Catherine Rottenberg - The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (Heretical Thought) (2018, Oxford University Press) PDF

THE RISE OF NEOLIBERAL FEMINISM
HERETICAL THOUGHT
Series editor: Ruth O’Brien,
The Graduate Center, City University of
New York
Assembly
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
THE RISE
OF NEOLIBERAL
FEMINISM
C AT H E R I N E R O T T E N B E R G
1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rottenberg, Catherine, author.
Title: The rise of neoliberal feminism /Catherine Rottenberg.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2018] |
Series: Heretical thought | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018005396 (print) | LCCN 2018012225 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190901233 (Updf) | ISBN 9780190901240 (Epub) |
ISBN 9780190901226 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Feminism. | Neoliberalism.
Classification: LCC HQ1155 (ebook) | LCC HQ1155 .R687 2018 (print) |
DDC 305.42—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018005396
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
To Ari and Avivi, my wilde khayes
CONTENTS
Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Feminism in Neoliberal Times 1

1. How Superwoman Became Balanced 23
2. The Neoliberal Feminist 53
3. Neoliberal Futurity and Generic
Human Capital 79
4. Back from the Future: Turning to
the “Here and Now” 105
5. Feminist Convergences 135
6. Reclaiming Feminism 162
Notes 179
Bibliography 217
Index 247
FOREWORD
In recent years, feminism has seen a resurgence in the pop-

ular media, with celebrities proudly declaring themselves
feminists and bestselling books teaching women how to
shatter the glass ceiling without neglecting their families.
In this book, however, Catherine Rottenberg shows us how
such “neoliberal feminism” forsakes the vitally important
goals of emancipation and social justice, substitutes positive
affect for genuine change, and adopts the theory and often
the very language of neoliberalism—which, in turn, needs
feminism in order to resolve its own internal contradictions.
With passion and rigor, Rottenberg reveals that neoliberal
feminism is not a philosophy but rather a self-help program
for upper-middle-class women, one that leaves behind those
who do not fit the template of a privileged professional.
She begins by mercilessly dismantling neoliberal
feminism’s preoccupation with maintaining “balance” be-
tween family and career. Rottenberg shows how this focus
on the self dovetails with neoliberal rationality, particularly
in its emphasis on the individual’s “cost-benefit calculus” of
x | F oreword
personal fulfillment (which relies on low-paid, outsourced

care work to make the numbers come out right). Instead of
benefiting all women, neoliberal feminism divides women
into aspirational and non-aspirational cohorts, with different
roles and expectations for the two groups.
Rottenberg carries this provocative analysis further with
her counterintuitive exposure of the way neoliberalism needs
feminism. In neoliberal rationalism, people are “human cap-
ital” consisting of ungendered productive units—yet for the
neoliberal system to be sustainable, women must also play
a reproductive role by creating future workers. To resolve
this contradiction, she argues, neoliberalism embraces “a
new ‘technology of the self ’ structured through ‘futurity,’ ”
which encourages women to postpone maternity (notably
by freezing eggs) until a time when it will interfere less with
their productive capacity. The popularity of neoliberal-
feminist books by women from across the political spectrum
shows how widespread approval of this brand of feminism is.
In detailing the deficiencies of neoliberal feminism,
and the fissures within the feminist movement that its rise
has accentuated, Rottenberg eschews any calls for unifica-
tion based on compromise, accommodation, or commonly
agreed-upon goals. Instead, she advocates “alternative femi-
nist visions [that] not only challenge but also constitute a pro-
found threat to our contemporary neoliberal order. Indeed,
given our grim and frightening reality, it is precisely such a
threatening feminism that we need to cultivate, encourage,
and ceaselessly espouse.” She concludes by invoking Judith
Butler’s concept of “precarity” as a unifying factor—not only
for women, but for all who are marginalized or who struggle
for social justice. With the times ripe for converting neolib-
eral feminism into a more vigorous and inclusive ideology,
F oreword | xi
women can turn around the unfortunate “mutual entangle-

ment of neoliberalism with feminism”—and subvert neolib-
eralism by killing it from within.
Like all works that challenge convenient untruths, this
book will disturb some readers and ruffle some feathers.
By disputing a widespread notion of what feminism is; by
elucidating the insidious ubiquity of neoliberal thought; by
demanding that we pay attention to the oppressed and mar-
ginalized; and by paradoxically finding hope in the current
dark times, Catherine Rottenberg gives us the hard truth,
takes us to the edge of a cliff, and then maps the way back. For
all these reasons, her book makes an outstanding addition to
the Heretical Thought series.
Professor Ruth O’Brien,
The Graduate Center, CUNY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
LIKE MOST RESEARCH, THIS PROJECT has multiple roots

and many people have cultivated its growth over the years.
The first seeds were sown when I was a visiting scholar at the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where I met Joan
Scott and Sara Farris and where we began a three-way con-
versation about feminism. I am intensely grateful to Joan—
she is a fiercely unique feminist force, and she continues
to inspire me at every single turn. Sara has been a kindred
spirit in this long journey. Her support, intellectual perspi-
cacity, and friendship have been a mainstay during these
past years. She has read and commented on almost every
line in this book. Not only has her feedback been invaluable
but her economic critique has changed the way that I see
and understand the world.
That year at the Institute for Advanced Study was a truly
formative one—in large part because of the wonderful new
friendships forged. One new and precious relationship is
with David Eng, to whom I am grateful for all of his unwa-
vering support, his amazing work, and his crucial feedback,
xiv | Acknowledgments
as well as the many conversations that helped me think

through my arguments. Many thanks also go to Moon-Kie
Jung for his incisive comments as well as his honesty and
dry humor. Peter Thomas, Nicola Perugini, Farah Salah, and
Teemu Ruskola have also become dear friends and important
interlocutors in my life. Thank you all. A special thank you
goes to Zia Mann, who was instrumental in igniting my de-
sire to research the notion of work-family balance, as well as
to Lila Berman, who kept sending me crucial material. Lila
also offered me extremely insightful comments, and I am
grateful to her in more ways than one.
The Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics
at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev has been my bed-
rock for almost a decade. I have been profoundly privileged
to have such fantastic colleagues. I would like to thank, in
particular, Barbara Hochman from whom I have learned
so much. I am absolutely indebted to her for her steadfast
and gentle guidance. To Yael Ben-Zvi, I would like to extend
my admiration and gratitude, especially for her razor-sharp
mind and passionate commitment to justice. Eitan Bar-Yosef
is not only a bundle of energy that illuminates every space
he enters, but I have never met someone who can do so
much at one time while simultaneously providing ongoing
support and encouragement. I could never have made it
this far without these beloved colleagues. My debts at Ben-
Gurion University, however, are many. The Gender Studies
Program has also been my second home for many years,
and I would like to thank Amalia Ziv for putting up with my
congenital impatience. Although I may not express it nearly
enough, I am very grateful to you, Amalia. My students at
Ben-Gurion, and particularly students in the Introduction
to Feminist Theory course, have taught me so much about
Acknowledgments | xv
contemporary feminism, and I owe them an enormous debt

of gratitude as well.
A huge and special thank you needs to go to two other
colleagues who have been absolutely central to my intel-
lectual journey, Niza Yanay and Nitza Berkovitch— two
brilliant and amazing women. Niza and Nitza’s feedback on
sections of this book has been absolutely crucial. Niza Y al-
ways challenges me from unexpected directions, and I have
learned so much from our conversations—as well as our
disagreements—over the years. And I am forever grateful
for Nitza B’s thoroughness, generosity, and insights. The two
Nitzot/Nizot have taught me so much about what it means to
live a feminist life. Then there is Yinon Cohen, whom I have
not only come to admire and adore but who has provided
me with all kinds of sustenance—intellectual and otherwise,
over the years.
The last two years in the United Kingdom have utterly
transformed my life— both intellectually and personally.
I have found a wellspring of feminist intellectuality, com-
radery, and solidarity here, something unlike anything
I have ever experienced before. I am humbled by the way
that I have been embraced in London. I have no words
to express my gratitude to a number of astonishing femi-
nist thinkers whose work I have admired for years and fi-
nally met in person; each of these women has profoundly
influenced my research and my intellectual journey. I would
like to express a deep and profound debt to Lynne Segal. She
literally adopted me and my family; she radiates warmth,
solicitousness, and sparkling intellect. She is a vibrant fem-
inist force and her ability to combine theory and praxis is
truly inspiring. Lynne has become one of my key feminist
interlocuters as well as my walking companion and chosen
xvi | Acknowledgments
kin. She has read parts of this book and provided me with
invaluable feedback. I would also like to express a deep and
profound debt to both Rosalind Gill and Angela McRobbie.
Ros has read much of this manuscript, offering so many ab-
solutely brilliant insights and critiques. I admire her spec-
tacular work and generosity to no end. Angela McRobbie,
too, has so warmly welcomed me into her world, and for this
I am eternally grateful. Angela has also read much of this
manuscript, and her feedback and our many conversations
have enriched my thinking in ways too numerous to limn.
Thank you, Angela—for your encouragement, friendship,
and amazing mind. Shani Orgad and Christina Scharff are
two incredible feminist thinkers whose work has not only
profoundly influenced my own but with which this book is
in constant conversation. In addition to her formidable in-
tellect, Shani’s critical eye, rigor, and sensitivity are simply
phenomenal. I would also like express my gratitude to Jo
Littler, who has become part of my life, both intellectually
and personally. I have already learned so much from her
research and from her comments on sections of this book.
Thanks also go to Jeremy Gilbert and Sarah Banet-Weiser.
This project was funded by two generous grants—The
Marie Curie Individual Fellowship (The EU Horizon 2020,
RNF 704010), which has enabled me to spend two forma-
tive years in London as a visiting professor at Goldsmiths,
University of London. I also received an individual grant
from the Israel Science Foundation (No. 602/16), which
has allowed me to continue my research under enviable
conditions. I am extremely grateful to Vikki Bell for spon-
soring me—without her these two years would not have been
possible. I first read her amazing work as a graduate student,
and her graciousness and wisdom have provided me with a
Acknowledgments | xvii
safe haven in the United Kingdom. She, too, has become an

important feminist interlocuter for me.
I am indebted to my two wonderful editors at Oxford
University Press: Ruth O’Brien and Angela Chnapko. Ruth’s
and Angela’s enthusiasm for this project from the very begin-
ning has been a lifeline. Their astute comments and respon-
siveness alongside their unfaltering belief in the manuscript
has made the publication process seamless and (unexpect-
edly) enjoyable. I wish to thank the anonymous readers of
the manuscript as well; their insightful comments helped to
push me forward.
Judith Butler and Wendy Brown are two feminist
thinkers whose work has shaped my intellectual path at
every step of the way and whose sheer brilliance, integrity,
and generosity are unparalleled. I was incredibly fortunate to
be able to spend a year with them as a young scholar. They
are my gold standard (forgive the market metaphor!), and it
is important for me to mention my awesome intellectual and
political debt to them.
I would also like to take a moment to thank many dear
friends—old and new—who have sustained me over the
years in different ways: Maya Barzilai, Lisa Baraitser, Yigal
Bronner, Andreas Chatzidakis, Hagit Damri, Orit Freiberg,
Laleh Khalili, Halleli Pinson, and Raz Shpeizer. Thank you all.
I would, of course, also like to thank my family—David
and Shelly Rottenberg as well as my sister, Elizabeth. They
have supported me unconditionally, each in their different
way. I would also like to thank Rachela Gordon for rescuing
me when no one else could. It has been a long and interesting
journey for all of us, and I love you all dearly.
Finally, I have a debt that accumulates with each passing
day. It is a debt unlike any other. Neve Gordon, my partner of
xviii | Acknowledgments
over twenty years, has read, discussed, and argued with me

about every single aspect of this book. He has taught me the
true meaning of care work, and it was from him that I first
learned what expansive generosity looks like. His passion and
intrepidity have enriched my life more than I can even begin
to express. He is my partner in every sense of the word—and
our life together is as rare as it is precious.
This book is dedicated to my two sons, Ari and Avivi,
both of whom have become fierce feminist forces in their
own right. They challenge me every single day, and their ir-
repressibility has made my life so much more meaningful.
They are gorgeous human beings who give me hope for the
future. I love you both more than you can ever imagine.
Different versions of Chapter 1 were published in Feminist

Studies 40, no. 1 (2014): 144–69 and Chapter 3 in Signs 42,
no. 2 (2017): 329–48. Chapter 2 is derived, in part, from an
article published in Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2014): 418–37.
All sections are reprinted with permission.
THE RISE OF NEOLIBERAL FEMINISM
INTRODUCTION
Feminism in Neoliberal Times
FOR MANY PROGRESSIVE AMERICANS, HILLARY Clinton’s

2016 presidential campaign as well as her strong endorse-
ment by feminist organizations marked one of the high
points of a resurgent feminist agenda in the United States.
In the days leading up to the election, there was heightened
and almost palpable anticipation among a great number of
people about the possibility of ushering in a new era when,
for the first time in US history, there would be a woman at
the helm of the most powerful nation. Consequently, in the
wake of Clinton’s unexpected—and, for many, horrifying—
defeat, it has proven difficult to assess the significance of a
female candidate running on a pro-woman and feminist-
identified ticket. For quite a few pundits and critics, Donald
Trump’s triumph simply signified an angry backlash against
feminist gains and rhetoric. The speed with which President
Trump has attempted to put his administration’s sexist and
anti-abortion agenda into action seems to lend credence to
the notion that we are witnessing yet another violent back-
lash against women’s progress.
There is little doubt that we have entered a particu-
larly frightening period in the history of the Unites States,
2 | T H E R I SE O F N E O L I B E R A L F E M I N I SM
especially since the new administration seems hell-bent on

eviscerating much of what remains of the country’s demo-
cratic institutions, agencies, and traditions, flawed as they
may have always been. In an interview not long after Trump’s
inauguration, the activist and author Naomi Klein suggested
that Donald Trump’s victory has led to a veritable corpo-
rate coup, while Cornel West has warned that the United
States is currently on the brink of neofascism.1 A full-blown
assault on women’s rights and gender equality appears to
be just around the corner. Indeed, the US administration’s
strike against reproductive rights has already begun, first
with the executive order reinstating the so-called Global
Gag Rule—prohibiting non-US nongovernmental organi-
zations that receive US funding from providing, educating,
or advising women about abortions—and subsequently with
the passage of legislation that aims to defund organizations
such as Planned Parenthood. Writing for the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) website, Brigitte Amiri states
that “there is no question that President Trump hopes to
stop progress toward full LGBT equality and access to re-
productive rights.”2 Irrespective of how the rest of Trump’s
term transpires, it seems clear that an inordinate amount of
damage will already have been done.3
The majority of this book, however, was written during
what, today, feels like a very different period—a period
in which certain progressive positions, such as the long-
overdue acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender,
queer and questioning (LGBTQ) rights, appeared to be
moving ineluctably from the margins into the mainstream
and institutional consensus. One has only to think about the
Marriage Equality Act as well as the nomination of the first
woman and feminist-identified presidential candidate by a
I ntroduction : F eminism in N eoliberal T imes | 3
major national party. Many on the left—myself included—

were quite ambivalent about these developments, in large
part because the enfolding of progressive movements into
mainstream common sense seemed inevitably to entail
a willful elision of the devastation wrought by neoliberal
policies—not least on the lives of poor women and women
of color—as well as the rendering (even) more invisible of
vast structural inequalities and continued oppression on so
many different fronts.4
Since January 20, 2017, however, the political climate
has been transformed in ways few predicted. We now have
a ruthless business tycoon with no previous political expe-
rience in the Oval Office, a president who actually lost the
popular vote by a historic margin of at least three million
votes. The Trump administration is also riddled with
profoundly disturbing— and ostensibly irreconcilable—
contradictions. A vehemently anti- choice evangelical
Christian has become vice president and an unapologetic
white nationalist served as chief White House strategist,
while Trump’s cabinet members—those appointees who
are currently heading the most important governmental
agencies—literally embody neoliberal principles in their
most extreme form, namely, intensified deregulation, pri-
vatization, and capital enhancement, spelling doom for the
remaining vestiges of the New Deal safety net and urgently
needed policies protecting the environment. What is so
striking is that neoliberalism, which is most often linked
with promoting the unhindered transnational flow of cap-
ital and goods, has become the bedfellow of a hyped-up
version of economic and nativist nationalism. While this
current convergence of neoliberalism with what Cornel
West has termed neofascism is perhaps nothing new on the
contemporary political landscape—existing in other coun-

tries for some time—it is still shocking and terrifying for
many people across the globe to witness this merging in the
United States.5 Indeed, actions taken by the Trump admin-
istration, including his flurry of extremely controversial
executive orders, have already sparked mass mobilization
and protest on a scale not seen for decades.6 Perhaps we
have entered a new era of renewed mass popular resistance,
where notions of social justice and equality will be given
new life and potentially present an alternative to both the
neofascist tendencies of the new administration as well as
the neoliberal market rationality that continues to colonize
our world apace. This, at least, is my hope, and one that
I return to in Chapter 6.
As will become clear, however, The Rise of Neoliberal
Feminism tracks a different if interrelated phenomenon,
namely, the mutual entanglement of neoliberalism with
feminism, which has always been considered a progressive
political stance.7 This research odyssey began in 2012 when,
after a long period of latency in which few women—let
alone powerful women—were willing to identify publicly as
feminist, the status quo began to change both rapidly and
dramatically. All of a sudden, many high-profile women
in the United States were loudly declaring themselves
feminists, one after the other: from the former director of
policy planning for the US State Department Anne-Marie
Slaughter, the former president of Barnard College Debora
Spar and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, to young
Hollywood star Emma Watson and music celebrities Miley
Cyrus and Beyoncé. Feminism had suddenly become ac-
ceptable and intensely popular in ways that it simply had
never been before.8
The prospect of a resurgent feminist discourse was, of

course, exhilarating, particularly since the term “postfemi-
nism”—which Rosalind Gill describes as a complex “entan-
glement of feminist and anti-feminist ideas”—was already
in mass circulation and had been doing such a good job
at eschewing the necessity of an organized mass women’s
movement.9 And, yet, many long-time activists and scholars
were wary of the newest development due, in large part, to
the all but total disappearance of key terms that had tradi-
tionally been inseparable from public feminist discussions
and debates, namely, equal rights, liberation, and social jus-
tice.10 In their stead, other words, such as happiness, balance,
responsibility, and lean in, began to appear with stubborn
consistency. Fascinated by the widespread circulation and
acceptance of a new feminist vocabulary alongside the eli-
sion of so many key terms, I began to follow the individual-
izing and political anesthetizing effect of this new variant of
feminism.
It was the appearance of a new feminist vocabulary that
first motivated me to begin examining feminism’s new vis-
ibility in mainstream cultural outlets, ranging from news-
paper and magazine articles to television series, bestselling
autobiographies and “how-to-succeed” guides for women,
and so-called mommy blogs. I wanted to understand why
this form of feminism became publicly acceptable and
was gaining such widespread currency as well as to query
whether the changing vocabulary was indeed linked to the
legitimacy feminism had suddenly acquired in the US pop-
ular imagination. My interest in this novel cultural phe-
nomenon peaked when several conservative actors—from
Prime Minister Theresa May in the United Kingdom to
Ivanka Trump—joined the ranks of an already impressive
list of high-profile women publicly identifying themselves

as feminists.11
The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism thus offers an in-depth
analysis of these complex and confounding issues, and,
as readers will see, its theoretical framework expands and
changes over the course of the book as I attempt to account
for the rapid shifts within this new feminist discourse. As cer-
tain feminist themes permeated and began circulating widely
within the US mainstream media, their contours and emphases
morphed, sometimes quite significantly. The book follows
these shifts, tracing where and how the new variant of fem-
inism has appeared in the cultural and political arena—and
through what particular idioms it has operated—since 2012.12
It is always difficult to capture a particular cultural moment as
it happens—in real time, as it were—and this, of course, is par-
ticularly true when events are unfolding so quickly.
The following chapters chart as well as analyze the rise
of what I have come to term neoliberal feminism. The book
begins by flagging what I perceived to be an intensifying
crisis in liberalism’s construal of space—namely, the bifur-
cation between the public and private—a crisis that has had
significant repercussions for liberal feminist thinking as
well as for its agenda for social change.13 This spatial crisis
is not particularly new and its genesis is clearly multifaceted,
involving liberalism’s own internal contradictions, not least
of which is the way that space is always already gendered in
the liberal political imaginary. However, I suggest that this
crisis became acute as more and more middle-class women
in the United States entered the professional classes on the
one hand and as neoliberal rationality has become increas-
ingly hegemonic on the other.
Drawing on the work of Wendy Brown, Michel Feher, and

Wendy Lerner, I understand neoliberalism not merely as an
economic system or a set of policies that facilitates intensified
privatization and market deregulation, but as a dominant po-
litical rationality or normative form of reason that moves to
and from the management of the state to the inner workings
of the subject, recasting individuals as capital-enhancing
agents.14 Neoliberalism’s ongoing and relentless conversion
of all aspects of our world into “specks” of capital, including
human beings themselves, produces subjects who are indi-
vidualized, entrepreneurial, and self-investing; they are also
cast as entirely responsible for their own self-care and well-
being.15 It is perhaps important—and paradoxical—to note
that precisely as market rationality has gained ascendency,
postfeminism, which scholars such as Angela McRobbie and
Rosalind Gill have argued is itself a product of neoliberalism,
has been eclipsed by this new form of feminism.16 Indeed,
the entrenchment of neoliberal rationality seems to have led
not only to the corrosion of liberal feminism and the advent
of postfeminism, but more recently, it has spawned a new
form of feminism.
All of which raises a series of fascinating questions: why
might neoliberalism need feminism? What does neoliberal
feminism do that postfeminism could not or cannot accom-
plish? What kind of cultural work does this particular variant
of feminism carry out at this particular historical moment?
And, finally, what exactly are its modes of operation? This
book provides an in-depth analysis of the underlying logic
of neoliberal feminism, its intricate mechanisms, and how it
operates to advance a series of objectives, including the pro-
duction of new feminist subjects.
MAINSTREAM FEMINIST
N A R R AT I V E S O F W O M E N ’ S
PROGRESS: THEN AND NOW
To make sense of the current moment in which neoliberal

feminism has been on the ascendant, it is vital to under-
stand at least some its historical underpinnings, or more
precisely, the way feminism has been perceived, narrated,
and depicted in the popular imagination. Since the 1970s,
a certain liberal feminist narrative of women’s progress has
emerged and been accepted in the United States, particularly
within the mainstream media. It unfolds in the following
manner: middle- and upper-class women were confined to
the private sphere until first-wave feminism’s mobilization
in the latter part of the nineteenth century, when women
began, en masse, to demand recognition as public subjects.
Women’s participation in the war effort, the passage of the
Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote,
and the coalescing of the modern New Woman norm
were all fruit of this long-standing demand and activism.
Throughout the twentieth century, many women took ad-
vantage of newfound freedoms, and yet upwardly mobile
women were very often forced to make difficult choices
between having a family or pursuing a career—namely,
between traditional definitions of womanhood and pro-
gressive ones. The second wave of the women’s movement,
the narrative continues, significantly transformed this re-
ality. Although difficulties remain—and the 1980s were, in
particular, fraught with various backlashes against femi-
nist gains—the last three to four decades have witnessed
unprecedented freedoms and choices for women in the
United States.17
This relatively uncritical progressive narrative has, not

surprisingly, been profoundly challenged on many fronts by
a range of feminist writers, academics, and activists over the
years. Some of the more well-known critiques include black
feminist writers, such as Hazel Carby and bell hooks, who
have crucially underscored the total erasure of race as well as
the privileging of a certain class within this narrative.18 Other
influential critiques include Arlie Hochschild and Anne
Machung’s The Second Shift, which spotlighted women’s dif-
ficult negotiation between work and home life, particularly
given the deeply entrenched assumption that women are still
ultimately responsible for domestic duties;19 Susan Faludi’s
Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women, which de-
tailed the anti-feminist counterattack of the 1980s;20 and
Naomi Wolf ’s bestselling The Beauty Myth, which famously
argued that contemporary beauty ideals constitute a psycho-
logical weapon against women whose objective is to slow
down their progress.21
Notwithstanding these trenchant interventions and
critiques, there was still a very widely held assumption,
particularly among middle-class whites, that women had
thrown off their historic shackles and gender equality had
been substantially realized. The 1990s and the first decade of
the new millennium have, accordingly, often been referred to
and understood in the mainstream media as the postfeminist
era that, like the notion of the post-racial era, promulgates
the conviction as well as the sensibility that the goals of
feminism have already—more or less—been achieved and
that there is no longer any raison d’être for a mass woman’s
movement.22 Not surprisingly, postfeminism coincided with
the increasing hegemony of neoliberal rationality, which
eliminates from view political stratification and the disparate
position of social groups and individuals.23 These years were

also precisely the ones in which high-profile women were
wary of admitting any feminist tendencies and where women
would often invoke feminism publicly only in order to dis-
miss its continued relevance.
Since 2012, however, we have witnessed yet another
transformation in the mainstream cultural landscape.
Indeed, in the past few years, feminism has become “in”
again. A flurry of self-proclaimed feminist manifestos have
appeared in the cultural and political arena, garnering in-
tense media attention and reenergizing feminist debates,
most prominently around the question of why well-educated
middle-class women are still struggling to cultivate careers
and raise children at the same time. Two of these, former
Princeton University professor and dean of the Woodrow
Wilson School of Public and International Affairs Anne-
Marie Slaughter’s “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” and
Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg’s best-
selling Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead might
well be said to have initiated a trend of high-power women
publicly and unabashedly identifying as feminists.24 These
two feminist manifestos feature prominently in the following
pages precisely due to the inordinate amount of the media
attention they have received. Considered together with ac-
tress Emma Watson’s September 2014 speech at the UN
Women #HeforShe campaign launch and the enormously
positive response she received, Beyoncé’s “spectacular” ap-
propriation of Chimamanda Adichie’s talk “We Should All
Be Feminists”25 (see Figure I.1), as well as other widely pub-
licized feminist enunciations, these recent developments
suggest that we have moved from liberal feminism through
an arguably postfeminist moment to a new era characterized
Figure I.1 Beyoncé performing her song “Flawless” against a giant and
illuminated “FEMINIST” backdrop during the MTV Video Music Awards,
2014. Michael Buckner/Staff/Getty Images
by the ascendency, visibility, and widespread popularity of a

novel feminist discourse.26
This book argues, however, that feminist themes have
not merely been popularized and “mainstreamed,” but they
have also become increasingly compatible with neoliberal
and neoconservative political and economic agendas. The
Rise of Neoliberal Feminism tracks how and in what ways this
new and increasingly popular form of feminism has been
curiously and unsettlingly unmoored from those key terms
of equality, justice, and emancipation that have informed
women’s movements and feminism since their inception. It
is crucial to remember in this context that even classic liberal
feminism, arguably the least radical of all feminisms, con-
ceived itself as oppositional, offering a critique of dominant
society by revealing the gendered contradictions from within
liberalism’s proclamation of universal equality.27 Today, by
contrast, feminist discourse—as it appears and circulates in

mainstream outlets—is increasingly dovetailing with domi-
nant ideologies and conservative forces across the globe, thus
defanging it of any oppositional potential.
As the feminist sociologist Sara Farris has demonstrated,
in Europe, right-wing nationalist parties, such as Marine Le
Pen’s National Front and Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom,
have embraced and utilized gender parity to further a racist,
anti-immigrant agenda.28 In the United Kingdom, long-
time activist and feminist scholar Lynne Segal points out
that Theresa May, the conservative Tory prime minister, has
publicly declared herself a feminist while supporting every
single one of the austerity measures that make the lives of
poorer women much harsher.29 In the United States, not
only has gender oppression been brandished to justify im-
perialist interventions in countries with majority Muslim
populations halfway across the globe,30 but, more recently,
high-powered and extremely visible corporate women, such
as Sandberg, have publicly endorsed a type of feminism that
is informed by the prevailing market rationality. While this
volume engages critically with the rapidly expanding schol-
arship that addresses feminism’s “co-optation” by neoliberal
capitalism,31 it argues that the concept of co-option is ulti-
mately inadequate since it fails to capture the intricate and
complex interactions between neoliberalism and feminism.
It is also important to underscore here that what is new
on the contemporary landscape is not the continued life of
feminism. Over the past decades, there have been unceasing
and diverse forms of feminist activism on the ground, and
there has also been debate about whether we can identify a
third-wave (or even fourth-wave) feminism.32 The inability
to reach any kind of consensus around third-wave feminism
and the reason it plays a minimal role in the mainstream

progress narrative outlined above derives not only from its
diffuseness and its tendency to focus on women’s individual
choices, but also from the way it has been taken up by the
media as virtually indistinguishable from a postfeminist sen-
sibility.33 Indeed, as I argue in Chapters 1 and 3, popular and
mainstream media have represented and helped to transmute
liberal feminism into choice feminism (which, again, can be
said to be one manifestation of third-wave feminism) and
eventually into postfeminism, or choice as postfeminism.
These mediated forms of feminism, I maintain, provided fer-
tile ground for the rise of neoliberal feminism, which, how-
ever, constitutes something new on the cultural landscape.
Neoliberal feminism’s newness is marked and manifests
itself in two central ways. First, in contrast to an open-
ended libertarian “choice feminism” of the third-wave va-
riety, a happy work-family balance has become neoliberal
feminism’s ultimate ideal, and this ideal has been enfolded
into mainstream common sense. Second, the dizzyingly pace
at which so many high-powered women have embraced
feminism is unprecedented. No form of feminism has ever
been as welcomed and championed by iconic, mainstream,
and highly visible figures as this current form. The following
chapters therefore attempt to account for this new variant of
feminism’s emergence as well as the cultural work it is cur-
rently carrying out.
T H E BA L A NC E D F E M I N I ST
The notion of a happy work- family balance constitutes

the central axis of this book’s empirical and theoretical
analysis. Its careful examination of diverse cultural sites—

from New York Times bestselling books, through widely read
articles in the mainstream print media, to popular televi-
sion shows and well-trafficked “mommy” blogs—lays bare
how discussion about work-family balance has surged in the
past few years, becoming a key feminist term in the United
States. The proliferation of this balance discourse as feminist
is as striking as it is significant. Balance has been incorpo-
rated into the social imagination as a cultural good, helping
to engender a new model of emancipated womanhood: a
professional woman able to balance a successful career with
a satisfying family life. A “happy work-family balance,” in
other words, is currently being (re)presented as a progres-
sive feminist ideal. Insofar as this is the case, then this new
feminist ideal must not only be understood as helping to
shape women’s desires, aspirations, and behavior, but also, as
this book demonstrates, as producing a feminist subject in-
formed through and through by a cost-benefit calculus.
In Chapter 1, I track the surge in balance discourse, while
discussing the cultural transformation in conceptions of
“progress” for middle-class women in the United States. I do
so first by examining Anne-Marie Slaughter’s “Why Women
Still Can’t Have It All” in the Atlantic, which not only sparked
heated debate but also catapulted the former Princeton dean
into the national spotlight. Reading Slaughter’s article in
conjunction with television series such as The Good Wife,
I suggest that these cultural texts register a reorientation of
the liberal feminist discursive field toward balance and pos-
itive affect, and demonstrate how women’s “progress” has
been reconceived as the ability to create a felicitous balance
between public and private aspects of the self. I suggest that
this transformation of liberal feminism is the result of an
intensifying crisis in liberalism’s construal of space and is

predicated precisely upon the erasure of notions of freedom,
equal rights, and social justice. I further argue that notions
like a felicitous work-family balance become a normalizing
matrix that helps govern women by shaping their desires,
aspirations, and behavior.
In Chapter 2, I move to explore the contours of an in-
creasingly dominant neoliberal feminism. Concentrating on
the shifting discursive registers in Sandberg’s Lean In, I pro-
pose that this hugely popular feminist manifesto can give us
insight into the specific ways in which the husk of liberalism
has been mobilized to spawn a neoliberal feminism as well
as a new feminist subject. Disavowing the socioeconomic
and cultural structures shaping our lives, this feminist sub-
ject accepts full responsibility for her own well-being and
self-care, which is predicated on crafting a felicitous work-
family balance based on a cost-benefit calculus. While this
new form of feminism can certainly be understood as simply
another domain neoliberalism has colonized by producing
its own variant, I suggest that it simultaneously serves a par-
ticular cultural purpose: it hollows out the potential of main-
stream liberal feminism to provide a critique of the social
injustices generated by the structural contradictions of lib-
eral democracy, and in this way further entrenches neolib-
eral rationality.
I next proceed to examine much more closely the wider
contemporary embrace of feminism by the mainstream
media. Thus, in Chapter 3, I expand my previous claims by
arguing that neoliberal feminism is producing a new form
of neoliberal governmentality for young middle-class and
“aspirational” women, namely, a governmentality structured
through futurity and based on careful sequencing and smart
self-investments in the present to ensure enhanced returns in

the future. Providing two representative examples—the glo-
rification of college hookup culture and the new technology
of egg-freezing being offered as part of corporations’ benefits
package—I demonstrate how upwardly mobile middle-class
women are currently being encouraged to invest in their
professions first and to postpone maternity until some later
point. By encouraging these women to build their own port-
folio and to self-invest in the years once thought of as the most
“fertile,” I lay bare how neoliberal feminism is increasingly
interpellating young middle-class women as generic rather
than gendered “human capital.”
While this form of interpellation is part and parcel
of neoliberalism’s rationality, one of The Rise of Neoliberal
Feminism’s central theses is that neoliberalism may actually
“need” feminism to resolve—at least temporarily—one of
its internal tensions in relation to gender. As an economic
order, neoliberalism relies on reproduction and care work in
order to reproduce and maintain human capital. Professional
women (and men), for example, frequently purchase and
thus outsource care work for their children or aging family
members. Yet, on the other hand, as a political rationality,
neoliberalism has no lexicon that can recognize let alone
value reproduction and care work. This is not only because
human subjects are increasingly being converted into generic
human capital (where gender is disavowed) but also because
the division of the public-private spheres—informing liberal
thought and the traditional gendered division of labor—is
being eroded through the conversion of everything into cap-
ital and the infiltration of a market rationality into all spheres
of life, including the most private ones. In stark contrast to
liberalism, in other words, neoliberalism has no political im-
aginary outside of the market and a market metrics—and
these are colonizing all spheres of life including the private

domain.
Indeed, the book’s underlying premise is that both
men and women—and particularly those subjects already
endowed with a certain volume of economic, social, cultural,
and symbolic capital34—are increasingly being hailed as ge-
neric human capital, as part of a process that strips them
of any value (or identity markers) except market ones. This
interpellation helps produce subjects who are informed by
a cost-benefit metric and who, in order to remain viable,
let alone thrive, must carefully sequence their lives while
making smart self- investments in the present to ensure
enhanced returns in the future.
Ultimately, though, my argument is that neoliberal fem-
inism must be understood as operating as a kind of push-
back to the total conversion of educated and upwardly
mobile women into generic human capital. By paradoxi-
cally and counterintuitively maintaining reproduction as
part of “aspirational” women’s normative life trajectory and
positing balance as its normative frame and ultimate ideal,
neoliberal feminism helps to solve one of neoliberalism’s
constitutive tensions by maintaining a distinctive and
affective lexiconic register of reproductive and care work,
and by helping to ensure women desire work-family balance
and that all responsibility for reproduction falls squarely
on the shoulder of individual women.35 Yet, as reproduc-
tive technology develops in the future, this population of
high-potential women will likely be able to outsource re-
production and care work more and more, thus ensuring
the re-entrenchment of the aspirational subject as generic
human capital on the one hand, and a whole other class of
women who are conceived as not fully responsibilized and
thus exploitable and disposable on the other. As I document
in more detail in Chapter 6, precisely at the moment when

more middle-class women have entered positions of power,
domestic and care workers have become the fastest growing
occupations in the US. The overwhelming majority of these
workers are women—while most are women of color and
immigrants—and they often work without any job security
or social benefits, earning poverty wages.36
In Chapter 4, I shift my analysis to another cultural
site, namely Internet blogs that fall loosely into the genre of
“mommy blogs.” I analyze two well-trafficked blogs written
by Ivy League– educated professional women with chil-
dren. Reading these blogs as part—and symptomatic—of
the larger neoliberal feminist turn, I show how neoliberal
feminism is currently interpellating middle- aged women
differently from their younger counterparts. I suggest
that in earlier articulations of the promise of work-family
balance, happiness is either linked to the balancing act it-
self (in Slaughter and Sandberg, for instance), or held out as
a promise for the future (for young aspirational women, as
I show in Chapter 3). Yet, for maturing feminist subjects—
those who have managed to approximate the balanced
woman—notions of happiness have expanded to include
the normative demand to live in the present as fully and as
positively as possible. Work-family balance is, in a sense,
already assumed and positive affect is then enfolded in a
new temporal dimension. The turn from a future-oriented
perspective to “the here and now,” in other words, reveals
how different temporalities function as part of the technol-
ogies of the self within contemporary neoliberal feminism.
I show how positive affect is the mode through which tech-
nologies of the self direct subjects toward certain temporal
horizons.37 Finally, I suggest that exhortation to live in “the
here and now,” particularly for aging women, is not neces-

sarily an anomaly or challenge to neoliberalism in general or
neoliberal feminism more specifically—where notions of fu-
ture returns remain key—but make up one part of the larger
apparatus of technologies of the self that are constitutive of
neoliberalism in our present moment.
In Chapter 5, I proceed to examine Ivanka Trump’s Women
Who Work in conjunction with Megyn Kelly’s memoir Settle
for More and Ann-Marie Slaughter’s Unfinished Business.38 On
the one hand, I demonstrate how Trump’s manifesto registers
and helps constitute the newest permutation of the neolib-
eral feminist subject that I have been tracking throughout
this book. Indeed, Women Who Work conjures up a subject
who further propels the conversion of aspirational women
into generic human capital, which is best exemplified in the
reworking of motherhood in managerial terms. It brilliantly
exposes, for example, how affect, even toward one’s own chil-
dren, becomes subsumed under neoliberal rationality and is
transformed into a form of investment and calculation that
helps to procure a felicitous balance. Simultaneously, the
ideal of a happy work-family balance continues to serve as a
pushback to this conversion process. These two concurrent
movements or trajectories bring neoliberal feminism closer
to its logical limit as well as render Women Who Work a neo-
liberal feminist manifesto par excellence. On the other hand,
through a careful comparative analysis of all three “how-to”
books, I reveal that an identical rationality undergirds all of
them—despite having been authored by women who identify
with opposing political camps. In this way, I highlight how
neoliberal rationality’s colonization of more domains of our
lives has undone conceptual and political boundaries con-
stitutive of liberalism and liberal thought, while refiguring
these domains through market metrics. Not only does the

private-public divide collapse, but so, too, does the distinc-
tion between one’s “private” self and one’s “public” enterprise
as the self itself becomes an enterprise. This dual process
of collapse and reconfiguration shapes the neoliberal femi-
nist subject, which, in turn, makes it increasingly difficult to
pursue a vocabulary of structural inequality and oppression.
Given the reality that, most often, women of color, poor,
and immigrant women serve as the unacknowledged care-
workers who enable professional women to strive towards
“balance” in their lives, neoliberal feminism is therefore
helping to produce and legitimize the exploitation of these
“other” female subjects. The detailed descriptions of new
forms of governmentality and technologies of the self offered
in the following pages expose how neoliberal feminism in-
creasingly produces a splitting of female subjecthood: the
worthy capital- enhancing feminist subject and the “un-
worthy” disposable female “other” who performs most of the
reproductive and care work. This feminism, in sum, forsakes
the vast majority of women and facilitates the creation of
new and intensified forms of racialized and class-stratified
gender exploitation, which increasingly constitutes the invis-
ible yet necessary infrastructure of our new neoliberal order.
It is important to stress—even at the risk of repetition—
that neoliberal feminism is an unabashedly exclusionary
feminism; it reinscribes white and class privilege and het-
eronormativity, while, at least until the time of writing,
presenting itself as post-racial and LGBTQ friendly. This new
variant of feminism, in other words, can indeed accommo-
date women of color, queer or trans women who espouse the
happy work-family balance ideal, even as neoliberalism does
not really require anti-racism or LGBTQ acceptance in the
same way that I suggest it “needs” feminism to help resolve

the quandary that reproduction and care work continue to
present for neoliberal rationality, at least for the moment.
Consequently, neoliberal feminism must be understood as
a key contemporary discourse that is overshadowing other
forms of feminism, rendering it more difficult to pursue a vo-
cabulary of social justice. Indeed, the notion of balance helps
“disarticulate” structural inequality by promoting individua-
tion and responsibilization.
In the concluding chapter, then, I return to the question
of hope, raising questions about whether and how we can re-
claim feminism for a radical democratic project. While some
scholars have insisted that neoliberal feminism should not be
considered feminist in any way, I argue that this approach is
problematic on a number of fronts. It assumes that feminism
has a stable essence or universal foundation that we know in
advance rather than leaving its definition open to democratic
contestation.39 As women of color and poststructuralist
feminists have already demonstrated, any attempt to define
feminism once and for all or to police its borders results in
violent exclusions. Such an approach also underestimates the
affective power of neoliberal feminism, which, as this book
stresses, is a crucial mode through which the new feminist
and neoliberal subject is being cultivated. In an effort to
offer a different path for reclaiming feminism, I engage with
Judith Butler’s recent work on precarity and ask whether her
notion of precariousness, which describes a social and eco-
nomic condition that cuts across identity claims, can provide
us with an alternative vocabulary, one that can help reorient
feminism toward a vision of social justice and egalitarian re-
distribution of vulnerability in these increasingly scary neo-
liberal and neofascist times.40
It is precisely during such a critical historical juncture,

where hard-won feminist gains are in imminent danger of
being undone on the one hand and where there has been a
resurgence in popular feminist mobilization on the other—
the #MeToo campaign as the most recent manifestation of
this41—that it becomes necessary to stand back and examine
the particular—and peculiar—ways in which feminism has
reentered public discussion in the United States in the past
few years. Indeed, by tracing the recent surge in feminist dis-
course in popular and mainstream media venues, we may
not only gain crucial insight into the powerful forces that
have helped to produce neoliberal feminism, but we may also
gain a greater understanding into the kind of cultural work
this strand of feminism is carrying out and will likely con-
tinue to carry out for many years to come. The reclaiming of
feminism as a vehicle with which to address the increasing
distribution of precarity across the globe is thus more urgent
now than it has ever been.
1
✦
HOW SUPERWOMAN
BECAME BALANCED
IN THE SECOND DECADE OF the twenty-first century, high-

profile women seemed, suddenly, to leave any lingering ret-
icence behind and began vocally and publicly espousing
feminism. Indeed, these media-attracting declarations have
successfully reinserted feminism into the mainstream pop-
ular imagination and have very often revolved around the
need to renew discussion about how women can cultivate
a better work-family balance. One crucial and formative
moment in this changing atmosphere was the publication of
an article by Anne-Marie Slaughter in the July/August 2012
edition of the Atlantic. In “Why Women Still Can’t Have It
All,” Slaughter describes the reasons behind her decision to
leave the State Department at the end of her two-year term
as the first female director of policy planning.1 She returned
home to Princeton—where she still held a tenured position
in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International
Affairs—because she simply wanted to spend more time with
her husband and two adolescent boys who had not accom-
panied her to Washington. Slaughter’s personal story then
prompts an extended articulation of what she argues is a
much larger cultural problem in the United States: the fact
that high-powered professional women are still finding it

exceedingly difficult to balance career demands with their
wish for an active home life. This is not due to any failure on
women’s part, Slaughter repeatedly insists, but rather due to
social norms surrounding success and the inflexibility of US
workplace culture, which (still) values professional advance-
ment over family.
Slaughter’s essay struck a deep cultural chord. It imme-
diately went viral and within a week of its publication, more
than one million people had accessed the online version.
It has since become the most widely read essay in the his-
tory of the Atlantic, and more than three million readers
have accessed it since its initial publication (see Figure 1.1).2
What emerges from an examination of the many and varied
responses on different blog sites and comments is a relatively
broad consensus that the essay’s power stems from its cogent
and succinct articulation of what “having it all” has come
to signify for educated middle-class women in the United
States, as well as from its simple explanation of why many
professional women continue to feel bitterly divided between
career and family.3 As many in the X and Y Generations
seem intuitively to know, “having it all” for upwardly mo-
bile women has meant— quite mundanely— pursuing a
meaningful career and cultivating an intimate family life.
Yet, even when women have managed, somehow, to juggle a
demanding career with being a “present” mother, Slaughter
argues, “having it all” has not translated into Zen-like well-
being; it has not brought happiness. Finding a way to “have it
all” is difficult enough for most professional women—unless
they are “superwomen, rich or self-employed”—but finding a
way to “have it all” happily is virtually impossible for the vast
majority of women.
Figure 1.1 Cover of the July/August 2012 Atlantic issue in which Anne-
Marie Slaughter’s essay first appeared. Photo by Phillip Toledano—Courtesy of
Philip Toledano and The Altantic
Indeed, Slaughter “had it all”—a high-level influential

government job and a heteronormative family (two kids
and an incredibly supportive husband)— but she reveals
that she wasn’t happy because she was spending too much
time away from her children. So, Slaughter queries, how can
women “combine professional success and satisfaction with
a real commitment to family?”4 The answer lies in allowing
women themselves to forge a felicitous “work-family balance”
by transforming social and workplace norms. While the
issues of work-life and work-family balance are nothing
new,5 Slaughter’s emphasis on a felicitous balance as the ideal
for progressive contemporary womanhood is. Because, she
suggests, women’s relationship to prolonged absence from
their children tends to differ from men’s, it is crucial that we,
as a society, begin valuing parenthood while simultaneously
demanding different work conditions in the United States,
like “flex time” arrangements offering flexible work hours.
Such changes would enable women to negotiate a better
equilibrium between the private and public aspects of their
lives. Asserting the importance of the right balance, more-
over, is absolutely instrumental in reinvigorating the for-
gotten clause of the Declaration of Independence: the pursuit
of happiness. It is time, Slaughter declares, to “embrace a na-
tional happiness project.”6
In this chapter, I focus on Slaughter’s essay not merely
because it has garnered so much media attention as well as
controversy, but, more important, because it registers very
distinctly a profound if subtle cultural shift in the conceptions
of what constitutes “progress” for (white) middle- class
women. Indeed, as I show both in this chapter and in the
7
following ones, this shift can also be detected in numerous

other cultural sites. However, two aspects of “Why Women
How Superwoman B ecame Balanced | 27
Can’t Have It All” strike me as particularly indicative of this

wider cultural trend and worthy of critical attention. The first
is the way the essay has sparked a re-envisioning of progres-
sive womanhood as a balancing act and, consequently, has
helped to inscribe a new gender norm. Dominant images
of progressive—as opposed to conservative or traditional—
womanhood in the United States have historically involved a
rejection of many of the traits and roles associated with the
private sphere. While the image of and society’s relationship
to “emancipated” womanhood has always been ambivalent,
in the United States “emancipation” has nonetheless been
conceived of, especially among upwardly mobile women, as
a move away from domesticity.8 In the 1980s, as more and
more middle-class women entered the public sphere, the
question of work-family conflict entered the feminist dis-
cussion;9 yet, advocating a felicitous equilibrium as the telos
of mainstream liberal feminism marks a decisive change. So
why, then, is women’s “progress” and liberation currently
being reconceived as the ability to balance between public
and private aspects of the self?
The second striking aspect of “Why Women Can’t Have
It All” is its invocation of happiness as a highly—if not the
most highly—valued social good. Slaughter indicates that
the pursuit of happiness, and, more specifically, women’s own
ability to negotiate a satisfying balance between family and
work, should be a top national and feminist goal. Her essay
can therefore be read to participate in what Sara Ahmed
has so aptly termed the “happiness turn,” and it is this ulti-
mate move toward positive affect—as key to overcoming the
obstacles currently facing professional women—that requires
further unpacking.10 It marks, I argue, the beginnings of a re-
orientation of the liberal feminist discursive field away from
notions of freedom, equal rights, and social justice toward

the importance of well-roundedness and well-being. This,
I maintain, can only be achieved through a dramatic con-
traction in the women who are ultimately included in the
field’s interpellative address. Yet, while the address may only
include a tiny minority of privileged women in the United
States, this new ideal of progressive womanhood is increas-
ingly being held out as the normative model for all (but par-
ticularly those aspiring middle-class) women. The question
then becomes, What kind of cultural and political work
does this change in orientation and discursive emphasis
ultimately do?
My point here, it is crucial to stress, is neither simply
to rehearse the various critiques of Slaughter’s piece that
have circulated in the blogosphere or in other popular
journals—criticism that ranges from the invocation of Carol
Gilligan’s notions of “women’s way of working” or essen-
tializing terms like “maternal instincts,” through the claim
that Slaughter is merely repeating a complaint that surfaces
every so often about the double shift and work-life balance,
to her failure to take into account current cultural pressures
on men.11 While I concur with many of the critiques, my
focus is elsewhere. My aim is, first, to map out in some de-
tail the discursive reimagining of progressive womanhood
that the essay taps into and reproduces. My second objec-
tive is to excavate the specific terms Slaughter mobilizes
in an attempt to understand the kind of cultural work—
and cultural disavowal—that the transmutation of liberal
feminism into a discourse of positive affect contributes to.
Finally, I maintain that both of these changes reflect a con-
temporary crisis in liberalism’s conception and construction
of space, a crisis that has facilitated the further entrenchment
of neoliberalism and, as I argue in Chapter 2, the rise of a

new variant of feminism.
F ROM N E W WOM A N
T H ROU G H SU P E RWOM A N
TO BA L A NC E D WOM A N
“Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” is clearly informed by

the still dominant and relatively uncritical feminist narrative
of progress in the United States, which I briefly outlined
in the Introduction and which unfolds in the following
manner: During the nineteenth century, due to the reigning
separate spheres ideology, middle- class women were, on
the whole, confined to the domestic realm. By the end of
the nineteenth century, however, women were increasingly
demanding recognition as public subjects.12 As feminist
historians and scholars have shown, middle class women’s
mass entrance into the workforce during World War I, the
long-awaited passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, and
the modern New Woman norm were all the result of more
than seventy years of mobilization and the demands of the
so-called first wave of the women’s movement. Freedom,
especially for middle-class women who had been associ-
ated with the domestic realm, translated into the ability
to transcend the private sphere and enter into the public
world of political representation and work.13 Consequently,
throughout the twentieth century, upwardly mobile women
were often forced to make stark choices between having a
family and pursuing a profession— between traditional
definitions of womanhood and “emancipatory” or progres-
sive ones. Until the 1970s, moreover, it was nearly impossible
for middle-class women to bridge both spheres at the same

time; the choice has historically been framed as either/or.14
The progress narrative Slaughter mobilizes in her essay
also clearly draws on the by now well-known and well-worn
feminist analysis of the traditionally gendered division be-
tween the private and the public. This conceptual framework
underscores how women have been discursively identified
with the private realm while men have identified with and
been identified with civil society and public life. Slaughter
intimates that due to this age-old linkage of womanhood
with domesticity and women’s emancipation with entry into
the male public space over the course of the twentieth cen-
tury, women had to fight in order to be taken seriously as
professionals. They were compelled to demonstrate time and
again their commitment to their work over and above any
attachment to family: “To admit to, much less act on, ma-
ternal longings would have been fatal to [women’s] career.”15
US social and business policies as well as dominant
social norms, according to the essay, still conceive of pro-
fessional life in these problematically masculinist terms.
Professional women have therefore always had to “be a man”
in public while, more often than not, disavowing the private
realm altogether. Slaughter calls this path the “fetish of the
one-dimensional life.”16 The few women who have traveled
down the even more difficult “career-and-family path”—and
this has only really become possible in the post-1970s era—
have had to enter the professional track on terms created
according to a male standard while completely cordoning
off their role as women in the private sphere. Not only have
these two realms had to be kept strictly separate, but the
demands of each have been incredibly high and most often
at total variance.
Following once again in the footsteps of a range of femi-

nist political theorists who precede her, Slaughter claims—in
precise, widely accessible, and US-specific language—that
the public and the private spheres have been (hierarchically)
associated with different identities, values, attributes, goods,
and demands.17 This, in turn, makes being successful in
both realms at the same time impossible, except for the few
women who have superhuman powers or enough money to
buy full-time substitutes—nannies and housekeepers, tutors,
and psychotherapists. Professional women with families—to
an exponentially larger degree than professional men with
families—have nonetheless been expected to find ways of
negotiating the conflicting expectations of both realms
while keeping them separate. Living up to these incompat-
ible demands is a Herculean task that very few women can
manage. After all, the essay queries, how can you be a pre-
sent, involved parent and simultaneously demonstrate un-
wavering commitment to a job that demands long hours
and uninterrupted accessibility? Consequently, Slaughter
laments, it is not surprising that many initially ambitious
women opt out of the fast track in far higher numbers than
men and are taking on consulting jobs or part-time work,
which has allowed them to spend more time with their
children. The trend will only increase, she predicts, unless
we transform workplace norms and our understanding of
successful career trajectories.
Slaughter proceeds by insisting that, given this dis-
turbing reality, women in positions of power—like Slaughter
herself—have a moral duty to speak out and declare openly
that today many women want both a career and family at
the same time; they want to be able to bridge their personal
and professional lives without having to prioritize one over
the other. This is precisely the moment when the notion of

the felicitous balance inserts itself as the essay’s solution to a
long-standing problem. While confinement to the domestic
sphere was certainly oppressive for middle-class women, the
subsequent normative demand that “emancipated” women
who have professional aspirations privilege the public over
the private has also been debilitating. This is particularly
true because in the career world, family has been devalued,
disavowed, or aligned with regressive tradition. In other
words, among liberals—which is the demographic Slaughter
is self-consciously addressing and a demographic that is
also very clearly class and racially specific—there has been a
privileging of the public over the private, which, according to
the essay’s logic, has had divisive effects on society as a whole,
but especially on women who have wanted to combine both
career ambitions and motherhood. The solution, then, is to
find ways of bringing both worlds into a happy equilibrium.
This revision of progressive or liberated womanhood
that marks the essay thus critiques the superwoman model
(in which women are expected to live up to the expectations
of both realms while keeping them separate and unchanged)
while attempting to integrate a version of nineteenth-century
True Womanhood with a version of the twentieth-century
New Woman.18 The norm of the hybrid progressive profes-
sional woman, which Slaughter conjures up and engenders,
not only exhibits both a natural maternal “imperative” and
serious career ambitions, but also insists upon a balance
between the two. By transforming the way the workplace
operates so that women can be “present mothers” even as
they continue working, and by thinking differently about
normative career trajectories (no longer linear but wave-like),
we can, according to the essay’s reasoning, help facilitate the
birth of the new ideal: the well-rounded woman. Slaughter

maintains that it is possible to reconcile once seemingly ir-
reconcilable notions of womanhood by changing our cultural
orientations, and, particularly by transforming the public
sphere so that it can accommodate the pulls, demands, and
desires of the private realm.19 The bifurcation between the
two spheres remains intact but certain modifications are now
required of the public sphere.
Precisely because the post-1970s era opened up unprec-
edented opportunities and freedoms, Slaughter tells us, a
different kind of conversation has now become possible. In
other words, the cultural climate is finally ripe for insisting
that progressive professional women can in fact bridge pri-
vate and public spheres simultaneously without disavowing
or disparaging either one. This becomes the true moment of
liberation for Slaughter—where neither realm needs to be
valued more highly than the other. From Private Woman
through the New Woman and Superwoman, it has finally
become possible to speak about the Balanced Woman. This,
I posit, is how the “truly liberated” woman of the twenty-first
century is increasingly being construed, particularly in the
mainstream media and the popular imagination.
BA L A NC E AS “PRO G R E S SI V E”
I N U S P O P U L A R C U LT U R E
Unlike second-wave feminists who famously insisted that

the personal is political, thus reconfiguring the private as
part of the public, in her essay Slaughter advocates reshaping
the public in light of the demands and needs of the private.
The public sphere must be reconstituted so that society can
begin recognizing the value of child-rearing and family life.

Slaughter is clearly neither the first feminist to advocate a
change in the public sphere nor to challenge the hierarchy
of values associated with the public and private spheres.20
However, her call to change workplace norms while contin-
uing to encourage women to pursue meaningful careers, the
noticeable—and disturbing—absence of a critique of “ma-
ternal instincts” in her vision,21 alongside her repeated insist-
ence on the paramount importance of pursuing happiness,
are, I claim, indicative of a wider discursive shift in the way
“progress” for women is being construed in US culture more
broadly.22
Indeed, Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl
Sandberg’s feminist manifesto Lean In: Women, Work, and
the Will to Lead, which I will examine in much more de-
tail in Chapter 2, appeared not long after the publication of
Slaughter’s article. It is ironic that the media has insisted on
pitting Slaughter and Sandberg against one another, since
despite their different emphases both women’s fundamental
assumptions about what constitutes liberation and prog-
ress for women are virtually indistinguishable. Sandberg
focuses on changing women’s attitudes about work and
self, exhorting them to “lean in” to their careers. Slaughter
focuses on legitimating women’s “natural” commitment to-
ward families, while urging social institutions to make room
for these attitudes. In both cases there is a deeply held con-
viction that once high potential women undertake the task
of revaluing their ambition (Sandberg) or the normative ex-
pectation that work comes first (Slaughter), then all women
will be empowered and will be able to carve out their own
felicitous work-family balance. Lean In, too, presents women
who are “competent professionals and happy mothers—or
[. . .] happy professionals and competent mothers” as its pro-

gressive and feminist ideal.23
The balance theme is also appearing with increasing
frequency in other mainstream venues and popular televi-
sion series. Books written by self-identified feminists, which
have a wide readership and some of which have become
bestsellers, include Why Have Kids?: A New Mom Explores
the Truth about Parenting and Happiness, by Jessica Valenti;
All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, by
Jennifer Senior; and Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love and
Play When No One Has the Time, by Brigid Schulte.24 These
books are part of a new and burgeoning genre that explores
the difficulties feminist and professional women encounter
when they become mothers. Moreover, they all—albeit in
varying ways—hold up a felicitous work-family balance as a
progressive feminist goal.
This shift can also be seen in popular television series
as more comic characters like Ally McBeal and Sex in the
City’s Carrie Bradshaw— both professionally successful
but on the constant lookout for a meaningful heterosexual
relationship—are (slowly) being replaced by dramatic female
leads such as The Good Wife’s Alicia Florrick and Birgitte
Nyberg from the Danish series Borgen, which at the time of
writing was slated to be remade for US audiences. In Borgen,
Birgitte Nyberg, the newly elected prime minister, has diffi-
culty maintaining intimacy with her husband and children
as she faces the incredible pressures of leading a country. Her
first year as “premierminister” is characterized by her devel-
oping skills in Realpolitik; the better she becomes at playing
the political game, the more willing she is to compromise her
integrity. This period also corresponds to her increasing ab-
sence from her family. The first couple eventually divorces,
after which their daughter begins to suffer from a debilitating

anxiety disorder. Torn between seemingly irreconcilable pri-
vate and public demands, Birgitte’s tenure in office is depicted
as a struggle to keep her moral compass. Predictably, per-
haps, her moral comeback is inextricably linked to her re-
alization that her victories in office have come at too high a
price: her family’s well-being. Following a month-long hiatus
dedicated to spending time with her recovering daughter,
Brigitte returns to the premiership at the end of the second
series. And it is clear that in order to stay the moral ground
in the future, Brigitte will have to do a better job balancing
family and work.
In The Good Wife (see Figure 1.2), Alicia Florrick is
portrayed as having opted out of the legal fast track to raise
her children while her husband pursues a career in public
office. The first season opens thirteen years later, after Alicia
has returned to the law and after being estranged from her
husband, who has had a salacious and widely publicized
affair. Despite the fact that her children are now teenagers,
in the first few seasons Alicia finds negotiating between
work and family difficult. This manifests itself in Alicia’s
articulations of guilt for coming home late (thus having to
rely on her mother-in-law, whom she does not trust) and
eventually in her decision to terminate an affair with her boss
when she loses track of her daughter’s whereabouts while
rendezvousing with her lover. Putting work or her “guilty”
pleasure before family causes her psychic malaise.
The protagonists of both The Good Wife and Borgen are
serious and career-oriented, while the importance of het-
erosexual love is transmuted into family (thus positioning
this aspect of women’s life firmly in the private sphere) and
their search is less about sexual satisfaction and coupling
Figure 1.2 Promotional image for the miniseries The Good Wife on CBS,
2009. Photo Still from The Good Wife—Courtesy of CBS Television Studios
and more about equilibrium. Indeed, the characters of Ally

McBeal and Carrie Bradshaw seem to embody an earlier
ambivalence with respect to women’s freedom and presence
in the public sphere.25 Both are portrayed as liberated pro-
fessionally and sexually, yet they still long for love; they are
liberated but unfulfilled (since to be normatively fulfilled as

women requires heterosexual coupling). By contrast, Alicia
Florrick and Birgitte Nyberg are more concerned about well-
being, and their primary concerns revolve around whether
they will be able to negotiate the two spheres of their lives
successfully. Heterosexual coupling (though, interestingly,
not necessarily long term and mostly for the children this
coupling engenders) and career aspirations are givens; they
are the background on which the quest for well-roundedness
gets played out. Thus, the dilemma and the ambivalence no
longer seem to be about entering the public sphere, or about
finding the right partner, but rather about the possibility
of finding happiness through a balancing act, which itself
becomes the sign of women’s progress.
The buzz and controversy that Slaughter’s “Why Women
Still Can’t Have It All” generated clearly indicates that it
tapped into a cultural sore spot, one that has been festering
in the last few decades. And, yet, precisely because Slaughter
is an exceedingly successful professional, continues to ad-
vocate the importance of women’s career aspirations, and
is a self-identified feminist, her mobilization of terms like
“balance” and “happiness” helped to endow or imbue them
with a progressive and feminist valence. These terms, of
course, also resonate deeply and dovetail with still other
discourses and other cultural sites—such as the recent spate
of academic books that challenge the notion that women are
“opting out” (while underscoring the structural obstacles
that inhibit middle- class women’s advancement), advice
pamphlets on how to balance work and family now widely
available on university websites, and self-help books dedi-
cated to the pursuit of happiness—all of which are associ-
ated with society’s as well as individual’s “improvement.”26
As Slaughter reported in a talk she gave at Princeton six

months after her essay appeared, many women read her
essay as final permission to start working part-time while
their children are small—and to reframe this decision as part
of the legacy of feminism.27 While clearly endorsing these
decisions, Slaughter was also adamant about encouraging
these women not to abandon their career aspirations, since
the pursuit of happiness includes a well-rounded life. The
elusive ideal of a “happy” balance can therefore be seen to
collate Sandberg’s Lean In, the feminist professional mother
genre, popular television series, and Slaughter’s piece in a
complex cultural web.
F ROM S O C IA L J U ST IC E
TO HA PPI N E S S
Slaughter is obviously motivated by a desire to understand

why so few well-positioned and privileged women “have it
all” and why even fewer of these women have it all “hap-
pily.” Moreover, she uses her personal story as a way of
underscoring that unhappiness among these women is pre-
cisely not a personal but a larger social problem. Slaughter’s
focus is on US society’s failure to value parenting and to rec-
ognize the legitimacy of professional women’s desire to be
present mothers. Feminist discussions about work-family
balance, such as Arlie Hochschild’s classic The Second Shift,
her later Time Bind, as well as more recent works, like the
2011 anthology At the Heart of Work and Family, have
underscored women’s often difficult negotiation between
work and home life, particularly given the deeply entrenched
assumption that women are still ultimately responsible for
domestic duties.28 For working mothers, navigating the con-

stantly shifting demands of career and family has been nec-
essary in order to survive; conflict is stressed while balance
is presented as implicitly desirable yet never as the end goal
of feminism.29 Slaughter draws on this older debate but
then reworks it through a discourse of positive affect, ulti-
mately holding up “a happy balance” as the objective for lib-
eral feminists. Crafting a felicitous balance—charting a path
between norms of “intensive mothering” and professional
success—has thus become normative. If in the past, progress
was measured by these women’s entrance into professions,
today well-roundedness and well-being increasingly signify
liberation. Slaughter’s own surprise at the fact that she wanted
to go home after her two-year stint in Washington is, in many
ways, the fulcrum on which the essay rests. These different
orientations and emphases are, I argue, crucial for under-
standing the cultural shift that we are currently witnessing, a
shift that involves the mobilization of affective terms.
As a way of demonstrating that the current crisis is
not the consequence of individual women’s dysfunction,
Slaughter quotes the economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey
Stevenson, who have “shown that women are less happy today
than their predecessors were in 1972, both in absolute terms
and relative to men.”30 Given the claims Slaughter makes
in her essay, the reader is plainly meant to conclude that
women are unhappier today because social conditions have
obstructed their ability to negotiate a “truly” balanced life.
Slaughter insists that in today’s cultural climate, it is virtually
impossible to be both an involved parent and successful pro-
fessional, which is causing so many “high potential” women
great anxiety and unhappiness.31 But Slaughter is also an op-
timist, and the happiness project that she endorses is one in
which the highest (feminist) good is the successful integra-

tion of the two most important realms that make up women’s
lives. It is only when we begin to value “the people [women]
love” as much as the success they seek, that we will begin to
help “Americans have healthy, happy, productive lives.”32
The embrace of a national happiness project, which
“starts at home” and which endorses a family-comes-first
principle, is a striking stance and not simply because it
is likely to be read as reactionary by many contemporary
feminists. Rather, what is particularly odd is exactly how
little emphasis Slaughter ultimately places on equal rights,
justice, or emancipation as the end goals for the feminism
with which she clearly identifies.33 In addition, there is a
strange inconsistency in her acknowledgment that the crisis
she explores is one that is most relevant for “high potential”
upwardly mobile women, on the one hand, and her call for a
national happiness project on the other.
The move from equal rights and social justice to national
happiness is, I maintain, predicated on the erasure or ex-
clusion of the vast majority of women. Put differently, the
happiness project Slaughter advocates is neither nationally
nor universally relevant, since it does not and cannot take
into account the reality of most US women. According to
the National Women’s Law Center, in 2015, 23.1 percent of
African American women, 20.9 percent of Hispanic women,
and 13.5 percent of white women were living below the pov-
erty line. The poverty rate for single-mother families in 2015
was 36.5 percent, nearly five times more than the rate (7.5%)
for married-couple families. Moreover, one third (34.4%)
of single- mother families were “food insecure,” meaning
that they didn’t have enough food at all times for an active,
healthy life. Many working mothers are working double
shifts, night shifts, or two to three jobs just in order to provide

for their families.34 Thus, given these blatant class and race
biases, there is something profoundly illiberal—and funda-
mentally incongruous—in her re-envisioning of progressive
womanhood as a balancing act and in her call for the pur-
suit of national happiness.35 Yet, once these inconsistencies
and elisions are examined more closely, the question then
becomes: how and why does happiness come to insert itself
as a key term in Slaughter’s progress narrative?
The “woman” problem in the United States no longer
appears to be about equity (between men and women or
among women themselves), women’s rights, women’s au-
tonomy, or rethinking how we understand emancipation, but
about affect, behavior modification, and well-roundedness.
In a similar vein, the bestselling Lean In focuses on changing
women’s attitudes about work and self. Sandberg and
Slaughter, it is important to note, have become two of the most
visible representatives of feminism in the United States in the
early twenty-first century. If for Slaughter, once we undertake
the task of revaluing the private (ironically, by changing only
the public), then supposedly all women will be empowered
to make better choices, for Sandberg, transforming women’s
attitude toward their careers becomes the necessary con-
dition for ensuring women’s liberation and happiness as
well as changing society. According to both Slaughter’s and
Sandberg’s logic, transforming affect and orientation becomes
the necessary conditions for ensuring women’s ability to
choose better—choice being, of course, a benchmark of and
code word for liberal freedom.36 This is one of the reasons
that Slaughter’s article helped to spark the “renewed” femi-
nist debate and has received so much attention: it does not
merely point to or reiterate the long-standing work-family
problem—although it does this as well and universalizes the

problem in disturbing ways—but provides seemingly simple
solutions that invoke recognizable liberal, feminist-inflected,
and US-specific terms.
Slaughter’s invocation of Gretchen Rubin’s “Happiness
Project” indicates that “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”
is indeed wittingly tapping into the current “happiness turn,”
which, in the United States, has found expression in a wide
range of fields and disciplines. Not only has a professional
journal, The Journal of Happiness Studies, dedicated to “the
scientific understanding of subjective well-being” been es-
tablished, but in the last few years popular and academic
writings, from philosophy to economics, have been engaging
the question as well as the importance of happiness.37 It has
now become common to refer to “the happiness industry.”38
Slaughter can therefore be seen to have contributed to this
industry by weaving the desirability of pursuing a happy
balance into the feminist discursive fabric, and this is one way
in which the essay becomes symptomatic of a larger cultural
phenomenon. Something besides Slaughter’s own class, race,
and heteronormative bias is being dramatized in her essay,
and this something revolves around a subtle but shifting dis-
cursive register. More specifically, I suggest that Slaughter’s
piece in the Atlantic participates in as well as registers a cer-
tain transmutation of liberal feminism into a discourse of
positive affect, and, as I argue in Chapter 2, ultimately marks
the incipient emergence and eventual entrenchment of a new
variant of feminism, namely neoliberal feminism.
W H AT D O E S H A P P I N E S S D O ?
In her book The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed asks

not what happiness is but rather what happiness does. She
argues that happiness as a social good has a long history,
and can be traced back to the classical notion of eudaimonia
found in Aristotle’s Ethics, which translates roughly into the
living of a good, meaningful, and virtuous life. The path to
eudaimonia, Ahmed reminds us, is inextricable from what
a particular society deems a life worth living. Happiness
thus functions as a promise that directs communities to-
ward certain objects, goals, and behaviors, which are con-
sidered necessary ingredients for the good life. The demand
for happiness in contemporary society, Ahmed posits, is
“increasingly articulated as a demand to return to social
ideals.”39 This is true because happiness operates as a form
of world making; happiness makes the world cohere around
certain “good” ways of living.40 In times of crisis, therefore,
it is precisely those ways of living and accepted social forms
that are challenged. If we are indeed witnessing a “happiness
turn” today, as Ahmed contends and the “happiness in-
dustry” suggests, then the corollary is surely that this turn
serves as a defense against profound challenges to our social
ideals.
Read through Ahmed’s theoretical framework, “Why
Women Still Can’t Have It All” is transformed into “a
happiness script” that provides directions for what women
in general should and need to do in order to follow the path
to happiness. Slaughter herself is aware of the prescriptive
aspect of her essay and self-consciously asserts that there
are certain concrete steps that need to be taken in order
to allow women to craft their own felicitous work-family
balance. But this is precisely where things begin to get sticky,

since “happiness involves a form of orientation; the hope for
happiness means [subjects] get directed in specific ways, as
happiness is assumed to follow from some life choices and
not others.”41
The promise of happiness that Slaughter, Sandberg, and
the popular television series offer, of course, does look very
much like social ideals. After all, the entire notion of a fe-
licitous balance, in effect (and not surprisingly), reinscribes
the desirability of having both a profession or meaningful
career and a normative family. The promise of happiness,
in other words, hinges not only on one’s ability but also on
one’s active desire to cultivate a profession or meaningful
work and on having not just a spouse but—more important
for the twenty-first century, it seems—children. Moreover,
the message Slaughter’s essay reinforces is that happiness
can only (or, reading more generously, is most likely to) be
found by following a particular path. The essay is therefore
not advocating a kind of open-ended libertarian “choice
feminism,” since there is an underlining assumption that
only certain choices can bring women in closer proximity to
eudaimonia.
Angela McRobbie has argued in a different context that
the whole notion of “work-family” balance “tends to reinstate
hierarchical gender norms in the heterosexual household.”42
In addition, Ahmed highlights how difficult it has been to sep-
arate images of the good life from the historic privileging of
heterosexual conduct, whiteness, and middle-classedness.43
It is not surprising, then, that the representations of women
struggling to find eudaimonia through work-family balance
are white, upper- middle-class, and heterosexual. While
Slaughter has addressed the critique of her class bias by
stating publicly that she is aware that she is addressing her-

self to a very particular demographic, her notion of a happy
balance wittingly or not plays into the dominant cultural
logic by (re)routing the desirability of emulating existing so-
cial ideals through the promise of happiness.
The notion of pursuing happiness through finding
the right work-family balance thus becomes a normal-
izing matrix, and a form of governmentality, which
interpellates all aspiring middle-class women, and helps
shape and direct women’s aspirations, desires, and behav
ior.44 Women, in other words, are encouraged to want to
“have it all.” Part of the cultural work that the promise
of happiness does is to orient (all) subjects in the “right
way,” namely, in the direction of the social ideals that are
thought to bring happiness through a subject’s proximity
to them. The promise operates as a technology of cultiva-
tion and control through affective routes: “A happy life,
a good life, hence, involves the regulation of desire. It is
not simply that we desire happiness but that happiness is
imagined as what you get in return for desiring well.”45 For
Alicia Florick, the “good wife,” her decision to give up her
affair with Will Gardner, which has caused her to deviate
somewhat from the happiness script since it “endangered”
her family, can be understood as part of this normative
injunction. Happiness, after all, is a sign of the “good,” of
the virtuous subject, and of the good life. And, who, after
all, does not want to be happy?
Some of Slaughter’s critics have pointed out that her
prescriptions can be used to ensure, once again, that women
do not advance as quickly as men. Her essay, in other words,
can be read to reinforce the assumption that most women,
once they have children, will simply not want or be able to

compete with their male counterparts.46 It does not seem
coincidental that the notion of a happy balance comes at a
historical juncture in which women are quickly outpacing
men in terms of higher education and constitute more than
59 percent of the college-educated, entry-level workforce.
Professional-minded women are often earning more than
the men in their lives, and 38 percent of wives outearn their
husbands in American households.47 Consequently, holding
out the promise of happiness to those women who attempt to
emulate the ideal of the Balanced Woman can be read as yet
another kind of backlash against feminist and women’s gains,
the latest myth that will ultimately ensure that upwardly mo-
bile women do not progress as quickly or as far as men.48
In this critique, the balanced woman ideal, where women
are encouraged to be hands-on “present” mothers as well as
professionals, becomes the latest— if unwitting—incarna-
tion of a longer genealogy of ideals, such as the Feminine
Mystique and the Beauty Myth, whose ultimate purposes
are to keep women down. The Balanced Woman, after all,
includes the injunction that women keep one foot firmly
planted in the private sphere.
The kind of normalizing cultural work that the call for
the pursuit of happiness ultimately produces may be clear,
yet accounting for the complex cultural logic behind the
call is, I believe, much more difficult. By way of concluding
this chapter, I would like to suggest that by morphing the
“woman question” into a happiness project, Slaughter’s
essay lays bare as well as endeavors to cover over the fault
lines of the liberal production of space—namely, the public/
private divide.
M I S S I O N I M P O S S I B L E : S AV I N G
T H E L I B E R A L I M A G I N AT I O N
The notion of a happy work-family balance can, I posit, be

read as an attempt to shore up the presumptions of liberalism’s
conception and construction of space. Articulated at a time
when Western liberal democracies have been loudly decrying
women’s lack of freedom in the Muslim world while lion-
izing gender equality in their own societies, it makes cul-
tural sense to shift the conversation away from the gendered
division of labor upon which US liberalism itself is consti-
tuted. I am tempted to go so far as to say that the turn to
balance and happiness underscores that we have reached the
limits of liberalism’s construal of “emancipation,” and that
this limit is articulated or being played out, not surprisingly,
through a crisis concerning the very privileged women who
are supposed to benefit most from the West’s gender equality
and freedom.
Wendy Brown’s early insights into the gendered opera-
tions of liberalism are still relevant for providing an alterna-
tive explanation of why we have witnessed a turn to a “happy
balance” as the liberal—and, as I will argue in the next
chapter, the neoliberal—feminist solution to what has been
deemed a deepening affective crisis among ambitious profes-
sional women with families. After all, if upper-middle-class
white women are in trouble, as Slaughter’s piece suggests,
then what might that tell us, as a society, about the limita-
tions of liberalism’s “emancipatory” promise with respect to
women more generally?
Brown has argued that while the public domain in the
liberal imaginary is the realm in which rights are exercised
and individuality is expressed, the private sphere of family
is the domain governed by needs and affective ties. Liberal

democracies have been constituted through and structured
around this bifurcation, a bifurcation that itself is produced
through the presupposition that men circulate in civil so-
ciety while women are stationed in the family. Brown further
argues that liberalism’s formulation of liberty is dependent
upon and enforces a gendered division of labor in which
women are construed as immanent while men are construed
as free or unencumbered. The public sphere of autonomous,
independent, freely choosing liberal subjects, in other words,
requires for its very sustenance, maintenance, and intelligi-
bility the production of its other: the domain of encumbrance
and relationality. Given the way in which the discursive iden-
tification of womanhood with the private, familiar, and re-
productive domain is inextricable from liberalism’s very
production and construal of space, women can never quite
be “possessive individuals,” nor can they inhabit public space
in the way that men do.49
Thus, if liberalism is constituted through a spatialized
gender division and interpellative identification, no woman
who aspires to emulate the unencumbered individual can
ever completely succeed: for subjects interpellated into so-
ciety as women, there will always be a remainder, a consti-
tutive “primary” failure, given the discursive identification
of womanhood with domesticity, family, and the private
realm.50 Thus, emancipated womanhood is, in some very
basic way, a contradiction in terms, since the very defini-
tion of womanhood in liberal discourse is (ultimately) in-
extricable from encumbrance and need, while emancipation
in Western liberal democracies, as Joan Scott has pointed
out in a slightly different context, has been understood as
getting “out from under, to be able to press ahead with no
obstacles in one’s path, to enjoy some measure of unencum-

bered thought or movement, from a situation of constraint to
one of some kind of freedom.”51 In Western liberal democra-
cies in general and in the United States more specifically, in
other words, women’s very identity as women always already
includes within it a discursive link to the realm of encum-
brance. Emancipation as an ideal, by contrast, and as Scott
further argues, has been defined as being either throwing
off the shackles of encumbrance or “self-determination of a
freely choosing, autonomous person.”52 As a consequence,
within the liberal imaginary itself, women can never really
be fully or entirely emancipated. And, when the question of
children enters into the equation, this constitutive remainder
or failure rears its head more forcibly and becomes increas-
ingly unwieldy.
Wendy Brown’s and Joan Scott’s theoretical insights help
explain why women still can’t “have it all,” but they do so
from a very different perspective from the one Slaughter
offers. Brown’s feminist critique of liberalism can also help
explain why professional women with families have been
required to undergo a “splitting” of identifications—being
“men” in the public sphere while cordoning off their roles as
women in the private sphere. As Slaughter’s essay indicates,
it takes superhuman capabilities to successfully carry out
the normative obligations of “womanhood”—of nurture, of
catering to needs and the affective demands of the house-
hold, particularly at a time when “intensive mothering” has
become the middle-class standard53—while simultaneously
performing the role of the unencumbered individual in the
public sphere. Slaughter’s description of this split identifi-
cation is insightful. Yet, as a liberal feminist, Slaughter’s an-
swer to this problem entails an attempt to heal that split by
remobilizing and revaluing the very same terms. The call to

reinvigorate the pursuit of happiness through negotiating
a balance between the public and the private thus becomes
symptomatic of a profound disavowal, since it attempts to do
the impossible—suture a gendered split that is constitutive of
the very way space is established and organized in the liberal
imaginary.
The invention of the ideal of the happy balance can
therefore be read as yet another attempt to reshuffle familiar
cards without bringing the entire house down. Represented
as choosing to bridge the private and the public, the liberated
woman of the twenty-first century is simultaneously a public
subject and a (present) mother. She awkwardly attempts to
reconcile the autonomous liberal subject with its constitutive
other, encumbered immanence. Indeed, at a moment when
prominent scholars like Scott are homing in on the gendered
antimonies of liberal notions of emancipation as well as the
underscoring the evacuation of liberal political principles
by a colonizing neoliberal rationality,54 the widespread mo-
bilization and acceptance of terms like a happy work-family
balance have helped to divert attention away from US self-
scrutiny as well as to shore up the gendered presuppositions
that make the liberal production of space possible. Not only
does the burden of unhappiness and disequilibrium ulti-
mately get placed, once again, on the shoulders of individual
women, which further entrenches neoliberalism, but the task
of pursuing happiness has oriented us away from attempting
to imagine spatiality and social relations in new ways.
Indeed, it has become nearly impossible to contemplate al-
ternative ways of organizing space or conceptualizing eman-
cipation that do not involve the public/private opposition in
some form or another. This impasse has ultimately provided
fertile ground for the entanglement of neoliberalism with an

attenuated liberal feminist discourse which has become in-
creasingly evacuated of any metrics other than market ones.
Indeed, Slaughter’s essay, I suggest, gives us insight not
only into the growing crisis in feminist liberal imaginings,
but also marks the beginnings of a continuous and complex
process in which the husks of liberalism and liberal feminism
have increasingly been mobilized and transmuted into a new
variant of feminism, one that is distinct from liberalism.
Whereas Slaughter still clearly positions herself within and
draws on a larger liberal feminist history, the notion of happy
work-family balance, as I will show in the following chapters,
has been gradually unmoored from its liberal underpinnings
and is increasingly being recast within a different register
and political rationality.
2
✦
THE NEOLIBERAL FEMINIST
IN MARCH 2013, JUST A few months after Anne-

Marie
Slaughter’s “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” appeared
in the Atlantic, Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In hit the shelves and
instantly became a New York Times bestseller.1 Indeed, these
two self-declared feminist manifestos have been read in such
large numbers—generating so much discussion and media
attention— that commentators have compared Sandberg
to Betty Friedan and Slaughter, by association, to Gloria
Steinem. They have insisted that the Sandberg-Slaughter dis-
agreement about the best way to facilitate women’s ability to
balance work and family is “the most notable feminist row
since Ms. Friedan refused to shake Gloria Steinem’s hand
decades ago.”2
Similar to what occurred following the appearance of
Slaughter’s piece, in the wake of Lean In’s publication and
the ensuing media blitz, there has also been a flurry of criti-
cism in various popular venues, ranging from the New York
Times to Al-Jazeera.3 Critics, particularly radical and socialist
feminists, have acknowledged that voices like Sandberg’s
have helped to reinvigorate a public discussion about con-
tinued gender discrimination in the United States, but
they have also underscored that this emergent feminism
is predicated on the erasure of the issues that concern the
54 | T he R ise of N eoliberal F eminism
overwhelming majority of women in the United States and

across the globe.4 In addition, there have been debates—
mostly in the academy—about the increasing compatibility
of mainstream feminism with the market values of neolib-
eralism.5 What does it mean, many longtime feminists are
asking, that a movement once dedicated, however problem-
atically at times, to women’s liberation is now being framed
in extremely individualistic terms, consequently ceasing to
raise the specter of social or collective justice? Building on
this question, my concern in this chapter revolves around
a related but slightly different conundrum: namely, why is
there any need for a feminism informed by the norms of
neoliberalism?
I suggest that Sandberg’s feminist manifesto can be seen
as symptomatic of the larger cultural phenomenon, which
I began to outline in Chapter 1, in which neoliberal feminism
is fast displacing liberal feminism. By examining in some
detail the language and shifting discursive registers in the
extraordinarily successful Lean In, we can, I propose, gain in-
sight into an ongoing cultural process in which mainstream
liberal feminism is being disarticulated and transmuted into
a particular mode of neoliberal governmentality.6 While
we saw the beginning of this process in Slaughter’s article,
Sandberg’s book clearly marks— and enacts— the further
entrenchment of neoliberal feminism in the United States.
Unlike classic liberal feminism, whose raison d’être was to
pose an immanent critique of liberalism, revealing the gen-
dered exclusions within liberal democracy’s proclamation of
universal equality, particularly with respect to the law, in-
stitutional access, and the full incorporation of women into
the public sphere, this new feminism seems perfectly in sync
with the evolving neoliberal order. Neoliberal feminism, in
T he N eoliberal F eminist | 55
other words, offers no critique—immanent or otherwise—

of neoliberalism or its rationality. More specifically, Lean In
reveals the ways in which the husk of liberalism has been
mobilized to spawn a neoliberal feminism as well as a new
feminist (and not simply a female) subject. Individuated in
the extreme, this subject is feminist in the sense that she is
distinctly aware of particular inequalities between men and
women. This same subject is, however, simultaneously neo-
liberal, not only because she disavows the social, cultural, and
economic forces producing this inequality but also because
she accepts full responsibility for her own well-being and
self-care, which is increasingly predicated on crafting a felic-
itous work-family balance based on a cost-benefit calculus.
The neoliberal feminist subject is thus mobilized to convert
continued gender inequality from a structural problem into
an individual affair.
In what follows, I briefly describe neoliberal govern
mentality and its specific mode of governance, while arguing
that a new strain of feminism has coalesced in the United
States. I then proceed by demonstrating how Lean In utilizes
terms borrowed from liberal feminism but effectively helps
call into being a new neoliberal feminist subject, one that
is distinct from her liberal feminist counterpart. Focusing
on three of Sandberg’s central phrases—(1) internalizing
the revolution; (2) lean in; and (3) the leadership ambition
gap—I show how they are all informed by neoliberal ration-
ality. Finally, I pose the question of why neoliberalism has
spawned a feminist rather than simply a female subject at
all. While this emerging form of feminism can certainly be
understood as yet another domain that neoliberalism has
colonized by producing its own variant, I suggest that it si-
multaneously serves a particular cultural purpose: it hollows
out the potential of mainstream liberal feminism to under-

score the constitutive contradictions of liberal democracy,
and in this way further entrenches neoliberal rationality
and an imperialist logic. Each individual woman’s success
becomes a feminist success, which can then be attributed to
the United States’ enlightened political order as well as to its
moral and political superiority.
In Chapter 3 I add yet another layer to this explanation,
positing that neoliberalism may actually need feminism in
order to solve the dilemma of reproduction. This is not to
suggest any necessity or teleology in the development of ne-
oliberal feminism, but rather that the convergence between
neoliberalism and feminism serves political objectives even
as such a convergence is conjunctural, historically contin-
gent, and may serve various purposes at the same or different
times. Thus, if during the Obama era, the emergent neolib-
eral feminism helped to promulgate certain assumptions
about progress while shoring up the notion that the United
States was still informed by the liberal principles of equality,
in the Trump era, where neoliberalism seems shorn of any
liberal veneer, this new variant of feminism is still thriving
precisely due to the way in which it is recasting reproduction
and care work in a market idiom while simultaneously accel-
erating the disarticulation of structural inequalities.
N E O L I B E R A L R AT I O N A L I T Y
In her germinal article, “Neoliberalism and the End of

Liberal Democracy,” Wendy Brown has argued that it is
critical to understand the contemporary US political land-
scape as one in which neoliberal rationality has become the
dominant mode of governance. This mode of governance is

limited neither to the economic sphere nor to state policies
but rather “produces subjects, forms of citizenship and be-
havior, and a new organization of the social.”7 Consequently,
neoliberalism is never simply about a set of economic pol-
icies or an economic system that facilitates intensified pri-
vatization, deregulation, and corporate profits, but rather is
itself a modality of governmentality in the Foucauldian sense
of regulating the “conduct of conduct.”8 Neoliberalism, in
other words, is a dominant political rationality that moves to
and from the management of the state to the inner workings
of the subject, normatively constructing and interpellating
individuals as entrepreneurial and capital-enhancing actors.
New political subjectivities and social identities subsequently
emerge. One of the hallmarks of our neoliberal age, Brown
proposes, is precisely the casting of every “human endeavor
and activity in entrepreneurial terms.”9
Drawing on Brown as well as the work of Nikolas Rose
and other contemporary theorists of governmentality,
Wendy Larner has similarly argued that neoliberalism is
both a political discourse about the nature of rule and a set
of practices that facilitate the governing of individuals.10
This form of governance transforms the logic by which
institutions such as schools, workplaces, and health and wel-
fare agencies operate, while creating a new form of selfhood,
which “encourages people to see themselves as individual-
ized and active subjects responsible for enhancing their own
well-being.”11 Collective forms of action or well-being are
eroded, and a new regime of morality comes into being, one
that links moral probity even more intimately to self-reliance
and efficiency as well as to the individual’s capacity to ex-
ercise his or her own autonomous choices. Most disturbing
for Larner, however, is the way neoliberal governmentality

undoes notions of social justice, while usurping the concept
of citizenship by producing economic identities as the basis
for political life.
More recently, the prominent feminist theorist Nancy
Fraser has decried the growing complicity of certain dom-
inant stands of feminism with neoliberal capitalism. In her
provocative article, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning
of History,” Fraser claims that second-wave feminism’s ul-
timate privileging of recognition (i.e., identity claims) over
redistribution (i.e., economic justice) is responsible for the
convergence of contemporary feminism with neoliberal
capitalism.12 The forgoing of economic analyses, particu-
larly by poststructuralist feminists, in other words, has led,
disastrously, to strengthening the spirit of the neoliberal
stage of capitalism. The current merging of feminism with
neoliberalism is consequently understood as the legacy of
second-wave feminism’s myopic refusal to sustain a materi-
alist critique.13 While I do not agree with Fraser’s ascription
of culpability, I do believe that her article is a key interven-
tion in the discussion, since it underscores the emergence of
a contemporary mode of feminism profoundly informed by
a market rationality.
However, the question of why neoliberalism has any need
of feminism at all still remains. The emergence of neoliberal
feminism during this particular historical juncture serves
specific objectives, as I will argue, but to place the blame on
the shoulders of second-wave feminism is, as Ozlem Aslan
and Zeynep Gambetti have convincingly posited, to “mis-
represent the ‘cunning of history,’ ” while subscribing to a
causal view of the past that “constructs unitary subjects.”14
My claim, therefore, is that the contemporary convergence
between neoliberalism and feminism involves the produc-

tion of a new kind of feminism that is eviscerating classic
mainstream liberal feminism.15 This neoliberal feminism,
in turn, is helping to produce a particular kind of feminist
subject. Using key liberal terms, such as equality, opportu-
nity, and free choice, while displacing and replacing their
content, this recuperated feminism forges a feminist subject
who is not only individualized but entrepreneurial in the
sense that she is oriented toward optimizing her resources
through incessant calculation, personal initiative, and inno-
vation. Indeed, creative individual solutions are presented as
feminist and progressive, while calibrating a felicitous work-
family balance becomes her main task. Inequality between
men and women is thus paradoxically acknowledged only to
be disavowed. And the question of social justice is recast in
personal, individualized terms.
THE LIBERAL HUSK OF LEAN IN
Lean In is a site in which we can very clearly discern the

processes by and through which liberal feminism has been
disarticulated and the neoliberal feminist subject born. The
book is a mixture of personal anecdotes, motivational lan-
guage, and journalism—all of which is larded with “hard
facts” and statistics. It is a quick read, and Sandberg is careful
to introduce pithy and catchy phrases as a way of attracting as
wide an audience as possible. Moreover, she self-consciously
details how she would like her text to be read: Lean In should
not be understood as a memoir, self-help book or a career
management guide, but rather draws on these genres in
order to engender a “feminist manifesto,” one dedicated to
convincing women to pursue their goals vigorously.16 The

book is motivated by a desire to revive a feminist discussion
and make good on the promise of “true equality”—one of the
central cornerstones of liberal democracy. Liberal feminism
accordingly appears to serve as the text’s scaffolding.
In the very first pages of Lean In, Sandberg majestically
announces that women in the United States and the devel-
oped world are better off today than they have ever been in
the entire history of humankind: “We stand on the shoulders
of the women who came before us, women who had to fight
for the rights we now take for granted.”17 She also insists
that women in the West should be grateful because they are
centuries ahead of the unacceptable treatment of women in
places like Afghanistan and Sudan. It is only by sheer luck
that some women are born into families in the United States
rather than “one of the many places in the world where
women are denied basic rights.”18
The discussion is thus immediately framed within a pro-
gressive trajectory and a well-worn binary that positions
the liberated West in opposition to the subjugated rest. The
United States and Western democracies are presented as the
pinnacles of civilization, which have been moving toward the
key goal of true equality between men and women. “Gender
equality,” in turn, becomes the benchmark for civilization, as
Sara Farris has underscored, while liberal principles are set
up as the unassailable standards of the good.19 At first glance,
this framing seems to deflect the question of continued ine-
quality at home by projecting true oppression elsewhere, and
it is no coincidence that Sandberg mentions by name coun-
tries that have been represented endlessly in Western media
as torn apart by Islamic extremism. This, as Ann Norton has
persuasively argued, is part of an Islamaphobic discourse
that endlessly depicts the Muslim world as particularly hos-

tile to women, which then serves to shore up US national
sentiment and nation-building.20
But Lean In does not ultimately use this anti-Islam trope
to turn the “gaze of feminists and other potential critics away
from the continuing oppression of women in the West.”21
Instead, Sandberg turns a critical eye on the United States it-
self, declaring that despite tremendous progress there is still
work to be done, particularly when it comes to women occu-
pying positions of power and leadership. In government, in
industry, and in corporations, she tells us, women are still
lagging behind in terms of representation at the top. Gender
inequality is thus associated with a dearth of women in the
higher echelons of powerful institutions. On the one hand,
then, Sandberg conceives of liberalism and the liberal femi-
nist struggle as responsible for producing the contemporary
cultural landscape, which is one of historic opportunities for
women in the West in general and in the United States more
specifically. This is clearly part of the progressive narrative
that I have outlined in the Introduction and Chapter 1. On
the other hand, she proceeds to map out what needs to be
done in order to move beyond the current impasse and fi-
nally fulfill the promises of the women’s movement as well as
of liberal democracy itself.
It is also in these first few pages that Sandberg sets up
her own progressive credentials by summoning the notion of
equality and underscoring just how central a principle it is.
Lamenting the fact that the feminist revolution of the 1970s
has stalled, she proclaims that “the promise of equality is not
the same as true equality.”22 This and other statements, inter-
spersed in the text, make it clear that Sandberg is attempting
to situate herself within a longer feminist tradition; her
objective, she repeatedly states, is to move toward a more

equal world. In addition, throughout the book she alludes to
other key liberal political principles, such as fair treatment
and equal opportunity. And while the text’s language is not
always coherent or consistent, the emphasis is certainly on
creating conditions that would allow women to make freer
choices about work and family. Sandberg even gestures to-
ward the structural inequalities that still exist in the United
States. She tells her reader that she is aware that institutional
barriers remain and admits that there is a need to eliminate
them. But these remarks are limited and made in passing,
while the vast majority of the book focuses on what are con-
sidered the more substantial barriers to women’s success: the
internal ones.
Before turning to an examination of the book’s key terms,
it is important to note that the “lean in” language and frame-
work are reminiscent, in many ways, of other now classic
feminist texts geared to “popular culture and media expo-
sure,” such as The Feminine Mystique and The Beauty Myth.23
All of these books—Sandberg’s included—attempt to iden-
tify the source of a recurrent (liberal) paradox: Given that
women’s opportunities and progress are no longer obstructed
by discriminatory laws and exclusionary institutions, what
are the causes of (white middle-class) women’s continued
inequality in the United States? If Betty Friedan’s objective
was to uncover the powerful cultural norms and pressures of
femininity, namely, the feminine mystique, which kept white
middle-class women in the domestic sphere in the post–
World War II era, Naomi Wolf ’s aim was to expose the way
in which contemporary ideals of female beauty—endlessly
produced in the mass media—helped to create an atmos-
phere of self-loathing and psychological warfare among a
new generation of middle-class women who had grown up

in the wake of the women’s movement and who were en-
tering the public sphere in record numbers. Sandberg, too,
is addressing a similar question (and a similarly privileged
white [upper] middle-class audience), and like Friedan, she
is ultimately interested in encouraging women to pursue
professional careers.24 Yet, in contrast to both Friedan and
Wolf, Lean In’s focus is decidedly not on confronting or
changing social pressures, but rather on what “women can
change themselves,” their “internal obstacles.”25 The shift
in emphasis: from an attempt to alter social pressures to-
ward interiorized affective spaces that require constant
self-monitoring is precisely the node through which liberal
feminism is rendered hollow and transmuted into a mode of
neoliberal governmentality.
The demand for self-realization and self-transformation
is, of course, nothing new in the United States either. It was,
as Christine Stansell has so meticulously documented, a
central part of the women’s movement in the 1970s and has
a much longer history in US culture: from the American
Dream discourse and the Horatio Alger myth, through
New Age cults and contemporary meditation and yoga
trends.26 Indeed, Sandberg draws on a wide variety of rec-
ognizably American discourses, such as US exceptionalism
as well as the highly profitable how-to-succeed literary
genre, some of which she explicitly acknowledges and some
of which serve as the implicit palimpsest for her brand of
feminism. Anne Applebaum describes Lean In as the “first
truly successful, best-selling ‘how to succeed in business’
motivational book to be explicitly designed and marketed
to women.”27 Yet, despite the hype surrounding its publi-
cation, there is nothing particularly new about Sandberg’s
book, Applebaum claims, except the fact of its female au-

thorship and its target audience.
While Applebaum’s critique is timely in that it highlights
the specifically entrepreneurial aspect of Lean In, this kind
of criticism ultimately fails to underscore what is indeed
new in feminist manifestos like Sandberg’s. If we under-
stand Lean In as a significant intervention in the feminist
discussion, which I believe we must, then the book can be
read as marking (and marketing) a change in articulations
of mainstream liberal feminism and as participating in the
production of a new feminist subject. This subject willingly
and forcibly acknowledges continued gender inequality but,
as I show, her feminism is so individuated that it has been
completely unmoored from any notion of social inequality
and consequently cannot offer any sustained analytic of the
structures of male dominance, power, or privilege. In this
emergent feminism, then, there is a liberal wrapping, while
the content—namely, its mode of operation—is neoliberal
through and through.
TIPPING THE SCALES:
M E TA M O R P H O S I N G L I B E R A L I S M
INTO NEOLIBERALISM
True to its title, Lean In (see Figure 2.1) is primarily con-

cerned with encouraging women to “lean in” to their
careers. The book lays out various strategies for facilitating
women’s ability to foster their professional ambition. In
the process, Sandberg coins three phrases, which play a
central role in Lean In and have, since the book’s publica-
tion, circulated widely in the public domain and the mass
Figure 2.1 Sheryl Sandberg with the first edition of her book Lean In,
published in March 2013 by Penguin. Taylor Hill/FilmMagic/Getty Images
media: internalizing the revolution, lean in, and the lead-

ership ambition gap. Before turning to explore how they
operate together to produce a specific kind of feminist con-
sciousness, I briefly lay out the book’s rationale for intro-
ducing these particular terms.
According to Sandberg’s logic, the first and funda-
mental step in reorienting women toward a successful ca-
reer is “internalizing the revolution.” This presumably
involves accepting (by making personal) the need to keep
moving toward true equality between men and women
(signifying, in this context, equal representation in pow-

erful institutions). By coming to terms with and working
through their internal obstacles, women will then be able
to muster the self-confidence necessary to push themselves
forward toward their professional goals. The text suggests
that it is incumbent on women to create effective ways of
overcoming their fears—of being too outspoken, aggressive,
or more powerful than men. Getting rid of these internal
impediments is crucial for expediting women’s ability to
lean into their careers, which becomes the second crucial
stage in reorienting their priorities. Women, in Sandberg’s
words, too often “hold ourselves back in ways both big and
small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands,
and by pulling back when we should be leaning in.”28 Only
when women finally internalize the revolution, triumph
over their internal obstacles, and actively lean in to their
careers will they be poised to accomplish one of Lean In’s
key feminist objectives: closing the “leadership ambition
gap.” Eliminating this gap constitutes the final stage in the
reorientation process. Indeed, the surest way to reach the
still elusive goal of gender equality is by encouraging more
women to move up the professional ladder and into leader-
ship positions. Sandberg maintains that as more and more
“women begin entering into high level positions, giving
strong and powerful voice to their needs and concerns,
conditions for all women will improve.”29
This amorphous “ambition gap” very quickly comes to
stand in for inequality, reducing inequality to the absence of
women in positions at the top, while intimating that inequality
is caused by a lack of personal ambition, namely, an affective
disposition shared by many women. One the one hand, then,
other classic liberal feminist goals, such as fair treatment,
equal institutional access, and women’s full integration into

the public sphere, are expediently elided, while climbing
the power hierarchy ultimately becomes one the most im-
portant feminist objectives. On the other hand, a critique
of individual desires and affective temperament replaces all
forms of structural analysis. Through the book’s shifting dis-
cursive registers—using a liberal frame while performatively
undoing that very frame—Lean In thus demonstrates very
clearly how neoliberal feminism takes shape under the legit-
imating cloth of liberal feminist discourse.
Premising her manifesto on the conviction that gender
inequality still exists in the United States, Sandberg patriot-
ically invokes the liberal notions of equality, equal opportu-
nity, and free choice in order to reinvigorate a public feminist
discussion. Yet, when examined more closely, the three
central phrases she invents overrun and then evacuate her
liberal framework, effectively replacing it with a different ra-
tionality. “Internalizing the revolution,” “lean in,” and closing
the “ambition gap” operate together in the text in order to
call into being a subject who is compelled and encouraged to
conform to the norms of the market while assuming respon-
sibility for her own well-being. Moreover, “true equality”
is predicated upon individuals moving up the professional
ladder, one woman at a time.
The notions of internalizing the revolution and lean in,
first and foremost, conjure up a discrete and isolated feminist
consciousness. The call to internalize revolution is particu-
larly disconcerting, since it assumes that the revolution has
in some sense already taken place and therefore all women
need to do is to rouse themselves by absorbing and acting on
this reality. Moreover, it not only neutralizes the radical idea
of collective uprising by atomizing the revolutionary agents
and transferring the site of activity from the public arena

to each individual’s psyche, but also conceptualizes change
as an internal, solipsistic, and affective matter. There is no
orientation beyond the self, which makes this form of fem-
inism distinct. Revolution, in other words, is transformed
from mass mobilization into an interiorized and individual
activity, thereby stripping it of any potential political valence
in the Arendtian sense of “acting in concert.”30 This turn in-
ward helps to produce an individuated feminist agent who,
alone, is accountable for garnering her own “revolutionary”
energy. That energy, of course, is not being steered toward
the toppling of a political order that discriminates against
women or even about coming to an awareness of systemic
male domination, as was the goal of liberal feminism in the
1970s, but rather such energy is transmogrified into ambi-
tion and metamorphosized into the nurturing of each indi-
vidual woman’s desire to reach the top of the power pyramid.
The exhortation to lean in to their careers thus effectively
reorients women away from conceptions of solidarity and
toward their own particular development, which, to stay “on
track” as it were, requires constant self-monitoring.
Angela McRobbie has argued in a slightly different con-
text that the lean in groups that Sandberg has managed to
create— by sheer force of will— are ghostly resurrections
of the conscious-raising groups of the 1970s. Rather than
serving as a vehicle for raising women’s awareness of sexual
politics or the ramifications of male dominance and sexism
in women’s everyday lives, these lean in groups are geared
to encourage women to help “play the corporate game more
deftly.”31 The very conception of encouraging women in
these groups to “lean in” to their individual careers is anti-
thetical to working together toward any common goal. What
is reinforced and (re)produced in these groups, then, is pre-

cisely the entrepreneurial subject who is encouraged to take
her own personal initiative in order to improve her career
prospects, particularly in the corporate world.
The last chapter of Lean In is entitled “Working Together
toward Equality.” The trajectory of this final chapter parallels
the process of liberal feminism’s disarticulation in the book
more generally: initially summoning the hallowed and today
uncontroversial liberal political principle of formal equality,
Sandberg very quickly moves on to personal anecdotes as
well as expressions of concern about the increasing numbers
of high-potential women who are “off-ramping” the career
track, particularly when they have children, concluding with
her by now familiar solution to the stalled revolution: more
women in positions of power. There is no dwelling on the
signification of “true equality” beyond the “trickle down”
statement that it will be achieved only when more women
“rise to the top of every government and every industry.”32
Indeed, with lightning speed, the text moves from its
mention of equality to honing in on encouraging women to
“seek challenges and lean in.”33 The chapter then ends with a
passionate exhortation to individual women to strive to reach
the highest echelons of their respective organizations. This is
a strange concept of working together indeed—even from a
liberal feminist perspective—since each woman is urged to
set her own goals within her own career path and then reach
for them with gusto. Working together this is not—working
separately for a similar but disparate goal, perhaps.
In these final pages Sandberg ironically converts the
notion of “working together” into its polar opposite. Moreover,
she confidently assumes that having more women in leader-
ship positions will automatically ensure fairer treatment for
all women, because shared experience leads to empathy.34

This is exactly the kind of top-down approach for which
many feminists have already harshly criticized Sandberg.35
Not only is the address directed to a tiny number of women
but her whole agenda operates to inculcate the norms of the
market, which divide rather than unify even these extremely
privileged women. While this is a key point, my focus here,
however, is less on the kinds of exclusions upon which this
kind of feminism is predicated—which, again, many critics
have rightly been quick to underscore and which I address in
the next chapter as well as Chapter 6—and more on the hows
and whys of its emergence, even though these aspects are, of
course, inextricably implicated in one another.
No longer concerned with classic liberal feminist
notions, such as “equal moral personhood” or each person
“being an end in and of herself,” which have a long history in
the West and in the United States,36 this new stand of femi-
nism inaugurates a subject who is being called upon to “pro-
vide for [her] own needs and service [her] own ambitions.”37
She may conceive of herself as an end, but everyone else
becomes mere means. This feminist subject’s “moral” pro-
bity, moreover, is measured by how well and efficiently she
provides for her own self-care, which entails calculation,
initiative, and innovation. Neoliberal feminism is predom-
inantly concerned with instating a feminist subject who
epitomizes “self-responsibility,” and who no longer demands
anything from the state or the government or even from men
as a group; there is no longer any attempt to confront the
tension between liberal individualism, equality, and those
social pressures that potentially obstruct the realization of
“true” equality. Moreover, as David Eng has cogently pointed
out in a different context, this subject is also a post-race one
who helps to ensure, yet again, “the forgetting of race.”38 The

creation of the neoliberal feminist subject thus bolsters the
assumption that the struggle for racial equality—just like the
feminist revolution—has, in some sense, already occurred,
been successful, and is, consequently, a thing of the past. At
most, there is a gesturing toward the importance of profes-
sional women speaking up in their respective workplaces so
as to make targeted or surgical improvements. There is no
mention of collective solutions to historic injustices: indeed,
the neoliberal feminist subject is divested of any orientation
toward the common good.
H A P P I LY E V E R A F T E R : A F F E C T A N D
THE NEW FEMINIST IDEAL
If, up until now, I have underscored the concern with in-

spiring women to “dream big” professionally, here it is crucial
to underscore that Lean In’s emphasis on career develop-
ment is not intended, by any means, to come at the expense
of family life. On the contrary, Sandberg’s call on women to
lean in to their careers is presented in the text as a reaction
to and an attempt to counter a rising and disturbing trend,
where “highly trained women are scaling back and dropping
out of the workforce in high numbers” when they have chil-
dren.39 The book intimates, time and again, that once indi-
vidual women value their own professional development
more highly and “lean in” to their careers, they will be better
poised to carve out a more effective and felicitous work-family
balance. Consequently, the feminist ideal being presented
here is emphatically not the one-dimensional or one-track
professional woman who sacrifices family for career, but
rather a high-powered woman who manages to balance a

spectacularly successful career with a satisfying home life. In
this way, neoliberal feminism not only interpellates a subject
responsible for her own self-care but this subject is also nor-
malized by this address, called upon to desire both profes-
sional success and personal fulfillment, which almost always
translates into motherhood. As in Slaughter’s “Why Women
Still Can’t Have It All,” what is reinforced is the message that
“progressive” and successful women’s well-being can only
(or, reading more generously, is most likely to) be found by
following a particular path: only certain choices can bring
women in closer proximity to well-being and true feminist
consciousness.
Furthermore, the notion of pursuing happiness is identi-
fied with an economic model of sorts in which each woman is
asked to calculate the right balance between work and family.
The promise of emancipation and happiness this feminism
holds out hinges not only on one’s active desire to cultivate a
profession and on having a spouse and children, but also on
one’s ability to calibrate a perfect equilibrium between the
private and the public spheres. Happiness therefore plays a
crucial role in this new feminism: it becomes the objective of
a particular calculus, functions as a normalizing matrix, and
serves to deflect attention away from the process by which
neoliberal feminism is rapidly displacing mainstream liberal
feminism.
As I argued in the previous chapter, advocating a happy
work-family balance is one of the ways in which the emer-
gent feminism disavows the gendered contradictions con-
stitutive of the public- private divide within the liberal
imagination, while simultaneously providing fertile ground
for the expansion of neoliberal rationality. The widespread
mobilization and acceptance of terms like a happy work-

family balance operate, in other words, to shore up the
gendered presuppositions that make the liberal production
of space possible—namely, the public-private distinction—
while allowing for the continued evisceration of the
foundations upon which that spatiality has been built. The
task of pursuing happiness consequently orients us away not
only from countering the rise of neoliberal feminism but also
from attempting to imagine either spatiality or social rela-
tions in new ways.
To make good on the new millennium’s feminist
promise, then, it seems that “progressive” ambitious
women are compelled and encouraged to pursue happiness
through constructing a self-tailored work-family balance.
The turn to a notion of a happy balance, moreover, helps
to further convert mainstream liberal feminism from a
discourse— even if tangentially— concerned with social
pressures to one that produces a subject who is constantly
turned inwards, monitoring and investing in herself.
After all, the goal of crafting and maintaining a felicitous
equilibrium—which might entail, for instance, making up
lost time with children after investing too many hours at
work, or finding creative solutions to unexpected conflicts,
such as planning an important conference call after the
children’s bedtime—is elusive, since well-being is famously
difficult to gauge, but, as a consequence of affect’s very elu-
siveness, requires constant calculation and optimizing of
personal resources. Thus, the quest for not just a sane equi-
librium but a satisfying equilibrium further inscribes an
entrepreneurial subject and a market rationality—since in
order to be successful and content, even for a period of
time, efficiency, innovation, and a cost-benefit calculus are
paramount. Moreover, such a quest requires constant self-

surveillance and evaluation.
Sandberg’s “how-to-reinvigorate-feminism” program
not only continues to be a New York Times bestseller but her
TED talks have attracted millions of viewers. Her message,
though—as I have indicated—is not unique.40 As I noted in
Chapter 1, both Sandberg and Slaughter have clearly tapped
into a cultural sore spot, and they have quickly become two
of the most visible representatives of mainstream feminism
in the United States in the early twenty-first century. While
Sandberg urges women to reaffirm their commitment to
work, Slaughter urges women to reaffirm their commitment
to family. And yet the end goal is the same for both
women: namely, providing women more latitude so that
they can carve out their own felicitous work-family balance.
Slaughter does gesture more toward the need for institu-
tional change than does Sandberg, yet change is ultimately
understood as the consequence of high-powered women
taking personal initiative and demanding things like flex
time. Moreover, Slaughter calls upon the same elite cadre of
highly successful women—thus initiating the identical top-
down, elitist, and exclusionary approach. The very turn to a
language of affect, namely, the importance of the pursuit of
personal happiness (through balance), unravels any notion of
social inequality by placing the responsibility of well-being
as well as the burden of unhappiness, once again, on the
shoulders of individual women.
As a result, neoliberal feminism is—not surprisingly—
purging itself of all elements that would orient it outwards,
toward the public good. And, yet, to simply claim that this
discourse is not really feminist or constitutes some sort of
backlash against “true” feminism is too easy and, I believe,
misguided, both because such a claim assumes that there

is one true definition of feminism (and that “we” have or
know it), and because it misses the opportunity to under-
stand the kind of cultural work the emergence of neolib-
eral feminism—which tracts like Lean In and “Why Women
Still Can’t Have It All” reflect and (re)produce—is currently
“doing.”
By way of conclusion, I would like to offer a set of pre-
liminary speculations about why we are witnessing the emer-
gence of a neoliberal feminism. To begin with, it is important
to ask the question of why neoliberalism acknowledges and
revives a discourse about continued gender inequality at
all. This in and of itself seems somewhat paradoxical, given
neoliberalism’s disregard and steady erosion of liberal polit-
ical principles, such as liberty, formal equality, solidarity, and
the rule of law. Why, in other words, is there any need for the
production of a neoliberal feminism, which draws attention
to a specific kind of inequality? Given that neoliberal ration-
ality individuates subjects, eliding structural inequalities
while instating a market rationality, why is there any need for
a feminist variant when a female (as opposed to a feminist)
neoliberal subject might do the job just as well or better?
The rise of neoliberal feminism can, I posit, be traced to
multiple sources. One has to do with the ability of neoliberal
rationality, as the dominant or hegemonic mode of govern-
ance, to continuously colonize more spheres and discourses.41
In the United States, all strands of feminism, even liberal fem-
inism, have always operated, at least in theory, as a critique of
the dominant political order. This critique has ranged from
an immanent one—embodied in liberal feminism—which
endeavored to show up the contradictions between liberal
democracy’s theoretical commitment to equality and its
actual practice of gendered exclusions and discrimination,

to a revolutionary one, which insisted on an overhaul of the
patriarchal or masculinist foundations of modern society.
From this perspective, the production of neoliberal femi-
nism makes cultural sense, since it becomes one more do-
main that neoliberal governmentality colonizes and remakes
in its own image. This is a process, in Stuart Hall’s words,
that performs the massive work of “transcoding while re-
maining in sight of the lexicon on which it draws.”42 As more
and more white middle-class women enter and remain in the
public sphere even after they have children—by choice and
increasingly by necessity—this emergent feminist discourse
helps to neutralize the potential critique from other strands
of feminism. And while neoliberal feminism might acknowl-
edge that the gendered wage gap and sexual harassment are
signs of continued gender inequality, the solutions posited
elide the structural or economic undergirding of these phe-
nomena. Indeed, ambitious individual middle-class women
themselves are recast as both the problem and the solution
in the neoliberal feminist age. And by tapping into what Sara
Ahmed has termed the current “happiness industry,”43 ne-
oliberal feminism attempts to ensure that the new feminist
subject is oriented and orients herself toward the goal of
finding her own personal and felicitous work-family balance.
In addition, the public acknowledgment of continued
gender inequalities in the United States may actually serve
to bolster a waning sense of liberal democracy’s perfectibility
and even continued feasibility. This, at least, seemed credible
during the Obama era and can still perhaps be considered as
one of the multiple sources for the emergence of this form
of feminism. At a time when the political principles of lib-
eral democracy are being eroded by the norms and practices
of the market, the production of neoliberal feminism may

help—or may have helped—to sustain the weakening belief
that the United States still aspires to fulfill liberal democracy’s
promise of “true equality” (while simultaneously diffusing
the threat from other forms of emancipatory movements,
like anti-racist and/or radical feminism). Whereas in recent
years the so-called plight of women in Muslim countries
served to deflect attention away from continued gender ine-
quality in the United States, today a specific kind of internal
critical gaze may have become increasingly necessary in
order to do some of the same cultural work. The publication
of these self-proclaimed feminist tracts not only creates the
powerful impression that the United States has been willing
and able to sustain self-critique but also—and importantly—
that it is still committed to and governed by liberal rather
than neoliberal or market principles. It is frightening to
think that even this kind of blinkered self-presentation and
self-understanding may quickly become obsolete under the
Trump administration.
Moving beyond the strategic use of “homonationalism”
or “queer liberalism,” where there has been an
instrumentalization of gay and lesbian rights so that Western
democracies and the United States can assert a kind of global
progressive superiority,44 neoliberal feminism may be the
latest—and perhaps the last, at least for a while—discursive
modality to (re)produce the United States as the bastion
of progressive liberal democracy. Indeed, it may even be
the case that neoliberalism’s convergence with feminism is
likely to “stick” even in the Trump era given, as I show in
the next chapter, how the production of neoliberal femi-
nism has helped neoliberal rationality to “resolve” or cover
up and over—even temporally—some of its own (rather than
liberalism’s) most intractable internal tensions. In fact, neo-

liberalism may need feminism in ways that it does not need
a discourse of anti-racism (post-racialism) or LGBTQ ac-
ceptance. What is abundantly clear, in any case, is that the
turn “inward”—both to the national borders of the United
States and into interiorized affective spaces—helps to further
entrench neoliberalism by “responsibilizing” women and by
producing individuated feminist subjects who have trans-
muted liberation into self-care and self-investment as well as
melded neoliberal rationality with an emancipatory project.
3
✦
NEOLIBERAL FUTURITY
AND GENERIC HUMAN CAPITAL
WHEN EMMA WATSON, THE NEWLY elected United

Nations Woman Goodwill Ambassador best known for
her role as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter movies,
declared herself a feminist in front of the crowded United
Nations General Assembly in September 2014, she re-
ceived not only hardy applause from those present but also
accolades from the mainstream and popular press. Indeed,
the twenty-something Watson announced to an auditorium
full of powerful international players that she proudly consid-
ered herself a feminist and that “this seemed uncomplicated
to [her],” even as she understood that feminism had become
an unpopular word.1 The YouTube clip of the nervous but
still poised Watson immediately went viral and has since
attracted more than seven million viewers (see Figure 3.1).
In the wake of Watson’s speech, it thus seems safe to say that
we are currently witnessing a historic moment in which it has
finally become acceptable for highly visible young Western
women to identify publicly as feminists.
Watson’s speech also suggests that critics may have been
too hasty in determining that we have moved, ineluctably, into
a postfeminist society. The term “postfeminist” is most often
Figure 3.1 A nervous but poised UN Women Goodwill Ambassador

Emma Watson delivering her speech for the HeForShe campaign launch
event at the United Nations, September 2014.
invoked critically in scholarly literature to refer to a discur-

sive formation and sensibility in the West—but particularly
in the United States and United Kingdom—that incorporates
various aspects of feminism into mainstream common sense,
while simultaneously disavowing the necessity of mobi-
lizing a feminist movement to struggle for gender justice.2
More specifically, postfeminism is understood to focus on
the importance of individual women’s “empowerment” and
“choice,” presenting feminism as something that has already
N eoliberal F uturity and G eneric H uman C apital | 81
occurred, accomplished its goals, and, therefore, as passé or

no longer necessary. Rather than simply anti-feminist, how-
ever, the postfeminist era appears to constitute a complex
“entanglement of feminist and anti-feminist ideas.”3
Watson’s very public declaration that she identifies as
a feminist and the overwhelmingly positive reception she
received, however, problematize the claim that we are cur-
rently living in a postfeminist era. This problematization
gains added force if we situate Watson’s declaration within a
wider cultural context—specifically in the United States—in
which feminism has resurfaced as an important and even in-
fluential discourse. Within the span of just a few years, as
I have described in the previous chapters, a flurry of self-
declared feminist manifestos, most prominently among
them Slaughter’s “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” and
Sandberg’s hugely popular Lean In, have widely circulated,
garnering intense mainstream media attention and re-
energizing feminist debates, most trenchantly, around the
question of why middle-class women are still struggling to
cultivate careers and raise children at the same time. These
recent developments underscore that we have moved from
an arguably postfeminist moment (back) to a feminist one,
in which feminism not only still seems necessary but also
increasingly mainstream.4
Watson’s short but passionate speech launching the UN
Women “HeForShe” campaign concentrated on urging boys
and men to participate in the fight against gender inequality,
asking them to ban the use of the word “bossy” to refer to
strong and confident girls. Slaughter and Sandberg’s feminist
solutions are somewhat different and, as I have shown, re-
volve around a felicitous balance, namely, ensuring women’s
ability to pursue a fulfilling career without having to forfeit
family life or raising children. To be sure, these are “accom-

modating feminism[s]‌,” which shy away from argument and
confrontation.5 Consequently—and not surprisingly—these
public feminist declarations have been harshly criticized by
postcolonial feminists.6 Sandberg and Slaughter’s manifestos
have also been criticized for advocating a “trickle-down” cor-
porate feminism.7 Yet, the fact remains that feminism, how-
ever ill-defined or watered-down, is currently experiencing
a wave of unprecedented popularity in the United States.
Jessica Valenti, the journalist and well- known feminist
blogger, confirms that more young women are thinking
about, looking into, and calling themselves feminists than in
the past two decades.8 Feminism has, in other words, been
given a new life.
In this chapter, I interrogate more closely feminism’s
“new life” as it has been circulating in the wider mainstream
US print media, while examining some of the central terms,
concepts, and ideals around which this new feminist discourse
has coalesced. As I have argued in the previous two chapters,
both Slaughter and Sandberg have not only helped to rein-
vigorate an older work-family debate in the United States,
but have also helped to inscribe balance as a feminist ideal
and therefore as one of the highest feminist priorities. On the
one hand, the balance discourse encourages women to invest
in and cultivate a career as well as develop one’s sense of self,
which has long been a liberal feminist objective. Yet, on the
other hand, the balance discourse reinscribes the normative
expectation that women should have—and should want to
have—children. The second part of the balance equation, the
expectation of (hands-on or intensive) mothering has also
become part and parcel of feminist discourse at least as it has
infiltrated mainstream consciousness at the present moment.
In addition, the newest form of feminism activates a more

attentive, “luminous,” and exclusive address to upwardly mo-
bile aspirational women.9 This feminism is an “unapologet-
ically middle-class feminism, shorn of all obligations to less
privileged women or to those who are not ‘strivers.’ ”10
Examining this contemporary upsurge in feminist
declarations and the seeming (mainstream) embrace of fem-
inism, I lay out three interrelated claims here. First, I rein-
force the claim that a new variant of feminism—neoliberal
feminism—is indeed on the rise, one that indeed presents
balance as its normative frame and ultimate ideal. I then
move on to argue that neoliberal feminist discourse has pro-
duced a new form of neoliberal governmentality for young
middle-class women, one that is based not on the manage-
ment of future risks,11 but rather on the promise of future
individual fulfillment, or, more accurately, one based on
careful sequencing and smart self-investments in the present
to ensure enhanced returns in the future. In other words, we
are currently witnessing a temporal shift in the balance dis-
course that resurfaced just a few years ago. Upwardly mobile
middle-class women are increasingly being encouraged to
invest in themselves and their professions first and to post-
pone maternity until some later point.
I provide two representative examples of this
phenomenon—the glorification of hookup culture among
high-potential women on college campuses and the new
technology of egg freezing being offered as part of the
benefits package of corporations such as Facebook and
Apple—in order to demonstrate this striking temporal shift
in the balance discourse. If a couple of years ago, Sandberg
and Slaughter insisted that balance was possible in the pre-
sent, in just the past few years there has been a subtle but
crucial transformation in the way balance is being presented

in the mainstream media: from a promise to be realized in
the present to a promise for the future. I propose that by re-
vealing the temporal shift in the work-family balance dis-
course we can gain insight into how neoliberal rationality
operates through a new “technology of the self ” structured
through “futurity.”
Second, I suggest that this future-oriented promise of
equilibrium may well constitute part of a conversion pro-
cess whose aim is to transform women into “human cap-
ital,” a process that is ongoing but as yet incomplete. If it
is true that neoliberalism is slowly colonizing every aspect
of our world,12 then human subjects, too, are being remade
into what Wendy Brown in her recent work cogently terms
human capital, “whose objective is to self-invest in ways that
enhance its figurative credit rating and attract investors.”13
Encouraging young upwardly mobile women to build their
own portfolio and to self-invest in the years once thought of
as the most “fertile” suggests that neoliberalism is increas-
ingly interpellating women— but particularly young and
so-called aspirational women—as generic (rather than gen-
dered) human capital. I accordingly posit that reproduction
continues to present a stumbling block in this conversion
process, especially since reproduction and the care work it
entails are thoroughly disavowed in neoliberal rationality. As
this rationality increasingly converts certain women into ge-
neric human capital, however, the link between these women
and reproduction and care work is slowly being attenuated.
In other words, reproduction and care work are already
being outsourced to other women deemed “disposable,”
since they are neither considered “strivers” nor properly
“responsibilized.”14 The emergent neoliberal order is slowly
expunging gender and even sexual differences among a cer-

tain stratum of subjects, while simultaneously producing new
forms of racialized and class-stratified gender exploitation.
Finally, I also explain why the operation of futurity
becomes particularly discernable in neoliberal feminism,
maintaining that this feminism currently facilitates the ad-
vancement of the neoliberal project, while simultaneously
revealing a constituent disjuncture within its own rationality.
This disjuncture seems to revolve precisely around the still
incomplete conversion of aspirational women into human
capital due to the quandary reproduction continues to pre-
sent, particularly as the gendered division of labor is not dis-
appearing but is rather being (re)naturalized in various and
complex ways.
T R A N SF OR M I NG BA L A NC E I N TO
A PROMISE
While the notion of work-family balance in the United States

can be traced back to the early 1980s—gaining feminist cur-
rency with the publication of Arlie Hochschild’s bestselling
The Second Shift—the feminist debate about the difficulty
of work-family balance has clearly been reignited by Anne-
Marie Slaughter’s “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” and
Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In.15 Yet, as critics have been quick to
point out in the years since these feminist manifestos have
been published, balancing a high-power career and family
is attainable for (perhaps) only the top 1 percent.16 Once
balance is held out as a promise for the future, however, then
this norm is transformed into an ostensibly achievable objec-
tive for all ambitious women. Indeed, increasingly this ideal
of balance serves as the ever-elusive, affective, individual,

and cultural reward for women adhering to a well-planned
and already scripted life trajectory.
Thus, while the work-family balance debate is not par-
ticularly new, the timing of its resurgence and its feminist
framing do require some unpacking. As I have already argued
in the previous chapters, in the 1990s and into the early
2000s, liberal feminism was, in many ways, transformed into
“choice” feminism and eventually postfeminism (or choice as
postfeminism), particularly in and by the popular media.17
However, “choice” feminism for well- educated ambitious
women in the United States ultimately boiled down to an ex-
pectation that these women would select between seriously
pursuing a demanding career or family life. Women were not
actively encouraged to pursue both. This became particularly
pronounced when the mainstream media began focusing
on the so-called mommy wars, which famously pitted well-
educated women who chose to become stay-at-home moms
against professional working mothers, signifying that “liber-
ated” women now had a choice with respect to career and
motherhood but that this choice was either/or. The media,
moreover, intimated that women could (and even should)
now happily ramp off the fast track and decide to stay home,
and that professional women who choose to work during
their children’s early years were prioritizing their careers at
the expense of their children.18
These were precisely the years when Lisa Belkin’s influ-
ential and controversial article, “The Opt-Out Revolution,”
which showcased a number of extremely well- educated
women who had decided to stay at home full-time with their
children, was published to much ado in the New York Times.19
The women whom Belkin interviewed all had a college if
not an advanced degree from elite universities, and they all

framed their decision to ramp off the fast track or stay home
with their small children in terms of choice. Belkin writes
that “[a]‌s these women look up at the ‘top,’ they are increas-
ingly deciding that they don’t want to do what it takes to get
there.” One of the women interviewed for the article added
that: “Women today, if we think about feminism at all, we
see it as a battle fought for ‘the choice.’ For us, the freedom to
choose work if we want to work is the feminist strain in our
lives.” Indeed, looking back at this period with its media hype
over this so-called opt-out revolution, the journalist Judith
Warner reminds us that in 2000, books like Surrendering to
Motherhood, a memoir about the liberation of giving up work
to stay home, had a huge readership.20 Warner also states that
during that same year almost 40 percent of respondents to
the General Social Survey told researchers they believed a
mother’s working was harmful to her children.
Yet, over the past ten years, this either/or discourse
has been receding in the United States and, as I have been
arguing, balance has come to fill its place. Within the span
of a single decade, the mainstream media representations of
the conflict faced by this same population of women have
changed. It actually appears that—at least at the discursive
level—middle-class stay-at-home mothers are “out” while
self-identified feminist “go-getters” with children are “in.”
The publication of Slaughter and Sandberg’s texts can be
seen as both registering this change as well as helping to
spark anew and contouring the latest upsurge of feminist
discussions. Rather than a simple outcome of the reces-
sion or of economic pressures, however, I read this shift as
an effect of the entrenchment of neoliberal rationality and
governmentality—in the Foucauldian sense of regulating the
“conduct of conduct”21—in addition to the ongoing transmu-

tation of liberal feminism into a neoliberal variant. Indeed,
through an examination of the various articles that have
appeared since 2010, not only do we see a transformation in
the either/or discussion, but the underlying message increas-
ingly appears to be that women are responsible for crafting
their own personal and felicitous equilibrium between career
and family. The only way women can do this is by sequencing
and planning well for their future.
In her 2013 New York Times article, “Why Gender
Equality Has Stalled,” Stephanie Coontz stresses that in
the past twenty years cultural attitudes have shifted quite
dramatically with respect to women, careers, and family.22
She underscores that if, in 1997, 56 percent of women aged
eighteen to thirty-four, and 26 percent of middle-aged and
older women said that, in addition to having a family, being
successful in a high-paying career or profession was “one
of the most important things” in their lives, by 2011, fully
two-thirds of the younger women and 42 percent of the
older ones expressed that sentiment. And, as if marking
the end of the “postfeminist” era and the move (back) into
a feminist one, the title of another 2013 New York Times
article written by Judith Warner reads: “The Opt- Out
Generation Wants Back In” (see Figure 3.2).23 The women
whom Warner interviewed are quite clear about the fact
that they did not want to return to their old “pre-opting
out jobs” but wished they could have found some way,
while their children were young, to combine time with
their children with some sort of intellectually stimulating,
respectably paying, advancement- permitting, and more
flexible work.
Figure 3.2 Image that appeared with the New York Times Magazine’s ar-
ticle “The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In” by Judith Warner, August
11, 2013. Jeff Brown/The New York Times Syndicate/Redux
This is precisely the point where the term “balance” enters

the discussion as the solution and as a feminist ideal. It is not
coincidental that Warner’s article appeared around the same
time as the publication of Slaughter’s and Sandberg’s mani-
festos. Balance is exactly the promise of successfully negoti-
ating the two pulls on contemporary “liberated” middle-class
womanhood: the importance of cultivating a career, on the
one hand, and the importance of being a hands-on mother,
on the other. Indeed, for the past few years, balance as the
“progressive” or “liberated” feminist solution has saturated
the popular imagination and has served as the background
for various mainstream representations as well as discussions
about how to solve the conflict between well- educated
women, work, and family. More recently, however, a further
transformation in the discourse can be discerned in which
balance is increasingly presented as a promise for the future.
NEOLIBERAL FEMINISM
AND FUTURITY
In the wake of Slaughter’s and Sandberg’s texts, there have

been a slew of articles in mainstream and even progressive
media venues in the United States, such as the New York
Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, and the Atlantic,
in which the notion of work-family balance for women has
been explored in different ways. Examining various rep-
resentative articles that depict hookup culture on college
campuses and egg freezing in the corporate world, a clear
pattern emerges: there is not only a clear and growing in-
sistence that well-educated women need to establish their
careers before thinking of family, but also a growing cultural
acceptance if not outright encouragement of this trajectory.
Postponing childrearing until one’s early thirties is increas-
ingly being depicted as the preferable life sequence for this
population of women and the one that has the most chance
of leading to a felicitous balance down the line.
In a July 2013 New York Times article—and just a few
months after the publication of Sandberg’s Lean In—Kate
Taylor describes a rising phenomenon among middle-class
undergraduate women in elite universities.24 Holding up
women like Sandberg and Slaughter as their role models,
many potentially high-achieving young women are presented
as no longer interested in investing in relationships during
their college years—years when they feel they need to be con-
cerned with building their professional résumés. The women
interviewed by Taylor declared that they envision their
twenties as a period of unencumbered striving, when they
might work at a bank in Hong Kong for one year, then go to
business school, then move to a corporate job in New York.
According to the article, young women assume that they

need to take this decade to invest in themselves since they also
assume they are going to have plenty of time to focus on their
husband and kids once they have established themselves
professionally. The idea of lugging a relationship through
all those transitions is too difficult for many of these young
women to imagine. Moreover, Taylor describes these women
as invoking a very neat metrics of “cost-benefit” when they
speak about sexual relationships. Hooking up rather than
cultivating a relationship during their first decade of adult-
hood is about low risk and low investment costs. Self-care,
pleasure in the form of casual sex, and an investment in their
own professional advancement are the motivations behind
these women’s preferences. Reproduction, according to the
article’s conclusions, is the farthest thing from their mind at
this stage in life.
It is important to note, albeit briefly, that these same
young women do not reject the family part of the balance
equation. Most of the women that Taylor interviewed still
planned to get married, but they were insistent that matri-
mony would not be on their horizons until they were in their
early thirties. Yet not one of the interviewees mentioned the
possibility of staying at home once their children were born.
These young women also tend to identify as feminists, and,
from their interviews, it seems clear that they firmly believe
in the wisdom of careful planning for the future. This is ac-
complished by building their professional résumé in the pre-
sent while postponing family life until their thirties.
Taylor’s article about hookup culture for the New York
Times came on the heels of another much-talked-about piece
by Hannah Rosin. Writing for the Atlantic, Rosin also reports
on the hookup culture among undergraduate and graduate
students in their later twenties. Best known for her contro-

versial book The End of Men on which the article is based,
Rosin writes that: “Single young women in their sexual
prime—that is, their 20s and early 30s—are for the first time
in history more successful, on average, than the single young
men around them.”25 While empirically this may be a du-
bious claim, Rosin appears to be registering a shift in cul-
tural norms. The article clearly frames the development of
college and post-college hookup culture as part of the femi-
nist and sexual revolutions. Rosin suggests that this remark-
able freedom has become possible not merely due to the pill
or legal abortion but to an entirely new landscape of sexual
freedom—the ability to delay marriage and have temporary
relationships that don’t derail education or career. Similar
to what Taylor reports, Rosin concludes that, “For college
girls these days, an overly serious suitor fills the same role
an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger
to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a prom-
ising future.” The language, again, is one of cost-benefit and
self-investment. Yet, also like the Taylor article, the prom-
ising future for these women still ultimately includes both
a successful professional life and fulfilling family life. The
mainstream cultural and feminist expectation—which are
strangely converging—is that women can still and should
have a family life, but young women are encouraged to post-
pone this part of the equation until after they have developed
their professional possibilities and build up their individual
portfolios. Thus, it is not that cultivating a career necessarily
trumps family life—at least not yet—but this suspension of
balance does defer the children part of the equation.
This insistence on a well- planned life and the im-
portance of self-investment emerged yet again when the
mainstream media shifted its focus from college students to

professional women in their mid-to-late twenties and early
thirties. This shift, of course, is not coincidental. The recent
sexual assault scandals on university campuses in the United
States have made it much more difficult to lionize hookup
culture in the way Rosin did just a few years ago. Alongside
the outrage at the university’s ineptitude when confronted
with sexual assault cases, as well as a culture of covering up
sexual abuse on campus—and, of course, the mobilization
of students across the country—the mainstream media have
mostly diverted attention away from the scandal. At the same
time, the exaltation of women who strive to “have it all” by
pursuing a career and planning for a future family has not
disappeared. Rather, the ideal of future balance discourse has
found its way into a new venue: slightly older women who
are currently working in their respective professions. It is in
this shift of focus from college to professional women that
the question and the quandary of reproduction emerge in
more explicit terms.
THEORIZING THE GENDER
OF FUTURITY
While many political and cultural theorists have convincingly

illustrated how neoliberal rationality is producing subjects
as entrepreneurial actors who are calculating and self-
regulating,26 much less attention has been paid to the partic-
ular temporality of neoliberal rationality and how an avowed
emphasis on “futurity” or future returns may increasingly
be serving as a new modality of what Foucault has famously
called “technologies of the self.”27 My claim thus draws on the
more recent work of Wendy Brown, who theorizes how ne-

oliberal reason produces subjects who are expected to “com-
port themselves in ways that maximize their capital value
in the present and enhance their future value . . . through
practices of entrepreneurism, self- investment, and/ or
attracting investors.” I would like, however, to center-stage
28
the mobilization of futurity as key to producing this neolib-

eral subject. If, as Brown cogently argues, neoliberal ration-
ality has disseminated the market model to more and more
domains and activities, and if humans are quickly becoming
self-investing capital that constantly attempts to enhance its
market value over time, then futurity seems to be key for the
neoliberal mechanism of governance. This is most clearly
seen, I suggest, in the address to aspirational women and the
production of a neoliberal feminist subject.
Indeed, there is a striking gendered aspect to the avowed
emphasis on futurity. Futurity as a technology of the self is
arguably most evident in neoliberalism’s hailing of young
upwardly mobile women who are still constantly told that
they must worry about their “biological clock” if they want
to “have it all.” “High-potential” men are also interpellated as
self-investing human capital, but the added and very clear in-
junction to sequence their lives carefully in order to achieve
work-family balance at a future point is much less prominent
in their interpellation; once sequence enters into the equa-
tion, it does not operate around juggling reproduction and
career, as it does for women, but rather around professional
advancement.29 There is, accordingly, nothing particularly
novel about this normative cultural injunction to upwardly
mobile men to invest strategically in their career develop-
ment; consequently, the operation of futurity is, I suggest,
rendered less perceptible in the address.
Given the growing mainstream acceptance and even em-

phasis on postponing motherhood for women, the futurity
of the promise of balance is—at least to feminist critics—
striking. The effort to keep these potentially powerful women
on a particular normative path in the present so that they can
ostensibly enjoy the fruits of their (self) investment in the
future not only includes professional advancement and en-
hancement prescriptions but also injunctions regarding how
to regulate and potentially exploit their reproductive capa-
bilities. Women’s value as women and thus their individual
futures and returns are still linked to being able to have
children—thus women’s (capital) value in the marketplace,
as it were, is still associated with maternity—but, as I will
suggest, this link seems to be weakening, at least among a
certain population of women.
I attempt to account further for this divergent gendered
address later; here, however, I would like to emphasize how
the promise of future enhanced capital “returns”—rather
than, say, risk management, as Ulrich Beck has so famously
argued30—seems increasingly to operate as one key contem-
porary technology of the self. The promise of future returns
to high-potential women clearly helps to ensure that each in-
dividual woman concentrates on her own particular life plan,
encouraging her to augment her individual capital value by
building her portfolio. It not only depoliticizes feminism
while defanging even liberal feminism’s immanent critique,
which invoked liberalism’s language of universal equality to
expose historic gendered contradictions and elisions. This
new form of feminism is currently also reordering space,
eroding notions of the private sphere (as well as the public
sphere) in the process. While many radical and materialist
feminists have long dreamed of the spatial and conceptual
breakdown between the private and the public, what we are

currently witnessing is not a rethinking of the private-public
divide. Nor is this merely the strategic co-optation of liberal
feminism by neoliberalism. Rather it is the steady evacuation
of an alternative feminist vocabulary, particularly since in
most streams of feminism emancipation has been conceived
in relation to women’s ability to disarticulate their link to the
private sphere and enter into the public sphere.31 Moreover,
the colonization of neoliberalism is simultaneously pro-
ducing a very clear distinction between worthy “aspirational”
female subjects and the majority of female subjects who are
deemed irredeemable due to their insufficient aspiration and
thus “responsibilization.”
FREEZING EGGS
Angela McRobbie suggests that new neoliberal norms of

middle-class aspirational life are currently being directed
intensely at women because women are ultimately seen as
responsible for holding together family life.32 As a result
of the entrenchment of neoliberalism in Britain alongside
the steady divestment in social programs, the family is
currently being cast as a small business in need of man-
agement while children are considered to be human cap-
ital. This, in turn, has the effect of responsibilizing and
entrepreneurizing domestic life and thus giving a more
professional status to full-time mothers. While this may
well be the case in the United Kingdom, I propose that
in the United States the discourse is coalescing around
women themselves as human capital that must “self-invest”
in order to enhance their portfolio value. This, in turn,
creates a profound ambivalence with respect to how to

manage issues of children and family life.
An example of the new acceptance of postponing—to
some ill-defined future moment—motherhood can be found
in more recent articles about Facebook and Apple paying for
female employees to freeze their eggs, which sparked heated
discussions across Europe and the United States after it first
appeared in venues ranging from The Guardian to CNN in
October 2014. Even more than the articles discussing the
hookup culture among undergraduate and postgraduate
students, this series of articles, which went haywire, empha-
sized the increasing importance that women and US society
are placing on women’s professional advancement. These ar-
ticles disclosed a new policy in which various Silicon Valley
firms and corporations would begin covering the cost of egg
freezing as part of their employees’ benefits package.
The message of both the initiative as well as the articles
is clear: women are increasingly interested in establishing
careers during their twenties and thirties, but these same
women do not (necessarily or not yet) want to jeopardize
the possibility of having children at some future point. By
offering employees this benefit, companies recognize the im-
portance of family life while legitimating women’s desire to
establish their careers before having children. As one of the
women interviewed for the article declared: “The pressure
is off, and I feel so empowered . . . I can now concentrate
on my career and becoming who I want to be before having
children!”33
The countless articles that have taken up the subject warn
that currently egg freezing is expensive and still at the exper-
imental stages. They also underscore that the women who
are lining up for the new procedure are, at the moment, the
overachievers, the aspiring law-firm partners, the ambitious

actresses, the medical- school residents— in other words,
the 1 percent. As Sarah Wildman, writing for New York
Magazine, suggests: these are “women who are acutely aware
of feminism’s cruel catch: the narrow fertility window that’s
been narrowed even further through years of schooling, se-
rial dating, and career advancement. They are boxed in by
mixed messages: 40 is the new 30! But be sure to have your
children before you turn 35.”34 Egg freezing seems to provide
a solution to this dilemma. In her article, Wildman further
suggests that in “all likelihood, the [egg-freezing] technology
will eventually get there. Even detractors see egg freezing as
becoming standard practice in the next five years. Someday,
one endocrinologist told [her], girls will get braces on their
teeth when they turn 12, freeze their eggs when they grad-
uate from college, and get pregnant whenever they want.”
According to this prediction, reproduction will eventually
be uncoupled from any notion of the biological clock and
women will be able to have children (or not) whenever they
so desire.
These articles clearly demonstrate that the postpone-
ment of childrearing has become part and parcel of the
newest upsurge of feminist discourse that revolves around
investment in the self, building one’s portfolio and credit
rating, and enhancing one’s market value. As another woman
interviewed in Wildman’s article articulated very clearly, “it’s
like, I’m me!, I don’t feel like [marriage, kids] is where I’m
supposed to be right now.” Middle- and upper-class women
are currently being interpellated as responsible for planning
their lives— or responsibilized— so that each individual
woman can cultivate a career and have a family once she has
sufficiently established herself professionally.
Yet, it also seems clear that the postponement of child-

rearing and the developing of egg-freezing technology, for
example, will likely lead to the further economization of re-
production. Once certain women are able to freeze their eggs
successfully, rent a womb, as well as hire various caregivers,
new and intensified forms of racialized and classed gender
exploitation will occur. Indeed, this trajectory of powerful
women is bound to produce new populations of dispen-
sable “service” providers, the vast majority of whom will be
women.35 As Hannah Seligson puts it in her article, “The
True Cost of Leaning In,” women who want a big career and a
family need a whole army of service providers to pull it off: a
nanny, a housekeeper, and a baby nurse. These providers will
carry out “the schlepping, cooking, cleaning, child care, and
laundry” and will cost “about $96, 261 per year.” 36
Ironically, however, precisely as neoliberalism colonizes
more and more domains of human life, pushing to convert
middle-class aspirational women into human capital, neo-
liberal feminism also operates—at the moment—as a pecu-
liar pushback to this total conversion by paradoxically and
counterintuitively maintaining reproduction (alongside pro-
fessional development) as part of the normative trajectory
for upwardly mobile women. While neoliberal feminism fur-
ther entrenches neoliberal rationality and helps to facilitate
the rapidly progressing cultural conversions and remakings
of certain female subjects into human capital, its emergence
also underscores that the conversion of aspirational women
is not yet complete given that reproduction is still part of the
normative address to these women.
The transformation of the balance discourse into a mode
of futurity, however, suggests that certain gender linkages are
being attenuated while new forms of gendered subjecthood
are being spawned. Insofar as neoliberalism reduces human

and individual freedom to the domain of market freedom,
the threshold between the private and public collapses.
Accordingly, and unlike liberalism with its constitutive
private-public divide, neoliberalism has neither lexicon nor
framework for addressing unwaged work or activity within
the family. On the one hand, then, neoliberal feminism is
helping to produce wages for housework and childrearing
by outsourcing these tasks to “non-aspirational” women. But
rather than serving as a path to liberation, wages for house-
work and care work serve to further expand and entrench
the market rationality while concurrently creating new and
reinforcing old class-based and racialized gender stratifica-
tion. On the other hand, if everything, even people them-
selves, are simply reduced to a cost-benefit calculus based on
capital investment and appreciation, then reproductive ac-
tivity as well as care work have no conceptual space in this
new order. In other words, reproductive work and care giving
continue to be “invisible infrastructure for all developing,
mature, and worn-out human capital, children, adults, dis-
abled, and elderly.”37
CONCLUSION
It is important to reiterate, by way of conclusion, that lib-

eral feminism—which has always been hegemonic in US
feminism and has always insisted on women’s right to enter
the public sphere on equal terms with men38—conceives of
emancipation as a move from the private to the public do-
main.39 Feminist discussions, such as Arlie Hochschild’s
classic The Second Shift, her later Time Bind, as well as At the
Heart of Work and Family, have underscored women’s dif-

ficult negotiation between work and home life, particularly
given the deeply entrenched assumption that women are still
ultimately responsible for domestic duties.40 Indeed, many
feminist political theorists have already— and crucially—
demonstrated that liberalism, particularly as it manifests
itself in modern democracies, is constituted through and
structured around the private-public bifurcation—where the
public domain is the realm in which rights are exercised and
individuality is expressed while the private sphere of family
is the domain governed by needs and affective ties.41 As part
of their dominant political imaginary, liberal democracies
produced and maintained a discursive and normative dis-
tinction between the private and public spheres. This distinc-
tion, of course, has always been gendered and has served to
naturalize the so-called sexual division of labor within liberal
democracies.
Moreover, as I have argued in Chapter 1, the very bifur-
cation of private-public itself is produced through the pre-
supposition that men circulate in civil society while women
are stationed in the family. Liberalism must consequently be
understood to be constituted through a spatialized gender
division, which has meant that reproduction has presented
a quandary and a “remainder” for liberal feminism from
its very inception. If women’s emancipation is conceived of
as their “engagement in the same activities as men,”42 then
where do reproduction and care work fit into this concep-
tion of emancipation? In more theoretical terms, the quan-
dary of reproduction and care work continue to haunt and
thwart liberal feminism’s conception of emancipation, de-
pendent as it is on the private-public divide and the unwit-
ting privileging of the public sphere as the site of liberation.
Put simply, somebody still needs to do the care work, and

that somebody has almost inevitably been women.
In many ways, as neoliberal rationality has colonized
more domains, mobilizing the husks of liberalism while
eviscerating its content, the neoliberal balance discourse
has emerged as a way of solving the dilemma of reproduc-
tion in the present moment as well as the double shift by
(re)inscribing motherhood as a normative part of women’s
individual life trajectory. “Intensive mothering” and the
discourse of a happy balance have entered the public dis-
cussion as part of not only the crisis of liberal imaginings,
as I argued in Chapter 1, but also—and more crucially—as
part of the entrenchment of neoliberal rationality. Neoliberal
rationality is currently converging with a weak liberal femi-
nist discourse, since the conversion of subjects into human
self-investing capital dovetails with the notion of profes-
sional success as emancipation. In addition, neoliberal ra-
tionality has incorporated the ideal of a happy work-family
balance, which is also a liberal feminist legacy, as I have been
arguing throughout this book. The futurity of the work-
family balance consequently serves as a means of managing
the dilemma of reproduction and the increasingly invisible
(because disavowed and increasingly outsourced) sexual and
gendered division of labor. We are witnessing the slow but
still incomplete conversion of aspirational women into generic
human capital because neoliberal feminism still incorporates
reproduction as part of its normative address to this popula-
tion of women.
This not-yet-
complete process of conversion is quite
clearly seen in contemporary media representations of
young “high-potential women” who are encouraged to post-
pone but not (yet) renounce reproduction. The technology
is developing in such a way, however, that this population of

women will likely be able to increasingly outsource repro-
duction and care work, thus ensuring the re-entrenchment
of the aspirational subject as human capital on the one hand,
and a whole other class of women who are conceived as not
fully responsibilized and thus exploitable and disposable on
the other. Once the conversion of aspirational women is more
or less complete, balance will gain a completely different
meaning since these women will no longer be carrying out
reproductive or the care work, but rather—and at most—
managing it. And when this occurs, the disavowal of gender
subordination and a renaturalization of the “sexual” divi-
sion of labor will also be more or less complete. Moreover,
as market rationality increasingly erodes the conceptual
framework of the private-public divide, rendering this divide
meaningless, waging even an immanent liberal feminist cri-
tique of gender subordination will become increasingly diffi-
cult. Finally, if and once the outsourcing of reproduction and
care work becomes even more widespread than it is today,
there will be a complete splitting of female subjecthood: the
worthy capital enhancing female few and the disavowed rest.
It is therefore not coincidental that futurity is developing
as part of neoliberal feminism’s address to young aspirational
women, since the promise of balance in the future helps to
cover up one of neoliberal rationality’s most vulnerable fault
lines in the present: its presumption of and yet inability to
recognize the gendered conditions of possibility for the pro-
duction of human capital in the first place: care work. But,
as more and more of these high-powered women purchase
both reproduction and care work, the discourse of balance
will likely recede. Thus, neoliberal feminism simultaneously
helps to produce a small class of aspirational subjects who
self-invest wisely and augment their capital value, and a large

class of women who are rendered expendable, exploitable,
and disposable.
As this happens, and more specifically, as the threshold
between private and public collapses through the infiltration
of a market rationality into all spheres of life, we will also
have less and less purchase or leverage with which to critique
neoliberal rationality. Neoliberal feminism is not only shorn
of all obligations to less privileged women while actually pro-
ducing new classes of disempowered women, but it is also
making alternative futures difficult to envision, since it ac-
tively and performatively “forgets” the conditions that natu-
ralize sexual difference and leaves us stunned in the face of a
fading lexicon of critique.
4
✦
BACK FROM THE FUTURE
Turning to the “Here and Now”
IN THE INTRODUCTION TO HER blog site, “A Design So

Vast,” Lindsey Mead, a self-identified feminist, Ivy League–
educated “Executive Recruiter,” mother, and writer, describes
her motivation for recording her life and feelings online.
Mead tells her blog readers that she “write[s]‌mostly about
the challenge of truly inhabiting the moments of [her] life,
the joys and difficulties of trying to be a mindful parent.” She
has also placed a beautiful picture of herself, and underneath
the image the caption reads: “One woman’s journey to right
here.”1 Indeed, one of the central themes of Mead’s blog site
is the importance—if tremendous difficulty—of living in the
here and now. Moreover, she consistently links her attempts
to savor the present with both the question of happiness and
being a professional working mother.
In one of her blog entries, Mead explicitly ruminates
on the relationship between being present and happiness,
commenting that striving to be present in her life has in-
deed made her a happier person. She writes, “The question is
whether being here has made me happier. The answer is yes.”2
This particular reflection about the relationship between
a specific orientation toward time and positive affect was
actually a response to another well-known blogger, Mead’s

friend, Aidan Donnelley Rowley, who also writes regularly
about her life on the site “Ivy League Insecurities.” Rowley
had asked her readers to share their thoughts on happiness
in a section called “The Here Year.”
“The Here Year,” from March 2014 to March 2015, was
meant to be a year in which Rowley would “focus on one
thing: being here, present in this life I’ve built and love.”3
Each month of the “Here Year” explores a different topic,
such as love, parenting, and vulnerability. In the project’s last
month, Rowley contemplates happiness, telling her readers
that the whole “Here Year” project “has had something im-
portant, if elusive, to do with Happiness.”4 For both Mead
and Rowley, then, savoring the here and now is closely linked
to happiness; or, in more theoretical terms, for these women,
a particular temporal/affective nexus is key to producing a
sense of well-being. Furthermore, a careful perusal of their
blog sites makes clear that their efforts to savor the pre-
sent are, in turn, premised on having successfully balanced
“mindful” mothering with fulfilling careers. Thus, these
women introduce yet another temporal modality, namely,
savoring the moment, which serves to complicate my pre-
vious argument with respect to futurity.
In Chapter 3, I argued that neoliberal feminism’s
address to younger upwardly mobile women operates
through the promise of future work-family balance where
futurity functions as a technology of self within neoliberal
governmentality in general and neoliberal feminist discourse
more particularly. This form of governmentality, I posited,
encourages subjects to invest in themselves in the present in
the hope (and belief) that they will receive future returns on
these self-investments. Consequently, Mead’s and Rowley’s
Back from the F uture | 107
descriptions of their insistent and overriding desire to savor

the present moment are striking, since its normative force
appears at odds with neoliberalism’s dominant temporal ho-
rizon. It is precisely this ostensible tension between a future-
oriented rationality and the longing to be “here and now” as
well as these diverging temporalities’ relationship to positive
affect that I focus on in the current chapter.
Interestingly, Mead and Rowley were two of approx-
imately 150 “representative” women featured on writer
Susie Schnall’s online “Balance Project,” in which Schnall
interviews “inspiring and accomplished women” who are
asked to speak about work-life balance.5 The project, as
Schnall explains, was conceived in the winter of 2013, as
discussions around whether women can “do it all” or “have
it all” resurfaced in various mainstream venues in the United
States. Not surprisingly, this was precisely the moment in
which Anne- Marie Slaughter’s piece “Why Women Still
Can’t Have It All” had already generated intense and wide-
spread commentary and around the same time publicity for
Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In began gaining traction. In
their interviews for Schnall’s project, Mead and Rowley both
emphasize that their balancing act revolves around negoti-
ating between career ambitions and spending quality time
with their children. When asked what part of the balance
equation is still challenging, Rowley answers that her biggest
struggle has been “balancing [her] mothering and writing.”
In a similar vein, Mead notes that she is “too often stressed
and snappy with her children, because [she is] preoccupied
with work-related obligations.”6
Balance and happiness are not only constituent of neo-
liberal feminist discourse but, as I have argued throughout
this book, the notion of a happy balance between one’s
professional and family life has also become the telos of this
variant of feminism. For Mead and Rowley—as well as the
148 other women interviewed by Schnall—balance remains
their desired goal; yet it is simultaneously the infrastructure
or scaffolding upon which all else rests. Indeed, balance,
happiness, and savoring the present are all phrases that domi-
nate Mead’s and Rowley’s blogs as well as many of the online
discussions by older feminist-identified professional women
with children.7 The way to achieve the desirable state of
happiness, which consists of an attempt to contract and even
suspend time, is described in individualized terms and as an
internal and self-investing process.
Rowley, for instance, tells us that she is “beginning to be-
lieve that happiness really is, in considerable part, a choice.
That it is up to us to decide how to see things and process them
and react to them.”8 She continues by stating that she firmly
believes that each one of us “can make ourselves happier if we
do the work” and that part of this work is “not losing the here
and now in the shuffle of there and when.”9 Mead similarly
describes the work of happiness as “remaining inside [her]
own life, living in the hours [she’s] allotted, paying attention
to everything that happens to and around [her].”10 But what
precisely are the relations among “being present,” happiness,
and balance, how do they inform one another, and why have
they become catchphrases and ideals for a particular popu-
lation of successful professional working mothers? How did
we move from the notion of futurity to the centrality of living
in the “here and now”?
Neoliberal feminism has—at least until the moment of
writing—been on the ascendant, increasingly becoming the
dominant and most visible variant of feminism in the United
States. Moreover, work-family balance is constituted within
this feminism as an ideal, a promised source of happiness.11

Reading Mead’s and Rowley’s blogs as part of the much larger
and wider nexus of neoliberal feminist discourse, I accord-
ingly claim that positive affect has been linked in complex
and shifting ways not only to the balancing act itself or to the
promise of a future balance. Rather, it has also expanded to
incorporate the normative demand to live in the present as
fully and as positively as possible, at the very least for a cer-
tain population of women (i.e., Rowley’s homogenizing yet
individualizing “we”). Yet, precisely given the future orien-
tation of neoliberalism, this turn to “presenting” happiness
is puzzling, suggesting that divergent temporalities may well
operate within the same governing rationality as part of the
technologies of the self within contemporary neoliberal fem-
inism. Indeed, these technologies appear to have diverging
temporal orientations as women age, suggesting that neolib-
eral feminism may currently be interpellating older women
differently from their younger counterparts while helping
to imbue all subjects—regardless of age—with a positive
affective disposition that the technologies themselves help to
produce.12
In order to make this multilayered argument, I first out-
line how affect operates as part of neoliberal governmentality.
As a number of scholars have convincingly shown, positive
affect is currently one crucial mode through which an indi-
vidualized, responsibilized, and entrepreneurial subjectivity
is produced.13 However, I would like to extend this argu-
ment by showing how affect is also the mode through which
technologies of the self-orient or direct subjects toward cer-
tain temporal horizons. Power, as Sara Ahmed has argued
in a different context, works as a mode of directionality as
well as orientation.14 I thus revisit the argument I laid out
in Chapter 3 regarding the future orientation of neoliberal

rationality, beginning with a discussion of how young aspira-
tional women are hailed within neoliberal feminism through
a promise of a future happy work-family balance. I then turn
to the question of the divergent temporal orientation that
Mead’s and Rowley’s blog sites register. I suggest that while
“the here and now” may appear to challenge neoliberalism’s
temporal orientation in which subjects are compelled and
encouraged to invest in themselves now in order to ensure
returns later on, it actually constitutes part of the larger ap-
paratus of technologies of the self that are constitutive of ne-
oliberalism more generally and neoliberal feminism more
particularly. These technologies are organized around di-
vergent temporal and affective orientations, and they even
produce different kinds of subjective dispositions, but, ul-
timately, they facilitate the crafting of subjects who are in-
formed through and through by a neoliberal metrics, which
not only individuates them but also constantly incites them
to cultivate particular affective modes as well as to endlessly
self-invest, self-monitor, and self-evaluate.
MOMMY AND
M O M M Y-E S Q U E B L O G S
Given that there are an estimated four million mommy blogs

in the United States,15 it seems safe to assume that there are
thousands if not tens of thousands of blogs like Mead’s and
Rowley’s. A great many of these blogs, however, are either
short-lived or inconsistently updated. The particular genre
of “mommy-esque” blogs that I am investigating here are
written by well- educated professional women who have
children. I have chosen Mead’s and Rowley’s blogs as my cen-

tral axes of analysis, since both women have been blogging
continuously and consistently for close to a decade, publicly
identify as feminists on their sites, are extremely articulate,
describe themselves as financially well-off, have children,
and seem to approximate the neoliberal feminist ideal in-
somuch as such an approximation is possible. In other
words, while Mead’s and Rowley’s blogs are neither the most
trafficked nor written by women who are particularly famous
in circles outside their own social milieu, they capture quite
distinctly—and in a distilled manner—a certain neoliberal
feminist sensibility that pervades many other mommy-esque
blog sites. These two particular blogs clearly circulate within
a specific “aspirational” milieu, as can be seen by the women
who comment on their posts as well as by the various names,
books, and personalities upon which Rowley and Mead draw.
Consequently, Mead’s and Rowley’s blogs can be understood
as both reflecting and (re)producing dominant norms of
successful and progressive “womanhood”—namely, the hap-
pily balanced woman.
NEOLIBERALISM’S
AFFECTIVE LIFE
Both women pay tribute to feminism. This point is cru-

cial, not only because it gestures to the way in which fem-
inism and feminist identifications have “gained new life,”
particularly in the past half-decade,16 but also because a
feminist consciousness pervades their blogs. Mead and
Rowley publicly identify as feminists, acknowledging the
role that the women’s movement has played in making their
lives and life trajectories possible. Rowley writes, for in-

stance, that: “Today, thanks to feminism and the struggle
of sisters, we women have unparalleled opportunities. We
are not circumscribed to certain roles.”17 Mead similarly
tells her readers how conscious she is of her mother’s and
grandmothers’ struggles: “Of knowing how hard the gen-
erations who came before me—those who actually had to
battle for rights and equal opportunity— fought.” Mead
then proclaims: “I call myself a feminist, enthusiastically
and without apology. This awareness underscores certain
decisions I’ve made, and contributes to my deep desire to do
what [Debora] Spar would call ‘it all.’ ”18 Both women present
their feminist identifications as uncontroversial and as part
of the fabric of their everyday lives. Importantly, however,
discussions about feminism per se or as a political movement
do not take up much of their blogging time.19 Their feminism
is both apparent and diffuse.
One ostensible reason that their blogs do not dwell
on the feminist aspects of the debates around “having it
all”—even though so much of what they write resonates
with the wider public and often contentious debate in the
United States—has to do, I suggest, with the fact that these
women perceive their blog entries as profoundly personal.
They recount, in detail, how they feel—about parenting,
about their everyday experiences of trying to juggle work
and family, about the passage of time (particularly in re-
lation to their children), about books they have read or
people whom they have met and admire, and, most cen-
trally, about the lives they have built and are living. There is
little attempt to connect, at least in any sustained fashion,
their personal experiences, feelings, or difficulties with
larger social issues, and, when they do, the discussions that
result are striking in that they lay bare an intricate process

of disavowal.
As Kara Van Cleaf has convincingly argued with respect
to the wider genre of “mommy” blogs, unlike earlier feminist
writings, such as Adrianne Rich’s Of Woman Born, these per-
sonal explorations share the same failure to connect “their
feelings or experiences to gendered structures of power.”20
Van Cleaf understands the mommy blogs as part of larger
cultural transformations, which encourage the commodifi-
cation and the depoliticization of motherhood. In a similar
vein, Tracy Jensen writes about the UK-based Mumsnet, an
online forum where parents—but mostly mothers—share
advice and information on parenting and many other topics.
Jensen, too, argues that while the articulation of personal
experience could potentially produce an implicitly feminist
public, these public articulations of private problems seem
simply to confirm that parenting problems are the result
of problematic individual choices.21 Drawing on Jensen’s
and Van Cleaf ’s insights, I add another layer to this argu-
ment by revealing the kind of extensive affective work pro-
fessional women with children are expected to perform on
themselves.22 These blogs, in other words, help lay bare the
endless investment in feeling “right” or “right feelings” and
thus the self-care work necessary to cultivate a “mature” and
positive neoliberal feminist subjectivity,23 whose objective
is not only balance but also—and crucially—“presenting”
happiness. Moreover, there is no sense that these sites de-
tail the challenges the bloggers face in order to have other
women identify with them as part of conscious-raising work,
but rather the writing serves as a therapeutic process to work
through anxiety, negativity, and insecurity in order to create
a more optimistic, positive affective disposition.
T H E P O SI T I V E P SYC H I C L I F E
OF NEOLIBERALISM
Building on Sara Ahmed’s earlier work on happiness, scholars

such as Christina Scharff and Sam Binkley have more recently
explored the relationship between positive affect and neo-
liberal governmentality. Binkley, for instance, has convinc-
ingly argued that the phenomenon of positive psychology
and the new pervasive discourse on happiness— namely,
the happiness turn—exercise a uniquely productive effect
in shaping autonomous, agentive neoliberal subjectivities.24
The happiness discourse, which coalesced in the United
States in the wake of the rise of positive psychology, ther-
apeutic culture, and self-help movements, is therefore cru-
cial to the operations of neoliberalism, since positive affect
helps to produce subjects who are not only induced to con-
stantly work on themselves and their emotional states but
also to cultivate an upbeat, entrepreneurial, responsibilized,
and individuated disposition.25 The repetitive injunction to
cultivate happiness has, Binkley argues, become part and
parcel of subject formation within neoliberalism, a mode of
governmentality that demands that the happy subject elimi-
nate all objects that obstruct or obscure “the agency, activity
and freedom to act in one’s own interest that is happiness
itself.”26 Moreover, positive well-being becomes the master
signifier of the successful (neoliberal) subject.
Scharff ’s approach to the question of the “psychic life
of neoliberalism” is similar. She demonstrates how neolib-
eral governmentality has helped to produce subjects who
not only relate to themselves as businesses or enterprises
but who must also constantly foster a positive attitude in
order to maintain their sense of well-being in a highly and
increasingly competitive world. The self is construed as ma-

terial that requires constant attention, and “various aspects of
the self—physical, mental and spiritual—are worked on for
optimization.”27 According to Scharff, competition becomes
an integral part of the formation of the self and neoliberal
subjects are just as likely to compete with themselves as with
others. It is in this way that social critique is transformed into
self-critique, and structural inequalities are disavowed.
Yet the process of producing neoliberal subjectivity
occurs not only through the cultivation and harnessing of
positive affect but also—and critically, as I show below—
through the orientation of subjects toward certain temporal
horizons. When discussing the time of neoliberalism, scholars
have tended to assume, as I do in the previous chapters, that
neoliberalism’s temporality is future-oriented.28 Yet, blogs
such as Mead’s and Rowley’s challenge this assumption in
many ways, gesturing to the mutually informing if not con-
stitutive relationship between affect and temporality—that
complex temporal/ affective nexus of technologies of the
self—which can and do orient subjects toward the present.
Moreover, these blogs can be read as precisely carrying out
the work necessary to transform the political into the indi-
vidual, all the while cultivating a responsibilized and positive
disposition.
THE FUTURE OF NEOLIBERAL

FEMINISM
Prominent feminist scholars such as Angela McRobbie,

Rosalind Gill, and Christina Scharff have argued that women,
and particularly young women, have been positioned as
ideal entrepreneurial and thus neoliberal subjects.29 Not

only do women have a deepened “luminosity” within neo-
liberal rationality, but the interpellative address to young
women appears to differ from the address to men in var-
ious respects.30 Gill and Shani Orgad have suggested that
neoliberal society— particularly in the United States and
United Kingdom— is currently inciting women— across
age, race, and class—to “be confident” as part of a new gen-
dered technology of self. Embracing feminist language and
goals, confidence as a technique of the self “inculcates a self-
regulating spirit, directed at identifying the problems and
solutions within [each woman’s] self and psyche.”31 Through
these gendered technologies, crucial cultural work is accom-
plished: women’s continued inequality is acknowledged, a
solution proposed (namely, build confidence), and an en-
trepreneurial responsibilized—and I would add positive—
neoliberal subjectivity engendered. Drawing on these crucial
insights, I maintain that the exhortation to confidence may
need to be understood as part of a more complex address
to young women, where confidence constitutes the affective
modality and futurity the temporal orientation. However,
I would like first to address the question of futurity before
returning to the relationship between a particular temporal
orientation and positive affect.
In recent years, as I demonstrate in Chapter 3, there
has been a growing mainstream acceptance if not overt en-
couragement of educated middle-class women postponing
motherhood until they have established themselves profes-
sionally.32 This is a striking feature in the current cultural
landscape, since it suggests that these women are currently
encouraged to prioritize their career development over
maternity, at least for a certain period of their lives. The
exhortation being directed toward particular women to in-

vest in themselves and build their portfolio during the very
years that were once thought of as the most fertile seems to
underscore how these women are increasingly being inter-
pellated as generic (rather than gendered) human capital
whose objective is to “self-invest” in ways that enhance their
figurative credit rating and appreciate their value over time.
However, I have also suggested that the postponement-
but-not-rejection of childrearing underscores the partial but
incomplete conversion of these women into generic human
capital, since reproduction and care work continue to pose a
stumbling block in this conversion process. On the one hand,
neoliberalism is dependent on the reproduction of and the
caring for “all developing, mature, and worn-out” human
capital.33 On the other hand, if everything, even people
themselves, is reduced to a cost-benefit calculus based on
capital investment and appreciation, then reproductive and
care work have no conceptual space let alone symbolic value
in this governing rationality.
The constitutive disjuncture produced by neoliberalism’s
dependence upon, alongside its conceptual elision of, re-
productive work is arguably most striking in the address
to young well- educated and upwardly mobile women.
Neoliberal feminism helps to resolve the reproduction/care
quandary by inciting these women, on the one hand, to make
smart self-investments in the present in order to ensure fu-
ture professional returns, while, on the other hand, this in-
citement also crucially involves holding out the promise that
professional advancement in the present will increase the
likelihood that these women will be able to craft a felicitous
work-family balance at some later point. To emulate this
feminist ideal, then, young middle-class women are expected
to plan their own life carefully by designing the right work-

family sequence. Consequently, the hailing of these women
not only responsibilizes and individualizes them but also
orients them toward the future. The exhortation to invest
in the present is inextricably linked to increasing the likeli-
hood of making individual good on future returns—namely,
ensuring individual fulfillment in the future in the form of a
happy work-family balance. This, in turn, produces a very
specific kind of feminist subject and subjectivity, one that is
obligated to maximize her portfolio and own generic market
value over time but one that also keeps reproduction as part
of her happiness script. In a sense, then, while young profes-
sional women are hailed as generic human capital, at least
some of the technologies operating on them are gendered
and engendering.
Turning now to how affect informs this temporal ori-
entation, I posit that this normative injunction to invest
in oneself in the present in order to enhance one’s cap-
ital appreciation over time dovetails with the exhortation
addressed toward women to build their confidence. After
all, confidence, as the cultivation of positive affect, is a nec-
essary condition for self-investment in the form of value
enhancement, and particularly for aspirational women at
the beginning of their professional lives. Thus, confidence
inserts itself into this future-oriented discourse in order to
imbue young women with a particular affective disposition.
Confidence is, after all, about self-assurance and the posi-
tive evaluation of one’s abilities. But confidence can also be
understood, I suggest, as an affective placeholder of sorts
that enables these subjects to defer happiness in the form of
work-family balance until some later point. In order to trust
in one’s future, particularly a happy and successful future,

one must certainly be confident.
Confidence should therefore be understood as the dom-
inant positive affective mode through which young aspira-
tional women cultivate their neoliberal feminist subjectivity,
enabling them to postpone the promise of a happy work-
family balance until a later stage in life. As such, confidence
is intricately tied to the mobilization of futurity as a tech-
nology of self and orients young women toward this tem-
poral horizon. For young and high-potential women, the
promise of future returns clearly helps to ensure that each in-
dividual concentrates on her own life plan, encouraging her
to augment her individual generic capital by building up her
own portfolio. To augment one’s capital, one needs to be con-
fident in one’s self as having capital-enhancing potential, and
this potential and promise are clearly future-directed.
W E L L - B E I N G A N D N E O L I B E R A L
FEMINISM’S PRESENT
Yet, what happens as these same women age and manage to

approximate more closely the happy balance ideal? In other
words, what happens when young aspirational women in-
vest “wisely” and manage to craft a (reasonably) felicitous
work-family balance later in life? I believe that Mead’s and
Rowley’s blogs provide some crucial insights into these issues
precisely because these women (albeit a very small and priv-
ileged group) appear to approximate normative neoliberal
feminist ideals while offering detailed descriptions of their
lives and feelings. Mead and Rowley are, after all, successful
professional working mothers. Both women, interestingly,

began their professional lives in the corporate fast track. On
the “about me” section of her blog site, we learn that Rowley
trained as a lawyer but decided to give up the corporate
law she was practicing in order to pursue a writing career.34
Mead received an MBA from Harvard but describes her de-
cision to become an Executive Recruiter as “leaning out” of
the professional rat race in order to make time for raising
her children.35 Thus, in many ways, the desire to be present
and savor the moment can—on one level—be understood
simply as an antidote and reaction to the high-powered and
anxiety-ridden corporate world, where constant calculations
about career advancement are paramount for getting ahead.
These women also had the necessary resources—educational
and financial—to enable them to pursue professional paths
where they could engage in meaningful work while per-
forming “mindful” mothering. Tellingly, “building confi-
dence” is often associated in their blogs with their youthful
selves, while cultivating a sense of well-being in the here and
now is what they desire and yearn for as middle-age pro-
fessional working mothers. The happiness script for these
women therefore does not entail an orientation toward the
future but is inextricable from enjoying the here and now.
Consider, for instance, an entry Mead posted following
a particularly difficult period in which her husband had
undergone an operation and she, alone, was responsible for
keeping everything together. She writes: “Peace. It does not
mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble or hard
work. It means to be in the midst of these things and still be
calm in your heart.” After berating herself on how snappy
she had been with her children, she muses that: “[e]‌ach day
is an opportunity to do better, to be more patient, to be more
gentle, to live in the days of my life with more ease.”36 For

Rowley, too, as I have also shown above, the major ingredient
to the happiness recipe is savoring the moment. In her blog
entry entitled “10 Ways to Be Happier,” Rowley writes, “It has
been my belief that making the effort to see these moments
and process them and enjoy them however mundane is a ro-
bust source of well-being.”37 In a later entry, Rowley connects
savoring the moment with both enjoying the fruits of her
professional success and spending quality time with her
three daughters; she asks, “I believe we must keep an eye on
the proverbial road ahead, live purposefully toward mean-
ingful personal and professional goals. But problematic too
because if we train our focus too intently on the future, we
will miss the present.” Her final thoughts, described as coa-
lescing as she is walking with her girls, return to the cen-
trality of happiness in the moment: “I want to kiss my life and
accept it. Just as it is. Today. Now. So that these moments of
happiness I’m waiting for . . . don’t pass me by.”38
Mead and Rowley return time and again to their intense
desire to live each moment fully and meaningfully. Both
women have clearly been influenced by and are drawing on
discourses circulating in the blogosphere as well as in a whole
range of mainstream cultural venues. In different sections
of their blogs, they review bestselling books and interview
admired authors. For example, Mead has included her in-
terview of the very successful and popular US author Laura
Vanderkam on her blog site. Vanderkam has not only written
about how high-powered professional women can and do
manage to make “it all” work but also how to be more present
in one’s life. As the host of a New York literary salon, Rowley
invites well-known authors to speak and then comments on
these events in a separate section of her blog. Among the
many authors and literary evenings Rowley comments on,

Gretchen Rubin—who wrote the New York Times bestseller
The Happiness Project—stands out as particularly relevant for
this analysis. Indeed, Rubin begins her well-known book by
admitting that: “[She] had everything [she] could possibly
want—yet [she] was failing to appreciate it”;39 the rest of the
book is dedicated to finding ways of transforming her atti-
tude about her life. Not surprisingly, the “everything” that
Rubin refers to includes a successful career, financial secu-
rity, children, and a supportive husband. Situating Mead’s
and Rowley’s blogs within this larger contemporary context
strengthens the claim that older professional women who
already have both career and children—those who are per-
ceived to “have it all”—are currently enjoined to “present”
happiness by constantly investing in their affective selves.
A happy balance is still the desired goal, only the promise of
happiness is now woven into what might be termed the pro-
tracted present.
Moreover, Rowley’s and Mead’s blog entries highlight, in
detail, how the cultivation of happiness and the self ’s ability
to savor the present require the constant evaluation of the self
as well as constant self-monitoring. There is, in other words,
a constant affective investment. As Binkley articulates it,
under neoliberal governmentality, “happiness is a task, a reg-
imen, a daily undertaking in which the individual produces
positive emotional states.”40 This affective labor for these
middle-aged women is oriented toward the present, while
simultaneously spawns intensified self-awareness. The inten-
sified self-awareness and self-care also produce a critical
perspective on one’s affective state, which is then endlessly
measured and assessed. Thus, similar to how the exhorta-
tion to build confidence and the promise of a future happy
balance functions to responsibilize and individuate younger

women, the injunction to savor the moment, which dovetails
with the discourse on happiness, operates in much the same
way. The normative force of presenting happiness, then,
is not merely an antidote to the corporate rat race and the
anxieties it produces. If confidence is the affective modality
through which the orientation toward futurity (and future
happiness) is cultivated among younger neoliberal feminist
subjects, savoring the here and now is the affective modality
through which middle-aged neoliberal feminists work to-
ward their well-being. Inability to savor the moment or to
achieve well-being consequently signifies individual failure.
PR I V I L E G E A N D ST RU C T U R A L
I N E Q UA L I T I E S
This orientation toward the present must therefore be un-

derstood to constitute a temporal/affective nexus that makes
up one of the technologies of self within neoliberal fem-
inism. Not only does this temporal/affect nexus produce
properly neoliberalized feminist subjects whose normative
trajectory—striving to craft a work-family balance—helps to
resolve the dilemma of reproduction for neoliberal ration-
ality, at least for the time being, but it also reifies an indi-
viduated feminist subject by ensuring that each woman
is concerned with her own individual psychic well-being.
Indeed, the self-investment here is predominantly a psychic
one. These blogs help expose the affective and psychic “work”
on the self that is necessary to be present for “these moments
that [we] will not get back.”41 Furthermore, analyzing the
descriptions of this intensive affective work also reveals the
way in which neoliberal feminism “intersects with extant

powers of stratification, marginalization, and stigma to gen-
erate new configurations and iterations of these powers.”42
Take, for example, Rowley’s entries on privilege. In these
entries, she berates herself for not being aware enough of her
own privilege, while mentioning—albeit obliquely—the on-
going violent assault on black bodies in the United States.
Rowley’s entries on privilege occur against the backdrop of
the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which
coalesced in the wake of the murders of the unarmed African-
Americans Trayvon Martin in Florida; Michael Brown in
Ferguson, Missouri; and Eric Garner in New York. In the
months before Rowley’s posts, study upon study had been
compiling and publishing data showing that unarmed black
men were at least seven times as likely as unarmed white men
to die from police gunfire. In 2015 alone, 1,134 black men
were killed by law enforcement officials, and black people
were killed at twice the rate of whites, Hispanics, and Native
Americans. About 25 percent of the African Americans
killed were unarmed, compared with 17 percent of white
people.43 Yet, Rowley chooses to focus on the murder of po-
lice officers in Dallas, Texas, during a Black Lives Matter pro-
test, asking how one should respond to such manifestations
of violence. While she vacillates among various answers on
what one should do with (so much) privilege, Rowley’s ulti-
mate response is a question. “What if looking honestly at our
current selves and our current lives and our histories brings
awareness of the privilege we have enjoyed (or not enjoyed),
privilege that has maybe heretofore been largely, problemati-
cally unconscious? Isn’t that something?”44
Granted that addressing racialized violence and social
injustice in the United States involves self-awareness, which
may very well be the first step in confronting the vast dif-
ferential in the way privilege and precarity are distributed
throughout society, Rowley’s solution remains precisely on
the level of self-examination. Her blog entries on privilege
lay bare—in black and white—the process of acknowledging
structural inequalities and acute injustice only to disavow
them completely. Thus, in her blog Rowley literally performs
the “invisibilization” of not merely gender inequalities but
also racial violence as well as class stratification through and
upon which social hierarchies in the United States have been
created. Perhaps paradoxically, the evocation of privilege
facilitates Rowley’s disavowal of the profound social strati-
fication in the United States, while the cultural work carried
out by neoliberal feminism helps to disarticulate the very vo-
cabulary with which to conceptualize and thus address these
social injustices.
Privilege is a key term here, since it is precisely through
its acknowledgment that a complex process of disarticula-
tion transpires. Consequently, by unpacking, albeit briefly,
how privilege operates, we can better understand the partic-
ular powers of stratification with which neoliberalism and
neoliberal feminism intersect. As I have argued elsewhere,
privilege is neither an individual trait nor something one
simply has or can eschew at will, but rather a relation vis-à-
vis dominant norms.45 More specifically, privilege is precisely
that which accrues to the subject who is positioned in prox-
imity to what Audre Lorde has famously termed the mythical
“American” norm. This mythical norm, which in the United
States has historically denoted a “white, thin, male, young,
heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure” subject,46 is
itself constituted through a coalescing of various categories
of identity (race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion, etc.) as
well as a hierarchization of the various normative attributes

linked to these categories. Privilege, however, is not merely
the result of a particular alignment among different catego-
ries of identity and their normative attributes, but, I suggest,
can be better understood by invoking Pierre Bourdieu’s
notion of habitus.
Habitus, according to Bourdieu, is the generative and
unifying principle through which a subject makes sense of
his/her position in social space; but habitus is also the histor-
ical product of that subject’s social position. When there is a
correspondence between a habitus and a social field—which
Bourdieu defines as an independent social universe with its
own laws of functioning—subjects “perform” in the field
without having to be conscious of their actions. This corre-
spondence ensures that subjects have a “feel for the game” (of
that particular field), which entails a certain bodily disposi-
tion; this “feel for the game” is pre-reflexive in that it does not
require conscious calculation or reflection.47
Privilege can thus be conceptualized as that which
accrues to a subject not only when there is an alignment be-
tween habitus and field, but also when the subject accumulates
the most social and cultural capital through this alignment.
For instance, a subject—black or white—interpellated into
a racist and racialized society might find their habitus and
field aligned, but only the subject intepellated as white will be
positioned as privileged.48 The black subject will also know
the rules of the game in a white supremacist society, and he/
she may (or may not) play by the rules in order to survive and
even thrive, but no matter how that subject performs in the
field, little if any cultural or social capital—with respect to
the racialized field—will accrue to her or him. Moreover, the
black subject is much less likely to perform in this racialized
field without having to be conscious of her/his actions pre-

cisely because of her/his dearth of social and cultural capital.
By contrast, due to her/his privilege, the white subject is more
like to perform within this field without being conscious of
her/his actions and will be ensured a certain amount of cul-
tural and social capital just by virtue of being interpellated as
white. Thus, my claim is that pre-reflexive habitus and priv-
ilege are constitutive of one another and are not merely the
product of an alignment of habitus and field but rather the
result of an alignment that entails and ensures social and cul-
tural capital.
Rowley’s musing can be read as revealing two crucial and
inseparable aspects of how privilege functions in order to
buttress the status quo. On the one hand, when one specific
category, such as race, is a site of “privilege,” there tends to
be a rendering invisible of that specific category of identity.
Rowley’s self-examination and self-berating underscore the
way in which she has taken her race privilege for granted. In
the beginning of her post where she deliberates privilege, she
writes, “I have been feeling guilty and quiet because I am the
poster-child of white privilege.”49 Yet, this recognition swiftly
transmogrifies into an elision of the violence against African
Americans in the United States through a process of individ-
uation and self-referencing. On the other hand, when a sub-
ject is positioned as privileged with respect to one category,
this may—and many times does—have the effect of bringing
into focus other categories in relation to which a subject is
not “privileged.” For instance, Rowley’s short-lived acknowl-
edgment of her race privilege occurs in conjunction with a
confession inspired by her reading of Playing Big: Practical
Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and
Lead, a motivational book written by fellow Ivy Leaguer Tara
Mohr and informed by Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. Rowley

confesses that she, alongside so many modern women, have
been “playing small in their personal and professional lives.”50
The turn to gender—namely, the singling out of the one area
in which Rowley lacks privilege—ultimately reinforces the
“naturalness” of the areas in which she is privileged, ulti-
mately (re)rendering her race and class privilege invisible.
When gender is pushed to the forefront, the other catego-
ries in which Rowley is privileged fade into the background
and can thus more easily be “taken for granted.” Thus, priv-
ilege can be said to operate through an intricate interplay
between presence and absence that creates varying degrees
of privilege, which, in turn, tends to reinforce existing social
hierarches.
Indeed, these entries on privilege help lay bare how ne-
oliberalism intersects with privilege to produce properly
neoliberalized feminist subjects. Quoting the bestselling
self-
help author Anna Quindlen, Rowley concludes her
post by resolving that each one of us must begin the “work
of becoming yourself.”51 Mead’s response to Rowley’s blog
entry on privilege resonates with a similar sensibility, while
demonstrating even more clearly the way in which culti-
vating affect becomes one crucial modality through which
a responsibilized, individuated, and thus atomized and
depoliticized feminist neoliberal subjectivity is spawned. She
tells us that she loves what Rowley “has to say about permis-
sion and privilege and playing it safe,” ending her own blog
with the resolution: “I vow to pay more attention to what
scares me.”52
It is important to reiterate that Rowley’s and Mead’s
ruminations on privilege occur within the framework
of a neoliberal feminist sensibility, given that the entire
discussion’s turn inward toward the “me” is informed by

Mohr’s motivational and Sandberg’s self-help texts. This in-
credible exchange, one that moves from an acknowledgment
of structural inequalities to the promise of working on the
self in order to ward off one’s fears not only dramatizes the
way privilege functions through disavowal and the process of
invisibilization, but also reveals how neoliberalism hollows
out the very vocabulary with which to address the increasing
precariousness of more and more people and populations
both in the United States and across the globe.
UNDERMINING A POLITICAL
HORIZON
Mead and Rowley describe themselves as women who have

managed successfully to negotiate the delicate balance be-
tween raising their children and pursuing a meaningful pro-
fession. Their ability to create even a temporary work-family
balance is, in turn, premised on their incredible privilege.
They have accrued enough financial, educational, social,
and cultural capital to enable themselves to fine-tune and
recalibrate that ever- elusive balance when the demands
on one side of the equation tilt their equilibrium. And al-
though their blogs underscore that balancing motherhood
and career is a constant struggle, it also appears that “having
it all” is the assumed backdrop for their seemingly endless
ponderings on “being present” and savoring the moment.
The incitement to savor the moment, in other words, entails,
as its corollary, staying—presuming and assuming—a certain
balanced course. Consequently, it is not that work-family
balance in any way disappears as an ideal and objective, but
rather that these women are incited to continue the work

of balancing, while simultaneously relegating the calcula-
tive balance discourse to the background and placing the
savoring-the-moment discourse front and center. By way
of conclusion, I examine in more detail why this particular
nexus of present tense and positive affect may currently be
operating as a technology of self for these middle-aged ne-
oliberal feminists.
Significantly, living in the here and now institutes an
affective investment in the status quo, while helping to fur-
ther transform even the most intimate aspects of our lives—
namely, our psychic life—into ones informed by a market
metrics, where proper orientation and investment promise
profitable returns, whether conceived in financial or affective
terms. Furthermore, so long as intensive or “mindful” moth-
ering remains part of the ideal of progressive womanhood,
the conversion of these women into generic human capital
remains incomplete. Mead’s and Rowley’s blogs, then, can be
understood to demonstrate how, on the one hand, neoliberal
rationality has indeed infiltrated more and more domains of
our lives, converting affect itself into a form of capital that
can be cultivated and invested as a means to transform and
enhance the self. On the other hand, neoliberal feminism,
which posits balance as its telos and maintains reproduction
as part of aspirational women’s trajectory, may help to en-
sure that once aspirational women do have children, there
is a normative shift in temporality and thus a reorienta-
tion toward the present, which encourages women to focus
on their own well-being in the here and now. This, in turn,
backgrounds the balance discourse, while simultaneously
assuming balance as the starting point for such affective
self-investment.
Consequently, not only is there is little sustained critique

of the notion of balance or “having it all” in these blogs, but
it also appears that this affective temporal register reinscribes
women’s individual responsibility for ensuring not only their
own affective well-being but also that of their children. And
this is done precisely within a feminist framework and lex-
icon. It is important to note that Mead’s and Rowley’s blogs
detail their own affective life and not the everyday emotional
labor they invest in their children, thus the focus remains on
each woman rather than on their children as human capital.53
Their husbands, moreover, are described as deeply loved and
supportive but also as less involved figures in the familial
landscape. Mead and Rowley do, however, consistently mark
and limn various coming-of-age moments in their children’s
lives and both Mead and Rowley describe the moments of
joy, wonder, and frustration that raising children elicits for
them. Take, for example, Rowley’s post where she describes
her three daughters’ first day of school after summer break,
“My three babies are no longer babies . . . I remember each
of their arrivals with a piercing clarity, their welcomes to
the world, and today they went off, with each other, without
me . . . And so. Today. Three little girls, exquisitely loved, on
a small yellow bus bound for a great school.”54 Savoring the
present, in other words, is one mode through which women
may be exhorted and exhort themselves to carry out the in-
tensive care work necessary for mindful mothering and
family life, even as the continued gendering of this care work
fades away through the presenting of happiness.
By cultivating positive affect as neoliberal feminists,
these women help push any structural critique of the balance
discourse or “having it all” into the background, effectively
disavowing their own privilege—and thus existing powers
of stratification—while ensuring that the responsibility for

maintaining such balance falls squarely on their own indi-
vidual shoulders;55 this, in turn, helps, in many ways, to (re)
naturalize care work as women’s work, rendering it imper-
ceptible. After all, in order to present happiness, these women
must first ensure that they are successfully calibrating the
“right” balance between work and mothering. This calibra-
tion, of course, often involves outsourcing care to nannies
and other domestic help, although both Mead and Rowley
portray themselves as endeavoring to be—as well as unprob-
lematically desiring to be—involved and present mothers.
Neoliberal feminism through its complex apparatus of tech-
nologies of the self, which harness affect to particular tem-
poral directions, appears, once again, to resolve the quandary
of reproduction and care work within neoliberal rationality.
Yet, it also seems crucial to underscore that political mo-
bilization requires a temporal horizon beyond the present
moment, either in a set of short- or long-term goals, demands,
or objectives, or simply as a vision for a better future. A real
or imagined political horizon is the condition of possibility
for envisioning and struggling for social change. The turn to
the here and now not only undercuts the possibility of imag-
ining an alternative horizon, but, in effect, also undermines
all efforts to mobilize publics and make concrete demands
aimed at enhancing a more egalitarian society. This appears
to be precisely the cultural work that neoliberal rationality
carries out as it engenders its own variant of feminism.
If it is true, as I have been arguing, that a particular nexus
of confidence and futurity operates as a technology of self,
which exhorts younger aspirational women to invest in them-
selves and their own individual future while deferring—but
not eliminating—the promise of a happy work-family balance
to the future, then the neoliberal variant of feminism can be

understood as a pushback to the total conversion of these
women into human capital. Yet, the emphasis on futurity and
confidence simultaneously opens up temporal and affective
spaces that can, potentially, be inhabited by alternative polit-
ical imaginaries. By rendering futurity more visible in neo-
liberal feminism, neoliberalism as a rationality may well be
producing, concurrently, its own vulnerabilities. The quan-
dary of reproduction and neoliberalism’s temporary solution
to this quandary in the form of a promise for the future may,
for instance, open up a set of potentialities that challenge the
neoliberal order. After all, if the conversion process is not yet
complete, as I have also claimed, then the very same women
who are being interpellated as neoliberal feminist subjects
are also the very same women who could potentially invest
their vast cultural, social, economic, and educational capital
in imagining an alternative future. The promise of a happy
future work-family balance, after all, inscribes futurity as a
promise as well as an orientation.
The turn to the here and now precisely shuts down
this potentiality. Intersecting with privilege, “presenting
happiness” helps render the difficult work of imagining al-
ternative political and temporary horizons increasingly im-
possible and, just as important, undesirable. As Mead and
Rowley repeatedly insist upon in their blogs, always looking
toward the future signifies precisely the inability to savor
the moment. However, such present-oriented self-care also
refuses to acknowledge yet alone address the increasingly
precarity of more and more populations around the globe,
ultimately reinforcing the neoliberal conversion of human
beings into specks of capital, which posits winners and
losers, worthy capital-enhancing subjects, and the disposable
rest. After all, neoliberalism flourishes in societies where the

playing field is already stacked against various segments of
society, and it only “needs” a relatively small select group of
capital-enhancing subjects, while everyone else is ultimately
dispensable.
Mead and Rowley are clearly “winners” in the neolib-
eral competition. Yet, given just how bleak the future looks
for an ever-increasing number of young people—something
I return to in Chapter 6—it seems that precarity will quickly
become a condition shaping even those young middle-class
aspirational subjects who might once have been able to
assume a relatively secure future. On the one hand, then,
this increasing precarity makes it very likely that the notion
of savoring the moment will become even more widespread
for an increasing number of young people, expanding its
interpellative force and thus ensuring the continued contrac-
tion of our political imaginary while further entrenching ne-
oliberal rationality by minimizing the possibility of waging
any kind of structural critique. If and when this expansion
occurs, the happy work-family balance discourse will also
undergo further shifts and permutations. On the other hand,
given that futurity still operates as part of the temporal ho-
rizon of neoliberal governmentality, the task of countering
the “here and now” discourse by mobilizing and transforming
visions of futurity as well as reclaiming feminism as a social
justice movement have become more urgent than ever.
5
✦
FEMINIST CONVERGENCES
WHEN IVANKA TRUMP’S HOW-

TO-
SUCCEED GUIDE
Women Who Work was released in May 2017, it generated
a flurry of angry reviews in the mainstream media.1 Many
commentators excoriated the book, claiming that this newest
“having it all” manifesto is composed of nothing more than
artless jargon, which could just as easily have been found
when Googling “inspirational quotes.”2 Summing up the
general reaction, Megan Garber explains that Trump’s book
has been dismissed in large part because it relies on chirpy
platitudes to convey its message of female empowerment
while offering a vision of feminism that is not very feminist
at all.3 Notwithstanding this widespread criticism, Women
Who Work has become a New York Times bestseller, and, to
date, continues to sell extremely well.
While it is true that Women Who Work is littered with
decontextualized clichés and unabashedly endorses the
Ivanka lifestyle brand, Trump’s manifesto actually warrants
serious analysis. Her main message—and the one that serves
as her repetitive mantra—is that women should work on all
facets of their life: “career, relationship, family, friendships,
hobbies, and passions.”4 The address is directed, not sur-
prisingly, toward “aspirational” women, who are incited to
achieve their “best self ” both professionally and personally.5
“When we are happy—when our mind-set and our mood

are positive,” Trump assures us, we are “smarter, more moti-
vated, and more inclined to succeed.”6 Success is defined
as facing obstacles with resilience, initiative, and creativity,
while one’s ability to thrive is described as “limited only by
one’s own hunger, drive, passion, and execution.”7 According
to Trump, then, empowerment and achievement involve in-
dividual women consciously choosing to create the life they
desire and proactively crafting such a life through contin-
uous labor and perseverance.
Women Who Work captures and reproduces a key con-
temporary and neoliberal expectation that individuals—and
particularly women—should never cease working on them-
selves in order to enhance their value as human capital. The
book deserves serious attention precisely for the way that it
lays bare the intensive labor—affective and physical—that
women are expected to invest in themselves in order to ap-
proximate the contemporary norm of female—and as I will
argue, feminist—accomplishment.8 The ideal female subject
is, however, not only conceived of as human capital, but a
close examination of Women Who Work also reveals how the
self is produced as well as produces itself as “an individual
firm” or business enterprise, where all activities and practices
are understood as investments that aim to appreciate the value
of the self-as-firm. Trump’s text, in other words, encourages
women to consider themselves as a form of “stock,” where
their normative role is to augment their market value. This
entails incessant labor, particularly the modification of be-
havior, aspirations, and affective orientation— much like
a corporation that alters its practices in an attempt to in-
crease its stock value by becoming more “efficient.”9 The
F eminist C onvergences | 137
woman-as-stock framework, in effect, conjures the ultimate

neoliberal feminist subject, one shorn of any and all liberal
trappings.
Another reason we need to pay close attention to Women
Who Work revolves around the many parallels between it
and other well-received and bestselling texts in this “having
it all” genre. In fact, just a few months before the publica-
tion of Trump’s book, former Fox anchorwoman Megyn
Kelly’s much anticipated memoir, Settle for More, appeared
on the literary scene and also became a New York Times best-
seller. Kelly’s narrative style is quite different from Women
Who Work, since it is structured as an autobiography. Yet,
even though Settle for More provides an historical account of
Kelly’s early life and details her eventual rise to prominence
as a popular if controversial Fox News anchorwoman,10 the
text should not simply be read as a memoir. Rather, given
its title and the way in which Kelly intersperses advice and
life lessons throughout, her book should be understood as
what Diane Negra calls an “advice-oriented memoir” and, as
such, included under the rubric of the self-help and how-
to-succeed genre.11 Kelly maintains, for instance, that “the
harder you work, the better attitude you have . . . the greater
job security you earn, and the more risks you can take.”12
Later she declares that women can be “doting mother[s]‌” as
well as “tough professional[s]”—but in order to achieve both,
especially at the same time, they need to work harder: “The
hard times remind you it is possible to change your life.
To do better. To be better. To settle for more.”13 If nothing
else, the book is clearly meant to inspire women to emulate
Megyn Kelly, and, like Women Who Work, wittingly instructs
women on how to succeed as professional working mothers.
One more much anticipated book, also published

shortly before Trump’s Women Who Work, is Anne-Marie
Slaughter’s Unfinished Business, which in many ways
constitutes a sequel to her widely commented-upon article
“Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” explored in depth in
Chapter 1. Building on the polemic she laid out in her 2012
essay, Slaughter expands on many of her previous arguments
about women, care work, and careers, while simultane-
ously addressing concerns raised by her critics. Rather than
speaking about “having it all,” Unfinished Business attempts
to reframe the debate—one, it is important to remember,
that Slaughter herself helped to reignite—forefronting, in-
stead, the question of why success for both men and women
has traditionally meant “privileging career achievement
above all else.”14 Her objective, she tells us, is to radically
change the terms of the “having-it-all” debate by affirming
care work so that, as a society, we can begin valuing care as
much as we value market competition. Crucially, however,
her ideal of feminist success—namely, women’s ability to
craft a felicitous equilibrium between work and family—
remains unchanged. More surprising, particularly given
her more progressive credentials, is the fact that Slaughter’s
advice to women turns out to be nearly indistinguishable
from that given by Trump and Kelly. It is precisely this con-
vergence among women of ostensibly very different po-
litical stripes that is striking and calls for serious critical
attention.
In this chapter, then, I first examine Women Who
Work and Settle for More, demonstrating how the two texts’
assumptions and their advice to women are perfectly com-
patible, suggesting that Trump’s book should not be consid-
ered an outlier and must be understood as part of the wider
cultural landscape. I concurrently underscore the ways in

which Trump’s manifesto registers and helps constitute the
newest permutation of the neoliberal feminist subject that
I have been tracking throughout this book. Indeed, Women
Who Work conjures up a subject who further propels the
conversion of aspirational women into generic human cap-
ital. This is best exemplified in the reworking of mother-
hood in increasingly managerial terms. At the same time, the
ideal of a happy balance continues to serve as a pushback
to the conversion process, as does Trump’s ongoing efforts
to center-stage wifehood. Consequently, Trump’s how-to-
succeed guide should therefore be understood as a neoliberal
feminist manifesto par excellence.
Next, I juxtapose Trump’s and Kelly’s books with
Slaughter’s Unfinished Business, revealing how all these
books ultimately perceive women’s progress as consisting of
individual women’s ability to combine professional accom-
plishment with a satisfying family life. By revealing the way
in which the same underlying rationality undergirds each
of these texts—texts that have, nonetheless, been authored
by women identified with opposing political camps— I
highlight how neoliberal feminism is erasing long-standing
divisions and political differences. This erasure pivots on
neoliberal rationality’s colonization of more domains of
our lives, refiguring these domains in market metrics while
undoing conceptual and political boundaries constitu-
tive of liberalism and liberal thought. Not only does the
private-public divide collapse, but so, too, does the dis-
tinction between one’s “private” self and one’s “public” en-
terprise as the self itself becomes an enterprise. This dual
process of collapse and reconfiguration shapes the neolib-
eral feminist subject.
T H E C O M PA R AT I V E A D VA N TA G E
In Settle for More and Women Who Work, Kelly and Trump
lay out a normative life trajectory for aspirational women
that is uncannily similar to the one discussed in Chapters 3
and 4. Both describe, albeit in different registers, how one’s
twenties should be a period of striving during which women
should be building their professional portfolios. Megyn Kelly,
for instance, informs her readers that in her early twenties
she was spending almost all of her time on the job. As an
exceedingly ambitious young woman, her main concern and
objective was advancing her career, while everything else was
put on hold. This decade was, in Kelly’s words, a period of
“coming of age and coming into [her] own professionally,
and living on the promise of what might be.”15 It was only
in her thirties that she began thinking more seriously about
starting a family.
Trump, for her part, proposes that the twenties should
be an “explorer phase,” where women should strive to iden-
tify their passions as well as their particular professional
strengths and skills.16 Thus, similar to Kelly, Trump assumes
that women should begin making their professional mark
before thinking seriously about family. The very structure of
Women Who Work reinforces this particular developmental
narrative. Only about midway through— after various
exhortations about staking one’s claim in one’s company and
industry—does Trump insert instructions about how to fit
children into the equation. In both texts, then, the desirable
chronology of women’s life trajectory and the sequencing
that is necessary are evident.17
Trump and Kelly— just like Sandberg and Slaughter
before them— clearly state their conviction that working
toward greater gender equality is of paramount impor-

tance, while explicitly acknowledging that gender parity has
yet to be reached in the United States. In her introductory
chapter, Trump declares that despite the progress and the
many advances women have made since her mother’s gener-
ation, “we’ve still got a long way to go.”18 For her part, Kelly
admits that sexism exists, unequivocally averring that gender
bias in all of its forms needs to be eliminated.19 Moreover,
both women advocate for certain structural changes, such as
paid maternity leave.20 These avowals, which can be under-
stood as one of the signs marking the shift from a postfem-
inist moment to a feminist one, are, however, overlaid by a
much more profound and general disavowal. Trump spends
approximately one page of her 212-page book expounding
on structural obstacles, while Kelly spends about the same.
The overwhelming majority of the advice and instruction
given by these two famous and wealthy women to less fa-
mous and wealthy women revolves around the labor indi-
vidual women are required to invest in themselves in order
to achieve success. Kelly extends this advice through the
rhetoric of doing better, being better, and settling for more,
whereas Trump utilizes the rhetoric of working on every as-
pect of one’s life in order to create one’s best self. The under-
lying assumption, however, is the same: individual women
are ultimately responsible for both their successes and their
failures.
What quickly becomes clear is that despite the different
narrative styles, Trump’s and Kelly’s recommendations
are nearly indistinguishable. Kelly’s advice to women—
particularly young ambitious women— is straightfor-
ward: work hard, choose to improve your life, and maintain
a positive attitude. When faced with bias or sexism, the
solution for Kelly is to be “so good that they can’t ig-

nore you . . . [D]‌oing better is far more empowering than
lamenting one’s circumstances.” And if women do eventu-
ally encounter a glass ceiling, Kelly advises them to “try to
crash right through it with stellar work product.”21 Positivity
and resilience, namely, bounding back after difficult periods
are also key to success. She goes so far as to tell readers that
showing up at work with a positive attitude despite feeling
like hell inside has come to her aid many times in her ca-
reer.22 In this way, Settle for More affirms the belief that
through positive thinking, hard work, and sheer force of will,
women can manage to get themselves where they want to go,
professionally as well as personally.23
Trump’s message revolves around the same discursive
axes, although she draws even more prominently on terms
that scholars such as Angela McRobbie, Rosalind Gill, Shani
Orgad, and Christina Scharff have argued are constitu-
tive of neoliberal subjecthood: namely, entrepreneurialism,
happiness, and resilience.24 Like Kelly, Trump maintains
that as long as women are passionate, hard-working, and
committed to excellence, they will succeed. She assures
readers that proactive, innovative, and entrepreneurial
people are bound to be productive, and if and when obstacles
emerge, positivity and perseverance—again, identical advice
to that offered in Settle for More—are all that are required to
tackle and overcome them. Trump also specifically states that
being resilient applies to each and every aspect of women’s
lives.25
Given just how similar the two texts’ messages are, it
should therefore come as little surprise that the normative
ingredients that make up successful womanhood are indis-
tinguishable as well. Kelly uncritically embraces the ideal
of a happy balance, extolling the virtues of pursuing moth-

erhood as enthusiastically as her career. Being able to be a
doting mother and a tough, ambitious professional are what
ultimately constitute “settling for more.” Trump ostensibly
eschews the notion of work-family balance, claiming that
such balance is often impossible on a day-to-day basis, opting,
instead, for the term “work/life rhythm.”26 Yet, rhythm turns
out to be interchangeable with equilibrium, and the term
“balance” nevertheless reinserts itself into Trump’s happiness
script when she posits that her overall objective is to “attain
balance over her lifetime,” by which she means an equilib-
rium between being an involved parent and a successful
businesswoman.27 Hence, the work/life rhythm might need
to be recalibrated occasionally— or even quite often— in
order to ensure happiness, but a happy equilibrium between
work and family over time remains the ultimate endgame.
While the overlap between Trump’s and Kelly’s texts is
extensive, it is Women Who Work that arguably takes neo-
liberal feminism closer to its logical conclusion. As a re-
sult of its adherence to the how-to-succeed genre, offering
step-by-step advice, the book exposes in greater detail
neoliberalism’s moral imperative. By constantly inciting each
individual woman to pursue “savvy self-investment and en-
trepreneurial strategies of self- care,”28 Trump’s manifesto
helps demonstrate how individual women are being con-
strued as specks of human capital. Indeed, she encourages
women to labor ceaselessly on themselves in order to pro-
duce, maintain, and appreciate themselves as human capital,
albeit without forfeiting reproductive and care work respon-
sibilities.29 In a sense, then, Women Who Work thematizes
with disturbing clarity how neoliberal feminist discourses
around benchmarks, competition, and success are eclipsing
demands for equal rights, as well as how notions of the self-

as-stock are replacing discussions of autonomy and emanci-
pation, leaving few if any traces of the liberal feminist subject
in their wake.
THE NEOLIBERAL FEMINIST

SUBJECT
Michel Feher has described the historic shift in governance

that has occurred under neoliberalism’s hegemony, arguing
that neoliberalism is creating new forms of subjectivation,
which spawn human beings as human capital.30 The main
purpose of human capital, Feher explains, is not so much
“to profit from [its] accumulated potential as to constantly
value or appreciate itself—or at least prevent [its] own de-
preciation.”31 Human beings consequently become investors
in themselves as capital, wishing to enhance their own value
over time: “The various things I do, all contribute to either
appreciating or depreciating the human capital that is me.”32
Feher further claims that neoliberalism’s “subjective appa-
ratus”—the apparatus through which subjects are consti-
tuted and gain intelligibility—is radically different from the
one operating under liberalism. If under liberalism human
beings are conceived of as free laborers with labor power to
sell—a conception of the subject that, Feher underscores,
presumes a separation between the sphere of production and
the sphere of reproduction—under neoliberalism, human
beings are engendered as subjects who cultivate a speculative
relationship to the human capital that they have become; this
conception, in effect, dissolves any presumed separation be-
tween the spheres. The focus accordingly shifts from selling
labor or even human capital in the marketplace to increasing

one’s value everywhere— and all the time— by altering
and diversifying assets or modifying behaviors and social
interactions. Once again, every alteration or lack thereof is
considered either to appreciate or depreciate the value of the
self-as-human capital.
Building on Feher’s insights, Wendy Brown has more
recently claimed that neoliberalism is economizing polit-
ical and social life in distinctive ways, producing subjects for
which consumption, education, training, and mate selection
are all configured as practices of self-investment, where the
self is perceived not only an as entrepreneur of the self, as
scholars such as Nikolas Rose have already argued, but also
as an individual firm or business enterprise.33 Through pro-
cesses of devolution and responsibilization, neoliberal gov-
ernance constructs and manages subjects who are configured
as agents wholly responsible and blameable for their own
individual lives.34 The conversion of subjects—and, I argue,
particularly female subjects—into self-investing capital con-
sequently undoes traditional forms of social ties and rela-
tions. Furthermore, given that neoliberalism is remolding all
spheres of life into the model of the market—where compe-
tition and capital appreciation override all else—the world
is, according to Brown, increasingly becoming a place in
which there are only winners and losers, capital-enhancing
subjects and those deemed “disposable” because they are
“unbankable.”35
Similar in many ways to the various texts I examined in
Chapter 3 about hookup culture and egg freezing, Women
Who Work can be read as exposing the processes through
which aspirational women are interpellated as (poten-
tially) capital-
enhancing subjects. Through her constant
exhortation that women invest in and labor on all domains

of their lives, Trump reveals, performs, and helps to (re)pro-
duce the conversion of women from ostensible autonomous
rights-bearing liberal subjects who need to fight discrimina-
tion in order to gain access to the marketplace to sell their
labor into subjects who must work tirelessly on themselves
in order to produce and cultivate their selves as human cap-
ital. This human capital, she intimates, must be maintained
continuously. Every aspect of the self becomes a site of spec-
ulation, intense scrutiny, and affective investment—a process
whose objective is to increase and diversify the self ’s assets,
ideally to facilitate its appreciation, but, most important, to
prevent its depreciation.
This “comprehensive” approach serves to facilitate the
transmutation of the self into a business enterprise, while si-
multaneously helping to further unravel the private-public
divide. It is therefore not merely the economization of all
domains of life under neoliberal rationality that collapses
the liberal distinction between the private sphere of care and
the public sphere of labor, rendering them interchangeable,
but it is also neoliberalism’s “apparatuses of subjectivation”
that helps accelerate the eradication of this distinction. The
neoliberal subject herself—as an individual firm—is com-
pelled and encouraged to perceive every and all aspects of
her life and self—including reproduction and care work—as
requiring continuous capital investment, rendering the sep-
aration of public-private unintelligible. In other words, as
neoliberal rationality transforms more and more elements
of society into enterprises informed by a business model
with financialization at its heart, not only do all remaining
private-public distinctions collapse but the self (itself)
becomes increasingly indistinguishable from any other kind
of business enterprise, which ultimately undermines the very

logic upholding the separation between the spheres.
In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt famously
warned that the infiltration of instrumental economic ra-
tionality into the public domain produces and sustains cer-
tain ways of relating to the world informed by self-interests,
and the limited goal of securing the life process.36 The private
sphere’s encroachment into and colonization of the public
domain thus symbolizes the destruction of democratic
practices and engenders isolation, automization, and individ-
uation. For Arendt, economic necessity must remain within
the confines of the oikos (the household or private sphere),
or else life’s fundamental requirements—or bare life—spill
over into political life, and then threaten the very possibility
of deliberating together and “acting in concert” to create a
better society. While Arendt clearly does not frame her dis-
cussion in terms of neoliberal rationality and her concep-
tion of the private/public divide has already been copiously
criticized by feminist political theorists,37 her analysis of the
repercussions of a disintegrating private and public distinc-
tion as well as the danger of an all-encompassing economic
reason are prescient in many ways. The infiltration of an ec-
onomic rationality into all aspects of the public sphere is not
only undoing any notion of a demos that participates in po-
litical processes but is also rendering the private-public dis-
tinction obsolete by refiguring and reducing both realms—as
well as everything and everybody else, including the self—to
a market metrics.38
It is precisely in this context that one should read
Trump’s manifesto, since it reveals as well as enacts the two-
fold and concurrent collapsing of these traditionally distinct
realms: the public versus the private as well as one’s enterprise
versus one’s self. Following a prolonged introduction, Trump

urges women to draft a personal mission statement, which,
she claims, will pay certain “dividends” in the future by
helping them to identify their passions and “true north.”39
This exercise, in other words, will help them maximize their
“influence” later on. After identifying what their passions
are—preferably in their twenties—women are subsequently
encouraged to enter the business or professional world and
to cultivate a wide array of capabilities, such as networking
and negotiating deals “thoughtfully and effectively.” These
capabilities are depicted as part of the self ’s overall “portfolio
of conducts,”40 which are considered key for increasing the
probabilities of creating a successful enterprise and “making
one’s mark.”
Yet, this is precisely the moment when the boundary be-
tween self and business becomes blurred, since the advice
to foster these abilities—networking, negotiating skills—is
meant to enhance not only the business one works for (or
runs) but also—and perhaps most crucially—the self itself.
This helps explain why Women Who Work repeatedly insists
that it is important for women who have begun to make
their mark professionally to create to-do charts to “prior-
itize [their] time so that [they] are always adding value.”41
Planning well, which includes making endless lists about
what women want to accomplish—from mission statements
to everyday color-coded to-do lists—is central to ensuring
that hard work will enhance value and yield the proper
results. The self thus becomes, in the words of feminist the-
orist Angela McRobbie, a kind of “neoliberal spreadsheet,”42
indistinguishable from a business, where one calculates one’s
assets, one’s losses, and what is more or less valuable in order
to decide where more capital investment—in the form of
developing entrepreneurial skills, resources, or capacities—

is necessary. In Women Who Work, the self has indeed been
unashamedly transformed into an enterprise, and, as such,
there is no longer any need to presuppose the separation of
the private and public spheres.
The reconfiguration and collapse of the private-public
divide is perhaps most evident as Trump includes domains
traditionally and historically excluded from notions of
“boosting one’s productivity” and “maximizing one’s effi-
ciency” in neoliberalism’s calculative schema.43 Hobbies,
friendships, and other intimate relationships that under
liberalism were separate— at least conceptually— from a
calculative matrix are now carefully remade into forms of
investment and value management. While the book merely
intimates that decisions about whom one dates and marries
should also be part of this calculus,44 it explicitly encourages
women to foster friendships and hobbies not as ends in and of
themselves but instead as part of the self-as-business’s capital-
enhancing process. When discussing the importance of net-
working for women just starting out on their career, Trump
urges these women to make one new strong bond each time
they meet people at a party or conference. Although there
is some attempt to play down the instrumentalization of
other people, the emphasis is nonetheless on the new contact
or friend as beneficial either for business or for enhancing
one’s own value. Indeed, both the cultivation of intimacies
as well as self-care and leisure activities are transposed into
business-like strategies, which also illustrates how neoliberal
rationality and its “subjective apparatus” dissolve traditional
forms of social ties and relations, even toward one’s self.
What we witness, then, is the economization of domains
once closely associated with the non-market interests of
the private sphere. Particularly striking is how affect—

again, once inextricably linked to the domestic realm—has
been further transmuted into its own form of asset or cap-
ital, which now requires smart investment so as to increase
the probability of “dividends” in the future. One’s affective
attachments are perceived as forms of capital to be cultivated
and invested in order to enhance the value of the self ’s overall
portfolio. Indeed, savvy self-investment and entrepreneurial
strategies of self-care have become paramount. In this way,
Trump’s how-to-succeed book provides readers with a clear
vision of a world in which all spheres of human life have be-
come not only completely saturated by a calculative reason
but also reconfigured by neoliberalism’s moral imperative to
appreciate—or at least maintain—“one’s own market value as
the ultimate aim in life.”45
On the one hand, then, Women Who Work clearly
exposes many of the processes through which subjects are
required to remake themselves into various credit-seeking
assets, endlessly working on themselves in order to in-
crease their worth.46 Trump lays out in some detail the var-
ious kinds of temporal, physical, aesthetic, and affective
investments that women must make in order to ensure
that they can manage themselves successfully precisely as
capital-enhancing subjects. Taking care of ourselves and
professional development are, Trump insists, things that “we
must prioritize so that we may become the best version of
ourselves and achieve our goals.”47 These activities are meant
to maximize each woman’s value. The text can therefore be
said to encourage and further enact the conversion of aspi-
rational women into generic human capital, and this process
is perhaps best exemplified in the refiguring of motherhood
in managerial terms.
Although Trump does pay tribute to norms of intensive

and hands-on motherhood,48 she simultaneously provides
various directives about how to better manage the care-giving
role. She tells us that she writes lists for “connecting with
each of [her] kids,” putting real thought into ideas for pro-
ducing “memorable moments” she can create with them.49
Her approach to care work is calculative and reads more like
ticking off the right boxes in order to demonstrate “correct
investment” for eventual returns in the form of future mem-
ories. She also informs her readers that she makes sure to
have concrete family goals, which then enable her to pencil
in time with her family.50 These goals include official date
nights with her husband, dates that are scheduled into the
general family list well in advance.51 This is a very different
conception of intensive mothering or care work from
that which emerges from the mommy blogs examined in
Chapter 4. If savoring the moment serves to background and
naturalize reproductive work in the blogs, in Women Who
Work the realm of reproduction is transmogrified into regu-
lated, calculative, and carefully planned affective investment.
The perceptible difference in the way in which reproductive
and care work is presented here, namely, in more managerial
terms—thus undermining in interesting ways discourses of
“natural” female nurturing instincts—gestures to the further
saturation of a market metrics into domains that have tradi-
tionally upheld the gendered division of labor, thus further
attenuating the link between (certain) women and care work.
As a result, the ideal female self whom Trump presents po-
tentially challenges traditional—and conservative—notions
of sexual difference.
On the other hand, the conversion of women into generic
human capital remains incomplete, and not merely because
women are the ones deemed responsible for managing the

to-do lists. Rather, Trump’s normative trajectory includes
reproduction, while her ideal of female success remains a
happy work-family balance, which is precisely why Women
Who Work should be considered a neoliberal feminist man-
ifesto par excellence. Reproduction and care work thus con-
tinue to function as a pushback to neoliberalism’s conversion
of aspirational women into generic subjects. Moreover, even
as Trump extends a market metrics to all domains of women’s
life—thus contributing to the invisibilization of the gendered
care infrastructure undergirding neoliberalism, though in
Trump’s case through the outsourcing of this care to nannies
and other domestic help rather than through discourses of
savoring the present—she repeatedly insists that she greatly
values her role as wife to Jared Kushner. This insistence not
only aligns (or realigns) her with a certain familial tradition-
alism but can be understood to help buttress the pushback
against the erasure of so-called sexual difference.
In her extensive research on the subject of women, work,
and family, in the United Kingdom, Shani Orgad has dem-
onstrated how contemporary stay-at-home mothers rarely if
ever claim “wifehood” as part of their identity. The reason
for this disavowal is due, in large part, to these women’s con-
ception of themselves as progressive and independent. From
these women’s perspective, the vocation of full-time mother-
hood, where, as Orgad shows, they can conceive themselves
as CEOs of the family business, is legitimate. Wifehood,
by contrast, is not, since it is associated with conservative
notions from the 1950s, when housewife rather than stay-at-
home mothers was the term used to describe women who la-
bored solely in the domestic sphere.52 Trump’s insistence on
wifehood, “family values,” and the rhetoric of “family comes
first” alongside her occasional hymns to femininity can be

read as serving to align herself with conservatives, creating
a profound incongruity in Trump’s text: the accelerated
neoliberalization, particularly with respect to relationships
and care work, which propels the transmutation of women
into generic human capital on the one hand, and the in-
scription of more traditionalist conceptions of wifehood and
femininity on the other. As a result, the emergent “threat”
of erasing notions of sexual difference is not only staved off
through incorporating balance as the telos of a successful
life, but also through Trump’s constant assurances that her
priorities include being a wife and mother as well as her oc-
casional mention of women’s desire to nurture “femininity.”
These latter strategies for reasserting sexual difference and
traditional familialism are, I suggest, connected to Trump’s
conservative political alignments, and it is these political
alignments and their consequences that I explore in the next
section.
POLITICAL LEANINGS
Ivanka Trump is considered to be progressive on a range

of social issues, such as women’s and LGBTQ rights, and
she is sometimes characterized as a moderate conservative
in the mainstream media.53 When her father became the
Republican presidential candidate, however, daughter Trump
increasingly aligned herself with the Republican Party, and—
at the time of writing—is currently an active member of one
of the most right-wing administrations in recent US history.
Interestingly, and in contrast to Megyn Kelly, Trump has
publicly identified as a feminist, even though she stays clear
of the f-word in Women Who Work.54 Due to this discon-

nect between her ostensibly liberal positions on social issues
and her perceived complicity with the various reactionary
policies put forward by her father’s administration, she is
represented as a particularly enigmatic and ambivalent figure
in the US popular imagination.55 Yet reading Women Who
Work as a neoliberal feminist manifesto and in conjunction
with Kelly’s and Slaughter’s texts may shed some light on these
seeming contradictions, particularly as they relate to gender
issues. These three women may describe motherhood and
the broader issue of care in somewhat divergent terms, yet
the different emphases ultimately cover up and over a much
more profound convergence. Indeed, by examining these
texts through the lens of neoliberal feminism we can gain
insight into the processes through which traditional polit-
ical divides in the United States are being undone, producing
a very different—and extremely frightening—political and
cultural landscape.
Megyn Kelly’s long-standing association with the con-
servative Fox News Network has meant that she, too, is often
considered to be a moderately conservative actor by the
mainstream media.56 In Settle for More, she discloses that she
does not consider herself to be a feminist, claiming that her
problem with the f-word “is that it’s exclusionary and alien-
ating.”57 Her motto with respect to sexism and gender dis-
crimination is “the less talking about our gender, the better.”58
She also refuses to endorse government-mandated maternity
leave or to take a stand on abortion,59 thus situating herself
closer to traditionally conservative stances in the United
States vis-à-vis these particular social issues. Nonetheless,
Kelly has been repeatedly characterized as a feminist icon in
the media.
In a Vanity Fair article from October 2016, Emily Jane

Fox describes the now famed interview between Kelly and
Newt Gingrich (see Figure 5.1), where Kelly calmly rebuked
the former Republican Congressman and Speaker of the
House for downplaying the Access Hollywood tape that had
caught then presidential candidate Donald Trump bragging
about grabbing female genitals. Fox writes that regardless of
how Kelly identifies, she had become an “improbable feminist
icon” in the 2016 election season.60 Another article written
during this same period but in the more liberal-leaning Daily
Beast also states that even if Kelly refuses the feminist label,
her challenging Donald Trump on his misogyny during the
Republican presidential debate as well as her defiant poise
during the Gingrich interview “has certainly set a powerful
feminist example.”61 The media’s ability to interpellate Kelly
as feminist is not merely the result of the anchorwoman’s
public criticism of sexist men, however, but is also intimately
related to the surge of neoliberal feminist discourse in the
Figure 5.1 Megyn Kelly interviews Newt Gingrich on Fox’s Kelly File two
weeks before the 2016 elections.
popular and mainstream press since 2012, as well as the sim-

ilarity between her messages about women and those of self-
proclaimed feminists like Sheryl Sandberg and Anne-Marie
Slaughter. Kelly herself has admitted that her solution to
gender inequality is “a lot like Sandberg’s” and that the “best
answer and the best way forward to young women out there
who want to get ahead is work your tail off. Work harder than
everybody. Be better than everybody else.”62
Arguably, Trump and Kelly’s agreement on so many
key issues, particularly concerning the expediency of hard
work and their disavowal of the structural obstacles facing
women, is not particularly surprising given their similar po-
litical alignments. At the same time, they both assume and
repeatedly assert that developing a professional identity is
and should be normative for women. Their own professional
endeavors are absolutely central to their self-definition and,
of course, to their self-branding. Kelly, for instance, tells her
readers that she is very happy that her children are able to
see their mother in a powerful position, since, as a result,
they will grow up to understand that women “loving their
work is a natural thing.”63 Similarly, Trump states that despite
her “family first” policy, she is passionate about her career
and “completely invested” in her work.64 Thus, if we accept
the claim that these women have aligned themselves or have
been aligned with more socially conservative elements in
the United States—ones that have traditionally held up the
private family with its traditional normative sexual divi-
sion of labor as the moral foundation of society that must
be protected from market values65—then Kelly’s and Trump’s
unequivocal stance with respect to women developing their
own professional persona as well as their endorsement of
women continuing to work full time after they have children
is certainly worth noting. In this sense, they are stretching

the US conservative imagination. Moreover, and as I have
argued above, Trump’s reworking of family life and care work
in more managerial terms can even be understood to effec-
tively, if unwittingly, undermine the very foundations of this
kind of neoconservative logic.
On the other side of the US institutional political di-
vide we find Anne-Marie Slaughter, who not only worked as
the first female director of policy planning in the US State
Department under then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,
but who has publicly identified herself as a progressive
Democrat. In Unfinished Business, Slaughter (once again)
proudly and unequivocally declares herself to be a feminist
and lays out her vision of a better world. Her ideal society—
and one that she claims would rejuvenate America as well as
its promise of equality—is a world in which care work and
competition are genuinely equal and equally valued for both
men and women.66 Thus, in an interesting historic twist, the
more progressive and feminist-identified Slaughter insists
on the centrality of the values traditionally associated with
the domestic sphere, namely, “loving and caring for other,”67
while the more conservative women extol women’s “pro-
ductive” labor. These perhaps unexpected starting points
ultimately result in a meeting in the middle: namely, the
championing of a happy work-family balance.
To be sure, equality does figure more centrally in
Slaughter’s book than it did in her 2012 article or than it
does in either Trump or Kelly’s texts. Slaughter also offers
more suggestions about how to facilitate certain institu-
tional changes, particularly in the workplace, which would
then allow for the re-evaluation of care work. Interestingly,
though, and similar to Megyn Kelly, she does not necessarily
advocate government solutions (having, it seems, internal-

ized the conservative critique of big government) to the care
work crisis, even as she speaks in grandiose terms about cre-
ating an equal infrastructure of care. For instance, she rhe-
torically asks, “why not encourage a little competition over
care?” and then leaves her readers with a deliberately vague
answer: “Left and Right should challenge each other to see
whether market solutions or government solutions for the
care crisis work better.”68 Like Ivanka Trump, then, market
competition is central to her vision.
Even more significant, however, is Slaughter’s answer
to the question regarding which concrete actions are re-
quired in order to achieve gender equality once and for all.
Throughout the book, she provides a number of suggestions
about the various steps women and men can and should
take in order to complete the feminist revolution. One of her
central propositions involves revamping our conception of
normative career trajectories. Rather than understanding
successful careers as progressing in a linear fashion, i.e.,
without any breaks or interruptions in advancement, or as
inflexibly requiring so-called face time, Slaughter suggests
that we need to begin legitimating alternative professional
paths that do not follow this rigid linear or “presentist” logic.
If we were to do so, we would be much better situated to value
care as much as competition. Indeed, given that Americans’
working lives have significantly expanded and that for the
vast majority of working people their now fifty-odd working
years will likely be punctuated by childrearing responsibilities
and/or taking care of elderly parents, reconceptualizing de-
sirable career paths would allow women or men to “lean out”
during precisely those periods in which intensive care work
is required. Everyone could then, according to Slaughter,
potentially “stay in the [job] game,” “plan for leaning back as

well as leaning in,” and “make deliberate rather than unin-
tended choices.”69 If, as a society, we were to take into account
these different periods and the divergent demands each pe-
riod makes on us, then the “care problem” could be solved.
The book’s final chapters, which lay out in detail
Slaughter’s concrete proposals, however, not only read like
a self-help manual but the suggestions focus almost exclu-
sively on women’s individual responsibility.70 “It is still up to
you,” she declares, “to start thinking now about what might
happen later.”71 Indeed, the book’s overall message can be
summed up in the following way: once women manage to
transform themselves—how they think, how they talk, how
they plan and work and vote—they will finally be able to
craft a felicitous equilibrium between work and family life
and thus solve the “care crisis.”72 And while Slaughter insists
that her advice is meant to address both men and women, the
implied audience is clearly women, which also helps explain
why the book is marketed under the rubric of “business and
women’s issues.” In this way, Slaughter, too, ultimately places
the responsibility of careful planning and investment for the
future on individual women’s shoulders. Not only does the
ideal of successful womanhood turn out to be identical in
all three books but Slaughter, like Trump and Kelly after her,
assumes and conjures up a responsibilized and individual-
ized neoliberal feminist subject.
Arguably the most revealing moments in Unfinished
Business—and one that sheds the most light on the hows and
whys of the convergence among the three texts—is when
Slaughter queries how the “human capital” that we build
through nurture and care should be measured. She contends
that while managing money may be difficult, so, too, is
managing children; after all, according to Slaughter, they are

both investments in certain kinds of capital.73 Invoking the
language of capital is in itself significant, underscoring the
way in which Unfinished Business is informed by neoliber-
alism, and, yet, it is the answer that Slaughter provides to her
own question that is the most significant. She proposes that
valuing care as much as competition requires an ability to
measure the true “economic value of care for children and
adults.”74 What Slaughter seems to be saying here is that in
order to arrive at the true value of care work, new economic
indicators must be introduced into the reproductive and
care sectors—ones that can more adequately evaluate proper
compensation for such labor.
On the one hand, this is clearly a laudable objective, since
care work has traditionally gone unacknowledged as valuable
work or, if acknowledged, has been vastly undervalued.75 On
the other hand, Slaughter’s solutions to the “care problem”
must be understood as part of the wider cultural and polit-
ical landscape, which is converting everything into an econo-
mized market frame. Unfinished Business fully participates in
this process, while helping to eclipse other possible registers
through which we could potentially evaluate our relations,
actions, and affective attachments (see Chapter 6). Care work
is not invisibilized in Slaughter’s text, but rather—and similar
to Trump’s managerial approach to motherhood—transposed
into and conceived through a calculative economic logic. The
final reduction of care work as well as everything and every-
body else into a market metrics transpires when Slaughter
optimistically declares that “we can measure anything we
think is important and seek to increase.”76 Wittingly or not,
a financialized market lexicon— namely, the language of
investment, stocks, and capital appreciation—has become

the standard and the means of all evaluation.
Despite their individual idiosyncrasies and different

narrative contexts, this three-text comparison reveals how
these books have all been forged within an increasingly
dominant neoliberal rationality, one that collapses and
refigures traditional distinctions—from the private versus
the public to one’s self versus one’s enterprise through
Democrat versus Republican. The condition of possibility
of the convergence among Slaughter’s, Kelly’s, and Trump’s
texts is precisely neoliberalism’s “stealth revolution,” which,
termite-like, “bor[es] in capillary fashion into the trunks and
branches of workplaces, schools, public agencies, social and
political discourse, and above all, the subject.” Importantly,
however, neoliberalism as a political rationality also brings
into being “new subjects, conduct, relations, and worlds.”77
This dual process, I suggest, can be seen quite clearly in
these how-to-succeed guides. And, yet neoliberalism is not
the entire story, either. As I have argued, these manifestos
have also been forged in a cultural and political context in
which reproduction and care work continue to present an
obstacle to and for neoliberal rationality’s ongoing conver-
sion of gendered human subjects into generic human cap-
ital. Consequently, it would be more accurate to say that the
underlying logic informing Unfinished Business, Settle for
More, and Women Who Work is a neoliberal feminist one.
And it is this context of an increasingly dominant neolib-
eral feminism that I now turn to thinking about whether
and how it might still be possible to reclaim feminism as a
social justice movement.
6
✦
RECLAIMING FEMINISM
AN ARTICLE THAT APPEARED IN the New York Times in

2014 tells the story of Jannette Navarro, a twenty-two-year-
old single mother whose cheerfulness and persistence even-
tually secured her a job at Starbucks. Her nine dollars an
hour wage as a barista was a move up from her previous
jobs, which included stints at Dollar Tree and the KFC fran-
chise. However, due to Starbucks’ flexible scheduling policy,
Navarro—the daughter of a drug addict mother and an ab-
sentee father— was endlessly scrambling to arrange last-
minute child care for her four-year-old son, Gavin. The
article poignantly describes how Navarro’s inability to plan
ahead wreaked havoc not only on her relationship with her
boyfriend but was also causing increasing tension with her
aunt, who had given her refuge over the years and who had
often looked after Gavin. But the aunt was herself a mother
of two small children, which made being on call for her niece
extremely difficult. Navarro’s story, luckily, has a relatively
happy ending—we learn that Starbucks eventually agreed to
provide her with a stable forty-hour-per-week schedule.1
The New York Times article is very much a human-
interest story, and, as such, its effectiveness derives, at least
in part, from the sympathetic description of Navarro, who
is portrayed as doing everything in her power to make a
R eclaiming F eminism | 163
better life for herself and her son. The story does, nonetheless,
include a structural critique, drawing attention to those left
behind by the so-called flexible or gig economy: “flexibility—
an alluring word for white-collar workers, who may desire,
say, working from home one day a week—can have a darker
meaning for many low-income workers as a euphemism for
unstable hours or paychecks.”2 In this way, the article manages
to foreground the reality of many low- income working
parents, particularly poor single mothers. The moving
narrative also profoundly resonates with a flurry of much
less hopeful reports that, in different ways, have documented
how, at the precise moment that the ideal of the balanced
woman began gaining traction and circulating widely—
individuating and responsibilizing “aspirational” women—a
whole series of other processes, generated or intensified by
neoliberalism, have further undermined working mothers’
ability to earn a living wage.
Jannette Navarro’s ability to procure a full-time and stable
job is perhaps unusual, particularly given her social and ec-
onomic background, yet her more general predicament is in
no way exceptional. The challenges facing many if not the
majority of women in the United States—and elsewhere—
are, in many respects, just as daunting. According to the
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD), in terms of real wages, the past progress made in
narrowing the gender wage gap in the United States has
lost momentum and currently remains stubbornly at about
17 percent.3 Yet, as scholars such as Keeanga- Yamahtta
Taylor have pointed out, these statistics do not differentiate
according to family status or race. Working women with
children earn up to 10 percent less than women without chil-
dren, while black women make 37 percent less than white
men do, with $0.63 for each dollar that white men make.4
Consequently, not only is there a motherhood wage “pen-
alty” but a racialized gender one as well. In terms of unpaid
work, recent studies reveal that on average women in the
United States are doing 242 minutes of unpaid work each
day compared with 148 minutes for men, where unpaid work
consists of both domestic chores and care work.5 Statistically,
then, low-income minority single mothers are at the very
bottom of the wage hierarchy, while they must do all of the
unenumerated labor themselves unless, like Navarro, they
have relatives or friends who are willing to help them.
The New York Times article also mentions, albeit briefly,
another key process that has undermined working mothers’
ability to earn a living wage—the privatization of child care
as well as its exorbitant cost and formidable lack of availa-
bility. According to a 2016 report by the Center for American
Progress, 42 percent of American children under five live in
“child care deserts,” namely, areas where there are not enough
child care centers.6 Many low-income working parents of
preschool-aged children are therefore forced to find patch-
work solutions to child care, rendering it extremely difficult
for many women with young children even to attempt to join
the labor force. Lack of affordable child care is yet another
reason why so many women—one in eight in the general
population and one in three for single mothers—cannot exit
the cycle of poverty.7
The flip side of this equation involves the outsourcing
of care work by those few who can afford it—women like
Ivanka Trump, Sheryl Sandberg, and Megyn Kelly. Women
who do manage to cultivate a demanding career while raising
children most often require some combination of service
providers—a cleaner, a nanny, a housekeeper, and/or a baby
nurse—in order to pull it off. After all, as Hannah Seglison

so aptly puts it: “someone has to do the schlepping, cooking,
cleaning, child care, and laundry.”8 And when this domestic
and care work is outsourced, that someone is—approximately
95 percent of the time—another woman.9
Yet narratives of the outsourcing of care are almost com-
pletely elided from contemporary mainstream or popular
narratives about women, work, and family. Ivanka Trump,
for example, mentions her children’s nanny only once in her
book Women Who Work, and this more or less is the pattern
among neoliberal feminists. It is rare, indeed, to encounter
a news story that gives us any details about the women who
make up the paid care sector operating under the official
radar. Who are they? Under what conditions do they work?
How widespread is the phenomenon? The media coverage
given to nannies, when it occurs, for example, is often sensa-
tional, occurring when these women are accused of abusing
either their charges or their situation—even though, in re-
ality, the abuse is exponentially more likely to be the other
way around.10 Moreover, available official government statis-
tics regarding domestic workers in the United States are con-
sidered extremely inaccurate since many of them are working
in the so-called gray economy. Unofficial reports, however,
show that domestic workers are overwhelmingly women,
and that the majority are women of color and immigrants.11
These reports also document that many of these women do
not receive social benefits or have any kind of job security
and that their wages rank among the lowest of all waged
workers in the United States.12
However, these reports merely strengthen what many
feminist scholars and activists have underscored time and
again: namely, that immense difficulties continue to confront
the majority of women in the United States. Highlighting

these difficulties here, even just briefly, helps buttress the
claim that precisely as neoliberal feminism gains ground and
becomes part of mainstream public discourse—increasingly
interpellating “aspirational” women— it simultaneously
“invisibilizes” the vast majority of American women—
women like Jannette Navarro, who, despite her few minutes
of fame, struggles daily just to sustain her and Gavin’s bare
existence. Indeed, exposing this dual process of interpella-
tion and invisibilization lays bare how neoliberal feminism
serves to refigure as well as reinforce gendered and racial
stratifications. The success of privileged women—particularly
in the professional world—often rests on the underpaid, pre-
carious, and very often exploitative work of other women
who are less privileged. As I have argued in Chapter 3, ne-
oliberal feminism accelerates and intensifies this splitting of
female subjecthood, thus facilitating the growing number of
women living in a state of precarity.
DELEGITIMIZING NEOLIBERAL
FEMINISM
It is precisely within the context of the rise of neoliberal femi-

nism and the intensifying and glaring gap between a handful of
elite women’s success stories on the one hand, and the 99 per-
cent of women on the other, that feminist activists and scholars
have excoriated the feminism espoused by Ivanka Trump and
Sheryl Sandberg, arguing that they valorize individual women’s
success over social and collective justice, while simultane-
ously defining success in terms that merely serve to buttress
the interests of the male establishment. In a recent opinion
piece published in OpenDemocracy, scholar Lea Sitkin ulti-

mately concludes that this new feminist discourse “isn’t fem-
inism at all.”13
In a similar vein, Andi Zeisler argues that the new phe-
nomenon of celebrities, such as Beyoncé, adopting feminism
and/or using it as part of their self-branding is a complicated
issue, especially since these celebrities’ knowledge of “ac-
tual feminist issues” is often very vague.14 Zeisler attempts
to distinguish between what she terms marketplace fem-
inism, which draws on a depoliticized notion of liberation
to sell products, and actual feminism that is concerned with
equality and gender justice. Well- known feminist writer
Jessica Valenti has also commented on the sudden om-
nipresence of the f-word in popular culture. Like Zeisler,
Valenti raises her concern that “without some boundaries
for claiming the word feminist, it becomes meaningless.” She
further ponders whether “in our haste to convince the world
that feminism is a simple, shared value, it may be that we
didn’t draw clear enough boundaries.”15 Thus, in an attempt
to critique the rise of so-called popular feminism, a range of
activists and scholars have insisted that only some feminisms
are “actual feminism,” declaring that “neoliberal feminism”
should not be considered feminism at all.
W H AT I S F E M I N I S M ?
This endeavor to shore up feminism’s borders is, however,

problematic. Such a position assumes that we know in ad-
vance what feminism is and that it can be demarcated once
and for all. It also assumes the existence of unchanging first
principles from which “actual” feminist issues organically
arise. Yet, are there unchanging and uncontested feminist

issues or, alternatively, are the issues that we conceive of as
feminist constantly evolving and changing? And if the issues
are contested and shift over time, then what does this signify
with respect to first principles? Postulating the necessity of
secure boundaries—thus shoring up first principles as well
as delimiting certain issues as the legitimate issues—often
entails, wittingly or unwittingly, the grounding of feminism
on the liberal conception of the rights-bearing autonomous
subject, as well as a refusal to keep the term feminism open
to future democratic contestations.
Valenti, for example, categorically states that women
who are anti-choice simply cannot be feminists. “So once
and for all,” she exclaims, “Can you be an anti-choice fem-
inist? The answer is a resounding, ‘No!’ ”16 Yet, this leaves
unquestioned and unexamined a whole set of assumptions,
not least the notion of choice and the Western context of
the political debate around abortion. In the United States,
the debates around reproductive rights have been forged
within a liberal framework involving the right to privacy and
property, where “choice” signifies women’s individual right
to make decisions about her body, conceived as her private
property. Within this particular frame, women should
have the right to choose whether or not to continue with a
pregnancy. Yet, as anthropologist Michele Rivkin-Fish has
argued, in post-Soviet Russia, the “choice” of whether or not
to undergo an abortion has a very different resonance, even
among more privileged women.
Given the historical lack of availability of safe
contraceptives, Rivkin- Fish shows, many women in the
Soviet Union resorted to legal and subsidized abortions as
a form of contraception, particularly from the 1950s until
the 1990s. In addition, even though abortions were offi-

cially sanctioned by the state, the Soviet government was
unabashedly pro-natalist; thus, the clinics that performed
abortions during this period operated like “factories or
meat grinders,” giving no thought to women’s comfort.17
Consequently, Russian women have “widely experienced
abortion as a symptom of their lack of choices.”18 Rivkin-Fish
also recounts how, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse,
there have been renewed attempts to limit women’s access
to abortion, due, in part, to the declining birth rate and the
rise of conservative forces, such as Russian nationalists. Yet,
to this day none of the proponents of legally accessible, pub-
licly funded abortion have deployed the concept of choice.
Drawing on a different set of assumptions as well as rhetor-
ical tools, feminist activists in Russia have tended to point
to the socio-economic constraints to childbearing and used
slogans such as: “fight abortion, not women.”19 Economic
equity, Rivkin-Fish shows, has served as their moral refer-
ence point rather than individual autonomy. Consequently, a
blanket statement such as the one that Valenti proffers in her
article, in effect—and even if it is meant on some level to be
polemical—precludes an analysis of the presuppositions of
such a statement, its specific political framing, or its potential
blind spots. It also shuts down crucial if difficult discussions
about what choice signifies, rendering such debates off limits.
A different approach, by contrast, is one that also avows
a certain political and normative commitment, but simul-
taneously recognizes feminism’s “contingent foundations”
and, as a consequence, is attentive to keeping its boundaries
open to future contestations.20 As many feminists of color
and postcolonial feminists have underscored time and again,
any attempt to define feminism once and for all or police
its borders has ultimately resulted in violent exclusions,

while often buttressing imperialist and racist projects.
Chandra Mohanty famously disclosed how Western feminist
discussions of “third world” women reproduced ethnocen-
tric universalism construing non-Western women as an ahis-
torical, monolithic, and coherent group or category.21 This, in
turn, positioned the Western feminists as the invisible norm,
reinscribing colonial power relations, while also determining
which issues received priority. Moreover—and crucially—
even within the United States, the pro-choice rhetoric has
been challenged by feminists of color, who have laid bare
how “choice” has been the privilege of predominantly white
middle-class women “who have the ability to choose from
reproductive options unavailable to poor and low-income
women, especially women of color.”22 Reproductive justice
rather than choice is often the banner around which these
theorists and activists mobilize.
Simply dismissing neoliberal feminism as “faux femi-
nism” reproduces a similar logic of exclusion. And while it is
clear that this kind of dismissal stems from a political desire
to reclaim feminism for more progressive purposes, theoreti-
cally it seems misguided. Indeed, if, on the one hand, we have
witnessed the increasing entanglement of feminism with a
range of neoliberal and neoconservative and even right-wing
issues across the globe, on the other hand, this imbrication
of feminism with non-emancipatory projects is a powerful
reminder that feminism has always been an unstable sig-
nifier. Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini, who have exam-
ined the field of human rights, have forcibly demonstrated
that discourses traditionally associated with emancipation
and social justice can (always) potentially be mobilized for
purposes of domination, since, as they argue, human rights
have no absolute essence or fixed meaning, but, rather,

emerge within particular historical political, social, and cul-
tural landscapes.23 The normative struggle, then, is not to
attempt to tether the signifier—whether human rights or in
our case feminism—to a set of ahistoric signifieds, which will
inevitably fail, but rather to ask how we can re-signify such
discourses to counter domination, while leaving these terms
open to further contestation.
It appears, therefore, that we would be better served by
exposing the kind of cultural work neoliberal feminism is
carrying out, the kinds of subjects it helps to produce, and
the way it mobilizes affect to generate passionate attachments
to its ideals, particularly the happily balanced woman.
Critical investigations of this sort are urgent, since these
critiques lay bare the dominant rationality undergirding this
strand of feminism while—crucially—facilitating renewed
discussion about how we might re-signify the term in neo-
liberal times. Importantly, this move does not discard neolib-
eral feminism’s claim to feminism but, rather, discloses and
rejects its logic and political commitments. The important
question, consequently, is not whether neoliberal feminism
is “actual” feminism, but rather how we can reorient femi-
nism toward a newly articulated vision of social justice, one
that holds out, in Juliet Mitchell’s famous words, the promise
of the “longest revolution.”24
T H E C U R R E N T S TAT E
OF FEMINISM
In a provocative commentary on the contemporary state of

feminism in the Anglo-American world, scholar Nina Power
points out that we are witnessing a “strange simultaneous

overlap and mismatch between three manifestations of fem-
inism today.”25 First, Power claims that academic feminism
continues to bubble along “despite, and sometimes because
of the inroads made by gender studies and queer theory.”26
In other words, feminist theory has remained a relatively
separate field of inquiry, even as other fields have emerged
to challenge, complicate, and often extend its disciplinary
boundaries. One could even argue that the increasingly
widespread entanglement of feminist themes with anti-
emancipatory movements has spurred a growing number of
feminist scholars to interrogate the root causes of this phe-
nomenon, while also attempting to map out the contours and
implications of these major and disturbing developments.
Indeed, there seems to be a reenergized scholarly literature
on “wither” feminism in the twenty-first century.27
Second, Power underscores that neoliberal feminism
has become ever more visible and dominant in the popular
media. This is partly due, in Power’s words, to “its online
prominence and support by pop stars like Beyoncé and Miley
Cyrus.”28 But neoliberal feminism’s currency in the main-
stream cultural landscape, as I have documented in the pre-
vious chapters, also goes hand in hand with well-known and
high-powered women publicly identifying as feminists as
well as the widespread circulation of texts, such as Sandberg’s
Lean In. The neoliberal feminist ideal of the happily balanced
woman, moreover, is currently taking hold in other spaces
well beyond the US borders, and has now permeated the cul-
tural field and popular imagination in the United Kingdom
and elsewhere.29
Finally, Power points to how grassroots feminism and
large-scale feminist protest have re-emerged as a potentially
potent political force. Particularly in the wake of Trump’s

election and the reappearance of a shameless sexism in the
public sphere, there has been a wave of mass feminist mil-
itancy.30 We witnessed this most prominently during the
Women’s March in January 2017, when millions of women
and men around the world marched to demand reproduc-
tive rights, immigration reform, LGBTQ rights, environ-
mental justice, and workers’ rights as well as to condemn
religious, gender, and racial inequalities (see Figure 6.1);
we also saw this mass political mobilization when tens of
thousands of women marched on International Women’s
Day in March 2017. What is particularly striking about these
mass demonstrations—as well as the grassroots activists who
helped organize them, such as the new movement Feminism
for the 99 percent—is that they very consciously (if not al-
ways successfully or unproblematically) attempt to include
and address inequalities that expand, in significant ways, the
Figure 6.1 Hundreds of thousands of people march down Pennsylvania

Avenue in Washington, DC, during the Women’s March, January 21,
2017. Bryan Woolston/Reuters.
single analytic frame of gender. These were not one-issue or

narrowly defined protests but rather an expression of mass
discontent regarding a dizzying array of inequalities facing
women, minorities, and precarious populations. Thus, on
some level, we have already seen various powerful attempts
to reclaim feminism. As Naomi Klein eloquently puts it,
after decades of “siloed” politics, more and more people un-
derstand that the current moment requires the deepening
connections among diverse movements fighting for a world
in which everyone is valued and where we “don’t treat people
or the natural world as if they were disposable.”31
The three contemporary manifestations of feminism
that Power documents mutually inflect and reflect one an-
other. The resurgence of the scholarly literature concerned
with “wither feminism in the twenty-first century” as well as
the mass feminist mobilization can be understood, at least in
part, as a response to the entrenchment of neoliberal femi-
nism, and perhaps more important, to what this entrench-
ment represents with respect to our contemporary political
landscape. On the one hand, taken together, these three
manifestations certainly all suggest that we are experiencing
a feminist renaissance of sorts. On the other hand, however,
these three manifestations are also radically divergent: fem-
inist theorizing is not the same as grassroots activism, even
if they very often inform one another, and the people who
champion feminist theory and feminist grassroots activism
are very often at profound odds with the proponents of ne-
oliberal feminism. In addition, the issues that activists and
many feminist scholars believe are urgent, the audiences
they address, the types of critiques they offer, and the kinds
of solutions they advocate are also diametrically opposed to
neoliberal feminism. It is, accordingly, incumbent on us to
distinguish among them. How, then, might we sustain and

even broaden this renaissance of feminism, while rejecting
the logic and political commitments of neoliberal feminism?
While I do not pretend to have the answers, movements
such as Feminism for the 99 percent do seem like important
places to begin. These feminist movements are qualitatively
different from their mainstream and popular counterparts,
such as Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In circles, since their vision
of the world is one in which economic, social, and cultural
structures must be dramatically transformed in order to en-
able the greatest number of people to thrive. In stark con-
trast to neoliberal feminism’s ideal of the happily balanced
woman, these alternative feminist visions not only challenge
but also constitute a profound threat to our contemporary
neoliberal order. Given our grim and frightening reality, it is
precisely such a threatening feminism that I believe we need
to cultivate, encourage, and ceaselessly espouse.
VISIONS OF PRECARITY
What kinds of conceptual “grounding” or framing might fa-

cilitate the widespread mobilization for such a feminism?
Judith Butler’s recent work on precarity can, I believe, help
provide such a conceptual framing. In particular, her notion
of precariousness, which describes a social and economic
condition that cuts across identity claims, provides us with
an alternative vocabulary with which to continue the work
of reorienting feminism. As activists and scholars have
been documenting for years, most conditions of precarity—
whether due to climate change, war, or domestic violence—
disproportionately affect women.
Building on this gendered insight, while leaving the cate-

gory of “woman” and feminism open to future contestation,
this conceptual framework asks after the social conditions
and structures that produce vast inequalities in and of pre-
cariousness in its various manifestations. Developing a
feminist politics of and against precarity could potentially
bring together and into alliances marginalized groups and
populations who “do not otherwise find much in common
and between whom there is sometimes even suspicion and
antagonism”: whether they are women, LGBTQ people, the
poor, or racial and other minorities.32 Indeed, this frame-
work imagines a coalition among Feminism for the 99 per-
cent, the Standing Rock water protectors, the marginalized
populations in Texas who were disproportionately affected
by Hurricane Harvey, Black Lives Matter, and Code Pink,
the feminist antiwar movement, to name a few of the more
visible groups struggling for social justice and against
precarity. Precisely because the condition of precarious-
ness cannot be reduced to economic processes—after all,
precariousness can and is produced through many diverse,
though often converging, processes, not least of which
include the dominant discursive power of intepellation
and subjectification—and because it underscores social,
economic, and cultural conditions rather than an iden-
tity, precarity can transcend particular identities without
disavowing these identities’ specificities. The creation of
such alliances has, to a certain extent, already become—
and should, I believe, become even more—threatening to
the diverse apparatuses that engender precarity, while pro-
viding the “ground” for renewed mass mobilization against
structural violence, immanent environmental catastrophe,
imperialism, and continued oppression.
In other words, given just how bleak the future looks

for an ever-increasing number of people—with increasing
economic insecurity not only for the poor but even for the
diminishing middle class in the West, an exponential rise
in racial and ethnic violence across the globe alongside dire
predictions with respect to climate change as well as renewed
threats of nuclear war—it certainly seems that more and more
people will be made vulnerable in the near future. Invoking
precariousness as a central term in our feminist vocabulary
as well as a conceptual node through which social justice
can be articulated and perhaps even assessed may therefore
be key to creating unexpected connections, coalitions, and
alliances, and even new communities. The monumentality
of the task in front of us is undeniable, since such a femi-
nist politics would not only have to challenge neoliberalism
but also the infrastructural apparatuses—whether economic,
racist, sexist, queer or transphobic, or otherwise—that help
produce such differential precarity in the first place.
By way of conclusion, I would like to add that the
reclaiming of feminism must also have an institutional com-
ponent. Grassroots action and mass protest will simply not
be enough. The forces against which we are struggling—
neoliberalism, neofascism, neocolonialism, ecological
catastrophe—are simply too powerful and too destructive
in their various convergences, while the corporate and state
institutions supporting them are currently so massive in both
their reach and influence. Taking into account that, currently,
the only institutions that can still potentially be made ac-
countable to the demos are state institutions, I do not believe
that we can dismiss or reject state politics outright. On the
contrary, we must (re)capture these institutions by engaging
directly and continuously with them on multiple levels. This
will enable us to reclaim and recontour the state, while rend-

ering its infrastructure and institutions feminist in the social
justice sense. Capturing the state is crucial if we are to win the
fight for guaranteed paid maternity and parental leave, free,
public, and quality child care, and ensuring a living wage with
decent working conditions for domestic and care workers. But
these struggles are ultimately insufficient. We will need to be-
come even more daring, creating coalitions and unexpected
alliances, insisting upon and instituting agendas like a living
wage for everyone, reproductive justice, a clean-energy revo-
lution including an immediate end to fossil fuel extraction,
production, and circulation, as well as state recognition of
and reparations for genocide and slavery. It is crucial to stress
that I do not in any way mean this list to be comprehensive
but rather to emphasize as strongly as possible that in order
to carry out any of these transformations we need to work
with and recreate state institutions. Institutional infrastruc-
ture and support are vital not only for buttressing us against
the ecological and economic catastrophes of neoliberalism,
but also—ultimately—for ensuring that the conditions under
which vulnerability and interdependency are produced can
be distributed equally, which, in turn, may be the only way
of enabling the greatest possible number of lives to become
“livable.” For sure, we must resist the “paternalism” and vi-
olence of existing state and economic institutions, but if we
are to survive the unprecedented threats to the very sustain-
ability of life on this planet that we are currently facing, then
we must mobilize the feminist threat on every single level of
existence possible.
NOTES
Introduction
1. Naomi Klein made this claim in an interview for Democracy

Now! on January 20, 2017, available online at https://www.
democracynow.org/2017/1/20/naomi_klein_on_trump_elec-
tion_this (accessed May 26, 2017); see also Naomi Klein, No
Is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics (London: Allen
Lane, 2017); and Cornel West, “Goodbye American
Neoliberalism: A New Era Is Here,” The Guardian, November
17, 2016: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/
nov/17/american-neoliberalism-cornel-west-2016-election
(accessed May 26, 2017).
2. Brigitte Amiri, “How Is Trump Planning to Attack Reproductive
Rights, LGBT Equality, and Religious Minorities? We’ll Find
Out,” ACLU website, available online: https://www.aclu.org/
blog/speak-freely/how-trump-planning-attack-reproductive-
rights-lgbt-equality-and-religious (accessed May 26, 2017).
3. Naomi Klein underscores the destruction that has already been
wrought under the Trump administration. However, she also
argues that Trump is not an aberration but rather a logical con-
clusion of “all of the worst trends” that have occurred in the past
half century. See No Is Not Enough, 9.
180 | N otes
4. See, for example, Julia Sudbury, “Unpacking the Crisis: Women

of Color, Globalization, and the Prison Industrial Complex,”
in Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the
United States, ed. Rickie Solinger et al. (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2010), 11– 26; Alison M. Jaggar, “Is
Globalization Good for Women?” Comparative Literature
53, no. 4 (2001): 298–314; and Nancy Fraser, “The End of
Progressive Neoliberalism,” Dissent, January 2, 2017: https://
www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/progressive-ne-
oliberalism-reactionary-populism-nancy-fraser (accessed
October 10, 2017).
5. West, “Goodbye, American Neoliberalism.”
6. See the website created by Jeremy Pressman and Erica
Chenoweth, Crowd Counting Consortium, available online:
https://sites.google.com/ v iew/ crowdcountingconsortium/
home (accessed May 26, 2017).
7. Indeed, the entanglement between neoliberalism and fem-
inism is fascinating if only because the former is associated
with the state shedding its obligations toward its citizenry,
while feminism—and more particularly liberal feminism as
the most dominant variant of feminism in the United States—
has been considered a progressive stance that makes claims on
the state to secure women’s rights and equal opportunity.
8. See, for example, Lynne Segal, Making Trouble, Life and
Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2017), iv–xxxvi.
9. Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of
a Sensibility,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 2
(2007): 147–66.
10. Segal, Making Trouble, iv–xxxvi.
11. Sky News, “Home Sec Theresa May: ‘Why I’m a Feminist,’”
Monday 23, 2012: http://news.sky.com/story/home-sec-
theresa-may-why-im-a-feminist-10481720 (accessed May 26,
2017); and Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, “Theresa May Says She’s
a Feminist,” The Guardian, December 13, 2016: https://www.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/13/theresa-may-
feminist-bloddy- d ifficult- woman- p eriod- p overty- afford-
tampons (accessed May 26, 2017); for Ivanka Trump, see
Mariana Fang, “Ivanka Trump Booed for Claiming Donald
N otes | 181
Trump Is ‘a Tremendous Champion’ for Women,” HuffPost,

April 25, 2017: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ivanka-
trump-g20-women_us_58ff48ebe4b0b6f6014aabf3 (accessed
May 26, 2017); see also: http://www.irishtimes.com/news/
world/europe/are-you-a-feminist-ivanka-trump-s ays-yes-
merkel-fudges-1.3060993 (accessed May 26, 2017).
12. The year 2012 constitutes a symbolic watershed and not an
absolute break. As I will explain, 2012 is the year in which
Anne-Marie Slaughter published her article “Why Women
Still Can’t Have It All” in the Atlantic, which helped to spark
renewed feminist discussion in the popular and mainstream
media. Many of the issues she raises had been brewing for
some time, but it was the publication of this article along-
side a number of other widely read publications that really
jump- started the conversation. Scholars such as Angela
McRobbie and have also demonstrated that since around
2012, there has been a marked explosion of feminist discus-
sion in the media. See McRobbie, “Feminism, the Family,
and the New ‘Mediated’ Maternalism,” New Formations 80,
no. 4 (2013): 119–37.
13. For the classic feminist critiques of this bifurcation in lib-
eral thought, see Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Jean Bethke
Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social
and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1981); and Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and
Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1995).
14. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth
Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015); Michel Feher,
“Self-Appreciation; Or, the Aspirations of Human Capital,”
Public Culture 21, no. 1 (2009): 21–41; and Wendy Larner,
“Neo-Liberalism: Policy, Ideology, Governmentality,” Studies
in Political Economy 63, no. 1 (2000): 5–25. See also Sarah
Banet-Weiser, AuthenticTM: The Politics of Ambivalence in a
Brand Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2012).
15. See Dean Mitchell, Governmentality, Power, and Rule in
Modern Society (London: Sage, 2010).
182 | N otes
16. Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility,”

147–66; Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender,
Culture, and Social Change (London: Sage, 2009).
17. For widely circulating mobilizations of this progress narrative,
see Debora L. Spar, Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the
Quest for Perfection (New York: Macmillan, 2013); and
Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013).
18. Hazel Carby, “White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the
Boundaries of Sisterhood,” Black British Cultural Studies: A
Reader (1996): 61– 86; bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From
Margin to Center (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1984);
and bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everyone (Cambridge,
MA: South End Press, 2000).
19. Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung, The Second Shift: Working
Families and the Revolution at Home (New York: Penguin
Books, 2012).
20. Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American
Women (New York: Crown, 1991).
21. Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used
against Women (New York: Random House, 2013).
22. See, for example, Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of
Feminism (London: Sage, 2009). For a popular account of the
widespread acceptance of postfeminism, see Spar, Wonder
Women; for examples of representations of postfeminism in
the mainstream media, see the covers of Time magazine from
December 4, 1989, and June 29, 1998: http://content.time.
com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601891204,00.html (accessed
May 26, 2017) and http://content.time.com/time/covers/
0,16641,19980629,00.html (May 26, 2017).
23. Wendy Brown makes this argument in “Sacrificial
Citizenship: Neoliberalism, Human Capital, and Austerity
Politics,” Constellations 23, no. 1 (2016): 3–14.
24. Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,”
The Atlantic (July/August 2012); Sandberg, Lean In.
25. See “Emma Watson: Gender Equality Is Your Issue Too,” on UN
Women website, available at http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/
stories/2014/9/emma-watson-gender-equality-is-your-issue-too
N otes | 183
(accessed May 26, 2017); and Jessica Bennett, “How to Reclaim

the F-Word? Just Call Beyoncé,” Time, August 26, 2014, available
online: http://time.com/3181644/beyonce-reclaim-feminism-
pop-star/ (accessed May 26, 2017).
26. Recently, there has been quite a bit of scholarly interest in the
current popularity of feminism in mainstream and popular
culture. See, for example, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Empowered:
Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny ((Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2018). For an overview of the differing
scholarly perspectives, see Daniela Agostinho, “Ghosting and
Ghostbusting Feminism,” Diffractions: Graduate Journal for
the Study of Culture 6 (2016): 1–16.
27. hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margins to Center.
28. Sara R. Farris, In the Name of Women‘s Rights: The Rise of
Femonationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
29. Segal, Making Trouble, xxii.
30. Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon, The Human Right to
Dominate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
31. See Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed
Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London: Verso Books, 2013);
and Hester Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites
Use Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World (Boulder,
CO: Paradigm, 2009); see also Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists
Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a
Political Movement (Philadelphia: PublicAffairs, 2016).
32. For a discussion of the continued life of feminism on the
ground, see Johanna Brenner, “There Was No Such Thing as
www.dissentmagazine.org/ online_ a rticles/ n ancy- f raser-
progressive- n eoliberalism- s ocial- m ovements- r esponse
(accessed May 26, 2017). Rebecca Walker is often credited
with coining the term “the third wave” in her January 1992
article in Ms. magazine entitled “Becoming Third Wave.”
33. See, for example, Shelly Budgeon, “The Contradictions of
Successful Femininity: Third-Wave Feminism, Postfeminism,
and ‘New Femininities,’” in New Femininities, Postfeminism,
Neoliberalism, and Subjectivity, ed. Rosalind Gill and
Christina Scharff (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011);
184 | N otes
and Kathleen Iannellow, “Third Wave Feminism and

Individualism: Promoting Equality or Reinforcing the Status
Quo?” available online: https://rachelyon1.files.wordpress.
com/2015/01/third-wave-feminism.pdf (accessed May
26, 2017).
34. See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, “What Makes a Social Class?
on the Theoretical and Practical Existence of Groups,” Berkeley
Journal of Sociology 32 (1987): 1–17; see also Bev Skeggs,
“The Making of Class and Gender through Visualizing Moral
Subject Formation,” Sociology 39, no. 5 (2005): 965–82; and
Kim Allen, “‘Blair’s Children’: Young Women as ‘Aspirational
Subjects’ in the Psychic Landscape of Class,” The Sociological
Review 62, no. 4 (2014): 760–79.
35. It is also important to underscore that I do not mean to suggest
that aspirational is a transparent or static category. Rather, one
is interpellated as aspiration and “performs” aspiration by
desiring and constantly attempting to emulate the norm of a
happy work-family balance.
36. See David Bornstein, “A Living Wage for Caregivers,”
New York Times, July 10, 2015: https://opinionator.blogs.
nytimes.com/2015/07/10/organizing-for-the-right-to-care/
(accessed October 10, 2017); and the Oxfam and the Institute
for Women’s Policy Research 2016 Report, “Undervalued
and Underpaid in America,” available online: https://www.
oxfamamerica.org/static/media/files/Undervalued_FINAL_
Nov30.pdf (accessed October 10, 2017).
37. See Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2017); and Michel Foucault et al.,
Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).
38. Megyn Kelly, Settle for More (New York: HarperLuxe, 2016);
Ivanka Trump, Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for
Success (New York: Penguin, 2017).
39. Here I am drawing on Judith Butler’s theoretical work, particu-
larly “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of
‘Postmodernism,’” in The Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives
on Social Theory, ed. Steve Seidman (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 153–76.
N otes | 185
40. See Judith Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of

Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015);
Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso,
2009); Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
(London: Verso, 2004); and Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and
Leticia Sabsay, Vulnerability in Resistance (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2016).
41. It remains to be seen how the campaign against sexual ha-
rassment and assault will continue to evolve. On the whole,
feminists have applauded the recent exposure of just how
systematic male sexual violence is, and the #MeToo hashtag
helps to reveal this. Yet, there is also concern on a number of
fronts. For one, the denouncing and targeting of individual
men potentially steers attention away from the systemic na-
ture of the violence. For another, serious questions have been
raised about when and where claims of sexual harassment
and assault are heard—in other words, when white, wealthy,
and famous women make the accusations, they are much
more likely to be believed and taken seriously. Furthermore,
feminists have pointed out that there has been a certain prob-
lematic conflation of sexual harassment and sexual assault,
and while they are related they are not reducible one to the
other. What does seem to be increasingly clear, however, in
the wake of the #MeToo campaign the gap between the re-
actionary and regressive policies of the Trump administra-
tion and the mainstream consensus around women’s rights
have become much more visible. I return to this dissonance in
Chapter 6. See also Catherine Rottenberg, “Can #MeToo Go
Beyond White Neoliberal Feminism?” Al Jazeera, December
13, 2017: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/metoo-
white-neoliberal-feminism-171213064156855.html (accessed
March 27, 2018).
Chapter 1
1. Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” The Atlantic

(July/August 2012).
186 | N otes
2. These statistics are taken from http://wws.princeton.edu/

webmedia/. See December 3, 2012, the introductory comments.
References to “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” are taken
from the online version, and can be found on Anne-Marie
Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” http://www.
theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2012/07/w hy-women-still-
cant-have-it-all/309020/.
3. See, for example: Carolyn Anderson, “Why Women Still
Can’t Have It All (at the Same Time),” HuffPost, August, 26,
2012: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carolyn-anderson/why-
women-still-cant-have_b_1628352.html (accessed May 26,
2017); Feminist Daily Blog, “Why Women Still Can’t Have
It All,” December 10, 2012: http://feministdaily.wordpress.
com/2012/12/10/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/ (accessed
May 26, 2017); and Avantika Krishna, “Anne-Marie Slaughter
Is Right: Women Still Cannot Have It All,” Mic, June 25,
2012: https://mic.com/articles/10165/anne-marie-slaughter-is-
right-women-still-cannot-have-it-all#.G1p5Z7g46 (accessed
May 26, 2017) for just a sample of the hundreds of thousands
of responses.
4. Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” 5.
5. See, for example, Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung, The
Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home
(New York: Penguin Books, 2012); Bernie D. Jones, ed., Women
Who Opt Out: The Debate over Working Mothers and Work-
Family Balance (New York: NYU Press, 2012); and Barbara
Ehrenreich, Anita Ilta Garey, and Karen V. Hansen, At the Heart
of Work and Family: Engaging the Ideas of Arlie Hochschild (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011).
7. In 2015, Slaughter published a book entitled Unfinished
Business: Women, Men, Work, Family (London: Oneworld,
2015), which both reiterates many of her original claims in
“Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” while also attempting
to address some of her critics. I discuss the book in Chapter 5
in some detail. However, here it is crucial to note that it was
Slaughter’s essay in the Atlantic rather than her book that helped
to reignite the debate around work-family balance.
N otes | 187
8. In The Beauty Myth, for example, Naomi Wolf famously

claims that women are still not completely liberated due
to the increasing power of the beauty myth; yet she simul-
taneously invokes the liberal feminist progress narrative,
declaring that women have finally released themselves from
the feminine mystique of domesticity and have more freedom
than ever before in history. Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
(New York: Morrow and Company, 1991), 9–10. See also Sara
Farris’s discussion in her In the Name of Women’s Rights: The
Rise of Femonationalism (Durham: Duke University Press,
2017), 131–37.
9. See, for example, Hochschild and Machung, The Second Shift.
10. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke
11. For examples of the critical responses to Slaughter’s piece,
see Linda Hirshman, “The ‘Having-It-All’ Crisis Isn’t about
Women, It’s About the 1%,” The Atlantic, June 27, 2012: https://
www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/the-having-
it- a ll- c risis- i snt- a bout- w omen- its- a bout- t he- 1 / 2 58894/
(accessed May 26, 2017); Rebecca Traister, “Can Modern
Women ‘Have It All’?” Salon, June 22, 2012: http://www.salon.
com/2012/06/21/can_modern_women_have_it_all/ (accessed
May 26, 2017); and Kelsey Wallance, “Anne-Marie Slaughter
in the Atlantic ‘Women Still Can’t Have It All.’ Can Anyone?”
Bitchmedia, June 21, 2012: http://bitchmagazine.org/post/
anne-marie-slaughter-in-t he-atlantic-feminist-magazine-
women-work-life-balance-children-career (accessed May
26, 2017).
12. See Christine Stansell, The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the
Present (New York: Modern Library, 2010); Joan Wallach
Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2011); and Carroll Smith- Rosenberg,
Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
13. See Charlotte J. Rich, Transcending the New Woman: Multiethnic
Narratives in the Progressive Era (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 2009); and Martha H. Patterson, Beyond
the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman,
188 | N otes
1895–1915 (Urbana- Champaign: University of Illinois

Press, 2005).
14. This dominant narrative, of course, presents a relatively
linear and uncomplicated account of progress; moreover, the
narrative, as many scholars have already underscored, elides
all those women who did manage or were forced to bridge
both spheres at the same time. Yet, I do think it important
to stress the discursive power and continued dominance of
this narrative. For example, Pamela Stone and Lisa Ackerly
Hernandez underscore the incredible effectiveness of this ei-
ther/or framework but from a very different perspective. As
sociologists, they point out that it has only been since the
1970s that shifting social norms made it possible for increasing
numbers of middle- and upper-middle-class women to work
fairly continuously throughout their childbearing and child-
rearing years. Indeed, Stone and Hernandez assert that it is
only relatively recently that increasing numbers of women of
the educated professional class could begin to envision, an-
ticipate, and “live lives” in which they would simultaneously
combine work and family. See Jones, Women Who Opt Out, 36
15. Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” 6. Although
I take serious issue with Slaughter’s progress narrative, once
again, I do think it important to highlight the effectiveness
of this dominant either/or discourse and how it has shaped
gender norms as well as the public debates on the possibility of
women combining work and family. One has only to think of
the so-called mommy wars, which pitted professional women
against women who were choosing to say home with their
children, or the mommy-track debates—spurred by Felice
Schwartz’s 1989 article in the Harvard Business Journal—
which brought public attention and scrutiny to the question
of whether women with children faced diminishing career
opportunities by being mommy-tracked. I discuss this further
in Chapter 4. See Felice N. Schwartz, “Management Women
and the New Facts of Life,” Women in Management Review 4,
no. 5 (1989): 65–76.
N otes | 189
17. The classic example is, of course, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public
Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
18. For a discussion of the racialized aspect of the New Woman,
see Catherine Rottenberg, Performing Americanness: Race,
Class, and Gender in Modern African-American and Jewish-
American Literature (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New
England), 92–108.
19. Nitza Berkovitch has pointed out that Slaughter’s transforma-
tion of the public sphere is shockingly minimal. “Why Women
Still Can’t Have It All” discusses flex time and face-time but
in no way challenges the norm of the ten-to-twelve-hour
workday. Nor does it demand one of the staples of 1970s fem-
inism: state-provided day care. Personal correspondence.
20. See, for example, Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power
and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1995); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); and Elshtain,
Public Man, Private Woman.
21. As I will show in Chapter 5, in her book sequel, Unfinished Business,
Slaughter revises some of her claims, particularly the notion of
maternal instincts, while playing down the pursuit of happiness.
However, by 2015, as I also show in the following chapter, many
of the terms—but particularly the notion of a happy work-family
balance—had already taken on a life of their own.
22. Catherine Rottenberg, “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism,”
Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2014): 418–37.
23. Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 24.
24. Jessica Valenti, Why Have Kids?: A New Mom Explores the
Truth about Parenting and Happiness (New York: Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2012); Jennifer Senior, All Joy and No
Fun (New York: HarperCollins, 2010); and Brigid Schulte,
Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has
the Time (New York: Macmillan, 2015)
25. Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender,
Culture, and Social Change (London: Sage, 2009), 21.
190 | N otes
26. For a challenge to the “opting out” discourse, see Jones, Women
Who Opt Out; for examples of how work-life balance discus-
sion has entered the university, see the following university
websites: https://www.princeton.edu/hr/benefits/worklife/
(accessed May 26, 2017) and https://hr.harvard.edu/worklife
and http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/11/having-
it-all-at-harvard/ (accessed May 26, 2017); for an example of
the self-help or motivational books, see Gretchen Rubin, The
Happiness Project (New York: HarperPerennial, 2011).
27. See http://wws.princeton.edu/webmedia/, Dec. 3, 2012,
lecture.
28. See Ehrenreich, Garey, and Hansen, At the Heart of Work and
Family; Hochschild and Machung, The Second Shift; and Arlie
Russell Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Home Becomes
Work and Work Becomes Home (New York: Henry Holt, 1997).
29. See, for example, Hochschild and Machung, The Second Shift.
31. Ibid., 10.
32. Ibid., 21.
33. The term “equal opportunity” appears boldly at the very be-
ginning of the article (and it is not clear whether Slaughter
wrote this or whether the editor at the Atlantic inserted these
lines), but then is barely mentioned again.
34. See the following website for these statistics: National
Women’s Law Center website: https://nwlc.org/issue/poverty-
economic-security (accessed May 26, 2017).
35. As a normalizing matrix, the ideal of a happy balance becomes
a form of governmentality, while those who “refuse” to be
“governed”— precisely those working- class mothers and
women of color—will likely be further marginalized. I discuss
this further in Chapters 3 and 6.
36. See Wendy Brown, “Civilizational Delusions: Secularism,
Tolerance, Equality,” Theory & Event 15, no. 2 (2012): 3–14.
37. See the journal’s website: https://link.springer.com/journal/
10902 (accessed May 26, 2017).
38. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010), 3.
39. Ibid., 7.
N otes | 191
40. Ibid., 14–15.
41. Ibid., 54.
42. McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism, 155.
43. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 112.
44. The address extends beyond heterosexual middle- class
women, and increasingly incorporating all so-called aspira-
tional middle-class women, whether they are straight or not.
Thus heterosexual coupling can, as it were, simply be replaced
by homonormative coupling, while the rest of the happiness
script remains the same.
45. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 37.
46. See Jessica Valenti, “Sad White Babies with Mean Feminist
Mommies,” blog: http://jessicavalenti.tumblr.com/post/
25465502300/ s ad- w hite- b abies- w ith- m ean- f eminist-
mommies-the (accessed May 26, 2017).
47. These statistics come from Debora Spar, “Why Women
Should Stop Trying to Be Perfect,” Newsweek, September 24,
2012: http://www.newsweek.com/why-women-should-stop-
trying-be-perfect-64709 (accessed May 26, 2017).
48. See Linda West, “No One ‘Has It All,’ Because ‘Having It All’
Doesn’t Exist,” Jezebel, June 22, 2012: http://jezebel.com/
5920625/no-one-has-it-all-because-having-it-all-doesnt-exist
(accessed My 26, 2017); and Rebecca Traister, “Can Modern
Woman ‘Have It All’”? Salon, June 22, 2012: http://www.salon.
com/2012/06/21/can_modern_women_have_it_all/ (accessed
May 26, 2017).
49. Brown, States of Injury; and Crawford Brough Macpherson,
The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to
Locke (Oxford: University Press Oxford, 1964).
50. Of course, men can never emulate once and for all the “unen-
cumbered” subject either, but that performative failure is likely
to take on or manifest itself in a different modality, one less
tainted by encumbrance.
51. Joan Wallach Scott, “The Vexed Relationship of Emancipation
and Equality,” History of the Present 2, no. 2 (2012): 149.
52. Ibid., 153.
53. Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Susan Jeanne Douglas
192 | N otes
and Meredith Michaels, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization

of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005).

54. Wendy Brown, “Neo- Liberalism and the End of Liberal
Democracy,” Theory & Event 7, no. 1 (2003): 37–59; Scott, The
Fantasy of Feminist History; and Scott, “The Vexed Relationship
of Emancipation and Equality,” 148–68.
Chapter 2
1. Claire Suddath, “Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’ Brand Goes

Global,” Bloomberg, March 22, 2013: http://www.businessweek.
com/articles/2013-03-22/sheryl-sandbergs-lean-in-brand-
goes-global (accessed May 26, 2017).
2. Jodi Kantor, “A Titan’s How-To on Breaking the Glass Ceiling,”
New York Times, February 21, 2013: http://www.nytimes.com/
2013/02/22/us/sheryl-s andberg-lean-in-author-hopes-to-
spur-movement.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed May
26, 2017).
3. Kantor, “At Titan’s How-To”; Lynne Huffer, “It’s the Economy
Sister,” Al-Jazeera, March 18, 2013: http://www.aljazeera.
com/indepth/opinion/2013/03/201331885644977848.html
(accessed May 26, 2017); and Zillah Eisenstein, “‘Leaning In’
in Iraq,” Al-Jazeera, March 23, 2013: http://www.aljazeera.
com/indepth/opinion/2013/03/2013323141149557391.html
4. Catherine Rottenberg, “Hijacking Feminism,” Al-Jazeera,
March 25, 2013: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/
2013/03/201332510121757700.html (accessed May 26, 2017);
and Eisenstein “ ‘Leaning In’ in Iraq.”
5. Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism; Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced.
6. For a discussion of neoliberal governmentality, see Wendy
Brown, “Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,”
Theory & Event 7, no. 1 (2003): 37–59.
7. Ibid.; Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s
Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).
8. Thomas Lemke, “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique,”
Rethinking Marxism 14, no. 3 (2002): 49– 64; Brown,
N otes | 193
“Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” 37–

59; Michel Foucault et al., The Foucault Effect: Studies in
Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
9. Brown, “Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy”;
see also Banet-Weiser, AuthenticTM: The Politics of Ambivalence
in a Brand Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2012); Brown,
Undoing the Demos, 65.
10. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas S. Rose, eds.,
Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and
Rationalities of Government (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996); Nikolas Rose, “Government, Authority, and
Expertise in Advanced Liberalism,” Economy and Society 22,
no. 3 (1993): 283–99; Wendy Larner, “Neo-Liberalism: Policy,
Ideology, Governmentality,” Studies in Political Economy 63,
no. 1 (2000): 5–25.
11. Wendy Larner, “Neo- Liberalism: Policy, Ideology,
Governmentality,” 13.
12. Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism, particularly 209–27.
13. In many ways Fraser’s current argument can be seen to
recapitulate her earlier indictment of the decoupling
of “cultural politics from social politics” (Fraser, Justice
Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the Postsocialist Condition
[New York: Routledge, 1997], 2). In Justice Interruptus, she
describes the increasing tendency of social movements and
feminists to privilege recognition over redistribution. Her
later work, however, not only takes on the perspective of
hindsight, arguing that this privileging only intensified over
the years, but more specifically targets second-wave fem-
inism for having failed to sustain a critique of capitalism.
Furthermore, she suggests that second-wave feminism, by
forfeiting the demand for economic redistribution, ended
up serving as a key enabler for “the new spirit of neoliber-
alism” (Ibid., 220). In this later work, Fraser also adopts a
three- rather than a two-dimensional account of injustice: in
addition to her well-known insistence that a truly emanci-
patory feminism must integrate demands for redistribution
and recognition, in Fortunes of Feminism she adds the de-
mand for political representation (Ibid., 225).
194 | N otes
14. Özlem Aslan and Zeynep Gambetti, “Provincializing Fraser’s

History: Feminism and Neoliberalism Revisited,” History of
the Present 1, no. 1 (2011): 145.
15. My claim is thus more in line with Angela McRobbie, who
has recently suggested that we are witnessing the folding
of US liberal feminism into current neoliberal modes of
governmentality. However, unlike McRobbie—whose concern
is primarily with what she terms the new norm of “maternal-
familialism” that aims to reify the nuclear family structure
as an enterprise, thus legitimizing the extinction of public
services—my focus is on the way neoliberal feminism is not
only eviscerating liberal feminism but helping to produce a
particular kind of feminist—as opposed to a female—subject.
See McRobbie, “Feminism, the Family and the New ‘Mediated’
Maternalism,” New Formations 80, no. 4 (2013): 119–37.
16. Sandberg, Lean In, 9–10.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 38.
19. Sara R. Farris, “Femonationalism and the ‘Regular’ Army of
Labor Called Migrant Women,” History of the Present 2, no. 2
(2012): 184–99.
20. Anne Norton, On the Muslim Question (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2013), 67.
21. Sandberg, Lean In, 67.
22. Ibid., 7.
23. Christine Stansell, The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present
(New York: Modern Library, 2011); Betty Friedan, The Feminine
Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), 206;
Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used
against Women (New York: Random House, 2013).
24. It is perhaps important to remember that The Feminine
Mystique, published in 1963, is not only considered part of the
liberal feminist tradition but is often credited with sparking
the beginning of second-wave feminism. The Beauty Myth,
by contrast, was first published in 1990, at a time when the
term postfeminism was gaining currency. Wolf ’s text is often
considered part of so-called third-wave feminism as well as a
critique of liberal feminist assumptions. What is interesting,
N otes | 195
however, is that despite the many differences between these

feminist manifestos, they all return to a similar liberal paradox.
26. Stansell, The Feminist Promise.
27. Anne Applebaum, “How to Succeed in Business,” New York
Review of Books, June 6, 2016. Available online: http://www.
nybooks.com/ articles/ 2 013/ 0 6/ 0 6/ s heryl- s andberg- h ow-
succeed-business/ (accessed May 26, 2017).
29. Ibid., 7.
30. Neve Gordon, “On Visibility and Power: An Arendtian
Corrective of Foucault,” Human Studies 25, no. 2 (2002): 125–45.
31. McRobbie, “Feminism, the Family and the New ‘Mediated’
Maternalism,” 24.
32. Sandberg, Lean In, 159
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 171.
35. Rottenberg, “Hijacking Feminism”; Huffer, “It’s the Economy,
Sister!”
36. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Christine
Stansell, The Feminist Promise; and Ruth Abbey, The Return of
Feminist Liberalism (Durham, England: Acumen, 2011).
37. Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare Neoliberalism,
Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization,” Political Theory
34, no. 6 (2006): 694.
38. David L. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and
the Racialization of Intimacy (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2010), 4.
40. It is important to note that Sandberg has qualified some of
her assertions in the wake of her husband’s sudden death.
However, Sandberg’s personal declarations are ultimately less
important to the coalescing of neoliberal feminism than the
cultural work that the text Lean In has performed and the
manifesto’s afterlife.
41. David Harvey has argued that neoliberalism has not only be-
come hegemonic as a mode of discourse, but it has become
196 | N otes
common sense: “It has pervasive effects on ways of thought

to the point where it has incorporated into the common-
sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the
world.” See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3.
42. Stuart Hall, “The Neo-Liberal Revolution,” Cultural Studies 25,
no. 6 (2011): 711.
43. See Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness.
44. See Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in
Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); and
Eng, The Feeling of Kinship.
Chapter 3
1. Emma Watson’s HeForShe speech before the United Nations

is available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-
iFl4qhBsE (accessed May 26, 2017).
2. See Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender,
Culture, and Social Change (London: Sage, 2009).
3. Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of
a Sensibility,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 2
(2007): 161.
4. One has only to think of Beyoncé standing proudly in front
of a FEMINIST backdrop at the MTV Video Music Awards in
August 2014.
5. McRobbie, “Feminism, the Family, and the New ‘Mediated’
Maternalism,” 135.
6. Writing for Al-Jazeera English, Julia Zulver, for instance, criti-
cized the United Nations’ decision to elect: “[a]‌white, western,
heterosexual, upper-class woman” who then was asked to
speak “for a group of united nations,” underscoring that
Watson’s speech invoked an “over-simplified, outdated version
of gender discourse.” See Zulver, “Is Emma Watson the Right
Woman for the Job?” Al-Jazeera, September 24, 2014: http://
www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/09/emma-w atson-
not-right-woman-job-20149245235239187.html (accessed
May 26, 2017).
N otes | 197
7. See Lynne Huffer, “It’s the Economy, Sister,” Al-Jazeera, March

18, 2013, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/
03/201331885644977848.html (accessed May 26, 2017); and
Zillah Eisenstein’s “Feminism, Unchained,” Al-Jazeera, April
16, 2013: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/
04/201341575057471878.html (accessed May 26, 2017).
8. See Jessica Valenti, “When Everyone Is a Feminist, Is Anyone?”
The Guardian, November 24, 2014: http://www.theguardian.
com/commentisfree/2014/nov/24/when-everyone-is-a-femi-
nist (accessed May 26, 2017).
10. Ibid., 120.
11. See, for example, Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New
Modernity (London: Sage, 1992).
12. See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
13. Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution
(New York: Zone Books, 2015), 33.
14. For a concise definition of responsibilization, see Brown,
Undoing the Demos, 84. For a discussion of strivers and the
construction of aspirational subjects, see Allen, “‘Blair’s
Children’: Young Women as ‘Aspirational Subjects’ in the
Psychic Landscape of Class,” 760–79. For a recent discussion
on how African Americans are conceived to be “disposable” in
the United States, see Michell Alexander on Democracy Now!
on May 19, 2017, https://www.democracynow.org/2017/5/19/
repair_the_damage_from_the_drug (accessed May 26, 2017).
15. Hochschild and Machung, The Second Shift: Working Families
and the Revolution at Home; Slaughter, “Why Women Still
Can’t Have It All”; Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the
Will to Lead.
16. See Huffer, “It’s the Economy, Sister”; Eisenstein, “Feminism,
Unchained”; and Catherine Rottenberg, “Hijacking Feminism.”
17. See Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a
Sensibility,” 147–66; Ann Orloff and Talia Schiff, “Feminists
in Power: Rethinking Gender Equality after the Second Wave,”
198 | N otes
in Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed.

Robert Kosslyn and Robert Scott (London: Sage, 2015); Kristin
Rodier and Michelle Meagher, “In Her Own Time: Rihanna,
Post-Feminism, and Domestic Violence,” Women: A Cultural
Review 25, no. 2 (2014): 176–93.
19. Lisa Belkin, “The Opt Out Revolution,” New York Times,
October 26, 2003: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/mag-
azine/the-opt-out-revolution.html (accessed May 26, 2017).
20. Judith Warner, “The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In,”
New York Times, August 7, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/
2013/08/11/magazine/the-opt-out-generation-wants-back-
in.html?pagewanted=all (accessed May 26, 2017).
21. Foucault et al., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality.
22. Stephanie Coontz, “Why Gender Equality Has Stalled,”
New York Times, February 16, 2013: http://www.nytimes.com/
2013/02/17/opinion/sunday/w hy-gender-e quality-stalled.
html (accessed May 26, 2017).
23. Judith Warner, “The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In.”
24. Kate Taylor, “Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game, Too,”
New York Times, July 12, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/
2013/07/14/fashion/sex-on-campus-she-can-play-that-game-
too.html?pagewanted=all (accessed May 26, 2017); see also
Amanda Marcotte, “Women Want Hook-Up Culture,” Slate,
August 23, 2012: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/
08/ 2 3/ h ook_ up_ c ulture_ women_ a ctually_ w ant_ it_ and_
less_needy_men_too_.html (accessed May 26, 2017); and
Debora Spar’s discussion in Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and
the Quest for Perfection (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2013), ch. 3.
25. Hannah Rosin, “Boys on the Side,” The Atlantic, September
2012 edition: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/
2012/09/boys-on-the-side/309062/ (accessed May 26, 2017).
26. See, for example, Larner, “Neo-Liberalism: Policy, Ideology,
Governmentality,” 5–25; Brown, “Neo-Liberalism and the End
of Liberal Democracy”, 37–59; McRobbie, “Feminism, the
Family, and the New ‘Mediated’ Maternalism,” 119–37.
N otes | 199
27. Foucault et al., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel

Foucault.
28. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 22, emphasis added.
29. There is simply no comparison when we think about the
amount of attention the media pays to powerful men with
very small children as opposed to powerful women with very
small children—one has only to think of the brouhaha around
Marissa Meyer who was pregnant when she was named as the
new CEO of Yahoo! By contrast, few people likely know that
the CEO of Google, Larry Page, has two small children, born
in 2009 and 2011. Moreover, when the issues relate to men’s
concerns, the term most often used is work-life conflict; when
discussing women, the term usually slips into work-family
balance.
30. Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity; Barbara Adam,
Ulrich Beck, and Joost Van Loon, The Risk Society and
Beyond: Critical Issues for Social Theory (London: Sage, 2000).
31. Joan Wallach Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
32. See McRobbie, “Feminism, the Family, and the New ‘Mediated’
Maternalism,” 119–37.
33. Jan Ridley, “Career Women Are Having Egg-Freezing Parties,”
New York Post, August 13, 2014, http://nypost.com/2014/
08/ 1 3/ nyc- c areer- w omen- g ather- at- e gg- f reezing- p arty/
34. Sarah Wildeman, “Stop Time,” New York Magazine, available
online at: http://nymag.com/nymetro/health/features/14719/
35. See, for example, Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s Forced to
Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Glenn provides a histor-
ical geneology of care work and coercion in the United States
as well as outlines which women are currently the most likely
to be care givers and domestic workers in the United States.
36. Hannah Seligson, “The True Cost of Leaning In,” The Daily
Beast, March 22, 2013: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/
2013/03/22/the-true-cost-of-leaning-in.html (accessed May
26, 2017).
200 | N otes
37. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 105.

38. See, for example, Nanette Funk, “Contra Fraser on Feminism
and Neoliberalism,” Hypatia 28, no. 1 (2013): 179–96.
39. See, for example, Farris, “Femonationalism and the ‘Regular’
Army of Labor Called Migrant Women,” 184–99; Farris, In
the Name of Women‘s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism; and
Joan Wallach Scott, “The Vexed Relationship of Emancipation
and Equality,” History of the Present 2, no. 2 (2012): 148–68.
40. See Hochschild and Machung, The Second Shift; Arlie Russell
Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Home Becomes Work and
Work Becomes Home (New York: Henry Holt, 1997); and
Barbara Ehrenreich, Anita Ilta Garey, and Karen V. Hansen,
At the Heart of Work and Family: Engaging the Ideas of Arlie
Hochschild (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011).
41. Pateman, The Sexual Contract; Elshtain, Public Man, Private
Woman; Brown, States of Injury. See also Joan W. Scott, Sex
and Secularism (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2017).
42. Scott, Fantasy of Feminist History, 33.
Chapter 4
1. Lindsey Mead, A Design So Vast, available at: http://www.

adesignsovast.com/about/ (accessed May 26, 2017).
2. Ibid., “The Here Year: Happiness,” 3/4/2015, available at: http://
www.adesignsovast.com/2015/03/the-here-year-happiness/
3. Aiden Donnelley Rowley, Ivy League Insecurities, “The Here
Year,” 4/10/2014, https://www.ivyleagueinsecurities.com/
aidan-donnelley-rowley-2/2014/04/the-here-year?rq=the%20
here%20year (accessed May 26, 2017).
4. Ibid., “The Here Year: Month 12: Happiness,” 3/2/2015, https://
www.ivyleagueinsecurities.com/ aidan- d onnelley- rowley-
2/2015/03/the-here-year-month-12-happiness?rq=the%20
here%20year%20happiness (accessed May 26, 2017).
5. Susie Schnall, The Balance Project, available online: http://www.
susieschnall.com/the-balance-project/ (accessed May 26, 2017).
6. Ibid, “No. 123: Lindsey Mead: Executive Recruiter,” http://
www.susieschnall.com/the-balance-project-no-123-lindsey-
mead-executive-recruiter/; and “No. 136: Aidan Donnelley
N otes | 201
Rowley, Novelist” http://www.susieschnall.com/the-balance-

project-no-136-aidan-donnelley-rowley-novelist/ (accessed
May 26, 2017).
7. For just a few examples in the sea of similar blogs, see
Christine Organ’s blog: http://christineorgan.com/blog/
(accessed May 26, 2017); Jennifer Lyn King’s blog: http://www.
jenniferlynking.com/blog/ (accessed May 26, 2017); see also
Amanda Magee, AM&A Magee blog: http://amandamagee.
com/about/ (accessed May 26, 2017).
8. Donnelley, Ivy League Insecurities, “Is Happiness a Choice?”
1/9/2015, emphasis added, https://www.ivyleagueinsecurities.
com/ a idan- d onnelley- r owley- 2 / 2 014/ 0 1/ i s- h appiness- a
choice?rq=b eg inning%20to%20b elie ve%20t hat%20
happiness%20really%20is%2C%20in%20considerable%20
part%2C%20a%20choice (accessed May 26, 2017).
9. Ibid., “The Here Year, Month 12: Happiness, 3/2/2015, https://
www.ivyleagueinsecurities.com/aidan-donnelley-rowley-2/
2015/ 0 3/ t he- h ere- year- m onth- 1 2- h appiness?rq=can%20
make%20ourselves%20happier (accessed May 26, 2017).
10. Mead, A Design So Vast, “The Here Year,” 3/4/2015, http://
www.adesignsovast.com/?s=+living+in+the+hours (accessed
May 26, 2017).
11. See, for example, Shani Orgad, “The Cruel Optimism of the
Good Wife: The Fantastic Working Mother on the Fantastical
Treadmill,” Television & New Media 18, no. 2 (2017): 165–83;
and Jill Armstrong, “Higher Stakes: Generational Differences
in Mother and Daughters’ Feelings about Combining
Motherhood with a Career,” Studies in the Maternal 9, no. 1
(2017): 1–25. Although they position work-family balance
within a postfeminist sensibility, both Maria Adamson and
Siri Sorensen also claim that balance serves an ideal for as-
pirational women. Sorensen further points to the way this
discourse informs common sense in Norway, suggesting that
the ideal of work-family balance is circulating not only in the
United States and United Kingdom but in other countries in the
West as well. See Siri Øyslebø Sørensen, “The Performativity
of Choice: Postfeminist Perspectives on Work-Life Balance,”
Gender, Work & Organization 24, no. 3 (2017): 297– 313;
and Maria Adamson, “Postfeminism, Neoliberalism, and
202 | N otes
a ‘Successfully’ Balanced Femininity in Celebrity CEO

Autobiographies,” Gender, Work & Organization 24, no. 3
(2017): 314–27.
12. Rosalind Gill has pointed out that the differing temporalities
may be less clear-cut than I argue here. Younger women are
also exhorted, for example, to savor the here and now. While
this is no doubt true, I am attempting to identify and account
for certain dominant discursive patterns. The preoccupa-
tion with the here and now is particularly prominent among
aging neoliberal subjects, although as I claim at the end of the
chapter, this may soon change. Personal communication.
13. See, for example, Christina Scharff, “The Psychic Life of
Neoliberalism: Mapping the Contours of Entrepreneurial
Subjectivity,” Theory, Culture & Society 33, no. 6 (2016): 107–
22; Sam Binkley, “Happiness, Positive Psychology, and
the Program of Neoliberal Governmentality,” Subjectivity
4, no. 4 (2011): 371– 94; Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad,
“The Confidence Cult(ure),” Australian Feminist Studies
30, no. 86 (2015): 324– 44; see also Lynne Segal, Radical
Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy (London: Verso,
2017), ch. 1.
14. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 43.
15. For an estimation of how many mommy blogs exist in
the United States, see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
news/mommy-blogs/ (accessed May 26, 2017); and http://
mashable.com/ 2 012/ 0 5/ 0 8/ mommy- blogger- i nfographic/
#caieXdCobEqa (accessed May 26, 2017).
16. See, for example, McRobbie, “Feminism, the Family, and the
New ‘Mediated’ Maternalism,” 119– 37; Angela McRobbie,
“Notes on the Perfect: Competitive Femininity in Neoliberal
Times,” Australian Feminist Studies 30, no. 83 (2015): 3–20;
Gill and Orgad, “The Confidence Cult(ure),” 324–44; and
Agostinho, “Ghosting and Ghostbusting Feminism.”
17. Donnelley, Ivy League Insecurities, “Choking on
Choice,” 9/25/2009, https://www.ivyleagueinsecurities.
com/ a idan- d onnelley- r owley- 2 / 2 009/ 0 9/ c hoking- o n-
choice?rq=feminism (accessed May 26, 2017); see also entry
N otes | 203
on 12/13/2014, https://www.ivyleagueinsecurities.com/aidan-
donnelley- rowley- 2 / 2 012/ 1 2/ it- h elps- t hat- h e- s till- l ikes-
to-s queeze-my-butt-w hen-i-walk-by-naked?rq=feminism
18. Mead, A Design So Vast, “Wonder Women, All Along: Where
Feminism Went Wrong,” 9/23/2013, http://www.adesignsovast.
com/2013/09/where-feminism-went-wrong/ (accessed May
26, 2017).
19. A search for the keywords “feminism” or “feminist” results in
approximately ten hits each for both blog sites.
20. Kara Van Cleaf, “Of Woman Born to Mommy Blogged: The
Journey from the Personal as Political to the Personal as
Commodity,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 43, no. 3
(2015): 248.
21. Tracey Jensen, “‘Mumsnetiquette’: Online Affect within
Parenting Culture,” in Privilege, Agency and Affect, ed.
Claire Maxwell and Peter Aggleton (New York: algrave
Macmillan 2013), 133. For a similar argument, see also Sarah
Pederson and Deborah Lupton, “What Are You Feeling Right
Now? Communities of Maternal Feelings on Mumsnet,”
Emotion, Space, and Society (2016): https://doi.org/10.1016/
j.emospa.2016.05.001.
22. I have been influenced here by Sarah Banet-Weiser’s discus-
sion of brand culture and how under neoliberalism the duty
to self-brand demands intensive immaterial labor, particu-
larly affective labor. Banet-Weiser also speaks about the im-
portance of contextualizing self-branding spaces—much like
the mommy-esque blogs I investigate—as part of the larger
confessional culture in the United States. These spaces or
venues of “telling the truth about oneself ” not only help con-
struct subjectivities but also dramatize how the personaliza-
tion of the consumer citizen privileges individual experience
over systematic problems. See Banet-Weiser, AuthenticTM: The
Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture, 42, 77.
23. Here I am drawing here on Arlie Hochschild’s notion of
“feeling rules.” See The Managed Heart: Commercialization of
Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 18–19.
204 | N otes
24. Binkley, “Happiness, Positive Psychology, and the Program of

Neoliberal Governmentality,” 372.
25. Ibid., 382.
26. Ibid., 385.
27. Scharff, “The Psychic Life of Neoliberalism,” 107–22.
28. See, for example, Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s
Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015); Michel
Feher, “Self-Appreciation; Or, the Aspirations of Human
Capital,” Public Culture 21, no. 1 (2009): 21– 41. See also
Beverley Skeggs, “Imagining Personhood Differently: Person
Value and Autonomist Working-Class Value Practices,” The
Sociological Review, 59, no. 3 (2011): 496–513; and Deirdre
Duffy, “Get on Your Feet, Get Happy: Happiness and the
Affective Governing of Young People in the Age of Austerity,”
in Neoliberalism, Austerity, and the Moral Economies of Young
People’s Health and Well-being, ed. Peter Kelly and Jo Pike
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 87–101.
29. See McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism; Rosalind Gill
and Christina Scharff, New Femininities: Postfeminism,
Neoliberalism, and Subjectivity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013); McRobbie, “Notes on the Perfect: Competitive
Femininity in Neoliberal Times,” 3– 20; and Scharff, “The
Psychic Life of Neoliberalism: Mapping the Contours of
Entrepreneurial Subjectivity,” 107–22.
30. See McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism; McRobbie, “Notes
on the Perfect,” 3–20.
31. Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad, “The Confidence
Cult(ure),” 340.
32. As Debora Spar puts it, “Single and adventurous at twenty-
five; married with kids at forty.” Wonder Woman, 79.
33. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 105.
34. Donnelley, Ivy League Insecurities, https://aidan-donnelley-
rowley.squarespace.com/hello-there/ (accessed May 26, 2017).
35. See the online website: http://poetsandquants.com/2013/08/
13/a-harvard-mba-working-mother-reflects-on-lifes-choices/
N otes | 205
36. Mead, A Design So Vast, “Rethinking Ease,” 10/10/2016, http://

www.adesignsovast.com/2016/10/17625/ (accessed May
26, 2017).
37. Donnelley, Ivy League Insecurities, “10 Ways to Be Happier,”
1/15/2014, https://aidan-donnelley-rowley.squarespace.
com/ aidan- d onnelley- rowley- 2 / 2 014/ 0 1/ 1 0- w ays- t o- b e-
happier?rq=10%20ways%20to%20be%20happier (accessed
May 26, 2017).
38. Ibid., “These Moments of Happiness,” 3/14/2016, https://aidan-
donnelley-rowley.squarespace.com/aidan-donnelley-rowley-
2/2016/03/these-moments-of-happiness?rq=proverbial%20
road%20ahead (accessed May 26, 2017).
39. Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project
(New York: HarperPerennial, 2011), 2.
40. Binkley, “Happiness, Positive Psychology, and the Program of
Neoliberal Governmentality,” 371–94.
41. Donnelley, Ivy League Insecurities, “The Here Year
#12: Happiness,” 3/2/2015, https://aidan-donnelley-rowley.
squarespace.com/aidan-donnelley-rowley-2/2015/03/t he-
here-year-month-12-happiness?rq=these%20moments%20
I%20will (accessed May 26, 2017).
42. Wendy Brown, “Sacrificial Citizenship: Neoliberalism,
Human Capital, and Austerity Politics,” Constellations 23, no.
1 (2016): 3–14.
43. For these statistics, see: https://www.theguardian.com/us-
news/2015/dec/31/the-counted-police-killings-2015-young-
black-men (accessed May 26, 2017).
44. Donnelley, Ivy League Insecurities, “How Privileged Are You?”
7/21/2016, https://aidan-donnelley-rowley.squarespace.
com/ aidan- d onnelley- rowley- 2 / 2 016/ 0 7/ how- privileged-
are- you?rq=honestly%20at%20our%20current%20selves,
45. See Catherine Rottenberg, Performing Americanness: Race,
Class, and Gender in Modern African-American and Jewish-
American Literature (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New
England, 2008); see also my “Teaching Giovanni’s Room in
the Shadow of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Denaturalizing
Privilege,” in Crossing Borders: Essays on Literature, Culture,
206 | N otes
and Society in Honor of Amritjit Singh, ed. Silvia Schultermandl

et al. (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).
46. Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining
Difference,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches Freedom
(California: Crossing Press, 1984), 116.
47. See Pierre Bourdieu’s The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard
Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); The Field of
Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge, United
Kingdom: Polity, 1993); and Practical Reason: On the Theory of
Action, trans. Randall Johnson (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1998).
48. Within a racialized field, there will also be a hierarchy or
stratification of whiteness. One has only to think of the way
in which certain minority groups—the Irish, the Jews, for
example—were interpellated as not-quite white during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This means that in a
racialized field, there will be further stratification and degrees
of privilege even within the “white subjects” themselves. This
also points to the way that fields—the racialized field are
imbricated in and with other fields—i.e., the religious/ethnic
field, and in this complex imbrication create the mythic norm.
For further theorization of how the mythic norm coalesces
and how it operates, see Rottenberg, Performing Americanness.
49. Donnelley, Ivy League Insecurities, “The Slow and
Certain Heartbreak of Playing It Safe,” 7/ 14/
2016,
https:// a idan- d onnelley- rowley.squarespace.com/ a idan-
donnelley- r owley- 2 / 2 016/ 0 7/ t he- s low- a nd- c ertain-
heartbreak- o f- p laying- i t- s afe?rq=I%20am%20the%20
poster-child%20of%20white%20privilege (accessed May
26, 2017).
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
52. Mead, A Design So Vast, “Scared, Scared.” 7/18/2016, http://
www.adesignsovast.com/ ? s=I+vow+to+pay+more+attent
ion+to+what+scares+me, emphasis added (accessed May
26, 2017).
53. My argument thus differs from scholars who argue that the
family is now conceived of as an enterprise and children are the
N otes | 207
main sites of investment as human capital. See, for example,

McRobbie, “Feminism, the Family, and the New ‘Mediated’
Maternalism,” 119–37.
54. Donnelley, Ivy League Insecurities, “I Lost Myself a Little Bit,”
9/12/2016, https://aidan-donnelley-rowley.squarespace.com/
aidan- d onnelley- rowley- 2 / 2 016/ 0 9/ i - l ost- myself- a - l ittle-
bit?rq=on%20a%20small%20yellow%20bus%20bound%20
for%20a%20great%20school (accessed May 26, 2017).
55. See Jo Littler, Against Meritocracy, (New York: Routledge,
2017), ch. 6.
Chapter 5
1. See, for example, Katherine Brooks, “Ivanka Trump’s ‘Vapid’

New Book Earns a Series of Savage Reviews,” HuffPost, May 3,
2017: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ivanka-trump-
women-who-work-reviews_us_5907a3f8e4b05c3976819069
(accessed October 10, 2017).
2. Jia Tolentino, “Ivanka Trump Wrote a Painfully Oblivious Book
for Basically No One,” The New Yorker, May 5, 2017: https://
www.newyorker.com/ b ooks/ p age- t urner/ i vanka- t rump-
wrote- a - p ainfully- o blivious- b ook- f or- b asically- n o- o ne
3. Megan Garber, “The Borrowed Words of Ivanka Trump,” The
Atlantic, May 5, 2017: https://www.theatlantic.com/enter-
tainment/archive/2017/05/the-borrowed-words-of-ivanka-
trump/525621/ (accessed October 10, 2017).
4. Ivanka Trump, Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for
Success (New York: Penguin, 2017), 133.
5. For a discussion of “aspirational subjects” and how they are
constructed, see Kim Allen, “‘Blair’s Children’: Young Women
as ‘Aspirational Subjects’ in the Psychic Landscape of Class,”
The Sociological Review 62, no. 4 (2014) 760–79.
6. Trump, Women Who Work, 19
7. Ibid., 91.
8. For a discussion of the aesthetic labor women are currently
expected to perform on themselves, see Ana Elias, Rosalind
Gill, and Christina Scharff, “Aesthetic Labour: Beauty Politics
208 | N otes
in Neoliberalism,” in Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty

Politics in Neoliberalism, ed. Ana Sofia Elias, Rosalind Gill, and
Christina Scharff (London: Springer, 2017), 3–49.
9. See Michel Feher, “Self-Appreciation; Or, the Aspirations of
Human Capital,” Public Culture 21, no. 1 (2009): 21–41.
10. It is probably true that much of the memoir’s market value has
to do with Kelly’s detailed description of Donald Trump’s con-
tinued and vitriolic harassment of her in the aftermath of the
first debate of the Republican primaries in 2016 as well as her
revelations regarding Roger Ailes’s serial sexual harassment.
11. Diane Negra, “Claiming Feminism: Commentary,
Autobiography, and Advice Literature for Women in the
Recession,” Journal of Gender Studies 23, no. 3 (2014): 275–86.
12. Megyn Kelly, Settle for More (New York: HarperLuxe,
2016), 131
13. Ibid., 474.
14. Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women, Men,
Work, Family (London: Oneworld Publications, 2015), xv.
15. Kelly, Settle for More, 146.
16. Trump, Women Who Work, 41.
17. Furthermore, confidence is most often an attribute ascribed to
the younger years, while notions of seizing the moment, well-
being, and self-care only enter into the discussion once chil-
dren and work are part of the picture. In many ways, this helps
to strengthen my argument about confidence and the tem-
poral shift offered in the previous chapter, although, at times,
these two self-help books complicate this temporal-affective
nexus by occasionally melding different temporalities, due, at
least in part, to their attempt to address as wide an audience
and age group as possible.
20. Indeed, daughter Trump was said to have influenced her
father’s insertion of a six-week paid family leave policy into his
proposed budget. Interestingly, Ivanka Trump, in contrast to
Kelly, insists that one of the great obstacles facing US women
is the lack of affordable and high-quality child care. Kelly, for
N otes | 209
her part, insists that sexual harassment is everywhere and that

it must stop.
22. Ibid., 114.
23. This discourse clearly resonates and draws on others, such
as the American Dream discourse. It is also informed by
the rise of the Happiness Industry as well as therapeutic
and self-help cultures in the West. See Sara Ahmed, The
Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010); Sam Binkley, “Happiness, Positive Psychology, and
the Program of Neoliberal Governmentality,” Subjectivity
4, no. 4 (2011): 371– 94; William Davies, The Happiness
Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us
Well-Being (London: Verso, 2015); Lynne Segal, Radical
Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy (London: Verso, 2017);
and Nikolas Rose, “Governing the Enterprising Self,” in The
Values of the Enterprise Culture: The Moral Debate, ed. Paul
Hellas and Paul Morris (New York: Routledge, 1992), 141–64.
The difference, I suggest, has to do with the assumption of the
human that these texts register and (re)produce. As I dem-
onstrate, the human is recast as human capital and not as an
“autonomous self aspiring to self-possession and happiness”
(Rose, “Governing the Enterprising Self,” 11).
24. See Angela McRobbie, “Notes on the Perfect: Competitive
Femininity in Neoliberal Times,” Australian Feminist Studies
30, no. 83 (2015): 3–20; Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad, “The
Confidence Cult(ure),” Australian Feminist Studies 30, no.
86 (2015): 324–44; and Christina Scharff, “The Psychic Life
of Neoliberalism: Mapping the Contours of Entrepreneurial
Subjectivity,” Theory, Culture & Society 33, no. 6 (2016): 107–
22, as well as Scharff ’s Gender, Subjectivity, and Cultural Work
(New York: Routledge, 2018).
25. Trump, Women Who Work, 176, 195.
26. Ibid., 147.
27. Ibid, 144, 147.
28. Wendy Brown, “Sacrificial Citizenship: Neoliberalism,
Human Capital, and Austerity Politics,” Constellations 23, no.
1 (2016): 9.
210 | N otes
29. If reproduction and balance were not part of the equation, then
the conversion of aspirational women into generic human cap-
ital would be “complete” and any neoliberal feminist discourse
would disappear. It is precisely by maintaining balance as part
of its ideal as well as the further conversion of women into
specks of human capital through construing motherhood in
managerial terms that neoliberal feminism moves toward its
logical limit.
30. Interestingly, Feher draws on neoliberal proponents and
thinkers, such as Gary Becker and Theodor Schulz on the
one hand, and on critics and theorists of neoliberalism, such
as David Harvey, Thomas Lemke, Nikolas Rose, and Wendy
Brown, on the other.
31. Feher, “Self-Appreciation,” 27.
32. Ibid., 30
33. Brown, “Sacrificial Citizenship,” 3.
34. Ibid., 10. As Brown also underscores, this “devolution” of re-
sponsibility is occurring precisely at a time when social safety
nets are being further dismantled.
35. See Katie Cruz and Wendy Brown, “Feminism, Law, and
Neoliberalism: An Interview and Discussion with Wendy
Brown,” Feminist Legal Studies 24, no. 1 (2016): 69–89.
36. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2013); and Neve Gordon, “On Visibility and
Power: An Arendtian Corrective of Foucault,” Human Studies
25, no. 2 (2002) 125–45.
37. See, for example, Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt,
ed. Bonnie Honig (University Park: Penn State Press, 2010).
38. This is Brown’s argument in Undoing the Demos.
39. Trump, Women Who Work, 28, 47.
40. Feher, “Self-Appreciation,” 30.
42. McRobbie, “Notes on the Perfect,”10.
44. Ibid., 131.
45. Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 15.
N otes | 211
46. For a discussion of the self as a portfolio of credit-seeking assets,

see Cruz and Brown, Feminism, Law, and Neoliberalism: An
Interview and Discussion with Wendy Brown, 69–89.
48. For a discussion of the emergence of the norms of intensive
mothering, see Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of
Motherhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
50. Ibid., 118.
51. Ibid., 17.
52. Shani Orgad, Heading Home: Motherhood, Work and the Failed
Promise of Equality (New York: Columbia University Press,
2018).
53. See, for example, Rubert Cornwell, “Ivanka Trump Could
Prove to Be the Most Powerful First Daughter in US History,”
The Independent, March 4, 2017: http://w ww.independent.
co.uk/voices/ivanka-t rump-jared-kushner-donald-t rump-
liberal-white-house-a7610906.html (accessed October
10, 2017); and Michelle Goldberg, “Ivanka Trump’s New
Book Exploits and Cheapens Feminism,” Slate, May 2,
2017: http://w ww.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/
2017/05/ivanka_trump_s_new_b ook_women_who_work_
exploits_and_cheapens_feminism.html (accessed October
10 2017).
54. Ivanka Trump publicly came out as a feminist at the G20
summit in Berlin in 2017. See Derek Scally, “‘Are You a
Feminist?’ Ivanka Trumps Says Yes, Merkel Fudges,” Irish
Times, April 25, 2017: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/
world/europe/are-you-a-feminist-ivanka-trump-s ays-yes-
merkel-fudges-1.3060993 (accessed October 10, 2017). It is
also important to stress that even though the f-word does not
appear in Women Who Work, it has been received as a feminist
(or pseudo-feminist) manifesto by pundits. See, for example,
Lucia Graves, “Women Don’t Need Ivanka Trump’s Fortune-
Cookie Feminism,” The Nation, May 6, 2017: https://www.
thenation.com/article/women-dont-need-ivanka-t rumps-
fortune-cookie-feminism/ (accessed October 10, 2017).
212 | N otes
55. See, for example, Beth Teitell, “Ivanka Trump, Who Are You?”
Boston Globe, February 11, 2017: https://www.bostonglobe.
com/lifestyle/style/2017/02/10/ivanka-trump-who-are-you/
noZDJVGuL1rRY6P5KxJDMJ/story.html (accessed October
10, 2017).
56. See, for example, Melanie McFarland, “Image Is Everything:
What Megyn Kelly’s Network Move to Tell Us about NBC, and
Herself,” Salon, January 7, 2017: https://www.salon.com/2017/
01/07/image-is-everything-what-megyn-kellys-network-move-
tells-us-about-nbc-and-herself/ (accessed October 10, 2017).
58. Ibid., 312.
59. Ibid., 274.
60. “How Megyn Kelly Became an Improbable Feminist Icon,”
Vanity Fair, October 26, 2016: https://www.vanityfair.com/
news/2016/10/how-megyn-kelly-b ecame-an-improbable-
feminist-icon (accessed October 10, 2017).
61. Tim Teeman, “The Power of Megyn Kelly’s Feminism—Even If
She Doesn’t Call It That,” Daily Best, October 26, 2016: https://
www.thedailybeast.com/ t he- p ower- o f- m egyn- k ellys-
feminismeven-if-she-doesnt-call-it-that (accessed October
10, 2017).
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid., 323.
65. See, for example, Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between
Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2017), 61.
66. Slaughter, Unfinished Business, 183.
67. Ibid., xx.
68. Ibid., 236
69. Ibid., 194.
70. See also Shani Orgad, Heading Home, where she makes a sim-
ilar argument.
72. Ibid., 256.
73. Ibid., 102.
74. Ibid., 243.
N otes | 213
75. See, for example, Sara R. Farris, In the Name of Women s

Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism (Durham, NC: Duke
77. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth
Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 36.
Chapter 6
1. Jodi Kantor, “Working Anything but 9 to 5,” New York Times,

August 13, 2014: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/
08/13/us/starbucks-workers-scheduling-hours.html (accessed
October 10, 2017).
2. Ibid.
3. See “Improving Opportunities for Women in the US,”
Workshop Brochure, OECD Washington Center, June 2016,
available online: http://www.oecd.org/unitedstates/improving-
opportunities-for-women-in-the-United-States-2016-OECD-
Washington-June.pdf (accessed October 10, 2017).
4. See Sarah Jaffe, “Feminism for the 99 Percent [Interview with
Dr. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor]” The Progressive, March 1,
2017: http://progressive.org/multimedia/feminism-for-the-
99-percent-with-keeanga-yamahtta-taylor/ (accessed October
10, 2017); and “The Gender Pay Gap,” The Economist, October
7 2017: https://www.economist.com/news/international/
21729993-women-still-earn-lot-less-men-despite-decades-
equal-pay-laws-why-gender (accessed October 10, 2017).
5. See the OECD website: http://stats.oecd.org/index.
aspx?queryid=54757 (accessed October 10, 2017).
6. See Rasheed Malik, Katie Hamm, Maryam Adamu, and
Taryn Morrissey, “Child Care Deserts,” Report for Center for
American Progress, Oct. 27, 2016, available online: https://
www.americanprogress.org/issues/early-childhood/reports/
2016/10/27/225703/child-care-deserts/ (accessed October
10, 2017).
7. See the National Women’s Law Center website: https://nwlc.
org/resources/national-snapshot-p overty-among-women-
families-2015/ (accessed October 10, 2017).
214 | N otes
8. Hannah Seligson, “The True Cost of Leaning In,” Daily Beast,

March 22, 2013: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-true-
cost-of-leaning-in (accessed October 10, 2017).
9. See Sarah Ruiz- Grossman, “95% of Domestic Workers
Are Women,” HuffPost, March 8, 2016: https://www.
huffingtonpost.com/ e ntry/ d omestic- w orkers- overtime-
law-ca_us_56ddd53fe4b0ffe6f8ea2bce (accessed October
10, 2017).
10. One has only to think of the amount of coverage that the story
of Yoselyn Ortega, who was accused of murdering two of her
young charges in 2012, received.
11. See Ruiz-Grossman, “95% of Domestic Workers Are Women;”
and Evelyn Nakana Glenn’s Forced to Care: Coercion and
Caregiving in American (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2010), 4–5.
12. For an exception to the rule regarding mainstream media as
well as the provision of statistics, see David Bornstein, “A Living
Wage for Caregivers,” New York Times, July 10, 2015: https://
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/organizing-for-
the-right-to-care/ (accessed October 10, 2017).
13. Lea Sitkin, “It’s Up to You: Why Neoliberal Feminism Isn’t
Feminism at All,” OpenDemocracy, July 18, 2017: https://www.
opendemocracy.net/ 5 050/ l ea- s itkin/ n eoliberal- feminism
14. Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to
CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement (Phi
ladelphia: PublicAffairs, 2016).
15. Jessica Valenti, “When Everyone Is a Feminist, Is Anyone?”
The Guardian, November 24, 2014: https://www.theguardian.
com/ c ommentisfree/ 2 014/ n ov/ 2 4/ w hen- e veryone- i s- a -
feminist (accessed October 10, 2017).
16. Ibid.
17. Michele Rivkin- Fish, “Conceptualizing Feminist Strategies
for Russian Reproductive Politics: Abortion, Surrogate
Motherhood, and Family Support after Socialism,”
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 3
(2013): 573.
18. Ibid., 575.
N otes | 215
19. Ibid., 589.
20. I am drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of “contingent
foundations.” See Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations:
Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’” in The
Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives on Social Theory, ed. Steve
Seidman (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
153–70.
21. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist
Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist Review, no. 30
(1988): 71.
22. See Dorothy Roberts, “Reproductive Justice, Not Just Rights,”
Dissent, Fall 2015: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/ar-
ticle/reproductive-justice-not-just-rights (accessed October
10, 2017).
23. Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon, The Human Right to
Dominate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
24. See Juliet Mitchell, “Women: The Longest Revolution,” New
Left Review, no. 40 (1966): 75–122.
25. Nina Power, “From the Screen to the Street: What Is Living
and What Is Dead in Contemporary Feminism,” WDW
Review, available online: http://wdwreview.org/think/from-
the-screen-to-the-street-what-is-living-and-what-is-dead-in-
contemporary-feminism/ (accessed October 10, 2017).
26. Ibid.
27. See, for example, Sara Farris and Catherine Rottenberg,
“Introduction: Righting Feminism,” New Formations: A
Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 91 (2017): 5–15.
28. Power, “From the Screen to the Street.”
29. See, for example, Shani Orgad, “The Cruel Optimism of the
Good Wife: The Fantastic Working Mother on the Fantastical
Treadmill,” Television & New Media 18, no. 2 (2017): 165–
83; and Siri Øyslebø Sorenson, “The Performativity of
Choice: Postfeminist Perspectives on Work- Life Balance,”
Gender, Work & Organization 24, no. 3 (2017): 297–313.
30. This renewed militancy, of course, draws on years of fem-
inist grassroots activity, much of which was quite invis-
ible in the mainstream media, at least until quite recently.
See Johanna Brenner, “There Was No Such Thing as
216 | N otes

www.dissentmagazine.org/ online_ a rticles/ n ancy- f raser-
progressive- n eoliberalism- s ocial- m ovements- r esponse
31. Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough, 241.
32. Judith Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 27.
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INDEX
Figures are indicated by an italic f following the page number.
2012, as symbolic watershed, 4, 6, Arendt, Hannah, 147

10, 23, 138, 156, 181n12 Aslan, Özlem, 58
aspirational women, 15, 17–18,
abortion rights, 168–169 83, 84, 110. See also human
Adamson, Maria, 201–202n11 capital, generic; Mead,
“A Design So Vast” blog (Mead). Lindsay; Rowley, Aidan
See Mead, Lindsay Donnelley
Adichie, Chimamanda, 10, 11f balance ideal, 201n11 (see also
affect. See also confidence; work–family balance)
happiness; positive affect; Borgen, 38
work–family balance, capital-enhancing, 145–146
confidence confidence, 119
neoliberalism’s, 111–113 futurity, 94, 103–104, 132
new feminist ideal, 71–78 generic human capital, 19,
Ahmed, Sara, 27–45, 76, 109 85, 99, 102, 103, 139, 150,
Ally McBeal, 35, 37–38 151–152,  210n29
American Dream discourse, 63, The Good Wife, 38
170–171,  209n23 happiness, pursuing, 46
Amiri, Brigitte, 2 individuating and
anti-feminist counterattack responsibilizing, 163
(1980s), 9 interpellating, 166, 184n35
anti-racism,  78 positive affect, cultivating, 118
Applebaum, Anne, 63–64 precarity, 134
228 | I ndex
aspirational women (cont.) Carby, Hazel, 9

public over private, care work
privileging, 32 affordable, 164, 208–209n20
reproduction and capital investment, 146
balance, 210n29 cost-benefit calculus, 117
vs. rest of women, 96, 100, 104 gendered, 56, 84, 100, 101, 102,
Settle for More (Kelly), 138–143 103, 131, 132
“Why Women Still Can’t Have It geneology, U.S., 199n35
All” (Slaughter), 38–39 Kelly, Megyn, 143, 156–157
Women Who Work (Trump), managing, 151, 156–157
135, 138–139, 140–145 market idiom, 56, 160
At the Heart of Work and Family measuring, 159–161
(Hochschild), 39–40, 101 neoliberal rationality, 16, 21,
132, 152, 161
Backlash: The Undeclared War outsourcing, 16, 17, 103,
against Women (Faludi), 9 164–165
balanced feminist, 13–22, 82. See privatization, 164
also Slaughter, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 138,
balanced woman, 33–39, 47 157–161
“Balance Project” (Schnall), 107 Trump, Ivanka, 151–153,
Banet-Weiser, Sarah, 203n22 156–157
beauty, as psychological weapon, 9 undervaluing, 157–158
Beauty Myth, The (Wolf), 9, 62–63, child care. See care work
187n8, 194–195n24 child rearing
Beck, Ulrich, 95 outsourcing, 100, 103 (see also
“being present,” 105–109, 119–122, care work)
130–131,  133 postponing, 90–93,  98–99
Belkin, Lisa, 86–87 value, recognizing, 34
Berkovitch, Nitza, 189n19 children
Beyoncé, 10, 11f, 167, 196n4 as human capital, 131,
Binkley, Sam, 114, 122 206–207n53
blogs media on powerful men vs.
mommy, 5, 14, 18, 110–111, women with, 199n29
203n22 confidence, 66, 81, 208n17
mommy-esque, aspirational women, 119
110–111,  203n22 building, 118, 120, 208n17
Borgen,  35–38 futurity, 116, 118–119, 122–123,
Bourdieu, Pierre, 126 132–133
brand culture, 203n22 positive affect, 118
Brown, Wendy, 7, 48–50, 56–57, work–family balance,
84, 94, 145, 210n34 happy, 119
Butler, Judith, 21, 175, 215n20 younger years, 208n17
I ndex | 229
contingent foundations, Faludi, Susan, 9

169–170,  215n20 family
convergences, feminist, 135–161. in career world, devalued, 32
See also Kelly, Megyn; as enterprise, 131, 206–207n53
Slaughter, Anne-Marie; Farris, Sara, 12, 60
Trump, Ivanka Feher, Michel, 7, 144–145, 209n24
Coontz, Stephanie, 88 felicitous work–family balance. See
cost-benefit metric, 17 work–family balance, happy
Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan),
earnings, wife vs. husband, 47 9, 62–63, 194n24
egg freezing, 16, 83, 90, 96–100, 145 feminism, 27
either/or discourse, 29–30, 86, academic and scholarly
87–88, 188nn14–15 literature, 172, 174
emancipated womanhood, as accommodating, 82
contradiction,  49–50 choice, 13, 45, 86, 168–170
emancipation, 27, 29 classical, 11
aspiring professionals, 24, 26–28, contingent foundations,
46, 48, 89 169–170,  215n20
liberal feminism, 100–101 current state, 171–175, 173f
liberalism, 48 definition, 167–171
liberalism’s construal, 48 first wave, 8, 29
End of Men, The (Rosin), 92 grassroots and large-scale,
Eng, David, 70–71 reemergence, 172–174, 173f
equality, 60, 61, 65–66, 67, media embrace, 15–16
69, 70, 77 neoliberal, 53–78, 82–83, 85
equality, gender (see also Sandberg, Sheryl;
critical gaze, U.S., 76–77 specific topics)
Sandberg, Sheryl, 60–62, affect and new feminist
64, 67, 69 ideal,  71–78
Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 158 balance, 3, 83–84 (see also
Trump, Ivanka, 140–141 work–family balance)
“Why Gender Equality Has “being present,” 105–109,
Stalled” (Coontz), 88 119–122, 130–131,  133
equal opportunity, 62, 67, 112, cultural purpose, 55–56
180n7, 190n33 delegitimizing, 166–167
exceptionalism, US, 63 future (futurity), 90–93,
exploitation 115–119,  133
“other” females, 17–18, 20, 96, individualistic framing,
100, 103, 104, 166 54–55,  63
racialized and classed gender, Lean In, liberal husk, 59–64
17, 20, 85, 99 liberal feminism
reproductive capabilities, 95 disarticulation, 54
230 | I ndex
feminism (cont.) vs. stay-at-home mothers, 87

“Neoliberalism and the End structural obstacles, 38
of Liberal Democracy” Wolf on, 62–63
(Brown), 56 feminism, neoliberal times, 1–22
neoliberalism from vs. “actual” feminism, 167
liberalism, 64–71, 65f balanced feminist, 13–22, 82
Power on, 172 Hillary Clinton’s presidential
reproduction dilemma, 56 campaign, 1
as responsibilizing women, 78 mass mobilization and protest, 4
rise of, reasons, 75–76 neoliberalism, 3, 7
Sandberg’s Lean In,  53–55 neoliberalism, with
neoliberal capitalism, 5, neofascism, 2, 3–4
11–12,  180n7 “new life,” 82
popularity and pop stars, 10–11, progress, mainstream narratives,
11f, 82, 167, 172 8–13,  11f
postfeminism, 5, 7, 9, 79–81, 86 progressive narrative, 9
second-wave, 8, 33, 58, public-private divide, 6
193n13, 194n24 Trump administration,
third-wave, 12–13, 183n32, 2–4,  179n3
194–195n24 vocabulary, new, 5
trickle-down corporate, 69, 82 feminism, reclaiming, 162–178
unstable signifier, 170–171 child care, privatization, cost,
western vs. third world, 170 and outsourcing, 164–165
feminism, liberal current state, 171–175, 173f
emancipation, 100–101 definition, 167–171
goals,  75–76 delegitimizing neoliberal
mainstream, disarticulation, 54 feminism, 166–167
public-private divide, 100–101 flexible economy, 163
raison d’être, 54 precarity, 175–178
feminism, middle-class, 6, 9, 10, 83 “Feminism, Capitalism, and the
egg freezing, 16, 83, 90, Cunning of History” (Fraser),
96–100,  145 58, 193n13
emancipation and aspiring feminist
professionals, 24, 26–28, convergences, 135–161 (see
46, 48, 89 also Kelly, Megyn; Slaughter,
freedom, 20th century, 29–30, 32 Anne-Marie; Trump, Ivanka)
Friedan on, 62 ideal, 14
futurity, as form of individuated, 54–55, 63
governmentality,  15–16 militancy, mass, 173, 215n30
heterosexual and white, 45 feminist, new, 82
neoliberal, 76, 81, 83 as faux feminism, 170
Sandberg on, 63 ideal, affect and, 71–78
I ndex | 231
feminist identification, 4–6, motherhood, postponing,

111–112 90–93,  95
1990s,  9–10 neoliberal feminism, 90–93,
2012+, 10–11, 11f, 23 115–119,  133
Beyoncé, 10, 11f, 167, 196n4 neoliberalism, positive psychic
futurity, 111–112 life, 114–115
Mead, Lindsay, 111–112 political horizon, undermining,
Rowley, Aidan Donnelley, 129–134
111–112 privilege and structural
Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 157 inequalities, 123–129
Trump, Ivanka, 153, 211n54 theorizing gender of, 93–96
Watson, Emma, 10, 79–81, 80f well-being, present and,
flexible economy, 162–163 119–123
flexible scheduling, Starbucks,
162–163 Gambetti, Zeynep, 58
Foucault, Michel, 87–88, 93 Garber, Megan, 135
Fraser, Nancy, 58, 193n13 gendered technologies of
Friedan, Betty, 9, 62–63 self, 116
fulfillment, individual, 83. See also gender equality
happiness critical gaze, U.S., 76–77
future (futurity), 105–134 Kelly, Megyn, 140–141
affective life, 111–113 Sandberg, Sheryl, 60–62,
“Balance Project” (Schnall), 107 64, 67, 69
“being present,” 105–109, Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 158
119–122, 130–131,  133 stalled, 88
blogs, mommy and mommy- Trump, Ivanka, 140–141
esque, 110–111 “Why Gender Equality Has
confidence, building, 118, Stalled” (Coontz), 88
120, 208n17 gender of futurity,
confidence, futurity, 116, theorizing,  93–96
118–119, 122–123, 132–133 generic human capital. See human
feminist identification, capital, generic; neoliberal
111–112 (see also feminist futurity and generic human
identification) capital
governmentality as, 15–16, 20, Gill, Rosalind, 5, 7,
46, 54–59, 57, 63, 76, 83, 115–116,  202n12
87–88, 106–107, 109, 114, Gilligan, Carol, 28
122, 134 Glenn, Evelyn Nakano, 199n35
happiness, 105–106 Global Gag Rule, 2
“Ivy League Insecurities” blog The Good Wife, 14, 35–38,
(Rowley), 106–109, 111, 37f, 46
119–120 Gordon, Neve, 170–171
232 | I ndex
governmentality HeForShe campaign, 79–81, 80f

happiness, pursuing, 46 “Here and Now,” 105–135. See
neoliberal, 15–16, 54, 55, 56–59, also Mead, Lindsay; Rowley,
63, 76, 83, 87–88, 106–107, Aidan Donnelley
109, 114, 122, 134 younger women, preoccupation,
new forms, 20 109, 202n12
theorists, contemporary, 57 “The Here Year,” 106
gray economy, 165 Hernandez, Lisa Ackerly, 188n14
heteronormativity, 20, 26, 43
habitus, 126–127 “high-potential men,” 94
Hall, Stuart, 76 high-powered women. See
happiness, 27. See also aspirational women
positive affect Hochschild, Arlie
balance, 18, 106–108 At the Heart of Work and Family,
being present, 105–109, 39–40,  101
119–122, 130–131,  133 Second Shift, The, 9, 39, 85, 100
cultivating, 108, 131–132 Time Bind, 39, 100
economic model, 72 homonormative coupling, 191n44
future, 105–106 hookup culture, 16, 83, 90–93,
new feminist ideal, 71–78 97, 145
social good, 27 human capital, generic, 17, 117.
social ideal, 45–46 See also neoliberal futurity
social justice to, 39–43 and generic human capital
what happiness does, 44–47 aspirational women, conversion
women’s, current vs. 1972, 40 into, 19, 85, 99, 102–103, 139,
from work–family balance, 150–152,  210n29
108–109 (see also work– Brown, 84
family balance, happy) Feher, 144–145
happiness industry, 43, 44, 76, measuring, 159–161
170–171,  209n23 self-investment, 7, 16, 17, 83, 84,
happiness project, national 92–94, 96, 102, 104, 106, 117,
class and race biases, 41–42 143 (see self-investment)
Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 26, 40–43 woman as, 84
Happiness Project, The, 26, Women Who Work (Trump),
40–43,  122 139, 143, 145–146
happiness turn, 114 young, aspirational women, 84–85
happy work–life balance. See Human Condition (Arendt), 147
work–family balance, happy
Harvey, David, 195–196n41 identification, feminist. See
“having it all,” 24, 112, 129, feminist identification
131–132, 135, 137, 138 individual fulfillment, 83. See also
happily,  24–26 happiness
I ndex | 233
individuation, 163 Lean In: Women, Work, and the

Arendt, Hannah, 68, 147 Will to Lead (Sandberg). See
confidence building and future Sandberg, Sheryl
happy balance, 123 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender,
neoliberal feminism, 21, queer and questioning
54–55, 75, 78 (LGBTQ) rights, 2
Rowley, Aidan Donnelley, acceptance, neoliberal
127, 128 feminism,  20–21
Sandberg, Sheryl, 64 liberal imagination, saving, 48–52
technologies of the self, 110 liberalism
intensive mothering, 11, 40, 50, 82, emancipation, 48
102, 130 gendered operations, 49–50
internalizing the revolution, neoliberalism from, 64–71, 65f
65–68 Lorde, Audre, 125
International Women’s Day March
(2017), 173 Machung, Anne, 9
Islamophobic discourse, 60–61 Marriage Equality Act, 2
“Ivy League Insecurities” blog mass mobilization, 4
(Rowley). See Rowley, Aidan #MeToo, 22, 185n41
Donnelley militancy, 173, 215n20
Women’s March (January 2017),
Jensen, Tracy, 113 173, 173f
maternal-familialism,  191n50
Kelly, Megyn, 19, 137 May, Theresa, 12
advice-oriented memoir, McRobbie, Angela, 7, 45, 68, 96,
137, 208n10 115–116, 181n12, 194n15
care work, managing, 143, Mead, Lindsay, 105–109, 111,
156–157 119–120
family, 156 being present and happiness,
gender equality, 140–141 119–122, 130–131
hard work, self-improvement, feminist identification, 111–112
and positive attitude, 140–142 men
maternity leave, paid, 141 “high-potential,”  94
political leanings, 154–157, 155f with small children, media
work–family balance, 139, on, 199n29
142–143 #MeToo, 22, 185n41
Klein, Naomi, 2, 174, 179n3 militancy, mass feminist,
173, 215n30
Larner, Wendy, 7, 57 “mindful” mothering, 11, 40, 50,
leadership ambition gap, 66–67 82, 102, 130
“lean in,” 62, 64, 67–68 Mitchell, Juliet, 171
groups,  68–69 Mohanty, Chandra, 170
234 | I ndex
Mohr, Tara, 127–128 neoliberalism

mommy blogs, 5, 14, 18, affective life, 111–113
110–111,  203n22 associations, 3
mommy-esque blogs, definition and scope, 7
110–111,  203n22 feminism entanglement,
mommy wars, 86, 188n15 5, 180n7
motherhood, postponing from liberalism, 64–71, 65f
child rearing, 90–93, 98–99 past effects, 2
egg freezing, 16, 83, 90, positive psychic life, 114–115
96–100,  145 “Neoliberalism and the End
futurity, 90–93, 95 of Liberal Democracy”
reproduction, 102, 116 (Brown),  56–57
mothering neoliberal rationality, 56–59,
expectation,  82–83 75, 102
intensive (mindful), 11, 40, 50, care work, 16, 21, 132, 152, 161
82, 102, 130 reproduction, 16, 21, 132,
Mumsnet, 113 152, 161
mythical “American” norm, New Woman, 32
125–126 Norton, Ann, 60–61
Norway, work–family balance,
Navarro, Jannette, 162–163, 166 201–202n11
Negra, Diane, 137
neofascism, 2, 3–4, 21, 177 “off-ramping,” 69,  86–87
neoliberal futurity and generic opt out discourse, 38, 87
human capital, 79–104 challenge, 190n26
accommodating feminisms, 82 “The Opt-Out Generation
egg freezing, 16, 83, 90, Wants Back In” (Warner),
96–100,  145 88–89,  89f
hookup culture, 16, 83, 90–93, “The Opt-Out Revolution”
97, 145 (Belkin),  86–87
individual fulfillment, 83 Orgad, Shani, 116, 152
neoliberal feminism, 82–83, 85 outsourcing
neoliberal feminism, futurity care work, 16, 17, 103, 164–165
and,  90–93 child rearing, 100, 103
vs. postfeminism, 79–81 reproduction, 16, 17, 103
theorizing gender of
futurity,  93–96 Perugini, Nicola, 170–171
transforming balance into political horizon, undermining,
promise, 85–89, 89f 129–134
Watson, Emma, 79–81, 80f positive affect, 27–28. See also
work–family balance, 83–84 (see happiness
also work–family balance) confidence, 118
I ndex | 235
cultivating, 131–132 presuppositions, gendered, 49,

neoliberalism, 114–115 51, 73, 100–101
positive psychology, 114 reshaping public and workplace
postfeminism, 5, 7 norms,  33–34
choice as, 86 rethinking,  95–96
era, 9 Women Who Work (Trump),
vs. neoliberal futurity, 79–81 146–149
scholarly literature, 79–81
post-racialism,  78 rationality, neoliberal, 56–59,
poststructuralist feminists, 21 75, 102
Power, Nina, 171–174 reproduction, 99
precarity, 21, 175–178 aspirational women, 210n29
present, being capital investment, 146
happiness, 105–109, 119–122, cost-benefit calculus, 117
130–131,  133 dilemma, 56
well-being, 119–123 disposable, unworthy
presuppositions, gendered, 49, 51, females, 20
73, 100–101 economization, 99
private-public divide. See egg freezing, 16, 83, 90,
public-private  divide 96–100,  145
privilege Kelly on, 143
Rowley, Aidan Donnelley, market idiom, 56
124–125, 127–129 neoliberal rationality, 16, 21,
structural inequalities and, 132, 152, 161
123–129 outsourcing, 16, 17, 103
white, 126 postponing, 102, 116
professional life, masculinist, 30 responsibilization, 21, 96,
progressive womanhood 145, 197n14
balanced, 27, 33–39 revolution
reimagining, 28 internalizing,  65–66
Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 30 opt-out,  86–87
Promise of Happiness, The Rivkin-Fish, Michele, 168–169
(Ahmed), 44 Rose, Nikolas, 57, 145
public, reshaping, 33–34 Rosin, Hannah, 91–92
public-private divide, 6, 30 Rowley, Aidan Donnelley, 106–109,
aspirational women, 32 111, 119–120
bridging,  31–32 being present and happiness,
dual expectations, 31 119–122, 130–131,  133
gendered, felicitous work–family feminist identification, 111–112
balance,  72–73 privilege, 124–125, 127–129
liberal feminism, 100–101 Rubin, Gretchen, 26, 40–43,
neoliberal feminism, 6 121, 122
236 | I ndex
Sandberg, Sheryl, 10, 12, 15, 18, human capital, 7, 16, 17, 83,
34, 65f, 85 84, 92–94, 96, 102, 104, 106,
criticism,  53–54 117, 143
as entrepreneurial, 63 neoliberal governmentality and
fair treatment and equal future returns, 106, 110
opportunity, 62 psychic, 123–124
gender equality, 60–62, self-realization,  63
64, 67, 69 self-transformation,  63
husband’s death on, 195n40 Seligson, Hannah, 98
individualistic framing, Settle for More (Kelly). See
54–55,  63 Kelly, Megyn
internalizing the Sex in the City, 35, 37–38
revolution,  65–68 sexual harassment and assault,
leadership ambition gap, #MeToo, 22, 185n41
66–67 sexual relationships, cost-benefit
“lean in,” 62, 64, 67–68 metrics, 91
liberal husk, 59–64 Sitka, Lea, 167
liberalism to neoliberalism, Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 10, 14, 18,
64–71,  65f 19, 23–52, 25f, 72, 85, 138,
new feminist ideal, 71–78 139, 186n7
self-realization and balance as “progressive,” US
self-transformation,  63 popular culture, 33–39
Slaughter disagreement, 53 career–family divide, 24
top-down approach,  69–70 care work, 138, 157–161
well-being and self-care, 55, 70 equal opportunity, 41, 190n33
work and self, 34–35, 42 family commitment focus, 74
work commitment focus, 74 feminist identification, 157
Scharff, Christina, 114–116 gender equality, actions for, 158
Schnall, Susie, 107 happiness, 26, 27, 40–41
Schwartz, Felice, 188n15 happiness, social justice
Scott, Joan, 49–50, 51 to,  39–43
Second Shift, The (Hochschild and “having it all” happily, 24–26
Machung), 9, 39, 85, 100 human capital, measuring,
Segal, Lynne, 12 159–161
Seglison, Hannah, 165 individual responsibility, 159
self, gendered technologies, 116 liberal imagination,
self-branding spaces, 203n22 saving,  48–52
self-care, 55, 70, 78 market competition, 158
self-investment, 78, 95 maternal instincts, 189n21
balance and happiness, 108 new woman through
egg freezing, 16, 83, 90, superwoman to balanced
96–100,  145 woman,  29–33
I ndex | 237
political leanings, 157–161 temporalities, 18, 93, 107, 109, 115,

popularity, 24 130, 202n12, 208n17
progressive womanhood as Time Bind (Hochschild), 39, 100
balancing act, 27 trickle-down corporate
progress narrative, 30, 188n15 feminism, 69, 82
Sandberg disagreement, 53 “The True Cost of Leaning In”
space, liberalism’s construction, (Seligson), 99
6, 15, 28–29 True Womanhood, 32
success as career Trump, Ivanka, 19, 135–137,
achievement, 138 140–145
synopsis,  23–24 20s, hard work and professional
what happiness does, 44–47 focus, 140
work–family balance, 27–28, affordable child care,
138–139 208–209n20
work–family balance, happy, care work, managing, 151–153,
81–82, 88, 138, 159 156–157
work–family balance, women economizing private, market
forging new, 26 value, and women as stock,
social justice, 170–171 136–137, 145–146, 149–152
erasure, 15 entrepreneurialism, happiness,
groups struggling for, 176 and resilience, 142
to happiness, 39–43 feminist identification,
liberal feminist discourse, 28, 41 153, 211n54
neoliberalism, 58, 59 gender equality, 140–141
new era, 4, 5 generic human capital, 139, 143,
precariousness, 177 145–146
reclaiming feminist, 134, 161, maternity leave, paid, 141
171, 178 motherhood, managerial
vocabulary, 21 approach, 139, 160
Sorensen, Siri, 201–202n11 one’s enterprise vs. one’s self,
space, liberalism’s construction, 6, 147–148,  150
15, 28–29, 48 political leanings, 153–154,
Stansell, Christine, 63 156–157
Stevenson, Betsey, 40 proactive, innovative, and
Stone, Pamela, 188n14 entrepreneurial people, 142
structural inequalities, privilege public-private divide, 146–149
and, 123–129 reproduction and care work,
superwoman model, 32 151–153, 156–157
self-investment,  136
Taylor, Kate, 87, 90–91 success, 136
Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, 163 wifehood and family first,
technologies of the self, 93 152–153,  156
238 | I ndex
Trump, Ivanka (cont.) wifehood, 152

work–family balance, 139, 143, Wildman, Sarah, 98
151–153 Wolf, Naomi, 9, 62–63, 187n8,
work/life rhythm, 143 194–195n24
Wolfers, Justin, 40
unencumbered individual, as male, Women’s March (January 2017),
128, 191n50 173, 173f
Unfinished Business (Slaughter). Women Who Work (Trump). See
See Slaughter, Anne-Marie Trump, Ivanka
work–family balance, 9, 13–14, 18,
Valenti, Jessica, 82, 167, 168 23, 27–28, 82, 189n21
Van Clear, Kara, 113 1980s, 27
Vanderkam, Laura, 121 articles, 90
aspirational women, 210n29
wage gap critique, 131
gender, 163 forging new, 26
gender + family status + race, future, promise, 85–89, 89f
163–164 hierarchical gender norms,
motherhood penalty, 164 reinstating, 45
Warner, Judith, 87, 88 Kelly, Megyn, 142–143
“The Opt-Out Generation neoliberal futurity, 83–84
Wants Back In,” 88–89, 89f Norway, 201–202n11
Watson, Emma, 10, 79–81, 80f Trump, Ivanka, 139, 143,
well-being, 55, 70 151–153
individual concern, 123 work–family balance, happy
present, 119–123 1980s feminist discourse, 27
well-planned life, 86, 92–93 articles exploring, 90
hookup culture, 16, 83, 90–93, “Balance Project”
97, 145 (Schnall), 107
well-rounded woman, 28, 33, 38, “being present,” 105–109,
39, 40, 42 119–122, 130–131,  133
“We Should All Be Feminists” books, 35
(Adichie), 10, 11f as burdening women, 51
West, Cornel, 2 confidence, 119
white governmentality, 190n35
hierarchy/stratification,  206n48 ideal, career and normative
privilege, 126 family, 45
“Why Gender Equality Has ideal, invented, 51
Stalled” (Coontz), 88 ideal, new feminist, 71–78
“Why Women Still Can’t Have neoliberal feminism, 59,
It All” (Slaughter). See 107–108
Slaughter, Anne-Marie as normalizing matrix, 15
I ndex | 239
public-private divide, gendered, women’s “progress” as, 14–15

72–73 Women Who Work (Trump),
reproduction/care quandary, 117 19, 135
Sandberg, 34, 81–82, 88 workplace norms, reshaping,
self-tailored,  72–74 34. See also Slaughter,
Slaughter, 26, 32, 40, 81–82, 88, Anne-Marie
138, 159
women crafting own, 40, Zeisler, Andi, 167
44–45,  55 Zulver, Julia, 196n6

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THE RISE OF NEOLIBERAL FEMINISM

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Introduction: Feminism in Neoliberal Times 1

In recent years, feminism has seen a resurgence in the pop-

personal fulfillment (which relies on low-​paid, outsourced

women can turn around the unfortunate “mutual entangle-

LIKE MOST RESEARCH, THIS PROJECT has multiple roots

as well as the many conversations that helped me think

contemporary feminism, and I owe them an enormous debt

safe haven in the United Kingdom. She, too, has become an

over twenty years, has read, discussed, and argued with me

Different versions of Chapter 1 were published in Feminist

FOR MANY PROGRESSIVE AMERICANS, HILLARY Clinton’s

especially since the new administration seems hell-​bent on

major national party. Many on the left—​myself included—​

contemporary political landscape—​existing in other coun-

The prospect of a resurgent feminist discourse was, of

list of high-​profile women publicly identifying themselves

Drawing on the work of Wendy Brown, Michel Feher, and

To make sense of the current moment in which neoliberal

This relatively uncritical progressive narrative has, not

position of social groups and individuals.23 These years were

by the ascendency, visibility, and widespread popularity of a

contrast, feminist discourse—​as it appears and circulates in

and the reason it plays a minimal role in the mainstream

The notion of a happy work-​ family balance constitutes

analysis. Its careful examination of diverse cultural sites—​

intensifying crisis in liberalism’s construal of space and is

self-​investments in the present to ensure enhanced returns in

these are colonizing all spheres of life including the private

in more detail in Chapter 6, precisely at the moment when

here and now,” particularly for aging women, is not neces-

these domains through market metrics. Not only does the

same way that I suggest it “needs” feminism to help resolve

It is precisely during such a critical historical juncture,

IN THE SECOND DECADE OF the twenty-​first century, high-​

that high-​powered professional women are still finding it

Indeed, Slaughter “had it all”—​a high-​level influential

following ones, this shift can also be detected in numerous

Can’t Have It All” strike me as particularly indicative of this

notions of freedom, equal rights, and social justice toward

of neoliberalism and, as I argue in Chapter 2, the rise of a

“Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” is clearly informed by

for middle-​class women to bridge both spheres at the same

Following once again in the footsteps of a range of femi-

the other. This is precisely the moment when the notion of

birth of the new ideal: the well-​rounded woman. Slaughter

Unlike second-​wave feminists who famously insisted that

begin recognizing the value of child-​rearing and family life.

[. . .] happy professionals and competent mothers” as its pro-

after which their daughter begins to suffer from a debilitating

and more about equilibrium. Indeed, the characters of Ally

liberated but unfulfilled (since to be normatively fulfilled as

As Slaughter reported in a talk she gave at Princeton six

Slaughter is obviously motivated by a desire to understand

domestic duties.28 For working mothers, navigating the con-

which the highest (feminist) good is the successful integra-

shifts, night shifts, or two to three jobs just in order to provide

problem—​although it does this as well and universalizes the

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

personal fulfillment (which relies on low-paid, outsourced

especially since the new administration seems hell-bent on

major national party. Many on the left—myself included—

contemporary political landscape—existing in other coun-

list of high-profile women publicly identifying themselves

contrast, feminist discourse—as it appears and circulates in

The notion of a happy work- family balance constitutes

analysis. Its careful examination of diverse cultural sites—

self-investments in the present to ensure enhanced returns in

IN THE SECOND DECADE OF the twenty-first century, high-

that high-powered professional women are still finding it

Indeed, Slaughter “had it all”—a high-level influential

for middle-class women to bridge both spheres at the same

birth of the new ideal: the well-rounded woman. Slaughter

Unlike second-wave feminists who famously insisted that

begin recognizing the value of child-rearing and family life.

problem—although it does this as well and universalizes the

The notion of a happy work-family balance can, I posit, be

IN MARCH 2013, JUST A few months after Anne-

other words, offers no critique—immanent or otherwise—

new generation of middle-class women who had grown up

rather a high-powered woman who manages to balance a

mobilization and acceptance of terms like a happy work-

paramount. Moreover, such a quest requires constant self-

While the notion of work-family balance in the United States

of balance serves as the ever-elusive, affective, individual,

“conduct of conduct”21—in addition to the ongoing transmu-

overachievers, the aspiring law-firm partners, the ambitious