Michel Foucault famously argued that Chicago school neoliberalism was beyond normativity, uninterested in the disciplinary categories of perversion or deviance. Yet neoliberal scholars were far from libertarian when it came to the legal regulation of sexuality and entertained a much more complex relationship to moral philosophy than what is suggested by Foucault. In this workshop, Melinda Cooper, (author of Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, 2017), will elucidate what she sees as the moral economy of neoliberalism and its provenance in the poor law tradition of family responsibility. This event will bring together Melinda Cooper with scholars who have worked on the intersection of neoliberalism and sexual politics, Lisa Duggan and Bethany Moreton.

Cosponsored by Zone Books, the PhD Program in Political Science, and the Committee for Globalization and Social Change