Counter Visions

Global feminism is positioned to offer counter visions for progressives in general, by imagining solidarities across national borders; by organizing around issues that connect political, economic, and cultural issues; by refusing single-issue or narrow identity frames; and by inventing new organizational and activist forms. Transnational and postcolonial feminists in particular have been at the cutting edge of devising a politics innovative enough to grasp the force of neoliberalism, and unveil the vision of bloodless world domination as the brutal and violent politics of coercion and inequality.[6]

If the triumph of neoliberalism brings us into the twilight of equality, this is not an irreversible fate. This new world order was invented during the 1970s and 1980s and dominated the 1990s, but it may now be unraveling - if we are prepared to seize the moment of its faltering, to promote and ensure its downfall. Only an interconnected, analytically diverse, cross-fertilizing, and expansive left - a left centrally shaped by the projects of global feminism - can seize this moment to lead us elsewhere, to newly imagined possibilities for equality in the twenty-first century.

Endnotes

1. Kurt Eichenwald, "The Nation: Clay Feet; Could Capitalists Actually Bring Down Capitalism?" New York Times, June 30, 2002, late edition-final, sec. 4; Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2002); and Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books, 2002). [Return to text]

2. My discussion of the history of Liberalism here is necessarily highly truncated. The literature on this topic is vast. For good introductions, see Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944); and Wendy Brown, "Liberalism's Family Values" in her States of Injury (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 135-65. [Return to text]

3. For varying but nonetheless overlapping outlines of the features and agenda of neoliberalism, see Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, eds., "Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism," special issue, Public Culture 12, no. 2 (Spring 2000); Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999); and David Boaz, ed., Toward Liberty: The Idea That Is Changing the World (Washington, DC: The Cato Institute, 2002). [Return to text]

4. Identity politics in the broadest sense arises from the exclusions of the U.S. nation-state beginning in the early nineteenth century. But identity politics in the narrowest sense defined here first appeared in the 1980s. [Return to text]

5. See any of a long list of publications by Cindy Patton, including Inventing AIDS (New York: Routledge, 1990); Last Served? Gendering the HIV Pandemic (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1994); and Globalizing AIDS (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). [Return to text]

6. See for example M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, eds., Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (New York: Routledge, 1996); and Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, eds., Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). [Return to text]