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THINKING GENDER: THE FIFTEENTH ANNUAL USC/UCLA GRADUATE STUDENT RESEARCH CONFERENCE
A public conference highlighting feminist research by graduate students in the humanities, social sciences, life sciences, arts, law, education, public health and public policy.
Friday, February 2, 2006
UCLA Faculty Center
8:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.
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WORK IN PROGRESS: PRESENTATIONS BY CFR AFFILIATED SCHOLARS
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CENTER FOR FEMINIST RESEARCH @ USC
FEMINISM & POLITICS SERIES FALL 2006 PRESENTS
BARBARA CRUIKSHANK
Associate Professor of Political Science,
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Neopolitics: Radical Reform, Feminism,
and the Practices of Freedom
Michel Foucault’s work on ethics and the care of the self is fertile ground for thinking anew on the subject of willing selves. However, this essay aims to wed the “practices of freedom” to politics on the basis of Foucault’s work, rather than turn as he did toward ethics. By drawing out the singularity of reform and highlighting its political dimensions in Foucault’s work on the prison and governmentality, and by rescuing reform from its opposition to revolution, I propose a conception of politics as the ever-shifting ground of practices of freedom, or neopolitics. The contingency of politics is captured by the concept of “neopolitics” used here to indicate politics in a state of adaptation and change. In that contingency, I locate the possibility of practicing politics and freedom in ways that can resist the shaping and instrumentalization of the subject advanced by the forces of neoliberalism and neoconservativism. In defense of that contingency, I combat the chorus of contention alternately warning or boasting that the present marks the end of political contingency, such as Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of the end of history or the many voices announcing the advent of post-modernity. Rather than at the end, I situate the present in terms of its continuity with the past, both in order to claim politics as a practice of freedom and to reclaim the contingency of politics. Using the recent 1996 U.S. welfare reforms as a case in point, a case usually used to point out the failure of feminists to advocate on behalf of poor women, I argue that feminist reformers are adept at the practices of freedom.
Wed., November 15, 2006 12-1:30pm
Taper Hall, Rm 420
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