The Sexual Logics of Neoliberalism in Britain

The Sexual Logics of Neoliberalism in Britain
Author: Aura Lehtonen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2022-12-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 100082117X

This book explores the relationship between sexuality and politics in Britain’s recent political past, in the decade preceding the Covid-19 pandemic, and asks what sexual meanings and logics are embedded in the dominant political discourses and policies of this time. A discursive framing of ‘exceptionality’ has commonly attached to the politics of austerity, crisis and neoliberalisation that have characterised the 2010s in Britain, with many noting the depoliticising effects of such a crisis politics. The book’s four case studies each investigate a binary concept that has played a key role in these limited and limiting discourses: the stable family/troubled family; deserving/undeserving; public/private and material/cultural. Deploying an expansive notion of sexuality, these binaries are examined by analysing a range of cultural and political texts in which they are reproduced, from policy and legal documents to popular films and TV series. This empirically informed and theoretically innovative analysis makes an important contribution to understandings of sexuality, identity and inequalities, as well as of crisis and neoliberalism. It will be of interest to scholars and students in gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, sociology, politics and social policy.

Karl Polanyi

Karl Polanyi
Author: Gareth Dale
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2010-06-21
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0745640710

Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is generally acclaimed as being among the most influential works of economic history in the twentieth century, and remains as vital in the current historical conjuncture as it was in his own. In its critique of nineteenth-century ‘market fundamentalism’ it reads as a warning to our own neoliberal age, and is widely touted as a prophetic guidebook for those who aspire to understand the causes and dynamics of global economic turbulence at the end of the 2000s. Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market is the first comprehensive introduction to Polanyi’s ideas and legacy. It assesses not only the texts for which he is famous – prepared during his spells in American academia – but also his journalistic articles written in his first exile in Vienna, and lectures and pamphlets from his second exile, in Britain. It provides a detailed critical analysis of The Great Transformation, but also surveys Polanyi’s seminal writings in economic anthropology, the economic history of ancient and archaic societies, and political and economic theory. Its primary source base includes interviews with Polanyi’s daughter, Kari Polanyi-Levitt, as well as the entire compass of his own published and unpublished writings in English and German. This engaging and accessible introduction to Polanyi’s thinking will appeal to students and scholars across the social sciences, providing a refreshing perspective on the roots of our current economic crisis.

Foucault and Neoliberalism

Foucault and Neoliberalism
Author: Daniel Zamora
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2016-01-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1509501800

Michel Foucault's death in 1984 coincided with the fading away of the hopes for social transformation that characterized the postwar period. In the decades following his death, neoliberalism has triumphed and attacks on social rights have become increasingly bold. If Foucault was not a direct witness of these years, his work on neoliberalism is nonetheless prescient: the question of liberalism occupies an important place in his last works. Since his death, Foucault's conceptual apparatus has acquired a central, even dominant position for a substantial segment of the world's intellectual left. However, as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, Foucault's attitude towards neoliberalism was at least equivocal. Far from leading an intellectual struggle against free market orthodoxy, Foucault seems in many ways to endorse it. How is one to understand his radical critique of the welfare state, understood as an instrument of biopower? Or his support for the pandering anti-Marxism of the so-called new philosophers? Is it possible that Foucault was seduced by neoliberalism? This question is not merely of biographical interest: it forces us to confront more generally the mutations of the left since May 1968, the disillusionment of the years that followed and the profound transformations in the French intellectual field over the past thirty years. To understand the 1980s and the neoliberal triumph is to explore the most ambiguous corners of the intellectual left through one of its most important figures.

Seduction

Seduction
Author: Rachel O'Neill
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2018-06-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1509521593

Within the so-called seduction community, the ability to meet and attract women is understood as a skill which heterosexual men can cultivate through practical training and personal development. Though it has been an object of media speculation – and frequent sensationalism – for over a decade, this cultural formation remains poorly understood. In the first book-length study of the industry, Rachel O’Neill takes us into the world of seduction seminars, training events, instructional guidebooks and video tutorials. Pushing past established understandings of ‘pickup artists’ as pathetic, pathological or perverse, she examines what makes seduction so compelling for those drawn to participate in this sphere. Seduction vividly portrays how the twin rationalities of neoliberalism and postfeminism are reorganising contemporary intimate life, as labour-intensive and profit-orientated modes of sociality consume other forms of being and relating. It is essential reading for students and scholars of gender, sexuality, sociology and cultural studies, as well as anyone who wants to understand the seduction industry’s overarching logics and internal workings.

The Neoliberal Age?

The Neoliberal Age?
Author: Aled Davies
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2021-12-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 178735685X

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are commonly characterised as an age of ‘neoliberalism’ in which individualism, competition, free markets and privatisation came to dominate Britain’s politics, economy and society. This historical framing has proven highly controversial, within both academia and contemporary political and public debate. Standard accounts of neoliberalism generally focus on the influence of political ideas in reshaping British politics; according to this narrative, neoliberalism was a right-wing ideology, peddled by political economists, think-tanks and politicians from the 1930s onwards, which finally triumphed in the 1970s and 1980s. The Neoliberal Age? suggests this narrative is too simplistic. Where the standard story sees neoliberalism as right-wing, this book points to some left-wing origins, too; where the standard story emphasises the agency of think-tanks and politicians, this book shows that other actors from the business world were also highly significant. Where the standard story can suggest that neoliberalism transformed subjectivities and social lives, this book illuminates other forces which helped make Britain more individualistic in the late twentieth century. The analysis thus takes neoliberalism seriously but also shows that it cannot be the only explanatory framework for understanding contemporary Britain. The book showcases cutting-edge research, making it useful to researchers and students, as well as to those interested in understanding the forces that have shaped our recent past.

Family Values

Family Values
Author: Melinda Cooper
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2017-02-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 194213004X

Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues? In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market liberals and social conservatives. Neoliberalism, she argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socio-economic order. Despite their differences, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged — and at the limit enforced — as a necessary counterpart to market freedom. In a series of case studies ranging from Clinton’s welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic, and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between free-market economics and social conservatism.

Queer Wars

Queer Wars
Author: Dennis Altman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2016-03-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0745698727

The claim that 'LGBT rights are human rights' encounters fierce opposition in many parts of the world, as governments and religious leaders have used resistance to 'LGBT rights' to cast themselves as defenders of traditional values against neo-colonial interference and western decadence. Queer Wars explores the growing international polarization over sexual rights, and the creative responses from social movements and activists, some of whom face murder, imprisonment or rape because of their perceived sexuality or gender expression. This book asks why sexuality and gender identity have become so vexed an issue between and within nations, and how we can best advocate for change.

Gender and Sexuality

Gender and Sexuality
Author: Momin Rahman
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2010-12-06
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0745633773

This new introduction to the sociology of gender and sexuality provides fresh insight into our rapidly changing attitudes towards sex and our understanding of masculine and feminine identities, relating the study of gender and sexuality to recent research and theory, and wider social concerns throughout the world.

Making Capitalism Fit For Society

Making Capitalism Fit For Society
Author: Colin Crouch
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2014-08-21
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 074568808X

Capitalism is the only complex system known to us that can provide an efficient and innovative economy, but the financial crisis has brought out the pernicious side of capitalism and shown that it remains dependent on the state to rescue it from its own deficiencies. Can capitalism be reshaped so that it is fit for society, or must we acquiesce to the neoliberal view that society will be at its best when markets are given free rein in all areas of life? The aim of this book is to show that the acceptance of capitalism and the market does not require us to accept the full neoliberal agenda of unrestrained markets, insecurity in our working lives, and neglect of the environment and of public services. In particular, it should not mean supporting the growing dominance of public life by corporate wealth. The world’s most successful mature economies are those that fully embrace both the discipline of the market and the need for protection against its negative outcomes. Indeed, a continuing, unresolved clash between these two forces is itself a major source of vitality and innovation for economy and society. But maintenance of that tension depends on the enduring strength of trade unions and other critical groups in civil society - a strength that is threatened by neoliberalism’s increasingly intolerant onward march. Outlining the principles for a renewed and more assertive social democracy, this timely and important book shows that real possibilities exist to create a better world than that which is being offered by the wealthy elites who dominate our public and private lives.

Cognitive Capitalism

Cognitive Capitalism
Author: Yann Moulier-Boutang
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2011
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0745647324

This book argues that we are undergoing a transition from industrial capitalism to a new form of capitalism - what the author calls & lsquo; cognitive capitalism & rsquo;