How the Neoliberal Appropriation of “Choice” and “Agency” Fails to Advance the Feminist Commitment to Social Justice

Abstract

The ever-changing face of femininity can be hard to keep up with. In “Western” societies, we first conceived of the ideal woman as baby-maker. After that, domestic goddess. Then supermodel. Now, the acceptable way to be a woman is to be “empowered”. The idealised version of femininity has been refashioned once again, this time, through discourses of “agency” and “choice”. Today’s femininity — and, importantly, feminism — is represented by a newly empowered young womanhood, imbued with personal agency and freedom of choice (Baker, 2010). Perhaps it is right to celebrate this new agency. By all accounts, women have historically suffered, at least in part, because they have been denied “agency” (the ability to make choices and then act on those choices). Women have been emancipated from various oppressive structural and legal constraints, and it might seem that gender equality demands we view both men and women as truly autonomous agents. I seek to argue that these once-feminist concepts of choice and agency have been co-opted, appropriated and resignified under the political, economic, and social hegemony of “neoliberalism”. Rather than working to undo capitalist patriarchy, the resignified concepts of choice and agency merely serve to reinforce it. And feminism, rather than reject the appropriated concepts, has largely incorporated them into its ideology.