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Image courtesy of interviewee. November 18, 2024

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This video discusses a co-authored book resulting from a research project at the Barnard College Center for Research on Women. The authors collaborated with scholars from various parts of the world to analyze neoliberalism's varying implications across different contexts, emphasizing the need for a comparative and synthetic approach rather than singular case studies. They argue for the importance of incorporating gender and sexuality into discussions of neoliberalism and highlight that these aspects are formative rather than merely resultant of socioeconomic changes.

The authors designed the book to engage with the paradoxical nature of neoliberalism, particularly in light of its societal impacts revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic. They examine how neoliberal policies, often promising justice and equality, can paradoxically lead to increased inequality and oppression, particularly for marginalized groups.

Central themes include the double binds people face under neoliberalism, where choices often lead to negative outcomes, and the need to reflect on how the pandemic highlighted and exacerbated existing vulnerabilities. The authors express concern over how neoliberalism shifts responsibilities and blames individual choices or marginalized groups for broader social issues.

They advocate for recognizing interconnectedness among various social issues (e.g., gender justice, economics, migration) in order to build a more comprehensive understanding and political response to contemporary challenges. This video concludes by positing that the frameworks developed in the book can help address current and evolving political landscapes, particularly those characterized by authoritarian neoliberalism.

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Here are five key points from the video regarding the co-authored book on neoliberalism:

1. **Collaborative Research**: The book resulted from a collaborative project involving 12 authors from various fields, initiated at the Barnard College Center for Research on Women. The research focused on understanding neoliberalism, particularly in the aftermath of the financial crisis, and how it manifests differently across various global convideos.

2. **Interconnectivity of Gender and Neoliberalism**: The authors emphasize that traditional scholarly discourse often marginalizes gender and sexuality in discussions of neoliberalism. They argue that these factors should be viewed as fundamental components that shape social structures, rather than merely as consequences of economic changes.

3. **Paradoxes of Neoliberalism**: The book discusses the paradoxes inherent in neoliberal frameworks, particularly how policies often intended to provide welfare instead exacerbate inequalities. The pandemic is highlighted as revealing these contradictions, such as essential workers being deemed important yet treated as disposable, and the disparity in definitions of safety based on privilege.

4. **Vulnerability and Social Relations**: The concept of vulnerability is examined in both its material and discursive sense. The authors assert that while all individuals are vulnerable under neoliberalism, certain populations are disproportionately affected. This prompts a discussion on who is deemed "worthy" of aid, revealing the exclusionary nature of welfare policies influenced by neoliberal ideologies.

5. **Intersectionality and Political Action**: The authors underscore the importance of understanding the intersectionality of issues such as gender, race, and class in relation to neoliberal policies. Rather than viewing these issues as separate, they advocate for a holistic approach that connects local struggles to global economic dynamics, fostering a more immediate political response to social injustices.

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Here are some key quotes extracted from the video you , highlighting central themes and concepts discussed:

1. **On Neoliberalism Workshops**:
"We were doing a workshop on neoliberalism that was in the early 2010s when we were kind of headed toward a, what might have been an apex of the power of the neoliberal framework."

2. **Understanding Neoliberalism**:
"It really operated differently depending on the locality, but rather, how did it get knitted together into what we might call hegemony."

3. **Comparative Analysis**:
"We weren't just looking at neoliberalism in Argentina or post-neoliberalism there, or the case of the United States, but trying to think about what it means to take all of these cases in a single frame."

4. **Gender and Sexuality**:
"Gender and sexuality are themselves material relations. And when you're thinking about other kinds of social structures, you need to be thinking about how gender and sexuality are also formative."

5. **Pandemic Reflection**:
"On the one hand, it was...something that actually brought to the fore all of the points we were already trying to make."

6. **Paradoxes of Neoliberalism**:
"Neoliberalism both continues and intensifies the paradoxes of neoliberalism to two predominant effects. One, people face double binds. No matter what you do, you lose."

7. **Impact of the Pandemic**:
"The pandemic revealed inadequacies of the social safety net...and demonstrated them in new and powerful ways."

8. **Intersectionality and Commensuration**:
"These different material relations...are both intersectional and they're also incommensurate."

9. **Vulnerability**:
"Vulnerability...can be both a material fact of people's lives...and a discursive fact that gets mobilized in different ways by different parties."

10. **Neoliberal Discourse's Role**:
"Vulnerability gets deployed to demarcate certain populations...as worthy of help."

11. **Carceral Politics**:
"The securitization arm is amplified while everything else actually shrinks."

12. **Migration Patterns**:
"Entire populations...can become vulnerable...through free trade agreements...and climate change."

13. **Political Power**:
"We also have to be able to build...as initially connected...to bigger issues in the world."

14. **Pragmatic Approach**:
"We hope that...there are some frameworks, some approaches that people can take away from this book."

15. **Local and Global Connections**:
"It's important to connect our immediate problems...to these broader economic questions."

These quotes encapsulate the essence of the discussion surrounding neoliberalism, its local and global implications, and the intersections of gender, race, and class within an evolving socio-political landscape.

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Of all I I, here's the book just

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so that people can see it.

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And it's a co-authored book with, 12 authors.

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So this came out of a project at the Barnard College

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Center for Research on Women.

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Barnard is associated

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with Columbia University in New York City.

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Um, and we do research projects.

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And we were doing, we did a workshop on neoliberalism

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that was in the early 2010s when we were kind

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of headed toward a, what might have been an apex of,

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the power of the neoliberal framework.

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Um, or I take that back.

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It was right after the financial crisis.

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And so the question of what neoliberalism was doing,

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was on a lot of people's minds.

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And that, was not just in the United States,

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but in a number of different countries.

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And we were able to bring people into the workshop

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who either were US scholars working in other areas

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of the world, or who were

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scholars in other areas of the world.

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So we decided to undertake a joint research project

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with these scholars where we tried to do a project

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that was both comparative between different areas

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of the world and synthetic.

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How do we understand neoliberalism coming together

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not into a single system,

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because we found that it really operated differently

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depending on the locality,

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but rather, how did it get knitted together into

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what we might call, he hegemony,

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Standard scholarly model is the individual scholar working

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in their place where in their field sites studying case X

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case, you know, case YKC.

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And, and many of us had trained in that way.

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And one of the other things that we were hoping

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to do in this book was to think about a different way

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of doing academic writing together to,

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to bring our scholarly expertise together

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and to think about connections between sites and locations.

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So, so

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that we weren't just looking at neoliberalism in Argentina

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or post neoliberalism there,

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or the, the case of the United States, or the case of the uk

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or Europe or Copenhagen or, or, or Nigeria.

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But trying to think about, what it means to take all

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of these cases in a single frame

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and think about, the, the connections

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and interrelations,

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between different places in the world

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and between different dynamics within them.

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One more thing, both Janet

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and myself are professors of women's gender

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and sexuality studies.

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Um, you know, were feminist researchers.

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And the other motivation for this book is that already

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by two 10, there had been many people writing about

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neoliberalism, in different parts of the world.

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And even doing, bigger synthetic discussions.

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David Harvey is the most famous, but,

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but very few people had thought about the significance

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of gender and sexuality,

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vis-a-vis the transformations that we were talking about.

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Gender and sexuality were seen as super structural

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to the side, not related.

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And we had a different opinion.

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And we'll be talking more about that,

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because it, you know, in the scholarship we'd done up until

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that point, and we're continuing to do gender

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and sexuality, are themselves material relations.

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And when you're thinking about other kinds of,

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social structures, you need to be thinking about how gender

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and sexuality are also formative.

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Um, and not just consequential in terms of other,

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consequences of other social

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changes, but actually formative.

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We were actually, poised to finish the book,

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when the pandemic emerged and,

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and transformed global social

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relations seemingly all at once.

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Um, and so we were, in a place where we had

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to think about, okay, what is the significance of this?

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On the one hand, it was, as you suggested, something

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that actually brought to the, for all

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of the points we were already trying to make.

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Um, and it really revealed in powerful

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and profound ways, precisely the inadequacies

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that you just named in public health

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and social safety nets, et cetera, et cetera.

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On the other hand, we felt like actually this,

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not just reveals dynamics that we're already talking about,

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but demonstrates them, in new

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and powerful ways that we need to highlight.

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And so that was why we chose to,

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to begin the book actually with this, both in terms of

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what it revealed about inadequacies of the social safety net

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and also about the paradoxical features of neoliberalism,

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which, we'd already decided we wanted to title,

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we wanted to title the book in terms of,

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highlighting the paradoxes. I'm

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Gonna follow up with what we mean by paradoxes.

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Yeah. Yeah. So why did we choose paradoxes

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of neoliberalism as the title?

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This comes from our colleague Ling Chang. Yeah.

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Who, teaches and researches in Hong Kong

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and also in other parts of Asia.

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And, sealing.

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We did some initial short videos

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that were published on the Barnard Center

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for Research on Women, the BCRW website.

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Um, and sealing, started talking about paradoxes

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of neoliberalism, and we made a video about it.

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And that clearly became a guiding framework.

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And it comes out of a tradition of critique

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of the enlightenment and its promises, so of liberalism.

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So the freedom, the justice, the economic equality

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that's promised in liberalism that neoliberalism

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shifts, in some way.

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There's a long tradition of critiquing that

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through paradoxes, which includes, scholars like,

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the Caribbean scholar, David Scott, the, scholar

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of Hawaii, Jay Kehlani Kauanui

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and, the historian, Joan Scott.

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And out of that, we were able to develop the ways in which

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neoliberalism both continues

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and intensifies the paradoxes of neoliberalism

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to two predominant effects.

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One, people face double binds.

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No matter what you do, you lose.

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Um, and we, the sixth chapter looks a lot about

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how people move through and around those double binds

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that are created by the paradoxes of neoliberalism,

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which we'll talk about in a minute.

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Um, and the second thing is that, that sense

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of the double means that,

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neoliberal promises of freedom or justice

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or equality tend to contribute to redistribution upward.

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They do the opposite of what they're claiming to do.

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Um, and so that's really at the core of the book, both

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that long history of

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how neoliberalism itself can be understood as part of,

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not just enlightenment,

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but also part of the colonial project,

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that in some ways it replaces.

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One way to think about neoliberalism is as a response by,

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global economic powers to anti-colonial movements.

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I wanna, remind us of three of the,

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paradoxical features of neoliberalism

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that we opened the book with,

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that were highlighted by the pandemic.

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One hand, the pandemic seemed like a long time ago now,

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somehow right

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after the US elections, it seems like really fresh again.

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And so, so,

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but the, the, the, the examples that we opened the book

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with, you know, the paradox

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around essential workers being called essential

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during the pandemic, and yet treated as utterly disposable.

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Um, the, the second case about endemic economics

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and which wealth was, you know,

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yet again redistributed upwards.

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And then the third case about, you know, the definitions

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of safety, which, relied on a model of safety of home,

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which many people didn't have access to.

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And those many people who have access

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to a home, it's not safe.

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So those are the three that we talk about

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in the introduction to the book.

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Um, in retrospect,

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and this is what I was gesturing towards a moment ago,

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I wanna, also mention a fourth,

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which we don't include in the book,

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but which has become clear now, the fourth

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and may be a fifth, right?

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So, so I think, you know,

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we're also right now in the aftermath of the US elections,

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which the whole world is paying attention to,

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and, you know, the reelection, of,

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of President Trump and, you know, with so many punts trying

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to figure out what happened, why et cetera.

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And, and everyone's saying, it's the economy stupid.

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And, and, and thinking about why, you know,

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working class people,

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voted in the ways that they did.

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And, and you know, one of the na the narratives

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that you're hearing, at least on the left,

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if not in mainstream media, is, is actually kind

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of nostalgia for Trump era economics

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and for the pandemic welfare state.

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So there was a moment of a pandemic welfare state, which,

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which is clear in retrospect that emerged

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and then disappeared, right?

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And so, what happened to

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that pandemic welfare state is it,

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it became the pandemic security state,

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which is a situation we're now,

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living in, in profound waves.

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One of the things, that's also been happening,

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not just in the us,

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and not just at Barnard Columbia where we are,

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but in many, many places, is

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that the securitization apparatus that was put in place

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during the pandemic, is still with us.

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Um, and, and in very significant ways.

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Technologies of surveillance, policing, securitization,

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carceral politics, all of all, all all of these are themes

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that we talk about, amply in the book,

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and that are very important and

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that we're still living with right now. This

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Is a really great question, and,

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and, as you know, one that's been central

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to a feminist scholarship

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and activism for decades now, you know, the,

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our Kimberly Crenshaw published the first,

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law review article on intersectionality in 1989.

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Um, and one of the things that, that we argue in the book,

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is that, these different material relations

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that Professor Bernstein was talking about,

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which include gender as a material relation, race

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as a material relation, economics,

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and class as a material relation,

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that they are both intersectional

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and they're also in commensurate that one of the things

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that we have to deal with in trying

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to address power relations is the way in which

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issues come together, material relations come together,

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and they also operate on their own.

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Um, and this makes for a very complicated social field,

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and it's often easy for people to either treat them

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as in commensurate, we're looking now at gender

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that has nothing to do with anything else,

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or as intersectional, they all go together and all the same.

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We'll get a big framework that will hold them all.

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Um, and the reason, that we wanna hold them apart,

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there's many reasons they move around in relation

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to each other in ways that, people can, activate,

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for the purpose of power.

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Oh, we care deeply about, being anti-abortion.

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Oops, that's not playing well.

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So now we move away from that and we're anti-immigrant.

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Instead, we can bring to the fore issue that that, seems

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to be playing well in the moment.

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But the deep argument in the book is that these hegemonic,

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power relations are formed

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through productive incoherence, that what makes them

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powerful is not that they hold together and make sense,

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but rather that they are variously incoherent

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and can move around in relation to each other.

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Um, and so, you know, obviously,

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contemporary US politics is a good sign of that where,

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you know, a politician say one thing one day

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and one thing the next day, and

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that actually works in their favor, right?

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That's their, productive incoherence.

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And similarly, we care deeply about gender one day,

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and we don't care about it at all the next day.

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That works in the favor of, status quo power relations.

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Uh, so part of what we're trying to do is develop a form

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of feminism that allows us

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to hold issues together without collapsing them.

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Why is Palestine a feminist issue?

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Um, and, you know,

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our colleague Nefertiti has worked on this, for a long,

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long time, and some

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of it is just basic transnational feminism, which is

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that any issue is a feminist issue

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because women's lives involve economics.

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They are, are marked by race, they're marked

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by transnational labor relations, et cetera, right?

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So the idea that you could pull out feminist issues is,

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itself mistaken.

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Uh, and the other reason is a positive reason, which is

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how can we create feminisms that work together in order

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to create a better world for more people?

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Um, and that often gets lost, which is part of the purpose

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of this kind of analysis, which can seem academic

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or, you know, productive incoherence.

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Why do we have to have that con concept?

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Um, and it's because we wanna build a better world,

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and understanding the world that we are dealing with,

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helps us to imagine a different kind of world

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Other than, than thinking about gender and sexuality

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or feminism in terms of where are the women, which is,

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you know, a, a sort of a, a an approach that often,

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lay people will take or, you know, you know,

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we're interested in doing something different, which is,

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not, not that we're not concerned about that, but,

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but asking how gender

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and sexuality, are, formative

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to understanding any social issue.

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Janet brought up the case of Palestine,

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and we could talk more about that, that, you know, that,

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has become prevalent, since writing the book.

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But it's, it's, it may appear in the,

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in the Latin American version

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of the book, which is coming out now.

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Um, but you know, to take something like a,

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a substantive area like migration or economics, right?

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So to ask even, you know, when, when,

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when people talk about migration and think about it

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and push pull factors, economic factors,

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they don't think about, where gender, sexuality,

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kinship, family formation fit, in terms

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of understanding some of those dynamics.

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They don't think about the gender, gendered

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and sexual dimensions of border control,

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securitization, militarism.

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They don't think about, the gendered

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and sexual dimensions of economic policy in terms of,

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homework and public economies, in terms

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of domestic labor and so forth.

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It's often thought that the Clinton administration in the

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middle of the 1990s was what fully neoliberal the,

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US economy that, the Reagan administration started this,

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but that Clinton brought it into, both the Democratic

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and the Republican Party,

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and, made it the common sense of the United States.

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And that was because Clinton ran on the slogan it's the

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Economy Stupid,

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which was supposedly separate from both race and gender.

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But his main plank in that, approach was

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what was called welfare reform, which was the reform

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of a policy that was about the 1935 Social Security Act

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and economic, policy,

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but was discussed almost completely

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in terms of race and gender.

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It was discussed in terms of the idea that,

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especially black women were somehow the recipients

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of welfare unfairly, when in fact, more white women,

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more white people than black people,

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were recipients of welfare.

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Um, and so to talk about the economy without talking about

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race and gender allowed for a profoundly unjust discussion

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of public policy, that extended neoliberalism.

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And so part of our, hope in the book is that

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by bringing gender justice into discussions

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of neoliberalism, that we can't, go back to the idea

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that we can address economic policy without

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also addressing race and gender

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Vulnerability is a really interesting slippery concept

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because it, it's both a, it's at once a,

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you know, it's a material fact of people's lives of all

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of our lives, really, and we can talk more about that.

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Um, but it's also, it's a discursive fact

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that gets mobilized in different ways by different parties.

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We are all vulnerable, you know, existentially,

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but especially so under neoliberalism,

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and some of us more than others.

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And, so I just wanna start with that.

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But, but the, the tricky thing about vulnerability,

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when we think about vulnerability under neoliberalism,

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and this is, you know, that's the chapter title,

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neoliberal vulnerability

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and the vulnerability of neoliberalism, is that,

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you know, we need to be attentive to both things at once,

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v vulnerability and social relations

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and vulnerability as a neoliberal discourse, that,

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can serve actually politically pernicious ends.

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This is, in a way, one of those double binds

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that Janet was talking about earlier, right?

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So, as, as a neoliberal, discourse

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of governance, and we can think about this,

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and we'll say more about this a bit later,

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at least in certain versions of neoliberalism,

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what we might call progressive neoliberalism,

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vulnerability gets deployed

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to demarcate certain populations, right?

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As worthy of help, as worthy of benefits.

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Um, it sort of works like this category of risk,

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but it's actually in a sort of sneaky way, a way

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of saying for some, but not for others.

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It's not a writer an entitlement for everybody.

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We're just gonna help those who are most vulnerable.

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So it, it demarcates a certain group, that is worth

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that, merits aid or health

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and leaves everybody else to the side, right?

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So that's one of the problems.

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The second problem, has to do precisely with these,

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relations of gender, sexuality, race, et cetera,

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that we were, talking about previously.

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Who gets, who gets to be vulnerable,

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and, you know, so getting, getting to be vulnerable.

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Um, on the one hand, you know, that's a, a,

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a paradoxical privilege of certain, racial

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and gendered, positions.

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White women are para paradigmatically white,

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white young women, are often the ones who are,

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most frequently designated with this term,

390
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but it can backfire, right?

391
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So on the one hand, it can get you, attention.

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Um, it can, it can, help you to garner humanitarian

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and state-based forms of social attention and social help.

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On the other hand, it can work in ways

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that are actually not so helpful, including for people,

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who, are the most vulnerable.

397
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And it can be not so helpful in terms of

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excluding certain populations based on,

399
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racial characteristics, or,

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and this is really, really important here.

401
00:17:12.745 --> 00:17:14.085
The kinds of help that are offered

402
00:17:14.085 --> 00:17:16.725
to the vulnerable can actually be the, the, the,

403
00:17:17.905 --> 00:17:21.085
in our view, the least, least helpful forms of intervention

404
00:17:21.085 --> 00:17:23.525
that one can imagine, especially, you know,

405
00:17:23.525 --> 00:17:24.685
and this gestures back to

406
00:17:24.685 --> 00:17:27.965
what I was saying earlier about the, the reconfiguration

407
00:17:28.225 --> 00:17:29.645
of the neoliberal state.

408
00:17:29.905 --> 00:17:32.525
So, you know, whereas people imagine,

409
00:17:32.525 --> 00:17:35.125
under neoliberalism the state where there's a way, you know,

410
00:17:35.125 --> 00:17:36.925
we're arguing, no, that's not right.

411
00:17:36.985 --> 00:17:39.165
The better way to think about it is, you know,

412
00:17:39.165 --> 00:17:41.805
the reconfiguration of the neoliberal state,

413
00:17:41.825 --> 00:17:44.245
in which the securitization arm, the carer arm,

414
00:17:44.245 --> 00:17:46.605
the punitive arm, is,

415
00:17:46.865 --> 00:17:49.125
is amplified while everything else actually shrinks.

416
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And, and we talked about this a few minutes ago,

417
00:17:51.755 --> 00:17:53.405
what does that mean in terms of vulnerability?

418
00:17:53.465 --> 00:17:56.205
It, it means that the so-called helping measures,

419
00:17:56.205 --> 00:17:59.525
that are targeted towards vulnerable pop populations,

420
00:17:59.755 --> 00:18:01.605
tend to be punitive and carceral in nature.

421
00:18:01.705 --> 00:18:06.165
And so this is why I've, written a lot,

422
00:18:06.185 --> 00:18:07.205
not just in this book,

423
00:18:07.205 --> 00:18:09.325
but he previously,

424
00:18:09.345 --> 00:18:11.365
that's something I call carceral feminism, right?

425
00:18:11.365 --> 00:18:13.845
Which is, not the good feminism that,

426
00:18:13.865 --> 00:18:15.605
not the sexual justice feminism that Janet

427
00:18:15.625 --> 00:18:17.885
and I are in favor of, but a different kind of feminism

428
00:18:17.885 --> 00:18:21.325
that unfortunately, has become much more hegemonic,

429
00:18:21.345 --> 00:18:22.925
not just in the United States, but globally.

430
00:18:23.225 --> 00:18:27.125
Um, and that, that imagines,

431
00:18:27.365 --> 00:18:31.005
a feminism feminism's main contribution as a, a partnership

432
00:18:31.005 --> 00:18:32.885
with the criminal justice system,

433
00:18:32.905 --> 00:18:37.405
and punishing those who, who might, harm women

434
00:18:37.425 --> 00:18:38.565
and other vulnerable people.

435
00:18:38.785 --> 00:18:41.245
And so, so one of the things we're arguing in this book, and

436
00:18:41.345 --> 00:18:45.245
and I've argued before, is, you know, actually it makes,

437
00:18:45.305 --> 00:18:48.205
people who are really material materially vulnerable,

438
00:18:48.425 --> 00:18:51.365
more vulnerable, more precarious,

439
00:18:51.465 --> 00:18:53.485
it doesn't help 'em, it doesn't, it doesn't,

440
00:18:53.485 --> 00:18:55.805
address the, their actual material needs.

441
00:18:55.905 --> 00:19:00.205
And it, actually what it accomplishes is a phenomenon

442
00:19:00.205 --> 00:19:02.245
that John is called safety through Violence, right?

443
00:19:02.245 --> 00:19:04.765
An imagination of safe through violence, through,

444
00:19:04.765 --> 00:19:05.805
through punishment of others,

445
00:19:05.805 --> 00:19:08.485
through more social harm. But follow

446
00:19:08.505 --> 00:19:11.245
Up on what Elizabeth was saying about vulnerability, one

447
00:19:11.245 --> 00:19:14.205
of the things that neoliberalism does is it makes entire

448
00:19:14.435 --> 00:19:15.805
populations vulnerable.

449
00:19:16.145 --> 00:19:18.885
Um, and that can be through an intensification

450
00:19:19.185 --> 00:19:22.245
of governmental violence so that people have to leave

451
00:19:22.245 --> 00:19:24.485
where they live because they're the targets of violence.

452
00:19:24.985 --> 00:19:28.805
It can be through free trade agreements where entire sources

453
00:19:29.105 --> 00:19:33.645
of local income agriculture in that, a market is flooded

454
00:19:33.645 --> 00:19:35.245
and you can no longer support yourself,

455
00:19:35.245 --> 00:19:36.885
and you have to migrate for economic reasons.

456
00:19:37.385 --> 00:19:38.765
Um, and it can lead to,

457
00:19:38.765 --> 00:19:42.285
because neoliberalism has, been coexistent with

458
00:19:42.285 --> 00:19:45.365
and possibly intensified climate change, it can lead

459
00:19:45.365 --> 00:19:46.445
to climate change migration.

460
00:19:46.445 --> 00:19:47.485
So we're seeing, and,

461
00:19:47.545 --> 00:19:51.165
and the fourth thing I realize is it can also,

462
00:19:51.295 --> 00:19:53.485
there, the level, the current level

463
00:19:53.485 --> 00:19:55.165
of warfare across the globe means

464
00:19:55.165 --> 00:19:56.885
that we're facing all kinds of people

465
00:19:56.885 --> 00:19:58.605
who are fleeing violence as well.

466
00:19:59.185 --> 00:20:01.845
Um, and that means that we're facing migration patterns

467
00:20:01.845 --> 00:20:05.525
that are, new, that are, intensified.

468
00:20:05.945 --> 00:20:08.845
Um, and that also build on existing patterns of migration.

469
00:20:09.265 --> 00:20:12.205
And one of the things that neoliberalism,

470
00:20:12.635 --> 00:20:15.805
does is it shifts in the reconfiguration of the state

471
00:20:15.805 --> 00:20:16.885
that Elizabeth was talking about.

472
00:20:17.385 --> 00:20:18.725
It shifts blame.

473
00:20:19.625 --> 00:20:23.245
So part of the idea is to ask who is to blame

474
00:20:23.665 --> 00:20:25.765
for the social problems of everyday life?

475
00:20:26.225 --> 00:20:29.045
And one of the things that neoliberalism says is,

476
00:20:29.075 --> 00:20:30.205
individuals are to blame.

477
00:20:30.305 --> 00:20:32.205
It is your fault. Whatever is happening bad

478
00:20:32.205 --> 00:20:33.325
in your life is your fault.

479
00:20:33.985 --> 00:20:37.965
But the other answer that is offered is it's the fault

480
00:20:38.105 --> 00:20:39.805
of people who are not like you,

481
00:20:39.945 --> 00:20:41.885
who are not within the internal boundaries

482
00:20:41.885 --> 00:20:43.285
of your community, of your nation.

483
00:20:43.705 --> 00:20:46.525
And particularly, it is the fault of migrants.

484
00:20:47.185 --> 00:20:51.365
So the anti-immigration politics around the world, we argue,

485
00:20:51.625 --> 00:20:54.965
is deeply tied to the development

486
00:20:54.965 --> 00:20:57.525
of neoliberalism since the late 1970s.

487
00:20:58.025 --> 00:21:02.725
Um, and that one of the ways to try to address the politics

488
00:21:02.725 --> 00:21:06.765
of migration is to shift neoliberal relations, as well as

489
00:21:06.865 --> 00:21:10.125
to protect migrants from any kind of either legal

490
00:21:10.145 --> 00:21:11.165
or extralegal violence.

491
00:21:11.425 --> 00:21:13.205
The traditional understanding of social movements,

492
00:21:13.205 --> 00:21:17.605
which is mass movements that take on either the entire world

493
00:21:17.605 --> 00:21:18.605
through revolution

494
00:21:18.785 --> 00:21:21.805
or, particular issues are important,

495
00:21:22.265 --> 00:21:27.045
but that we also have to be able to build,

496
00:21:27.235 --> 00:21:30.205
connections amongst issues that we may not see

497
00:21:30.205 --> 00:21:31.205
as initially connected.

498
00:21:31.585 --> 00:21:34.005
So gender justice in relation to economics,

499
00:21:34.005 --> 00:21:35.765
obviously is the one that we're most focused on.

500
00:21:36.145 --> 00:21:38.405
Um, and what that does is it gives us a way

501
00:21:38.405 --> 00:21:40.005
to think about building political power

502
00:21:40.005 --> 00:21:41.205
that is more immediate.

503
00:21:41.205 --> 00:21:43.645
We don't have to solve all the problems of the world,

504
00:21:44.025 --> 00:21:47.685
and that can also connect our immediate problems

505
00:21:47.685 --> 00:21:50.325
and issues to bigger issues in the world so

506
00:21:50.325 --> 00:21:51.565
that we can ask the question,

507
00:21:51.785 --> 00:21:54.045
why is my life harder than it used to be?

508
00:21:54.745 --> 00:21:56.645
Why can I no longer afford my rent?

509
00:21:56.945 --> 00:22:01.885
And I can both address that through local,

510
00:22:02.385 --> 00:22:04.325
pro-tenant policies,

511
00:22:04.345 --> 00:22:05.565
and I can also connect that

512
00:22:05.565 --> 00:22:07.525
to these broader ques economic questions,

513
00:22:07.525 --> 00:22:09.245
which would connect me to people all over the world

514
00:22:09.245 --> 00:22:10.605
who are working on the same issue.

515
00:22:11.185 --> 00:22:12.325
And that, to me, is one

516
00:22:12.325 --> 00:22:13.605
of the biggest things that the book offers.

517
00:22:14.315 --> 00:22:15.605
Yeah, I think, I think that's excellent.

518
00:22:15.605 --> 00:22:18.205
Um, the only thing I would add to that is just I think,

519
00:22:18.305 --> 00:22:22.605
you know, it's, you know, local

520
00:22:22.865 --> 00:22:24.965
and specific policies and dynamics

521
00:22:24.965 --> 00:22:26.965
and political dynamics seem to change very quickly.

522
00:22:27.145 --> 00:22:29.805
And so, you know, all the examples, we, we have lots

523
00:22:29.805 --> 00:22:32.085
of concrete examples in the book on purpose, you know,

524
00:22:32.085 --> 00:22:33.565
including the pandemic examples,

525
00:22:33.565 --> 00:22:35.005
and now we're in another moment,

526
00:22:35.065 --> 00:22:36.885
and there's so many other examples we could bring up.

527
00:22:36.945 --> 00:22:41.885
So we hope that, despite the specificity of,

528
00:22:42.585 --> 00:22:45.365
you know, any, any particular, empirical case,

529
00:22:45.365 --> 00:22:48.045
that there are some frameworks, some approaches that people,

530
00:22:48.585 --> 00:22:51.445
can take away from this book to, to use,

531
00:22:51.825 --> 00:22:54.805
to understand whatever set of, a paradox

532
00:22:54.805 --> 00:22:57.645
as contradictions, political challenges,

533
00:22:57.645 --> 00:22:59.325
they're con they're confronting,

534
00:22:59.425 --> 00:23:01.805
and find some utility in our approach.

535
00:23:02.105 --> 00:23:04.125
So we're moving into a moment that, many

536
00:23:04.125 --> 00:23:06.045
of our colleagues are now calling authoritarian

537
00:23:06.115 --> 00:23:07.485
neoliberalism as opposed

538
00:23:07.485 --> 00:23:09.405
to progressive neoliberalism, right?

539
00:23:09.405 --> 00:23:12.125
To think about what does it mean to take, some

540
00:23:12.125 --> 00:23:14.485
of the approaches that we are advocating in this book,

541
00:23:14.505 --> 00:23:16.845
and to think about relations between sites

542
00:23:16.845 --> 00:23:19.125
and locations, relations between,

543
00:23:19.405 --> 00:23:21.925
seemingly distinct issues, as Janet said, the role of gender

544
00:23:21.945 --> 00:23:23.965
and sexuality and authoritarian regime.

545
00:23:23.965 --> 00:23:25.445
It's not talked about enough, right?

546
00:23:25.615 --> 00:23:27.525
We're pretty convinced that there, that,

547
00:23:27.955 --> 00:23:30.845
that the approach that we, have tried

548
00:23:30.845 --> 00:23:32.205
to develop in this, in this book.

549
00:23:32.275 --> 00:23:35.165
Also working together with scholars in different places,

550
00:23:35.425 --> 00:23:38.365
and locations and trying to think about,

551
00:23:38.825 --> 00:23:40.445
how our gay cases fit together.

552
00:23:40.585 --> 00:23:42.205
Not just what's happening there or there,

553
00:23:42.545 --> 00:23:43.765
but what is the relationship

554
00:23:43.765 --> 00:23:46.125
between what's happening in place X and place Y.

555
00:23:46.305 --> 00:23:48.125
And and, and time X

556
00:23:48.125 --> 00:23:51.565
and time Y is, is, is the best chance we have

557
00:23:51.625 --> 00:23:53.445
of understanding the moment that we're living in.

Collaborative Exploration of Neoliberalism

00:00:00 - Of all I I, here's the book just so that people can see it. And it's a co-authored book with, 12 authors. So this came out of a project at the Barnard College Center for Research on Women. Barnard is associated with Columbia University in New York City. and we do research projects. And we were doing, we did a workshop on neoliberalism that was in the early 2010s when we were kind of headed toward a, what might have been an apex of, the power of the neoliberal framework.

00:00:34 - It was right after the financial crisis. And so the question of what neoliberalism was doing, was on a lot of people's minds. And that, was not just in the United States, but in a number of different countries. And we were able to bring people into the workshop who either were US scholars working in other areas of the world, or who were scholars in other areas of the world. So we decided to undertake a joint research project

00:01:05 - that was both comparative between different areas of the world and synthetic. How do we understand neoliberalism coming together not into a single system, because we found that it really operated differently depending on the locality, but rather, how did it get knitted together into what we might call, he hegemony, Standard scholarly model is the individual scholar working in their place where in their field sites studying case X case, you know, case YKC.

Reframing Neoliberalism: Interconnections of Gender, Location, and Scholarship

00:01:38 - And one of the other things that we were hoping to do in this book was to think about a different way of doing academic writing together to, to bring our scholarly expertise together and to think about connections between sites and locations. So, so that we weren't just looking at neoliberalism in Argentina or post neoliberalism there, or the, the case of the United States, or the case of the uk or Europe or Copenhagen or, or, or Nigeria. But trying to think about, what it means to take all of these cases in a single frame

00:02:10 - and interrelations, between different places in the world and between different dynamics within them. One more thing, both Janet and myself are professors of women's gender and sexuality studies. you know, were feminist researchers. And the other motivation for this book is that already by two 10, there had been many people writing about neoliberalism, in different parts of the world. And even doing, bigger synthetic discussions. David Harvey is the most famous, but,

00:02:41 - of gender and sexuality, vis-a-vis the transformations that we were talking about. Gender and sexuality were seen as super structural to the side, not related. And we had a different opinion. And we'll be talking more about that, because it, you know, in the scholarship we'd done up until that point, and we're continuing to do gender and sexuality, are themselves material relations. And when you're thinking about other kinds of, social structures, you need to be thinking about how gender and sexuality are also formative. and not just consequential in terms of other,

Transformative Insights: The Pandemic's Impact on Neoliberalism

00:03:13 - changes, but actually formative. We were actually, poised to finish the book, when the pandemic emerged and, and transformed global social relations seemingly all at once. and so we were, in a place where we had to think about, okay, what is the significance of this? On the one hand, it was, as you suggested, something that actually brought to the, for all of the points we were already trying to make. and it really revealed in powerful and profound ways, precisely the inadequacies

00:03:45 - and social safety nets, et cetera, et cetera. On the other hand, we felt like actually this, not just reveals dynamics that we're already talking about, but demonstrates them, in new and powerful ways that we need to highlight. And so that was why we chose to, to begin the book actually with this, both in terms of what it revealed about inadequacies of the social safety net and also about the paradoxical features of neoliberalism, which, we'd already decided we wanted to title, we wanted to title the book in terms of,

00:04:16 - Gonna follow up with what we mean by paradoxes. Yeah. Yeah. So why did we choose paradoxes of neoliberalism as the title? This comes from our colleague Ling Chang. Yeah. Who, teaches and researches in Hong Kong and also in other parts of Asia. And, sealing. We did some initial short videos that were published on the Barnard Center for Research on Women, the BCRW website. and sealing, started talking about paradoxes of neoliberalism, and we made a video about it. And that clearly became a guiding framework.

Neoliberalism: Paradoxes and Redistribution

00:04:48 - of the enlightenment and its promises, so of liberalism. So the freedom, the justice, the economic equality that's promised in liberalism that neoliberalism shifts, in some way. There's a long tradition of critiquing that through paradoxes, which includes, scholars like, the Caribbean scholar, David Scott, the, scholar of Hawaii, Jay Kehlani Kauanui and, the historian, Joan Scott.

00:05:20 - neoliberalism both continues and intensifies the paradoxes of neoliberalism to two predominant effects. One, people face double binds. No matter what you do, you lose. and we, the sixth chapter looks a lot about how people move through and around those double binds that are created by the paradoxes of neoliberalism, which we'll talk about in a minute. and the second thing is that, that sense of the double means that,

00:05:51 - or equality tend to contribute to redistribution upward. They do the opposite of what they're claiming to do. and so that's really at the core of the book, both that long history of how neoliberalism itself can be understood as part of, not just enlightenment, but also part of the colonial project, that in some ways it replaces. One way to think about neoliberalism is as a response by,

Pandemic Paradoxes: Essential Workers, Safety, and Economic Inequality

00:06:22 - I wanna, remind us of three of the, paradoxical features of neoliberalism that we opened the book with, that were highlighted by the pandemic. One hand, the pandemic seemed like a long time ago now, somehow right after the US elections, it seems like really fresh again. And so, so, but the, the, the, the examples that we opened the book with, you know, the paradox around essential workers being called essential during the pandemic, and yet treated as utterly disposable.

00:06:53 - and which wealth was, you know, yet again redistributed upwards. And then the third case about, you know, the definitions of safety, which, relied on a model of safety of home, which many people didn't have access to. And those many people who have access to a home, it's not safe. So those are the three that we talk about in the introduction to the book. in retrospect, and this is what I was gesturing towards a moment ago, I wanna, also mention a fourth,

00:07:20 - but which has become clear now, the fourth and may be a fifth, right? So, so I think, you know, we're also right now in the aftermath of the US elections, which the whole world is paying attention to, and, you know, the reelection, of, of President Trump and, you know, with so many punts trying to figure out what happened, why et cetera. And, and everyone's saying, it's the economy stupid. And, and, and thinking about why, you know, working class people, voted in the ways that they did.

From Pandemic Welfare to Security State: The Intersection of Economic Nostalgia and Surveillance

00:07:52 - that you're hearing, at least on the left, if not in mainstream media, is, is actually kind of nostalgia for Trump era economics and for the pandemic welfare state. So there was a moment of a pandemic welfare state, which, which is clear in retrospect that emerged and then disappeared, right? And so, what happened to that pandemic welfare state is it, it became the pandemic security state, which is a situation we're now, living in, in profound waves. One of the things, that's also been happening,

00:08:23 - and not just at Barnard Columbia where we are, but in many, many places, is that the securitization apparatus that was put in place during the pandemic, is still with us. and, and in very significant ways. Technologies of surveillance, policing, securitization, carceral politics, all of all, all all of these are themes that we talk about, amply in the book, and that are very important and that we're still living with right now. This Is a really great question, and, and, as you know, one that's been central to a feminist scholarship

00:08:55 - our Kimberly Crenshaw published the first, law review article on intersectionality in 1989. and one of the things that, that we argue in the book, is that, these different material relations that Professor Bernstein was talking about, which include gender as a material relation, race as a material relation, economics, and class as a material relation, that they are both intersectional and they're also in commensurate that one of the things

Navigating Complex Power Dynamics: Intersectionality and Incoherence

00:09:26 - to address power relations is the way in which issues come together, material relations come together, and they also operate on their own. and this makes for a very complicated social field, and it's often easy for people to either treat them as in commensurate, we're looking now at gender that has nothing to do with anything else, or as intersectional, they all go together and all the same. We'll get a big framework that will hold them all. and the reason, that we wanna hold them apart,

00:09:57 - to each other in ways that, people can, activate, for the purpose of power. we care deeply about, being anti-abortion. Oops, that's not playing well. So now we move away from that and we're anti-immigrant. Instead, we can bring to the fore issue that that, seems to be playing well in the moment. But the deep argument in the book is that these hegemonic, power relations are formed through productive incoherence, that what makes them

00:10:31 - but rather that they are variously incoherent and can move around in relation to each other. and so, you know, obviously, contemporary US politics is a good sign of that where, you know, a politician say one thing one day and one thing the next day, and that actually works in their favor, right? That's their, productive incoherence. And similarly, we care deeply about gender one day, and we don't care about it at all the next day. That works in the favor of, status quo power relations.

Transnational Feminism and the Interconnection of Social Issues

00:11:03 - of feminism that allows us to hold issues together without collapsing them. Why is Palestine a feminist issue? and, you know, our colleague Nefertiti has worked on this, for a long, long time, and some of it is just basic transnational feminism, which is that any issue is a feminist issue because women's lives involve economics. They are, are marked by race, they're marked by transnational labor relations, et cetera, right?

00:11:36 - itself mistaken. and the other reason is a positive reason, which is how can we create feminisms that work together in order to create a better world for more people? and that often gets lost, which is part of the purpose of this kind of analysis, which can seem academic or, you know, productive incoherence. Why do we have to have that con concept? and it's because we wanna build a better world, and understanding the world that we are dealing with,

00:12:07 - Other than, than thinking about gender and sexuality or feminism in terms of where are the women, which is, you know, a, a sort of a, a an approach that often, lay people will take or, you know, you know, we're interested in doing something different, which is, not, not that we're not concerned about that, but, but asking how gender and sexuality, are, formative to understanding any social issue. Janet brought up the case of Palestine, and we could talk more about that, that, you know, that,

Exploring Gender, Migration, and Economic Policy Dynamics

00:12:39 - But it's, it's, it may appear in the, in the Latin American version of the book, which is coming out now. but you know, to take something like a, a substantive area like migration or economics, right? So to ask even, you know, when, when, when people talk about migration and think about it and push pull factors, economic factors, they don't think about, where gender, sexuality, kinship, family formation fit, in terms of understanding some of those dynamics. They don't think about the gender, gendered

00:13:08 - securitization, militarism. They don't think about, the gendered and sexual dimensions of economic policy in terms of, homework and public economies, in terms of domestic labor and so forth. It's often thought that the Clinton administration in the middle of the 1990s was what fully neoliberal the, US economy that, the Reagan administration started this, but that Clinton brought it into, both the Democratic and the Republican Party, and, made it the common sense of the United States.

00:13:41 - Economy Stupid, which was supposedly separate from both race and gender. But his main plank in that, approach was what was called welfare reform, which was the reform of a policy that was about the 1935 Social Security Act and economic, policy, but was discussed almost completely in terms of race and gender. It was discussed in terms of the idea that, especially black women were somehow the recipients

Intersection of Neoliberalism, Race, and Vulnerability

00:14:13 - more white people than black people, were recipients of welfare. and so to talk about the economy without talking about race and gender allowed for a profoundly unjust discussion of public policy, that extended neoliberalism. And so part of our, hope in the book is that by bringing gender justice into discussions of neoliberalism, that we can't, go back to the idea that we can address economic policy without

00:14:43 - Vulnerability is a really interesting slippery concept because it, it's both a, it's at once a, you know, it's a material fact of people's lives of all of our lives, really, and we can talk more about that. but it's also, it's a discursive fact that gets mobilized in different ways by different parties. We are all vulnerable, you know, existentially, but especially so under neoliberalism, and some of us more than others. And, so I just wanna start with that. But, but the, the tricky thing about vulnerability,

00:15:14 - and this is, you know, that's the chapter title, neoliberal vulnerability and the vulnerability of neoliberalism, is that, you know, we need to be attentive to both things at once, v vulnerability and social relations and vulnerability as a neoliberal discourse, that, can serve actually politically pernicious ends. This is, in a way, one of those double binds that Janet was talking about earlier, right? So, as, as a neoliberal, discourse of governance, and we can think about this, and we'll say more about this a bit later,

Vulnerability and the Paradox of Selective Aid

00:15:44 - what we might call progressive neoliberalism, vulnerability gets deployed to demarcate certain populations, right? As worthy of help, as worthy of benefits. it sort of works like this category of risk, but it's actually in a sort of sneaky way, a way of saying for some, but not for others. It's not a writer an entitlement for everybody. We're just gonna help those who are most vulnerable. So it, it demarcates a certain group, that is worth that, merits aid or health and leaves everybody else to the side, right? So that's one of the problems.

00:16:17 - relations of gender, sexuality, race, et cetera, that we were, talking about previously. Who gets, who gets to be vulnerable, and, you know, so getting, getting to be vulnerable. on the one hand, you know, that's a, a, a paradoxical privilege of certain, racial and gendered, positions. White women are para paradigmatically white, white young women, are often the ones who are, most frequently designated with this term,

00:16:45 - So on the one hand, it can get you, attention. it can, it can, help you to garner humanitarian and state-based forms of social attention and social help. On the other hand, it can work in ways that are actually not so helpful, including for people, who, are the most vulnerable. And it can be not so helpful in terms of excluding certain populations based on, racial characteristics, or, and this is really, really important here. The kinds of help that are offered

Reconfiguring Neoliberalism: The Pitfalls of Carceral Feminism

00:17:17 - in our view, the least, least helpful forms of intervention that one can imagine, especially, you know, and this gestures back to what I was saying earlier about the, the reconfiguration of the neoliberal state. So, you know, whereas people imagine, under neoliberalism the state where there's a way, you know, we're arguing, no, that's not right. The better way to think about it is, you know, the reconfiguration of the neoliberal state, in which the securitization arm, the carer arm,

00:17:46 - is amplified while everything else actually shrinks. And, and we talked about this a few minutes ago, what does that mean in terms of vulnerability? It, it means that the so-called helping measures, that are targeted towards vulnerable pop populations, tend to be punitive and carceral in nature. And so this is why I've, written a lot, not just in this book, but he previously, that's something I call carceral feminism, right? Which is, not the good feminism that, not the sexual justice feminism that Janet

00:18:17 - that unfortunately, has become much more hegemonic, not just in the United States, but globally. and that, that imagines, a feminism feminism's main contribution as a, a partnership with the criminal justice system, and punishing those who, who might, harm women and other vulnerable people. And so, so one of the things we're arguing in this book, and and I've argued before, is, you know, actually it makes, people who are really material materially vulnerable,

Vulnerability and Violence in Neoliberalism

00:18:51 - it doesn't help 'em, it doesn't, it doesn't, address the, their actual material needs. And it, actually what it accomplishes is a phenomenon that John is called safety through Violence, right? An imagination of safe through violence, through, through punishment of others, through more social harm. But follow Up on what Elizabeth was saying about vulnerability, one of the things that neoliberalism does is it makes entire populations vulnerable. and that can be through an intensification

00:19:22 - where they live because they're the targets of violence. It can be through free trade agreements where entire sources of local income agriculture in that, a market is flooded and you can no longer support yourself, and you have to migrate for economic reasons. and it can lead to, because neoliberalism has, been coexistent with and possibly intensified climate change, it can lead to climate change migration. So we're seeing, and, and the fourth thing I realize is it can also,

00:19:53 - of warfare across the globe means that we're facing all kinds of people who are fleeing violence as well. and that means that we're facing migration patterns that are, new, that are, intensified. and that also build on existing patterns of migration. And one of the things that neoliberalism, does is it shifts in the reconfiguration of the state that Elizabeth was talking about. It shifts blame. So part of the idea is to ask who is to blame

Neoliberal Blame and Migration Politics

00:20:26 - And one of the things that neoliberalism says is, individuals are to blame. It is your fault. Whatever is happening bad in your life is your fault. But the other answer that is offered is it's the fault of people who are not like you, who are not within the internal boundaries of your community, of your nation. And particularly, it is the fault of migrants. So the anti-immigration politics around the world, we argue, is deeply tied to the development

00:20:58 - and that one of the ways to try to address the politics of migration is to shift neoliberal relations, as well as to protect migrants from any kind of either legal or extralegal violence. The traditional understanding of social movements, which is mass movements that take on either the entire world through revolution or, particular issues are important, but that we also have to be able to build,

00:21:30 - as initially connected. So gender justice in relation to economics, obviously is the one that we're most focused on. and what that does is it gives us a way to think about building political power that is more immediate. We don't have to solve all the problems of the world, and that can also connect our immediate problems and issues to bigger issues in the world so that we can ask the question, why is my life harder than it used to be? Why can I no longer afford my rent? And I can both address that through local,

Connecting Local Policies to Global Economic Issues

00:22:04 - and I can also connect that to these broader ques economic questions, which would connect me to people all over the world who are working on the same issue. And that, to me, is one of the biggest things that the book offers. Yeah, I think, I think that's excellent. the only thing I would add to that is just I think, you know, it's, you know, local and specific policies and dynamics and political dynamics seem to change very quickly. And so, you know, all the examples, we, we have lots of concrete examples in the book on purpose, you know, including the pandemic examples,

00:22:35 - and there's so many other examples we could bring up. So we hope that, despite the specificity of, you know, any, any particular, empirical case, that there are some frameworks, some approaches that people, can take away from this book to, to use, to understand whatever set of, a paradox as contradictions, political challenges, they're con they're confronting, and find some utility in our approach. So we're moving into a moment that, many

00:23:06 - neoliberalism as opposed to progressive neoliberalism, right? To think about what does it mean to take, some of the approaches that we are advocating in this book, and to think about relations between sites and locations, relations between, seemingly distinct issues, as Janet said, the role of gender and sexuality and authoritarian regime. It's not talked about enough, right? We're pretty convinced that there, that, that the approach that we, have tried to develop in this, in this book. Also working together with scholars in different places,

Understanding Global Interconnections in Queer Studies

00:23:51 - how our gay cases fit together. Not just what's happening there or there, but what is the relationship between what's happening in place X and place Y. And and, and time X and time Y is, is, is the best chance we have of understanding the moment that we're living in.

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