Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 42, No. 1, January 2011 THE NEOLIBERAL SUBJECT OF FEMINISM JOHANNA OKSALA I remember that T-shirt we used to wear in the 70s which featured Thatcher and the slogan “We are all prostitutes”, meaning that exploitation was a universal fact. At that time it was thought clever to display some awareness of the social and psychological forces underpinning your actions. Now we think the opposite. Even prostitutes are insulted by the suggestion that they are not free agents, defining the terms of engagement. Charlotte Raven Foucault’s radical intervention in feminist theory and more generally in political thought has been the crucial claim that any analysis of power relations must recognise how these relations are constitutive of the subjects involved in them. Power cannot be conceived of as an external relation that takes place between pre-constituted subjects, but must rather be understood as constituting the subjects themselves: their constitution only becomes possible in the shifting, precarious and contested field of power relations. As Judith Butler famously formulates this idea in relation to gender in the opening pages of Gender Trouble, “It is not enough to inquire into how women might become more fully represented in language and politics. Feminist critique ought also to understand how the category of “women”, the subject of feminism, is produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought”.1 Foucault’s analyses of power and the subject can also be read as part of the contemporary politicisation of the social realm and the increasing dissolution of the distinction between public and private. Similar to the feminist emphasis on the political nature of the personal, his analyses show how subjects are constructed through mundane everyday habits and practices as certain kinds of political beings. Individuals do not enter the public, political arena as fully formed subjects who then demand rights and represent interests. The supposedly personal or private aspects of their being are already traversed by power relations, which not only restrain them, but produce them as political subjects. In Discipline and Punish Foucault shows how the abstract political subject of liberalism is in fact materially constructed through concrete and detailed disciplinary habits. He argues that the establishment of an explicit, coded and formally egalitarian juridical framework, made possible by the organisation of a parliamentary, representative regime in the 18th century, was accompanied by the development and generalisation of disciplinary mechanisms. They constituted the other, dark side of these processes of democratic progress.2 Similarly, feminist appropriations of Foucault’s thought have demonstrated how feminine subjects are constructed through patriarchal, disciplinary 104 practices as very different kinds of subjects than the autonomous, liberal model suggests: they are constructed as subjects who are dependent on others, who must suppress their aggression, egotistical interests and ambitions and demonstrate caring and nurturing qualities. In the first section of this paper, I will analyse this process by discussing Sandra Bartky’s influential account of how the docile feminine subject is constructed through disciplinary habits and practices of beauty. However, the first section only forms a background for the main argument of this paper: in the last decades new and fundamentally different mechanisms and rationalities of power have come to shape our technologies of gender. It is my contention that because the constitution of the subject is a thoroughly historical and highly precarious process it is possible to detect changes in it even in the course of such relatively short periods of time as the last twenty or thirty years. In order to analyse these changes, I turn in the second section to Foucault’s lectures on liberalism and neoliberalism. I explicate Foucault’s idea of governmentality and particularly neoliberal governmentality as an alternative framework to discipline for studying the construction of the governable subject. In the final part I argue that this framework has not replaced the disciplinary mechanisms that produce the feminine subject, but rather complemented and intensified them. It is my contention that analysing the neoliberal paradigm dominant in our society provides us with a more comprehensive conceptual model for understanding the construction of the feminine subject in its current form. I want to make the controversial claim that liberalism’s allegedly masculinist conception of the subject as an independent, self-interested, economic being has come to characterise also the feminine subject in the last decades.3 This is not due to the triumph of feminism, but to the triumph of neoliberalism. I. The Disciplinary Production of the Feminine Subject Sandra Bartky’s seminal and much anthologized 1988 article ‘Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power’ was one of the first appropriations of Foucault’s idea of disciplinary power to explicitly feminist issues.4 It gives a compelling account of the way in which a docile feminine subject is constructed through the internalisation of disciplinary habits. The key claim that Bartky adopts from Foucault is that an adequate understanding of women’s oppression requires an appreciation of the extent to which not only women’s lives, but their very subjectivities are constructed through an ensemble of disciplinary habits. In Discipline and Punish Foucault argues that discipline was a historically specific technology of power that emerged in the 18th century and operated through the body. In disciplinary practices, habits and patterns of behaviour are broken down and constructed in new ways that are more productive for the aims 105 of modern industrial societies. Discipline consists of various techniques, which aim at making the body both docile and useful. In the 18th century, claims Foucault, bodies of prisoners, soldiers, workers and school children were subjected to a new kind of discipline in order to make them more useful for mass production and at the same time easier to control. The functions, movements and capabilities of their bodies were broken down into narrow segments, analysed in detail and recomposed in a maximally effective way. Disciplinary power does not mutilate or coerce its target, but through detailed training reconstructs the body to produce new kinds of gestures, habits and skills. Individuals literally incorporate the objectives of power, which become part of their own being. The human body becomes a machine, the functioning of which can be optimised, calculated and improved through the internalisation of specific patterns of behaviour.5 Bartky acknowledges the strengths of Foucault’s analysis, but contends that he is blind to those disciplines that produce a modality of subjection that is particularly feminine. She analyses habits such as dieting and fitness regimes as disciplinary practices imposed on women that aim at producing an ideal feminine body. These disciplinary practices of femininity aim at an exhaustive and perpetual regulation of the body’s size and contours, its appetite, posture, gestures and comportment, as well as the appearance of each of its visible parts. Expert discourses on how to walk, talk, style one’s hair, care for one’s skin and wear make-up create habits conducive to the requirements of submissive femininity: feminine movement as well as feminine faces are trained to the expression of deference. The rationality of these disciplinary practices can thus only be understood in the light of the modernization of patriarchal domination. They subjugate women by normalisation, by constructing them as particular kinds of subjects, not simply by taking power away from them. Feminist analysis must recognise these individual practices of feminine beauty as aspects of a large and systematic disciplinary regime – an oppressive and inegalitarian system of sexual subordination. The rationality of this disciplinary apparatus is clear: it aims at turning women into “the docile and compliant companions of men just as surely as the army aims to turn its raw recruits into soldiers”.6 The question of why women agree to partake in these practices and actively acquire such oppressive and painful habits clearly troubles Bartky. She acknowledges that “no one is marched off for electrolysis at gunpoint, nor can we fail to appreciate the initiative and ingenuity displayed by countless women in an attempt to master the rituals of beauty”.7 She explains the compelling character of these practices by emphasising how they are tied to powerful sanctions and rewards. Refusal to take part in these practices in a world dominated by men means that women face a very severe sanction: the refusal of male patronage. This can mean the loss of badly needed intimacy or even of decent livelihood. The disciplinary technologies of femininity are also taken 106 up and practiced by women against the background of a pervasive sense of bodily deficiency: a sense of shame is a central component of normative feminine experience and a measure of the extent to which all women have internalized patriarchal standards of bodily acceptability. A generalised male witness structures woman’s consciousness of herself as a bodily being, and women become self-policing subjects committed to a relentless self- surveillance. The rewards importantly include sexual attractiveness: to possess a feminine body is usually essential to a woman’s sense of herself as a sexually desiring and desirable subject. Pain, constriction, tedium, semi-starvation, and constant self-surveillance are preferable to desexualisation and the loss of a socially recognised identity. Instead of being explicitly coerced into adopting disciplinary practices or freely choosing them as their preferred means of self-expression, women thus internalise them as normative habits that become an integral part of their gender identity. The explanatory power of habit as the mundane basis of gender oppression lies exactly in the way it forms a conceptual bridge between coercion and free volition, the two untenable extremes in the debates on the nature of gender. Feminist accounts of gender have attempted to challenge forms of essentialism, but they have equally rejected gender voluntarism: one is not born a woman, one becomes one, but not through a deliberate choice. Habit forms the normative mechanism that produces a stable and enduring pattern of being and creates an illusion of a permanent gender core or essence. It is like a second nature, which unlike the first nature allows for historical and cultural variation and change whilst also incorporating the permanence and stability that characterise our experience of gendered identity.8 In her 2002 article ‘Suffering to Be Beautiful’, Bartky reiterates the same key arguments, but she also attempts to respond to some criticisms of her earlier paper. She still argues that disciplinary practices are importantly involved in the process whereby a female body is turned into a “properly” feminine one. She also maintains the position that this process is, on the whole, disempowering to women. However, she now acknowledges that two themes were underdeveloped in the earlier paper. First, she wants to respond to the criticism that she had under-theorized the pleasure women take in turning themselves into properly feminine subjects, by spelling out in more detail the nature of these pleasures. The second theme she neglected was the psychic ambivalence connected to these disciplinary practices. We have to acknowledge that the disciplines of the body are in and of themselves complex and carry ambiguous meanings.9 These additions make her powerful account more nuanced by acknowledging the complexity of the mechanisms of oppression involved in the construction of the feminine subject. However, I want to pose the question of whether her analysis also needs updating in light of the fundamental changes in the ways the 107 feminine subject is constructed, which have taken place in the time between the two versions of her article. The two articles mark interesting moments in time, 1988 and 2002, because many feminist thinkers now see the intervening years as the time of a serious backlash against feminism. Crucially, these years also mark the period in which the neoliberal hegemony became firmly established in both the USA and Europe. If we accept Foucault’s key claim about the ineliminable tie between forms of power and forms of the subject, this shift in techniques of government would have necessitated a shift in the corresponding construction of the subject. I will show in the next section that what is distinctive about Foucault’s analysis of liberalism is that he does not approach it primarily as a political theory, but as a governmental practice that is constitutive of a particular type of subject as its necessary correlate. His critical analysis shows that neoliberal governmentality can be viewed as a particular production of subjectivity: it produces an economic subject structured by different tendencies, preferences and motivations than the political or legal citizen of a disciplinary society or a society of sovereignty.10 The neoliberal subject is understood as an atomic individual whose natural self-interest and tendency to compete for economic rewards must be fostered and enhanced. II. Neoliberal Governmentality Foucault’s lectures on ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’, delivered at the Collège de France in 1979, focus on the birth of liberal and neoliberal governmentality, forms of political rationality concerned with the government of the modern state. He proposes that the new liberal governmentality challenges the ideal and the project of an exhaustive disciplinary society in which the legal network hemming in individuals was taken over and extended internally by normative mechanisms.11 His lectures on liberalism and neoliberalism can thus be read as a form of self-critique: while disciplinary power had provided Foucault with a useful tool for elucidating some of the key mechanism for the construction of the subject still operative in our society, it was proving to be inadequate for understanding many others. He was concerned about the rise of neoliberal forms of governmentality characterising his own historical milieu, and the lectures should be read as a response to these concerns [BB 192]. His target was the “state phobia” prevalent in the social critiques of his day. Similar to his aim in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, which was to show that the fervent mission to liberate our repressed sexuality was fundamentally misguided, he was again trying to show how the most popular forms of social and political critique were in fact attacking the wrong enemy. “What is presently at issue in our reality…is not so much the growth of the state…but much more its reduction” [BB 192]. His problem was not the unlimited growth of the state, its omnipotence or its continuous and unified expansion. The risk was not that 108 the unlimited expansion of social security, or the administrative apparatus on which it rested, would inevitably lead to a totalitarian state like the Nazi or Stalinist state. “All those who share in the great state phobia should know that they are following the direction of the wind and that in fact, for years and years, an effective reduction of the state has been on the way” [BB 191]. Foucault makes it clear, however, that his aim is not to give an account of how mechanisms of governmentality replaced disciplinary mechanisms, which would have replaced juridico-legal mechanisms [BB 107]. His move from discipline to governmentality is not a conceptual substitution, but an extension. It is, he argues, still possible to identify and analyse the intensification of disciplinary mechanisms of surveillance and normalisation operative in contemporary society.12 It is also important, however, to identify and analyse a completely different kind of logic or rationality of power that is gaining importance, but that in fact has fairly long roots in traditional liberalism. It is my contention that while the current neoliberal governmentality continues to be deeply intertwined with sovereign and disciplinary forms of power, it has also initiated significant transformations in our practices of governing. As Foucault notes, we face “a new problem”, which consists of “the transition to a new form of rationality to which the regulation of government was pegged” [BB 312]. To understand and analyse this new rationality, Foucault, typically, had to trace its genealogy. He identifies its emergence in the 18th century: the ideal society was no longer the panoptic society of all-encompassing discipline. It was no longer one in which a mechanism of general normalization and the exclusion of those who could not be normalized was needed. What emerged instead was the idea or the theme-programme of a liberal society in which governing was reconceived as a practice to be organised, rationalised and limited according to the principles of economy: the social field was left open to fluctuating processes, and minority practices were tolerated more easily because the primary responsibility of government was to support the economy. This did not mean the end of governmental interference, however; it necessitated a fundamental change in the rationality of governmental practice. Governmental action was now brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players themselves. There was “an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals” [BB 312]. This did not mean a complete nullification of the technologies aiming to influence individual behaviour, such as disciplinary techniques. But it meant that a level of behaviour could be identified as economic behaviour, and controlled as such. Subjects were understood to be responsive not only to social sanctions and rewards, but also, and primarily, to economic gains and losses. Foucault thus claims that the birth of the new liberal governmentality necessitated the birth of the economic subject as its correlate. In the liberal governmentality homo economicus functions as a crucial element with regard 109 to the exercise of power. Foucault’s provocation against liberalism is the claim that the liberal subject is not in fact an atom of freedom in the face of all the conditions, undertakings, legislations and prohibitions of a possible government. He or she is not a natural being with predictable forms of conduct and calculable interests. Instead, he or she must be understood as a certain historically constructed type of subject that enabled an art of government to be developed according to the new principles of economics. The habits installed in this subject no longer aimed to turn him or her primarily into a docile and efficient machine; they aimed to construct him or her as a consumer and an entrepreneur. Foucault’s genealogy of the economic subject begins with the British empiricists – Locke and Hume – and their philosophical accounts of the subject. His rereading of the history of philosophy proposes that it was their theories of the subject – as opposed to the Cartesian subject, for example – which represent the most important theoretical transformation in Western philosophy since the Middle Ages [BB 271]. What British empiricism introduces to Western philosophy for the first time is a subject who is not so much defined by his freedom, or by the opposition of soul and body, or by the presence of a source or core of concupiscence marked to a greater or lesser degree by the Fall or sin, but who appears in the form of a subject of individual choices which are both irreducible and non-transferable [BB 271-2]. The key notion of ‘interest’ denotes this principle of an irreducible and non- transferable individual choice, and its emergence is the momentous rupture in Western thought [BB 273].13 In political practice, it signals the emergence of a subject of interest as the core correlate of the art of government. Foucault proceeds to draw a sharp distinction between the liberal subject understood as a subject of rights and as a subject of interests. The subject of liberalism in political thought is traditionally understood to be primarily characterised by the fact that he or she has natural rights. Foucault insists that this emphasis is misleading, however, because he or she is equally characterised by the fact that he or she has subscribed to the limitation of these rights and has accepted the principle of relinquishing them. In contrast, the liberal subject understood as a subject of interest is never called upon to relinquish his or her interests. The key principle of liberal governmentality is not that each individual may pursue his or her interests, but that it is absolutely paramount that he or she does pursue them. The liberal subject is importantly a correlate of the ‘invisible hand’: a complex economic system which makes him or her function as an individual subject of interest within a totality which eludes him or her, and which nevertheless founds the totality of his or her egoistic choices. For there to be certainty of collective economic benefit – that the greatest good is attained for the greatest number of people – it is not only possible but necessary that each actor is blind to this totality and pursues only his or her own interests. The 110 collective good must not be an objective of governmentality because paradoxically only then can it be achieved [BB 278].14 In sum, the liberal subject is essentially a non-substitutable and irreducible atom of interest. He or she is essentially someone who always pursues his or her own interest, and whose interest is such that it converges spontaneously with the interest of others. The consequences of this insight for current neoliberal governmentality have been momentous. Two hundred years after Adam Smith and David Hume, Gary Becker, one of the leading economists of the Chicago School, understood it as a guarantee for the economic calculability of all aspects of human behaviour: homo economicus responds systematically, in a non- random way, to modifications in the variables of the environment. Becker’s influential work in economics demonstrates how a whole range of behaviour is rational from an economic perspective, including phenomena such as altruism and addiction that were generally understood as exceptions to purely economic interests.15 When economic rationality is defined broadly enough, individuals always prioritise their interests as they conceive them. Furthermore, many of their actions become economically intelligible as attempts to increase their human capital. Becker’s ground-breaking idea of human capital explains behavioural choices such as education and on-the-job training as investments made in people. People enhance their capabilities as producers and consumers by investing in themselves. The many ways of doing this include activities such as schooling, training, medical care, vitamin consumption, acquiring information about the economic system, and migration.16 These investments result not just in some incalculable increase in the individual’s wellbeing, but also in a calculable increase in his or her income prospects. Human capital comprises both innate and acquired elements. While the innate elements are largely out of our control, the acquired elements are not. If we make investments in ourselves we can become ability machines that will produce income.17 Neoliberal governmentality thus scrambles and exchanges the terms of the opposition between ‘worker’ and ‘capitalist’ by aiming to construct a society in which everybody is a capitalist, an entrepreneur of him or herself.18 This means that the economic subject is someone manageable, but through different mechanisms than the docile subject of the disciplinary society: he or she is someone who will always pursue his or her own interests and who is – not in spite of this, but precisely because of it – eminently governable. He or she will respond systematically and in a predictable way to strategic modifications artificially introduced into the environment. He or she is the correlate of a governmentality that must act, not on the body of the individual, but on his or her environment by systematically modifying its variables so that economic competition is maximised. According to this governmentality, economic incentives provided by the free market will therefore automatically bring about maximal efficiency, wellbeing and wealth [BB 270-71]. Foucault emphasises 111 that for this reason liberal governmentality does not have to rely on large-scale, panoptic mechanisms of normalisation, exclusion and surveillance. Governmental action has to first and foremost bear on the rules of the game, rather than disciplining the players themselves. Many commentators now see the year 1979 – when Foucault delivered his lecture series – as the inauguration of the formal period of dominance of neoliberal economic policy in Europe and the United States.19 Thirty years after its expanding application, Foucault’s topic and his insights appear farsighted, almost prophetic. Many of our contemporary experiences in the last three decades reflect the new hegemony of neoliberal governmentality and the corresponding form of the economic subject as an entrepreneur of him or herself. As Trent Hamann notes, several critics of neoliberalism have documented a sustained expansion of self-help and personal power technologies that range from the old ‘think and grow rich’ school to new techniques promising greater control in the management of everything from self to anger.20 Much of what was once understood as social and political has been shifted to the personal or private realm to be dealt with through voluntary charity, the invisible hand of the market or by improving one’s own self-esteem. Given that neoliberal governmentality has becomes so dominant and pervasive in contemporary society, I will next ask what its consequences are for the construction of the feminine subject. Can this model of exercising power contribute to our understanding of the feminine subject? If a docile feminine body is the correlate of disciplinary practices, what kind of feminine subject is the correlate of neoliberal practices of governing? III. The Neoliberal Subject of Feminism It seems incontestable that the normative practices of feminine beauty that Bartky describes have dramatically increased in both volume and variety since 1988. The cosmetics industry has reported huge increases in profits globally and many multinational cosmetics companies have expanded to new territories such as China. Technical innovations in cosmetic surgery as well as in anti- aging techniques such as botox have become widely available and form part of many women’s normal beauty routine. Both the very young and the very old are also included now in the target group for cosmetics as well as other normative techniques of shaping the feminine body such as dieting, exercising and hair removal. There seem to be no signs suggesting that the disciplinary techniques that Bartky so aptly describes and catalogues have in any way waned or even come under heightened critique in contemporary society. I want to suggest that there have been changes in the rationality underpinning these techniques in the last decades, which have emerged in tandem with the rise of the neoliberal, economic subject. These changes can be described and documented in different ways – by analysing visual culture or sociological data, 112 for example. I will try to illustrate my point by briefly turning to feminist thought and practice itself as reflective of these changes. Natasha Walters’ book The New Feminism was published in 1998 and written for wide, mainstream audience. As its name suggests, the book attempts to articulate ideas about femininity and feminism that became dominant during the course of the 1980s and 1990s. Although one can object immediately that the book is just one voice in the cacophony of contemporary feminist thought and therefore not representative of any wider shift in attitudes, I want to maintain that it does capture something essential about the cultural and political transformation concerning our ideas of femininity that has taken place in the last decades. Walters strongly emphasises at the outset that she is not trying to invent a new feminism. The book is not an original theoretical argument advocated by her. She is merely trying to describe the already existing ideas about feminism and ideal femininity as they have emerged in politics, journalism, television dramas and everyday life during 1980s and 1990s.21 The new feminism she describes is fervently materialist. It is a triumphant story of success not framed in the reductive language of victims. Walters insists that the new feminists are not angry, bitter or sexually unimaginative. A woman can be a feminist and still have a white wedding, buy pornography, wear designer clothes or even be a prostitute or a porn star as long as that has been her own choice. In other words, it is irrelevant how women speak, dress or make love as long as they are pursuing their own interests. The icons of this new feminism are Madonna and Margaret Thatcher, the feminine faces of power from the 1980s. Madonna used fashion and costume-changes to demonstrate not her powerlessness, but her sexual and financial independence.22 Margaret Thatcher had no problems in dealing with hierarchies, displaying egoism and opportunism. She showed her pleasure in power and her misery when she was ousted from it. Because of her, women no longer have to feel so worried about getting their hands dirty, because it is clear now that many good things can be built with dirty hands, “covered with the grit of determination and the oil of money”.23 The real issues of feminism are about personal freedom, economic independence and professional success in all areas of employment. The new feminists are women “with money and greed and lovingly described designer suits”.24 Walters gives a nod to feminist analyses such as Bartky’s by noting that feminists down the ages have argued that the oppression of women is played out on their bodies, their clothes and their styles of adornment. She claims that this is not the case anymore, however. The connection that Bartky, for example, makes between practices of feminine beauty and disempowerment is a false one. The strings that once tied women’s decoration to women’s lack of power have been cut: one no longer leads to the other, or feeds off the other, or invariably involves the other.25 Unless our costume actually stops us from doing 113 something – as the crinolines of 19th-century fashion slowed women down – we should stop guilt-tripping women for their desire to look feminine. The further we get along the road towards equality, the easier feminists should feel about the decisions of individual women to spend time waxing their legs and painting their nails.26 While some of these claims must be attributed to Walters’ personal view, it is my contention that her book nevertheless strikes a cord concerning some of the transformations that have taken place regarding the ideals of femininity since the 1980s. Instead of challenging the neoliberal conception of the subject emerging from the political, economic and cultural discourses and practices of the time, the new feminism of the 1990s closely mirrored it. The feminine subject too came to be seen increasingly as an egoistical subject of interest, a subject making free choices based on rational, economic calculation. Early feminist demands for political rights were often repudiated on the grounds that women did not have any political interests separate from those of their husbands and fathers and therefore they had no need for political representation. Even though women have now had equal political rights for nearly a century, the idea that all their actions would be driven by calculated self-interest to the express exclusion of all other values has been absent or even structurally impossible in the liberal political paradigm. When Margaret Thatcher came to power she was still commonly seen as an exception to ‘natural’ womanhood: her selfishness made her ‘unfeminine’. To see her twenty years later as the heroine of British feminism who gave us permission to follow our own egotistical interests signals a significant change in attitudes. Feminist critics of liberalism have convincingly argued that the naturalisation of the family in political liberalism meant that women simply could not be the selfish and possessive individualists that men were. As Wendy Brown, for example, has argued, the subject of liberalism as a figure of fundamental self- interest and self-orientation is quite at odds historically with what men have wanted women to be and with what women have been socially constructed to be.27 The autonomous woman – the childless, unmarried or lesbian woman – has been a sign of disorderly society or nature gone awry on the one hand, or of individual failure to ‘adapt to femininity’ on the other. Such ‘unnatural’ figures make clearly visible how the social order presumed by liberalism is itself pervasively gendered, representing both a gendered division of labour and a gendered division of the sensibilities and activities of subjects. In the liberal paradigm the family has been importantly cast as natural and pre-political, and woman, the primary worker and the crucial signifier of the family, has been constructed as naturally suited for the caring and nurturing role she performs within it.28 Women’s traditional role in the family has been to surrender their self-interest so that their husbands and children can attain their autonomous subjectivity. The constitutive terms of liberal political discourse and practice – 114 individual, autonomy, self-interest – fundamentally depend upon their implicit opposition to a subject and a set of activities marked ‘feminine’, whilst effectively obscuring this dependence.29 Brown has also noted the opposing tendency of capitalism to erode social differences in the long run, however. The logic of capitalism does not require gender subordination: there is nothing in sexed bodies as such that capitalism cannot live without. Women and men can be “rendered interchangeable cogs in a capitalist machine, where physical strength is rarely at issue, where continuity of the job matters little, where reproductive work has been almost completely commodified and where reproduction is itself nearly separable from sexed bodies and is in any event separable from sexual division of labour”.30 I contend that neoliberal governmentality, with its excessive emphasis on the economic, has exaggerated this tendency of capitalism to homogenise its subjects. Women have now seemingly become liberal subjects in the full sense of the term: they are not only individual subjects of rights, but also egotistical subjects of interest. They not only have the rights guaranteed by political liberalism; they are now also the subjects presumed by economic liberalism – individuals pursuing their own interests and responding primarily to economic gains and losses. It has now become conceivable that a woman’s interest might not coincide with her husband’s and children’s interests anymore: new feminists do not want a happy home, they want money, power and success. They are atomic, autonomous subjects of interest competing freely for the economic opportunities available. This implies that women are now also governed and subjected through new mechanisms, namely through the harnessing of their economic interests. It is significant that normative femininity has become firmly attached to economic gains in a new way. Women are increasingly rationalising their participation in the normative habits of femininity in terms of their own economic interests, not in terms of men’s interests: women no longer have long, manicured nails because their male partners find this sexually attractive and arousing, but because manicured nails have now become a sign of professional and financial success, a sign that is likely to help them move forward in their career. Similarly, in interviews with cosmetic surgery patients, for example, one of the main arguments women state for undergoing the operations is the fact that it can be a career move.31 Feminine appearance has come to be seen as an important instrument by which women can increase their human capital. The neoliberal subject views feminine appearance as well as her own body increasingly as an investment for getting the returns she wants. This means that the practices of normative femininity are no longer upheld only through the subtle mechanisms of discipline described by Bartky – women adopt the habits of femininity through a system of social sanctions and rewards such as shame and sexual admiration. It is upheld now also through a rationality based on financial loss and gain. 115  Whereas Bartky noted that successful provision of a beautiful or sexy body gained women attention and admiration but did not result in any real social power, the situation has, on the surface level, changed considerably. Walters seems to be right in insisting that success in normative feminine appearance is not primarily a sign of deference anymore, but has become an important sign of economic success and social power. The link between idealised femininity and economic success has become tight and pronounced. The most successful performances of feminine appearance in our society no longer symbolise subservience – waitresses, flight attendants or secretaries. The most successful performances of feminine appearance are these days accomplished by women who have power and money: female executives and politicians. We live in a world in which appearances are more important than ever and the modern female consumer is well aware of this. We must not be fooled into thinking that this means that the cultural meaning of femininity and its profound tie to subservience, selflessness and dependency has fundamentally dissolved, however. Nor is it the case that the structural dependence of liberalism on its “others” – beings who belong to the realm of familial selflessness and dependency making the autonomy and selfishness of others possible – would have disappeared. When Brown writes that in contemporary advanced capitalism “reproduction itself is nearly separable from sexed bodies”,32 we have to emphasise the word nearly. As long as our life form is fundamentally centred on families and on a gendered division of the sensibilities and activities of the subjects, the neoliberal, purely self-interested feminine subject would signal the collapse of our social order, a collapse that is in no way evident. While the defenders of family values loudly proclaim such collapse, it is my contention that normative, subservient femininity continues to provide the necessary support for the liberal political and economic order. However, the irreconcilable dualisms that constitute political liberalism – individual/family, autonomy/dependency, self-interest/selflessness – do not cut neatly between the two genders any more, but have now come to characterise increasingly the psychic life of working women torn between conflicting demands of femininity, as well as the divisions between different groups of women. The self-interest of particular women can be bought with the subordination and exploitation of others: the successful new feminist can buy childcare and household help provided by other women.33 It is thus significant to see that neoliberal governmentality operates with a different logic of gender subjection. Rather than disciplining the feminine subjects through the normalising habits connected to shame, social sanctions and sexual rewards, it installs the habits constitutive of normative femininity increasingly through their economic rationality. The focus is on the environmental variables that determine and constrict women’s behaviour as consumers and entrepreneurs of themselves. 116  We must recognise that the personal freedom and choice that neoliberal governmentality entails is an integral aspect of this technique of power. The idea of personal choice effectively masks the systemic aspects of power – domination, social hierarchies, economic exploitation – by relegating to subjects the freedom to choose between different options whilst denying them any real possibility for defining or shaping those options. This excessive focus on free choice has been perhaps the most insidious aspect of neoliberal governmentality for the subject of feminism. The measure of women’s liberation has become the individual choices we are able to make: to become executives or prostitutes, to have white weddings or to buy pornography. Power is increasingly understood as simply another thing that women can choose. Within this framework, the fact that many women choose to stay at home or opt out of more demanding and higher-paying employment opportunities is understood straightforwardly as their own free choice. The impediments to their social and political success are personal or psychological rather than political. Because the neoliberal subject is a free atom of self-interest fully responsible for navigating the social realm by using cost-benefit calculation, those who fail to succeed can only blame themselves.34 The obvious problem with this excessive focus on choice is that women cannot choose power like they can choose between different wedding dresses. Women have to make their choices in a network of highly unequal power relations that not only restrict their possibilities and options, but, crucially, construct their very subjectivities. The lasting importance of Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power and Bartky’s feminist appropriation of it is to remind us that the formation of the subject and the apparently free choices of the liberal individual take place through highly normative disciplinary practices. As I argued earlier, the current neoliberal governmentality continues to be deeply intertwined with disciplinary forms of power. Women’s choices cannot be presented uncritically as autonomous, natural or rational when they are understood as a result of pervasive disciplinary techniques. Feminist analyses have shown that women develop their work aspirations and identities, for example, only within the context of, and in response to, structural features of the work world.35 Their desires, pleasures and ambitions are constituted through the normative ideals of femininity dominant in our culture, but also through the concrete disciplinary practices and habits that they engage in daily. The idea that feminine subjects have static interests and identities that precede their choices as well as the power relations they are embedded in obfuscates the systematic and constitutive aspects of male power. This means that, paradoxically, their belief in unlimited possibilities and freedom of choice makes women more, not less, vulnerable to sexism. While Bartky’s analysis of feminine embodiment acknowledged the force of habit – the way that our actions are never simply a matter of free choice, but 117 are importantly tied to social norms, sanctions and rewards – the neoliberal framework effectively erases this insight. Women still internalise social divisions and power hierarchies through mundane techniques of gender to the extent that they become part of their subjectivities. Only now these techniques as well as the hierarchies that they mirror and uphold are portrayed even more effectively as the consequence of individual choice. This shift has resulted in the intensification of these practices. The belief that women are in complete control of their lives, that traditional femininity is their free choice and that they can achieve anything they want, not in spite of it, but with the help of it, makes them more compliant with normative techniques of gender. If we believe the neoliberal doctrine that subjects do nothing that is not in their own interest, then normative femininity must be what we truly want. It is therefore paramount that feminists engage in critical analyses of neoliberalism. If we want to resist the new mechanism of power operative in our society, we have to expose and understand their rationality, not in order to become who we truly are, but in order to gain a critical perspective on our current techniques of gender and forms of the subject. If this means that feminism is unglamorous, victimizing, and stops us from shopping, we cannot for this reason give up the task. The University of Dundee References 1. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 2. 2. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 222. 3. Feminist critiques of liberalism have become a central strand of feminist political philosophy. As Mary Dietz writes in Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt and Politics (London: Routledge, 2002, p. 28), over the past two decades they have become a kind of cottage industry within feminist theory. Feminists have critically examined the implications of liberalism for ethical and moral theory, as well as challenged the assumptions that underlie liberal thought and inform its politics. Many of these critiques eschew the liberal focus on rights protected by the state and criticise the abstract individualism, rational egoism as well as the instrumental conception of social relationships that informs liberal political theory. A crucial issue underlying the different strands of feminist critique has been the philosophical repudiation of the liberal subject. It has taken two main forms. Feminists have argued that the idea of an atomistic individual that underlies liberal thought is ontologically false because subjects are importantly relational and constituted by their attachments and primary social relationships. The second strand of the feminist critique has focused on the male-bias prevalent in liberalism’s understanding of the subject: the rational, highly competitive and self-interested subject might be an accurate characterisation of the male subject, but it does not correspond to female experience. In other words, to the extent that there is reality to liberalism’s understanding of the subject, it is a narrow and biased account because it rests on an allegedly masculinist conception of the subject as an independent, self-interested, economic being. On feminist critiques of the liberal subject, see, for example, Carole Pateman, The Problem of Political Obligation: A Critique of Liberal Theory (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979); Jean Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); Alison Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and 118  Allanheld, 1983); Virginia Held, Rights and Goods: Justifying Social Action (New York: Free Press, 1984); and Dietz op. cit. 4. For other feminist appropriations of Foucault’s idea of disciplinary power, see, for example, Susan Bordo, ‘The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity: A Feminist Appropriation of Foucault’ in Allison Jaggar and Susan Bordo (eds.), Gender/Body/Knowledge (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1989), pp. 13-33 and ‘Feminism, Foucault and the Politics of the Body’ in C. Ramazanoglu (ed.), Up against Foucault (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 179- 203. 5. Foucault (op. cit., p. 135) argues that in the seventeenth century a soldier, for example, still learnt his profession for the most part in actual fighting in which he proved his natural strength and inherent courage. But by the eighteenth century a soldier had become a fighting machine, something that could be constructed through correct training. 6. Bartky, Sandra Lee ‘Foucault, Feminity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power’ in I. Diamond and L. Quinby (eds.), Feminism and Foucault: Paths of Resistance (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press), 61-85, p. 75. 7. Ibid. 8. The idea of gender as an acquired habit characterises both poststructuralist approaches, such as Butler’s performative gender theory, as well as phenomenological attempts such as Iris Marion Young’s analysis of typically feminine ways of movement. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, op. cit., and Iris Young, Throwing like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990). 9. Sandra Bartky, ‘Sympathy and Solidarity’ and Other Essays (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), p. 4. 10. See. for example, Jason Read, ‘A Genealogy of Homo Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity’ in Foucault Studies, no. 6, pp. 25-36. 11. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the College de France 1978-1979 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), p. 259. I refer to this text henceforth as BB. 12. Trent Hamann (‘Neoliberalism, Governmentality and Ethics’ in Foucault Studies, no. 6, 2009, 37-59, p. 48), for example, points to the alarming explosion of the US prison populations as well as the worldwide escalation of the use of surveillance technologies. Likewise, the open acknowledgement of the use of torture by the US government can be recognised as one of the signal characteristics of sovereign power. 13. Foucault discusses a frequently cited passage from Hume’s Enquiries in which he proposes that we ask a man why he uses exercise. The man would answer that he wants to keep his health. If we pushed the enquiry further and asked why he wants to keep his health, he would note that sickness is painful. However, he would not be able to answer the final question of why he hates pain. Foucault argues that for Hume, individual choice is irreducible in the sense that it becomes a regressive end point in the analysis of human behaviour. It is also non- transferable which does not mean that we could never choose to place another person’s interest before our own. However, even in that case of an altruistic choice the principle of my choice is still based on my own feeling of pain and pleasure, only another person’s satisfaction causes me more pleasure than my own. Foucault (The Birth of Biopolitics, op. cit., p. 272) refers to Hume’s famous aphorism in A Treatise of Human Nature (ed. Selby-Bigge, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, p. 293), in which Hume argues that it is not “contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger”. 14. Foucault notes that what is usually stressed in Smith’s famous theory of the invisible hand is the ‘hand’, in other words the existence of something like providence which would tie together all the dispersed threads. But for Foucault, the other element, ‘invisibility’, is at least as important. The total rationality will always remain invisible, which means that no economic agent can or should attempt to pursue the collective good but should focus on pursuing solely his or her own interests; see BB 279-80. 15. See, for example, Gary Becker, The Essence of Becker, ed. R. Febrero and P. Schwartz (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1995), pp. 218-39 and 329-42. 119 16. The theory of human capital developed by economists of the Chicago School such as Gary Becker and Theodore Schultz in the 1960s and early 1970s was an attempt to fill a gap in formal economic analysis by offering a unified explanation of a wide range of empirical phenomena that had either been given ad hoc interpretations or had baffled investigators. Becker, for example, refers to well-known phenomena such as the fact that earnings typically increase with age at a decreasing rate, and that unemployment rates tend to be negatively related to the level of skill. See Gary Becker, ‘Investment in Human Capital: A Theoretical Analysis’, The Journal of Political Economy, vol. 70, no. 2, 1962, Part 2: Investment in Human Beings, 9-49; and Theodore Schultz, ‘Reflections on Investment in Man’, The Journal of Political Economy, vol. 70, no. 2, 1962, Part 2: Investement in Human Beings, 1-8. 17. The most striking example that Foucault discusses is the mother-child relationship [BB 229- 230, 243-244]. A neoliberal economic analysis would treat the time the mother spends with the child, as well as the quality of the care she gives, as an investment that constitutes human capital and on which she can expect a return. Investment in the child’s human capital will produce an income when the child grows up and earns a salary. Similarly, economic analyses of marriage could be read as attempts to decipher what is traditionally considered non- economic social behaviour in economic terms. Social relationships could be considered forms of investment: there are capital costs, and returns on the capital invested. 18. See Read, art. cit., p. 31. 19. See, for example, Palley ‘From Keynesianism to Neoliberalism: Shifting Paradigms in Economics’ in Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader, ed. A. Saad-Filho and D. Johnston (London: Pluto Press, 2005). 20. See Hamann, art. cit., p. 40. 21. Natasha Walters, The New Feminism (London: Virago, 1998), p. 6. 22. Ibid., p. 98. 23. Ibid., p. 175. 24. Ibid., p. 193. 25. Ibid., p. 84-5. 26. Ibid., p. 86. 27. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 157. Hereafter States of Injury. 28. See also Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity, 1988). 29. See, for example, Wendy Brown, op. cit., p. 152. 30. Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 106. Hereafter Edgework. 31. See A. Elliott, Making the Cut: How Cosmetic Surgery is Transforming our Lives (London: Reaktion Books, 2008). 32. Wendy Brown, Edgework, op. cit., p. 106. 33. See, for example, Wendy Brown, States of Injury, op. cit., p. 164. 34. As many critics of neoliberalism have argued, exploitation, domination and every other form of social inequality is rendered invisible as political phenomena to the extent that each individual’s social condition is judged as nothing other than the effect of his or her own choices and investments. Neoliberal rationality thus allows for the avoidance of any kind of collective structural or governmental responsibility for social and economic inequality. See Hamann, art. cit. p. 44. See also, for example, Wendy Brown, Edgework, op. cit.; David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Read, art. cit. 35. See, for example, Vicki Schultz, ‘Women “Before” the Law: Judicial Stories about Women, Work and Sex Segregation on the Job’ in J. Butler and J. Scott (eds.), Feminists Theorize the Political (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 297-341. 120