以下文章發表於《逆流》（Against the Current）十七卷第一期，2002年
取自http://www.igc.apc.org/solidarity/indexATC.html
Feminism in the New Gender Order :
Restructured Capital, Reconstructed Identities
by Johanna Brenner
A RECENT OPINION poll, showing that the percent of U.S. women
willing to label themselves feminist has declined since the early
1990s, sparked another round of pronouncements about the death of
feminism. Yet in that same poll, women with a "favorable" opinion
about "the women's movement" ranged from a vast majority among
women 18-29 (84%) to a solid majority among women 45-64 (63%).
Like this opinion poll, the place of feminism in U.S. political
life is difficult to decipher. I think one way to understand
what's happened to feminism and to chart a course of political
action is to see this period as a time of consolidation of a new
gender order, within a profound restructuring of the global
capitalist economy.
By a gender order, I mean the social and cultural constructions
of gender identities as well as institutionalized relations of
power and privilege organized around gender difference. Second
wave feminism was truly historic—challenging and overturning a
deeply entrenched web of culturally and legally sanctioned
exclusionary practices, practices which disempowered women
economically, socially and politically.
Assumptions about natural gender differences in intellect,
character, or capacities have been, if not eliminated,
fundamentally revised. The old patriarchal system is
disappearing, despite the attempts of a socially conservative
right-wing movement to restore it.
In its place has emerged a gender order that is less unitary
and stable, less reliant on fixed gender identities. There is
much more social and cultural approval for diverse household
arrangements and gender relations—working mothers, "stay-home
fathers," cohabiting couples, blended families, gay families.
In one sense, this new gender order is the culmination of a
century-long struggle by women against pre-capitalist constraints
on their ability to participate in the capitalist market and
the liberal political order. All women in today's United States
have unprecedented freedom to compete with men in the labor force
and the political system and to negotiate the terms of their
sexual and domestic relationships.
But only some women—particularly those well placed by their
class/race position—have been able to strike quite favorable
bargains with employers and with male partners. Their capacity
to do so rests on a large, low-paid pool of other women employed
in the rapidly expanding service economy.
The importance of immigrant women workers in the commodification
of caregiving in the U.S. is linked to a global process of
"primitive accumulation," the forced removal of populations
from their lands, which is driving women onto the labor market
and out of their own countries.
The "internationalization" of caregiving work is one of the key
features of the new gender order. The women, largely women of
color, performing caring labor as wage workers, and the millions
more employed in clerical, technical, and manufacturing work, are
far less able than women from the affluent upper middle class to
take advantage of women's new access to positions of economic and
political power.
Yet the very fact that women with more cultural capital and
economic resources do succeed "proves" that success is possible.
The dilemmas that so many working-class women experience in the
new gender order appear as individual problems—the result of
bad choices or bad luck. The constraints that reproduce gender
difference and inequality in the household and the labor market
are invisible because they take shape "behind the backs of women,"
outside of relationships freely entered into.
These constraints arise from the fact that in this country
primary responsibility for meeting human needs for care is still
located in the private family household. Families do draw on
market services (e.g. daycare) but still the sheer amount of
unpaid labor most families must perform is large.
Because care is considered a predominantly private
responsibility and not also a social responsibility, families
are forced to manage pretty much on their own. This structure
disadvantages women in relation to men within the economy and
polity because it limits possibilities for breaking away from
a gendered division of labor within the household, because it
reinforces the devaluation of caring work and because it
disadvantages women who are solo mothers.
To really socialize the responsibility of caregiving—and
to reward caregiving at levels that would attract men to do
it as family work and as wage work—requires a significant
redistribution of wealth, reordered priorities in, and expansion
of, government spending and increased regulation of employer
practices. All these changes would directly threaten powerful
capitalist interests.
Not surprising, feminists have been here frustrated at every
turn, even as they continue to successfully extend and defend
the accomplishments of the second wave. This pattern of
tremendous gains on the one hand, and abysmal failure on
the other, is reflected in the new gender order.
It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that liberal
feminism is now hegemonic in U.S. culture and politics. Of
course, this worldview continues to be contested, especially
by a religious right which wants to restore the patriarchal
family household.
But while social conservatives have caused both feminist
and gay rights organizations much pain, they have achieved
no definitive victories. Posing a very broad socially
conservative agenda, the right has been successful in
attacking only relatively powerless groups.
For example, they have curtailed access to abortion for
teenagers (with parental notification and consent laws), for
rural women and for poor women (denying funding for abortions
through public health provision), and forced public schools
to include "abstinence" in sex education. But they have not
been able to roll back the clock on the sexual revolution.
In this particular battle they are up against not only a
well-organized, well-funded and persistent "pro-choice"
political lobby (that includes but is not limited to feminist o
rganizations) but also powerful market forces that are driving
the pervasive commodification of women's sexuality.
The same can be said for their backlash movement against
homosexuality. The right has done better here, but is slowly
being pushed back, partly because mainstream gay rights groups
have increasing political clout, partly because the gay
community has access to economic resources, partly because
mainstream civil rights groups and unions have been won over
to support gay rights, and partly because niche marketing has
promoted gay visibility in the media.
Organizations that defend and support "women's interests"
have maintained a firm foothold in the U.S. political scene.
Feminist organizations have a legitimate voice, can amass
financial resources, and influence politics when they remain
within the terms of this now dominant political discourse.
They draw broad support from women insofar as they focus on
equality of opportunity rather than equality of result, and
on individual rights rather than group rights.
The declining numbers of women who identify explicitly with f
eminism reflect the highly selective and limited incorporation
of second-wave feminist ideas into both social practice and
culture. Insofar as feminism (in comparison to "the women's
movement") signifies a "gender first" political activism,
radicalism, and separation from men it carries a challenge
that, for many women, is either too scary or too far from the
dilemmas that shape their daily lives.
It is not the "backlash" politics of the reactionary right
but rather the triumph of neoliberalism that is feminism's
great challenge. The celebration of the market and the
demonization of the welfare state; the assertion of paid
work as a moral good; and the invocation of "self-sufficiency"
and "independence" as the touchstones of respectable adulthood
—these are at the heart of what might be called, in contrast
to the religious right, the modernizing right.
Although the "new" Democratic party puts a slightly more
populist spin on this basic conservative message, Democrats
have essentially adopted it. Witness Clinton's vicious
campaign to "end welfare as we know it," which culminated in
the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996
abolishing single mothers' federal entitlement to income
support.
By no accident was Clinton surrounded by several Black
women, former welfare mothers, when he signed that bill.
Clinton's rhetoric about welfare's "cycle of dependence"
not only reproduced rather than challenged the racist
figuration of poor Black women as undeserving welfare
queens. He also adopted the modernizing right's discourse
arguing that welfare reform would give single mothers "a
hand up" rather than "a handout."
This framing delegitimizes government efforts to improve
the lives of people collectively through public spending
(a handout). Instead, the role of the state is only to
"help" individuals enter into the market, where they can
enjoy the supposedly equal opportunities for upward mobility
that await those willing to make the effort.
The dominance of the modernizing right is made possible by
the disorganization and weakness of the social forces that
are the traditional base of the Democratic Party. A highly
competitive and turbulent economy now dominates life in the
United States.
As in other significant periods of capitalist restructuring,
the institutions of working-class political and economic
defense which had been built up under the old economic
order and which might have worked (although not all that
well) previously are now utterly unable to respond to new
conditions. Just as the old forms of trade unionism won't
work in the new world economic order, the old forms of
feminism won't work in the new gender order.
In the 1960s and '70s it was possible for a radical
feminist movement to develop and to make substantial
gains alongside a trade unionism that was for the most
part bureaucratic and demobilized. Today, feminism's
fate is tied to the fate of trade unionism and other
forms of collective resistance to corporate capital.
Only in the context of a broad, militant and disruptive
movement capable of wresting real concessions from capital
can feminism hope to speak to the dilemmas of working-class
women's lives.
This renewed feminism is going to look very different—
in organization and politics—from the second wave.
Historically, feminism has been a movement by and for
women to challenge gender oppression. The issue of how
gender oppression is linked to other relations of domination
has never taken center stage, although working-class feminists
and feminist women of color have had no choice but to think
about it.
Within the second wave, there were important political
currents, led by feminist women of color, arguing for a
theory and practice that reflected the multiple, "intersecting"
oppressions that shape most women's experience and identities.
This insight—that a gender-only or gender-first politics
cannot mobilize the majority of women, and will only reproduce
within the movement the relations of domination outside it—is
critical to a feminist practice capable of challenging the
new gender order.
This implies that gender-based organizations will have to
take up issues of race and class oppression. For example,
women's organizations fighting domestic violence have gained
increasing legitimacy for their cause through close working
relationships with the police, the courts, and the corrections
system. They will have to risk those ties, becoming allies
to the grassroots movements now organizing against the prison
-industrial complex, the death penalty, and the criminalization
of poverty through the so-called war on drugs.
Intersectionality implies also that women's leadership and
issues of gender oppression will have to become more central
to anti-racism and trade-union organizing. One of the crucial
legacies of second wave feminism is changing attitudes toward
women's political leadership.
Where sexism drove women out of the '60s left, today women
are sharing leadership with men in many grassroots movements
—anti-sweatshop groups on college campuses, mobilizations by
high school students against anti-immigrant initiatives in
California, the "Critical Resistance" mobilizations against
the prison-industrial complex, the Black Radical Congress—
and in the trade unions.
Women's caucuses and informal women's networks have often
been effective strategies for integrating feminist perspectives
into organizations. Women of color are beginning to speak out
against and in some instances successfully challenge the
historic intensely masculinist and heterosexist biases of
civil rights organizations.
Lesbians and gay men have convinced their unions to take a
stand on and contribute to campaigns for lesbian/gay rights;
and feminist trade union members have forced their unions to
"come out" for abortion rights.
True, our movements are weak and now on the defensive. But
the gains of the feminist, anti-racist and gay liberation
movements have opened up possibilities for coalition-building
that are historically unprecedented.
Within the last two years, the world wide movement against
global capitalism, focused on the World Trade Organization,
the World Bank/International Monetary Fund, G8 etc. has
brought renewed energy and hope to the left. The labor/
environmental alliance has tremendous radical potential.
But let us be sure that within this movement, racism and
gender oppression are central as well—the incarceration of
poor men of color, the denial of welfare to single mothers,
the cuts in public services and the disregard of our human
right to be caregivers. Let us not forget that these are
the face of "structural adjustment" in the United States.
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