A Call to Loyalty: Women’s Bodies, Playgrounds and Battlefields
by Debora Spini
pp. 92-106 Issue 8 (4,2) – July-December 2017 ISSN (online): 2539/2239 ISSN (print): 2389-8232 DOI: 10.17450/170206
Abstract
The article aims at analysing how the use of “feminist” arguments by xenophobic, right –wing and populist discourses– constitutes a specific form of neutralisation of feminism. In European public discourse, women’s freedom is becoming a pawn in a political game that has nothing to do with women themselves. Women’s bodies possessed, re-appropriated, impregnated, covered and uncovered– become battlefields for the “identity conflicts” of late modernity. On the other hand, the aspiration to autonomy, re-narrated in late capitalism in terms of freedom to consume, causes women bodies, exposed, spectacularised, commodified, to become the playgrounds of neo liberal order (Fraser, 2009). Some trends in contemporary feminism reflect this mimetic version of freedom, thus contributing to make feminist critique suitable to the spirit of new capitalism and easily manipulated by xenophobic, right-wing populist discourses.