Abstract
In her recent work on feminism and capitalism, Nancy Fraser has insisted on the necessity to resist the neoliberal cooptation of feminist discourse and to combine the critique of gender inequality with the critique of capitalism. Arruzza accepts Nancy Fraser’s invitation to think again about the structural connection between gender and sexual oppression and capitalist social relations. She critically discusses the liberal feminist notion that capitalism has led and can still lead to greater emancipation from gender and sexual oppression, and that the oppression of women and of sexuality is only a vestige of a pre-capitalist past. As capitalism generates gender and sexual oppression in various ways and new forms, these kinds of oppression cannot be considered simply as a remnant from a pre-capitalist past.
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Notes
- 1.
On the capitalist recuperation of some tenets of feminist discourse, see in particular Fraser (2013, pp. 209–226). As Fraser argues: “the rise of neoliberalism dramatically changed the terrain on which second-wave feminism operated. The effect, I shall argue here, was to resignify feminist ideals. Aspirations that had a clear emancipatory thrust in the context of state-organized capitalism assumed a far more ambiguous meaning in the neoliberal era. With welfare and developmental states under attack from free-marketers, feminist critiques of economism, androcentrism, étatism, and Westphalianism took on a new valence” (2013, p. 218).
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The term was coined by Hochschild (2000).
- 6.
For an expansion of the notion of global care chain and a discussion of global nursing care chains, see Yeates (2009).
- 7.
For an example of the thesis that heteronormativity is both functional and necessary to capitalism, see Butler (1998).
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See also Hennessy (2000).
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Arruzza, C. (2017). Capitalism’s Insidious Charm vs. Women’s and Sexual Liberation. In: Bargu, B., Bottici, C. (eds) Feminism, Capitalism, and Critique. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52386-6_5
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