Resilience is a feminist issue: A response to Angela McRobbie’s Feminism and the Politics of Resilience in the context of Britain during the coronavirus pandemic

Abstract

This article responds to Angela McRobbie’s latest book Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on Gender, Media and the End of Welfare (2020) which is a characteristically feminist, state-of-the-nation account of intersections of gender, media and culture in neoliberal Britain. It first situates the book in the context of McRobbie’s larger body of work in the field of feminist media and cultural studies, before then going on to address some of the issues that arise from essays themselves, thinking in particular about the notion of ‘resilience’ in relation to our year (and counting) spent living through the Covid-19 pandemic, and how some of the issues McRobbie deals with have taken on new levels of urgency in the context of the coronavirus crisis. The principal focus of my response is McRobbie’s interrogation of the extent to which and the ways in which working class women (especially those of colour) have been deleteriously impacted by the logic of neoliberalism that continues to operate under the ideologically disingenuous banner of ‘resilience.’