As a feminist, I’ve always assumed that by fighting to emancipate women I was building a better world – more egalitarian, just and free. But lately I’ve begun to worry that ideals pioneered by feminists are serving quite different ends. I worry, specifically, that our critique of sexism is now supplying the justification for new forms of inequality and exploitation.
作为一名女权主义者，我一直认为通过努力解放女性，我正在建设一个更美好的世界—更平等，更公正，和更自由。 但最近我开始担心女权主义者开创的理想服务于不同的目的。具体来说，我担心我们对性别歧视的批评现在为新形式的不平等和剥削提供了理由。
In a cruel twist of fate, I fear that the movement for women’s liberation has become entangled in a dangerous liaison with neoliberal efforts to build a free-market society. That would explain how it came to pass that feminist ideas that once formed part of a radical worldview are increasingly expressed in individualist terms. Where feminists once criticised a society that promoted careerism, they now advise women to “lean in”. A movement that once prioritised social solidarity now celebrates female entrepreneurs. A perspective that once valorised “care” and interdependence now encourages individual advancement and meritocracy.
在命运的残酷扭曲中，我担心女性解放运动已经陷入与新自由主义建立自由市场社会的努力的危险联系中。这可以解释为什么曾经构成激进世界观的一部分的女权主义思想越来越多地以个人主义的方式表达。女权主义者曾经批评过一个促进职业主义的社会，他们现在建议女性“倚靠”。 曾经优先考虑社会团结的运动现在庆祝女性企业家。曾经重视“关心”和相互依赖的观点现在鼓励个人努力和精英专制。
What lies behind this shift is a sea-change in the character of capitalism. The state-managed capitalism of the postwar era has given way to a new form of capitalism – “disorganised”, globalising, neoliberal. Second-wave feminism emerged as a critique of the first but has become the handmaiden of the second.
这种转变背后隐藏着资本主义特征的巨变。 战后时代的国家控制的资本主义已经让位于一种新的资本主义形式—“混乱”，全球化，新自由主义。第二波女权主义作为对前者的批判出现，但成为了后者的女仆。
With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that the movement for women’s liberation pointed simultaneously to two different possible futures. In a first scenario, it prefigured a world in which gender emancipation went hand in hand with participatory democracy and social solidarity; in a second, it promised a new form of liberalism, able to grant women as well as men the goods of individual autonomy, increased choice, and meritocratic advancement. Second-wave feminism was in this sense ambivalent. Compatible with either of two different visions of society, it was susceptible to two different historical elaborations.
回望过去，我们现在可以看到，女性解放运动同时指向了两种不同的未来。在第一种情况下，它预示着一个性别解放与参与式民主和社会团结手拉手的世界; 在第二种情况下，它承诺了一种新形式的自由主义，能够赋予女性和男性一样的个人自治，增加选择和精英专制的进步。 第二波女权主义在这个意义上是矛盾的。 与两种不同的社会愿景兼容，它容易受到两种不同的历史阐述的影响。
As I see it, feminism’s ambivalence has been resolved in recent years in favour of the second, liberal-individualist scenario – but not because we were passive victims of neoliberal seductions. On the contrary, we ourselves contributed three important ideas to this development.
在我看来，女权主义的矛盾心理近年来已经被解决的有利于第二种，自由主义—个人主义情景—但并不是因为我们是被动的被新自由主义诱惑的受害者。相反，我们自己为这种发展贡献了三个重要的观点。
One contribution was our critique of the “family wage”: the ideal of a male breadwinner-female homemaker family that was central to state-organised capitalism. Feminist criticism of that ideal now serves to legitimate “flexible capitalism”. After all, this form of capitalism relies heavily on women’s waged labour, especially low-waged work in service and manufacturing, performed not only by young single women but also by married women and women with children; not by only racialised women, but by women of virtually all nationalities and ethnicities. As women have poured into labour markets around the globe, state-organised capitalism’s ideal of the family wage is being replaced by the newer, more modern norm – apparently sanctioned by feminism – of the two-earner family.
一个贡献是我们对“家庭工资”的批判：一个男性养家糊口—女性家庭主妇的家庭的理想，这种家庭是国家组织的资本主义的核心。女权主义者对这一理想的批评现在为合法的“灵活的资本主义”服务。毕竟，这种形式的资本主义在很大程度上依赖于女性的劳动力，尤其是服务和制造业的低薪工作，参与者不仅有年轻的单身女性，而且还有已婚女性和有孩子的女性; 不仅仅是种族化的女性，而是几乎所有国籍和种族的女性。随着女性涌入全球劳动力市场，国家组织的资本主义家庭工资的理想正在被更新，更现代的—显然受到女权主义的认可的—双收入家庭的规范所取代。
Never mind that the reality that underlies the new ideal is depressed wage levels, decreased job security, declining living standards, a steep rise in the number of hours worked for wages per household, exacerbation of the double shift – now often a triple or quadruple shift – and a rise in poverty, increasingly concentrated in female-headed households. Neoliberalism turns a sow’s ear into a silk purse by elaborating a narrative of female empowerment. Invoking the feminist critique of the family wage to justify exploitation, it harnesses the dream of women’s emancipation to the engine of capital accumulation.
不要紧，新理想背后的现实是下降的工资水准，降低的工作保障率，下降的生活水平，每户工作小时数急剧上升，双班制加剧—现在往往是三班制或四班制—以及贫困的增加，越来越多地集中在女户主家庭。 新自由主义通过详细缩窄对增强女权的叙述，将母猪的耳朵变成丝绸钱包。援引女权主义者对家庭工资的批判以合理化剥削，它将女性解放的梦想运用到资本积累的引擎上。
Feminism has also made a second contribution to the neoliberal ethos. In the era of state-organised capitalism, we rightly criticised a constricted political vision that was so intently focused on class inequality that it could not see such “non-economic” injustices as domestic violence, sexual assault and reproductive oppression. Rejecting “economism” and politicising “the personal”, feminists broadened the political agenda to challenge status hierarchies premised on cultural constructions of gender difference. The result should have been to expand the struggle for justice to encompass both culture and economics. But the actual result was a one-sided focus on “gender identity” at the expense of bread and butter issues. Worse still, the feminist turn to identity politics dovetailed all too neatly with a rising neoliberalism that wanted nothing more than to repress all memory of social equality. In effect, we absolutised the critique of cultural sexism at precisely the moment when circumstances required redoubled attention to the critique of political economy.
女权主义也为新自由主义精神做出了第二种贡献。在国家组织的资本主义时代，我们正确地批评了一种如此专注于阶级不平等的狭隘的政治异象，以至于它无法看到家庭暴力，性侵犯和生育压迫等“非经济的”不公正。女权主义者拒绝“经济主义”并将“个人”政治化，扩展了政治议程以挑战以文化建构的性别差异为前提的地位等级制度。结果应该是在文化和经济领域扩大争取正义的斗争。但实际结果是片面地关注“性别认同”而牺牲面包和黄油问题。更糟糕的是，女权主义转向身份政治是与新自由主义的崛起完全吻合的，新自由主义只想压制关于社会平等的所有记忆。实际上，当环境需要加倍关注政治经济学批判的那一刻，我们绝对化了对文化性别歧视的批判。
Finally, feminism contributed a third idea to neoliberalism: the critique of welfare-state paternalism. Undeniably progressive in the era of state-organised capitalism, that critique has since converged with neoliberalism’s war on “the nanny state” and its more recent cynical embrace of NGOs. A telling example is “microcredit”, the programme of small bank loans to poor women in the global south. Cast as an empowering, bottom-up alternative to the top-down, bureaucratic red tape of state projects, microcredit is touted as the feminist antidote for women’s poverty and subjection. What has been missed, however, is a disturbing coincidence: microcredit has burgeoned just as states have abandoned macro-structural efforts to fight poverty, efforts that small-scale lending cannot possibly replace. In this case too, then, a feminist idea has been recuperated by neoliberalism. A perspective aimed originally at democratising state power in order to empower citizens is now used to legitimise marketisation and state retrenchment.
最后，女权主义为新自由主义贡献了第三个观点：对福利国家的家长主义的批判。尽管在国家组织的资本主义时代这是无可否认的进步，但这一批判从那时起就与新自由主义对“保姆国家”的战争以及最近对非政府组织的愤世嫉俗的拥抱汇合起来了。一个有说服力的例子是“小额信贷”，即向全球南方国家的贫困女性提供小额银行贷款的计划。作为一种增强，自下而上的替代方案变得自上而下，官僚主义的国家项目的繁文缛节，小额信贷被吹捧为对女性贫困和服从的女权主义解毒剂。然而，被错过的是一个令人不安的巧合：小额信贷已经蓬勃发展，正如各国放弃了消除宏观结构的对抗贫困的努力，而这是小规模贷款无法取代的努力。在这种情况下，新自由主义也补充了女权主义思想。最初目标为使国家权力民主化以增强民权的愿景现在被用来使市场化和政府裁员合法化。
In all these cases, feminism’s ambivalence has been resolved in favour of (neo)liberal individualism. But the other, solidaristic scenario may still be alive. The current crisis affords the chance to pick up its thread once more, reconnecting the dream of women’s liberation with the vision of a solidary society. To that end, feminists need to break off our dangerous liaison with neoliberalism and reclaim our three “contributions” for our own ends.
在所有这些案例中，女权主义的矛盾心理已经被解决得有利于（新）自由个人主义。 但另一方面，团结的情景可能仍然存在。 当前的危机使人们有机会再次回归，重新将女性解放的梦想与团结社会的愿景联系起来。为此，女权主义者们需要打破我们与新自由主义的危险联系，并为我们自己的目的收回我们的三个“贡献”。
First, we might break the spurious link between our critique of the family wage and flexible capitalism by militating for a form of life that de-centres waged work and valorises unwaged activities, including – but not only – carework. Second, we might disrupt the passage from our critique of economism to identity politics by integrating the struggle to transform a status order premised on masculinist cultural values with the struggle for economic justice. Finally, we might sever the bogus bond between our critique of bureaucracy and free-market fundamentalism by reclaiming the mantle of participatory democracy as a means of strengthening the public powers needed to constrain capital for the sake of justice.
首先，我们可以通过组织一种去中心化有偿工作和为无偿活动提供价值，包括—但不只是—照顾工作以打破我们对家庭工资的批判和灵活资本主义之间的虚假联系。其次，我们可能通过对以男性主义文化价值观为基础的地位秩序与对经济正义的斗争相结合的斗争，将我们对经济主义的批判从身份政治中解放出来。最后，我们可以通过回归参与式民主的手段来切断我们对官僚主义的批判和自由市场原教旨主义之间的虚假联系，以此作为增强为正义而限制资本所需的公共权力的手段。
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/feminism-capitalist-handmaiden-neoliberal
