Globalising Neoliberalism, Travelling Feminisms: Pollesch@Prater

Abstract

The work of the playwright and director René Pollesch (*1962) brings into view the changes in the gender order that have attended the complex process we call globalisation, and adds a distinctly European perspective to our understanding of it. In the late 1990s, European feminist scholars began to examine the combined effects of immigration and the dismantling of socialist and Western welfare states on the gender order of European societies shifting from industrial to post-industrial economies. The status of the state in countries on that continent, and in particular its function of regulating the economy, differs considerably from that in so-called free market economies. The state’s economic policies have played a key role in crafting socialist-egalitarian and capitalist-patriarchal gender and family relations (with many variations in between across the region). In addition, the state (in Western Europe) has also long subsidised public spaces for the production and dissemination of academic knowledge as well as art, in order to facilitate a self-correcting, democratic public discourse protected from commercial or political pressures. Concomitant with the adoption of neoliberal policies by the European Union, which aim to liberate the economy from state control at the national and supranational level, the relations between men and women, and between natives and immigrants, are undergoing dramatic changes, at the same time that the possibility to reflect collectively on these changes and publicly debate them in academic, journalistic and artistic venues is also radically curtailed through the privatisation of the public sphere.