Just being and being bad: Female friendship as a refuge in neoliberal times

Abstract

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.

Motherhood and guilt in a pandemic: Negotiating the “new” normal with a feminist identity

“…Guilt at how we feed our babies (Williams, Donaghue, & Kurzm, 2013), guilt for going back to work (Murray, 2015) and guilt for staying at home (Rubin & Wooten, 2007). Furthermore, neoliberal corporatized feminism relies on self-surveillance (Martinussen, 2020), which in turn are rooted in anti-femininity and femmephobic ideas (Hoskin & Taylor, 2019). Others have already shown how women are complicit in policing other women's adherence to social norms; their mothering practices (Grant, Mannay, & Marzella, 2017), breastfeeding choices (Tomori, Palmquist, & Dowling, 2016), childcare decisions (Murray, 2015), sexuality (Stone & Gorga, 2014), attire (Mavin & Grandy, 2016), behaviors (Berbary, 2012), and so much more.…”

“If your institution refuses to provide what you need, create it yourself”: Feminist praxis on #AcademicTwitter

“…This is echoed in Martinussen et al's (2020) discussion of women's friendship as a means of "escaping the regimes of productivity" (p. 8). In their analysis, Martinussen et al (2020) showed how participants construct their female friendship to constitute an "escape", which centres around authenticity, intimacy, and comfort. Women in the study described their friendships as a space to subvert, reject, or reinscribe feminine norms of "niceness", thus giving way to empowerment by resisting the everpresent pressure of self-management and self-scrutiny.…”

Emotions in Aotearoa New Zealand: Reflexive emotionalisation in a colonised context

“…Besides, Europeans and other ‘Westerners’ are arguably not as emotionally disconnected from others as often claimed (Jamieson, 1999; Smart and Shipman, 2004). New Zealand based studies which pay some attention to reflexivity and emotions suggest that not all Pākehā are rational, individualised actors (although see Howland, 2010) whose reflexivity is free from concerns about the feelings or wishes of others, including indigenous others (Huygens, 2011; Martinussen et al, 2020; Walton et al, 2018). Hence, a more relational approach to emotional reflexivity is needed to understand colonisation and moves towards decolonisation.…”