Working on working women: the postfeminist mystification of employable femininity in post-crisis Spain

ABSTRACT

This article deploys the notion of ‘employable femininity’, by which we refer to the mystification along postfeminist lines of an idealized womanhood suitable to be employed and worked upon, in order to explore how women’s relation to employment is currently being articulated and contested in contemporary Spain. Structural transformations during neoliberalism have promoted women’s rising involvement into labor markets while, simultaneously, reinforcing the systemic relevance of women’s unpaid work in the domestic arena. A hegemonic, media-constructed model of femininity has thus emerged where participation into paid employment is presented as a path towards liberation and economic independence for certain women who, nonetheless, cannot do away with the care-related responsibilities traditionally allotted to them. The current Spanish conjuncture provides a paradigmatic case in point to observe how women’s relation to employment is being reconfigured, insofar as attempts to ‘re-domesticate’ women in the aftermath of the Great Recession have been confronted by a resurgent feminist movement which, nowadays, figures as the main vector of social contention in contemporary Spain.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural studies
• employment
• femininity
• neoliberalism
• postfeminism

SUBJECT CLASSIFICATION CODES:

• Cultural Studies
• Political Economy
• Feminist Economics
• Gender Studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While the term neoliberalism has received many different usages, we employ it to refer to the latest stage in capitalist history, the possibility of whose historical demise was first announced by the onset of the Great Recession. Responding to falling capitalist profitability and to growing social unrest, several institutional transformations took place in various social domains, from the late-1970s onwards, whose ultimate raison d’être was the reinforcement of market logics in various social domains. Rising inequalities, financialization, and labor casualization were thus among its most prominent manifestations.

2 The references to the expressed opinions and experiences of Spanish new femininities contained in this last part of the article correspond to the fieldwork performed by Laura Martínez-Jiménez in her doctoral research (2019). For that work, a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews with 30 women who fitted the profile of what we have defined as new femininities were conducted between 2017 and 2018.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pedro M. Rey-Araújo

Pedro M. Rey-Araújo has a PhD in Economics from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. His research interests include critical political economy, discourse theory, the sociology of time, and critical theory broadly understood. He is the author of Capitalism, Institutions and Social Orders. The Case of Contemporary Spain (Routledge, 2021).

Laura Martínez-Jiménez

Laura Martínez-Jimenez has a PhD in Social Sciences, a MA in Gender Studies and a Degree in Journalism. She specializes in feminist cultural studies and her work is focused on the intersections of (post)feminism, popular culture, (gender) identity, precariousness and neoliberal capitalism. Laura has been a visiting scholar at the UCD Equality Studies Center (Dublin, Ireland) and lecturer at the School of Business Management and Administration (Pablo de Olavide University, Spain) and the School of Communication (University of Seville, Spain). She is a member of the GEP&DO Observatory, the EcoEcoFem Research Group and the Spanish Association of Communication Research.

Lina Gálvez-Muñoz

Lina Gálvez-Muñoz is Professor of Economic History, Economic Institutions and Gender Studies at Pablo de Olavide University (Spain). She has collaborated with national and international organizations and institutions such as United Nations, as well as several news media. Currently, Lina is a member of the Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament.