New heroines of labour: domesticating post-feminism and neoliberal capitalism in Russia

In recent years, postfeminism has become an important element of popular media culture and the object of feminist cultural critique. This paper explores how postfeminism is domesticated in Russia through popular self-help literature aimed at a female audience. Drawing on a close reading of self-help texts by three bestselling Russian authors, the paper examines how postfeminism is made intelligible to the Russian audience through constructions of femininity and how it articulates with other symbolic frameworks. It identifies labour as a key trope through which postfeminism is domesticated and argues that the texts invite women to invest time and energy in the labour of personality, the labour of femininity and the labour of sexuality in order to become ‘valuable subjects’. The paper demonstrates that the domestication of postfeminism also involves the domestication of neoliberal capitalism in Russia, and highlights how popular psychology, neoliberal capitalism and postfeminism are symbiotically related

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OnlineFirst Version of Record - Jan 13, 2014