Producing Neoliberal Subjectivities: Literacy, Girlhood, and Collective Biography

In: Cultural studies - critical methodologies, Volume 15, Issue 1, p. 64-71

Abstract

This article takes up the question of literacy and its relationships to gender, race, class sexuality, and neoliberal ideologies. It traces the various feminist critiques of the relation between gender and literacy. It uses the memory stories of learning to write written by young American women, in the context of a collective biography exercise done in a women's studies university classroom. I analyze the stories for what they reveal about neoliberal subjectivity (and resistance to it), such as self-regulation, competitive self-making, and the affective responses to both the constraints and possibilities of what it means to encounter and work with literacy as a form of self-making.