This article employs a Foucauldian discourse analysis of UK social policy on work and retirement from the austerity measures of 2010 to 2019, to explore the emergence of older femininity as a key site to articulate and justify a neoliberal governmentality in old age, in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Feminist Cultural Studies' scholarship has remarked and critiqued the centrality of work in contemporary cultural discourses of female emancipation and empowerment, highlighting how the celebration of female workplace success has been employed to sustain the social, cultural, and economic project of neoliberalism. However, this academic field has focused predominantly on young women and women up to childbearing age, failing to account for the way older femininity is being increasingly included in neoliberal discourses through the encouragement to work in old age. Through the dialogic relationship between ‘entrepreneurialism’ and―what I call―‘gendered anti‐welfarism’ in old age, the UK social policy draws on a feminist vocabulary to offer ‘the older entrepreneurial woman’ as its ideal subject, characterized by capacity and willingness to work, personal and job‐market flexibility, responsibilization and individualization of risk, and―but only for the more privileged few―choice. Ultimately, the article illustrates how contemporary cultural discourses that place work as central to female empowerment and emancipation are not limited to younger women, but extend to older femininity through the normalization of the figure of the older entrepreneurial woman, with the articulation of a ‘neoliberal feminism in old age’.
This article identifies an important conversation about the politics of female anger in older age in the CBS show The Good Fight (2017–). By centring the narrative around the emotional life of a woman in her 60s, the show offers older femininity as a site for discussing social and political changes that have occurred in the USA in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump. Through a close analysis of the four seasons that were released before the Covid-19 pandemic, this article maps the emotional journey of Diane Lockheart through her personal, economic, and political crises, showing how different emotions are connected with Diane’s engagement—and at times disengagement—with politics. Ultimately, the article contributes to the field of feminist cultural studies by exploring the way The Good Fight offers female anger in older age as key to feminist engagement and political change.
This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of Open Library of Humanities, which is a journal published by the Open Library of Humanities.
The article takes as its subject the trials of Amanda Knox, Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guede for the murder of the English student Meredith Kercher in Perugia on 2 November 2007. Through a Foucauldian discourse analysis, the article explores the discursive strategies that are employed – through the interplay of the media and the legal system – to reinsert the disruptive figure of ‘the woman who kills’ within normative and sanctioned forms of femininity and female sexuality. Furthermore, the analysis shows how the Knox case is central for understanding Italian culture, which is characterised by an anxiety towards, and rejection of, a novel facet of young femininity in post-feminist culture: the phallic subjectivity and sexuality incarnated by Knox.
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