Governmentality, Gender and the Undoing of Democracy

In line with Michel Foucault, the paper conceptualizes governmentality as political rationality that constitutes society, subjectivities and statehood. Going beyond Foucault however, the paper grasps governmentality as gendered rationality that deploys gender and sexual politics as (subtle) technologies of power to transfer power into people’s everyday lives. People are governed to consent to a political rationality through ideals of ‘normal’ relationships and family forms and through supposedly ‘true’ forms of femininity, masculinity, sexuality, and desire. Thus, in the first part of the paper, I argue that gender and sexual policies are key elements of governmentality precisely because they permeate people’s private, intimate and everyday lives and are individualized, naturalized and thereby experienced as our own choice, rather than as an effect of power. The second part of the paper asks how such an understanding of governmentality can help us to better understand the current undoing of democracy. Here, a governmentality approach does not reduce the current crisis of democracy to a crisis of state politics but conceptualizes it as a fundamental de-democratization of the entire society, which correlates with a far-reaching yet subtle de-democratization of everyday forms of living and subjectification. The paper offers a queer-feminist analysis of neoliberal governmentality and argues that already neoliberal governmentality installed a broad de-democratization in people’s every-day lives. Paradoxically, a specific neoliberal ‘democratic vocabulary’ has contributed to weaving deep anti-democratic fabrics that serve as a prelude to the current rise in authoritarian politics. For the purpose of my argument, I distinguish two phases of neoliberalism. The first period is libertarian neoliberalism, which precedes the authoritarian neoliberalism of today. Under libertarian neoliberalism promises of inclusion and participation are cloaked under the guise of guaranteeing certain kinds of ‘freedom’. In the contemporary era of authoritarian neoliberalism, such guarantees have proven to be a prelude to the rise in anti-democratic and authoritarian politics. Based on these premises, this paper scrutinizes how gender and sexual politics of the libertarian era of neoliberalism have contributed to a de-democratizing society, albeit in a subtle way, and by doing so the related discourses have helped to enable the current increase of authoritarian politics. The aim of the paper is to reveal that applying a queer-feminist governmentality approach to contemporary debates on the crisis of democracy does not simply add gender and sexual politics as another scope or terrain for analysis. Rather, it brings to light the analytical importance of social micro-practices. Thus, a queer-feminist governmentality approach invites us to expand our analytical parameters: The current crisis of democracy is not only caused by right-wing anti-democratic actors with their anti-feminist, anti-queer politics. Rather, neoliberal governmentality has already deeply ingrained anti-democratic elements in people’s everyday practices – not least through gender and sexual politics. A perspective that criticizes right-wing authoritarianism without tracing it back to a much broader consensus, created through decades of neoliberal governmentality, will not be equipped to grasp the myriad ways that democracy is currently in crisis.