Legendary disenchanted feminist scholar Nancy Fraser of New School University in Manhattan has a book in the stores and has puffed it with a couple of articles claiming that feminism has become the "handmaiden of capitalism". Here's one in
The Guardian
Feminism and Neoliberalism
And an interview in the
New York Times
Leaning-in
Fraser claims "My feminism emerged
from the New Left and is still colored by the thought of that time. For me,
feminism is not simply a matter of getting a smattering of individual women
into positions of power and privilege within existing social hierarchies. It is
rather about overcoming those hierarchies. This requires challenging the
structural sources of gender domination in capitalist society — above all, the
institutionalized separation of two supposedly distinct kinds of activity: on
the one hand, so-called “productive” labor, historically associated with men
and remunerated by wages; on the other hand, “caring” activities, often
historically unpaid and still performed mainly by women. In my view, this
gendered, hierarchical division between “production” and “reproduction” is a
defining structure of capitalist society and a deep source of the gender
asymmetries hard-wired in it. There can be no “emancipation of women” so long
as this structure remains intact..... the
mainstream feminism of our time has adopted an approach that cannot achieve
justice even for women, let alone for anyone else. The trouble is, this
feminism is focused on encouraging educated middle-class women to “lean in” and
“crack the glass ceiling” – in other words, to climb the corporate ladder. By
definition, then, its beneficiaries can only be women of the
professional-managerial class. And absent structural changes in capitalist
society, those women can only benefit by leaning on others — by offloading
their own care work and housework onto low-waged, precarious workers, typically
racialized and/or immigrant women. So this is not, and cannot be, a feminism
for all women!"
But London-based Brenna Bhandar and Denise
Ferreira da Silva counter that Fraser "reveals the innate and
repetitive myopia of White feminism to take account, to converse and think
along with Black and Third World Feminists." They find it "tiring when White feminists speak of second-wave feminism as if it were the only “feminism” and use
the pronoun “we” when
lamenting the failures of their struggles" and complain that "the persistent claim to universalism, which is the core of this White feminism,
renders the experiences, thoughts and work of Black
and Third World feminists invisible, over and over again."
White Feminist Fatigue
