Posthuman Feminism. Rosi Braidotti
scholars denounced this operation as a double defeat. Firstly, it created hierarchical divisions among the women, betraying feminist solidarity (Ferguson, 2005; Perugini and Gordon, 2015). Secondly, it violated human rights and further endangered world peace (Denike, 2008; Otto and Heathcote, 2014). It does remain a fundamental tenet of postcolonial feminism, however, that all differences among women are flattened by the imperial gaze of the colonizers who occupy their lands, cultures and bodies (Mohanty, 1991). The white patriarchs gleefully proclaim the necessity to wage war because they allegedly want to save brown women from brown men (Spivak, 1985).
By becoming mainstream, neoliberal feminism has shifted from a radical and even revolutionary movement to a dominant or majoritarian mode of governance, including serious parliamentary legal and military uses of power (Halley et al., 2019).7 This aggressive and punitive position has been described by critics (Engle, 2019) as a move from a liberal rule of law to ‘carceral feminism’ (Bernstein, 2012). Yesterday’s radicals are today’s governors.
Reproductive contradictions
Let us reflect for a moment about what happens when a feminist project of equality comes partially true. Firstly, as we saw in the previous chapter, visibility is gained. Gender has acquired legitimacy in neoliberal governmentality and has become a formidable normative tool for policy making on demographics, public health, population growth and decline. Socio-metrics, however, far from being neutral analytical tools, are instruments of political power: they control, monitor and quantify, but also discipline and punish as Foucault revealed (1977). Gender as a mainstream instrument of analysis to measure discrepancies in power and privilege between the sexes is functional to neoliberal economics, in so far as it allows biopower to penetrate every aspect of social, sexual and personal life.
Secondly, equality, narrowly defined within the gender binary, strengthens possessive individualism (MacPherson, 1962). The subject of neoliberalism is an autonomous entrepreneur of the self (Lemke, 2001), bound to a morality of responsible self-management of its human capital, to produce the utmost results, profits and surplus value. For Repo, neoliberalism is ‘an expansive political rationality that generalizes the logic of the market to the entirety of the social body’ (2016: 114). The workers or labourers are turned into astute managers of their physical and genetic abilities and those acquired through education and social opportunities. For women, this adds extra pressure to the management of their fertility as reproductive capital.
The issue of reproduction is, as ever, capital. The process of emancipation worldwide has complicated the demographic issue further by demonstrating that – contrary to earlier expectations – increased wealth results in actual decrease in childbirths. This unexpected result led to higher investments in the fewer children, making the downsizing of families a key consideration of cost–benefit analyses of economic profitability. The sexual conduct of contemporary reproductive subjects is of the greatest importance in ensuring rational choices that benefit the market economy as well as individual fulfilment by the same standards. This is the system that neoliberal or ‘choice’ feminism fervently upholds, foregrounding in an individualistic manner the role of women as co-producers of wealth and capital value.
But when it comes to measuring rates of human reproduction, the dominant template of the human that is built into statistical analyses and policy making on gender deploys all of its contradictions. It prioritizes the fertility of white middle-class women as factors of productive prosperity for developed society (Repo, 2016). Other demographic data, from the South of the world for instance, is often presented as a social problem, as in over-population or uncontrolled population growth. Access to the social capital of parenthood is therefore strictly limited. As the Xenofeminists put it: ‘the wealthy, white “yummy mummy” might be applauded for her contribution to the future of the nation state, but teenage mothers, black and Latina parents, trans* and genderqueer subjects, immigrants, refugees, and benefit claimants receive no such treatment’ (Hester, 2018: 52). The exclusion of the lived experience of these ‘others’ exposes the problematic nature of gender metrics, which are as seductive in their promise of objective data as they are limited in making such data representative and inclusive (Merry, 2016).
Mainstream motherhood becomes a major investment for neoliberal economics, devoting ample technological resources to the task and demanding returns on capital. The profit motive overrides all other concerns. Working with Indigenous populations and focusing on the women’s role in the Arctic region, Rauna Kuokkanen makes a crucial observation: ‘Neoliberal discourses of self-reliance, responsibility and individual capacity-building restructure Indigenous self-determination into a limited decision-making authority within the confines of the global capitalist economy’ (2019: 19). Reproduction and fertility are key issues in the neoliberal governance of human capital, gender and individually gendered subjects. If women are to become successful self-entrepreneurs within this system, reproductive biopolitics requires them to make some serious managerial readjustments. The reproduction of human capital implemented in neoliberal reproductive politics is subjected to the dominant social codes and values. It implements individualized gender roles that rest on a patriarchal idea of binary sexual difference and compulsory heterosexuality.
Technology matters here. The boundaries between reproductive humans and technologies have become far more porous, intimate and interactive than they used to be. The political economy and the management of human reproduction benefits from the parallel rise of the Life Sciences and of a neoliberal economy that approaches ‘life as surplus’ (Cooper, 2008). Instead of individualizing and psychologizing the issues, posthuman feminism invites seeing the repositioning of both women’s reproductive bodies and biotechnologies at the core of the neoliberal governance of economic production, energy consumption, reproduction and population growth. Neoliberalism displays ‘a particular kind of biopolitical deployment of gender as an apparatus of population control’, which is also racialized and Eurocentric in its applications (Repo, 2016: 145). Thus, the deployment of gender as a tool of neoliberal reproductive politics is built on the silencing of the more radical and critical feminist sources of analysis. I will return to this in chapter 5.
Reproductive technologies play a central role in the emancipation of neoliberal feminists, who individualize the responsibility for reproduction, by inventing a new ideology of ‘happy work–family balance’ (Rottenberg, 2018: 14). This ‘happy’ ideology relies on a number of factors for its success. Firstly, it is capital intensive in that it requires investments in the fitness, health and wellness industries to achieve that much coveted level of happiness and individual balance. It also calls for intense biotechnological and medical intervention to assist reproduction, notably frozen egg implants and IVF, all commercially available.8 And last but not least, it relies on the assistance of paid domestic female help. The latter entails the creation of new subcategories of reproductive workers, mostly migrant women and women of colour, who take over the tasks of care, welfare and child-rearing. The present-day ‘global care chains’ position migrant workers as central to the project of taking on the care work that middle-class women in the Northern hemisphere give up in order to participate in the labour force. The emancipation project of liberal feminism thus depends on the exclusion of migrant and sexual minorities from the same rights enjoyed by white middle-class women (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2002; Gottfried, 2007; Peterson 2007; Eisenstein, 2009). In commercial surrogacy, also carried out mostly by migrant women, even the task of gestation is outsourced commercially (Lewis, 2019).
This neoliberal sleight of hand does not solve the patriarchal division of labour between the sexes. It achieves a relative redistribution of family and work responsibilities that allows privileged women to enter elite economic positions, while supporting an international division of labour that is compatible with patriarchal family values and the capitalist market economy. As Rottenberg put it, neoliberal feminism ‘reinscribes white and class privilege and heteronormativity, while … representing itself as post-racial and LGBTQ friendly’ (2018: 20). To call this liberation merely adds insult to injury.
The ‘indirect supplementation of rich women in the North by poor women from the South’ is at the core of the racialized economy of advanced capitalism (Bhattacharyya, 2018: