Freedom and responsibility of women, between patriarchy and neoliberalism

The objective of this analysis is to try to understand what relationship presently exists between gendered conceptions of responsibility, women’s freedom and neoliberal hyper-responsibilisation. In the following pages I shall try to reflect on the consequences of the neoliberal subjectivity in a feminist perspective, focusing above all on the impact that the neoliberal transformations of responsibility and freedom produce on the life of women, as well as on their legal and political condition. As I shall seek to demonstrate, women represent a sort of paradigmatic case. By analysing their condition, it is possible, on the one hand, to understand the changes underway with greater clarity; on the other hand, we will realise that some original “distortions” in respect of women’s freedom and responsibility today appear to be useful for the purposes of the neoliberal design and consequently tend to be universalised.