Women’s (Dis) Empowerment in the Contemporary Discourse of Neoliberal Capitalism

Abstract

The contemporary world has witnessed an unprecedented spread of feminist antipatriarchal discourse that have narrowly perceived women’s empowerment and liberation as a pure struggle against men for more commensurate economic opportunities and gender equality. This has brought about the incorporation of the female figure into the global institutions of the capitalist market as never before. Subsequently, in their quest for empowerment, women end up subject to the double burden of both productive and reproductive labor. Accordingly, this paper is an attempt to revisit the common orthodox perceptions of empowerment and resistance in the world of global capitalism. Endorsing a feminist political economic perspective represented by leading theorists and critics like, Maria Mies, Cynthia Enloe, Elizabeth Kammarck Minnich and others, this research is an attempt to engender the hegemonic capitalist ‘knowledge’ by exposing the suppressed ‘exploitative’ and ‘oppressive’ meanings that are attached to women’s empowerment in the contemporary age of globalization. Furthermore, this paper is a contribution to the concurrent literature on feminist empowerment and resistance. It calls for an inclusive gender perspective to the understanding of neoliberal capitalism so as to pave the way to modes of resistance and empowerment that subvert the dysfunctional meanings propagated by the system’s neoliberal knowledge.