Abstract
In her earlier path-breaking work, The Aftermath of Feminism (2009), Angela McRobbie provided a compelling account on the rise of ‘post-feminism’ in some Western societies. That is, how feminism has been ‘undone’ and ‘mainstreamed’ through popular culture characterized by anti-feminist sentiment. In her new book, Feminism and the Politics of Resilience (2020), she continues and extends her sharp cultural analysis on gender and feminism in relation to its new articulation with the neoliberal regime in recent decades. Particularly, she foregrounds in this book a combination of critical social policy studies with feminist media and cultural studies, which proves to be especially fruitful.
All four essays in this book concern how femininity, as a series of ‘historically embedded and institutionally endorsed crafting processes’ (p. 1), took shape through various textual and visual practices in contemporary neoliberal capitalism. Drawing on Foucault (2006) and Wendy Brown (2015), McRobbie approached neoliberalism as a form of governmental rationality that not only influences overarching social policy but also operates ideologically at an everyday level. With her thought-provoking concept of ‘visual media governmentality’, she traces, mainly in the UK context, how feminism has been selectively adopted by popular media and political parties across the spectrum, resulting in backlash, including ‘competitive feminism’, ‘leadership feminism’ (Littler, 2017; Rottenberg, 2014), ‘anti-welfare ethos’, and ‘poverty-shaming’ of working-class women.
The first two chapters explore how female individualism and entrepreneurship have been encouraged not only in the workplace but also at home. Chapter 1 traces the changing political and policy landscape in relation to family and maternity, and how an earlier radical social feminist agenda has been erased from public discussion. She argues that since Margaret Thatcher, conservative political forces have increasingly retrieved vocabularies from feminism, advancing a false fantasy of female mobility, meritocracy and the ‘work–life balance’. The modernization project of the Blair government also led to ‘gender retraditionalization’ (Adkins, 1999) whereby women are expected to take a dual role but not to ‘rely on’ the state. Concurrently, the rise of certain media genres, with upper-middle-class females playing the ‘role models’, contribute to the cultural narrative of ‘confidence’ and ‘choice’. For example, Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, warmly encouraged women to ‘lean in’ in the business world and be ready to ‘choose’ to be good mothers. As McRobbie acutely pointed out, such ‘leadership feminism’ not only feeds into the neoliberal notion of self-responsibility, but also individualizes collective social problems and defines female success in ways that replenish the capitalist economy. She argues that without any mention of public nurseries, day care or state provision, such mediated discourse of female success only endorses white middle-class femininity and promises ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011) for women. More importantly, it overrides and marginalizes socialist feminists’ righteous claim for universal childcare and state-provided provision for all, hence de-politicizing and de-legitimizing feminism.
Chapter 2 goes deeper to scrutinize neoliberal middle-class feminism, both sociologically and psychoanalytically. The author asks hard and urgent questions, including what are the mechanisms by which some aspects of feminism are absorbed by consumer capitalism, how far can it go, and where is its boundary? The key ‘palliative’ identified in this chapter is what McRobbie calls ‘perfect–imperfect–resilience’ (p–i–r). She points out that as ‘a dispositif for the management of emerging feminisms’ (p. 43), p–i–r operates at an everyday level through social media and popular genres. It creates a fantasy of a perfect ‘good life’ for women at the same time as it offers some mild criticism of such ideals and encourages women to be ‘resilient’ when they fail to be ‘perfect’. She argues that p–i–r is associated with the disturbing phenomenon that women, often from a very young age, seem to be trapped in endless self-criticism and self-beratement on the way to perfection and self-improvement, whether in terms of appearance, body, qualification, or marriage and relationships. As p–i–r links closely to the massive fashion-beauty industry and competitive corporate culture, McRobbie suggests that it is one of the ways in which capitalism profits from feminism.
Moreover, McRobbie gives a nuanced account of the consequences of such cultural ideals that penetrates deeply into people’s psyches. She points out that feminine self-castigation is in fact ‘a competition with and against the self to achieve those landmarks that are linked to the perfect’ (p. 48, emphasis mine). Even though the narrative of ‘resilience’ allows women to catch a breath from the demanding competition towards perfection, it nevertheless reinforces the myth of ‘work–life’ balance. Furthermore, drawing on Adam Phillips (2015) and Judith Butler (2005), McRobbie questions how the self-mastery super-ego that grows in such a context blinds us, making us lose the ability to reflect on where all these ‘standards’ that discipline us come from. Such resilience techniques, again, radically individualize the collective plight of women and extinguish alternative feelings, such as anger and sense of solidarity. Moreover, McRobbie elaborates on the social-economic context of ‘resilience’ techniques. That is, the recession period of neoliberal capitalism, particularly since the 2008 financial crisis, when austerity has been unashamedly advocated and welfare provision radically cut.
If the first two chapters are concerned with the accommodation of white middle-class feminism to the neoliberal culture, the last two chapters address the more covert (and more barbaric) violence of neoliberalism on disadvantaged women, including the working-class, migrant women, ethnic minorities, and single mothers. Based on her analysis of Stuart Hall’s key formulation of historical conjunctural analysis, McRobbie first traces the establishment of the workfare system and rise of anti-welfare agenda in the United Kingdom. She discusses, throughout the years of the New Labour government to Cameron’s time as PM, how work has been emphasized and prioritized, and adopted as a strategy to accommodate the progressive aspects of feminism on women’s employment. However, these agendas de-legitimatize support for women as mothers and transfer most of the care responsibility from the state to individual families. Poor women, including single mothers, are forced to go out to work no matter how hard their situations are and how exploitive the job is. Thus, low-paid and insecure work becomes ‘a primary space of control for disadvantaged women’ (p. 79). This has created what McRobbie labels the ‘contraceptive-effect’.
With sharp critique of two key left-wing scholars, David Harvey (2005) and Wolfgang Streeck (2016), McRobbie also explains why she felt it was urgent to ‘make the case for and against work’ (p. 85, original emphasis) in Chapter 3. She argues that, as a feminist and socialist, work is important as it is constitutive of women’s political freedom. However, it is also critical to expand the understanding of work that values women’s work at home and their rights to benefits and provision. However, under the workfare system, a woman’s benefit is dependent on her job situation or the male breadwinner, with only well-off women able to ‘choose’ to attend to their family. Women’s care labour is still systematically unrecognized and devalued. She particularly criticizes Streeck’s account, which only has white working-class’s interests at sight, effectively excluding migrant and other subaltern populations from the picture. By introducing Hall and others’ works, McRobbie demonstrates how the protected period (with social wages and benefits for white working-class men) lamented by Streeck and others was in fact built on the oppression of women and the massive migrant population in the United Kingdom.
After historical discussion of how the welfare state has been hollowed out, McRobbie continues the conjunctural analysis on the ideological basis of anti-welfarism and the everyday violence inflicted on women in Chapter 4. Together with many others, she demonstrates how poor people, especially women as single mothers, have been portrayed in derogatory ways by the tabloid press, reality TV, and social media platforms. This emerges at a time when there has been consensus among political forces that welfare breeds dependency and inefficiency. Acknowledging Ouellette and Hay’s (2008) valuable analysis, McRobbie highlights how the rise of these media genres interrelates with the state’s retreat from social care and welfare provision. She argues that by stigmatizing disadvantaged women as unkempt in appearance, unmotivated to find jobs, and unworthy of the ‘nation’s resources’ and ‘taxpayer’s money’, such ‘visual media governmentality’ has produced a ‘double incarceration effect’ (p. 101) for women. That is, women are doubly contained both materially and symbolically: they find themselves in living conditions without much hope for improvement while they also found in pervasive negative images that they have very few resources to alter.
The end of welfare and visual violence on disadvantaged women discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 are in fact closely interrelated to the leadership of feminism and the ‘p–i–r’ mode explained in earlier chapters. It is precisely the individualized responsibility cultivated in neoliberalism that leads to the reduction of welfare provision and the burden of women across different socioeconomic statuses. Moreover, as McRobbie demonstrates throughout the book, with a competitive ethos and stigmatizing discourse enacted through popular culture, the idea of protecting vulnerable and disadvantaged groups has been ideologically swept away. It also enflames antagonism and hostility between different groups of women and in society. To conclude, inequality within and across gender, class, and ethnicity has been intensified with the selective adoption of feminism under the current historical conjuncture. Towards the end of the book, McRobbie advocates for a radical reimagination of our social democracy that is based on interdependence, care and compassion. With so many obstacles in sight, it is impossible to demand this single book provides a comprehensive solution (it is also not the intention of the book). This cause demands strenuous and persistent endeavour, but it would, as McRobbie puts it, inaugurate ‘a new era of productive, reproductive and reparative social investment for women and for all’ (p. 124).