The second speaker at Barnard’s public event on sexual and economic justice was Naomi Klein, an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, and author of the international best selling books No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Klein writes a regular column for The Nation and The Guardian, and in 2004 her reporting from Iraq for Harper’s Magazine won the James Aaronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. Klein’s path-breaking work in charting the alternative globalization movement and the rise of extreme forms of neoliberal capitalism has made her one of the most influential and respected figures speaking from the global left on issues of economic justice, but she has also linked her work with gender concerns, and she has documented the key role played by women’s activism in forging alternative economic futures.
Drawing on her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein’s talk foregrounds the crucial role played by crisis, and promises of security from it, in current economic and political processes. Klein identifies the post September 11th agenda focused on security and the war on terror as the latest manifestation of the neoliberal project, evident in the privatization of surveillance and of the state’s disaster response, the intensified policing of borders, and the for-profit incarceration of those who are criminalized. She also links this project of privatization and deregulation to increased precariousness, and to a new, normalized relationship with crisis, wherein neoliberal policies have been imposed all at once, in a rapid fire way intended to produce a disorientating shock to the economic and political system. The neoliberal project profits from containing and monitoring these precariously-positioned and displaced people, and, as she explains, sexuality, along with race/ethnicity, can be central to this process.
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