Working Women on Screen

This chapter analyses influencer Alice Liveing’s Instagram account in the context of a heightened exercise and fitness culture, a shift from self-help to self-health, and the emotional labours of positivity. This shift creates a number of contradictions, including (1) a need to engage in constant forms of work on the body and on the self while extorting the benefits of loving yourself just the way you are (Gill, Rosalind and Ana Sofia Elias. “‘Awaken Your Incredible’: Love Your Body Discourses and Postfeminist Contradictions.” International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 10, no.2 (2014): 179–188.), (2) the careful governance of negative emotions and affects, expressed in constant calls to ultimate happiness—either in the present (“I am happy now”) or the future (“I am working on my happiness”) and (3) the way these contradictions necessitate a blurring of public and private, through which all elements of intimate, private life become part of an entrepreneurial practice of self-branding (Banet-Weiser,.Authentic: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture, University of New York Press, New York, 2012). These contradictions are discussed through (Illouz,.Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2008) concept of ‘triumphant suffering’. In Liveing’s social media presence, the triumph in having overcome, among other things, eating disorders, body insecurity and an abusive relationship, provides the hook through which she is able to present her life work as the outcome of a positive mental attitude and herself as the ambassador of her own self-transformation.

This chapter analyses how both aesthetic and emotional labour are presented as a vital yet ambiguous part of women’s inclusion in the contemporary creative workforce, through the examination of two US comedy dramas Shrill (2019–2021) and Mythic Quest (2020–). What is considered appropriate for women to look like, and how they are directed to manage their emotions is not without nuance when working in the cultural and creative industries (industries which often intentionally embrace informality as a way of distinguishing themselves from business-oriented practices). Navigating an environment that both profits from an individual’s authentic creative voice’ whilst also upholding specific (and often ambiguous and imprecise) expectations about what constitutes professionalism within a specific field can be complex and directly relates to multiple intersections of identity (notably the way class and race intersects with gender). This chapter will consider firstly, how the selected comedy dramas represent contemporary creative workplaces (journalism and video games design) and their gendered dynamics, and secondly, how the women protagonists’ embodied experiences of their workplaces are used within the narratives to explore current working conditions for women.

Live streaming platforms have become extremely popular in China within the past five years, resulting in the formation of new industries and professions in the area of live media. Nüzhubo, meaning female live streamers in Chinese, is one of these emerging professions, with women making up two-thirds of full-time live streamers. A large number of nüzhubos produce a genre that I call “live/life streaming”, which invites audiences to participate in their mundane life events in a seemingly intimate setting. This is achieved through watching and commenting in real-time and is facilitated by the “beauty filter” and “virtual gift” functions of such platforms. Many nüzhubos make a living from hyper-gendered performance and sexually suggestive content that plays upon sexual tension with their predominantly heterosexual male viewers in exchange for money. This chapter examines the user practices of professional nüzhubos that developed around the technological features and economic mechanisms of Chinese live streaming platforms. I demonstrate how they engender different forms of labour nüzhubo perform in managing relationships with viewers and creating self-representations within the ecosystem of Chinese live/life streaming.

This chapter explores screen media depictions of nurses and care work in series produced and aired in the context of a UK political climate defined by neoliberal imperatives. It interrogates a selection of case study examples of British television fictions of nursing from the 2010s that differently depict nurses’ experiences of managing and negotiating the dilemmas for women of doing care work in a neoliberalised National Health Service. It does so with a view to arguing that the neoliberalism that informed and led to the passing of the Health and Social Care Act of 2012 [HASCA 2012] and its subsequent implementation, beginning in 2013, are key contexts in relation to which these depictions of women in the nursing profession must be understood. The chapter begins with an interrogative contextual analysis of the BBC sitcom Getting On (2009–2013), which lampoons NHS managerialism and bureaucracy, and culminates in a case study analysis of the issues raised by the depiction of nursing and care work in the first series of the BBC drama Trust Me (2017–).

In Control (Remedy Entertainment, 2019), the player-protagonist Jesse Faden starts a journey looking for her missing brother and ends up as Director of a secret agency—the Federal Bureau of Control. Battling a supernatural threat of corruption by the “Hiss”, Jesse discovers a workplace full of otherworldly dimensions. Drawing on different elements of work in the game, this chapter will explore the representation of Jesse. This will involve considering the neoliberal expectations placed upon her and the corporate environment she is in, the ways a process of neoliberal subjectivation is evident, and how Jesse demonstrates resistance to individualism in favour of intersectional feminist approaches. Furthermore, I will consider the relationships and roles that frame her within this new world, including male/female camaraderie and Jesse’s rejection of hierarchies. Considering some of the challenges Jesse faces, I suggest that the game offers an astute commentary on women in power in the workplace, and the tensions of the choices they must make. This builds on Rettberg’s (2011) argument that games serve as training for work environments in terms of both ideologies and skills amassed, to explore Control also as a training ground for the challenges of women in work.

This chapter will explore the workplace relationship between Zoey and her boss Joan as representative of neoliberal feminist values. I argue that the dialectic between narrative and numbers, characteristic of the musical genre, negotiates tensions over the role of “women in tech” and feminist discourses in popular culture. In the narrative, the antagonism between Zoey and the “brogrammers” makes the inequalities in the industry visible without challenging their structural roots, as typical of popular feminism (Banet-Weiser, 2018). The analysis of key musical numbers will then demonstrate how the conventions of the integrated musical emphasise an affective reconfiguration of the workplace as a performative arena that fosters an emotional connectivity between characters and reinforces discourses of female empowerment.

The final season of Veep follows fictional former US Vice-President and President Selina Meyer’s quest for re-election. Airing in 2019, it was the only season written and filmed during the Trump presidency. As the showrunners state, the aim of the show is to explore a political sensibility, rather than drawing explicit direct comparisons between Meyer and Trump. Selina Meyer stands in stark contrast to many of the other (post)feminist heroines of quality television, who often make their mark through being very competent at their jobs and invite comparison to former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In many ways, Selina Meyer is the anti-Hillary Clinton. Meyer’s mismanagement of her workplace is fundamental to the construction of her as incompetent and is in stark contrast to the image she tries to convey to prospective voters. In television and media and political life more broadly, women have been constructed as saviours of democracies in crisis. Veep does not offer the same illusion of empowerment that other quality television shows offer. Veep’s gender and workplace politics can thus be understood as a critique of the narrative of the White woman saviour and demonstrate the limitations of White mainstream liberal feminism in the age of populism.

In Japan, the employment rate for disabled women is significantly lower than that of disabled men and of non-disabled women. Disabled women suffer from double discrimination in the labour market, due to both their gender and their disability. However, following recent policies aimed at improving access to employment for disabled people, a growing number of media representations are picturing disabled people, including women, at work.

This chapter analyses representations of disabled women’s work in this film. By comparing these representations with recent fieldwork data on disabled women’s experiences of employment, it highlights how the film constructs a discourse that is both dramatised and realistic.

Writing in the New Statesman, Alison Phipps (New Statesman, 24 November 2014) advocates that feminism needs sex workers if we are to make women’s lives better, pointing out that the commodification of sex and desire provides a unique insight into gender power relations, exploitation and cultural misogyny. These problematic real-life issues also manifest in cultural texts that incorporate sex work as paid labour, including HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–2019), which has been heavily criticised for its sexual abuse and violence towards women (Ferreday, Australian Feminist Studies 39: 21–36, 2015; Needham, Femspec 17: 3–19, 2017). Despite the pervasiveness of transactional sex and sexploitation in the television show, there are only three named sex workers—Ros (Esme Bianco), Daisy (Maisie Dee) and Shae (Sibel Kekilli). Each has a different role and approach to sex work, but they all facilitate the exploration of precarity and provide an insight into the intersection of sex work, exploitation and the wider political climate. In this chapter, I explore the representations of Shae, Ros and Daisy, utilising a close textual reading of key scenes in conjunction with Phipps’ inclusive feminist framework to highlight the problems associated with treating sex workers as a homogenous group who are undeserving of feminist attention.

This chapter explores German science fiction film I’m Your Man [Ich bin dein Mensch] (Maria, Schrader, Germany, 2021). The chapter scrutinises the “working” woman in the neoliberal labour market, asking for a re-definition of man/womankind in opposition to human-like machines within society and a “capitalist reading of love”. Ich bin dein Mensch centres on 40-something-year-old Alma, a successful researcher, who has devoted her life to her work. Tom (a humanoid robot made to make her happy) comes on the scene as part of an experiment, a kind of Turing test for robotic partners. Alma is intellectual, successful, independent and single because of it. The only man available and willing to date her, is Tom, the robot; thus, raising questions on the invisibility of women and the seemingly exclusionary juxtapositions for women between their private and professional lives and personas. Alma encapsulates these juxtapositions, as she fights her emotions throughout the film, highlighting the dilemma of the modern woman forced to choose between professional and private success. Reading this film through a lens of gender and feminist film theory, phenomenology and posthumanist theory, raises questions with regards to relationships, desire and love as well objectification and oppression.