This book investigates how neoliberalism shaped the women’s movement in Aotearoa/New Zealand from the mid-1980s to late 2010s and looks at the future of the movement. Based on an empirical study that encompasses the three levels of the movement—individualised feminism, the work of women’s organisations, and state feminism—it explores how neoliberal rationality, promoted by governments over three decades, has impacted feminist identification and activism as well as political opportunities for organisations and institutions working within the movement. Exploring the diversity of feminist voices, the author analyses intersectional, (post)colonial and intergenerational debates within the movement in the context of neoliberalism’s influence on feminist values and strategies, and examines whether neoliberal rationality succeeded in depoliticising, individualising and fragmenting the movement. The book comes to the conclusion that despite some severe drawbacks, internal conflicts and changes of strategies, the women’s movement in Aotearoa/New Zealand has survived the impact of neoliberalism. This book will be of interest to scholars of Gender Studies, Sociology, Political Science, and Women’s History, as well as feminist activists.

This book offers a critical examination of the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, being held in Australia and New Zealand. Drawing on perspectives from sociology, history, political science and management, it sheds new light on the development of women’s soccer and on women’s sport more broadly. The book examines the politics of the build-up to the tournament, including the bidding process, as well as how the tournament has been represented in the media, the governance structures of the tournament itself, and policy proposals designed to leave an enduring legacy for women and girls in sport. The 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup is the first Women’s World Cup to be held in the Southern Hemisphere and the first to be held with an expanded 32-team format. This book shows why the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup represents a unique opportunity to enhance our understanding of women’s football, gender-oriented sport development initiatives and strategies, national sport policy and programming, and the management of international sporting events. This book is fascinating reading for any student, researcher or practitioner with an interest in sport development, sport management, sport policy, sport sociology, event management, gender studies, political science, or the relationship between sport and wider society.

The impact of neoliberal governance on indigenous peoples in liberal settler states may be both enabling and constraining. This book is distinctive in drawing comparisons between three such states—Australia, Canada and New Zealand. In a series of empirically grounded, interpretive micro-studies, it draws out a shared policy coherence, but also exposes idiosyncrasies in the operational dynamics of neoliberal governance both within each state and between them. Read together as a collection, these studies broaden the debate about and the analysis of contemporary government policy. The individual studies reveal the forms of actually existing neoliberalism that are variegated by historical, geographical and legal contexts and complex state arrangements. At the same time, they present examples of a more nuanced agential, bottom-up indigenous governmentality. Focusing on intense and complex matters of social policy rather than on resource development and land rights, they demonstrate how indigenous actors engage in trying to govern various fields of activity by acting on the conduct and contexts of everyday neoliberal life, and also on the conduct of state and corporate actors.

Western Welfare in Decline explores the plight of poor single mothers in five English-speaking countries that have implemented welfare restructuring: the United States, Canada, Britain, and New Zealand.

During the past decade governments around the globe have introduced institutional mechanisms to promote the advancement of women, including measures to increase women's political participation rates and to incorporate women's interests into policy-making. Why have they done so? How successful have these initiatives been? What are the emerging agendas facing gender equality advocates now? In The New Politics of Gender Equality Judith Squires examines the origins, evolution and key features of three strategies that have been employed across the world in pursuit of gender equality – quotas, policy agencies and gender mainstreaming. The author critically examines each strategy to see how far they transform political institutions and agendas and to what extent they lead rather to the assimilation of women in male-defined structures. Squires argues that a multi-pronged approach, drawing on democratic rather than technocratic strategies, offers the best potential for advancing gender equality. She highlights too the limitations of approaches that ignore inequalities among women and the challenges of developing equality initiatives to address multiple and cross-cutting inequalities between groups. Judith Squires is Professor of Political Theory, University of Bristol. She has written, researched and published widely in the field of gender politics and gender equality.

Knowing Victims explores the theme of victimhood in contemporary feminism and politics. It focuses on popular and scholarly constructions of feminism as ‘victim feminism’ – an ideology of passive victimhood that denies women’s agency – and provides the first comprehensive analysis of the debate about this ideology which has unfolded among feminists since the 1980s. The book critically examines a movement away from the language of victimhood across a wide array of discourses, and the neoliberal replacement of the concept of structural oppression with the concept of personal responsibility. In derogating the notion of ‘victim,’ neoliberalism promotes a conception of victimization as subjective rather than social, a state of mind, rather than a worldly situation. Drawing upon Nietzsche, Lyotard, rape crisis feminism and feminist philosophy, Stringer situates feminist politicizations of rape, interpersonal violence, economic inequality and welfare reform as key sites of resistance to the victim-blaming logic of neoliberalism. She suggests that although recent feminist critiques of ‘victim feminism’ have critically diagnosed the anti-victim movement, they have not positively defended victim politics. Stringer argues that a conception of the victim as an agentic bearer of knowledge, and an understanding of resentment as a generative force for social change, provides a potent counter to the negative construction of victimhood characteristic of the neoliberal era. This accessible and insightful analysis of feminism, neoliberalism and the social construction of victimhood will be of great interest to researchers and students in the disciplines of gender and women’s studies, psychology, sociology, politics and philosophy.

With the worldwide sweep of gender-neutral, gender-equal or gender-sensitive public laws in international treaties, national constitutions and statutes, it is timely to document the raft of legal reform and to critically analyse its effectiveness. In demarcating the academic study of the public law of gender, this book brings together leading lawyers, political scientists, historians and philosophers to examine law's structuring of politics, governing and gender in a new global frame. Of interest to constitutional and statutory designers, advocates, adjudicators and scholars, the contributions explore how concepts such as equality, accountability, representation, participation and rights, depend on, challenge or enlist gendered roles and/or categories. These enquiries suggest that the new public law of gender must confront the lapses in enforcement, sincerity and coverage that are common in both national and international law and governance, and critically and pluralistically recast the public/private distinction in family, community, religion, customary and market domains.