Neoliberal Film and Feminism

Abstract

This essay looks at two recent films – Rick Rosenthal’s 2013 Drones and Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2014 A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night – to discuss the intersections between feminism and neoliberalism. It argues neoliberalism promotes images of feminist-influenced independent women in order to advance its ideologies of resilience and public-sector critique as well as to make sense of its policies of privatization, technological expansion, and cuts in workforce supports. Images of women in such films also serve to create narrative and moral meanings that support forms of exploitation in reproductive economies. However, such films also demonstrate that neoliberalism’s citations of feminism cannot help but produce multiple feminist perspectives, some of which cannot be collapsed into – and even contradict – neoliberalism’s constructions.

Keywords:

• Feminism
• gender
• neoliberalism
• reproductive economy

Notes

1 Duggan, for example, highlights how corporatist agendas have strengthened and spread partly by hardening identity hierarchies: neoliberals, she maintains, “make use of identity politics to obscure redistributive aims” (2003, 15).

2 Neoliberal realignments of gender within reproductive economies, as Ong has shown, have allowed for manipulation and seizure of profits by constructing private, domestic, reproductive identities as privatized “work.” For example, as women professionals in the tech economy have been absorbed into production, women “care” workers are recruited from poorer nations with their identities re-envisioned with “moral guarantees of biological welfare” (2009, 179) by prohibitions on sex and policed leisure time.

3 As Harvey explicates the main difference between liberalism and neoliberalism that arose in the 1970s:

under the former lenders take the losses that arise from bad investment decisions, while under the latter borrowers are forced by state and international powers to take on board the cost of debt repayment no matter what the consequences for the livelihood and well-being of the local population. (2005, 29)

4 “The coercive arm of the state,” notes Harvey, meaning the police, the prisons, and the army, “is augmented to protect corporate interests and, if necessary, to repress dissent” (2005, 77).

5 See Goodman (2016). At the same time, militarization shapes identities and interprets bodies. As Puar states, “Militarized bodies are crafted through the dissemination and diffusion of control” (2007, 156). In neoliberalism, Jasbir continues, people acquire an intimacy with enforcement mechanisms, an intimacy which prepares bodies and minds for participation in containment policies.

6 “An integrative feminist politics of reproduction was reduced to decorative support for pharmaceutical companies and population controllers. Numerical targets for implants and sterilizations – the polar opposite of a woman’s right to choose – still drove policy on the ground” (Watkins 2018, 45).

7 Known mostly for directing TV serials.

8 Much of this filmography information is cited from Danny Leigh’s interview with Amirpour: “The Skateboarding Iranian Vampire Diaries,” The Guardian, May 7, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/may/07/skateboarding-iranian-vampire-ana-lily-amirpour-feminism-porn-girl-walks-home-alone-at-night.

9 I thank Barry J. Faulk for this interpretation.