The impact is gendered violence

Austerity is a term which forms part of the neoliberal agenda designed to ‘roll back the state’. As noted above, strategies include reducing corporation taxes and those paid by wealthy individuals (benefitting predominantly men), cutting public spending (affecting predominantly women), moving public service provision to the private sector and deregulating business and labour (benefitting predominantly male owners of wealth). The language of markets has been essential to this agenda, and the neoliberal assumption of rationality, or homo economics – notably rational man – have been the ideological underpinnings. The rational man, neoliberalism assumes, will pursue his own selfinterest, thereby generating wealth. This relies on the language of empowerment but fails to acknowledge of address the structural obstacles that are placed upon those who do not conform to the category of rational ‘man’. The neoliberal assumptions of ‘rational man’ rely on this particular version of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (cf. Connell, 1987). The rational man in the neoliberal context is unshackled by government constraints, rational in the pursuit of his self-interest, competitive and by extension aggressive in this pursuit. Masculinity and the notion of ‘man’ of course rely on their definition in relation to binary opposites, femininity and woman. In shoring up the interests of rational economic masculinity, this serves to ‘symbolically annihilate’ feminine interests (Tuchmann, 1974), which takes a form of symbolic violence (Spivak, 1988; Bourdieu, 2001). Discourses of wealth creation perpetuate a masculine version of what it is to be productive i.e. a prioritising of a masculinised version of worth and value. To think about the ways in which wealth is masculinised, it is useful not only to consider this in the structural context of neoliberalism and its underlying assumptions, but also in the way this translates into practice. A stated aim of the then UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne’s, austerity measures was to introduce measures that ‘support a strong enterprise led recovery’ and that this economic recovery ‘must have its foundations in the private sector’ (cited in Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012: 135-8). This government endorsement of the benefits of business in pursuit of economic policy has been accompanied by not only descriptive reinforcement of men’s interests but substantive affirmation too. In business boardrooms, we see a dramatic overrepresentation of men. Noticeably, in the UK, who not only are 94.5% of CEOs male, but there are more CEOs called John, than there are women (Hampton Alexander Review, 2018). This despite the overwhelming evidence which cites improved business performance where boards have a greater diversity of representation (Nolan & Moran, 2016). A 2018 Credit Suisse report showed that the numbers of super wealthy are growing, and their wealth is increasing far faster than that of the general population: 0.8% of adults own 44.8% of global wealth (Credit Suisse, 2018). Men are still disproportionately the wealth owners; Forbes rich list counted 2,208 billionaires. Only 244 of those were female. So while women disproportionately bear the costs of austerity, men are disproportionately holding the wealth as beneficiaries of policies and discourses which enable and facilitate this. As noted in table 1 below, during the period of ‘feminised austerity’, men are also over represented as holders of wealth in the UK. (This is in a context where men are constructed as heroic holders and generators of wealth in our popular culture in films such as The Wolf of Wall Street1 ). Over the same time period as the austerity measures analysed (2010-17), the Sunday Times top 10 rich list yielded the following data for the wealthiest in our country: Sunday Times Annual Rich list no of men no of women Top of the Rich List 2010 13 2 Lakshmi Mittal (M) 2011 14 2 Lakshmi Mittal (M) 2012 12 2 Lakshmi Mittal (M) 2013 12 2 Alisher Usmanov (M) 2014 12 1 Sri & Gopi Hinduja (M) 1 With thanks to Candy Yates for this point 12 2015 14 2 Leonard Blavatnik (M) 2016 13 2 David & Simon Reuben (M) 2017 13 2 Sri & Gop[i Hinduja (M) Table 1. Sunday Times top ten wealth holders in the UK by sex 2010-2017 Since the introduction of austerity in the political lexicon in 2010, we see that the top ten holders of wealth are 86% male. So while there is extensive descriptive over representation of men, and it is useful to perhaps briefly explore how these men were discursively positioned in this context. The top wealth owner in 2012, is presented as a generous benefactor willing to sacrifice some of his profits, in order to advance the profits of his company: The Independent’s (1/11/2011) headline ‘Mittal puts his business first with $350m cut to dividend payout’ suggests an altruism on the part of Britain’s wealthiest man at that time. Wealth it seems is a product of ‘meritocracy’ rather than an unequal economic structure: A celebratory article in The Sunday Times, promoted the advantages of Osborne’s policies, which had meant that ‘The billionaire industrialist Jim Ratcliffe has moved back to Britain, six years after relocating to Switzerland to slash the tax bill of his Ineos chemicals empire’ (Sunday Times, 17/7/16). In this positioning the term ‘slash’ is also used, but here presented as a positive trait of masculinity, a necessary measure of wealth creation and success (and indeed it did seem to indicate neoliberal ‘success’ as Ratcliffe was named Britain’s wealthiest man in 2018). Violence is intertwined and celebrated in this neoliberal context as a mechanism through which wealth is created, predominantly by and for men. The violence of the gendered structures which facilitate this wealth creation is obscured. Rather we are presented with ‘objective’ (for which read structurally blind) account of neoliberal masculine economic success. This notion of structural blindness acts to deflect us from asking some of the more challenging questions about why things are the way they are and helps perpetuate a belief that solutions are located in individual and privatised agency. The privatisation of both individual agency and the public sphere; being left to the neoliberal agenda of fighting for survival, has the effect of masculinising notions of freedom by privileging self-reliance and competition over co-operation and compassion. In effect it amounts to an assault on values ascribed to female impacting on the material structures of power and ‘where it should naturally’ be located (Giroux 2001).