An exploration of how Moroccan ethnic minority women navigate and negotiate their entrepreneurial identity in the Netherlands: a postfeminist analysis

This paper seeks to further our understanding of how Moroccan ethnic minority women entrepreneurs in the Netherlands navigate and negotiate their entrepreneurial identities. Using postfeminism as an analytic device, we interrogate how gendered, ethnicised, and postfeminist discourses intersect in shaping the entrepreneurial identities of ethnic minority women entrepreneurs, drawing out the enabling and constraining factors that attach to this. Recognizing that postfeminism as a global culture may also resonate with ethnic minority women entrepreneurs, we empirically illustrate the (dis)enabling functioning of postfeminism and the ambiguities and contradictions of it. Doing so, we add to the literature on women entrepreneurship and postfeminism. Mobilizing postfeminism as an analytic device, we identify three core themes: 1) the recognition of persistence of inequality in these women’s experiences, 2) the articulation of postfeminist agency, and 3) the recourse to resilience and bounding back from adversity. We demonstrate how engagement with the postfeminist discourses, underpinning these three themes, contribute to the emergence of the postfeminist ethnic minority woman entrepreneur.