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Abstract
This article examines the "paradox of empowerment" after neoliberalism, namely that discourses of empowerment sound liberatory, but have the potential to affect the opposite of what they promise by legitimating the offloading of responsibilities to vulnerable and dependent citizens in the name of self-determination. Using the concept of health activism, and focusing on the film Dallas Buyers Club, I explore whether the traditional and neoliberal strands of empowerment can be disentangled, and thus whether political theorists concerned with freedom, agency, non-sovereign autonomy, and the like, should embrace and fight for this term, or be content to let "empowerment" go.
Introduction
"Empowerment" is a concept with a shady history. Once identified with civil rights activism and feminist consciousness-raising, empowerment was early on coopted by neoconservatives and neoliberals alike, and deployed as a justification to deregulate, devolve, and diminish social safety nets by valorizing entrepreneurial self-care and "responsibilization."1 If "empowerment" has any life leftin it today, it is within discourses such as community psychology, social work, new public health, management and leadership studies, international development, educational reform, and consumer product marketing (because nothing empowers a person like the right paper towel). Given Foucault's radical reconceptualization of power, and in the wake of eviscerating scholarship on neoliberalism by, among others, Wendy Brown, Jodi Dean, Henry Giroux, David Harvey, Angela McRobbie, Sanford Schramm and Sheldon Wolin,2 can we really be bothered with revisiting an idea that was considered by many to be problematic - too uncritical, too second wave, too optimistic - even during its heyday? Should political theorists, cultural critics and critical citizens be content to let "empowerment" go?
In this article I explore this question. I argue that "empowerment" - as a densely coded word, desire and agenda - is worth fighting for, by persistently and overtly articulating it in the context of genuinely democratic commitments such as substantive equality, relational autonomy, democratic humility, meaningful participation and solidarity. However, I also question whether the traditional and the neoliberal strands of "empowerment" can neatly or finally be disentangled. If a bygone era of uncorrupted grassroots collectivism cannot be recreated (and may never have existed in the pure form that wistful civil rights retrospectives suggest), a contemporary defense of empowerment must resist both nostalgia for a golden...