Neoliberal Capitalism: An Ally for Women? Materialist and Imbricationist Feminist Perspectives

This work takes as its starting point a recurring question about the links between the fate of women and the development of (nowadays neoliberal) capitalism, which Hirata and Le Doaré in France were the first to call “the paradoxes of globalisation” (1998). Are we witnessing an improvement, however slow and partial, in the situation of women, thanks to their increasing integration in the labour market? Or, on the contrary, are we seeing a drastic deterioration illustrated by increasingly widespread poverty, particularly amongst the non-privileged women of the planet? In this chapter, I would like to emphasise the particularly heuristic nature of feminist theories in order to explain first how structural power relations between the sexes function, second what neoliberal globalisation is, and finally, what neoliberal globalisation does to structural power relations between the sexes and vice-versa. More specifically, I intend to develop a synthesis of francophone materialist feminist theories and feminist theories about interlocking social relations, specifically those theories devised by women who are racialised and/or are from the Global South. Through the image of “communicating vessels”, I will attempt to prove that this “materi-alist-imbricationist” feminist synthesis constitutes the best tool for responding to three series of important questions raised by the paradoxes of globalisation.