Catherine Rottenberg is a Professor of Media, Communications, and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research investigates the convergence of feminism and neoliberalism, as well as the politics of care. Catherine’s full profile can be found here.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

That is a difficult question both because I see so much exciting research being published on feminism and because I am an interdisciplinary scholar so don’t have one field! I would say that, for me, some of the most interesting research at the moment involves thinking about transnational decolonial feminist solidarities; the potential as well as limitations of feminist rage in a moment of anti-gender crusades; and a theory and practice of anti-fascist feminist—in fact, I am part of a collective drafting an anti-fascist feminist manifesto!

How has the way you understand the world and feminism changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

Feminism for me began as a kind of inarticulate rebellion — against restrictive norms, against people telling me what I should want or how I should live my life. I grew up in New York City, and I started marching on Washington in my early teens; it was here, in these political mobilisations, that I found my feminist community. It wasn’t until I reached university that I encountered feminist theory as such, and that encounter very literally changed my entire career trajectory. I was studying biology at the time, planning to become a medical doctor. But in my second year of my undergraduate studies, I took a class — Introduction to Embryology — with Professor Anne Fausto-Sterling, a very well-known feminist biologist and thinker. It was the exposure to Fausto-Sterling’s critical feminist perspective on sex that changed the course of my life. I never did become a scientist — and instead went on to study literature and critical theory. 

Over the years, I have moved toward feminist media studies and become increasingly interested in political economic analyses.  It has been my many teachers, my mentors, my colleagues, my fellow activists, and my students who have influenced and changed my understanding of feminism and the world.  My thinking continues to be shaped by my many interlocutors. Though, if pushed comes to shove, I would probably say that the one person who has most influenced and prompted the most significant shifts in my thinking has been Judith Butler, who was (and continues to be) my mentor. Both their notion of gender performativity and their notion of precariousness have profoundly shaped the way I approach the world as a political activist and feminist thinker.

In The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism and subsequent work, you analyse the first Trump presidency as deeply damaging to women’s rights while also reshaping feminist politics. How do you think current events and rising authoritarian tendencies are reshaping women’s rights and feminism?

I think the answer to that is quite clear. On the one hand, we see how rising authoritarian tendencies are dismantling hard-won feminist and LGBTQI+ successes — the overturning of Roe versus Wade, the onslaught of anti-trans legislation and the targeting of trans people, alongside the mainstreaming of the tradwife phenomenon. One of Trump’s first executive orders was called “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”, which is not only anti-trans but draws on a long history of paternalistic and anti-feminist rhetoric.Joan W Scott (another huge influence on me) recently published a piece in The Guardian underscoring how many gender studies programs are being shut down across the US.She writes that gender studies is “not a parochial feminist project, but a vital stand … based on aspirations for equality and justice for all”. I could not agree more.  All of these developments have direct and serious consequences for how we mobilise as feminists because the ground has shifted. The rise of the far-right — not only in the US but across the world — is profoundly changing the political landscape, which means that, in many ways, we have lost serious ground in terms of women’s and LGBTQI+ rights — as well as the rights of immigrants and racialised communities. 

The attack on women’s rights and the preoccupation with targeting trans people alongside the dismantling of any affirmative action and EDI policies are part of what Sara Farris, Veronica Gago, Rafeef Ziadah and I are calling the fascisisation of politics.  After all, we know that fascist politics mobilise hyper nationalist, masculinist and master ‘race’ discourses, all of which are underpinned by the (re)production of a racialised and essentialised gender binarism. 

Some argue that this very, very grim moment also provides an opportunity been to think beyond the liberal rights framework and to create a truly transnational anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist feminist mobilisation.  In other words, some people suggest that the annihilatory violence has always been embedded within liberalism and liberal democracy (which, after all, has a long history of justifying genocide, colonialism; slavery, and misogyny), and today the progressive veneer has been stripped away.  While the first part of this claim is undoubtedly true, I also strongly believe that we need to recognise how the fascisisation of politics has had — and will continue to have — ever more devastating, violent consequences for the vast majority of humanity as well as for the planet and other living creatures. This recognition makes finding ways of countering this fascisation even more urgent. 

You describe the disappearance of key feminist terms such as equal rights, liberation, and social justice, and their replacement with words such as happiness, balance, responsibility, and lean in. Do you see any new key terms or discursive formations emerging from neoliberal feminism today?

I think we are seeing a number of different discursive developments today that relate to neoliberal feminism. We do still have the continued embrace of a kind of feel-good- empowerment neoliberal popular feminism across media sites. But we also have another phenomenon: the resurgence of discourses around gender traditionalism, exemplified in the mainstreaming of the tradwife (a portmanteau, short for traditional wife).  I would argue that in many ways there is now an increasing preoccupation with this latter discursive formation, which seems to be eclipsing the different iterations of neoliberal feminism.

In other words, I think we have entered a new moment, where a new kind of sensibility is emerging, and where there is a different kind of entanglement between neoliberalism and gender. The insistence on returning to traditional gender roles serves as the tradwife’s solution to one of the main inherent contradictions within neoliberalism — the quandary of reproduction and care work. As I argue in my work on neoliberal feminism, as an economic order, neoliberalism is dependent on the reproduction of human capital; as a political rationality, neoliberal has no lexicon that can recognise reproduction and care work because the neoliberal subject, like everything else, is reduced to a marked metrics and recast as a speck of generic human capital. Neoliberal feminism ‘solves’ this quandary through promoting the ideal of a happy work-family balance. Like neoliberal feminism, tradwivery also attempts to solve this quandary, but their solution is not a happy work-family balance but a return to the traditional gendered division of labour and a clearly defined gender binarism.

Your work has highlighted how gender equality is often mobilised as a marker of national progress and modernity. How do you understand the use of feminist or “women’s rights” rhetoric in the UK and Europe to justify exclusionary and racialised politics?

I think it is quite obvious that this rhetoric is being used to criminalise immigrants and to target trans and genderqueer people. Though of course the weaponisation of women’s rights is nothing new.  We saw this kind of rhetoric used to justify the US invasion of Afghanistan.  Yet, Gyatri Spivak reminds us that the trope of “white men saving brown women from brown men” has a much longer history, rooted in colonialism.  While in the past, the emphasis might have been on ‘protecting’ or ‘defending’ women from brown and black men, today the emphasis — particularly in the UK — is often upholding ‘women’s rights’ even as the ‘danger’ and threat remains brown and black men — and particularly Muslims and immigrants.  

In much the same way that neoliberal feminism is being eclipsed by an insistence on gender traditionalism, I might go so far as to say that the notion of gender equality as the ‘benchmark of civilisation’, which was current a decade ago, is increasingly being eclipsed by right-wing forces. Here the older more overtly or blatantly heteropatriachical and white supremacist rhetoric of protecting women (rather than gender equality) is gaining traction in order to shore up and police borders — of the nation and of the gender binary. In the US, the Trump executive order ‘defending’ women from radical gender ideology is a perfect example of this.  

As feminist language has become increasingly co-opted or undermined within neoliberal frameworks and authoritarian political trends, what forms of feminist politics do you think are most capable of resisting both authoritarianism and neoliberalism?

Of course, this is THE question: How do we counter these forces effectively and collectively? Part of my answer is that I have written (another!) co-authored manifesto about this — The Care Manifesto, where we argue that we need to cultivate a feminist, queer, anti-racist and eco-socialist vision based on a politics of care. 

But here, I want to talk about rage as potentially the condition of possibility of beginning to cultivate that politics of care. This might sound counterintuitive, but lately, I have been working on gendered rage. I do think that rage plays a part in challenging and even helping to dismantle normative scripts. Thinking with Sara Ahmed: Unhappiness, killjoy energy, rage, all play a part in recognising and resisting and mobilising against neoliberalism, authoritarianism, and oppressive norms and regimes.

At the same time, we also have to be careful not fetish either unhappiness or rage — since rage has no political loyalty. Rage, as we have seen in the rise of the far-right, can be just as effectively mobilised by reactionary forces and anti-gender crusaders. And today, in many parts of the world, we see how reactionary rage and nihilistic raging are eclipsing the progressive potential and force of feminist rage. Yet, I do think that collectivising and collective feminist rage does have a part to play in dismantling oppressive happiness scripts and ironically perhaps in the cultivation of a politics of care.

In the wake of #MeToo — whatever your feelings about this movement/hashtag ­— we have seen the increased public and popular visibility of women’s rage. Think of The Woman’s Marches; think of Women, Life, Freedom movement, following Mahsa Amini’s murder in police custody in Iran; think Ni Una Menos. Though if we want to mobilise rage for constructive and emancipatory purposes, we will need to recognise rage not only as contextual in the sense of being produced and fomented within particular material, social, political and cultural condition, where its iteration and reception is always inflected by one’s subject position.

Maybe we could say that unhappiness and rage are, I would venture to say, necessary but insufficient for dismantling oppressive structures and scripts. Rage, in particular, can serve as a catalyst in public mobilization and collective demands for change and even the push needed to begin articulating and cultivating a politics of care, since rage has a propulsive force.  Yet rage is also always entangled and messy — and can be reactive and reactionary and can be destructive. 

In order to counter these forces, we need feminist rage that helps us forge new, more egalitarian, caring, collective and democratic visions and practices of living together.

What is the most important advice you could give to younger scholars working on feminism, power, and political economy today?

Read closely and widely; find/create communities of feminist learning and practice — the best thinking is most often done together; forge collaborations and alliances; debate passionately — do not be afraid of disagreement; persist — in asking critical questions, in the face of rejection; use your imagination daringly — the university does not have to be the neoliberal managerial one that it is today; and, finally, externalise and collectivise your rage — it can be a propulsive force that leads to an alternative, better — and caring — university (and world).

Further Reading on E-International Relations