Journal of Gender Studies
ISSN: 0958-9236 (Print) 1465-3869 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjgs20
Economic citizenship: neoliberal paradoxes of empowerment Elaine Coburn To cite this article: Elaine Coburn (2017): Economic citizenship: neoliberal paradoxes of empowerment, Journal of Gender Studies, DOI: 10.1080/09589236.2017.1316895 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2017.1316895
Published online: 12 Apr 2017.
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Date: 12 April 2017, At: 14:25
Journal of Gender Studies, 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2017.1316895
BOOK REVIEW
Economic citizenship: neoliberal paradoxes of empowerment, by Amalia Sa’ar, New York, NY, Berghahn Books, 2016, 248 pp., £78.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-7853-3179-4 Economic Citizenship is a well-written, nuanced and interesting account of contradictions at work in contemporary non-profit projects supporting economic rights for women. Focussing on developments in Israel, from the 1990s to the present, cultural anthropologist Amalia Sa’ar describes how grassroots ‘human rights, minority rights and feminist organizations’ (p. 50) develop training strategies to empower women, especially the most marginalized. Yet these non-profits do not choose the historical and national circumstances in which they act. Instead, they are shaped by economic, gender, ethnic and religious inequalities in Israel and by hegemonic understanding of women’s ‘empowerment’ as requiring incorporation into capitalist relations as entrepreneurs or as alienated labour in the paid workforce. This contradiction, between women’s efforts to achieve social justice and a neoliberal context of radical inequalities and entrenched capitalist relations, is the central paradox confronting feminist activists and ordinary women in the everyday practices of non-profit economic training programmes. In the opening chapters, Sa’ar describes the highly unequal relationships of contemporary Israel, including worsening wages and higher unemployment for Palestinians compared to Jews since 2004 (p. 34). Monthly wages for Jewish and other men are higher than for Jewish women, Arab men and Arab women, in that order; Jewish men’s wages are over twice those of Arab women (p. 37). If the specificities of this ethnically and religiously based stratification are unique to Israel, others are familiar to any contemporary neoliberal state. This includes declining spending on public health and the privatization of social services, simultaneously hurting women’s employment, disproportionately in the public sector, and creating a heavier burden of domestic care for women (p. 35). This is the background against which ‘community economic development’ (CED) projects unite non-profits, state agencies, business and private actors. In a problematic (but unproblematized) language of citizenship, the aim is to support women’s real, full citizenship through the exercise of economic independence or, somewhat differently, by enabling economic security through community solidarity (pp. 214–5). As Sa’ar emphasizes, CED projects bring together disparate actors. Buzz-words like ‘empowerment’ function as empty signifiers, temporarily and strategically uniting the quite different agendas of business philanthropists and feminists, many engaged in lifelong struggles against ‘discrimination, oppression and social injustice’ (p. 58). Women organizers and clients are often grouped by ethnicity and religion, but typically include women of heterogeneous class backgrounds with widely varying levels of cultural capital (pp. 51–53). Women with deeply conflicting political views about the Israeli apartheid state may cooperate, leaving ideological differences deliberately unspoken to focus on the social over the political. Other CEDs insist on taking a strong political stand – for instance, as Palestinian rights associations – even if this is financially penalizing to the organization (p. 64). Radical feminists who insist that patriarchy and economic oppression must be named to avoid ‘collaborating’ in the routine reproduction of ‘a deficient social order’ (p. 130), work alongside reformist feminists who insist it wastes poor women’s limited energies to rage against what is, for now, the hard reality of systemic inequalities (p. 130). Instead of social transformation, the latter seek to help women better navigate ‘the swamp’ of unjust social relations. A younger generation of organizers ‘coaches’ women to individual self-sufficiency in language owing more to organizational management and popular psychology than to liberal or radical feminisms (p. 132). In sum, tensions, rooted in class, ideology, ethnicity and generational differences, run through
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BOOK REVIEW
diverse CED projects. Often, Sa’ar illustrates these through extended, judiciously chosen passages from interviews and group discussions among women organizers and clients, demonstrating women activists’ reflexive understandings of the limits and possibilities of contemporary feminist practices (p. 224). One striking example of the paradoxical spaces opened by CEDs is what Sa’ar terms ‘the discourse of love-and-giving’ (p. 178). Through some programmes, very poor women learn to articulate love and giving to others as central to their (often unpaid) domestic and volunteer labour. Ironically, this reinforces some women’s tendencies to avoid money-making as shamefully self-interested, as working against essentialized understandings of (selfless) womanhood (pp. 178–181). Thus, many women involved in these CED projects refused to charge for work outside the home, even when additional income would make an important difference to themselves and their households. At the same time, emotional talk was valued as a major benefit to participating in economic training, as a source of energizing solidarity among women. Characteristically, one participant suggested training sessions created opportunities ‘to give and receive love, to learn and to listen’ (p. 185), regardless of any (economic) benefit, immediate or in the future. This attentiveness to the paradoxical or ‘multidirectional’ (p. 184) dynamics of CEDs is characteristic of Sa’ar’s self-confessed ‘fascination with contradictions’ (p. 223). This systematically equivocal analysis is not unproblematic. At times, Sa’ar appears to endorse emotional, pop-psychology ‘coaching’ styles and the incorporation of racialized women (especially poor Arab women, but also ultra-orthodox religious Jewish women) as low-paid labour within capitalist relations, because some positive dynamic – for instance, the women’s improved self-esteem – inevitably manifests. In short, a strong theoretical and political argument about the systemic reproduction of gendered, racialized inequalities is lost in the strenuous attentiveness to the many ways women exercise agency, despite this system. This likely reflects a commendable desire to portray oppressed women as something more than agency-less victims, able to carve out positive spaces for mutual support, but makes the condemnation of ‘rapacious capitalism’ (p. 224) in the book’s final sentence nearly inexplicable. Still, the book makes a valuable contribution to many fields: feminism and women’s studies, the study of everyday feminist community organizing and critical analyses of ‘women in development’, among others. If inevitably imperfect, it is an important analysis of the pragmatic difficulties feminists face in seeking meaningful social change in a neoliberal context of gendered, racialized economic inequality. Elaine Coburn York University, Canada
[email protected] © 2017 Elaine Coburn http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2017.1316895
