The Broken Windows of Rosa Ramos

This chapter considers how “broken windows” policing as both philosophy and practice emerged alongside and also facilitated major transformations of the neoliberal political economy. It further proposes the concept of imminent violability as an analytic through which this vulnerability might be comprehended within the racial, spatial, and ultimately gendered dimensions of neoliberal securitization. By thinking within and across scales, from the regulation of bodies and behavior to the refashioning of spaces for global capital, it argues that imminent violability can serve as a radical feminist critique linking racism, capital accumulation, and the increasingly commonplace vulnerability to state violence most keenly experienced by poor and working-class communities of color across the United States.

The Production of Silence

The essay examines the distinctive nature of neoliberalism in Bangladesh that began under military rule, and analyzes the discursive silences that neoliberal development policies have produced within the NGO sector. It analyzes three major strands that refer to how policies of market liberalization were historically promoted by successive military and democratic governments since independence; the impact of this confluence of market liberalization on the state, NGOs, and the framing of feminist/women’s agendas; and how policies and ideologies of neoliberalism discursively shape public discourses about NGOs, women, and development. The chapter argues that feminist/women’s agendas have been shaped by liberal ideas of empowerment, which have been reworked through neoliberal models of economic empowerment that have silenced more critical discourses questioning free market policies and their deleterious effects on women’s labor and lives.

What’s in a Word?

Drawing on a materialist feminist analysis of austerity discourse, this chapter foregrounds the dynamics of gender, race, nation, and class to put into sharp relief the “relations of ruling” that contour the everyday lives of diverse individuals, families, communities, and nations during and following the Great Recession of 2008–9. This approach allows for a comparison of the role of the state in the United States and Europe and considers the intersection of the media, state actors, and economic analysts in post-liberal state governance. This multi-institutional approach enhances our understanding of general patterns across the United States and the European Union as well as differences between nations.

Conceptualizing the Post-Liberalization State

This essay presents the theoretical framework for understanding state power in the context of policies of economic liberalization that are associated with the paradigm of neoliberalism. It specifically develops a conceptualization of the post-liberalization state that moves beyond assumptions that the neoliberal state is one that has necessarily weakened or retreated. The post-liberalization state is defined by shifting boundaries between state, market, and civil society that are contingent on the political, social, and economic circumstances within nations while also being shaped by transnational processes. These boundaries are shaped as much by historical continuities with older formations such as the developmental state and the racial state as they are with new modes of power. Through this focus on the state, the essay seeks to disrupt the conflation between neoliberalism and processes of privatization and the dominance of market rationalities. An understanding of the post-liberalization period in the twenty-first century requires analyses that also foreground questions of how conceptions of “publicness” are reconstituted and deployed, how states shape economic policy and contribute to the reproduction of inequality, and how political and social consent to structures of exclusion are produced and disrupted by social movements.

After Neoliberalism?

This chapter addresses the shift away from neoliberalism in Ecuador toward the socialist or post-neoliberal Citizen Revolution (2007–present). It addresses concepts that were resignified in the 2008 Constitution: family, defined as “diverse” and based on kinship and alternative forms of intimate relations; nation, defined as plurinational, recognizing indigenous rights to land, territory, and identity; and economy, defined as postcapitalist, with the goal of privileging well-being (buen vivir) and human life over capital. The chapter highlights the centrality of heteronormativity in understanding post-neoliberal states, including governance and development frameworks that privilege the patriarchal heterosexual family, viewing it as the foundation of the country’s modernization goals. It argues that Ecuador’s shift away from neoliberalism is fraught with contradictions, best understood as signifying a partial rupture with the neoliberal legacy. Despite progressive legal changes to the definition of family, nation, and economy in the 2008 Constitution (symbolizing the country’s move away from neoliberalism), it argues that the state maintains a heteronormative, colonialist understanding of governance and development, rendering the potentially radical project of reimagining life “after” neoliberalism incomplete and paradoxical. This has important implications for individuals, communities, and social movements that don’t fit the resignified but colonialist pillars of the Citizen Revolution.

Toward a Feminist Analytic of the Post-Liberalization State

This chapter presents an overview of the feminist analytic of the post-liberalization state as developed in this volume. It develops a feminist materialist approach that addresses the complexities and contradictions of the policies, ideologies, and practices associated with contemporary neoliberalism. This approach rests on an integrated analysis of discursive and nondiscursive practices and addresses the interconnections between inequalities such as gender, race, caste, sexuality, and class. From this materialist feminist perspective, the discursive regimes that shape policies of market liberalization often rest on a paradox. If a materialist feminist analysis necessitates that we pay attention to complex dynamics of race, sexuality, class, and national context, these discursive regimes are also invested in liberal narratives of women’s empowerment that invoke a homogeneous category of “woman.” This category thus becomes a key component of the developmental dimensions of market liberalization in ways that discipline feminism itself. Strategies of social movements and critical intellectual currents that emerge in response to inequality and exclusion can be inadvertently disciplined or misguided when trapped by a ubiquitous or ethereal idea of “neoliberalism.” The feminist analytic of the post-liberalization state seeks to open up intellectual avenues that can disrupt this disciplining of interdisciplinary knowledge practices.

An Improvising State

State-led neoliberalization is discussed through the case of rural development in Gujarat, India’s flagship state of market reforms. The essay takes neoliberalization not as given or self-evident, but as a process of reworking of the state’s boundaries with the market and civil society. State transformation in India includes a downsized rural bureaucracy recruiting temporary workers and contract NGOs to implement development, expanding women’s employment while rendering its circumstances precarious, delegating development practice to an ungoverned space in the locality, and employing techniques of self-governance among development subjects to rid the state of these responsibilities. The new state is revealed to be an improvising state, constantly departing from certainty and provisionally administering social life.

After Rights

This chapter draws on ethnographic research; federal, state, and municipal policy mandates; and feminist and critical race theory to provide a genealogy of choice, as a key principle of reform and management in education that emerged in the post-Brown v. Board of Education context. This genealogy helps us track the realignment that took place in the post–civil rights social structure and illuminates how the continued production of a tiered citizenship, organized through race and embedded within the realm of the public, was assured when universal rights were organized as individual private choices. As such, this chapter provides a more capacious understanding of neoliberal restructuring in the United States. I examine how the contradiction of exclusion despite juridical inclusion is animated in the present day, and also query the possibilities for transformative, nonreformist reforms that might be forged by those political subjects who inhabit the cracks of such contradictory universalism.