Libertarianism

[Montmorency1]

From your perspective or experience, have many streams of feminism been predicated on libertarianism?

I refer to both political and metaphysical libertarianism, between which it is important to distinguish, though they are obviously closely related.

I broach this apropos of no single source, but from a general impression that libertarianism is central to most feminisms.

I think "Empire" is a political post-post-structuralist political work. I think it aims at presenting (the beginnings) of a counter-discourse to neo-liberalism. I also think it is massively indebted to Deleuze as well as Spinoza.

I'm not sure I can think of anything more recent.

There is a feminist philosopher I'm thinking of, but I've forgotten her name ... She wrote a little book ... it is, literally, quite small.

I would really, really like some modern stuff to read.

If SF is science fiction, that is really going beyond my comfort zone!!

This thread, like all philosophy and jurisprudence, is bending my noodle so please bear with me.

I'm a bit surprised that you are keen on post-structural feminism Buffy but then I don't know much about it I wrote it off after reading Butler's views that male and female sex are socially constructed. What is it that appeals to you?

summer I honestly think free-will and agency are among the least utilised drives or forces in people's actions. I don't have an intellectual basis for that, just observations on how people behave. I certainly don't think we are all individual actors making rational choices and people are making huge amounts of money betting that we aren't, whether on trading floors, marketing departments or otherwise.

I agree there are plural feminisms but on the other hand, words have to mean something and simply labelling something "feminist" doesn't make it so.

Ooh, is 'Empire' easy to find? And if you remember the other book, please let me know. There is a book called The Twilight of Equality which is about neoliberalism, but I can't remember how far it goes to countering it.

summer sorry that last sentence was truncated and looks more aggressive than I intended. Meant to add - how do we draw the line?

I think OP's critique of governmentality was quite Foucault-ish.

I also think that the questions enzima put to that critique (what, exactly, is so wrong with harmonious relations? [and adding my own tuppence-worth to enzima's questions:] Why is some post-governmentality state prefereable? What would it be like for women?) are really, really valid questions.

When I was younger, I though I knew the answers to those: of course we must do away with this pretence of harmonious relations - it's a soft cosh! - it merely hides the violence!!

Now I am not so sure. I think a lot more thought needs to go into the things that would need to be in place, and the stages on the way to transformation. I think that this desire for an extreme change is, actually, a form of Idealism, and particulary crap for those who are not yet full subjects within the existing system (yes, I mean women there. Or at least, many women, a fair portion of the time, in various ways).

FloraFox, I disagree, I think people are spending huge amounts of money trying to inform our choices, or predict them, which is a different matter. We make choices every minute of the day practically, what to eat for breakfast, whether to drive to work or take the car, whether to buy that Latte on the way to work, whether to smoke, vape or not to use any nicotine-containing product, what exercise to do. These choices are all informed by the information we have, or believe, is in our interests. Or we can rationalise to ourselves. That is the central premise of neoliberalism, I think, anyway. The fact that there are real and insurmountable barriers to some of those choices is where a critique needs to come in.

Flora Fox: "Meant to add - how do we draw the line? [in defining "feminism"]"

Blessed if I know. Agree it's an issue. Perhaps just being aware it's an issue will help?

"Empire" is here: www.amazon.co.uk/Empire-Michael-Hardt/dp/0674006712

Thank you very much for the book recommendation, summerflower. I will go and look it up.

I've remembered name of feminist: Nina Power. A couple of friends have highly recommended her.

summer the choices might be informed but it is not just barriers that prevent them being in our self-interest. There are extremes of harmful behaviour such as self-harm or serious drug abuse but there are also more moderate harmful choices around food, alcohol, spending money etc. We have a lot of law and regulation to protect people from their own choices, especially in financial matters. We have statutory cooling off provisions for some types of contracts that recognise that we make bad decisions and sometimes need to get out the consequences of our own actions.

I agree that the barriers need to be critiqued but I think the idea that we make self-interested choices also needs thought.

I can't even read critiques of the notion of "choice" at the moment, summerflower, I'm living it! It's supposedly my "choice" to be working in a really low-paid job and to spend every waking hour servicing the needs of others (OK. When I'm not on mumsnet ).

i see the word "choice" and I feel like crying.

I've moaned elsewhere about this but I really think there is a rise in the notion of everything to do with having children and working as being all about "choice", and "lifestyle choice" in particular. What this seems to do is to render these areas unavailable to political examination - and (important this) class resistance/calls for change.

Buffy thanks, I'll have a look at Laurel Richardson. I think I get what you mean about knowing feminism versus doing it.

I don't disagree with you, Flora, my point was about the premise of neoliberalism. Fortunately we don't (yet) live in a completely neoliberal state. Nonetheless, a lot of the regulation is to prevent the state picking up the tab in the long run, and individuals harming others as well.

cat I agree with you. None of our 'choices' happen in a vacuum.

I'm not advocating neoliberalism, just trying to understand it as an idea (ideology?). To be clear. I am getting a bit worried how I am coming across now.

I also, off topic, think it is a counselling mantra, isn't it? Everything you do is a choice, because you either accept it or change it. The idea is that you cam change anything if you want to enough. Which is patent nonsense, I can't leave my job when I have two dc, remove them from school and go travelling. Well, theoretically, I could, but I 'choose' not to. That is about the level of it.

I'm bothered by this as well:

it is important that groups be interdependent but not dependent upon each other, as this causes strain and upheaval, which reduces efficiency

How are these "groups" to be formulated? In an earlier post, you talk of "gender groups". Are you proposing some kind of economic segregation by gender? I may be misunderstanding, but your project has a whiff of essentialism and heterosexism about it.

I found this article to be an illuminating examination of the concept of free choice and how it functions within feminism:

An assumed underlying ideal of “free choice” naturalises some decisions and not others. The implication is that some decisions may occur purely as a result of individual proclivity, rather than all decisions being the necessary outcome of many relevant factors. The way it usually functions in feminist discourse is to provide an intangible and unfalsifiable standard with which practices that are demonstrably harmful to women (from prostitution to wearing high heels) can be justified. Naturalising some decisions with the idea of Free Choice reduces them to a matter of taste (ie, some people just like X regardless of anything else), and voids them of any political or materialist analysis. Rarely is this framing used to lobby against skewed parameters that push groups in a particular direction.

rootveg.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/free-choice-does-not-exist/

My brand of posthumanism envisages humanity as the bootstrap to an iterative series of designed races. One race develops and tutors the next, and then enters the phase of planned obsolescence and goes extinct.

Obviously, after the first iteration this species would no longer be human - perhaps not even close to it. See also, "Semantic Apocalypse".

In case it wasn't clear, all goals and motivations of governance converge on this one point in my view. Forever.

Perhaps implicit to this program is the merger of the subject and the object - they would be considered non-distinct. This would be accomplished by the technological enhancement of the organic capacity to recursively process the process that processes processes that process (i.e. meta-consciousness), as well as a unification of all such into a single "experience".

I doubt any of these ideas are particularly novel, though I understand them to be frightening to many, since they literally involve the "alienation" of humanity.

But many might also find it easy to simply dismiss such musings as implausible or irrelevant sub-nihilism. My response to that is, "oh well".

ezinma:

Hopefully that addresses some of your questions. As for groups, the idea is that however groups are composed, or of whomever they are composed, their inter-relations should be that way.

Described here as "a prison of activity" — a useful expression, I think. The article talks about a "sexual contract" imposed on young women, narrowing the field in which they seek to engage politically by, essentially, reducing politics to a series of 'choices' that are drawn up and dangled in front of us by governments. Simultaneously, there has been a powerful and "oddly obsessive" reinvestment in 'femininity', driven by the fashion and beauty industries, which seeks to bind young women's subjectivity to the demonstration of (hetero-)sexual 'agency'.

This … was absolutely not saying, “Get involved in community politics, certainly not get involved in feminism, get involved in childcare debates, get involved in industrial debates about equal pay," which is still, of course, by the way, not equal pay at all. So there was a kind of cutting off point that government was saying, “You know what? We’ll look after you”. And who is we? Well “we” is pretty much the same old male hierarchy with a few odd women.

That was a reply to Donkey Skin, talking about "free choice" and feminism.

To the above, it must be acknowledged that women are totally invested in this "prison", and have helped in large part to build its walls.

Just as the Native Americans, native Africans, and native Asians played an indispensable role in their own disenfranchisement and marginalization by actively allying with European colonists and invaders to war against one another.

And the hilarious thing is, the men are no less prisoners (of their own device!) than women are. Narratives such as the quoted one belie the unwitting character of human slavery - slavery to the universe much more than to each other.

But of course, it is the slavery that is visible which we are wont to emphasize, the slavery that stings us most. What we don't know can't hurt us, it seems...

Thank you muchly for all the reading suggestions.

New Question:

How do you keep a ... library? index? map? of blog ... addresses? Is there a way? I think we can tell I am a bit new to this because I don;t even know the words to describe what I'm asking for.

(Thanks in advance.)

Those recommending Empire - is it best to start there or go straight to Hardt and Negri's Commonwealth from 2011? I'm moving from political theory to international relations in Autumn so currently building my summer reading list :-)

I proper laughed out loud at Buffy's earlier comment about generally liking "post-" things. I agree

The term "post-feminism" isn't used much these days, is it?

Thanks ezinma. Interesting article. This resonates with me, especially as I was a teenager just getting interested in feminism at the time she says the backlash to feminism really took hold (mid-90s). I distinctly remember feminism being scorned among my peers, and the idea that cool girls were unbothered by strip clubs and porn, because we were all equal now, weren't we?

I also began to recognize that there was a kind of fearfulness on the part of a younger generation of women. They somehow feared male disapproval: it was as though the idea of sexual politics itself had got lost. And that then induced this kind of timidity or fearfulness, on the part of young women.

I don't agree with her that it's a good thing that feminism is 'fragmented, dispersed, contradictory and defined in terms of difference'. IMO successful political movements have certain core values and effect change through solidarity-based activism around those values. Part of the problem with feminism these days is that the media have declared anything - from capitalism to porn to high heels – can be feminist if a woman is 'choosing' it.