ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes to situate the trajectory of second-wave feminism in relation to the recent history of capitalism. In a fine instance of the cunning of history, utopian desires found a second life as feeling currents that legitimated the transition to a new form of capitalism: post-Fordist, transnational, neoliberal. If second-wave feminism partook of the general aura of 1960s radicalism, it nevertheless stood in a tense relation with other emancipatory movements. In general, second-wave feminism remained ambivalently Westphalian, even as it rejected the economism, androcentrism and étatism of state-organized capitalism. Neoliberalism’s rise coincided with a major alteration in the political culture of capitalist societies. In this period, claims for justice were increasingly couched as claims for the recognition of identity and difference. The election of Barack Obama may signal the decisive repudiation, even in the belly of the beast, of neoliberalism as a political project.
