Angela McRobbie - Feminism and the Politics of 'Resilience'

Focusing on the media and popular culture as a favoured public space for debates about liberal feminism in Chapter 1(which was written in 2012 and first published in 2013), I trace a passage from liberal feminism to neoliberal feminism through the prism of family life and maternity. Where work and employment for women have emerged across the polity as the defining mark of status and womanhood, anxieties that family and parenting must now take second place have led to an intensification, within the world of entertainment, leisure and consumer culture, of attention to family life. So alluring and enjoyable are the new pleasures of the hearth that it becomes incumbent on women to double their efforts after work to become a new kind of ‘angel in the house’. 4This pathway is given a feminist gloss by figures such as Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Facebook, who is author of the best-seller titled Lean In , and who goes so far as to encourage younger women to look for a pro-feminist type of husband who will willingly do his fair share of household duties and childcare (Sandberg 2012). These ideas play a role in precipitating new seemingly up-to-date models of conservative feminism, of the type endorsed by the former UK Prime Minister, Theresa May, who, at the time of writing Chapter 1, was Home Secretary. This is a resoundingly white middle-class cultural formation of women’s citizenship, which, as I show in the chapter, has its historical roots in the late nineteenth century when virtuous white middle-class women were encouraged to envisage their good housekeeping acumen as a kind of professional task and, in so doing, also taking responsibility for the ‘future of the race’. I come back in Chapter 4to the question of colonial power and how that gets to be subsumed into the edifices of the British welfare state. The main argument in Chapter 1is concerned with this modern-day injunction, realized by means of what I label ‘visual media governmentality’, to middle-class young women to extend their enthusiasm for their careers, with the proviso that the home too becomes the site of new domestic pleasures, this time with a vaguely feminist gloss, ensuring a shared division of labour in the home. As part of what Wendy Brown refers to as neoliberal rationality, this emphasis on the family as an enterprise that can be worked on for better and more enjoyable ‘returns on investment’ eliminates all traces of earlier socialist feminist attempts to socialize the family through state investment in nursery provision for all (Brown 2015). No longer is it possible to refer to household duties as drudgery; the task at hand is to find so many new pleasures of the hearth, meanwhile allocating those tasks that entail repetitive and unrewarding labour to low-paid migrant women. In short, I am arguing that privileged middle-class women will aim for leadership jobs in order to crash through the glass ceiling, while also showing themselves to excel in parenting and in creating and maintaining a beautiful home. Their working-class and materially disadvantaged counterparts must prioritize earning a living and taking care of their children as best they can.

In Chapter 2, written some six years later than Chapter 1, there is something of a reversal of neoliberal leadership-feminism, as popular culture proposes what could be envisaged as a move back towards liberal feminism, in the light of the pathologies that contemporary life has exacted on the female subject. The chapter reflects also on two interrelated changes that have interrupted the competitive dynamics of neoliberal rationality as it is directed towards young women. One of these is the anti-capitalist feminism, which has had a remarkable impact, and with this is the specific dilemma that the new era of feminism then poses to the world of consumer culture. Has there been a significant drop in sales of so many beauty products? How does the magazine industry respond to the new demands of seemingly feminist consumers? The other change is the perceived high cost to female ‘well-being’, which is wrought by the punitive regime of the self-monitoring subject. Sarah Banet-Weiser, extending her previous co-authored work on ‘commodity feminism’, has undertaken an exhaustive account of how feminism has found its way into the heartland of popular culture, often through the activities of well-known female celebrities who have also welcomed the #MeToo movement (Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser 2012; Banet-Weiser 2018). A whole landscape opens up of female empowerment, which becomes the motif that permits capitalism to make some moves towards welcoming, or even appearing to embrace young women’s commitment to feminism.

In Chapter 2, I ponder two related points, asking how far can feminism go in its incursions into the landscape of capitalism’s consumer culture before it meets its limits, before it is defined merely as a fad about to pass its sell-by date; before it is once more shunned? If the new feminism mounts an attack on capitalism, what is the response? Banet-Weiser rightly points to the rise of popular misogyny spearheaded by an online culture dominated by young men. I pursue a different tack in this chapter by outlining the emergence of a set of discourses that seek both to supplant and supplement feminism by means of a kind of palliative offering in the form of what I call the ‘perfect-imperfect-resilience’ or p-i-r , which steps forward to offer young women a popular therapeutic strategy that permits some aspects of feminism to be retrieved and drawn upon for support.

With this high visibility of feminism I also draw attention to the argument of Boltanski and Chiapello, who examine the ways in which capitalism has revitalized itself by absorbing elements of the anti-capitalist movements of the late 1960s (social critique or artistic critique) on the basis of their potential for innovation (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). This leads me to propose that new feminist research projects might look closely, with ethnographic detail, at the cultural producers, including the gatekeeper, editors and other decision-makers; in particular those people who are charged with this task of translation.

The second issue I reflect on connects with the perceived harms to women of competition and endless self-assessment. Here I draw attention to the politics of resilience, which in turn entails a scaling down of the principles of neoliberal ‘leadership-feminism’ in favour of a more ordinary and less exceptional set of expectations. Liberal feminism proves itself to be more accommodating to the management of self for the modern-day middle-class gender regime. With such an emphasis on the widespread mental ill health of the female subject I also query the absence of a feminist psycho-analytical vocabulary, which would interrogate the basis of this female complaint and the prevalence of self-beratement. The writing of Adam Phillips and also Judith Butler permits a pathway away from the tyranny of the sovereign self in favour of a more relational and dependent idea of the subject who asks, from the start: ‘Who are you?’

Chapter 2brings together, then, three specific themes: the displacement function played by the p-i-r ; the profit from feminism; and the need for an ethics of care and of vulnerability by means of a psychoanalytical feminism, which de-centres the sovereign self, opening up an unstable female subjectivity as livable in her relation to others. Overall, the chapter reveals some of the tensions that emerge in relation to the driving force of a neoliberal leadership-feminism that has gripped hold of so many popular discourses and textual artefacts directed at women.

In Chapter 3, the focus of attention is on what is required for a feminist cultural studies perspective on the social polarization effect born out of more than three decades of neoliberalism in the UK. This entails a critique of the work of prominent Marxists David Harvey and Wolfgang Streeck for their inattention to sociologically important changes to the gender regime. The writing of Stuart Hall provides a stronger steer for investigating the way in which political economy is translated at ground level to transform the vocabularies that prevail in the workplace, the home and the local neighbourhood. It is everyday language, in particular that deployed by the tabloid press, which implants a new terminology of welfare and which provides a groundswell for public approval to cuts to benefit payments on the grounds of claimants being typecast as feckless, cheating and lazy. Women, especially single mothers, are poverty-shamed, and this drives a further wedge not just between these working-class women and their middle-class counterparts but also at an intra-class level. This suggests that the anti-welfare agenda comprises a moving horizon to target the majority of the low paid who are also current recipients of in-work benefits. There is a war of attrition reminding us of how key to neoliberal rationality is the attack on social democracy as the guarantor (within limits) of welfare. (In fact, social democrats have been at the forefront of the drive to reduce welfare since the mid 1990s, but it has proved even more integral to the neoliberal project to get rid of any lingering traces.) There is substantial pressure on women not just to be employed, but also to prioritize working life and to abide by the rules of ‘contraceptive employment’. If there is a shaming effect on single mothers as they come to embody all the failings of welfare dependency, the logic is to avoid this status except under exceptional circumstances, such as an abusive relationship. The stigmatizing stereotypes and the demeaning images are also boundary-marking activities, which enact a vernacular of social polarization on a day-to-day basis.