Between consumption, accumulation and precarity: The psychic and affective practices of the female neoliberal spiritual subject

Abstract

Why do gig workers perceive work practices as aspirational in spite of their precarity? Selling beauty products through their networks appeals to many women as a convenient way to earn an income. Drawing on interviews and observations with women distributors of beauty products in a network marketing company, this article shows how aspirational messaging that appears spiritual is used to encourage these women to think and feel that they are in charge of their own destiny while making it difficult for those women to articulate the precarious conditions that are associated with such work. Practices that encourage those women to think in specific ways include internalising the right spiritual dispositions, developing as an entrepreneurial spiritual subject and selling the self. Women are also encouraged to feel in specific ways by monitoring how they feel about themselves and others. The article shows how ‘thinking rules’ and ‘feeling rules’ are used to construct an ideal female neoliberal spiritual subject in new forms of organising who is selling and consuming beauty products while aspirational-spiritual messaging makes it difficult to articulate precarity.

Conceptualising feminist resistance in the postfeminist terrain

“…In particular, transforming intellectus resembles practices of circumvention. Resistance in the form of circumvention is seen not only as practicable but also recommendable in neoliberal and postfeminist regimes, because head-on confrontation tends to result in co-optation and incorporation, instead of changing structures and systems (Bröckling, 2015; Carr and Kelan, 2021; Scharff, 2016). What we add to the literature on neoliberal resistance is that practices of tactics or circumvention – transforming intellectus in our vocabulary – is learnt, and moreover, it is preceded by two other forms of resistance, embodying and verbalising intellectus.…”

“…Understanding resistance as a learning process can help women in leadership positions fathom the ambiguity of privilege and opposition they may encounter (Mavin and Grandy, 2019). Practising embodying and verbalising intellectus and seeing it as resistance may enable the (postfeminist) self to embrace inequality instead of disavowing it, to accept vulnerability instead of hiding it and to collaborate with oneself and others instead of competing, and thus enable one to see the structural dimensions of power (Ahl and Marlow, 2021; Carr and Kelan, 2021; Mavin and Grandy, 2019; Scharff, 2016). Learning to resist through embodying and verbalising intellectus can help women distance themselves from postfeminist expectations, to find their directions in life and to “play” more with societal expectations.…”

“…Such ideas include postfeminist discourses that tend to depict women as “blind-folded”, neglecting the precarity, insecurity and vulnerability entailed (Dabrowski, 2021; Sullivan and Delaney, 2017), and making them conducive to a double-edged position as both privileged and oppressed (Mavin and Grandy, 2019). Postfeminism thus exerts control via certain rules for thinking and feeling (Carr and Kelan, 2021), rules that govern women by developing postfeminist sensibilities to cope with neoliberal pressures and influences outside of themselves (Gill, 2007).…”

Self-entrepreneurship in uncertain futures: The case of performing artists in Italy

“…Studies on self-entrepreneurship and creative professions have pointed to the regulatory position occupied by the promise of future success in individual experiences of work (Duffy, 2016; Hughes, 2013; Kuehn and Corrigan, 2013). Developing an optimistic vision of the future has been considered central in entrepreneurial discourses where notions of self-cultivation and performance optimisation are a relevant part of project-based work (Carr and Kelan, 2021; Lamberg, 2021). If hope labour and aspirational narratives have been regarded as disciplinary commitments in everyday working activities (Kuehn and Corrigan, 2013; Mackenzie and McKinlay, 2021), hope has also been framed as a ‘psychosocial temporal resource oriented to the present’ (Alacovska, 2019: 3), which can help subjects not only cope with a context of insecurity but also create social- and artistic-oriented practices (Alacovska, 2020; Avramopoulou, 2017).…”

Editorial: Introducing the Special Issue to mark the 75th Anniversary of Human Relations

“…However, many, more contemporary authors have continued to work towards the broad aims of these early studies – a number of which are highlighted in Guest et al’s article. More generally, as the article emphasizes, the desire to improve the quality of people’s working life is perhaps particularly evident in the growing stream of articles we are publishing on the so-called gig economy (see, for instance, Carr and Kelan, 2021; Caza et al, 2021; or Tirapani and Willmott, 2022) even though some of these authors may not necessarily see themselves as members of the QWL movement as such. However, as Guest et al put it, contributing, in one way or another, to the ‘humanisation of work through sustainable interventions that can produce positive outcomes for employees and employers in the first instance and, in the second, wider society’ (p. 1477) is an activity to which almost all Human Relations ’ authors, reviewers and editorial team would surely subscribe.…”