AustLit
Latest Issues
AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'What are students of popular culture to do with the term “neoliberalism?” From one perspective, the term is already exhausted. Critics attack writing about neoliberalism for being reductive, for pursuing a critical “buzz‐word” that tends to oversimplify a complex set of economic and political processes. Fashionable terminology circulates with ever greater speed and intensity in academic discourse. Why cling to the outmoded? But, before shelving the topic, we must recognize that the tendency to seek new critical terms rapidly is itself informed by the dynamics of the neoliberal era. We should be wary of moving on a bit too quickly in pursuit of greener pastures. Even cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who admits the limitations of the catch‐all term, insists that the frame of neoliberalism serves a vital purpose by making visible a dense network of interrelated cultural changes over the past fifty years. For Hall, the term does not put a period at the end of the sentence. Instead, it offers common ground from which to begin further exploration. This special issue on neoliberalism in popular culture continues that exploration, showing how the concept still offers numerous avenues for productive inquiry.' (Introduction)
Notes
-
Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
-
Neoliberalism Goes Pop and Purple: Postfeminist Empowerment from Beyoncé to Mad Max,
single work
criticism
(p. 399-420)
'The neoliberal revolution is not only an economic but also a sociopolitical project that requires institutional and cultural changes to support and legitimize it. The “adaptive capacity of neoliberalism itself” (Bergeron 67) has not only enabled a refoundation of its project during each crisis, but has especially made possible its reinforcement in terms of both accumulation and symbolism. Despite the threats and social disaffection faced by neoliberalism, it continues to be a “hegemonic project” (Hall 728), deeply and thoroughly normalized, even though it actually represents a denaturation and dehumanization of the economy and its goals and threatens the sustainability of life in all its forms. The evident conflict between capitalism's logic of accumulation and the logic of care in human lives makes it difficult to assume the premise that neoliberal legitimacy requires people's rational support or sympathy for its project, as Marie Moran has shown. On the contrary, the reason for people's (eminently inertial) acceptance of it lies in the ability of the capitalist and neoliberal social logic to “saturate” ordinary spaces, dilute in habituality (69), and, especially, ingrain itself in “the hearts and souls” of people, as one of its major creators, Margaret Thatcher, once expressed it (qtd. in Butt).' (Publication summary)
