Engl. 555, "Black Feminism and the Rise of Neoliberalism":

Neoliberalism is a term for political economy that emerges after World War II and become more salient from the 1970s onward. Neoliberal policies and ideology advance autonomous individuality, personal responsibility, and the neutrality of apparatuses—the law, free markets, contractual agreements—that enable personal freedom. Intensified national interest in “individualism” and attenuated meanings of “freedom” can be gleaned through the era’s welfare reform, and the espousal of post-racialism. This course will pose the following questions: what does “freedom” mean in the neoliberal age? How is life managed and organized through state power? Our focus will be on the analytics feminist thought offers for interpreting the forms of governance and cultural politics that rise in the second half of the twentieth century.