Abstract
This edited book by Leela Fernandes is a good collection of essays which provides theoretically sophisticated analyses of original empirical material and develops a valuable framework for a comparative, transnational feminist analysis of neoliberalism. The editor argues that ‘the growing forms of socioeconomic inequality and exclusion’ are a contemporary burning topic (p. vii). This edited text brings together feminist scholars working on questions related to the distinctiveness of the neoliberal state, and problematizes ‘long-standing forms of inequalities within and between nations’ (p. viii). Furthermore, the editor argues that this new text is required, on the grounds that ‘a layered analysis is still too often missing from a dominant social scientific understanding of structures of political economy’ (p. viii). The text provides a new set of feminist perspectives on the varied and contradictory structures, ideologies and practices of States.
In Chapter 1, titled Conceptualizing the Post-Liberalization State: Intervention, Restructuring, and the Nature of State Power, Fernandes argues that through a redefinition of conceptions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ a better understanding of the post-liberalization period can be sought. The author addresses four central questions: How the state has been restructured; how it exercises power; how state interacts with organizational forms and institutions within the realm of civil society in the post-liberalization era of the 21st century; and how it is shaped by the needs of capital (p. 7). The master concept of neoliberalism serves as an explanatory device to respond to these questions (p. 7).
As Fernandes explains, the book focuses on: first, the reconstitution of the ‘public’ and ‘civil society’; second, a deepening of understanding of various forms of inequality and exclusion; third, delineating the new state structures, modes of governance and forms of power that have specifically emerged with the implementation of policies of economic liberalization; and finally, engaging with both the possibilities and limits of political and social change. Each of the essays present a set of interdisciplinary, empirically grounded studies, shaped by a feminist theoretical approach that ‘seeks to pry open and understand categories such as the “state,” “civil society,” and “the economy” in the post-liberalization world’ (p. 21).
Chapter 2, titled What’s in a Word? Austerity, Precarity, and Neoliberalism, authored by Nancy A. Naples, presents a comparative materialist feminist examination of the public and political discourses associated with neoliberal ideologies and policies. She provides a rich and systematic analysis of the effects of austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on socioeconomic inequalities of class, gender and race through a comparative focus on the United States and the European Union.
Chapter 3, titled After Rights: Choice and the Structure of Citizenship, by Ujju Aggarwal, elaborates on the complex connections between public and political discourses, institutional practices, social and economic exclusion, and inequality through analysis of the relationship between narratives of choice, racial inequality, and state-produced segregation in the United States.
In Chapter 4, Lamia Karim examines the distinctive nature of neoliberalism in Bangladesh which began under military rule, assessing the discursive silences that neoliberal development policies have produced within the NGO sector (p. 107).
Dolly Daftary’s essay, titled An Improvising State: Market Reforms, Neoliberal Governmentality, Gender, and Caste in Gujarat, India explores the state-NGO nexus in the context of postcolonial nations with special reference to Gujarat state in the Republic of India. She provides an in-depth examination of the restructuring of rural bureaucracies and examines the micro-credit model through an analysis of NGOs that are funded by the state. Christina Heatherton takes up the question of vulnerability in the next chapter, titled The Broken Windows of Rosa Ramos: Neoliberal Policing Regimes of Imminent Violability. She provides a careful analysis of the intersections and divergences of dimensions of state power that are concerned with security on the one hand and with neoliberal models of urban development on the other.
In the penultimate chapter, titled After Neoliberalism? Resignifying Economy, Nation, and Family in Ecuador, Amy Lind analyses post-neoliberal Ecuador’s Citizen Revolution, and highlights the centrality of heteronormativity in understanding post-neoliberal states, including governance and development frameworks that privilege the patriarchal heterosexual family. Lind claims that Ecuador’s shift away from neoliberalism is fraught with contradictions and is best understood as signifying only a partial rupture with the neoliberal legacy.
The final chapter of the volume, Towards a Feminist Analytic of the Post-Liberalization State, concludes with a discussion of the need to rethink how we understand the project of neoliberalism through a nuanced and contextual feminist analytic that has ‘wrestled with the meaning, practices, and power of the post-liberalization state’ (p. 230).
This book is a much-needed contribution to a topic of intellectual and political significance. It combines a wealth of analysis by a range of contributors, each of whom have contributed such impressive chapters that the book as a whole represents makes an important international contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship.