Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History

This chapter proposes to situate the trajectory of second-wave feminism in relation to the recent history of capitalism. In a fine instance of the cunning of history, utopian desires found a second life as feeling currents that legitimated the transition to a new form of capitalism: post-Fordist, transnational, neoliberal. If second-wave feminism partook of the general aura of 1960s radicalism, it nevertheless stood in a tense relation with other emancipatory movements. In general, second-wave feminism remained ambivalently Westphalian, even as it rejected the economism, androcentrism and étatism of state-organized capitalism. Neoliberalism’s rise coincided with a major alteration in the political culture of…