Catherine Rottenberg

Neoliberal Feminism and the Future of Human Capital

W hen Emma Watson, the newly selected UN Women Goodwill Am-

bassador best known for her role as Hermione Granger in the Harry
Potter movies, declared herself a feminist in front of a crowd at the
headquarters of the United Nations in September 2014, she received not
only hearty applause from those present but also accolades from the main-
stream and popular press. Indeed, the twenty-something Watson announced
to an auditorium full of powerful international players that she proudly con-
sidered herself a feminist and that “this seemed uncomplicated to [her]”
even as she understood that feminism had become an unpopular word.1 The
YouTube clip of the nervous but still poised Watson immediately went viral
and has since attracted over 7 million viewers. In the wake of Watson’s
speech, it thus seems safe to say that we are currently witnessing a historic
moment in which it has finally become acceptable for highly visible Western
women to identify publicly as feminists.
Watson’s speech also suggests that critics may have been too hasty in de-
termining that we have moved, ineluctably, into a postfeminist society. The
term postfeminist is most often invoked critically in scholarly literature to
refer to a discursive formation and sensibility in the West—particularly in
the United States and the United Kingdom—that incorporates various as-
pects of feminism while simultaneously disavowing the necessity of mobiliz-
ing a feminist movement to struggle for gender justice (Gill 2007; McRobbie
2009). More specifically, postfeminism is understood to focus on the im-
portance of individual women’s empowerment and choice, presenting fem-
inism as something that has already occurred, accomplished its goals, and
is therefore passé or no longer necessary. Rather than simply being anti-
feminist, however, the postfeminist era appears to constitute a complex “en-
tanglement of feminist and anti-feminist ideas” (Gill 2007, 161).
Watson’s very public declaration that she identifies as a feminist and the
overwhelmingly positive reception she received, however, problematizes the

I would like to thank Neve Gordon and Sara Farris, as well as the anonymous reviewers and
Andrew Mazzaschi at Signs, for their insightful and helpful comments. This research acknowl-
edges support from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020, through the Marie Skłodowska-
Curie Individual Fellowship RNF (704010).
1
Video of Emma Watson’s HeForSHe speech before the UN is available on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v5p-iFl4qhBsE.

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2017, vol. 42, no. 2]
© 2016 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2017/4202-0002$10.00
330 y Rottenberg

claim that we are currently living in a postfeminist era.2 This problematiza-

tion gains added force if we situate Watson’s declaration within a wider cul-
tural context—specifically the United States—where feminism has resurfaced
as an important and even influential discourse. Within the span of just a few
years, a flurry of self-declared feminist manifestos have circulated widely, gar-
nering intense mainstream media attention and reenergizing feminist de-
bates, most trenchantly around the question of why middle-class women
are still struggling to cultivate careers and raise children at the same time.
Two of these, Anne-Marie Slaughter’s “Why Women Still Can’t Have It
All,” published in the Atlantic in the summer of 2012, and Sheryl Sand-
berg’s best-selling Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, published
just a few months later in 2013, might well be said to have initiated this
trend of high-power women publicly and unabashedly identifying as fem-
inists (Slaughter 2012; Sandberg 2013). Taken together, these recent de-
velopments underscore that we have moved from an arguably postfeminist
moment (back) to a feminist one—a moment in which feminism not only
still seems necessary but also increasingly mainstream.3
Watson’s short but passionate speech for the HeForShe campaign con-
centrated on urging boys and men to participate in the fight against gen-
der inequality, asking them to ban the use of the word “bossy” to refer to
strong and confident girls. Slaughter’s and Sandberg’s feminist solutions
are somewhat different and revolve around a felicitous balance, namely, en-
suring women’s ability to pursue a fulfilling career without having to for-
feit family life or raising children (Rottenberg 2014a). To be sure, these are
“accommodating feminism[s],” which shy away from argument and con-
frontation (McRobbie 2013, 135). Consequently—and not surprisingly—
these public feminist declarations have been harshly criticized by post-
colonial feminists.4 Sandberg’s and Slaughter’s manifestos have also been
criticized for advocating a “trickle-down” corporate feminism (Eisenstein
2013; see also Huffer 2013). Yet the fact remains that feminism, however ill-
defined or watered down, is currently experiencing a wave of unprecedented

2
In a recent article, Angela McRobbie (2015) also reflects on feminism’s rehabilitation,
thus revisiting her earlier claims about postfeminism.
3
One has only to think of Beyoncé standing proudly in front of a backdrop reading
“FEMINIST” at the MTV Video Music Awards in August 2014. See http://www.huffingtonpost
.com/2014/08/25/beyonce-feminist-vmas_n_5708475.html..
4
Writing for Al Jazeera, Julia Zulver (2014), for instance, criticizes the United Nations’
decision to elect “a white, Western, heterosexual, upper-class woman” who then was asked
to speak “for a group of united nations,” underscoring that Watson’s speech invoked an
“over-simplified, outdated version of gender discourse.”
 S I G N S Winter 2017 y 331

popularity in the United States. Jessica Valenti, the journalist and well-
known feminist blogger, confirms that more young women are think-
ing about, looking into, and calling themselves feminists than in the past two
decades (Valenti 2014). Feminism has, in other words, been given a new life.
In what follows, I more closely interrogate feminism’s new life as it has
been circulating in mainstream US print media, while I examine some of
the central terms, concepts, and ideals around which this new feminist dis-
course is coalescing. Drawing on the insights of cultural and media theo-
rists such as Rosalind Gill (2007) and Angela McRobbie (2013, 2015),
I assume that these widely circulated and popular venues register and
(re)produce particular cultural sensibilities. Even though the claims in these
mainstream articles may at times be based on dubious research, the articles
nonetheless have cultural currency. Scholars have accordingly noted that
the rhetoric mobilized by both Slaughter and Sandberg has not only helped
to reinvigorate an older work-family debate in the United States but has
also helped to inscribe balance as a feminist ideal and therefore as one of
the highest feminist priorities. On the one hand, the balance discourse en-
courages women to invest in and cultivate a career as well as to develop
one’s sense of self, which has long been a liberal feminist objective. Yet, on
the other hand, the balance discourse reinscribes the normative expecta-
tion that women should have—and should want to have—children (Rot-
tenberg 2014a). The second part of the balance equation, the expecta-
tion of (hands-on or intensive) mothering, has also become part and parcel
of feminist discourse, at least as it has infiltrated mainstream consciousness
at the present moment. In addition, the newest form of feminism, such
as is found in the writing of Sandberg and Slaughter, activates a more at-
tentive, luminous, and exclusive address to upwardly mobile, aspirational
women (McRobbie 2013). This feminism is an “unapologetically middle-
class feminism, shorn of all obligations to less privileged women or to those
who are not ‘strivers’” (McRobbie 2013, 120).
Examining this contemporary upsurge in feminist declarations and the
ostensible (mainstream) embrace of feminism, I lay out three interrelated
claims here. First, I reinforce the claim that a new feminism is on the rise,
one that indeed presents balance as its normative frame and ultimate ideal.
Scholars have already outlined in detail the processes by which mainstream
liberal feminism is converging with neoliberalism (Fraser 2013; Orloff and
Schiff 2014; Prügl 2015) and have argued that this convergence is in turn
producing an individuated feminist subject whose identity is informed by
a cost-benefit calculus (Rottenberg 2014b). However, I claim that this neo-
liberal feminist discourse is also producing a new form of neoliberal gov-
ernmentality for middle-class women, one that is not based on the man-
332 y Rottenberg

agement of future risks (e.g., Beck 1992) but rather on the promise of future
individual fulfillment or, more accurately, on careful sequencing of career
and maternity and smart (self-)investments in the present to ensure en-
hanced returns in the future. In other words, we are currently witnessing a
temporal shift with respect to the discourse of balance. Upwardly mobile
middle-class women are increasingly being encouraged to invest in themselves
and their professions first and to postpone maternity until some later point.
I provide two representative examples of this phenomenon—the glo-
rification of hookup culture among young high-potential women on col-
lege campuses and the new availability of egg freezing as part of the ben-
efits package of corporations such as Facebook—in order to demonstrate
this striking temporal shift in the balance discourse. If Sandberg and Slaugh-
ter insisted that balance was possible in the present, in just the past few
years there has been a subtle but crucial transformation in the way balance is
being presented in the mainstream media: from an undertaking to be real-
ized in the present to a promise for the future. I propose that, by revealing
the temporal shift in the work-family balance discourse, we can gain insight
into how neoliberal rationality operates through a new “technology of the
self ” (Foucault 1988) structured through futurity.
Second, I suggest that this future-oriented promise of equilibrium may
well constitute part of a conversion process the aim of which is to trans-
form women into neoliberal human capital, a process that is ongoing but
as yet incomplete. If it is true that neoliberalism is slowly colonizing every
aspect of our world (Harvey 2005), then human subjects, too, are being
remade into what Wendy Brown cogently describes as human capital, namely,
beings “whose objective is to self-invest in ways that enhance its figura-
tive credit rating and attract investors” (2015, 33). Encouraging upwardly
mobile women to build their own portfolios and to self-invest during the
years once thought of as the most fertile suggests that neoliberalism is in-
creasingly interpellating women—particularly middle-class women—as human
capital. On the other hand, I posit that reproduction continues to present
a stumbling block in this conversion process, especially since reproduction
and the care work it entails are thoroughly disavowed in neoliberal ratio-
nality. As this rationality increasingly converts certain women into human
capital, however, the link between these women and reproduction and care
work is slowly being attenuated. In other words, reproduction and care work
are already being outsourced to other women deemed disposable since they
are neither considered strivers nor properly responsiblized. The emergent
neoliberal order is slowly expunging gender and even sexual differences
among a certain strata of subjects while it simultaneously produces new
forms of racialized and class-stratified gender exploitation.
 S I G N S Winter 2017 y 333

Finally, I also explain why the operation of futurity becomes particu-

larly discernable in neoliberal feminism; I maintain that this feminism cur-
rently facilitates the advancement of the neoliberal project while it concom-
itantly reveals a constituent disjuncture within neoliberal rationality. This
disjuncture seems to revolve precisely around the still-incomplete conver-
sion of middle-class women into human capital due to the quandary re-
production continues to present, particularly as the sexual division of labor
is not disappearing but is rather being (re)naturalized in various and com-
plex ways.

The balanced feminist

While the notion of work-family balance in the United States can be traced
back to the early 1980s—gaining feminist currency with the publication
of Arlie Hochschild’s bestselling The Second Shift ([1989] 2003)—the fem-
inist debate about the difficulty of work-family balance has clearly been re-
ignited by Slaughter’s “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” and Sandberg’s
Lean In. The first was written by a former State Department director of
policy planning and Princeton professor and the second by the chief oper-
ating officer at Facebook. These two feminist manifestos have been read
in astonishingly large numbers, generating much discussion and media at-
tention. They have also reopened the debate about how, why, and in what
ways the feminist revolution has stalled (see, e.g., Coontz 2013).
While the emphases of these two texts may be different—and they have
repeatedly been represented in the media as representing opposing camps—
their feminist ideal ultimately remains the same: enabling women to es-
tablish a successful career and a (hetero)normative family while also ensur-
ing that they can enjoy both at the same time. The means may vary, but in
both cases there is a deeply held conviction that once high-potential women
undertake the task of revaluing and pursuing their ambition (Sandberg) or
rethinking the normative expectation that work comes first (Slaughter), then
all women will be empowered and will be able to carve out their own happy
work-family balance in the present. As critics have been quick to point out,
balancing a high-power career and family is attainable for (perhaps) the top
1 percent (see Eisenstein 2013; Huffer 2013; Rottenberg 2013). Yet once
balance is held out as a promise for the future, then this norm is transformed
into an ostensibly achievable objective for all middle-class women. Indeed,
increasingly this ideal of balance serves as the ever-elusive affective, individ-
ual, and cultural reward for women adhering to a well-planned and already-
scripted life trajectory. The notion of pursuing happiness through finding
the right work-family balance thus becomes a normalizing matrix that in-
334 y Rottenberg

terpellates all aspiring middle-class women and helps shape and direct wom-
en’s aspirations, desires, and behavior.5
While the work-family balance debate is not particularly new, the timing
of its resurgence and its feminist framing do require some unpacking. In the
1990s and into the early 2000s, liberal feminism was, in many ways, trans-
formed into “choice feminism” and eventually choice-as-postfeminism, par-
ticularly in and by the popular media (Gill 2007; Orloff and Schiff 2014;
Rodier and Meagher 2014). However, choice feminism for well-educated
middle-class women in the United States ultimately boiled down to an ex-
pectation that these women would choose between seriously pursuing
a demanding career or having a family life. Women were not actively en-
couraged to pursue both. This became particularly pronounced when the
US mainstream media began focusing on the so-called mommy wars, which
famously pitted well-educated women who chose to become stay-at-home
moms against professional working mothers, signifying that liberated women
now had a choice with respect to career and motherhood but that this choice
was either/or. The media, moreover, intimated that women could (and even
should) now happily ramp off the fast track and decide to stay home and
that professional women who choose to work during their children’s early
years were prioritizing their careers at the expense of their children (McRobbie
2013, 131).
This was precisely the time when Lisa Belkin’s influential and contro-
versial article, “The Opt-Out Revolution” (2003), which showcased a num-
ber of extremely well-educated women who had decided to stay at home
full-time with their children, was published to much ado in the New York
Times.6 The women Belkin interviewed all had college, if not advanced de-
grees, from elite universities, and they all framed their decision to ramp off
the fast track or stay home with their small children in terms of choice.
Belkin writes that “as these women look up at the ‘top,’ they are increas-
ingly deciding that they don’t want to do what it takes to get there.” One
of the women interviewed for the article added, “Women today, if we
think about feminism at all, we see it as a battle fought for ‘the choice.’ For
us, the freedom to choose work if we want to work is the feminist strain

5
The address extends beyond heterosexual middle-class women, increasingly incorpo-
rating all aspiring middle-class women, whether they are straight or not. Thus heterosexual
coupling can, as it were, simply be replaced by homonormative coupling, while the rest of the
script remains the same.
6
I concentrate on articles that appeared in the New York Times in large part because,
as Moon-Kie Jung states, “within mainstream journalism, it sits imperiously at the pinnacle”
(Jung 2015, 144).
 S I G N S Winter 2017 y 335

in our lives.” Indeed, looking back at this period with its media hype over
this so-called opt-out revolution, journalist Judith Warner reminds us that
in 2000, books like Iris Krasnow’s Surrendering to Motherhood, a memoir
about the liberation that accompanies giving up work to stay home, had a
huge readership (Warner 2013). Warner also states that during that same
year almost 40 percent of respondents to the General Social Survey told
researchers they believed a mother’s working was harmful to her children.
Yet over the past ten years this either/or discourse has been receding in
the United States, and balance has come to fill its place. Within the span of a
single decade, the mainstream media representations of the conflict faced
by this same population of women have changed. It actually appears that—
at least at the discursive level—middle-class stay-at-home mothers are out,
while self-identified feminist go-getters with children are in. The publica-
tion of Slaughter’s and Sandberg’s texts can be seen both as registering this
change as well as helping to spark anew and contour the latest upsurge in
feminist discussions. Rather than a simple outcome of the recession or of
economic pressures, however, I read this shift as an effect of the entrench-
ment of neoliberal rationality and governmentality—in the Foucauldian
sense of regulating the “conduct of conduct” (Gordon 1991, 48)—in ad-
dition to the ongoing transmutation of liberal feminism into a neoliberal
variant. Indeed, through an examination of various articles discussing the
idea of balance that have appeared since 2010, not only do we see a trans-
formation in the either/or discourse, but the underlying message increas-
ingly appears to be that women are responsible for crafting their own per-
sonal and felicitous equilibrium between career and family. The only way
women can do this is by sequencing and planning well for their future.
In her 2013 New York Times article “Why Gender Equality Stalled,”
Stephanie Coontz stresses that, in the past twenty years, cultural attitudes
have shifted quite dramatically with respect to women, careers, and family.
She underscores that, “in 1997, 56 percent of women ages 18 to 34 and
26 percent of middle-aged and older women said that, in addition to hav-
ing a family, being successful in a high-paying career or profession was ‘very
important’ or ‘one of the most important things’ in their lives [whereas] by
2011, fully two-thirds of the younger women and 42 percent of the older
ones expressed that sentiment.” And, as if marking the end of the post-
feminist era and the move (back) into a feminist one, the title of another
2013New York Times article, written by Warner, reads “The Opt-Out Gen-
eration Wants Back In.” The women Warner interviewed are quite clear
about the fact that they do not want to return to their old “pre-opting-out
jobs” but wish they could have found some way, while their children were
young, to combine spending time with their children with some sort of intel-
336 y Rottenberg

lectually stimulating, respectably paying, and advancement-permitting flex-

ible work.
This is precisely the point where the term balance enters the discussion
as the solution and as a feminist ideal. It is not coincidental that Warner’s
article appeared around the same time as the publication of Slaughter’s and
Sandberg’s manifestos. Indeed, the elusive ideal of a happy balance can there-
fore be seen to link this and other New York Times articles, Lean In, and
“Why Women Still Can’t Have it All” in a complex cultural web; all of these
works (re)produce the contemporary and increasingly widespread currency
of mainstream feminism. Balance is exactly the promise of successfully nego-
tiating the two pulls on contemporary liberated middle-class womanhood:
the importance of cultivating a career on the one hand and the importance
of being a hands-on mother on the other. Indeed, for the past few years,
balance as the progressive or liberated feminist solution has saturated the
popular imagination and has served as the background for various main-
stream representations as well as discussions about how to solve the con-
flict between well-educated women, work, and family (Rottenberg 2014a).
More recently, however, a further transformation in the discourse can be
discerned that increasingly presents balance as a promise for the future.

Neoliberal feminism and futurity

In the wake of Slaughter’s and Sandberg’s texts, there have been a slew
of articles in mainstream and even progressive media venues in the United
States, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Huffington
Post, and the Atlantic, in which the notion of work-family balance for women
has been explored in different ways. When examining various representative
articles that depict hookup culture on college campuses and egg freezing in
the corporate world, a clear pattern emerges: there is not only a distinct and
growing insistence that well-educated women need to establish their ca-
reers before thinking of family but also a growing cultural acceptance, if
not outright encouragement, of this trajectory. Postponing childrearing
until one’s early thirties is increasingly being depicted as the preferable life
sequence for this population of women—and the one that has the most
chance of leading to a felicitous balance down the line.
In a July 2013 New York Times article, Kate Taylor describes a rising
phenomenon among middle-class undergraduate women in elite universities
(Taylor 2013; see also Marcotte 2012). Holding up women like Sandberg
and Slaughter as their role models, many potentially high-achieving young
women are presented as no longer interested in investing in relationships
during their college years—years when they feel they need to be concerned
 S I G N S Winter 2017 y 337

with building their professional résumés. The women interviewed by Taylor

declared that they envision their twenties as a period of unencumbered
striving, when they might work at a bank in Hong Kong for one year, then
go to business school, then move to a corporate job in New York. According
to the article, young women assume that they need to take this decade to
invest in themselves, since they also assume they are going to have plenty of
time to focus on their husband and kids once they have established them-
selves professionally. The idea of lugging a relationship through all those
transitions seems too difficult for many of these young women to imagine.
Moreover, Taylor describes these women as invoking a very neat metric of
“cost-benefit” when they speak about sexual relationships. Hooking up
rather than cultivating a relationship during their first decade of adulthood
prioritizes lowering risk and investment costs. Self-care, pleasure in the form
of casual sex, and an investment in their own professional advancement are
the motivations behind these women’s preferences. Reproduction, accord-
ing to the article’s conclusions, is the farthest thing from their minds at this
stage in life.
It is important to note that these same young women do not reject the
family part of the balance equation. Most of the women Taylor interviewed
still planned to get married, but they were insistent that matrimony would
not be on their horizons until they were in their early thirties. Yet not one
of the interviewees mentions the possibility of staying at home once their
children are born. These young women also tend to identify as feminists,
and from their interviews it seems clear that they firmly believe in the wisdom
of careful planning for the future. This is accomplished by building their
professional resume in the present while postponing family life until their
thirties.
Taylor’s article about hookup culture for the New York Times came
on the heels of another much-talked-about piece by Hanna Rosin. Writing
for the Atlantic, Rosin (2012) also reports on the hookup culture among
undergraduate and graduate students in their later twenties. Best known
for her controversial book The End of Men, on which the article is based,
Rosin writes: “Single young women in their sexual prime—that is, their
20s and early 30s—are for the first time in history more successful, on av-
erage, than the single young men around them.” While empirically this
appears to be a dubious claim, Rosin, too, appears to be registering a shift
in cultural norms. The article clearly frames the development of college
and postcollege hookup culture as part of the feminist and sexual revolu-
tion. Rosin suggests that this remarkable freedom has become possible not
merely due to the pill or legal abortion but because of the emergence of an
entirely new landscape of sexual freedom—the ability to delay marriage and
338 y Rottenberg

have temporary relationships that don’t derail an education or a career. Sim-

ilar to Taylor, Rosin concludes that, “for college girls these days, an overly
serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th cen-
tury: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promis-
ing future.” While the women interviewed in these articles may not be a
representative sample of women from their age or racial group, the articles
themselves carry out a certain kind of cultural work. The language in both
is one of cost-benefit and self-investment. And, also like Taylor’s article, the
promising future for the women in Rosin’s piece still ultimately includes
both a successful professional life and a fulfilling family life. The mainstream
cultural and feminist expectations—which are strangely converging—is that
women still can and should have a family life, but young middle-class women
are encouraged to postpone this part of the equation until after they have de-
veloped their professional possibilities and built up their individual port-
folios. Thus, it is not that cultivating a career necessarily trumps family life—
at least not yet—but this suspension of balance does defer the motherhood
part of the equation.
This insistence on a well-planned life and on the importance of self-
investment emerged yet again when the mainstream media shifted its fo-
cus from college students to professional women in their mid- to late twen-
ties and early thirties. This shift, of course, is not coincidental. The recent
sexual assault scandals on university campuses in the United States have
made it much more difficult to lionize hookup culture in the way Rosin did
just a few years ago. And while there has been public outrage at universities’
ineptitude when confronted with sexual assault cases, a certain exposure of
a long history of covering up sexual abuse on campus, and, of course, the
mobilization of students across the country, the mainstream media has mostly
diverted attention away from these sexual assault scandals. At the same time,
the exaltation of women who strive to have it all by pursuing a career and
planning for a future family has not disappeared. Rather, the ideal of future
balance discourse has found its way into a new venue: slightly older women
who are currently working in their respective professions. It is in this shift
of focus from college to professional women that the question and the
quandary of reproduction emerge in more explicit terms.

Theorizing the gender of futurity

While many political and cultural theorists have convincingly illustrated
how neoliberal rationality is producing subjects as entrepreneurial actors
who are calculating and self-regulating (Larner 2000; Brown 2003; McRobbie
2013), much less attention has been paid to the particular temporality of
 S I G N S Winter 2017 y 339

neoliberal rationality and how an avowed emphasis on futurity or future

returns may increasingly be serving as a new modality of what Michel Fou-
cault (1988) has famously called “technologies of the self.” My claim thus
draws on the recent work of Wendy Brown, who theorizes how neoliberal
reason produces subjects who are expected to “comport themselves in
ways that maximize their capital value in the present and enhance their
future value . . . through practices of entrepreneurism, self-investment,
and/or attracting investors” (2015, 22). I would like, however, to place
the mobilization of futurity at center stage, as key to producing this neo-
liberal subject. If, as Brown cogently argues, neoliberal rationality has dis-
seminated the market model to more and more domains and activities, and
if humans are quickly becoming self-investing capital that constantly at-
tempts to enhance its market value over time, then futurity seems to be
central to the neoliberal mechanism of governance. This is most clearly
seen, I suggest, in the address to upwardly mobile middle-class women and
the production of a neoliberal feminist subject.
Indeed, there is a striking gendered aspect to the avowed emphasis on
futurity. Futurity as a technology of the self is arguably most evident in
neoliberalism’s hailing of upwardly mobile women, who are still constantly
told that they must worry about their biological clock if they want to have it
all. High-potential men are also interpellated as self-investing human capital,
but the added and very clear injunction to sequence their lives carefully in
order to achieve work-family balance at a future point is much less promi-
nent in their interpellation; once sequence enters into the equation, it does
not focus on juggling reproduction and career, as it does for women, but
rather on professional advancement.7 There is, accordingly, nothing par-
ticularly novel about the normative cultural injunction that upwardly mo-
bile men invest strategically in their career development; consequently, the
operation of futurity is, I suggest, rendered less perceptible in the address
to men.
Given the growing mainstream acceptance, and even emphasis, on post-
poning motherhood for women, the futurity of the promise of balance is—
at least to feminist critics—striking. The effort to keep potentially powerful
women on a particular normative path in the present so that they can os-

7
There is simply no comparison when we think about the amount of attention the media
pays to powerful men with very small children as opposed to powerful women with very small
children—one has only to think of the brouhaha around Marissa Mayer, who was pregnant
when she was named as the new CEO of Yahoo! By contrast, few people likely know that the
CEO of Google, Larry Page, has two small children, born in 2009 and 2011. Moreover, when
the issues relate to men’s concerns, the term most often used is work-life conflict; when
discussing women, the term usually slips to work-family balance.
340 y Rottenberg

tensibly enjoy the fruits of their (self-)investment in the future includes not
only professional advancement and enhancement prescriptions but also in-
junctions regarding how to regulate and potentially exploit their reproduc-
tive capabilities. Women’s value as women, and thus their individual futures
and returns, are still linked to being able to have children (thus women’s
value in the marketplace, as it were, is still associated with maternity), but
this link seems to be progressively weakening, at least among a certain pop-
ulation of women.
I further account for this divergent gendered address below. Here, how-
ever, I would like to emphasize how the promise of future enhanced capi-
tal returns—rather than, say, concern with risk management, as Ulrich Beck
(1992; see also Adam, Beck, and Van Loon 2000) has so famously argued—
seems increasingly to operate as one key contemporary technology of the
self. For high-potential women, the promise of future returns clearly helps
to ensure that each individual woman concentrates on her own particular life
plan, encouraging her to augment her individual capital by building her port-
folio. It depoliticizes feminism—defanging even liberal feminism’s imma-
nent critique, which invoked liberalism’s language of universal equality to
expose historic gendered contradictions and elisions. This new form of fem-
inism is also reordering space, eroding notions of the private sphere (as well as
the public sphere) in the process. While many radical and materialist femi-
nists have long dreamed of the spatial and conceptual breakdown of the
division between the private and the public, what we are currently witness-
ing is not a rethinking of the private-public divide but rather, I propose, the
slow and devastating erosion of feminism’s emancipatory impetus. Nor is
this merely the strategic co-optation of liberal feminism by neoliberalism; it
is the steady evacuation of an alternative feminist vocabulary, particularly
since in most streams of feminism, emancipation has been conceived in re-
lation to women’s ability to disarticulate their link to the private sphere and
enter into the public sphere (see Scott 2011). Moreover, neoliberalism’s col-
onization of feminism is simultaneously producing a very clear distinction
between female subjects who are worthy because they are aspirational and
thus convertible and the majority of female subjects, who are deemed ir-
redeemable due to their insufficient aspirations and responsibilization.

Freezing eggs
McRobbie (2013) suggests that new neoliberal norms of middle-class as-
pirational life are currently being intensely directed at women because women
are ultimately seen as responsible for holding together family life. As a re-
sult of the entrenchment of neoliberalism in Britain alongside the steady
 S I G N S Winter 2017 y 341

divestment in social programs, the family is currently being cast as a small

business in need of management while children are considered to be human
capital. This, in turn, has the effect of entrepreneurializing domestic life and
thus giving a more professional status to full-time mothers. While this may
well be the case in the United Kingdom, I propose that in the United States,
the discourse is coalescing around women themselves as human capital,
who must self-invest in order to enhance their portfolios’ value. This, in turn,
creates a profound ambivalence with respect to how to manage issues of
children and family life.
An example of the new acceptance of postponing motherhood—to some
ill-defined future moment—can be found in more recent articles about
Facebook’s and Apple’s decision to pay for female employees to freeze their
eggs, which sparked heated discussions across Europe and the United States
after news of this first appeared in venues ranging from the Guardian to
CNN in October 2014. These articles disclosed a new policy in which
various Silicon Valley firms and corporations would begin covering egg
freezing as part of their employees’ benefits packages. Even more than the
articles discussing hookup culture among undergraduate and postgraduate
students, this series of articles emphasized the increasing importance that
women and US society are placing on women’s professional advancement.
The message of both the initiative as well as the articles is clear: women
are increasingly interested in establishing careers during their twenties and
thirties, but these same women do not want to jeopardize the possibility of
having children at some future point. By offering employees this benefit,
these companies ostensibly recognize the importance of family life while
they legitimate women’s desire to establish their careers before having
children. As one of the women interviewed for an article declared: “The
pressure is off, and I feel so empowered. . . . I can now concentrate on my
career and becoming who I want to be before having children!” (in Ridley
2014).
The countless articles that have taken up the subject warn that cur-
rently egg freezing is expensive and still at the experimental stages. They also
underscore that the women who are lining up for the new procedure are, at
the moment, the overachievers, the aspiring law firm partners, the ambitious
actresses, the medical school residents—in other words, the 1 percent. As
Sarah Wildman (2013), writing for New York Magazine, suggests, these are
“women who are acutely aware of feminism’s cruel catch: the narrow fer-
tility window that’s been narrowed even further through years of schooling,
serial dating, and career advancement. They are boxed in by mixed messages:
40 is the new 30! But be sure to have your children before you turn 35.” Egg
freezing seems to provide a solution to this dilemma. Wildman further sug-
342 y Rottenberg

gests that in “all likelihood, the [egg-freezing] technology will eventually

get there. Even detractors see egg freezing as becoming standard practice
in the next five years. Someday, one endocrinologist told me, girls will get
braces on their teeth when they turn 12, freeze their eggs when they grad-
uate from college, and get pregnant whenever they want.” According to
this prediction, reproduction will eventually be uncoupled from any no-
tion of the biological clock, and women will be able to have children (or not)
whenever they so desire.
These articles clearly demonstrate that the postponement of childrear-
ing has become part and parcel of the newest upsurge of feminist discourse
that revolves around investment in the self, building one’s portfolio and
credit rating, and enhancing one’s market value. As another woman in-
terviewed in Wildman’s article articulated very clearly, “It’s like, I’m me!,
I don’t feel like [marriage, kids] is where I’m supposed to be right now.”
Middle- and upper-class women are currently being intepellated as respon-
sible for planning their lives—or responsibilized—so that each individual
woman can cultivate a career and have a family once she has sufficiently
established herself professionally.
Yet it also seems clear that the postponement of childrearing and the
developing of egg-freezing technology will likely lead to the further econ-
omization of reproduction. Once certain women are able to freeze their eggs
successfully, rent a womb, and hire various caregivers, new and intensified
forms of racialized and classed gender exploitation will occur. Indeed, this
trajectory of powerful women is bound to produce new populations of dis-
pensable service providers, the vast majority of whom will be women. As
Hannah Seligson (2013) puts it in her article “The True Cost of Leaning
In,” women who want a “big career” and a family need a whole army of ser-
vice providers to pull it off: a nanny, a housekeeper, and a baby nurse. These
providers will carry out “the schlepping, cooking, cleaning, child care, and
laundry” and will cost “about $96,261 per year.”
Ironically, however, precisely as neoliberalism colonizes more and more
domains of human life, pushing to convert middle-class women into human
capital, neoliberal feminism also operates—at the moment—as a peculiar
pushback to this total conversion by paradoxically and counterintuitively
maintaining reproduction (alongside professional development) as part of
the normative trajectory for upwardly mobile women. While neoliberal fem-
inism further entrenches neoliberal rationality and helps to facilitate the
rapidly progressing cultural conversion and remaking of certain female sub-
jects into human capital, its emergence also underscores that the conversion
of middle-class women is not yet complete given that reproduction is still
part of the normative address to these women.
 S I G N S Winter 2017 y 343

The transformation of the balance discourse into a mode of futurity,

however, suggests that certain gender linkages are being attenuated while
new forms of gendered subjecthood are being spawned. Insofar as neo-
liberalism reduces human and individual freedom to freedom as it is con-
ceived in the domain of the market, the threshold between the private and
public collapses. Unlike liberalism, with its constitutive private-public divide,
neoliberalism has neither a lexicon nor a framework for addressing unwaged
work or activity within the family. On the one hand, then, neoliberal femi-
nism is helping to produce wages for housework and for childrearing by out-
sourcing these tasks to women deemed nonaspirational. Namely, there will
increasingly be a whole class of women who are compensated for house-
work and childrearing in the homes of aspirational women, while the repro-
ductive and affective labor that they perform in their own homes will remain
uncompensated and unvalued. This underscores how certain labor is com-
pensated, while other labor is not, as well as the exclusive investment in those
children who are potentially valuable enough to have their care enter the pro-
ductive labor. Moreover, it also points to a significant irony in the way a revo-
lutionary Marxist campaign can be co-opted and rerouted by the neoliberal
order.8 Indeed, rather than serving as a path to liberation, wages for house-
work and care work serve to further expand and entrench market rationality,
while they concurrently create and reinforce new forms of class-based and
racialized gender stratification and exploitation. On the other hand, if every-
thing, even people themselves, is simply reduced to a cost-benefit calculus
based on capital investment and appreciation, then reproductive activity and
care work have no conceptual space in this new order. In other words,
reproductive work and caregiving continue to be “invisible infrastructure
for all developing, mature, and worn-out human capital, children, adults,
disabled, and elderly” (Brown 2015, 105).

Conclusion
It is important to note, by way of conclusion, that liberal feminism—which
has always been hegemonic in US feminism and has always insisted on wom-
en’s right to enter the public sphere on equal terms with men (Funk 2013)—
conceives of emancipation as a move from the private to the public domain
(see Scott 2011; Farris, forthcoming). Feminist discussions, such as Hochs-
child’s classic The Second Shift and her later The Time Bind (2001), as well
as work inspired by Hochschild, such as At the Heart of Work and Family

8
This formulation is Miranda Outman’s, and I am taking it from a private correspondence
(May 26, 2016).
344 y Rottenberg

(Garey and Hansen 2011), have underscored women’s difficult negotia-

tion of work and home life, particularly given the deeply entrenched as-
sumption that women are still ultimately responsible for domestic duties.
Indeed, many feminist political theorists have already, crucially, demon-
strated that liberalism, particularly as it manifests itself in modern democ-
racies, is constituted through and structured around the private-public bi-
furcation—where the public domain is the realm in which rights are exercised
and individuality is expressed, while the private sphere of family is the domain
governed by needs and affective ties (see, e.g., Elshtain 1981; Pateman 1988;
Brown 1995). As part of their dominant political imaginary, liberal democ-
racies produced and maintained a discursive and normative distinction be-
tween the private and public spheres. This distinction, of course, has always
been gendered and has served to naturalize the sexual division of labor within
liberal democracies.
Moreover, the very bifurcation of the private and the public is itself
produced through the presupposition that men circulate in civil society,
while women are stationed in the family. Liberalism must consequently be
understood to be constituted through a spatialized gender division, which
has meant that reproduction has presented a quandary and a remainder
for liberal feminism from its very inception. If women’s emancipation is
conceived as their “engagement in the same activities as men” (Scott 2011,
33), then where do reproduction and care work fit into this conception
of emancipation? In more theoretical terms, the quandary of reproduction
and care work continue to haunt and thwart liberal feminism’s conception
of emancipation, dependent as it is on the private-public divide and the
unwitting privileging of the public sphere as the site of liberation. Put
simply, somebody still needs to do the care work, and that somebody has
historically been women.
In many ways, neoliberal balance discourse emerged as a way of solving
the dilemma of reproduction, as well as the double shift, by (re)inscribing
motherhood as a normative part of women’s individual life trajectories.
Intensive mothering and the discourse of a happy balance have entered
public discussion as part of the rise of neoliberal feminism, not simply as a
backlash against the gains of liberal feminism. Neoliberal rationality is cur-
rently converging with liberal feminist discourse, since the conversion of
subjects into self-investing human capital dovetails with the notion of pro-
fessional success as emancipation. In addition, neoliberal rationality has
incorporated the ideal of a happy work-family balance, which is also a liberal
feminist legacy (Rottenberg 2014a). The futurity of the work-family balance
consequently serves as a means of managing the dilemma of reproduction
and the increasingly invisible (because disavowed and increasingly out-
 S I G N S Winter 2017 y 345

sourced) sexual division of labor. As mentioned above, we are witness-

ing the slow but still incomplete conversion of middle-class women into
human capital because neoliberal feminism still incorporates reproduction
as part of its normative address to this population of women.
This not yet complete process of conversion is quite clearly seen in con-
temporary media representations of young high-potential women who are
encouraged to postpone but not (yet) renounce reproduction. The tech-
nology is developing in such a way, however, that this population of women
will likely be increasingly able to outsource reproduction and care work,
thus ensuring the reentrenchment of the aspirational subject as human
capital, on the one hand, and a whole other class of women who are con-
ceived as not fully responsibilized and thus as exploitable and disposable,
on the other. Once the conversion of middle-class women is more or less
complete, balance will gain a completely different meaning, since these
women will no longer be carrying out reproductive or care work but rather—
at most—managing it. And when this occurs, the disavowal of gender sub-
ordination and a renaturalization of the sexual division of labor will also be
more or less complete. Moreover, as market rationality erodes the private-
public divide, rendering it meaningless, waging even the weak immanent
liberal feminist critique of gender subordination will become increasingly
difficult. Finally, once the outsourcing of reproduction and care work be-
comes even more widespread than it is today, there will be a complete split-
ting of female subjecthood: the worthy, capital-enhancing female few and
the disavowed rest.
It is therefore not coincidental that futurity is developing within neo-
liberal feminism, since the promise of balance in the future helps to cover
up one of neoliberal rationality’s most vulnerable fault lines in the present:
its presumption of, and yet inability to recognize, the gendered conditions
of possibility for the production of human capital in the first place: care
work. But as more and more of these high-powered women purchase both
reproduction and care work, the discourse of balance will likely recede.
Thus, neoliberal feminism simultaneously—and frighteningly—helps to pro-
duce a small class of aspirational subjects who self-invest wisely and augment
their capital value and a large class of women who are rendered expendable,
exploitable, and disposable.
As this happens—and more specifically, as the conceptual threshold be-
tween private and public collapses further through market rationality’s in-
filtration of all spheres of life—we will also have less and less purchase or
leverage with which to critique neoliberal rationality. Neoliberal feminism
is not only shorn of all obligations to less privileged women, while it actually
produces new classes of disempowered women; it is also makes alternative
346 y Rottenberg

futures difficult to envision, since it actively and performatively forgets the

conditions that naturalize sexual difference, and it leaves us stunned in the
face of a fading lexicon of critique.
Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics
and the Gender Studies Program
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

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