Neoliberalism

Author(s): Grace Kyungwon Hong

Source: Critical Ethnic Studies , Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 56-67
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
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 Neoliberalism
GRACE KYUNGWON HONG

If there is anything my particular subject can bring to students of different

backgrounds, ages, genders it is that it is possible to join the differences
they find in society through rigorous thinking, pleasurable because it is
rigorous, rigorous because it is pleasurable. In my classes, I have a United
Nation [sic] of students. I believe that if I am a good teacher, they teach
each other as much as I teach them. If I am a good teacher, they teach me
as much as I teach them. It doesn’t always happen that way despite
preparation, performance, pedagogical technique. But when it does
happen, there is nothing quite like it. That is what I think education is—
a kind of ecstasy, a lifting out of oneself, that I try to have my teaching be.
—Barbara Christian, “Phi Beta Kappa B. Christian Teaching Statement”

T he 1965 policy brief “The Negro Family: A Case for National Action,”
more famously—or infamously—known as “The Moynihan Report”
after its primary author Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a sociology profes-
sor and U.S. Assistant Secretary of Labor, might seem like an unlikely place
to begin a discussion of neoliberalism.1 While much ink has been spilled
on critiques and defenses of the Moynihan Report and its ideological ilk,2
which blame a host of social problems, from poverty to crime to violence, on
the ostensible reproductive and domestic failings of poor Black women, it is
not a conversation that has intersected much with those on neoliberalism.3
However, I find in the Moynihan Report perhaps the clearest symptomatic
distillation of the shifts in technologies of power that mark the past four
decades—that era that has been called neoliberal. In short, my definition of
neoliberalism is a response on the part of global racial capital to the growing
inadequacy of then-dominant modes of social relation, based on exclusion
from institutions of citizenship and nationalism: franchise colonialism, set-
tler colonialism, and Jim Crow segregation as the aftermath of chattel slavery.
These social relations came into crisis with worldwide movements for de-
col­onization, desegregation, and self-determination. The response, of which

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 P  Neoliberalism • 57   O

the Moynihan Report is an exemplary case, was to invest racialized com-

munities with not only what Foucault has called deductive or repressive
power, but also to induct such communities into affirmative, productive
biopower.4 Neoliberalism thus can be characterized by the coexistence of
diverse forms of power—both repressive and affirmative, necropolitical and
biopolitical—at the same time.
In describing neoliberalism in this way, as a change in the distribution
of respectability in response to the crises in racial capital as marked by the
social movements of the mid-twentieth century, I contribute to contempo-
rary scholarship on the nature of global capital.5 I do so by re-narrating
a shift that has been explained as instigated by everything from changes
in communication technology to a crisis among Cold War superpowers to
the development of the atom bomb, centering mid-twentieth-century social
movements. In situating these social movements as the symptomatic crisis
of neoliberalism, I understand them within a longer history of contesta-
tions around the racialized and imperialist functions of capital, and I thus
am indebted to a substantive tradition of scholarship that documents this
longer history.6 In addition, however, I follow women of color and Third
World feminists who have for decades steadfastly maintained that that racial
and imperialist capital was always organized around gender, reproduction,
and sexuality.7
The introduction to the Moynihan Report states: “The fundamental
problem . . . is that of family structure. The evidence—not final, but power-
fully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling.
A middle-class group has managed to save itself, but for the vast numbers
of the unskilled, poorly educated working class the fabric of conventional
social relationships has all but disintegrated. . . . So long as this solution
persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself.”
As can be seen, a crucial element of incorporating Black communities
in the United States into biopower was to constitute them as populations
requiring help and care (by narrating them as presently deviant), and in par­
ticular, help in attaining reproductive and domestic respectability and secu-
rity. Access (or lack thereof) to gendered and sexual respectability becomes
the dividing line between those who are rendered deviant, immoral, and thus
precarious in opposition to those whose value to capital has been secured
through a variety of norms. The invitation to respectability becomes a way of
regulating and punishing those populations it purports to help. The Moyni-
han Report forecast a future for African Americans that would not improve
despite the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts because of the

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 P   58 •  GRACE KYUNGWON HONG   O

“breakdown in the Negro family.” This “breakdown,” by which Moynihan

meant the high rates of mother-headed or “matriarchal” families without
the presence of Black men, produces a variety of ills, which he described in
the infamous phrase, “tangle of pathologies.” Strengthening the Black fam-
ily by encouraging patriarchally organized, heteroreproductive domesticity
must be a priority for “national action,” according to the report.
While this aspect of The Moynihan Report is quite familiar, other less-
analyzed parts of the report make explicit certain connections that we today
might have forgotten: that is, that the regulation of Black female sexuality as
ostensibly a means of bringing Black communities into the fold of respect-
able national culture was motivated by the U.S.’s precarious position in a
Cold War struggle that became split along racial lines. Moynihan goes on
to state:

It is in no way a matter of chance that the nonviolent tactics and philosophy

of the movement, as it began in the South, were consciously adopted from
the techniques by which the Congress Party undertook to free the Indian
nation from British colonial rule. It was not a matter of chance that the
Negro movement caught on fire in America at just that moment when the
nations of Africa were gaining their freedom. Nor is it merely incidental
that the world should have fastened its attention on events in the United
States at a time when the possibility that the nations of the world will divide
along color lines seems suddenly not only possible, but even imminent.
(Such racist views have made progress within the Negro community
itself—which can hardly be expected to be immune to a virus that is endemic
in the white community. The Black Muslim doctrines, based on total alien-
ation from the white world, exert a powerful influence. On the far left, the
attraction of Chinese Communism can no longer be ignored.)
It is clear that what happens in America is being taken as a sign of what
can, or must, happen in the world at large.

Moynihan situates struggles for desegregation and Civil Rights (what he

calls the “Negro movement”) within the context of decolonization world-
wide (including India and “the nations of Africa”), highlighting the interna-
tionalist imaginaries of U.S.-based movements (for example, the potential
influence of “Black Muslims” and “Chinese Communism”) as a threat to U.S.
global power.8
The Moynihan Report thus makes perfectly evident its own context within
a field of power that was reacting to the seismic shifts in social relations

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 P  Neoliberalism • 59   O

caused by the movements for liberation of the twentieth century. The Moy­
nihan Report’s fixation with regulating Black female sexuality is no acci-
dent but is symptomatic of the ways in which earlier social relations were
based on producing racialized subjects as exempt from normative modes
of reproduction, intimacy, and sexuality. These earlier social relations were
organized around the tenets of white supremacy and the triumph of West-
ern civilization as legitimating ideologies for enslavement, settler colonial-
ism, segregation, and colonization, but such legitimating ideologies had to
erase the conditions of its possibility: reproduction, intimacy, and sexuality.
As Lisa Lowe has argued, bourgeois notions of intimacy that emerged in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in European and American liberal
humanist thought disavowed its dependence on the processes of settler
colonialism, indentured labor, and enslavement that produced other, less
evident forms of intimacy and admixture among enslaved, indentured, and
colonized populations.9 African chattel slavery, on which modern racial capi­
tal is predicated, for example, was organized around the differential manage­
ment of reproduction.10
The establishment of white liberal state policy and the conditional invi­
tation of certain formerly marginalized populations into respectability has
been bolstered by, and has enabled, a discourse of rationality that equates
capitalist development with political and social freedom11—a discourse most
famously advocated by neoliberal economist Milton Friedman in Capital-
ism and Freedom. This invitation into respectability enables the more effi-
cient extraction of a variety of forms of surplus from populations rendered
marginal and deviant. Such invitations to respectability have had different
manifestations and effects in different parts of the globe. The United States
(and other white settler colonial states) have reformed themselves along
the lines of what Jodi Melamed has called “a formally anti-racist, liberal-
capitalist modernity whose driving force has been a series of successive offi-
cial or state-recognized U.S. anti-racisms,”12 or the development of white
liberalism as an official state policy. This state-recognized nominal anti­
racism has the effect of eliding and thus exacerbating, rather than mitigating,
state violence against racialized populations. At the same time, a neocolo-
nial world order contains formerly colonized territories, now nation-states
in the wake of decolonization, through international debt and structural
adjustment, on the one hand, and militarism, now increasingly narrated
as a form of humanitarianism, on the other.13 Liberal feminism and norma-
tive notions of respectable heteropatriarchal sexuality are now crucial to
legitimating such relations of domination.14 The process by which capital is

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 P   60 •  GRACE KYUNGWON HONG   O

extracted from the poor and redistributed upward, called “structural adjust-
ment” in countries of the Global South, is often accomplished through what
is called “privatization” in North America and Western Europe. A transna-
tional Asian “model minority” and a new Black bourgeoisie, for example,
can only now exist because of U.S. militarism in Asia, on the one hand,
and the rendering surplus of poor people of color, warehoused in prisons
or punitively regulated through welfare “reform,” on the other.15 Alongside
such brutal demonstrations of state violence, scholars have noted that
NGOs and what has been termed the “nonprofit industrial complex” are
crucial to managing populations marked as deviant and demonstrate the
dispersal of regulation and governance beyond the literal apparatuses of
the state.16
In this context, respectability, increasingly defined by the attainment of
monogamous couplehood, normative reproductivity, and consumerist sub-
jectivity, has become indispensible for determining those who are worthy
of capital investment and thus protected and those who are not and thus
precarious.17 Given this, we can now recognize the Moynihan Report as an
exemplary document of neoliberalism. Roderick Ferguson has usefully sit-
uated the Moynihan Report as producing a discourse that legitimates the
regulation of working-class women of color within a new global division of
labor that took shape within neocolonial and neoliberal political economies
based increasingly on a feminized proletariat and on domestic and service
labor.18 In conjunction with this argument, we can read the report as per-
forming a rhetoric of care for Black communities that paradoxically renders
such communities more deviant and punishable.
At this point, some caveats and clarifications are probably in order. The
establishment of an official state antiracism and the invitation into respect-
ability are not experienced uniformly by all. One aspect of neoliberal power
is that incorporation and affirmation has different effects for different pop-
ulations, as the Moynihan Report and its kindred policies and programs
make perfectly clear. The protection of white middle-class reproductivity
is quite different from the marriage promotion programs that became a
part of welfare “reform,” for example.19 Likewise, the family reunification
preference in the 1965 Immigration Act, which allows immigrants to sponsor
members of their immediate family, has organized Asian American com-
munities heteropatriarchally. While this has enabled middle-class formation
and capital accumulation among certain populations of Asian Americans,
the 1991 emendation, which requires that relatives sponsoring new immi-
grants take responsibility for ensuring that they do not apply for welfare

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 P  Neoliberalism • 61   O

benefits during the naturalization process, has also enabled the shifting of
the social welfare burden of a low-waged workforce from the U.S. state to
the Asian families who can least afford it.20 Thus one hallmark of neoliberal
power is that it is no longer simply organized around inclusion and exclu-
sion; inclusion itself has differential effects. Put another way, we might under-
stand neoliberal power as the dizzying enfolding of care, regulation, and
punishment as simultaneous operations, in which punishment and regula-
tion are not only the consequences of the lack of care but also, equally terri­
fyingly, are themselves functions of care.
Likewise, a focus on the Moynihan Report is not to scrutinize Black fam-
ilies or Black sexuality per se, a project that already has been taken up, often
perniciously, by an army of social welfare and state agencies and social sci-
entific studies, but rather a reading of neoliberal discourses, desires, and
common senses, from one particular site in the United States. In so doing,
I do not aim to posit the United States as the only or the most important site
for the study of neoliberalism, although it is a crucial one. Instead, it is
to resituate something like the Moynihan Report, which has to date gener-
ally been though of strictly within U.S. national discourse, as itself a trans­
national document: with transnational effects, but also mediating forces
and processes that originated outside the boundaries of the United States
and beyond the control of the U.S. state. In other words, the Moynihan
Report’s desire to regulate Black women, families, and reproductivity within
the United States was indexing the U.S. response to a set of truly global
forces, which manifested differently in sites worldwide. Thus, reading the
Moynihan Report this way is an attempt to provincialize the United States,
situating its policies and discourses within a variety of responses to a set
of historical conditions by different state forms (white settler colonial, post­
colonial, authoritarian capitalist, etc.) and nonstate actors (international
debt regimes, NGOs, and nonprofit organizations, etc.).
Perhaps ironically, perhaps understandably, the neoliberal regulation of
sexual and gender normativity has manifested itself through the very institu­
tions and discourses of social movements themselves. As a variety of Third
World feminists have noted, decolonizing or antiracist politics invested in
normative gender relations and patriarchal masculinities can replicate and
sustain neoliberal power, as can gay liberation politics with narrow defi­
nitions of what constitutes sexual liberation, and feminist politics that are
complicit with the imperialist state.21 Against such prescriptive understand-
ings of the political, engagements that begin with an understanding that all
subjects are always already positioned within, and compromised by, power

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 P   62 •  GRACE KYUNGWON HONG   O

often seem insufficiently politicized. Yet such investments in the purity of

political struggles can often end up replicating the very neoliberal condi-
tions they purport to evade.
Given these complexities, undoing neoliberal power requires different
strategies and different definitions of politics. Critical ethnic studies, then,
might begin with an understanding that there is no single pure, authentic
politics of decolonization or radical antiracism, but rather that all politics
emerge out of complex negotiations of care, regulation, and punishment. In
the current moment in which relations of rule are organized around the
incorporation of selective aspects of the social movements of the twentieth
century from which ethnic studies emerged, the project of critical ethnic
studies, if it is truly to be critical, must rigorously interrogate any claims
to respectability, while at the same time understanding the impossibility of
refusing respectability. By way of offering a provisional direction for what
such a politics might look like, I now briefly turn to the epigraph with which
I opened this essay. Barbara Christian is best known for her pioneering
books on African American women writers and Black feminist criticism,
as well as for a number of groundbreaking essays, most famously “Race
for Theory.”22 What is less readily available for posterity than her published
works is her commitment to, and theorization of, teaching. While her stu-
dents are perhaps the best traces of what remain of her pedagogical vision
since her premature death in 2000, another more documentary archive
exists in her personal and professional papers, which are housed at the Ban-
croft Library at UC Berkeley.
In another context, I have discussed the ways in which another of
Christian’s essays, “Diminishing Returns: Can Black Feminism Survive the
Academy?” diagnoses the university as a technology of power in which
the fetishization of Black feminism does not mitigate, and indeed, often
becomes a cover for the exclusion of and violence against Black female bod-
ies.23 This critique of the university is one that recognizes the challenges
and irony inherent in her own position and her work, as one of the pioneer-
ing scholars whose work is inarguably a part of what has now become a
canon of Black feminist thought. Christian never eschewed a politics of
recognition and affirmation throughout her career, both in research and in
her institutional work; indeed, she argued passionately in print, university
documents, speeches and talks, and private correspondence, that attention
to Black and Third World feminist writers and Black and Third World fem-
inism was vital to survival, and documented the pernicious violence of star-
vation, neglect, and dismissal. However, as “Diminishing Returns” points

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 P  Neoliberalism • 63   O

out, she also understood keenly the dangers of recognition and observed
that recognition and affirmation were not inimical to, but exacerbate, era-
sure and eradication. In this way, her politics kept in balance the perpetual
tension inherent to ethnic studies institutionalization: survival on the one
hand, incorporation on the other.
If there is anything, however, that breaks out of that binary, it might
be this vision of teaching as an ecstatic, transcendent exercise articulated
in the quotation with which I opened this essay. In the midst of a push
toward multiculturalism that, as Roderick Ferguson has compellingly argued,
was innovated by the university as a management strategy for the social
movements sweeping college campuses in the 1960s and 1970s,24 Christian’s
vision of teaching confounds and exceeds the multicultural imaginary.
While Christian may seem to be referencing such multicultural utopias by
referring to her class as a “United Nation[s],” rather than imagining teach-
ing as producing students as neoliberal subjects with competencies and skills
for a global marketplace, she invests in the unpredictable capacity of teach-
ing. She defines “good” teaching as that which enables something new and
different to be produced, contingently and temporarily, through the rela-
tions between students and between student and teacher, in that particular
time and space of the classroom. In so doing, Christian articulates the tem-
porality of the classroom as nongenerational, outside linear time, one that
does not have to be future-oriented or teleological in order to be success-
ful. Teaching, for Christian, redefines the relationship between education
and subjectivity as not the cultivation and development of an individuated,
atomized subject separated from community, but one in which one’s relation­
ality with others within the communal space of the classroom eradicates
subjectivial boundaries—a lifting out of oneself—and opens new possibili-
ties for thinking and pleasure: “pleasurable because it is rigorous, rigorous
because it is pleasurable.”
We might do well to take to heart Christian’s words, which remind us
that there might be a space and a time that exists between and within the
unsustainable choice between repression and incorporation. Could critical
ethnic studies be one such space, such time, within the university?

G R A C E K Y U N G W O N H O N G is associate professor of Asian American studies

and Gender studies at UCLA. She is the author of The Ruptures of Ameri-
can Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor
(Minnesota, 2006) and the coeditor of Strange Affinities: The Gender and
Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (2011).

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 P   64 •  GRACE KYUNGWON HONG   O

NOTES
I thank Jodi Kim for her brilliant and meticulous editing of this essay. I also thank
Roderick Ferguson and Jodi Melamed for last-minute help on citations. All errors
are entirely my own.
1. United States Department of Labor Office of Policy Planning and Research,
“The Negro Family: A Case for National Action” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govern-
ment Printing Office, 1965).
2. For important critiques of the Moynihan Report and similar ideological
mobilizations, see Angela Davis, “The Role of the Black Woman in the Community
of Slaves,” in Women, Race, Class (New York: Vintage, 1981); Roderick Ferguson,
“Something Else to Be,” in Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Wahneema Lubiano, “Black
Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels: Ideological War by Narrative Means,”
in Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and
the Construction of Social Reality, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon Books,
1992).
3. There is now a substantive body of scholarship on neoliberalism. See Milton
Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (40th Anniversary Edition) (1962; Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002), which established the key terms of neoliberal
thought, in particular the idea that free trade and competitive capitalism enhances
political freedoms and liberal democracy. For useful critiques, see David Harvey,
A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Gérard
Duménil and Dominque Lévy, Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), and The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Cam­
bridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); Aiwha Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception:
Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006);
Jean Comeroff and John Comeroff, eds., Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of
Neoliberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
4. Roderick Ferguson, The Re-Order of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies
of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
5. For scholars who have followed Karl Marx’s theorizations of capital as a world-
historical process, and in particular as a means of understanding the contemporary
moment, see Ernest Mendel, Late Capitalism (1970; London: Verso Books, 1978);
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System (New York: Academic Press, 1976);
David Harvey, The Condition of PostModernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Giovanni
Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times
(London: Verso Books, 1994).
6. See V. I. Lenin, “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism” (New York:
International Publishers, 1933); C. L. R. James (with Raya Dunyayevskaya and Grace
Lee), State Capitalism and World Revolution (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986; origi-
nally published 1969 by Facing Reality, Detroit); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slav-
ery (1944; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Cedric Robinson,
Black Marxism: The Making of a Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: Universitiy of
North Carolina Press, 2000; originally published 1983 by Zed Books); Walter Rodney,
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972; Washington: Howard University Press,

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 P  Neoliberalism • 65   O

1974); Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1996).
7. See Frances Beal, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” The Black
Woman, ed. Toni Cade Bambara (New York: New American Library, 1970); Angela
Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981); Maria Mies,
Patriarchy and Accumulation on a Global Scale: Women in the International Division
of Labor (London: Zed Books, 1986).
8. For important discussions of the connections between social movements
and race politics in the United States and decolonization movements abroad, see
Robin Kelley, “‘But a Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black History’s Global
Vision,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1045–77; Cynthia
Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Dayo Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads:
African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York Univer-
sity Press, 2012); Cheryl Higeshida, Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writ-
ers of the Black Left (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illnois Press, 2011).
9. Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” in Haunted by Empire:
Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2006).
10. Hazel Carby demonstrated the ways in which the nineteenth-century Cult of
True Womanhood constituted white womanhood as pure, proper, and respectable
over and against the figure of the lascivious, unwomanly Black enslaved female, as
the context in which Black women novelists emerged. See Reconstructing Woman-
hood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987). Jennifer Morgan traces the ways in Black women’s repro-
ductive labor, in particular their ability to reproduce capital in the form of their
children, became materially and ideologically central to New World slavery in the
Americas. See Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
11. For nuanced and historically contextualized critiques of Black respectability,
see E. Frances White, Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Poli-
tics of Respectability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); see also Candice
Jenkins, Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
12. Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New
Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 1.
13. For an important critique of military humanitarianism, see Neda Atanasoski,
Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2014).
14. See M. Jacqui Alexander, “Not Just (Any)Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics
of Law, Sexuality, and Post-Coloniality in the Bahamas and Trinidad and Tobago,”
Feminist Review 49 (1994): 5–23. Ding Naifei reveals the complicity between femi-
nism and the state against which sex workers in Taiwan organized in the 1990s in
“Parasites and Prostitutes in the House of State Feminism,” Inter-Asia Cultural Stud-
ies 1, no. 2 (August 2000). Hans Tao-ming Huang similarly critiques state feminism

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 P   66 •  GRACE KYUNGWON HONG   O

in his discussion of AIDS organizing in Taiwan in Queer Politics and Sexual Moder-
nity in Taiwan (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011). Jodi Melamed cri-
tiques the cosmopolitianization of liberal feminism in Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita
in Tehran in her chapter “Making Global Citizens: Neoliberal Multiculturalism and
Literary Value,” in Represent and Destroy, ed. Jodi Melamed.
15. Loic Wacquant importantly connects the carceral state and the welfare state
in Punishing the Poor. For analyses of the neoliberal and U.S. imperialist deploy-
ments of the Model Minority discourse, see Victor Bascara, “Cultural Politics of
Redress: Reassessing the Meaning of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 after 9/11,” Asian
Law Journal 10 (2003): 185–214; Grace M. Cho, “The Fantasy of Honorary White-
ness,” in Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Kamala Viswesaran, “Dias-
pora by Design: Flexible Citizenship and South Asians in U.S. Racial Formations,”
Diaspora 6, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 5–29; Helen Jun, “Black Surplus in the American
Century” and “Asian Americans in the Age of Neoliberalism,” in Race for Citizen-
ship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to Neoliberal Amer-
ica (New York: New York University Press, 2011). For an analysis of Asian class
development and U.S. militarism, see Jin-Kyung Lee, Service Economies: Sex Work
and Migrant Labor in South Korea (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2010). For discussions of the emergence of the Black bourgeoisie, see Cathy Cohen,
The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999); Michelle Boyd, Jim Crow Nostalgia: Reconstruct-
ing Race in Bronzeville (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Erica
Edwards, “The Female Without; or, the Limits of the Black Political.” For an analysis
of the warehousing of poor Black populations, see Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden
Gulag: Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2008). For scholarship on the criminalization of welfare, see
Dorothy Chunn and Shelly A. M. Gavigan, “Welfare Law, Welfare Fraud, and the
Moral Regulation of the ‘Never Deserving’ Poor,” Social and Legal Studies 13, no. 2
(June 2004): 219–43; Kaaryn Gustafson, Cheating Welfare: Public Assistance and the
Criminalization of Poverty (New York: New York University Press, 2011). Frances
Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Wel-
fare (New York: Vintage, 1971); Sharon Hays, Flat Broke with Children: Women in the
Age of Welfare Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
16. See Incite!, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Indus-
trial Complex (Boston: South End Press, 2009); Soo-Ah Kwon, Uncivil Youth: Race,
Activism, and Affirmative Governmentality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013);
Craig Willse, “Neoliberal Biopolitics and the Invention of Chronic Homelessness,”
Economy and Society 39, no. 2 (2010): 155–84.
17. For useful critiques of homonormativity, see Chandan Reddy, “Asian Dias-
poras, Neoliberalism, and the Family: Reviewing the Case for Homosexual Asylum
in the Context of Family Rights,” Social Text 84–85 (Fall–Winter 2005): 101–19;
Anna Agathangelou, Daniel Bassichis, and Tamara Spira, “Intimate Investments:
Homonormativity, Global Lockdown, and the Seductions of Empire,” Radical His-
tory Review 100 (Winter 2008): 120–43; and Craig Willse and Dean Spade, “Freedom

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 P  Neoliberalism • 67   O

in a Regulatory State: Lawrence, Marriage, and Biopolitics,” Widener Law Review 11

(2004–5): 309–29.
18. Ferguson, “‘Something Else to Be,’” in Aberrations in Black.
19. Gwendolyn Mink, “From Welfare to Wedlock: Marriage Promotion and Poor
Mothers’ Inequality,” The Good Society 11, no. 3 (2002): 68–73. Brenda Cossman,
Sexual Citizens: The Legal and Cultural Regulation of Sex and Belonging (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2007).
20. Reddy, “Asian Diasporas, Neoliberalism, and the Family.”
21. For a critique of minority nationalism’s investment in normative gender and
sexual relations, see Frances Beal, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” in
The Black Woman, ed. Toni Cade Bambara (New York: New American Library,
1970). For a critique of the narrow parameters of what counts as “queer” in queer
theory and activism, see Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bull Daggers, and Welfare Queens:
The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ 3, no. 4 (1997): 437–65. Hazel Carby’s
“White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood,” in The
Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 1970s Britain (Birmingham: Center for
Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1982); and Chandra Mohanty’s “Under Western
Eyes,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade
Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1991), are arguably the most influential critiques of white feminist scholarship.
22. See Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradi-
tion, 1892–1976 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980); Christian, Black Feminist
Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers (New York: Teacher’s College Press,
1997); Christian, “Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique 6 (Spring 1987): 51–63.
23. Grace Kyungwon Hong, “‘The Future of Our Worlds’: Black Feminism and
the Politics of Knowledge in the University under Globalization,” Meridians: Race,
Feminism, Transnationalism 8, no. 2 (2008): 95–115.
24. Ferguson, The Re-Order of Things.

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