‘Neoliberal feminism’: Legitimising the gendered moral project of austerity

This article focuses on how middle-class women identify with ‘neoliberal feminism’ within the context of UK austerity by drawing on interviews with 17 women in Leeds, London and Brighton during 2014 and 2015. The article argues that the way in which these women identify with, understand and discuss whom feminism is important for, converges with a range of values present in the austerity discourse. In line with the principles of ‘late modernity’, feminism is spoken through an individualised lifestyle discourse, with an emphasis on the need to be resilient and have a positive mental attitude to deal with forms of inequality. Due to the particularity of the context, women create distance, and classed and racialised distinctions away from women who are suffering in the current context. This distancing is crucial to the maintenance of the austerity project, since, instead of helping to put an end to gender inequality, this form of feminism aids the legitimation of hierarchical relationships and gendered socio-economic inequalities. This is produced via a form of indifference towards those who are understood as ‘bad subjects’, perceived as being unable to manage and who are thus undeserving of help. Mapping out the contours of the entanglement of feminist narratives with an anti-emancipatory narrative is thus crucial for widening understandings of the politics of austerity and contemporary engagements with feminism.