Posthuman Feminism. Rosi Braidotti

Posthuman Feminism - Rosi  Braidotti


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In became an instant bestseller in 2013. Mindful of the difference between militant feminists and ‘Professional Feminists’, Roxane Gay (2014b: x) was quick in picking up the absurdity of Sandberg’s highly privileged perspective. Something that reads like a corporate fairy tale can only trigger ‘delectation and irritation’ in normal, average feminists (Gay, 2014a: 321). As Rottenberg sharply asked (2018), how reliable is a feminist manifesto drafted by the Chief Operating Officer of tech giant Facebook? Not only does it run the risk of turning into an imperialist assertion of the cultural and political superiority of American culture, but it also over-individualizes the practice of empowerment, losing sight of minimal requirements of feminist solidarity. Neoliberal feminists ignore or forge one of the founding values of feminism, namely that ‘Feminism is the political theory and practice to free all women: women of color, working-class women, poor women, physically challenged women, lesbians, old women, as well as white economically privileged heterosexual women. Anything less than this is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement’ (Smith, 1998: 96).

      Corporate feminism is also successful in public institutions, best exemplified nowadays by the first woman to chair the IMF and now the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde. Committed to gender equality, and the professional advancement of women, as well as to fighting poverty and social inequalities, Lagarde famously declared that had Lehman Brothers been called and functioned as ‘Lehman Sisters’, the 2008 financial crisis would not have happened. More critical feminists may add that, sisterhood or brotherhood notwithstanding, we would all be better off without such a hegemonic financial sector, but such radicalism cannot be expected of neoliberal feminists. Their political agenda remains the fight against institutional sexism for an equal share of the spoils of an essentially exploitative system.

      Sleep is a significant concern for the wellness industry and the ‘sleep economy’ is a profitable proposition. Marketing high-tech mattresses, high-performance pyjamas and technological sleep-tracking devices, it is estimated at around US$432 billion (Mahdawi, 2020). Remedies against insomnia and bad sleep plunge directly into the psycho-pharmaceutic industry, which is one of the pillars of advanced capitalism (De Sutter, 2018). Gender, labour and class relations are crucial in structuring access to adequate sleep (Fuller, 2018). Paltrow seems to ignore the basic fact that sleep is a class prerogative and that well-off people, and men, have always slept longer and better than economically disadvantaged ones.

      The opportunistic commercial pursuit of wellness by the ‘happiness industry’ (Segal, 2017) reinforces the shallow ideology of capitalism as the coercive ‘promise of happiness’ (Ahmed, 2010). Lauren Berlant calls this ideology ‘cruel optimism’ (2011): a constant pressure to succeed in every single aspect of life, including health, happiness, wellness and fitness. Promoted as a social imperative across members of the public, regardless of their actual social situation, it is doomed to fail and cause even greater misery. This neoliberal ideology conceals the concrete socio-economic causes of the ill health, mental fatigue and other problems encountered by large sections of the population. These are due to the consequences of economic austerity regimes; the reduced purchasing power of waged labour and the brutal cuts in social services and welfare introduced by neoliberal economics in the last twenty years (Finlayson, 2019).

      This uncritical support of the status quo shows up dramatically in politics, where at least some neoliberal feminists are prone to turn to the right-wing and even become civilizational warriors in the name of women’s rights. This crusaders’ zeal emphasizes the commitment of Western culture to emancipation and equality set in opposition to the allegedly backwards discriminatory practices of other cultures, notably Islam. In a remarkable reversal of past habits, many Right-wing and populist movements in the West have come out in favour of women’s and gay rights, provided they meet set standards of national cultural identity. They paradoxically stress this emancipated position while perpetuating the populists’ nationalism and inclination to sexism, misogyny, homo- and trans-phobia, as well as virulent racism.

      This is the case, for example, in France, where the National Front, under the influence of its former deputy leader and gay activist Florian Philippot, took a firm stand against the ancestral homophobia of Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen’s party. It happened even earlier in the Netherlands, where Right-wing parties embraced the LGBTQ+ people’s cause as a sign of liberation from supposedly Muslim conservatism (Duyvendak, 1996; Mepschen and Duyvendak, 2012). The most recent phenomenon occurred in Germany, where Alice Weidel, an out lesbian, became the leader of the Parliamentary group of the Far-Right Party ‘Alternative for Germany’. The gay (the term ‘lesbian’ is deliberately avoided) Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabić also operates within the rank and file of conservative patriotic nativism.6 At the same time, those Islamophobic political movements are doing nothing to fight growing anti-Semitism across the EU region; in fact, some of them are quite embroiled in an anti-Semitic stance.

      This spurious neoliberal feminist pride can even be complicit with Western militarism, in quite a devious manner. At the time of the Afghan war, notorious anti-feminists like President George W. Bush and his wife Laura, together with Tony Blair, proclaimed their support for the Afghan women as a reason to invade their country. As feminist legal scholar Emily Jones points out (Bertotti et al., 2020), this tendentious argument was also quite central to justifying the illegal use of force by the United States and allies in 2001 in Afghanistan (Cloud, 2004) and, to a lesser extent, in 2003 in Iraq (Al-Ali and Pratt, 2009). In this respect, liberal feminism is perfectly allied with Western patriarchal interests and practices, as Hillary Clinton’s support for the invasion of Afghanistan and later Iraq, and her work as State Secretary, clearly demonstrated.

      This ‘embedded feminism’, as it became known (Hunt, 2006), co-opted feminist and women’s


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