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Abstract: In this essay I reflect on a sample of a relatively new literature that has emerged in recent years on the growth of 'womenomics' and what Adrienne Roberts has called 'transnational business feminism'. Are these developments a triumph for the influence of feminist activists around the globe? Or do we see them as yet another classic attempt by the agents of capitalist globalisation to contain the energies of women and turn them to the advantage of the bottom line? I look at some examples of TBF on the part of Goldman Sachs, Unilever, Levi-Strauss, and the Nike Foundation; at the debate among feminist scholars over whether neoliberal feminism is 'really' feminism; at the rise of the concept of 'empowerment;' and finally, at some elements that TBF leaves out of the picture, including the neoliberal assault on social reproduction; the extreme exploitation of women workers, from Walmart to Export Processing Zones; the retreat from class analysis under neoliberalism; and the continuing effects of 'structural adjustment' on countries in the North like Greece subject to the ravages of the international financial order. I conclude with a call to the international male left to be as welcoming and as creative toward the ideas and the activism of the international women's movement as their corporate adversaries.
Keywords: Women and development; women's empowerment; Marxism; capitalism; feminism; neoliberalism.
INTRODUCTION
In this essay I want to reflect on a sample of a relatively new literature that has emerged in recent years on the growth of 'womenomics' and what Adrienne Roberts has called 'transnational business feminism'.1 If in the 1970s, we saw the growth of official feminism, femocrats, and state machinery for women, and in the 1980s, a surge of activities around women in development, the 1990s and the 2000s seem to have ushered in a new doctrine, that of so-called 'womenomics', meaning that investment in women and girls is now the key to ending poverty, hunger, and disease.
I extend the argument first put forth in my book Feminism Seduced.2 In that study I argued that national governments and international financial institutions were making use of a certain kind of 'hegemonic' feminism, to advance the view that the solution to poverty and underdevelopment was the fostering of education, training and...