Senellart (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 33. Physiocrats were a school of economists founded in 18th century France. Their key tenet was the curious belief that land was the source of all wealth, but they also advocated the idea that profoundly influenced Adam Smith and economic liberalism that government policy should not interfere with the operation of natural economic laws. Foucault discusses the physiocrats in several instances in the lectures Security, Territory, Population - the lectures that preceded The Birth of Biopolitics.
39. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of Human Sciences (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
40. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 36.
41. See e.g. Gary Becker, "Investment in Human Capital: A Theoretical Analysis", Journal of Political Economy 70, no. 2, part 2:
42. "Investment in Human Beings", (1962), 9-49;
43. Gary Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1964).
44. See e.g. Friedrich Hayek, A Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1944), 13, 27.
45. See e.g. Kathleen Barry, The Prostitution of Sexuality (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 32.
46. Wendy Chapkis, Live Sex Acts. Women Performing Erotic Labour (New York: Routledge, 1997), 82.
47. Cf. Michael Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).
48. Brown, Edgework, 44-45.