Studies of personal life over the past three decades have provided rich accounts of new forms of togetherness, with some pointing to a loosening of hierarchical lines between friends, kin, family, and long-term sexual partnership. While acknowledging the importance of these queering perspectives, I suggest that asking how people use ‘traditional’ relationship distinctions remains valuable. Reporting on research centred on practices of intimacy between women friends in early midlife, I examine how the competing demands of long-term sexual partnerships and family are managed alongside friendship, asking what forms of intimacy between friends are sanctioned or disparaged. I show that the organising logics of heteroromantic orders prevail, working through the contemporary cultural pushes of postfeminism and individualisation. As a result, friendships become constructed as bonus entities in relational life – necessary, but always supplementary to the mainstays of sexual partnership and familial relationships.

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Those investigating neoliberal and postfeminist subjectivities have argued that continuous self-improvement and self-surveillance have become everyday life strategies for many women. It has been suggested that these strategies have also re-organised women’s friendships, so that this is now a significant field of practice for women to support each other in the anxiety provoking work of self-perfection. Using talk-data from a sample of women in Aotearoa New Zealand we explore these claims, and report on how our sample of women describe their friendships, not so much as a site for developing and perfecting the neoliberal self, but as a place of reprieve from conventions of relentless productivity – a site of ease, escape and refuge. We are not suggesting that accounts of postfeminist, neoliberal subjectivities are inaccurate or that these modes of self-making are not relevant to our participants, but that the discursive environment of women’s close friendships is plural, combining neoliberal emphases with potentially subversive counter-narratives.

From policy to personal practice, injunctions to harness the positive effects of positive affects are pulsing through global emotion regimes. Scholarship tracing this phenomenon links the push for positivity – and other seemingly “entrepreneurial” affects – to neoliberal cultural formations. Within and beyond psychology, feminist analyses are highlighting the gendered address of these formations and their imbrication with contemporary femininities. While this raises important questions about the gendered implications of positivity imperatives, an absence of fine-grained empirical work means little is known regarding how positivity discourse is taken up and lived out. We draw from interviews with 24 women facing distinctive emotional management demands (influencers, mothers and service workers) to investigate how positivity inflects everyday living. Our analysis presents two affective–discursive repertoires that participants drew on to explain positivity: positivity as attractive relationality and positivity as agentic cognitive style. We also identified four figures who are central to positivity talk, and three affective– discursive practices linked to positivity: keeping emotions in check, virtuously declining negativity and triumphant positivity. We conclude that, while offering new and appealing feeling positions, positivity discourse may also reaffirm profoundly unequal patterns of emotional practice and regulation.

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