Feminism and the crises of capitalism

Some feminisms seek liberation through the market; others seek liberation from the market. This panel draws together global perspectives on the fraught relationship between feminism, queer politics, and contemporary capitalism. How do family structures and reproductive labor sustain historical and contemporary forms of racial capitalism? How can feminist and queer lenses illuminate the crises of the current political moment? How have feminist and queer politics engaged and resisted commodification? And what are the possibilities for feminist articulations outside neoliberal vocabularies?

Panelists:

• Celeste Curington, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Brandeis University

  Celeste Curington is a feminist and intersectional sociologist with diverse interests in the African Diaspora in the United States, Europe, and other communities of color.

  Curington’s newest book, Laboring in the Shadow of Empire: Race, Gender and Care Work in Portugal, examines the everyday lives of an African descendant care service workforce in an ostensibly “anti-racial” Europe and against the backdrop of the Portuguese colonial empire. Drawing on nearly two years of ethnographic research in the greater metropolitan area of Lisbon, Curington chronicles how African descendant care workers experience – and relentlessly resist – everyday experiences of systemic gendered anti-Black racism as they go about their days searching for work, interacting with patrons in public spaces, and negotiating workspace interactions with colleagues, clients, and the families of those under their care. By tracing the historical construction of labor from the imperial period and how its vestiges remain firmly ensconced in a post-colonial global care economy, Curington illustrates how deeply intersectional logics of a racialized and international division of reproductive labor in Portugal render these women “hyper-invisible” and “hyper-visible” as “appropriate” workers in Lisbon.

  As a trained doula, Curington combines her passion for reproductive care with her scholarly insights. She is currently embarking on a new book project that centers on the intersection of BIPOC doula birth workers’ labor and community experiences in Massachusetts and within the context of nationwide reproductive injustice.

• Dr. Smitha Radhakrishnan, Marion McLean Butler Professor in the History of Ideas and Professor of Sociology, Wellesley College

  Smitha Radhakrishnan is a feminist sociologist studying development, financialization, and the intertwined legacies of the slavery, colonialism, and the Cold War. Radhakrishnan is the author of four books, most recently Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India (Duke University Press, Alice Amsden Book Prize Honorable Mention 2024) and The Gender Order of Neoliberalism (with Cinzia D. Solari, Polity Press, Immanuel Wallerstein Book Prize Winner 2024). Her article publications have appeared in leading feminist and development studies journals. She is currently working on a large interview-based project on household debt in precarious households with sites in India, South Africa and the US. Radhakrishnan is currently Chair of the Global and Transnational Sociology section of the American Sociological Association. Apart from her scholarly life, Radhakrishnan is a lifelong Bharatanatyam dancer and runs NATyA Dance, which includes a performing collective and classes for children and adults.

• Evren Savci, Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at, Yale University

  Evren Savcı is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her first book Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (2021, DUP) analyzes sexual politics under contemporary Turkey’s AKP regime with an eye to the travel and translation of sexual political vocabulary. Her second book project, Monogamy and its Discontents,  turns to the political economy of monogamy. In it, she discusses the establishment of it as a central tenet of civilized sexual morality, and attends to the current neoliberal incorporation of its alternatives and restoration of it distributive logic. She is the co-editor of the South Atlantic Quarterly special issue "Transnational Queer Materialism" with Rana M. Jaleel (UC Davis), and her work on the intersections of language, knowledge, sexual politics, neoliberalism and religion has appeared in Journal of Marriage and the Family, Ethnography, Sexualities, Political Power and Social Theory, Theory & Event, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, GLQ, and New Perspectives on Turkey, and in several edited collections. Savcı received her Ph.D. in Sociology from University of Southern California, and her master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Sociology from University of Virginia. Following her Ph.D., she was a postdoctoral fellow at The Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN).

• Elena Shih, Manning Assistant of American Studies, Brown University

  Elena Shih is Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University, where she directs a Human Trafficking Research Cluster through the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Shih is the author of two books: Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehabilitation, and the Racial Wages of Rescue (University of California Press), and White Supremacy, Colonialism, and the Racism of Anti-Trafficking (Routledge). Recent op-eds about her research and organizing as a core collective member of Red Canary Song appear in the New York Times and Providence Journal. 

• Cinzia D. Solari, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Boston

  Cinzia Solari is Associate Professor of Sociology at UMass Boston. She is a feminist ethnographer whose work has focused on post-Soviet peoples as they make their way in a capitalist world. Dr. Solari has used the tools of global ethnography to investigate the intersections of migration, modernity, and neoliberal capitalism. Her first book, On the Shoulders of Grandmothers: Gender, Migration, and Post-Soviet Nation-state Building, is winner of the 2020 Mirra Komavrsky Book Award from the Eastern Sociological Society. On the Shoulders of Grandmothers investigates how grandmother-led migrations from Ukraine to Europe and the US built the “new” Ukraine transnationally. Dr. Solari’s second book with Smitha Radhakrishnan, The Gender Order of Neoliberalism, is winner of the 2024 Immanuel Wallerstein Book Award from the Political Economy of the World System Section of the American Sociological Association. The book places in conversation three world regions—the US, the former Soviet Union, and South and Southeast Asia—to show not only how gender is foundational to making the neoliberal global order work but that existing templates for feminist imaginings of an anti-capitalist, anti-racist world were erased as the world took the neoliberal turn. This feminist work must be recovered and repurposed to create a fairer future. Dr. Solari’s recent investigations into how pro and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric is deployed by nation-states in the international area have led to her current research that focuses on nonbinary and transgender youth.

Moderated by Gowri Vijayakumar of Brandeis University