virginity, respectability politics, moral panics

THE CAMMI6I VAGES HOVKV0RK

The New York WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK COMMITTEE is part of a nationwide organization that is campaigning for WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK from the government for ALL WOMEN married or not with or eithout children with or without native or immigrant lesbian or straight a second job

HOUSEWORK IS OUR COMMON PROBLEM LET'S MAKE IT OUR COMMON STRUGGLE We demand WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK because we cannot afford to work endless hours in the home and then depend on a Ban or on welfare or have to take a second job BECAUSE WE HAVE NO MONEY we can call our own. Nobody works as much as we do. WE ALL HEED MORE MONEY NOT MORE WORK.

WE'RE NEVER UNEMPLOYED WE'RE DUST Business and Government profit from our work - THEY SHOULD PAY FOR IT. We know they need us so we can set the terms.

WE DEMANDWAGES FOR HOUSEWORK To cut down on housework - to eat out, get machines to

do some of the work, and refuse to be slaves to the house

To be able to decide working conditions and wages on the second job, and if_ we want it in the first place

To stand up to men when we work WITH them and when we work FOR them - if we had our own money we could

To decide what our sex lives should be like

To decide if, when and under what conditions to have children

To give our children what we want them to have

To demand and WIN paid holidays away from ALL work

To demand and WIN decent housing

30IN OUR CAMPAIGN All over the US and in several other countries of the world women are organizing speak outs, rallies, marches for WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK. We speak in different languages but we are all saying the same thing.

WE ARE A STOREFRONTCAMPAIGN OFFICE

Z88 8 8 •* S W t (on 5 * A * ) in- BROOKLYN Come and visit us while shopping

SAT. 11 a.m. to to 12 a.m.2 p.m. WED. 9:30 a.m. New York" WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK COMMITTEE - We have discussion groups, video tapes, cassettes, literature, speakers available to talk with your group. Call 625 0780 or 788 2822

WAGES n« HOUSEWORK NOTICE TO ALL GOVERNMENTS

The women of the world are serving notice. We clean your homes and factories. We raise the next generation of workers for you. Whatever else we may do, we are the housewives of the world. In return for our work, you have only asked us to work harder.

We are serving notice to you that we intend to be paid for the work we do. We want wages for every dirty toilet, every painful childbirth, every indecent assault, every cup of coffee and every smile. And if we don't get what we want, then we will simply refuse to work any longer.

We have brought our children to be good citizens and to respect your laws and you have put them in factories, in prisons, in ghettos and in typing pools. Our children deserve more than you can offer and now we will bring them up to EXPECT more.

We have borne babies for you when you. needed more workers, and we have submitted to sterilization when you didn't. Our wombs are not government property any longer.

We have scrubbed and polished and oiled and waxed and scoured until our arms and backs ached, and you have only created more dirt. Now you will rot in your owp__ garbage.

We have worked in the isolation of our homes when you. needed us to and we have taken on a second job too when you needed that. Now we want to decide WHEN we work, HOW we work, and WHO we work for. We want to be able to decide NOT TO WORK AT ALL —like you.

We are teachers,, and nurses and secretaries and prostitutes and actresses and childcare workers and hostesses and

THE

and cooks and cleaning ladies-and. worjcers of every variety. We have sweated while you have grown rich. Now we want back wealth we have produced. WE WANT IT IN CASH, RETROACTIVE AND IMMEDIATELY. AND WE WANT ALL OF IT.

CAMPAIGN FOR WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK

HOUSEWORK-UMttlDVJORK The crime against us internationally, from which all other crimes against us flow, is our life sentence of housework at home and outside, servicing men, children, and other women, in order to produce and reproduce the working class. For this work we are never paid a wage.

This crime of work pid wagelessness brands us for life as the weaker sex and delivers us powerless to employers, government planners and legislators, doctors, the police, prisons and mental institutions as well as the individual men for a lifetime of servitude and inprisonment.

Our campaign for wages for housework is our demand for power to refuse the social and sexual onslaught on our minds, our bodies and our relations — in a word, our demand for power to refuse this destiny of work which we carry in every country, wherever we find ourselves.

THE OWE

We have been divided by the status and income of the men we marry, by whether or not we work fulltime in the home, by whether or not we are with men, by whether or not we have children, by whether or not we are natives or immigrants, and by language, race, and nation and the techno- logy of our exploitation.

But our destiny and the roots of our exploitation — our wageless work in the home — are the same in every country of the world, and so is our struggle against it.

LET'S UNITE TO

WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK FROM ALL GOVERNMENTS

FOR ALL WOMEN

AGAINST WOMEN INTERNATIONALLY

New York WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK COMMITTEE

NYU Press

Chapter Title: Neoliberalism Chapter Author(s): Lisa Duggan

Book Title: Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Third Edition Book Editor(s): Bruce Burgett, Glenn Hendler Published by: NYU Press. (2020) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11vcb5n.50

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182

the status quo through creative means such as school

climate strikes (Fridays for the Future) and direct action

groups (Extinction Rebellion). Speeches, lawsuits, and

protests are tactics that environmental activists, front-

line communities, and tribal groups who want to protect

nature are using in their fight against global and carbon-

based extractive capitalism. Nature continues to matter,

now more than ever. But what nature means— with all

its fraught and liberatory possibilities— is still contested,

as it always has been.

2020

46 Neoliberalism Lisa Duggan

The word “neoliberalism,” first used during the 1930s,

came into widespread circulation in the 1990s to name

a utopian ideology of “free markets” and minimal

state interference, a set of policies slashing state social

services and supporting global corporate interests, a

process (neoliberalization) proceeding in company with

procorporate globalization and financialization, and a

cultural project of building consent for the upward

redistributions of wealth and power that have occurred

since the 1970s. But neoliberalism might best be

understood as a global social movement encompassing

all these political goals. In American studies and cultural

studies, the concept has gathered force as a description

of current tendencies in global politics and a critique of

those tendencies, even as its meanings have dispersed.

Though the term tends to be used differently across

the social sciences and the humanities, there is wide

agreement that neoliberalism is a radicalized form of

capitalist imperialism, centered in the United States and

Anglo- Europe, that has developed unevenly across the

globe since the 1970s. Most scholars trace its intellectual

genealogy to the Mont Pelerin Society and the ideas of

Friedrich Hayek (1944), Ludwig von Mises (1949) and

economists of the Austrian school, and the writing

and activities of Milton Friedman ([1962] 2002) and

the Chicago school, developed and circulated since the

1940s. These economists defended classical liberalism

and market- based economies grounded in individual-

ism and published scathing critiques of the centralized

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n e o l i b e r A l i s m l i s a D u G G a n 183

government regulation and redistributive social ben-

efits provided by capitalist welfare states as well as so-

cialist societies.

These minority views moved toward centers of power

during the 1970s, beginning with the overthrow of the

democratically elected socialist government of Salvador

Allende in Chile by the Chilean military and internal

elites, with the assistance of the CIA and the advice of

the University of Chicago– based economists surround-

ing Milton Friedman, often called the “Chicago Boys.”

Neoliberal reforms— privatization of state enterprises,

opening up to foreign business ownership and expa-

triation of profits, cuts to social services— were accom-

plished along with violent suppression of dissent. When

these policies were later modified to meet the challenges

of economic stagnation in the mid- 1970s, neoliberalism

as state policy (rather than a utopian theory opposed to

the state) began to appear as a practical set of strategies

for maintaining capitalism in the face of global social

movement challenges and for reinforcing or installing

elites with access to an increasing share of economic

and political power. As David Harvey (2005) and Naomi

Klein (2007) describe the genealogy of neoliberalism

since the Chilean coup, successive experiments devel-

oped means of extracting resources on the US imperial

model (as had occurred in earlier interventions in Ni-

caragua and Iran, among many others), the installation

of unaccountable governing structures, the transfer of

profits out of social services supported by progressive

taxation, and the maintenance of widening inequalities.

These events and tactics function as experiments by

creating or exploiting crisis conditions to test key eco-

nomic hypotheses central to the theory of neoliberalism,

as political institutions and modes of decision- making

are simultaneously reshaped to entrench neoliberal

power brokers. Such experiments include the 1975 New

York City fiscal crisis that slashed social services and

gave bankers and bondholders unprecedented control

over the city’s finances; the 1980s “structural adjust-

ment” programs forced on Latin American economies

through the practices of the International Monetary

Fund (IMF) that created and exploited sovereign debt

to enforce investor domination of the political process;

and the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, where the administra-

tor of the US- controlled Coalition Provisional Authority

of Iraq, Paul Bremer, presided over massive privatization

of state enterprises opened to foreign control. These ex-

periments developed policies in localities at the periph-

ery of US imperial power that might then be generalized

for use in the center, both nationally, as in the rebuild-

ing of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and trans-

nationally, as in the imposition of austerity policies in

the European Union after the 2008 economic crisis and

recession. By the 1990s, such policies had been fittingly

labeled the Washington Consensus.

Within the imperial purview of the United States and

the policies of US- dominated global institutions includ-

ing the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Or-

ganization, these neoliberal policies express ongoing

tensions and contradictions. As an ideological revival

of classical liberalism in radicalized form, neoliberalism

constitutes an attack on the twentieth- century capitalist

welfare state, with its modest redistributions and state

regulation of corporate power. Critiques of the theories

of John Maynard Keynes (1936), the welfare- state liberal

capitalism that he championed during the Great Depres-

sion of the 1930s, and the Keynesian economic policies

dominant in the United States and Anglo- Europe from

the 1940s to the 1980s have been a crucial focus of neo-

liberal intellectual and policy elites. As a set of strategies,

set in place over time through trial and error, via both

force and consent, neoliberalism in practice has often

deviated from the theories of the intellectuals. Over-

lapping at times with neoconservative security- state

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n e o l i b e r A l i s m l i s a D u G G a n184

policies that deploy centralized military power for impe-

rial violence and war, neoliberalism has functioned his-

torically less as a clearly defined set of ideas and theories

and more as an internally contradictory mode of upward

redistribution of wealth and power and an extension of

the practices of imperial extraction of resources from

economies of the Global South.

But US imperial power has not been the sole source

of global neoliberal reform. From the “opening” of

China to world capitalist markets in the 1980s, through

the new business and trade policies of post- Soviet Rus-

sia and postapartheid South Africa in the 1990s, to the

policies enacted via the 1992 Maastricht Treaty on Eu-

ropean Union, many global, local, and national forces

have produced the uneven spatial and temporal land-

scape of neoliberalism. Some scholars acknowledge

this unevenness but emphasize the hegemonic force of

global neoliberalism since 1980. These writers focus on

the power of the dominant economic system in reshap-

ing global societies and politics (Harvey 2010). Others

acknowledge global neoliberalism’s historical power but

emphasize the highly variable landscape of exceptions

to neoliberalism and of neoliberalism as an exception

under other economic regimes around the globe. This

group includes many researchers who are as interested

in tracking the limitations of neoliberalism’s influence

as in documenting its power (Ong 2006).

Despite these differences, there is wide agreement

among scholars on the foundational causes and endur-

ing effects of global neoliberalism. As a response to the

economic and political challenges to capitalist domi-

nance in the mid- twentieth century, neoliberalism

organized the uneven, contradictory efforts of global

corporate and political elites to maintain and concen-

trate power. The effect of widening global inequalities is

indisputable (Galbraith 2012; Stiglitz 2013). But within

this consensus, approaches to the study of neoliberalism

within American studies and cultural studies are broadly

various. Sociologists, geographers, and urbanists tend

to take a structural approach, emphasizing the over-

all logic and force of neoliberal policies as they spread

over time and space (N. Smith 1983; N. Brenner 2004).

Anthropologists are more likely to point to the contin-

gencies of those policies and to the power of resistance

to them, especially in the Global South (Sawyer 2004;

Tsing 2011). Scholars located in the literary humanities

tend to analyze the cultural project of neoliberalism,

its modes of subject formation, along with its affective

traces (G. Harkins 2009; Berlant 2011). Layered along-

side these divisions are other theoretical differences.

Marxist scholars offer narratives of political- economic

conflict and change, focused on the class conflicts that

shape the shifting forms of capitalism and the state

(Harvey 2005; N. Smith 1983; N. Brenner 2004). Writ-

ers influenced by Michel Foucault examine the broad

dispersion of power among institutions that regulate

populations, including schools, prisons, health care in-

dustries, popular culture, the media, and the ways that

self- disciplining subjects who comply with neoliberal

expectations are produced (N. Rose 1999; Povinelli 2011).

Across all these fields, postcolonial and transnational

studies scholars have offered the most pointed set of

challenges to the standard narratives of spreading neo-

liberal hegemonies since the 1970s. Rather than focus

primarily on the structural impact of late capitalism,

procorporate globalization, and financialization on

states, economies, cultures, and everyday lives, these

scholars have noted the myriad ways in which chal-

lenges to Western colonial modernity have shaped,

rather than simply resisted, the ideas and practices of

neoliberalism. These scholars expand on postcolonial

and decolonial studies of the cultural work of racial tax-

onomies, gendered narratives, and sexual discourses in

producing dominant forms of Western modernity and

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185

empire since the sixteenth century (McClintock 1995;

Stoler 2010; M. Jacqui Alexander 2005). They have

noted the role of decolonization and of feminist, queer,

and ecological social movements, as well as of class and

labor politics, in producing constantly morphing re-

sponses to and from ruling institutions (Grewal 2005;

Reddy 2011).

This group of scholars enables expansive ways of

thinking about social change. If we follow their lead

in going beyond notions of neoliberal hegemony, un-

even developments, or dominance and resistance, we

can begin to trace the interactions among complexly

intertwined axes of power. The global landscape of so-

cial movements contesting the impact of neoliberalism

today— all of which treat the boundaries between state,

economy, and culture, public and private, as dynamic

and fluid— might be best understood as an ongoing

set of dispersed yet interconnected efforts at achieving

more just forms of globalization (Duggan 2003).

2014

47 Normal Robert McRuer

“Normal,” because of its easy associations with typical,

ordinary, or unremarkable, appears to many people as

a benign word, nothing more than a neutral descriptor

of certain groups, bodies, or behaviors that are more

common than others. Yet more than almost any other

keyword in American studies and cultural studies,

“normal” carries with it a history of discursive and

literal violence against those who could never hope to

be described by the term. Sexual minorities, disabled

people, racialized populations, immigrants, and many

others have at times found themselves among the

motley group that the Chicana lesbian feminist Gloria

Anzaldúa terms los atravesados: “those who cross over,

pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal’”

(1987, 3). For Anzaldúa and innumerable other critics of

normal, this border crossing has consequences. Lives

lived beyond the confines of the normal have been

marked as illegitimate and targeted for surveillance,

control, correction, confinement, and even elimination.

The history of the keyword “normal” is relatively

short compared to that of most words in the English

language, despite the fact that the term structures con-

temporary cultures in powerful and nearly ubiquitous

ways. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) notes that the

idea of “normal” as “constituting or conforming to a

type or standard; regular, usual, typical; ordinary, con-

ventional” was not in common usage until 1840. This

usage roughly coincides with the French statistician

Adolphe Quetelet’s (1835) widely influential notion of

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