Just being and being bad: Female friendship as a refuge in neoliberal times

Abstract

Those investigating neoliberal and postfeminist subjectivities have argued that continuous self-improvement and self-surveillance have become everyday life strategies for many women. It has been suggested that these strategies have also re-organised women’s friendships, so that this is now a significant field of practice for women to support each other in the anxiety provoking work of self-perfection. Using talk-data from a sample of women in Aotearoa New Zealand we explore these claims, and report on how our sample of women describe their friendships, not so much as a site for developing and perfecting the neoliberal self, but as a place of reprieve from conventions of relentless productivity – a site of ease, escape and refuge. We are not suggesting that accounts of postfeminist, neoliberal subjectivities are inaccurate or that these modes of self-making are not relevant to our participants, but that the discursive environment of women’s close friendships is plural, combining neoliberal emphases with potentially subversive counter-narratives.