I was recently invited to reflect on the conditions of women in British universities with a group of students and colleagues exploring the politics of the corporate academy. Rather than trying to speak in some hackneyed way for ‘women’, I decided to reflect on the anti-feminist nature of the neoliberal rationalities now dictating academic life within universities, and on the subversions of critical feminist ethics, methodologies and pedagogies in higher education today. I had hoped that this might open space for discussion about how hegemonic masculinities and femininities are being reconstituted through our everyday practices of teaching – including of feminist theory – research, professional labour, and political resistance inside institutions. But while I anticipated challenges to my particular readings of feminist critique and understanding of the intersections of patriarchy, racism and class power in neoliberal institutions, I was unprepared for the hostile reactions to the invocation of feminism itself. ‘Isn’t it sexist’, one woman asked, ‘to keep talking about an ideology that doesn’t include men?’ Another agreed. ‘Feminism has gone too far’, she suggested. ‘It’s not that we don’t know what women went through before, but these things just don’t affect us now. And maybe women want too much’. Finally, there some change of heart, but one attached to a disorienting demand: what is the Feminist Movement’s answer to neoliberal power?

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Mary Ellen Campbell and A.L. McCready

Feminism has had many lives. Living in colonial-settler Canada, the editors of this special issue are especially attuned to the forms of imperialist, settler and liberal “feminism” that have motivated a great many social projects. Recently, these include the ostensible concern over the status of women in Afghanistan that has played so well as a rationale for war, the false feminism of micro-credit lending schemes, and the “post-feminist” discrediting of alternative social visions in favour of a corporate or consumer feminism. These faux feminisms occurs alongside the institutional dislocation of women’s and gender studies programs as loci for the generation of transformational knowledge, and the simultaneous incorporation of certain elements of movements and struggles in order to generate “academic captial” for the neoliberal university. We live amidst a rapidly accelerating culture of neoliberal individualism, characterized by the dogged attack by state and business on the material and social protections won by decades of women’s struggle within and against the current system. This neoliberal moment is also characterized by the virulent cult of persecuted white masculinity and the backlash against supposed minority gains that demonstrates the neoconservative social values that a neoliberal culture feeds and begets. There has never been such dire need for decisive, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, transnational feminist analysis, pedagogy and social foment.

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