Roundtable: Whither corporate feminism?

Abstract

In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, corporations quickly seized on the gender equality agenda in search of re-legitimation and to expand into new consumer markets. In the field of feminist IPE, two seminal interventions inaugurated a prolific body of research on increasingly noticeable affinities between corporations and feminist claims. Published in 2015, Elisabeth Prügl’s “neoliberalising feminism” and Adrienne Roberts’ “transnational business feminism” left an indelible mark, furnishing us with different, but equally piercing, theoretical lenses and paving the way for a rich field of empirical research on soft law, corporate social responsibility, public-private partnerships, femvertising, and genderwashing. Ten years on, the global political economy looks starkly different. President Donald Trump’s opposition to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives quickly reverberated across corporate America, with CEOs of major tech companies publicly disavowing “wokeness” and celebrating “masculine energy”. Conversely, as recent research on India attests, aspects of neoliberal feminisms continue to be selectively mobilised by the state and the corporate community. From a feminist perspective, the uneven undoing of transnational business feminism as a globalising hegemonic project, and neoliberalising feminism as a dominant governmentality, calls for fresh theoretical and empirical assessments of the present-day travails and fate of corporate commitments to gender equality and women’s empowerment. To this end, our roundtable aims to take stock of the past, present, and future of what we have dubbed “corporate feminism”, to accentuate the centrality of corporations in the production of gender knowledge and the material configurations of everyday life. Participants will provide brief reflections based on their current research around three key questions and engage in exchanges amongst themselves and the audience. The questions at the centre of the roundtable are the following: Does the year 2025 mark the end of corporate feminism? If corporate feminism is morphing, what is being replaced by? And if now is “the time of monsters”, what kind of feminist critiques and praxes can gnaw at them? While all participants are affiliated with European and American universities, the roundtable includes speakers with research interests and active collaborations in non-Western contexts. Substantive research themes addressed in the roundtable include the nature of a feminist business, organised/organising misogyny, gender in corporate finance, business and the law, and vernacular economics.

Title	Details
Roundtable intervention 1: Whither corporate feminism?	View Paper Details
Roundtable intervention 2: Whither corporate feminism?	View Paper Details
Roundtable intervention 3: Whither corporate feminism?	View Paper Details
Roundtable intervention 4: Whither corporate feminism?	View Paper Details
Roundtable intervention 5: Whither corporate feminism?	View Paper Details