Allen17
10-21-2016, 11:32 AM
In light of the increasingly "inevitable" outcome of Our First Woman President...
One of the insidious things about neoliberalism is how it has managed to absorb our vibrant, multifaceted liberation struggles into itself and spit them back out to us as monotone (dollar-bill-green) self-actualization narratives. The way this has happened to feminism is particularly instructive. As I wrote in Dissent last winter, the so-called “second wave” of feminism fought for women to gain access to work outside of the home and outside of the “pink-collar” fields. Yet in doing so, as Barbara Ehrenreich has written, some feminists wound up abandoning the fight for better conditions in what had always been considered women’s work—whether that be as teachers and nurses, or the work done in the home for little or no pay.
In fact, the flight of middle-class women into the paid workplace left other women, namely domestic workers, cleaning up the mess left behind, and many of those middle-class women seemed unwilling to deal with the fact that they too, sometimes, could oppress. As Ehrenreich wrote in “Maid to Order,” a piece published in the anthology, Global Woman, which she co-edited with Arlie Russell Hochschild, “To make a mess that another person will have to deal with—the dropped socks, the toothpaste sprayed on the bathroom mirror, the dirty dishes left from a late-night snack—is to exert domination in one of its more silent and intimate forms.”
While some women have experienced the workplace as a site of liberation and increased power, for many others, the workplace was never a choice. [b]Particularly for women of color, whose domestic work was excluded intentionally from New Deal-era labor laws, the workplace was and remains a site of oppression. And to this day, women remain concentrated in the economy’s lowest-paying jobs—some two-thirds of minimum-wage workers are women, and three of the fastest-growing occupations in the country are retail sales, food service, and home health care, which are both low-wage and female-dominated jobs. Home health care workers, in many ways the face of the new service economy, were just ruled only “partial” public employees by the right-wing Roberts Supreme Court. More than 90 percent of them, according to the Economic Policy Institute, are female.
Those are jobs at which, no matter how hard one leans in, the view doesn’t change.
http://www.politicalresearch.org/2014/09/01/neoliberal-feminists-dont-want-women-to-organize/
The bourgeois feminism exemplified by the likes of Hillary Clinton and Shery Sandberg is, at its core, advocacy for rich white women whose definition of "feminism" is granting women like themselves - professionals, businesswomen, and similar corporate careerists - the "right" to join and assimilate into the capitalist ruling class (which yes, is dominated by white men) and thus, exploit and oppress poor and working class people - men and women alike, along with poor children for that matter - not just in the United States, but on a global scale.
The trouble with glass ceilings is that when they are broken, the shards that fall to the ground are deadly for all of the people who can't reach the ceiling, and never will. Fuck that...
One of the insidious things about neoliberalism is how it has managed to absorb our vibrant, multifaceted liberation struggles into itself and spit them back out to us as monotone (dollar-bill-green) self-actualization narratives. The way this has happened to feminism is particularly instructive. As I wrote in Dissent last winter, the so-called “second wave” of feminism fought for women to gain access to work outside of the home and outside of the “pink-collar” fields. Yet in doing so, as Barbara Ehrenreich has written, some feminists wound up abandoning the fight for better conditions in what had always been considered women’s work—whether that be as teachers and nurses, or the work done in the home for little or no pay.
In fact, the flight of middle-class women into the paid workplace left other women, namely domestic workers, cleaning up the mess left behind, and many of those middle-class women seemed unwilling to deal with the fact that they too, sometimes, could oppress. As Ehrenreich wrote in “Maid to Order,” a piece published in the anthology, Global Woman, which she co-edited with Arlie Russell Hochschild, “To make a mess that another person will have to deal with—the dropped socks, the toothpaste sprayed on the bathroom mirror, the dirty dishes left from a late-night snack—is to exert domination in one of its more silent and intimate forms.”
While some women have experienced the workplace as a site of liberation and increased power, for many others, the workplace was never a choice. [b]Particularly for women of color, whose domestic work was excluded intentionally from New Deal-era labor laws, the workplace was and remains a site of oppression. And to this day, women remain concentrated in the economy’s lowest-paying jobs—some two-thirds of minimum-wage workers are women, and three of the fastest-growing occupations in the country are retail sales, food service, and home health care, which are both low-wage and female-dominated jobs. Home health care workers, in many ways the face of the new service economy, were just ruled only “partial” public employees by the right-wing Roberts Supreme Court. More than 90 percent of them, according to the Economic Policy Institute, are female.
Those are jobs at which, no matter how hard one leans in, the view doesn’t change.
http://www.politicalresearch.org/2014/09/01/neoliberal-feminists-dont-want-women-to-organize/
The bourgeois feminism exemplified by the likes of Hillary Clinton and Shery Sandberg is, at its core, advocacy for rich white women whose definition of "feminism" is granting women like themselves - professionals, businesswomen, and similar corporate careerists - the "right" to join and assimilate into the capitalist ruling class (which yes, is dominated by white men) and thus, exploit and oppress poor and working class people - men and women alike, along with poor children for that matter - not just in the United States, but on a global scale.
The trouble with glass ceilings is that when they are broken, the shards that fall to the ground are deadly for all of the people who can't reach the ceiling, and never will. Fuck that...