state of nature

One Question is a monthly series in which we ask leading thinkers to give a brief answer to a single question.

This month, to mark International Women’s Day on March 8th, we asked a number of women academics:

What is the biggest challenge facing women today?

The response has been huge. Overall we have received 25 answers, and as such have split them into two parts. Part one can be found here. Please take the time to read through both.

Sara R. Farris

I think we should begin by acknowledging that not all women are the same and not all of them face the same challenges. The brutality of neoliberal capitalism in the last twenty years or so – with its anti-welfare agenda, its profound class inequalities and its intensification of racism – has deepened the divisions among women along class and racial lines in particular, but also along gender lines when we think of the exclusion that trans-women encounter in some feminist and women’s circles.

While the women belonging to the wealthy 1% of the population – and I am thinking of course of the ‘neoliberal feminists’ à la Sheryl Sandberg – face the challenge of feeling in full control of the corporate boardrooms and making even more money, the large majority of women, or the 99%, have the problem of making ends meet. Migrant and ethnic minority women face additional challenges insofar as the racism ingrained in western labour markets and societies at large relegates them to the most precarious, low-paid and under-valued jobs in the socially reproductive sector (as cleaners, nannies, domestic workers and so forth). READ MORE

One Question is a monthly series in which we ask leading thinkers to give a brief answer to a single question.

This month, to mark International Women’s Day on March 8th, we asked a number of women academics:

What is the biggest challenge facing women today?

The response has been so great that we have split the answers into two parts. Please take the time to read through both.

Cinzia Arruzza

If I had to summarise in a slogan the greatest challenge women face today, I would say that ‘taking feminism back’ is the one. From the 1990s onwards, contrary to the past, in a number of countries formal gender equality and the recognition of formal rights for LGBTQ people has ceased to be a taboo. Even right-wing political forces have started to adopt some form of ‘feminist’ discourse to justify their policies. The most notable phenomena in this sense are those recently labelled as ‘homonationalism’ and ‘femonationalism’, that is, the mobilisation of ideas of gender and sexual equality stemming from feminism and gay liberation struggles in order to justify military aggressions.

This, of course, is not a novel phenomenon as women’s bodies and ‘liberation’ have been instrumentalised by colonial forces already before. But neoliberal capitalism has managed to both exhume and greatly expand this practice. Besides this adoption of feminist slogans by nationalist and neoliberal forces, we have also witnessed an increasing capacity of right-wing or conservative parties to endorse women’s leadership: Sarah Palin, Marine Le Pen, Theresa May, Angela Merkel and Giorgia Meloni are only some examples of this phenomenon, which shows all the limits of a formalistic approach to gender equality and the representation of women in elected institutions.

The candidature of Hillary Clinton in the US presidential election of 2016 also marked the impasse of the liberal feminist approach to gender equality. Hillary Clinton, in fact, embodied the kind of lean-in feminism that privileges the experience and aspirations of upper middle class women, while leaving the rest behind. Her candidature also symbolised the disconnection between women’s representation in elected institutions and the improvement of the large majority of women’s lives.

The challenge we face today is, therefore, to retrieve feminism as a force of social transformation for all women – starting from the liberation of working class, migrant, trans women and women of colour – and as a form of critique of social relations in their complexity, starting from capitalism and its effects on women’s lives. Together with other feminist authors and activists I have labelled this anticapitalist and antiracist feminism as ‘feminism for the 99%’, by which we understand a class-based feminism capable of being a force of transformation not just for women, but also for what we understand by class struggle, and for the life on this planet as a whole. READ MORE