An embarrassment of riches: The seduction of postfeminism in the academy

Abstract

Given critiques of postfeminism as a neoliberal and patriarchal discourse that has taken considerable tolls on professional life, its popularity in organisational practice seems out of place. This article explores the processes of postfeminism through an autoethnographic inquiry of my experiences working as a research fellow at a leadership research centre in Australia. In theorising from my narrative accounts as an early career scholar, I offer a view into the entangled processes of postfeminist knowledge production and my own making as a postfeminist subject. In doing so, I attempt to illustrate the seductive appeal of postfeminism as an ostensibly empowering process that ultimately preserves White elite class patriarchal power.

‘You’d want to be sure that you don’t burn the bridge behind you when you leave’.

The woman in front of me folds her hands over her knee and lets the silence between us stretch. The sweeping windows of her elegant office cast their view into the campus courtyard below where birds are singing, careless to the way the vice chancellor’s (VC) words had caused the pit of my stomach to free fall. My face heats up and I’m too afraid to look down at my hands, which I worry are shaking. I shuffle through the various scenarios I anticipated for my exit interview. Despite the hundred rehearsals I had in my head leading up to this morning, her response now never featured as a possibility. I don’t know how I should answer, so I don’t. A year and a half of being the poster girl for the research centre ending with an anticlimactic goodbye.

I was certainly not the first pawn worn out at a neoliberal institutional and there have been countless more broken pieces after me, swept into the waste bin. A couple of years after I left, even the centre itself was cleared away. Everyone at the university has probably already moved on and forgotten about the centre. I hope I will too, after I share my story.

So how did the unfathomable occur?

I find postfeminism a powerful theoretical lens to make sense of my experiences at the research centre. Following in the steps of feminist scholars before me (Gill et al., 2017; Gill and Scharff, 2011; Lewis, 2014b; Lewis et al., 2017), I take postfeminism to be a discursive formation that has risen to dominance in our neoliberal era. Postfeminism recasts gender equality in neoliberal terms: ‘as an individualistic, entrepreneurial project that can be inculcated by the self’ (Gill and Orgad, 2015: 334). Although postfeminist discourses ostensibly emphasise feminist values of freedom, choice and empowerment, it does so alongside an uneasy reinforcement of patriarchal notions of feminine beauty and sexuality. At the same time, structural gender inequalities are denied in favour of transferring the responsibility to overcome sexism onto the individual. The ideal postfeminist subject is exhorted to fashion herself as an independent and ambitious ‘working girl’ who also conforms to traditionally feminine conduct and desires, such as heterosexual romantic relationships and motherhood (Adamson, 2017; Gill and Scharff, 2011; Negra, 2009).

I was confronted with the ways gender relations came to be redefined in postfeminist terms during my time working as a research fellow at a research centre in Australia after graduating from my PhD. Over the course of 18 months, my immersion in the knowledge-making projects of the centre revealed the normalisation of neoliberalism in the academy as well as the increasing importance of systemic analysis and critique of these processes (Mohanty, 2013). With this article, I seek to contribute to the ongoing critique of postfeminism by illustrating how an early career scholar becomes implicated in the messy processes of postfeminist knowledge production and the making of myself as a postfeminist subject through an autoethnographic inquiry. I extend theorisations of postfeminism through an intersectional analysis that not only demonstrates the seduction of postfeminism, but also highlights how we are being seduced into a fundamentally White and elite class gender regime. But before I offer my story, I will discuss autoethnography more formally to explain how and why I have adopted this non-traditional method of inquiry.

Autoethnography

Grounded in the biographical turn in social science (Chamberlayne et al., 2000), autoethnography is an autobiographical genre of research and writing involving the study of personal documents that offer insights into the structure and dynamics of the author’s consciousness in relation to their sociocultural context (Ellis, 1998; Ellis and Bochner, 2000; Reed-Danahay, 1997). Such documents might include diaries, memoirs, witness statements, letters and e-mails; research diaries and field notes are also important sources of information about their author’s perceptions of the self and their social reality (Haynes, 2011; Vickers, 2007). Although autoethnography prescribes no fixed form or format, autoethnographic writing enables the author and the readers alike to ‘make sense of their experiences and enter into dialogue through empathic understanding’ so that ‘one can analyse and understand personal experience as part of a larger social and political system’ (van Amsterdam, 2015: 270).

Autoethnographic accounts may take the form of poetry, short stories, novels, plays and photographic essays. For this article, I choose the form of vignettes: fragmented personal stories that provide ‘a vivid portrayal of the conduct of an event of everyday life’ (Erickson, 1986: 149) that ask readers to ‘relive the experience through the writer’s or performer’s eyes’ (Denzin, 2009: 131). These vignettes are presented alongside journal entries, meeting notes and correspondence written at the time of these events. I’ve been an avid journaller since I was a child, and as the new role represented a significant milestone in my life, I began recording the events and my reflections from my first day on the job in a new pocket notebook. I would go on to fill up two more notebooks over the next 18 months. While none of the notes were made with the intention for future autoethnographic analysis, they were regular and detailed as I sought to process the intense emotional experiences that plagued my time at the centre. The vignettes are contextualised by memory, presented with interpretive commentary and interwoven with theory.

Autoethnography has predominantly to date been relegated to the periphery of organisational theorising. In a field dominated by positivistic research, autoethnography was traditionally regarded as biased, unreliable departures from the prevailing conventions of survey methods and experiments (Watson, 2011). Even more virulent critics accuse autoethnography of being atheoretical and self-obsessed navel-gazing (Ellis, 1998). The last decade of autoethnographic organisational theorising has demonstrated to the contrary that autoethnography has its place for recognising the researcher as an inseparable instrument of their inquiry. Autoethnography, when done well, has the power to speak beyond the self (Ellis, 1998) and show how sociological insights can be illustrated through vivid personal narratives (Bochner, 2001; Spry, 2001). This has enabled organisational autoethnographers to provide emotionally honest insights into a range of issues including bullying and violence (Hearn, 2003; Vickers, 2007; Westwood, 2003), workaholism (Boje and Tyler, 2008), overwork (Bourne and Forman, 2014), grief (Han, 2012), motherhood (Riad, 2007), breastfeeding (van Amsterdam, 2015), being a doctoral student (Prasad, 2013), teaching (Humphreys, 2006; Sinclair, 2005), conferences (Ford and Harding, 2010; Learmonth and Humphreys, 2011), intersectional inequalities (Faifua, 2010; Ng, 2014; O’Shea, 2017) and even doing autoethnography (Haynes, 2011).

In defiant rebellion against positivistic conventions, autoethnography embraces a degree of fictionalisation. In this way, autoethnography does not presume that research is about the discovery of ‘truth’ (Haynes, 2011). My representations of the events at the research centre are embellished with fictive elements in attempts to recreate the raw emotional experiences in ways that feel more representationally ‘real’ to me as I remember them while also disguising sensitive and confidential information about those who were involved with the research centre (Humphreys and Watson, 2009). Some details in the stories (including all names) have been deliberately altered, to preserve anonymity. The portrayals will be somewhere between confessional and impressionistic (Van Maanen, 1998) to counter the distanced, impersonal forms of writing that dominate organisation studies (Kaufmann, 2014).

As a ‘methodology of the heart’, autoethnography demands the author to place their body in their writing – ‘a body deployed not as a narcissistic display but on behalf of others, a body that invites identification and empathic connection, a body that takes as its charge to be fully human’ (Pelias, 2004: 1; see also Denzin, 2006). Revealing the vulnerable and intimate autoethnographic body (Doloriert and Sambrook, 2009) does not come easily to me as this is the first autoethnography I have attempted on my own. While striving to be evocative with my storytelling, I find myself unable to let go of theoretical analysis. To defend my approach, I could cite scholars like Anderson (2006) who critique evocative autoethnographers for writing so much from the heart that they neglect to engage with theoretical analysis. But I lumber from personal narrative to theory and back again to shield from the painful reliving of my experiences at the research centre. Theory here is my armour.

I will therefore start with some theory in order to rally the courage to tell my story. After all, it is fitting to clarify ‘postfeminism’ – a term that has been used to signify conflicting ideas – and discuss how it will be conceptualised in this article to make sense of how it shaped my experiences.

A new postfeminist gender regime

As an evolving construct marked by diverse and oftentimes conflicting meanings, it has been suggested that there is ‘no original or authentic postfeminism that holds the key to its definition’ (Genz, 2009: 20). According to Gill et al. (2017), there are at least three distinct and contradictory notions of postfeminism, including a theoretical perspective, an evolutionary shift of third-wave feminism and a backlash against feminism.

Postfeminism as a theoretical perspective refers to the ways feminism was seen to join anti-foundationalist movements such as poststructuralism, postmodernism and postcolonialism (Brooks, 1997; Gamble, 2001; Phoca and Wright, 1999). This epistemological shift appeared to challenge an essentialist and universal assumption of femalehood aligned with second-wave feminism (Gill et al., 2017). The ‘post’ prefix is not a rejection of feminism, but rather an acknowledgement of feminism’s ongoing transformation in the wake of its encounter with difference (Lewis, 2014b). However, few theorists have adopted this definition of postfeminism in the ensuing two decades. Theoretical developments of feminism notwithstanding, the other two definitions of postfeminism have dominated popular discourse.

The evolutionary view constructs postfeminism as a historical trend within feminism, marking a supposed period of third-wave feminism illustrated by examples ‘of typically heterosexual, white, middle-class female achievement in male-dominated workplaces, women’s ability to treat men as sexual objects, and the seemingly unfettered freedoms women enjoy in respect to career choice, parenting and domesticity’ (Rumens, 2017: 3). This view underpins popular business handbooks such as Lean In, #GIRLBOSS and The Confidence Code, which articulate a shift from classic liberal feminism towards a new neoliberal feminist subject who may be aware of the social, cultural and economic forces that reinforce gender inequality, but focuses almost exclusively on self-regulation and self-care (Rottenberg, 2014). Collective struggles towards social justice are ignored by this mode of feminism defined by a market rationality that encourages all people to see themselves as autonomous, self-reliant actors (Rottenberg, 2014).

As a backlash, postfeminism is used to signal a reaction against feminism through an assorted set of assumptions. Backlash discourses may decry the tyranny of political correctness, attribute all women’s unhappiness to feminism (such as in suppressing women’s ‘natural’ desires to be feminine), claim that men are the ‘real’ victims or suggest that sexism has already been defeated and thus feminism is no longer needed in our new meritocratic world order (Faludi, 1991; Gill, 2014; Gill et al., 2017; Tasker and Negra, 2007).

In light of these conflicting uses of postfeminism, Lewis (2014b) has suggested that it is more insightful to understand postfeminism as a discursive formation (Foucault, 1972) produced through hegemonic ideas of gender relations. Postfeminism in this sense is recognised as a cultural discourse that has contributed to the reshaping of contemporary femininity through the ‘active shaping and regulating of bodies and subjectivities’ (Lewis et al., 2017: 215; see also Adamson, 2017; Lewis, 2014b). Lewis et al. (2017) identify a set of recurring themes including

an emphasis on individualism, choice and empowerment; the revival and reappearance of ‘natural’ sexual difference; the shift from objectification to ‘voluntary’ subjectification; the emphasis upon self-surveillance with constant monitoring and disciplining of women’s bodies; the ascendancy of a make-over paradigm that not only acts on the body but also constitutes a remaking of subjectivity; the resexualisation of women’s bodies and the retreat to home as a matter of choice not obligation. (p. 214)

These trends reveal an emerging postfeminist gender regime that attempts to graft feminist values such as freedom of choice, equality of opportunity and self-determination onto traditional patriarchal expectations around female sexuality, beauty and motherhood (Lewis et al., 2017). Postfeminism is thus not a straightforward renunciation of feminism; it is instead the ‘taming’ of feminism into something more docile and less threatening (Dean, 2010).

The persistent march of postfeminism in our culture is clearly in lockstep with neoliberalism. Postfeminism recasts gender equality in neoliberal terms: ‘as an individualistic, entrepreneurial project that can be inculcated by the self’ (Gill and Orgad, 2015: 334), while market rationalities come to define social and political relations (McRobbie, 2008, 2013). Like neoliberalism, postfeminism turns a blind eye towards systems of power and histories of oppression, reducing collective responsibilities to the individual (Giroux, 2003; Mohanty, 2013).

In organisational theorising, Gill et al. (2017) explored how postfeminism has developed a culture of ‘gender fatigue’ in organisations that rendered gender inequality unspeakable. Drawing on each of the authors’ own research of professionals spanning across various countries and industries in Europe, participants strongly refuted the existence of sexism in the face of documented gender inequality in their industries. Under postfeminism, a pervasive ideology of meritocracy leads workers to believe that gender issues are outdated (Bagilhole and Goode, 2001; Lewis, 2014b). Although postfeminist discourses promote the idea that individuals ought to be rewarded on their merit rather than their gender, the material reality of gender inequality is ignored (Simpson et al., 2010; van den Brink and Benschop, 2012).

Similarly, Lewis (2012, 2014a, 2014b) has shown how postfeminism translates via the construction of feminine entrepreneurial identities. Her work delineated how specific postfeminist discourses of ‘natural’ sex differences, the female ‘choice’ to retreat into the domestic sphere, and individualism, choice and empowerment are interwoven into feminine entrepreneurial identities. Analysing the autobiographies of female celebrity chief executive officers, Adamson (2017) also vividly illustrated how the ideal postfeminist subject is constructed as performing a successfully balanced gendered identity. As part memoir and part self-help texts, the autobiographies counselled women to embrace traditional feminine behaviours, attitudes and roles without ‘overdoing’ any of these. Within the postfeminist regime, women are expected to exercise relentless self-discipline and personal responsibility in order to make themselves valuable feminine subjects within our contemporary capitalist economy.

Existing studies have demonstrated the tolls neoliberalism takes on the ‘psychic life’ of individual professionals who are compelled to construct themselves as self-sufficient, entrepreneurial subjects (Scharff, 2016: 107; see also Davies et al., 2005; Gill, 2014). Exhorted to see the self as business, professionals often describe senses of heightened anxiety and insecurity, overwork and competition with both oneself and others (McNay, 2009; Scharff, 2016). In light of such tolls, it raises the question, ‘Why has postfeminism become so entrenched in organisational practice?’ The compelling pull of postfeminism suggests there may be more to its processes than this psycho-emotional violence.

Although critics have acknowledged that at the heart of the postfeminist gender regime is ‘the promotion of white, middle-class, heterosexual women and men as culturally central’ (Projansky, 2001: 87), intersectional considerations of postfeminism in organisations have to date only been nominally referenced. Intersectionality is an evolving, cross-disciplinary theory grounded in the insight that gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, dis/ability and age operate not as fixed, unitary attributes, but as reciprocally constitutive phenomena (Cho et al., 2013; Collins, 2015; Crenshaw, 1989). Although intersectionality can be traced back to women of colour activism in the 1960s (Chun et al., 2013; Collins, 2000; hooks, 1984; The Combahee River Collective, 1977), its conception in academic theorising is popularly attributed to legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989, 1991), who challenged the limitations of the law in accounting for the intersection of racial and gender discrimination that impact women of colour.

Arguably one of the most significant contributions of feminist thought, intersectionality has since been immensely influential. Its application to organisational research spans across analyses of professional identities (Essers et al., 2010; Johansson and Śliwa, 2014; Kelan, 2014), career progression (Kamenou et al., 2013; Sang et al., 2013), leadership (Jean-Marie et al., 2009; Richardson and Loubier, 2008), entrepreneurship (Knight, 2016; Romero and Valdez, 2016), diversity management (Syed and Özbilgin, 2009; Tatli and Özbilgin, 2012; Zanoni et al., 2010) and organisational inequality regimes (Acker, 2012; Healy et al., 2011; Holvino, 2010). An intersectional view of postfeminism extends beyond a focus on femalehood, recognising instead the complex and varied effects of identity and power across individual, institutional, cultural and societal spheres of influence (Rodriguez et al., 2016). Specifically, intersectionality has the potential to critically examine the roles of race and class in the rise of postfeminism, interrogating how the dominance of whiteness and the elite classes is reinforced through postfeminist discourse and practice (Butler, 2013; Dosekun, 2015; Lewis et al., 2017; Tasker and Negra, 2007). By undertaking an autoethnography from the standpoint of an Asian woman with a working-class background, I demonstrate how the White elite class character of postfeminism wrought through the body of one who did not align with this cultural ideal.

In the proceeding vignettes, I will attempt to illustrate how postfeminism shaped my making as an early career scholar through its seductive promises. I’ll start now at the beginning of my encounter with the research centre.

The search for treasure

The research centre was established in early 2012 with the philanthropic donation of an alumnus under the stated aims to restore ethics in leadership across both private and public sectors. It seemed serendipitous that a 2-year research fellowship was advertised just as my PhD thesis (on the social construction of authentic leadership) passed external examination. Other opportunities in academia at the time were scant, particularly for one so freshly minted with only one journal article to her name, so I was determined to develop a persuasive application. I collected everything I could find about the research centre. I pored over every press release about the centre’s formation, analysed the 1 hour commencement lecture of the chairman of the executive board and even reviewed old media profiles of the benefactor. My 13-page long application waxed lyrical about the centre’s mission, values and objectives I interpreted from my dogged analysis. As the weeks passed, I dutifully applied for other advertised roles, but the centre lingered in my mind as an idyllic outcome.

The interview plays out like a dream. My opening introduction bowled over the chairman of the research centre’s board. He is smiling and nodding enthusiastically at my every word from across the table. To my right, the VC and provost, both women, are reviewing my application. ‘I see you’re currently writing on women and leadership’, the VC starts. ‘Could you tell us a little more about your work there?’

I was in the midst of writing a paper with my doctoral supervisors on the gendered construction of authentic leadership and began a well-rehearsed précis about our findings. As I recounted a female CEO’s experience with gender stereotypes, the VC elbows the provost and says to her with a playful smile, ‘We know what that’s like, don’t we?’

I feel a rush. The relaxed and cordial atmosphere envelopes the entire interview. I’ve got this! I’m so overwhelmed with optimism I visit the building in which the centre is located on campus after my interview to preview what I was certain would become my future office.

The currency of gender essentialism

When I started my PhD, I was begrudgingly dragged into gender research by my supervisor. Thinking back to our earliest meetings now, I caricaturise myself as a rebellious teenager, with my arms crossed over my chest, rolling my eyes at her suggestion that I should consider gender in my study of leadership. When I put the finishing touches on my thesis 3 years later, I wondered how I ever intended to understand social relations without talking about gender. Yet, back then, I was apprehensive about my career prospects if I was seen to leap up on the tables and wildly wave my arms as a declared ‘gender scholar’. I knew virtually nothing of gender and feminist scholarship, yet I knew enough to hesitate before entering such a ‘dangerous’ terrain. Postfeminism had already seeped into my skin.

As the only woman of colour in my department among both doctoral students and academics, I suspected there would be repercussions to speaking against gender structures. As Sara Ahmed (2017) says, ‘we become a problem when we describe a problem’ (p. 39). Over time, I plastered my fear with pride. I stopped merely believing I would be safer as an aspiring academic to deny gender matters, but I supposed it would be advantageous to my career to proclaim gender blindness like so many of the successful academics in my field.

My engagement with feminist theorising of organisations has since then taught me to challenge the essentialist assumptions in the prevailing belief that gender is defined by biologically determined binary categories from which (stereotypically) ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ behaviours derive. My PhD eventually followed feminist scholars who promote instead a social constructionist view of gender as an embodied performance that we ‘do’ (Butler, 1999; West and Zimmerman, 1987). These performances are understood to occur through mundane, iterative acts that inscribe our identities for ourselves and others (Acker, 1990, 2012; Alvesson and Billing, 2009; Ashcraft, 2004; Holmes, 2006). Yet, in our present postfeminist moment, reductionistic views of ‘natural’ gender differences appear to remain firmly entrenched (Lewis, 2012, 2014a, 2014b).

Shortly after beginning my new role at the leadership centre, I discover that my paper-in-progress on gender and authentic leadership has turned into something of a hook. When the pro-VC of research met with me in my second week (at the insistence of the provost), he declared in front of all the academics in the campus café, ‘So you’re the expert on women and leadership I’ve heard so much about!’

How do I correct him? I’m utterly insignificant to him, yet he has taken such efforts to make me feel welcome and valued. Should I risk alienating this engineering professor by patronising him with a lecture on social constructionism and gendered organisations?

So I kept my mouth shut, and the aura of my unearned reputation glowed brighter by the day.

A week later, the VC arranges a meeting for me with the alumni manager, Robert. He’s an avuncular former academic who was pulled out of retirement to help leverage relationships with the university’s alumni, including the research centre’s benefactor. Over coffee, he raucously congratulates my research, even though I only had one publication at the time out of my Honours thesis. He brought a worn print copy of my article with him, covered in highlights and handwritten notes. I treasure this artefact of his interest and warm to him immediately. He describes to me a local philanthropist whom I later learn is a doyenne of the non-profit sector and an heiress to one of the country’s most celebrated business dynasties. Apparently she had been particularly vocal in the press about the need to increase the representation of women in senior corporate leadership. ‘She would love you!’ Robert gushed.

He coaches me to write a research proposal on ‘women and leadership’ that he would personally pitch to this philanthropist. Over the next 3 days, I draft up a research proposal with Robert’s close and continual input seeking AUD$30,000. We decide it’d be charming to open with a quote from the philanthropist’s most recent opinion piece about the ‘agonisingly low’ representation of women in corporate leadership. I suppress the resurfacing guilt that I’m perpetuating essentialist notions of gender, but I fear if I back out now it will let down Robert who has already given so much of his time. Robert shares the proposal with the Centre’s advisory board, extolling my efforts and the exciting prospect of my ‘gender-related research’ to ‘attract support from key women leaders’.

Not an hour passes before an e-mail arrives from the VC. I’m unable to suppress a cry of delight. She expresses that she was ‘deeply impressed’ with my proposal. I imagine her admiring my proposal over her morning coffee. Her validation for the project’s merit assures me that the philanthropist will certainly agree. I had no reason to doubt the VC’s judgement or Robert’s abilities to advocate my project to the philanthropist. In the meantime, Robert sent a professional film crew to produce a slick video of me to showcase my research and I started to be recognised around campus. It had barely been 3 months since my graduation, and this grant worth more than what my PhD scholarship paid in a year was, in my rosy view, all but assured.

A windfall of individual rewards

My latest pay cheque appears on my monitor. The small unassuming font spells out my new salary: AUD$96,000 – AUD$8000 more than what it was on the contract I signed when I joined the centre a month ago.

My unexpected prosperity came about in an odd turn of events. The centre’s assistant had set me up with access to our centre’s shared computer drive where I found ‘Budget 2012.xls’ sitting at the top. Listed within the spreadsheet was my salary alongside everyone else employed at the centre. I wondered, at first, whether it was some commitment to transparency, but I queried whether or not I was supposed to see it anyway. When the provost heard that the centre’s confidential personnel details were released, she called a meeting with me. I had barely sat down at her table when she burst out, ‘I need you to understand that this is not a gender thing’.

It seemed her foremost concern was that I would take issue with the fact my salary was lower than an incoming male researcher – an observation that I hadn’t made. The provost launched into an explanation of how human resources urged her to match my colleague’s current salary at another institution, but as I had only just graduated from my PhD, she was ‘forced’ to put me on the starting rate. Relieved after months of job searching, I did not negotiate my salary when I accepted the offer:

‘It’s okay’, I finally interjected when she took a breath. ‘The salary difference didn’t even occur to me’.

The provost leaned back into her chair with a smile:

‘I’m happy to work my way up’.

I left her office completely oblivious that I had played the good postfeminist woman. My ongoing denial of structural inequality allowed me to affirm an individual commitment to hard work with such forceful sincerity that inspired her.

She called me at home later that week some time past 9. Her voice echoed through the line with uncontainable excitement:

Helena – I’m just leaving dinner with the chairman and I couldn’t wait to tell you what he said. I told him about what happened with you being accidentally given access to the budget. I know you said you didn’t care about the salary difference, but it didn’t sit right with me… it has never sat right with me. Stephen was appalled. He says he will support your salary to be raised immediately to match the male researcher.

It is easy to overlook postfeminism’s assault on feminism (Genz, 2009; Lewis, 2014b; Rottenberg, 2014) when it drip-feeds a soporific stream of individual rewards. One month into my new role and I had developed warm relationships with most of the senior leaders of the university. They mobilised institutional resources to assist my research in ways that few other academics at the university enjoyed, let alone a junior one. Growing up in Australia during a bitter wave of anti-immigration sentiment, my interactions with White people throughout my life have predominantly been associated with cries of ‘go back to where you came from’ hurled at me from moving vehicles. With the exception of my doctoral supervisors, my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at a White-dominated sandstone university were marked by White lecturers who remained noticeably tense around me. They would often gaze past my shoulder when I spoke as though my presence could only be tolerated if they imagined I was not there. Others immediately relaxed when on opening my mouth I revealed an Australian accent, as though they thought, ‘thank god, you’re one of the good ones’.

‘You’ve made it at last’, I thought to myself. Blessed with material and symbolic fortunes at the centre, I desperately wanted to believe that this proved gender, racial and class barriers can be broken after all. I had the alumni manager of the university personally pitching my project to a billionaire philanthropist, while the provost and chairman advocated for my salary increase. Meanwhile, the chairman regularly took us out of work to have lunch at his home. We discussed the future of the centre on his back porch sipping Moët and gazing out over an Olympian pool. In the previous year when I submitted my thesis, I took on an extra job marking undergraduate assignments so that I could afford a bottle of champagne for each of my supervisors. Now Stephen was topping up our glasses like he was pouring water. Not that we had been short of drink at the centre. The benefactor marked our launch by shipping us 10 crates of wine from his own vineyard. Both the VC and the provost had offered to mentor me. Although we never actually met for any mentoring, their offers served a powerful public relations purpose where at every university function they would clasp my hand and vocally congratulate my latest activities in front of a bemused audience. Once a White male technology professor stumbled up to me at an event, face flushed from wine, and blurted, ‘I’ve been here 12 years and they have no idea who I am!’

Intoxicated by the illusion of female empowerment, I became seduced into the postfeminist rendering of myself as the rising young female academic – a rare and unique resource – who will single-handedly advance leadership scholarship, gender equality and not least of all my academic career. Little did I care to reflect that my impressions of myself as a ‘rare’ resource were in part enabled by the White, capitalist and patriarchal structures that commonly excluded other women, non-White and working-class people from its privileged field. I also foolishly ignored the fact that my salary was offered at a lower rate than a male colleague doing the same job. The unexpected salary increase only seemed proof of postfeminism’s meritocratic reign (cf. Simpson et al., 2010; van den Brink and Benschop, 2012), where my individual commitment to hard work resulted in its timely payoff.

Postfeminism as fool’s gold

Robert spent 3 months failing to secure a meeting with the philanthropist. He eventually got her assistant to agree to pass on the proposal, but she returned with the philanthropist’s disinterest. Robert persisted with a couple more foundations, but the responses were the same: ‘Our funding allocations have already been made for next year’.

The initial shine of being the postfeminist golden child started to wear off when my women and leadership project failed to be commercialised, and with that, the implausibility of postfeminism’s grandiose promises was brought into focus. My value as a professional/person was defined within market rationalities (McRobbie, 2008, 2013), and my commodified femalehood had been determined by the market to be ‘worthless’.

Bankrupted by resistance

We welcomed a new director for the research centre in the winter. When Nigel first arrived on his campus visit, I wrote the following excerpt in my journal:

I met Nigel today and it was odd. We discussed having coffee after his welcome lunch next week and he gestured to [my male colleague] saying, ‘We can take off our ties’. He then leered at me and wondered aloud, ‘What would you take off?’ After a moment he remarked in a singsong voice, ‘I guess you could take out the ribbons from your hair’.

Nigel can project the impression that he is warm and personable. ‘Fatherly’, was how one colleague generously described him after their first interaction. But I felt infantilised by our first encounter, and while I kept my reservations about Nigel to myself, a lingering unease creeps into the workplace under his suffocating paternalism.

Nigel has a habit of constantly wetting his lips as he talks and smirking at the end of every statement as though he is amused by some inside joke. Cries of ‘good girl!’ follow my announcement of publications, while teasing ‘tut tuts’ accompany my (increasing) expressions of concern for the activities of the centre as whimsical admonitions for my pessimism. When I read Kanter’s (1977) work on token women in organisations, I shiver with familiarity at the stereotypical role of pet. Kanter (1977) observed that in male-dominated organisations, women are often inducted into stereotypical roles such as the mother, seductress, iron maiden and pet. As the token Asian woman at the research centre, I was infantilised as an endearing child and ‘symbolic mascot’ who served only to admire and flatter the men (Kanter, 1977: 983). At best, Nigel marvelled at my research productivity, astounded that I could theorise, yet I was only tolerated at the centre if I stayed obedient and compliant.

Nigel immediately outlines the deliverables the centre would produce in his first month as director as he repeatedly proclaims in our new weekly staff meetings that he’s here to ‘build an empire’. In addition to academic outputs, he is adamant that we engage with the public, which involves maintaining our official blog, recording a weekly podcast, distributing working papers on our website, promoting our research seminar series and starting a monthly newsletter called Leadership Matters where we would curate leadership-related books, videos and studies for our mailing list subscribers.

Our new emperor needs to control every aspect of other’s attitudes and behaviours, particularly when they reflect on his leadership. Three times a week he would slither up to my office door to boast about how he successfully coaxed academics around the university to present a seminar or contribute a working paper to our website. Once he accidentally cc’s me into an e-mail to the provost that included my assessment of the centre’s strategy, but with liberal amendments to my original e-mail to make my words sound more flattering towards him.

Nigel charges me with a theme for the Leadership Matters newsletter to produce: Gender and Leadership. I challenge him in a reply e-mail:

Do you think if I present the newsletter on gender I risk marginalising myself from [the centre] as the ‘other’? I’m concerned the subtext of our institute will say, ‘Ethnic woman looks at trivial personal issues of gender while white male academics do the “real work” of leadership’. Maybe one of my research areas on leadership ethics or philanthropy would suit for an alternate newsletter topic?

‘Good questions. Such clever thinking’, Nigel responds as though he is patting me on the head. ‘Gender and leadership, please’, he presses more firmly.

Frustrated that I’m still unable to break out of my box as the women and leadership expert after a year at the research centre, I decide to reclaim my voice and present gender and leadership on my own terms. I draft my issue of Leadership Matters with a feminist approach: opening with a video of Emma Watson’s #HeforShe campaign before challenging this more conservative call for gender equality with feminist critiques of capitalism and White supremacy. Also included is a link to bell hooks’ essay about Lean In, in which she decries Sheryl Sandberg’s brand of postfeminism as ‘faux-feminism’.

Nigel is livid. In an error-filled e-mail sent within minutes of receiving my draft issue, he accuses me of refusing to ‘grow as a scholar’ and ignoring his heeds to ‘[find] a voice that others want to listen to and engage with rather than stridently stating your own views’ (his emphasis). He underscores that ‘the most important lesson I feel I can share at the moment’ is the need ‘to find a way of expressing oneself – and finding appropriate times and places for doing so – that are not just about stating your position but also invite dialogue’.

Having lost my glow as the centre’s poster girl, I was less easily dazzled by postfeminism’s promise of material and symbolic rewards. I slowly came to recognise the way I was complicit in my commodification as the centre’s ticket into elite executive women and their funding. The ongoing self-disciplinary process of constraining myself into the mould of the perfect postfeminist woman – ambitious, industrious, individualistic, yet soft, sweet, nurturing – became unbearable once it was evident that this gender performance was all but intended to help the centre’s research activities be more marketable. I was overwhelmed with the compulsion to kick down the postfeminist order I had so carefully maintained and be done with the empty displays of self-empowerment that had been used to enrich the centre.

Even as I write this, I realise how tempting it is to reframe my resistance against postfeminism as a postfeminist narrative of individual choice and agency (Lewis, 2012, 2014a, 2014b). Here I am, playing the character of an embattled heroine who found her voice and boldly declared a radical vision for gender equality refusing to be tamed by the economic interests of postfeminism. ‘I pulled the wool off my eyes, became the proud feminist scholar that I am today, and lived happily ever after’. But back then I was distressed and afraid. I heard whisperings around the centre that while we haemorrhaged money through our non-stop seminars and events, the benefactor had grown impatient with our seeming lack of ‘real’ scholarship. My 2-year contract was due to be renewed at the end of the year and I seriously doubted that even if they had the money, Nigel would want to keep me around. Unemployment was a serious and terrifying possibility.

Even after everything I had experienced, a part of me still clung to the postfeminist fantasy of female empowerment. I hoped that even if Nigel rejected my recommitment to feminism and denied my re-employment, perhaps the provost, the VC, the chairman or even the benefactor would redeem me. I pictured what they would do if they found out about Nigel’s sexism, opportunism and need for control. I dreamed of them replacing him with a new director who would validate my critiques of postfeminism, champion a new research agenda that centres on genuine scholarship and renew my contract indefinitely.

But it was never about individuals. Nigel represents an entrenched patriarchal system that is continually drawing and redrawing the strict boundaries of acceptable femininity (Adamson, 2017; Lewis et al., 2017). As our resident patriarch, it was his duty to instruct women on their appropriate gendered performance. When I ‘stridently’ adopted a feminist agenda, I had stepped far out of line from my expected role, one grounded in stereotypical assumptions of my place to ‘invite dialogue’, relate with others and soothe their emotions. Patriarchy was further inflected through systems of racial and class power (Collins, 2000; Crenshaw, 1991; Holvino, 2010). Whiteness, with its attendant myths of benevolence (Sullivan, 2014), enabled Nigel to imagine himself as a saviour who had the duty to teach the woman of colour how to be respectable and civilised. Such distinctions of middle-classness (Bourdieu, 1984) are fundamental to belonging in the neoliberal academy.

The way Nigel’s behaviour flourished at the research centre points to the problematic ways postfeminism elides questions of structural inequalities. My appointment and subsequent visibility in the organisation as a female scholar waving the banner for female leadership served as an alibi against sexism. In Gill’s (2014) words, sexism became ‘unspeakable’. Its logic is that if gender inequality really existed, I never would have been hired, let alone invited to curate a newsletter for our 500+ subscribers on the very topic of gender and leadership. That being said, the postfeminist reshaping of my research agenda via a ‘women and leadership’ project acknowledged sexism, but only in the forms encountered by female corporate leaders, thereby reducing inequality to only that which frustrates the ambitions of elite White women.

The seduction of postfeminism

In theorising my experiences as a research fellow from the inside out, I have attempted to show the messy, entangled processes of postfeminist knowledge production and the making of myself as a postfeminist subject. While existing critiques of postfeminism have demonstrated its psychic toll on organisational members (Davies et al., 2005; McNay, 2009; Scharff, 2016), its popularity in organisations hints to postfeminism’s seductive allure. Postfeminist discourses at my institution encouraged me to celebrate and construct a hyper-individualistic, autonomous self with limitless potential to single-handedly transform the world, while securing my own professional success. I actively engaged in these processes as they produced anxiety, insecurity and competition with equal measures of hope, delight and elation.

In order to attain the economic and emotional rewards of postfeminism, I was required to fashion myself in line with the postfeminist ideal. This postfeminist woman is not the meek, simpering, subordinated figure one might picture in traditional patriarchal discourses (Baumgardner and Richards, 2004). Rather, she is agentic, confident and empowered (Adamson, 2017; Lewis et al., 2017) – a character I embodied when I affirmed my commitment to hard work to the provost, when I deliberated the centre’s strategy with the chairman and when I put forth an ambitious research proposal to solve the gender leadership gap. By embodying this feminine ideal through constant self-discipline and self-surveillance (Rottenberg, 2014), I treated myself as a commodity that exists to enhance the research centre’s marketability. Yet as reliant as I was on my employment at the centre, I perversely understood my branding as the ‘women and leadership expert’ as a matter of personal choice. My growing visibility as a female scholar at the university further silenced any challenges against structural gender inequality. Patriarchy and neoliberalism have thus become cosy bedfellows under postfeminism, finding more subtle and sophisticated ways to elide feminist critique.

My postfeminist subjectivity was not developed alone but co-created with others involved with the research centre through the university’s various launch events, distinguished lectures and award ceremonies. In particular, the centre hosted regular strategy meetings that invited interchanging guests from media and communications, alumni development and international partnerships, who shared in the collective imaginings of the centre’s potential and our roles as research fellows in realising this destiny. When I was first introduced to the university’s director of communications, for example, he declared with earnestness, ‘We’re going to make you a star’. In the neoliberal academy (Mohanty, 2013), the logic of these fantasies seemed commonsensical alongside intensifying pressures for academics to demonstrate ‘innovation’ and ‘relevance’ via media and public engagement (Butler et al., 2015; De Vita and Case, 2016). This ongoing construction of the self links with postfeminism’s make-over paradigm (Lewis et al., 2017), which perpetuates the idea that success can be wilfully attained through self-transformation.

The abrupt and unsettling failure of my commodified femalehood in the form of my women and leadership project proposal prompted me to critically reflect on postfeminism’s promises. I began to question how postfeminism’s premature and narrow celebration of gender equality via individual examples of faux-empowerment ultimately left prevailing systems of power intact. Further to postfeminism’s assault on feminism, postfeminism shores up White elite class power through its ongoing investment in existing racial and class hierarchies.

Although some critics of postfeminism have acknowledged the central position held by White, middle-class, heterosexual women within the postfeminist gender regime (Butler, 2013; Genz, 2009; Lewis, 2014b; Projansky, 2001; Tasker and Negra, 2007), there remains an overall lack of understanding of what this really means and how it is brought to bear in organisations. Lewis (2014b), for example, suggests that the hierarchy of femininity means that the successes of White femininity become understood as all women’s claimed success. Similarly, Adamson (2017) looks at the elite White women celebrated in the autobiographies she analysed and wonders to what extent they are accessible to readers ‘who may not have the resources or opportunities to achieve this valuable subject position’ (p. 324).

By adopting an intersectional approach to this autoethnography, I would argue that postfeminism’s complicity in White elite class power is more invidious than simply the construction of a universal normative ideal. In my experiences at the research centre, my identity makeover was facilitated by White capitalist ideologies that had taught me to be ashamed of my race and class background. If I were a White and middle-class woman, the psycho-emotional tolls of postfeminism might have been more acute as I measured myself up against high-profile female executives. Or perhaps I would have more readily identified the false promises of postfeminism, questioning why I was not reaping the rewards of the so-called meritocratic gender regime. Yet I had learned to see myself through the White capitalist gaze as inherently deficient, and thus, I enthusiastically accepted the need to be ‘made over’ into a middle-class, White-adjacent subject. In conforming to a White middle-class feminine performance (individualist, confident, assertive, optimistic, humble and wine-drinking), I further internalised and perpetuated the ideologies that subordinated me in the social order.

Whiteness, especially intersecting with the elite classes, so frequently elides feminist critique that it has largely remained secure in its position in organisational theorising and practice as transparent, ordinary and universal (Grimes, 2002; Grimes and Parker, 2009; Liu and Baker, 2016; Liu, 2017; Nayak, 2005; Nkomo, 1992; Nkomo and Al Ariss, 2014). Yet philosopher George Yancy (2017) warns us that whiteness is mythomaniacal. It commits violence and oppression with one hand while perpetuating fantasies of its benevolence with the other. My inclusion as a token Asian (in addition to being a token woman) simultaneously served as performances of a ‘good’ whiteness (Sullivan, 2014) to prove the institution’s commitment to equality and diversity. Yet beyond the superficial visible displays of my difference at the centre, White dominance and power were unquestioningly reinforced in our research agenda, leadership and everyday practices.

Of course, I cannot know for sure whether things would have played out differently if I were White and middle class. Nor can I say how it would have been different if I were not straight, cis-gender or able-bodied. I imagine that race and class could not override postfeminism’s central mandate of patriarchal femininity (Genz, 2009; Gill and Orgad, 2015; Lewis et al., 2017; Rottenberg, 2014), where even while we are encouraged to be agentic and ambitious, we are still required to be docile, accepting and grateful for what we are given. With that being said, the historical subordination of women of colour and the representation of East Asian women in particular as weak and submissive (see Chou, 2012) as well as the capitalist myth of meritocratic social mobility (see Reay, 2013) likely enhanced the expectations that I would (and should) serve the interests of White elite class people.

Furthermore, elite White women’s interests, in particular, shaped my research agenda as the centre eagerly sought to cater to their appetite for power (packaged in my proposal as ‘leadership’). So that, while sexism was largely rendered unspeakable beyond the aspects that impacted elite White women’s career advancement, racism and classism were made wholly invisible. When I attempted to call out postfeminism’s inherent racism and classism through my draft newsletter, I, in effect, placed the final nail in the coffin of my fellowship. Postfeminism’s power lies in this seductive promise that success is something for women to wilfully attain (Gill and Orgad, 2015; Lewis, 2014b; Rottenberg, 2014). As long as we stay in silent complicity with systems of gender, racial and class domination, we can secure personal and professional fulfilment. If we speak out on inequality, it becomes seen as our choice to reject that fulfilment (Gill, 2014).

While my experiences have highlighted the constraints of research fellows whose fixed-term positions are funded by philanthropic donations, even permanent full-time faculty members are variously constrained by national research frameworks and institutional benchmarks to produce certain privileged forms of knowledge. In this postfeminist moment, it has become more urgent than ever that we re-engage with feminist thought and retaliate against its domestication into something less threatening to the existing patriarchal order (Dean, 2010). In particular, poststructuralist, postmodern and decolonial feminist theories that transcend neoliberal notions of equality such as representation in corporate leadership (Calás and Smircich, 2006) may better disrupt the interlocking power systems of race and class within postfeminism. So contrary to the advice I received from the VC, I believe it is vital to the aims of equality that more scholars speak out and speak against the diverse and continuous pressures for epistemic obedience. In naming how power intersects with our scholarly work and deconstructing the compelling enticements of accepting the status quo, we may move closer to dislocating postfeminism’s grasp on theorising and practice.