On the Uses of (Neo)liberalism and the promise of radical feminism

“I sometimes wonder why I should bother to read one after another extended scholarly analysis only to reach, again and again, such an unsurprising conclusion.” – James Ferguson

·       POSTED ON OCTOBER 25, 2017 ON TEACIRCLEOXFORD.COM

A different lens on the Rakhine State crisis

Critiques of (neo)liberalism broadly aim to reveal the insidious ways that dispossession is depoliticized and justified qua economies and arts of government. Yet the recent scramble among scholars and journalists to understand the role of state power and (neo)liberal ideology in shaping Rohingya displacement has revealed few surprising insights about the mechanisms underpinning violence in Myanmar, nor has it revealed any new possibilities for undermining the structures and discourses that frame this violence as inevitable. Of course, this is not to say that (neo)liberal ideology does not harm minorities and the poor. It most certainly does.

Drawing on James Ferguson, I argue that a myopic focus on (neo)liberal ideology belies its polyvalence and overlooks its uses for radical and subversive ends. Here neoliberalism is understood as the particularly insidious refusal to see liberalism as a political rather than economic project (Brown, 2010). By now most scholars of Myanmar are well-acquainted with the work of Luxembourger historian Dr. Jacques Leider, whose scholarship is frequently cited (or shared in the form of social media memes) to support claims of Rohingya fraudulence, nonexistence, foreignness, or deviance. Several Burma studies scholars have highlighted instances where his work has been taken up to serve anti-Rohingya or chauvinist interests (see, for example, pieces by Tim Frewer, Soe Lin Aung in Tea Circle).

Although I strongly agree with Soe Lin Aung’s political economy analyses and Tim Frewer’s critiques, the authors include no more than a cursory citation of Jacques Leider’s research on Rakhine history and Rohingya ethnicity as an example of problematic (neo)liberal scholarship.

Viewing problems exclusively through the lens of (neo)liberalism does not do much to innovate new ways of understanding the causes and conditions of Rohingya displacement, nor does it open space for radical alliances that achieve social and political change.

Rather, these analyses work to reinforce the centrality of (neo)liberalism as an organizing principle of intellectual and material life while falling short of recognizing its potentially subversive uses.

The promise of radical feminism

For over the last couple of decades, what we call ‘the Left’ has come to be organized, in large part, around a project of resisting and refusing harmful new developments in the world. But it has left us with a politics largely defined by negation and disdain, and centered on what I will call ‘the antis.’ Anti-globalization, anti-neoliberalism, anti-privatization, anti-imperialism, anti-Bush, perhaps even anti-capitalism—but always ‘anti’, not ‘pro’. This is good enough, perhaps, if one’s political goal is simply to denounce ‘the system’ and to decry its current tendencies.” – James Ferguson (2010), p. 1

In ‘The uses of neoliberalism,’ James Ferguson warns that in providing a coherent idea of neoliberalism, one has created a counter-ideology that discursively functions to anchor neoliberalism as the primary point for theoretical and political engagement. Operating within ‘anti’ critiques of (neo)liberalism only gets us so far, as there is never space for being ‘pro’. Furthermore, critical scholars often fail to realize that critiques of (neo)liberalism often work to reinforce masculinist methodologies by prioritizing some forms of knowledge, and specific forms of critique, over others. More specifically, Tim Frewer’s recent polemic against liberalism reproduces the same ways of knowing about Rohingyas that he critiques – namely, a linear progression of points and counterpoints that prioritize elite academic knowledge and genderless analysis without considering the vast body of feminist and subaltern literature and methods that have innovated new approaches to the dilemma of critiquing power structures without reproducing them. By remaining within the terrain of (masculine) liberalism, Frewer does not move beyond a politics of the ‘anti’. This is not to say that I disagree with his critiques of liberalism. On the contrary. Yet operating within masculinist terrains of critique and knowledge production is not useful for building alliances that subvert, rather than shore up, capitalism and the capillary workings of power in Myanmar.

There are limitless possibilities in the radical politics of feminism and feminist methods, which address broader questions of gender, race, class, and power as they relate to knowledge production (see Nagar, 2006).

Where traditional (masculinist) Western science pursues ‘objective’ knowledge about the world, feminist scholars emphasize the fact that the production of knowledge itself is not neutral, but deeply political (Haraway, 1988). As Tim Fresner correctly observes, knowledge about Rohingyas has material consequences as it shapes the understandings of journalists, diplomats, analysts, and state actors.

Feminist scholars have innovated several methods and approaches that resist co-optation by the state, chauvinist political groups, and neo-nazi activists, to name a few.  For example, Elizabeth Povinelli (2012) developed the method of austere ethnography in response to Australian state policymakers’ misuse of a report on aboriginal communities, which mentioned instances of child sex abuse but included no evidence or claims that it was a ‘rampant’ problem. State representatives cited the report to justify draconian restrictions on the finances, movements, and childrearing practices of indigenous Australians. Galvanized by this co-optation, Elizabeth Povinelli’s writings highlight her everyday interactions with aboriginal peoples, but reveal no details about the cultural, economic, or political lives of aboriginal peoples themselves. Instead, her research combines theory with mundane accounts of institutional violence and abandonment. For example, one passage examines ‘economies of abandonment’ through a recollection of the ubiquity of painful staph infections on the skin. Povinelli reflects on inequitable access to resources like clean water, washing machines, or bacterial-resistant wool clothing, which became more difficult after welfare payments were cut and money became accessible only through prepaid debit cards. Povinelli prioritizes her role as a provider of everyday acts of care in a vulnerable community, while considering whether or not she should write about the details of this care and the people she has cared for.

In addition to austere ethnography and everyday acts of care, Community Based Research methods provide a toolkit for creating research that resists co-optation through its attention to the role of communities in the design, implementation, and dissemination of research. These methods also decenter researcher ‘expertise’ and question researcher positioning vis-à-vis participants and the process of producing knowledge. For example, Richa Nagar’s conceptualization of ‘radical vulnerability’ encourages the researcher to make themselves vulnerable to participants in a similar way that participants are often asked to be vulnerable with researchers. This concept aims to address the vast differences in power and access to resources that often separate researchers and ‘the researched’ by cultivating emotional equity.

Feminist methods prioritize community and individual insights about best practices for engaging with researchers and the ways they may be able to achieve their goals through alliances with academics.

In the context of my own research on Myanmar, a collaboration with Rohingya political activists and students has shed new light on the meanings and challenges associated with literature that represents Rohingyas as a ‘stateless’ mass of humanity. As one community partner explained to me, “we are not stateless. Our citizenship was taken away.” Prioritizing Rohingyas’ ideas about what ‘good’ and ‘beneficial’ research looks like and trusting their views of what an academic ally should write about, opens new avenues for undermining knowledge that reinforces the role of the state as the arbiter of rights while simultaneously representing Rohingyas as less-than-human.

Radical feminism also enables us to look beyond generic stories of Rohingya vulnerability to highlight the everyday ways that many displaced Rohingyas contribute to societies, economies and places.

In her discussion of the production of knowledge about Black experiences in the United States, McKittrick (2011) challenges academic writers to engage an analytics of race and racism based on human life, not on human suffering. Bifurcated understandings of dispossession and possession miss the importance of human life in forming and mediating structural processes. To study dispossession from the perspective of inevitable killing and death is to consign racialized bodies to death without recognizing the lives that people make diagonal to geographies of racism and dispossession. Recent analyses of Rohingya displacement from the perspective of state power over ‘bare life’ only work to frame Rohingyas according to their deaths, not their lives. Academic research about Rohingyas, therefore, should be predicated on life and act as a space for cooperative action and human efforts (McKittrick, 2011: 960).

Crucially, analyses of suffering need not preclude necropolitics and the role of the state in wielding absolute power over death (Mbembe, 2006). However, I do not see a tension or contradiction between the recognition of oppressive state power and the production of scholarly knowledge that resists representations of people as ‘bare life’ and less-than-human.

Efforts to co-produce feminist, anti-capitalist, and antiracist knowledge about Rohingya experiences creates space for new alliances between rural Rohingyas, political activists, and Gramscian ‘organic’ intellectuals who aim to cultivate a broader class consciousness among Rohingyas and other ethnic minorities. The formation of alliances between diverse intellectuals and ethnic minority activists not only has the potential to alter party politics in Myanmar, these alliances have the potential to undermine and destroy the forms of knowledge that allow Rohingyas and other populations to be marked as deviant, abandoned, and to be killed with impunity.

Works Cited

Brown, Wendy. (2010). Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. Boston: MIT Press.
Haraway, Donna. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist studies, 14(3), 575-599.
Ferguson, James. (2010). The uses of neoliberalism. Antipode, 41(1), 166-184.
Mbembe, Achille. (2006). Necropolitics. Raisons politiques, (1), 29-60.
Mountz, A. (2010). Seeking asylum: Human smuggling and bureaucracy at the border. University of Minnesota Press
Nagar, Richa and the Sangtin writers (2006). Playing with fire: Feminist thought and activism through seven lives in India. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Povinelli, E. A. (2011). Economies of abandonment: Social belonging and endurance in late liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Rose, Hilary. (1994). Love, power, and knowledge: Towards a feminist transformation of the sciences. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Treitler, Vilna. (2013). The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions. Stanford University Press.
Schissler, Matt, Matthew J. Walton, and Phyu Phyu Thi. (2017) “Reconciling Contradictions:
Buddhist-Muslim Violence, Narrative Making and Memory in Myanmar.” Journal of
Contemporary Asia, 4(73) 376-395.
Strand, Kerry, Nicholas Cutforth, Randy Stoecker, Sam Marullo, and Patrick Donohue. (2003). Community-based research and higher education: Principles and practices. London: John Wiley & Sons.
Wimmer, A. (2008). The making and unmaking of ethnic boundaries: A multilevel process theory. American Journal of Sociology, 113(4), 970-1022.

Shae A. Frydenlund is a PhD Candidate in Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her work examines race, gender, and labor in the Himalayas and Myanmar. She is the author of “Labor and Race in Nepal’s Indigenous Nationalities Discourse: Beyond ‘Tribal’ vs ‘Peasant’ Categories” in the journal Himalaya. She can be reached at shae.frydenlund@colorado.edu.

Photo: Carsten ten Brink