Re-claiming resilience and re-imagining welfare: A response to Angela McRobbie

Abstract

Across popular media and political discourse, subjects are increasingly addressed through the language of resilience – called upon to be positive, to show ‘grit, and to ‘bounceback’ from adversity. In her latest book, Feminism and The Politics of Resilience: Essays on Gender, Media and the End of Welfare (2020), Angela McRobbie offers an incisive analysis of the gendered address that this call to resilience takes; teasing out its complex relation to the logics of post-feminism and locating its traction against a backdrop of neoliberal austerity which has disproportionately punished women – and poor, black and brown women especially. In this short piece, I reflect upon the book’s contributions and consider whether the language of resilience, rather than be abandoned, might be reclaimed and repoliticised as part of radical feminist re-imaginings of welfare