Publications

“Neoliberalism, feminisms, and counter-conducts: Foucauldian perspectives”

2019

Margareth Rago e Maurício Pelegrini (eds.)

In what ways has the rapid expansion of neoliberalism across the world affected all our lives, and especially the lives of women, who are generally more undervalued and exploited than men? Beyond the precarization of labor, the dismantling of recently acquired rights, the violent attacks on democracy, and the visible resentment expressed in right-wing mobilizations, this book presents the distinctive reading that Michel Foucault offers of neoliberalism, understood as an “art of government” or a form of “governmental rationality” that demands the production of a new subjectivity: the “entrepreneur of the self”, supposedly free to make every decision of their lives according to cost-benefit reasoning and to invest in themselves as “human capital.” The entrepreneurial logic extends to all spheres of social life, including the private and intimate domains. In this context, even feminisms find themselves deeply threatened, as the very agendas they defend are increasingly captured by the entrepreneurial rationality of this new neoliberal regime. Discussing these phenomena is essential, just as it is essential to invent new forms of resistance, counter-conducts, and struggles against the political, cultural, economic, and moral setbacks that affect our present.

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