The Factory of Superwomen

While the entry of women into the workforce has meant achieving economic independence and the pursuit of alternative life paths beyond the traditional role of home care for many of them, it has also brought about the emergence of new stereotypes and imperatives to meet to ensure their continued presence in the current labor market conditions. These stereotypes encompass contradictory ways of living and practices based on the rationality of ends and means, while the imperatives focus on performance, thereby producing superwomen as correlates of the imperial mode of living consistent with the capital accumulation circuit. Positioned within feminist economics and philosophical anthropology, in this work, we aim to identify and conceptualize, based on the category of superwoman, the formation of discursive practices suitable for neoliberal modes of subjectivation that address highly qualified women. Specifically, we intend to articulate this mode of subjectivation as one of the dimensions in which the imperial mode of living becomes apparent. For this purpose, and due to its heuristic value, we will take a widely circulated “women’s magazine” as an example, to establish how this imperial mode of living addresses women, prescribing the subjectivities and ethos for them.