When Will They Hear Our Voices? Historicizing Gender, Performance, and Neoliberalism in the 1930s
Abstract
Charlotte Canning’s chapter historicizes neoliberalism through Flanagan and Clifford’s Can You Hear Their Voices?, written in 1931, and performed at Vassar College (a school for the daughters of wealthy US elites) by students, faculty, and local residents of Poughkeepsie, New York. In 1932, German economist Alexander Rüstow, disillusioned by Soviet communism and equally troubled by classic liberal economics, coined the term ‘neoliberalism’ as a new way to theorize the relationship between ‘free markets’ and the democratic state. While Flanagan/Clifford could not have anticipated neoliberalism, their play contains a critique of Rüstow’s ‘third way’ by offering an alternative to homo oeconomicus. In every scene of Can You Hear Their Voices? women characters drive the action, and the construction of their agency offers twenty-first-century feminism possibilities for rethinking and challenging neoliberalism.
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