Enterprising femininity: new modes of work and subjectivity

Abstract

This article introduces a group of ‘enterprising women’ in occupations dealing with ‘impression management’ and ‘care of the self’. It argues that this brand of worker successfully transforms skills acquired through consumption and the making of the feminine into increasingly valuable marketable skills. As such she embodies a blurring of consumption and production and inhabits a particular form of enterprising femininity. Through a reflexive life story method, questions of the role of consumption and self-help literature in the construction of this subjectivity are explore