This article reviews contemporary academic debates about feminist organising in and against neoliberalism, which we see as structured by a co-optation–resistance dichotomy. We outline three narratives: a high-profile ‘strong’ co-optation thesis; a more nuanced co-optation discourse; and an emergent counter-narrative of resistance. While sympathetic to the latter two, we critically unpack the account of neoliberalism, of feminist protagonists and of where feminist activism takes place in all three. We sketch out ways in which neoliberalism and the ‘who’ and ‘where’ of feminism might be considered differently, and argue overall for the need to move beyond the co-optation–resistance dichotomy.

This article argues that a feminist approach to the 'politics of resistance' offers a number of important empirical insights which, in turn, open up lines of theoretical inquiry which critical theorists in IR would do well to explore. Concretely, we draw on our ongoing research into feminist 'anti-globalisation' activism to rethink the nature of the subject of the politics of resistance, the conditions under which resistance emerges and how resistance is enacted and expressed. We begin by discussing the relationship of feminism to critical IR theory as a way of situating and explaining the focus and approach of our research project. We then summarise our key empirical arguments regarding the emergence, structure, beliefs, identities and practices of feminist 'anti-globalisation' activism before exploring the implications of these for a renewed critical theoretical agenda in IR.

This article engages with the influential narrative about the co‐optation of feminism in conditions of neo‐liberalism put forward by prominent feminist thinkers Nancy Fraser, Hester Eisenstein and Angela McRobbie. After drawing out the twin visions of ‘progressive’ feminist politics that undergird this narrative – couched in terms of either the retrieval of past socialist feminist glories or personal reinvention – we subject to critical scrutiny both their substantive claims and the conceptual scaffolding they invoke. We argue that the proleptic imaginings of all three authors, in different ways, are highly circumscribed in terms of the recommended agent, agenda and practices of progressive politics, and clouded by conceptual muddle over the meanings of ‘left’, ‘radical’ and ‘progressive’. Taken together, these problems render the conclusions of Fraser, Eisenstein and McRobbie at best unconvincing and at worst dismissive of contemporary feminist efforts to challenge neo‐liberalism. We end the article by disentangling and redefining left, radical and progressive and by sketching a contrasting vision of progressive feminist politics enabled by this re‐conceptualisation.

This article explores the intersections between feminism and 'the anti-globalisation movement'. It draws attention to the marginalisation of overtly feminist voices within anti-globalisation movement texts. However, the adoption of a feminist postmodernist approach shows that this marginalisation is exaggerated and exacerbated by dominant discourses about globalisation, feminism and social struggle.

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