Placing Postfeminism and Affect: Exploring the Affective Constitution of Postfeminist Subjectivities by Leaders in the City of London

This chapter brings together notions of postfeminism and place to explore the affective positivity and affective dissonance connected to the identity work of men and women leaders working in the City of London. While leadership as an activity has conventionally been characterised as a realm saturated by masculine norms, a social transformation in our understanding of the ‘good’ leader means that culturally feminine relational behaviours are increasingly expected alongside masculine-marked practices. Postfeminism has produced the cultural conditions which facilitate the reframing of leadership as contradictorily gendered, and the reconfiguration of subjectivities characterised by the simultaneous uptake of masculine and feminine norms is fundamental to this discursive formation. The interpellation to invest in a postfeminist subjectivity is revealed in the disciplined performance of a set of life regulations alongside affective attachments expressed in the form of ‘feeling rules’. These ‘feeling rules’ shape the way individuals articulate and manage the demands and contradictions of a leadership identity. A focus on affect in relation to the postfeminist constitution of leadership draws on a changing understanding of postfeminism as an affective and psychic phenomenon which tries to shape what women and men think and feel and how their emotional states are displayed.