Feminism and the Politics of 'Resilience'. Angela McRobbieЧитать онлайн книгу.

Introduction

This short book of just four chapters seeks to develop a feminist account of some contemporary dividing practices associated with our current times of neoliberalism.¹ Each of the essays examines, in different ways, how social polarization is enacted through popular culture² and media, and how highly normative ideals of femininity play a role in promoting an increasingly fragmented and splintered society. In a vaguely Butlerian gesture, I understand femininity as a series of historically embedded and institutionally endorsed crafting processes, which take shape and are realized in a wide range of textual and visual practices. These bestow, in ritualistic fashion, modes of recognition on bodies that come to be marked, in their conduct and behaviour as well as appearance, as female. These are also then boundary-marking practices ensuring the perpetuation of heterosexual masculine domination, while also confirming male bodies as in a binary relation with their female counterparts. These crafting processes separate and differentiate the female subject according to class and ethnicity. Femininity, as it is created in the imaginations of the cultural intermediaries of the consumer culture, as well as by various professionals and administrators of the state, is put to use as a mechanism for producing a whole world of distinctions and ‘society of inequality’ (Bourdieu 1984; Foucault 2006). For example, as shown in Chapter 2, the familiar and quite mundane idea of ‘having it all’, a staple feminine lifestyle topic of women’s magazines and discussion point for high-profile women, which Catherine Rottenberg has subjected to strenuous feminist analysis, becomes an elite call to high-income, mostly young, and almost exclusively liberal-minded white women to separate themselves off, to pull further away, so as to protect their social cachet by finding uniquely middle-class solutions to the predicaments of sustained gender inequities at the upper end of the social spectrum (Rottenberg 2018). We come to know and recognize this privileged class status primarily by visual means and through familiar repertoires which draw attention to slimness, perfected grooming techniques, designer wardrobes, elegant accessories and so on. To be within reach of ‘having it all’, is already to be significantly and unambivalently upper middle class. Femininity, more so than before, becomes a finely tuned instrument of social calibration; its focus is on the measurement of goals and the meeting of daily objectives.

To an extent, these norms of femininity emanating from consumer culture and from the contemporary polity mark out a continuity with what I described as the field of post-feminism, led by ambitious and competitive ‘top girls’, for whom feminism as a mass movement was deemed no longer needed, for the reasons of government being seemingly well-disposed to such