Posthuman Feminism. Rosi Braidotti
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Название: Posthuman Feminism

Автор: Rosi Braidotti

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Социология

Серия:

isbn: 9781509518111

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СКАЧАТЬ 2017), ‘pinkwashing’, ‘sexual nationalism’, ‘homonationalism’ and ‘queer nationalism’ (Puar, 2007). It is an attempt to enlist the transformative project of feminist and LGBTQ+ people’s rights to xenophobic civilizational campaigns.

      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 rights to legitimize armed intervention by the West. Critical feminist 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).

      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.

      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).

      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.