Late Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism, Cooptation, and Resistance

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

How can we best understand the political economy of late stage American empire? The Gender Justice and Neoliberal Transformations research group is a transnational collective of scholars working to produce comparative and synthetic understandings of gender, sex, and political economy. We propose a roundtable discussion of the new conditions of neoliberalism that will focus on Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. This conversation reflects the forthcoming publication of a Spanish translation of the book, Paradojas de Neoliberalismo (published by the at the National Autonomous University of Mexico with a new Introduction by Mario Pecheny and Ana Amuchástegui) and is also in dialogue with the proposed roundtable on political economy in the decades following the publication of Lisa Duggan's Twilight of Equality. We will consider the new formations of governance are underway in our research sites (Argentina, Mexico, Dominican Republic, US Virgin Islands, and the United States). We presented part of this research at the 2019 American Studies Association conference in preparation for the publication of our 2020 book, Paradoxes of Neoliberalism: Gender, Sex, and Possibilities for Justice, which argued that there is no single neoliberal order, nor a specific set of stages that all economies move through, but rather a set of political and cultural transformations that may or may not align. As Mario Pecheny observed with regard to the case of Argentina, political-economic practices and policies can move from neoliberalism to post-neoliberalism to post-post-neoliberalism and back again. In the United States, we described the form of neoliberalism enacted in the first Trump Administration as “nationalist neoliberalism.” Now we argue that the US in the second Trump Administration has moved to a form of governance that combines both authoritarian and neoliberal principles, with profound implications for political economy and for myriad social relations, gender and race among them, on a global scale. If neoliberalism was reported to have died in the financial crisis of 2008 and then to have been killed off by populist movements in 2016, why does it remain so powerful in political economies in 2025? What transformations of neoliberal relations have allowed it to survive (even if in zombie form)? How do these transformations relate to new global configurations of political power, including rightwing authoritarian alliances, a new “reactionary internationale,” ascendant nationalist religious formations, and global activist formations on the left? How does an intersectional gender justice approach respond to these new formations in theory and practice?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Lisa Duggan, New York University

Panelists

• Ana Amuchástegui, UAM-Xochimilco

• Elizabeth Bernstein

• Maja Horn, Barnard College

• Janet Jakobsen, Barnard College

• Kerwin Kaye, Wesleyan University

• Tami Navarro, Drew University

• Mario M Pecheny, University of Buenos Aires & CONICET

Biographical Information

Moderator
Lisa Duggan, Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU
Lisa Duggan is a journalist, activist and Professor of Social & Analysis at New York University, where she teaches in the American Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies Programs. She is the author of Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity; The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism and Cultural Politics, and Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed. She is co-author with Nan Hunter of Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture and co-editor with Lauren Berlant of Our Monica Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and National Interest. She is also co-editor with Curtis Marez of a book series at University of California Press, American Studies Now: Critical Studies of the Present. She is currently at work on a book on the political architecture of the far right in the United States in global context— as analyzed through the career of Steve Bannon. Her next book project is a study of character AI technology platforms.

Panelists
Ana Amuchástegui, CIEG, National Autonomous University of Mexico
Ana Amuchástegui is Social Psychology Professor-Researcher at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco in Mexico City, and member of the National System of Researchers. She has carried out extensive qualitative studies on subjectivity and governmentality regarding women’s sexual and reproductive rights. She recently collaborated in the collective endeavor Paradoxes of Neoliberalism: Sex, Gender and Possibilities for Justice, led by Elizabeth Bernstein and Janet Jakobsen. Tired of the neoliberal model of extractive research, she has been involved since 2014 in the long-term project “Yantzin: Women Peer HIV Advisors in Health Services in Oaxaca, Mexico City, and Chiapas.

Elizabeth Bernstein, WGSS, Barnard College, Columbia University
Elizabeth Bernstein, Professor of Women's Studies and Sociology at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her research and teaching focus on the political economy of the body, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of the award-winning books Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking, and the Politics of Freedom (University of Chicago Press 2018) and Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (University of Chicago Press 2007), and co-editor of the volume Regulating Sex: The Politics of Intimacy and Identity (Routledge 2004). She is also a Principal Investigator along with Janet Jakobsen for the Gender Justice and Neoliberal Transformations Working Group, a collaboration among twelve scholars working transnationally on questions of gender justice in the contemporary world, which is sponsored by the Barnard Center for Research on Women (https://bcrw.barnard.edu/projects/transnationalfeminisms/gender-justice-neoliberal-transformations/). Together these twelve scholars have written Paradoxes of Neoliberalism: Gender, Sex, and Possibilities for Justice (Routledge 2022), which is about to be republished in a Spanish translation by Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios de Género (CIEG), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México with a new Introduction by Ana Amuchástegui and Mario Pecheny. Her research and scholarship have been recognized by awards from the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, AAUW, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Sociological Association.

Maja Horn, Spanish and Latin American Cultures, Barnard College, Columbia University
Maja Horn is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Cultures at Barnard College. She was a research associate at FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where she developed and taught a performance studies concentration (2005-2006). Her research focuses on Hispanophone Caribbean cultures with an emphasis on literature, visual and performance art, gender and sexuality studies, and political culture. Her book, Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature (Florida UP, 2014), foregrounds the impact of U.S. imperialism on dominant notions of Dominican masculinity and their reinterpretation by pivotal Dominican writers. She is the editor of a special dossier for Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism dedicated to the memory of José E. Muñoz (2015). Maja recently completed a second monograph tentatively titled Queer Dominican Genealogies: Same-Sex Desire in Dominican Literature and Culture. She is currently developing a new research project tentatively titled, “Beyond Independence and Inclusion: Disability Narratives in the Americas, a Critical South-North Dialogue,” that asks what other normative goals and aspirations must be included alongside “independence/autonomy” and “inclusion/accessibility” in disability advocacy and studies? She explores this question through a critical and comparative analysis of disability narratives from both North and South America, with a particular focus on personal narratives from people with disabilities and/or their caretakers.

Janet Jakobsen, WGSS, Barnard College, Columbia University
Janet Jakobsen is Claire Tow Professor and Chair of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) at Barnard College, Columbia University. She served for fifteen years as Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), where she founded the webjournal, Scholar & Feminist Online, and the New Feminist Solutions series of activist research projects with community-based organizations, such as Queers for Economic Justice and the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Her most recent book, The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics was a 2021 finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies. With Ann Pellegrini she is co-author of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance and co-editor of Secularisms. She has led research projects supported by the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, Overbrook Foundation, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, and Luce Foundation. She has taught as a Visiting Professor at Wesleyan University and Harvard University. Before entering the academy, she was a policy analyst and organizer in Washington, D.C.

Kerwin Kaye, FGSS, Wesleyan University
Kerwin Kaye is Associate Professor and Chair of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and an affiliated faculty member of American Studies Department Wesleyan University. He is the author of Enforcing Freedom: Drug Courts, Therapeutic Communities, and the Intimacies of the State (Columbia University Press 2020). He has also done research on sex work and the discourse of “sex trafficking.” His contributions to the Paradoxes of Neoliberalism project focus on the discourse of vulnerability. His current research investigates the discourse of “drug trafficking.”

Tami Navarro, Pan-African Studies, Drew University
Tami Navarro is an Assistant Professor of Pan-African Studies at Drew University. She is a Cultural Anthropologist whose work has published work in Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Transforming Anthropology, Small Axe Salon, The Caribbean Writer, Social Text, and Feminist Anthropology. She is a founding member of the Virgin Islands Studies Collective (VISCO) and a member of the Editorial Board for the journal Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. Dr. Navarro is co-host of the podcast, “Writing Home: American Voices from the Caribbean” and the author of Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands.

Mario Pecheny, Political Science, University of Buenos Aires
Mario Pecheny is Professor of Political Science and Sociology of Health at the University of Buenos Aires. In 2018, he was elected by his colleagues to be the Director of Social Sciences and Humanities at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina. In 2019, he was appointed as Vice-President on Scientific Affairs of CONICET. He has published many books, including recently: Prevención, promoción y cuidado. Enfoques de vulnerabilidad y derechos humanos (with José R. Ayres, Vera Paiva, Alejandro Capriati & Ana Amuchástegui Herrera, Teseo, 2018), Políticas del amor: derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (with Fernando A. Blanco & Joseph M. Pierce, Cuarto Propio, 2018), Travestis, mujeres transexuales y tribunales: Hacer justicia en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (with Blas Radi, Jusbaires, 2018). He has been visiting scholar and/or visiting professor at many universities, including Columbia, Michigan, Monmouth College, Utah, State of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), Federal of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Sao Paulo (USP), Federal de Goias (UFG), UPCH-Lima, Cape Town, Paris III, Libre de Bruxelles, San Martín (UNSAM), Córdoba (UNC), and de la Patagonia San Juan Bosco (UNPSJB). He was awarded in 2013 with the National Prize “Bernardo Houssay” in Social Sciences, by the Ministry of Science and Technology (Argentina). He has also received recognition from the Argentine Senate for his contribution to equal marriage law in 2010, and from community-based organizations in Argentina.