Lynne Segal - Making Trouble

I am writing this new preface at the beginning of 2017, when that intermediate zone between life and politics has never felt so shaken. My friend, the American feminist Barbara Ehrenreich, reports being startled when asked How do we join the resistance? by the most unexpected people at a suburban lunch immediately after Trumps electoral victory.

Not just gloom, but something approaching cataclysmic upheaval is expressed by many on the left, making it hard not to feel like a rabbit frozen in the headlights of calamity: Politics will never be the same, I keep reading not after Brexit, not after the inauguration of Donald Trump, not after the collapse of the liberal centre in government, in those democracies where it has long held sway. All this should never have happened, those around me agree, before quickly adding, Racism, never far from the surface, has been given new authority in the upsurge of far-right populism, grounded in anti-Islamic, anti-immigrant sentiments, now with presidential endorsement in the United States.

It has not come out of the blue, that much we know. Indeed, a decade ago my reason for writing Making Trouble was an awareness that so much we had fought for, and often won, had been unravelling for more than twenty years. Starting from my coming of age in what was, for many young people, the hedonistic, libertarian ambiance of the 1960s, this book primarily addresses the grounding I found and embraced so enthusiastically in the flourishing feminist movement the following decade, in the distinctive, all-encompassing cultural and political world of socialist feminism. This is why, in the opening decade of the twenty-first century, I was pondering what had become of my generation of once collectively bold and buoyant feminists, now facing old age in far harsher, more divisive political times. It was clear that our feminist fashioning of new vernaculars for discussing sexism, gender equality, mens violence against women and, above all, for envisaging social transformations through democratic engagement emphasizing the significance of intimacy, care, and shared responsibility for the lives of others, were now being refashioned to suit the abrasively competitive, individualist, neoliberal cultural climate of ever-more invasive market reasoning. Taking stock once more, I cant see past those headlights threatening only danger ahead without revisiting how we got into these austere times, despite our alternative dreams and resistance.

Interestingly, the concept of neoliberalism did not appear in the index of Making Trouble and, given its various contradictions, it remains controversial for some as a way of describing our current moment.This was accompanied by the lowering of taxes on private wealth and shortly thereafter the removal of state regulation over wealth production, first known as monetarism.

Meanwhile, at the same time that regulations were removed on the corporate commercial and financial sectors, especially after the Big Bang of 1986, which opened Londons financial centre to overseas banks, there was increasing bureaucratic regulation of all public institutions in their servicing of social needs, whether dealing with the nations health, education, housing, security, or any other centralized or municipal provision for peoples general welfare and development.

With its fundamental mantra of individual autonomy and competitiveness, neoliberal sentiment necessarily enshrined the marginalization, if not disparagement, of those seen as dependent, needy, and vulnerable, people calling upon the resources of what Thatcher derided and stigmatized as the nanny state. In her perversely upended version of reality, it was the welfare state that created dependency by encouraging idleness and cheating, and trade unions that created unemployment.

Feminists, too, were her enemy within at least so long as we supported an oppositional agenda. And just as we feared, Thatchers policies would end up hugely deepening the divisions between women, when poverty almost doubled and unemployment tripled under her administration.

Making Trouble therefore captures the gloom and doom many feminists felt a decade ago, even among those still most active in working for change. However, few of us were really prepared for how much worse things could get, or for how hard it would prove to shift the market-driven agenda, even when this form of aggressive corporate capitalism almost

Ten years later, the majority of us are still paying in falling living standards and the imposition of further austerity cutbacks in basic social provision, making Britains welfare spending now lower than all but the very poorest countries in Europe.

Moreover, as feminists argue and economists confirm, these ongoing cuts in welfare provision invariably hit large swathes of women hardest, precisely because of our continuing primacy in the provision of care, both inside and outside the home. As the British Fawcett Society reveals, since the beginning of the financial implosion in 2008, close to a million women have moved into low-paid, insecure work; the number of underemployed women has nearly doubled, and 371,000 women have moved into self-employment, typically also with very low pay.

Such a predicament leads me to wonder whether I was too optimistic at the close of Making Trouble. When searching for reasons to remain hopeful a decade ago, I concluded: We never simply win, but then again, we never simply lose either. Was I wrong? Have women been simply losing over the last decade, challenging us to wonder whether all the trouble feminists have made gained anything at all for the majority of women? Of course, we are familiar with one response to this situation from anti-feminists gleefully pointing the finger of blame at feminism itself. As ever, such accusations sometimes come from women themselves and, more recently, even a few of the latest self-styled feminists, blaming their more radical sisters for worsening womens situation: either because our talk of sexism and womens special needs is seen as counterproductive; or else because we are accused of enabling men to evade their former sense of responsibility for assisting women. Illustratively, both accusations are evident in the instant media space accorded to Kim Elsessers Sex and the Office, where the former American banker, now a new sort of feminist and gender expert, argues that the commotion over sexual harassment has backfired on women, making it too risky for men to forge professional friendships with women, while intimidating senior male executives out of offering to help women in the workplace for fear those actions might be misconstrued as sexual harassment.