One of the most interesting demi-myths of contemporary politics concerns neoconservatism as an intellectual movement and its rumoured leftist heritage. Oft commented upon, the Trotskyist origins of some of its early thinkers (Irving Kristol, James Burnham), and an apparent debt displayed in its evangelical policies of aggressively exported global ideological revolution, meant that for disillusioned leftists bobbing about in the seemingly un-navigable tides of postmodern liberal democracy it recreated some of the old certainties: better to be on one side, even if it’s the wrong side, than no side at all. Indeed, though it begs the question somewhat, is this need for a coherent and familiar political narrative (radical youth jading into reactionary zeal) not entirely indicative of just such a shift, as evinced by figures like Christopher Hitchens and Kanan Makiya, that the desire to believe in this kind of myth demonstrates? This is part of exactly what is so impressive about the neoconservative project, the shamelessness of its authoritarian extremism. Leo Strauss made no bones about the need for an elite to create lies necessary to bind the republic to their will, and just what makes this principle so insidiously effective is the disengagement it correctly presumes, that the people will lap up the lie, because they too are lost without the old grand narratives of good versus evil.

All of which leads me to one of the areas that this manoeuvre makes itself most frequently apparent: language. The ideological reorientation of words traditionally associated with the progressive and emancipatory realm of political expression is something of which we see an ever increasing amount, and to which we seem to unable to formulate a staunch response. The excellent new book from the London-based academic Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman, hones in on a particular facet this broad problem, and tackles it head on, armed with voluble wit, confidence and clarity of thought. We are dealing with “a fundamental crisis in the meaning of the word. If ‘feminism’ can mean anything from behaving like a man ([Jacques-Alain] Miller), being pro-choice ([Jessica] Valenti), being pro-life ([Sarah] Palin), and being pro-war (the Republican administration), then we may simply need to abandon the term, or at the very least, restrict its usage to those situations in which we make quite certain we explain what we mean by it”.

I’m aware that by contextualising the book in this way I’m performing a typical misogynist denial of the importance and specificity of feminism by making it part of the universal narrative of emancipation. For this I apologise, with the caveat that this is exactly what Power is doing, in reverse. By relocating feminism firmly back within this narrative, as she does in the first half of the text, she mounts a trenchant defence of the term from those who would use it for their own ends, as in the case of Palin, whose feminist belief in non-violence (all three of those terms so laughably questionable I’ve only resisted the urge to ring-fence each in a squall of ugly inverted commas by an act of tremendous willpower) finds expression only in her concern towards the unborn, or the Bush administration, who regularly invoked the lack of women’s rights over there in the middle east as another perfectly good reason for bombing them a lot. With great ease she thus demonstrates exactly why the coalition of the “Mawkish and Hawkish” can make no claim to the term, thereby locking out two of the four instances of troublesome reappropriation in one.

This astute dismissal of the claims of the right to the term sets up the rest of the text, which broadly concerns itself with the two remaining contested meanings and the one underlying major one, so far unmentioned. Over a series of quickfire chapters in which she engages with sex, fashion, the hijab, pornography and monogamy, she demonstrates that contemporary feminism must neither be about behaving like men nor imitating the characters of Sex & The City, while setting up her central point, which concerns political economy. On the one hand attacking the ‘feminization’ of the labour market, in which employment opportunities increasingly resemble those initially determined for women, all temporary contracts and zero benefits, she uses the other to cohere all the above arguments into an engaging critique of contemporary capitalism.

Part of an ongoing series published by zero books, which also includes Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and David Stubbs’ excellent Fear of Music (subtitled why people get Rothko but don’t get Stockhausen and reviewed here by Andrew Lison), One Dimensional Woman doesn’t posture. Both highly provocative and eminently sensible, Power’s 81 pager demands to be snapped up and passed about. Highly recommended.