A call to loyalty : women’s bodies, playgrounds and battlefields.

Resumo

The article aims at analysing how the use of “feminist” arguments by xenophobic, right –wing and populist discourses– constitutes a specific form of neutralisation of feminism. In European public discourse, women’s freedom is becoming a pawn in a political game that has nothing to do with women themselves. Women’s bodies –possessed, re-appropriated, impregnated, covered and uncovered– become battlefields for the “identity conflicts” of late modernity. On the other hand, the aspiration to autonomy, re-narrated in late capitalism in terms of freedom to consume, causes women bodies, exposed, spectacularised, commodified, to become the playgrounds of neo-liberal order (Fraser, 2009). Some trends in contemporary feminism reflect this mimetic version of freedom, thus contributing to make feminist critique suitable to the spirit of new capitalism and easily manipulated by xenophobic, right-wing populist discourses.