Rottenberg - Neoliberal Feminism and The Future of Human Capital
Rottenberg - Neoliberal Feminism and The Future of Human Capital
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
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“over-simplified, outdated version of gender discourse.”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
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
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
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
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