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Capitalism's Handmaidens : Myth and Women's Enterprise under Neoliberalism.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Langworthy, Melissa.
- Series:
- Women's Work Series
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (189 pages)
- Edition:
- 1st ed.
- Place of Publication:
- Newcastle Upon Tyne : Agenda Publishing, 2026.
- Summary:
- A powerful mythology has grown up around the idea of women's entrepreneurship. Langworthy offers a political economy of women's enterprise and asks what value women's enterprise gives, not to women, but to the institutions that have shaped them and placed them in the centre of the global imaginary.
- Contents:
- Cover
- Half-title
- Series information
- Title page
- Copyright information
- Table of contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- Defining neoliberalism, redefining the good life
- Positioning women's enterprise as a handmaiden of neoliberal capitalism
- The architecture of myth in the neoliberal political economy
- The biopolitical imperative of women's enterprise
- (Bio)power and entrepreneurship
- Through the (feminist political economist) looking glass
- A note on terminology: what is women's enterprise?
- Assembling myth, cultivating handmaidens
- The myth of the financially prudent woman
- The myth of empowerment
- The myth of work-life balance
- The myth of modernity
- The road ahead
- 2 The architecture of extraction
- Introduction
- Entrepreneurship and women's enterprise before the neoliberal turn
- Re-emergence of small enterprises
- The global realignment of women's material conditions
- Institutionalizing neoliberalism
- The contradictory foundations of gendered reform
- The strategic feminization of development
- Institutional gains, gendered losses
- Discipline through debt
- Banking on mothers
- From contradiction to myth
- 3 When only women will do
- Myth and poststructuralism
- Gendering modernity and market readiness
- Women's enterprise as a post-communist signal
- The peace dividend of women's enterprise
- FDI and the gendered entrepreneurial subject
- Symbolic success, material precarity: the contours of the women's enterprise mythology
- Capitalism's essential handmaidens: the strategic value of the women's enterprise myth
- Legitimizing neoliberal life
- Stabilizing neoliberal life
- Subsidizing neoliberal life
- Conclusion
- 4 The myth of the financially prudent woman
- A note on the myth of the financially prudent woman.
- Capital's new handmaidens: the functional contours of gendered financialization
- Microcredit and the management of SAP-induced precarity
- The motherhood dividend
- Trading social guarantees for financial inclusion
- Commodifying gendered credit, building institutional profits
- Converting gendered precarity into corporate virtue
- Unmasking the value extraction behind the myth of women's financial prudence
- The handmaid's yield: harvesting value from gendered creditworthiness
- Disciplining creditworthiness (and entrepreneurialism)
- The legacy of women's financial prudence
- 5 The myth of empowerment
- The value of empowered enterprise
- Handmaidens and heroes: allocating gendered and racialized labour enterprise
- Governing "inferior populations" through the lens of enterprise
- Women entrepreneurs as handmaidens promoting neoliberal subjectivites
- Gendered entrepreneurial failure by institutional design
- The handmaiden's role in securing institutional power
- "Fixing women": state intervention as a project of self-improvement
- Branded inclusion, gendered extraction
- The handmaiden's loop: engineering dependency through the cycle of institutional fixing
- Entrepreneurial subjectivities, empowered capital(ist institutions)
- Handmaidens of resilience: disciplining the self for neoliberal life
- The legacy of empowerment
- 6 the Myth of work-life balance
- Capital's double shift: enterprise and the ideal of working motherhood
- Neoliberal households and the dual intensification of work and care
- Managing enterprise, care and crisis at home
- Handmaidens of care: entrepreneurial motherhood buffering neoliberal life
- Entrepreneurial motherhood and the reproduction of neoliberal life
- The legacy of WLB
- 7 the Myth of modernity
- Introduction.
- The invisible hand of neoliberal modernity
- Visible hand of state regulation: top-down enterprise in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)
- Top-down reform and state-directed enterprise
- The rentier bargain and public sector employment
- Family values
- Substituting state provision with entrepreneurial duty
- The case of Kuwait: reconciling neoliberal modernity and rentier realities
- Handmaidens crafting neoliberal rentier identities
- The legacy of modernity
- 8 Conclusion
- The triple utility: legitimize, stabilize, subsidize
- Impact of myth and future implications
- Notes
- 6 The myth of work-life balance
- 7 The myth of modernity
- References
- Index.
- Notes:
- Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.
- ISBN:
- 1-78821-597-4
- 1-78821-596-6
- OCLC:
- 1582440311
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