Neoliberal Capitalism and the 'New Sexual Contract'

Neoliberal Capitalism and the “New Sexual Contract” Brunella Casalini (University of Florence) Abstract Taking into consideration the long-term transformations in the form of capitalism, the paper focus on how women's labor and socio-economic conditions have changed in recent years, creating the conditions for new forms of resistance to market capitalism. It explores the multiple meanings and interpretations of the expression “feminization of labor”. In search of a categorical framework, capable of explaining this reality and the “new sexual contract” on which it is based, the paper adopts the Marxist feminist theory of housewifization and Maria Mies’s view of woman as the last colony. Today Maria Mies's view is shared by postcolonial and Marxist feminists such as Federici and Hartsock. This strand of feminism, which seems to have a non negligible influence on contemporary radical social movements and on the issues and preoccupations which they advance in their anti-austerity protests, follows and develops Rosa Luxemburg's legacy and expands the Marxian idea of primitive accumulation in a similar manner to David Harvey's concept of accumulation by dispossession. Focusing on the “background conditions” presupposed by capitalism production, it highlights the way in which the neoliberal accumulation of capital always creates new labor precarity and unemployment which particularly affect women, undermining the very conditions of social reproduction. The centrality of “social reproduction” - in the specific sense in which the concept is used in the feminist literature - for the process of capitalist valorisation and of its transformations has been often denied also in the critical perspectives analysing capitalism. The contribution of this paper, supporting a renewed feminist materialist approach, is to critically present an alternative history of capitalism and of its forms of exploitation in which the role of the women is central.