Redoing Feminism within and outside the Neoliberal Academy

This essay reflects on the “undoing” of feminism in the era of neoliberalism, focusing specifically on the feminist epistemological problem posed by the dismantling of collective politics and the privatization of the political today. After considering how the pressures of capitalism dovetail with feminist theoretical developments to remove the basis for a feminist politics within and outside the neoliberal academy, I suggest that contemporary transnational feminist protest movements are redoing feminism by laying bare neoliberalism’s privatization of experience. I argue that these protests pose a provocative challenge for feminist scholars to resist the reduction of the political to the personal and to resignify solidarity and collectivity. In the final section of this essay I consider how the Coalition of Women in German is uniquely poised to take up this challenge, and I offer a few thoughts on how we might proceed.