Re-externalizing the revolution: young women and the neoliberal re-ordering of race, class and gender

• Main Author: Lux, Stephanie
• Other Authors: Bennett, Jane
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: University of Cape Town 2015
• Subjects: African Studies
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/12837

Includes bibliographical references. === My research interest can be framed as an investigation of how the contemporary neoliberal reordering of race, class and gender is negotiated, resisted or embraced by (young) socially mobile women at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Through a qualitative mixed-method approach consisting of nine semi-structured, open-ended interviews with ten women and auto-ethnography, I wrote into existence counter-representations to the currently hegemonic – mainly northern-based – representations of neoliberal femininities. The Literature Review provides an overview of existing scholarship on neoliberalism, its intersection with postcolonialism and lastly neoliberal subjectivities/femininities. Given that neoliberalism as an ideology affects all areas of life, the two methodology chapters explore feminist epistemology in relation to neoliberal cooption. Additionally, by taking into account neoliberalism’s attendant ideology of non-racialism, I explore the effects of my own white subject position, the world view it affords me as well as how my whiteness affected the encounter with the participants and subsequent representation of their narratives. By utilizing discourse analysis and by reading the interview transcripts through a lens that allowed me to identify the tension and relationship between the two main neoliberal ideals of freedom and responsibility, I assembled the ‘data’ into two main clusters. The first cluster – Bodies and Heterosexuality, subdivided into two chapters – broadly explores gendered socialization and the (ab)use of gendered socialization by the neoliberal project as well as the participants’ representations of their engagements with male bodies. The second cluster – Education and Freedom – locates the reasons for the participants’ wish to become socially mobile/educated; the performances/techniques the participants embrace in order to be able to construct race and gender as choice and concludes with the claim that true human liberation will remain unfinished in neoliberal environments characterized by inequality, non-racialism as well as ideologies of choice and agency which neglect systemic analysis.