Abstract
I started reading Letting Go exhausted. Having submitted a full draft of my own book manuscript to a press just days before, my body was grappling with the deep fatigue that comes from too many weeks of too little sleep, lack of self-care, and isolation. And still I was dogged by guilt about not working enough. How timely, then, to read the words in this edited collection, with its collective voice urging readers to “let go” of the neoliberal capitalist imperatives that valorize constantly striving for more and doing so at an ever-increasing pace. (I thus recognize with some irony that writing this review further embeds me in the epistemological order that the book I’m reviewing critiques.)
Donna King’s article, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Letting Go,” originally published in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies in 2012, serves as the anthology’s launching point and is reprinted as its first chapter. King places Zen Buddhist principles in conversation with feminist analyses of global, structural forces to analyze women’s narratives about living with chronic illness. Bringing the damaging demands of neoliberalism into sharp relief, King ultimately argues that slowing down, accepting our body’s limitations, and treating ourselves with care and compassion is not only a survival strategy but “may enact a transformative process that allows for the rejection of social norms that have functioned to limit and constrain or push and exhaust, and for the rewriting of a set of new possibilities of being and time” (p. 29). Blending personal experience, case studies, and scholarly sources, the essays in this anthology take up King’s call to let go of the neoliberal scripts that relentlessly foist a singular capitalist vision of productivity on our lives.
The anthology’s four main sections are framed by a short introduction and a concluding essay by bell hooks. The first part outlines the primary themes that scaffold the book through more scholarly essays: in addition to letting go, the contributors foreground Buddhist philosophies (King and David Loy), feminism and feminist theories (Jennifer Randles), and gender (Robert Jensen). In particular, Sheryl Sandberg’s “lean in” feminism provides a counterpoint to letting go, since Sandberg measures empowerment and equality based on one’s access to the benefits of corporate capitalism (p. 226). Building on this foundation, the sections that follow present personal-essay-style reflections on letting go (Part 2), discuss case studies about others’ experiences of neoliberal institutions and strategies for letting go (Part 3), and elaborate how our attachments to neoliberal capitalism are ecologically destructive (Part 4). bell hooks concludes the book with a penetrating critique of Sheryl Sandberg’s “lean in” version of feminism by exposing the sexism, racism, classism, and heterosexism on which it relies.
Most contributors are affiliated with sociology departments—as are the editors—so the essays tend to rely on ethnographic methods and draw from sociological literature, but they also move beyond this purview to generate a multidisciplinary conversation. Megan M. Sweeney, for example, insightfully integrates feminist pedagogy as she explores the intersections of her personal life and her teaching. And Patricia Widener thoughtfully exposes the global linkages between producers and consumers of oil and food by drawing from environmental and economic studies. This scope makes the book especially useful for exploring the ways in which neoliberal capitalism infiltrates the most minute and mundane details of our lives while, at the same time, structuring conceptions of productivity, success, value, and identity at transnational scales.
Regardless of the approach or topic, the essays generally present a jargon-free analysis, ground their theoretical frameworks in specific examples, and frequently use narratives to illustrate their knowledge claims. As a result this anthology would be accessible for an undergraduate audience and for those with little background knowledge in sociology or feminism. Adding to the book’s potential appeal to a broad audience, the editors spend much of their brief introduction defining terms, and most authors follow suit, especially when bringing up key concepts that would not be commonly known. This practice does mean, however, that some terms are presented without much depth, and those with knowledge of these topics may find the definitions somewhat oversimplified.
Yet regarding the book’s primary focus—on letting go—readers get a thick study. We learn about letting go in relation to life, the aging process, and death; as it pertains to gender, class, sexuality, race, and age; and from the perspectives of credit counselors, teachers, and stay-at-home fathers. The essays in Part Two offer especially intimate investigations of letting go of identity norms and the new scripts people adopt to interpret their changed sense of self. And Part Four takes readers on a transnational journey, bridging the local and the global and exposing interconnections between producers and consumers. With a blend of academic and personal writing, Letting Go also brings forth theoretical and affective dimensions of neoliberalism and our modes of resisting it.
In its exploration of letting go, the anthology adheres closely to the version King elaborates. Most essays foreground the impact of neoliberalism and neoliberal forms of feminism; for most, gender is the primary axis of analysis; and they overwhelmingly laud letting go as liberatory. While I do not want to diminish the power and value of letting go, I also wondered how we might examine its limitations as a theory and practice. Steven Farough’s essay is one of the few that conveys ambivalence: he recognizes that he can choose to be a stay-at-home father and “let go” of the norm that men be breadwinners because of socioeconomic privilege.
In general, the book could have interrogated this conception of “choice” more rigorously. Diane E. Levy discusses the way “choice feminism” falsely ascribes autonomy to women (pp. 105–6), but rarely did an essay question the extent to which people can choose (or not) to let go of those practices that reproduce neoliberal capitalism. On the one hand, the rhetoric of choice recognizes that we can let go of harmful scripts and values in our daily lives; coming out as gay to one’s students or friends (Anthony Ocampo), listening more carefully to the clients one works with (Kevin Delaney), or not using pesticides in a backyard garden (Leontina Hormel and Ryanne Pilgeram) all have transformative power. On the other hand, letting go—especially regarding one’s job—is not a choice available to everyone. The ability to work less, produce less, change careers, slow down, or practice a greater degree of self-care often requires class, gender, and race privilege that too often remained implicit. Moreover, Loy astutely observes that neoliberalism “has attained not only a life of its own but also its own volitions, quite apart from the individuals who work for it and who will be replaced if they do not serve that institutional motivation” (p. 39). In other words, our individual choices—while personally meaningful—may not have a significant impact on the larger system.
This critique, though, is not meant to mitigate the important argument Letting Go makes. Capitalism is a force that we need to reckon with, as the recently leaked Panama Papers reveal, and the contributions to this anthology demonstrate that doing so need not be limited to attacks on transnational institutions like the WTO or IMF. Rather, deciding to be “nobody special” (p.106), refusing to compete, and not acting one’s age (Deana Rohlinger and Haley Gentile) disrupt this economic behemoth and start creating new narratives about what it means to live a good life.