Villains and Victims: Women of Color in Global Debates About Neoliberalism

During the late twentieth century, as neoliberal economic ideas grew in influence globally, both its advocates and opponents deployed histories of women of color to advance their causes. The stories they told were strikingly different. Advocates of conservative economic orthodoxy in the U.S. proffered “welfare queens,” presumed to be African-American women or Latinas, as evidence of the failure of the liberal welfare state.  Meanwhile, foes of neoliberalism responded to its implementation in the Global South with a stereotype of their own—that of poor, guileless, “Third-World women,” who were robbed of public services as the result of retrenchment campaigns that ultimately shifted resources to elites. This paper argues that women of color, portrayed either as villains or victims, were central characters in debates concerning neoliberalism and that stereotypes describing them shaped the political landscapes that they and other activists sought to influence and limited the strategies they could use to do so.   On the global level, feminist-inspired gender analysis that focuses on the experiences of women won considerable prominence in policy debates even as it largely continued to posit Third-World women as victims and obscured other power dynamics that contribute to poverty in the Global South.  Meanwhile, feminist inspired gender analysis that focuses on women has largely been absent in national-level conversations about poverty and public policy in the U.S., where attention to race, deindustrialization and mass incarceration has produced activism focused primarily on the experiences of men.