Disavowing dependency: On Angela McRobbie’s Feminism and the Politics of Resilience

In this short piece, I would like to focus on what are, for me, the most powerful and generative insights of Angela McRobbie’s latest book Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on Media, Gender and the End of Welfare.

First, the book brings together a set of ostensibly opposing terms – the perfect, imperfect and resilience – abbreviated as p-i-r, arguing that they not only operate in a reciprocal entanglement but that, in conjunction, they constitute a dispositif. p-i-r is a powerful intervention into the feminist debate precisely because it renders intelligible a number of seemingly contradictory elements in the contemporary popular culture and media landscape, namely, the circulation of gendered notions of the perfect, but also – and at the same time – the media’s encouragement of our embracing our vulnerabilities and imperfections. The music video for John Legend’s hit ‘All of Me’, where he sings ‘Cause all of me, loves all of you / Love your curves and all your edges / All your perfect imperfections . . .’ as a young, slim, normatively ‘perfect’ model bathes in the background seems to dramatise this double movement with particular force.

As McRobbie documents, the perfect’s emphasis has shifted over time; in its current configuration, it seems to combine a successful, satisfying job, a healthy happy family, a slim attractive physique and the cultivation of a healthy aesthetic environment conducive to all-round well-being. The point, however, is that every woman ultimately fails to live up to this ideal, and it is in response to this inevitable failure that the imperfect comes to temper the perfect’s impossible demand. The imperfect, in other words, helps to dilute the relentless demands of neoliberal feminism, particularly in the wake of renewed mass and more radical feminist mobilisations. Thus, while the perfect aligns with competitive neoliberal leadership feminism à la Sheryl Sandberg, the imperfect performs a crucial role as an ‘anti-thesis’ – entering into a dialectical relation of sorts with the thesis, that cut-throat competitiveness of the perfect – and encouraging, instead, the cultivation of resilience. The imperfect-resilience is, McRobbie posits, consequently more aligned with liberal feminism than with its neoliberal counterpart.

The book tracks the move from a ruthless corporate feminism back to some form of ‘gentler’ liberal feminism, demonstrating how over the past few years, an individualised, therapeutic but feminist-inflected resilience-training has materialised as the preferred ‘solution’ to gender inequality. Resilience-training has become the mediated and popular remedy to cut-throat neoliberal competition, even as it too can be understood as a ‘lighter’ variant of Sandberg’s lean-in, since responsibility for righting injustice ultimately falls on the shoulders of individual women here as well. It is also, of course, a very lucrative business, with an entire apparatus of how-to-build-resilience guidebooks, apps and other products. p-i-r marks this shift from a dominant postfeminist sensibility to a new kind of sensibility that no longer repudiates feminism. On the contrary, McRobbie convincingly argues that our current moment actively incorporates aspects of feminism, particularly around empowerment and individual agency, even endorsing widespread feminist identification.

Yet, like its predecessor, postfeminism, p-i-r also operates as a form of governmentality, a technology of self-governance; it is the newest configuration of neoliberalism’s address to women as ‘subjects of attention’. p-i-r also helps cement and intensify already existing social polarizations among women. Indeed, the boundaries of the perfect are, as the book so skillfully highlights, always already exclusionary – inflected and bounded by race and class. This leads to the devastating but brilliant analysis of how resilience-training goes hand in hand with mediated poverty and welfare shaming, where welfare shaming in tabloid culture and reality TV performs a very public (and popular) excoriation of any and all forms of dependency. This, in turn, buttresses neoliberalism and its evisceration – as well as its demonization – of welfare while helping to produce a new moral economy where women must, in McRobbie’s words, ‘achieve the bottom-line status of being in work’ (p. 75). Resilience-training and welfare shaming are, in effect, two sides of the same p-i-r coin.

To me, what is particularly interesting and provocative here is the claim that p-i-r inserts itself as a way of managing emergent feminist activism of the kind we have seen in the past half decade. As McRobbie puts it, ‘p-i-r comprises a dispositif for the management of emerging feminisms – they grab hold of flows and expressions and pull them into a less disconcerting agenda for change’ (p. 43). This set of terms interact in such a way as to effectively defang feminism, diffusing it as a threat, while helping to produce a feminism that both bolsters the neoliberal imaginary while also packaging itself as a profitable commodity in its own right, in effect bridging ‘the gap between feminism and capitalism’ (p. 61).

So p-i-r emerges during this historical conjuncture in order to retool, reroute, reorient and repurpose the radical calls for social change coming from the mass feminist movements of the last few years. This dispositif helps to produce a new cultural landscape alongside a new female subject who no longer disavows feminism but rather virulently disavows dependency and interdependency, and who is urged to constantly work on every aspect of herself in order to develop her resilience skills. I find this line of analysis both compelling and insightful.

Another crucial insight revolves around the relationship between norms and our psychic lives, or what Judith Butler (1997) has called the psychic life of power. As I understand it, McRobbie suggests that part of the p-i-r’s ‘success’ has to do both with how the psyche and social norms are co-constitutive, and how a certain ambivalence – that constant pendulum oscillating between love and hate or attraction and repulsion – lies at the very core of our psychic lives. McRobbie suggests that p-i-r can readily be incorporated as part of our super ego precisely because the super ego thrives on ambivalence. This, in turn, helps to explain why the ambivalent and polarising coupling of the perfect and the imperfect has been so effective as a self-governance dispositif. Self-beratement becomes addictive, and we generate pleasure from self-beratement. In short, p-i-r aligns well not only with neoliberalism but also with our psychic make-up.

Feminism and the Politics of Resilience has also left me with a number of generative questions, which I pose here as a springboard for further feminist discussion. The book was written before Covid-19 hit the world, and it was published during the first months of lockdown in the United Kingdom. Yet, over the last year, we have witnessed shifting discourses around dependency. I would even venture to say that we have witnessed an unprecedented avowal of our dependencies and interdependencies in the wake of the global pandemic. The British television documentary ‘2020: The Story of Us’, which tells the story of coronavirus in Britain through the experiences of hospital intensive care workers and patients – and which addresses ‘us’ as a collective subject – is a good example of this broader cultural affirmation of interdependency. It would therefore be interesting to think, together, about whether the media and popular culture landscape has shifted even since the book was written. In other words, is there the same kind of violent disavowal of dependency in popular culture and the media, or has the terrain shifted since March 2020?

Finally, another question that the book has raised for me revolves around the relationship between femininity and feminism. If p-i-r takes into account and actively incorporates some elements of feminism into its discursive form, then what is the relationship between normative femininity, feminism and this new form of self-governance? Does normative femininity now have a feminist glow? Can femininity incorporate elements of feminism and still be described as femininity?

In its analyses and insights – as well as in the questions it raises – McRobbie’s book constitutes a crucial and formidable intervention into the feminist debate, one that will no doubt lay the groundwork for a range of future discussions around feminism, the media, dependency and social welfare in the post-Covid era.