Affirmative Consent and Neoliberal Bodies

The individual yes vs. the social no

I am writing this with great relief as the “crisis” of sexual assaults on college campuses in New York State has finally been addressed through affirmative consent, or “yes means yes” legislation from Governor Cuomo. Having worked for years as the director of a college-based women’s center, having ...

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On Wendy Brown

Let’s start with an example. Brown discusses the 2003 Bremer Orders, issued by Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq after the United States and its allies defeated Saddam Hussein and occupied the country. The Bremer Orders appear at first blush to be a classic instance of neoliberal ...
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Another New Kind of Marriage

Has fiscal conservatism found a partner in gay rights?

On Friday, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a decision guaranteeing the right of same-sex couples to marry in every state in the nation. This landmark case concludes just as another marriage is crumbling: the marriage between anti-gay politics and fiscal conservatism.

Since the 1980s, ...

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Think Outside the Boss

Cooperative alternatives to the sharing economy

Digital labor touches all of us, whether you are browsing Tinder profiles in your spare time, searching for “Jersey Shore” on Google, or ordering an Uber taxi.

In this afternoon’s talk, I will highlight what is and what could be successful about 21st century work and what are some tendencies that ...

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Feminism, Capitalism and Social Transformation

Feminist theorists today are increasingly returning to the insight that ‘capitalist society’ must constitute the critical frame for understanding contemporary forms of women’s subordination and feminist struggles to overcome it. This renewed interest in the connections between feminism and capitalism raises a host of difficult questions concerning capitalism, socialism as ...
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Neoliberalism and the Feminine Subject*

Foucault’s radical intervention in feminist theory, and more generally in the philosophy of the body, has been the crucial claim that any analysis of embodiment must recognise: how power relations are constitutive of the embodied subjects involved in them. His studies of disciplinary technologies, for example, show how individuals are ...

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Neoliberalism and the Feminine Subject*

The Future of Democracy

Martin Jacques, a former leader of the British Communist Party, poses an important challenge in Friday’s Financial Times. He questions the widespread “Western” (i.e. European and American) assumption that our democratic system is superior to China’s authoritarian state, and the usual correlate, that the Chinese system is unstable. As Jacques ...
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