Hope as Master Frame in Feminist Mobilization: Between Liberal NGO-ization and Radical-Intersectional Street Politics

Abstract

The feminist critique of “family wage” central to the state-organized capitalism legitimates the contemporary supple capitalism, relying on low-waged work of less-privileged women. The shift from redistribution to identity politics concealed the structuring role of class. While the first decade, following the collapse of the state-socialist regime was characterized by the emergence of an NGO-ized feminism, embracing a women’s empowerment discourse, permeated by individualism and neoliberal free-market assumptions, the second decade was sequenced by the rise of a street feminism – contentious and intersectional, making room to queer, anarcho-feminism, and Roma feminism, to engage in social justice struggles addressing an anti-capitalist and anti-racist critique and the collective role of political economy. The financial and the refugee (reception) crisis opened a discursive window of opportunity in Romania where class, economic inequalities, the racialization of poverty began to penetrate the liberal right-wing curtain, that promoted privatization and deregulation, welfare chauvinism, delegitimizing the use of welfare provisions, by deepening the cleavage between the worthy and non-worthy. In this context, a politics of intersectional hope was contoured, through a three-dimensional process of bridge-building at the level of discourse, movements and repertoires of action.