Has neoliberalism impacted men and women differently Essay - 1

Has neoliberalism impacted men and women differently - Essay Example The economic, political and cultural realities in throughout the globe have been undergoing radical transformation for the last more than three decades. The shifts towards neoliberalism have converged the concepts of liberalism with the market ideologies and principles. It has indeed been crucial to the extent it exerted a crucial impact in altering the gender geographies in many parts of the world. However it has also brought in new issues, new modes of regulating the selves and subjectivities, new ideological apparatuses stressing upon certain representations and exemplars, lifestyles, culminating in hegemonic forms of masculinity and femininity, and eventually the hegemony of market itself. A significant platform through which this mode of â€Å"neoliberal governmentality has been understood and discussed is the very idea of instrumentality, as Butler, Joan Scott and others have done† (Gill and Schraff, 2011: 5). ... technological devices have not only not eradicated the traditional structures of inequality but also have exacerbated the complexities through which the former structures are reproduced and/or operationalised in albeit new fashions. The two broad epistemological and pragmatic fields where the structures of inequality, subjugation and subjectivisation are constantly articulated are one, political and cultural and two economic and the global circulation of capital (Butler, 2004; Gill 2009; Gill and Schraff 2011). For the last more than three decades scholars and activists around the world have pointed at the varying schemes of capital at the worldwide level and the surging motives of profit relying chiefly on the availability of labour and, sometimes, resources from the so called Third world nations. This global paradigm is further conditioned within the gender realities that persist within these geo-political terrains to the extent women and children, especially from lower classes, ha ve continued to remain the primary victims of these neoliberal, neocolonial tactics (Nash and Safa 1976; Nash and Fernhdez-Kelly 1983; Leacock and Safa 1986). These gender realities were invariably products of a global economic circuits that was and still is western centric and a western centred discourse of human rights according to which these geo-political locales, on the one hand, were depicted as having highly degenerated human rights situation and, on the other hand, opened new areas for further socio-economic interventions (Nash and Safa 1976; Nash and Fernhdez-Kelly 1983; Leacock and Safa 1986). The relationship between the rich and poor in terms of an imbalance between the global west and the rest (Hall, 1994) is another major paradigm where the question of gender is hijacked and