152 Kathleen S. G. Skott-Myhre
living force relies on capital’s ability to take the radically heterogeneous
field of living ecologies and to transform them into binary taxonomies of
monetary value. Put simply, capitalism takes the ontological realm of life
and translates it into the transcendent code of abstract value; the value of
life is produced as a financial equivalence. In this vernacular, a body’s
trajectory across a life span is only valuable to the degree that its activities
can be monetized.
To reconfigure development and psychology as a radical alternative to
neoliberal capitalism’s appropriation of the creativity and variability of
living force would require an alternative set of logics founded in actual
living ecologies. I would propose that such alternative understandings of a
body’s movement across the lifespan might be found within recent
developments in feminist thought such as neo-materialism, ontological
becoming, and transhumanist feminism.
It is significant to note that in each of the configurations of capitalism
from industrial to the current post-modern form, feminists have been at the
forefront of contesting the brutality and rapacious greed of a system that
has become in our time what Hardt and Negri (2001) term Empire. From
the earliest days of union organizing, movements for immigrant rights,
fights against child labor laws, advocacy for recognition of housework as
unwaged labor, and reproductive rights for women to contemporary
movements for ecological justice, global labor equity, equity for the queer
community, and indigenous struggles for justice, feminists have contested
the dominant masculinist frameworks of knowledge underlying both
capitalism and developmental psychology.
Feminist scholars such as Bordo (1990), Lloyd, (1984) and Hekman
(1990) have argued that feminism offers a framework of radical alterity to
the modernist project by contesting dualistic frameworks such as
rational/irrational, masculine/feminine, subject/object, and culture/nature.
Janack (2004) proposes: “The aim ... of feminist epistemology is both the
eradication of epistemology as an ongoing concern with issues of truth,
rationality, and knowledge and the undermining of gender categories”
(para 4). Contemporary feminist thought from the middle of the 20th
century through our contemporary period has sought to explore alternatives