Paradoxes of Anti‐austerity Protest: Matters of Neoliberalism, Gender, and Subjectivity in a Case of Collective Resignation

Abstract

This article analyses an episode of collective resignation. Carried out mainly by specialist nurses, this is a proliferating form of worker protest in Sweden that poses a challenge to austerity policy and emerges in a specific industrial‐relations context. Mobilizing for collective resignation, activist nurses navigate terrains of neoliberal governance, marketization and flexible labour‐market dynamics. The collective resignation is also a form of action underpinned by a discourse of gender equality. Our analysis, which attends to the co‐emergence of gendering and subject formation in the narratives of a group of activists and to the use of gender‐equality rhetoric in framing collective action, shows how opportunities for collective action arise that also restrain the exercise of agency. In this case, subject formation included contrasting nursing to tropes of archetypical militant workers and negotiating tensions between care and collective action. This involved reproducing and challenging established forms of gendering.

Reactionary radicalism and the analysis of worker subjectivity in Marx’s critique of political economy

“…For one, in attending to the subjective preconditions of this form of militancy, the analysis does not systematically treat ‘mobilization’ or ‘structures of opportunity’. This would entail analysis of evolving sources of workers’ power in the context of different modalities of commodification of public services Granberg (2016). Another limitation is that, in showing how Marx’s analysis of worker subjectivity can be applied, it has focused on a subjective trajectory specific to the form of militancy that Calhoun (1983) calls reactionary radicalism.…”

Postfeminist individuating of a women collective and the strugglesome emergence of a relational collective feminist solidarity: The story of Kudumbashree, a Kerala state‐instituted women empowerment program

“…We join this stream by mobilizing a critical postfeminist approach to comprehend the pluriversal experiences of women who form Kudumbashree as a collective. We seek to unravel the neoliberal postfeminization that unfolds in collectivizing women in order to empower them, which treats the collective as an aggregate of individual decisions, reconstituting the interpretations of collectives and collectivization (Granberg & Nygren, 2017). To do so, we start with exploring the implications of the empowerment discourses and practices that mobilized women to join Kudumbashree.…”

“…Overall, mobilization into Kudumbashree appears to involve legitimization and contextual reworking of a postfeminist empowerment, wherein women accept responsibility for their empowerment (primarily economic) claim to be relatively autonomous, free, and desiring entrepreneurs who place themselves in a path of continuous improvements by upskilling and self‐disciplining (Lewis, 2014), and act accordingly. Thus, individualized paths of continuous self‐improvement were being created within Kudumbashree, and the collective was becoming an aggregate of those paths (Granberg & Nygren, 2017). This postfeminization is imbricated by contextual reworking and reinforcement of gendered and patriarchal relations with co‐opted ruptures of shifts in economic decision‐making in families and the othering that sympathetically recognizes non‐collectivized caste–class disparities and their ramifications.…”

Rethinking gender equity in the contaminated university: A methodology for listening for music in the ruins

“…They explore the ways in which neoliberal discourses and practices are appropriated and internalized, resulting in a deepening of already existing gendered inequalities. There have also been several studies of the ways in which neoliberalism is contested and resisted in everyday practices at the work place and in feminist movements (e.g., Adamson, 2017; Berglund, Ahl, Pettersson, & Tillmar, 2018; Colley & White, 2019; Davies, Browne, Gannon, Honan, & Somerville, 2005; Granberg & Nygren, 2017; Grosser & McCarthy, 2019; Kemp & Berkowich, 2020; Rottenberg, 2019).…”