Neoliberal feminism in old age: Femininity, work, and retirement in the aftermath of the Great Recession

Abstract

This article employs a Foucauldian discourse analysis of UK social policy on work and retirement from the austerity measures of 2010 to 2019, to explore the emergence of older femininity as a key site to articulate and justify a neoliberal governmentality in old age, in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Feminist Cultural Studies' scholarship has remarked and critiqued the centrality of work in contemporary cultural discourses of female emancipation and empowerment, highlighting how the celebration of female workplace success has been employed to sustain the social, cultural, and economic project of neoliberalism. However, this academic field has focused predominantly on young women and women up to childbearing age, failing to account for the way older femininity is being increasingly included in neoliberal discourses through the encouragement to work in old age. Through the dialogic relationship between ‘entrepreneurialism’ and―what I call―‘gendered anti-welfarism’ in old age, the UK social policy draws on a feminist vocabulary to offer ‘the older entrepreneurial woman’ as its ideal subject, characterized by capacity and willingness to work, personal and job-market flexibility, responsibilization and individualization of risk, and―but only for the more privileged few―choice. Ultimately, the article illustrates how contemporary cultural discourses that place work as central to female empowerment and emancipation are not limited to younger women, but extend to older femininity through the normalization of the figure of the older entrepreneurial woman, with the articulation of a ‘neoliberal feminism in old age’.