Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times Edited by Elin Diamond, Denise Varney and Candice Amich (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

Abstract

This collection of essays—Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times—edited by Elin Diamond, Denise Varney and Candice Amich is a compelling and energising read. The twenty-two essays gathered here, from an international cohort of scholars, speak with urgency and passion to a troubling political climate. Documenting the performative responses of women globally to the rise of neoliberalism, these writers engage the intersection of feminist artistic praxis with affective outcomes to demonstrate how these works reveal and resist this ideology and its products. Neoliberalism, which casts people as cogs in an economic machine, encourages entrepreneurship, competition, and do-it-yourself individualism through government policies of free trade, reduced regulation, and stripped social safety networks. This “Third Way” governance creates precarity of labour, precarity of health, and a sense of dispossession as interdependent communal relations are undervalued and so eroded.