Page 173 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

However, during the 1990s post-feminist writers have suggested that women are
not necessarily oppressed by dint of being women. Thus not all men are oppressors
and it is unhelpful to understand gender relations in terms of ‘women versus men’.
150 Instead, what is required is constructive dialogue and structural change where
necessary. Thus Rosalind Coward has described feminism as a movement blind to
its own effectiveness. This is not to say that gender inequality and injustice are not
still in evidence, rather it is to argue that there have been significant gains for
women in the economy and increased visibility for women in the cultural sphere.
In addition, there have been changes in sexual attitudes and behaviour and reform
of pay and divorce laws so that that women can wield sexual power. Finally there
has been the recognition of male loss and vulnerability that undermines the simple
sense of male oppressor and female oppressed.
Links Feminism, femininity, gender, masculinity, men’s movement, patriarchy, sex

Post-Fordism In order to understand what is meant by the concept of post-Fordism
we need to have a sense of what is meant by the idea of Fordism itself, that is, that
which post-Fordism is said to have superseded. Thus Fordism is a name for the post-
1945 social formation of the United States and Western Europe that was founded
on the large-scale industrial production of standardized goods in the context of
mass consumption. It required relatively high wages in order to sustain the
purchasing of large volume production and a culture of promotion and advertising
to support the selling process. In a broader context, Fordism worked in tandem with
Keynesian economic policies. These were marked by a corporate state that played
an interventionist role as the manager of social welfare provisions, as an arbitrator
of industrial conflict and as a significant direct employer.
In the account of Harvey, this Fordist regime began to experience problems that
came to a head during the early 1970s. In particular, a system geared towards mass
production and consumption faced the difficulties of saturated Western markets
with a consequent crisis of over-production. In addition, Western economies were
facing increased price competition from Japan and the Newly Industrialized
Countries (NICs) including Taiwan, Korea and Singapore. This, combined with the
success of the Oil Producing and Exporting Countries (OPEC) in pushing up world
oil prices, and the failure to stabilize the world financial markets as US ascendancy
weakened, led to economies blighted by stagflation (economies with nil growth but
high inflation levels).
Post-Fordism marks the successful re-organization of capitalism as a way out of
the global recession of the 1970s. In particular, corporations sought to re-introduce
growth and increase the rate of profit through more flexible production techniques
that involved the use of new technology, the re-organization of labour and a speed-
up of production/consumption turnover times. On the level of production, the
move from Fordism to post-Fordism involved a shift from the mass production of
homogeneous goods to small batch customization. That is, economic production
was transformed from a basic concern with uniformity and standardization to more
flexible and variable manufacture for niche markets. This was enabled by just-in-