Scarcity and Sexual Politics: Gendered Precarity Under Neoliberal Patriarchy

Abstract

This paper argues that neoliberalism, while framed as an economic logic of freedom and efficiency, is deeply bound up with gendered violence. The withdrawal of the state from social welfare disproportionately burdens women, forcing them into precarious labor while devaluing feminized professions and normalizing sexual exploitation. Analyzing Chinelo Okparanta’s Happiness, Like Water (2013)—specifically “Story, Story!,” “America,” and “Runs Girl”—the study examines how Nigerian women are situated at the intersection of economic fragility, global desire, and gender inequality. Drawing on David Harvey’s account of neoliberal restructuring and Lauren Berlant’s idea of “cruel optimism,” the paper shows how women’s bodies become “survival economies,” where mobility and intimacy are commodified under global capitalism. Ultimately, Okparanta’s fiction portrays neoliberalism not as an abstract system but as an embodied struggle in which love, freedom, and survival are inseparable from global economic forces. The study also looks at how Nigerian women deal with intimacy, migration, and survival in the face of economic instability as depicted in the short story collection by Okparanta.