If one only listened to such early twenty-first century public figures as Carly Fiorina or Sheryl Sandberg, one would believe that the troubles working women face are troubles they alone should solve. The seductive rhetoric of postfeminism rears its head in the language of “lean-in” and in Fiorina’s proclamation that “A feminist is a woman who lives the life she chooses.” Presumably, the work of femininity is unfettered and the woman who struggles in her labors has clearly made poor decisions. However, American neoliberal promises of free choice ring false in the face of such discriminatory practices as unequal pay for equal work and grossly inadequate maternity leave policies.

If the world of politics and big business all too often offers the illusory promises of free choice and the hegemonic fantasy of “having it all,” so too do popular culture depictions of cupcakes, Kim Kardashian, and Pinterest. But, these media texts also reveal the desire for work that does something more for the women who perform it. The authors of the third section, titled “Labors” in Elana Levine’s new anthology Cupcakes, Pinterest and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century, address the pleasures and pitfalls of popular renderings of feminized work. From new media to chick lit, reality television to cupcake culture, the essays in “Labors” explore how diverse popular cultural forms construct feminized labor. Taken together this collection of essays paints a picture of femininity as always laboring, working hard in public and private spheres, while also striving for creativity, community, and sisterhood.

The authors in “Labors” refuse to blame women for having chosen wrongly in the work they perform, but rather highlight how feminized labor is haunted by the threat of failure. As Julie Wilson and Emily Chivers Yochim succinctly put it: “neoliberalism has rendered all of life precarious.” Popular depictions of feminized labor are faced with such conditions as the global financial crisis, rising economic inequalities, and jobs defined by contingency and flexibility. According to Suzanne Ferris, chick-lit heroines embody the anxieties prompted by such conditions of precarity; their dead-end jobs limit their well-educated potential. Furthermore, the conditions of the postfeminist sensibility hold women to unattainable standards, expecting them to seamlessly manage home, self, and work, all while being punished for their own ambition. Reality television celebrities Kim Kardashian and Bethenny Frankel strive to achieve all the markers of the feminine lifecycle while also becoming successful career women; but as authors Alice Leppert, Suzanne Leonard and Diane Negra demonstrate, the joys these celebrities take in their professional successes are routinely mitigated by the pain of failed romances.

The women discussed in “Labors” struggle to do work that is often performed at the messy, blurred line between public and private worlds. Many popular renderings of feminized labor capitalize upon notions of entrepreneurialism in which the private self is monetized and branded in the interests of professional “success.” Kim Kardashian and Bethenny Frankel’s intimate lives are commodified on their reality television programs and in the marketing of their affiliated products. As Leonard and Negra argue: “Frankel both created and was the ‘Skinnygirl,’ a feedback loop that masterfully associated her brand identity with the affective qualities and class positioning that came to be associated with her as a person.” Combinations of self and product reward the ambitious, self-sufficient laborer who satisfies the requisites of neoliberal individuality. Such entrepreneurialism structures many of the depictions of feminized work by highlighting how success depends upon flexibility and creativity, but only when such flexibility and creativity is performed within strict parameters. On programs like Cupcake Wars I explore how contestants are encouraged to bake cupcakes with high degrees of individual ingenuity, thus presenting their cupcakes as an extension of themselves. But, contestants’ culinary artistry is sharply critiqued by a panel of judges who establish the limits of confectionary (and by extension feminine) acceptability.

These authors show how work that conflates the market with the self promises both economic and affective rewards. Sarah Ahmed’s theory of happiness informs a number of the authors’ discussion of the affective power of such feminized labor. As Wilson and Yochim explain, in the “mamasphere” of Pinterest, the act of pinning operates as digital care work that upholds the family as a “happy object.” On 2 Broke Girls, cupcake baking promises to grant heroines Max and Caroline happiness by releasing them from the drudgery of working as waitresses in a Brooklyn diner. As “happy objects,” cupcakes activate affective structures that maintain relations of power. Cupcakes promise to make Max and Caroline happy by offering them liberation from the diner, where the work environment is marked by racial diversity. Their professional aspirations thus ultimately affirm the ideal of the white, upwardly mobile, heteronormative feminized subject.

The entrepreneurialism explored in these chapters appears to be an efficient solution to the inevitable stresses resulting from the demands of the postfeminist “work-life balance.” Family businesses abound: sisters create their own cupcake business on DC Cupcakes and the Kardashians monetize their family across multimedia ventures. And yet, here we find room for optimism. For while many of the authors argue that this work upholds existing inequalities, mediated renderings of feminized work may also offer a critique of the alienation resulting from the demands of neoliberal individuality. Numerous authors argue that the pleasures offered by such depictions of feminized labor speak to the desire for interpersonal connections and community. We see this in the pinning care work of Pinterest, and in the friendship between Girls characters Hannah and Marnie who gossip while eating cupcakes in the bathtub. As Alice Leppert argues, the sister-branding and sister-entrepreneurship exhibited by Kim, Khloe, and Kourtney Kardashian “suggests that young women do value and desire bonds with each other.” Such examples reveal how intimate and sometimes surprising connections between women offer the working heroines of popular culture, and the audiences who take pleasure in them, relief from the relentless labor required to be successful or happy.

Meet Tracy: an interior designer who can’t find a good house painter. Meet Bob: a wine store proprietor whose retail staff is unreliable. Meet Seth: a valet driver losing tips in an increasingly cashless culture.

Tracy is a founder of EasyPaint, a startup that matches house painters with individuals and companies seeking their services. Bob sells wine to Bjorn and Marissa Ovick, whose startup Staffly supplies retail workers to independent shops. Seth is a client of Bravo, which lets customers tip electronically.

Last week, each of these companies participated in the Startup Battlefield competition at TechCrunch Disrupt San Fransisco, the annual convention hosted by TechCrunch, AOL’s tech journalism site. The September 2015 Disrupt marked the thirteenth iteration of the event, which began in New York in 2012, and which now takes place each year on both coasts as well as in an overseas city. Each event features an exhibition hall, where software and hardware companies display newly launching products, panel discussions and “fireside chats” with executives whose companies lead the technology industry, and a hackathon that asks teams of coders to build something new over the course of twenty-four hours. Yet Disrupt’s main event, the centerpiece of the convention, is the Startup Battlefield. Billed as “the very heart of TechCrunch Disrupt,” the Startup Battlefield is a competition for investment capital and press attention. To win the competition’s $50,000 prize, preselected contestants must deliver a compelling pitch before an assembly hall of industry insiders, including investors and press, followed by a question and answer session with a panel of industry judges.

Disruption, a favorite Silicon Valley buzzword, signals the end of business as usual—yet the modes of engagement employed this week at TechCrunch Disrupt replicate, rather than rupture, industry norms. In their Startup Battlefield presentations, EasyPaint, Staffly, and Bravo took care to emphasize that the protagonists of their product narratives are real-life individuals affiliated with each company. Still other contestants opened their pitches with (presumably) archetypal or composite characters, imagined individuals whose struggles are solvable with the right company’s technology. In other words, each company set up its product’s desirability by introducing a person (“meet so-and-so”) who faces an obstacle (“so-and-so requires X but can’t have it because Y”) which the company’s technologies will remove (“I’m here to tell you about Z.”)

About half of the Startup Battlefield contestants invoked this presentational formula, which fits a range of industrial verticals: Emily wants to get pregnant but doesn’t know her fertility window. Abby needs school lunches but hates bananas. Scott needs medical care but hospital communication confuses him. Sam owns a car dealership but 401ks overwhelm him. Susie wants a divorce but lawyers are expensive. Tom grows peppers but can’t analyze his farming data. Gillian has asthma but can’t keep up with her treatment regimen. Kendall loves art and manicures but can’t customize her fingernails. Alex needs to notarize his will but must bring a full stack of paper to a notary public, and who prints anything anymore?

Having presented these protagonists’ perils on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage, the startup founders quickly came to their rescue. Ava makes a smart bracelet that tracks its wearer’s menstrual cycle. Scrumpt lets parents order their children preselected lunches. Stitch streamlines communication between medical providers. Money Intel automates 401k administration. Separate.us helps divorce petitioners manage their own filing. Agrilyst, winner of the Startup Battlefield, analyzes the agricultural data produced by individual indoor farms. Cohero Health tracks asthma patients’ treatment adherence and lung function through a mobile app that syncs with a smart inhaler and spirometer. Preemadonna prints customized images from a smartphone onto users’ fingernails. Stampery provides digital document certification.

If there is a neoliberal logic undergirding the move to locate a would-be revolutionary technology within the life of a particular person, a narrative logic is also at play in these presentations. An irony of the Startup Battlefield is that the broader the implications of a given technology, the more difficult it is to explain in a matter of minutes. The plight of the pepper farmer highlights the revolutionary potential of Agrilyst for an audience likely unfamiliar with indoor farming on a broad scale.

Still, it’s worth considering what it means when, in the name of disruption, one of the tech industry’s most celebrated events for new, innovative technologies proposes the transformation of industrial sectors as diverse as agriculture, healthcare, and business administration using identical presentational paradigms. Sometimes “breaking shit”–to use another of the tech industry’s favored terms for innovation–means remaking it in Silicon Valley’s image.

Post by Yiu-wai Chu, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

This post is part of a partnership with the International Journal of Cultural Studies, where authors of newly published articles extend their arguments here on Antenna. 

Hong Kong, now a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China, had been a British colony for 156 years before sovereignty over the territory was handed to China in 1997. Shortly after reversion to its “motherland,” it was expected that Hong Kong people would have a stronger sense of belonging to their home city. The surprisingly stellar rise of China in the new millennium, however, has resulted in many impacts on Hong Kong. Hong Kong people have worried about forced integrations, in particular during the post-free-tour period, when countless Mainlanders crossed the border to purchase different commodities, ranging from luxury goods to baby formula.

The Hong Kong SAR government launched BrandHK, a global communications platform, in 2001 to focus international attention on Hong Kong’s drive to become “Asia’s World City.” In March 2010, a “Faces of Hong Kong” campaign was inaugurated via the BrandHK platform as a new marketing and communications strategy to promote the city and enhance the sense of belonging of Hong Kong people. The strategy of the overhauled campaign endeavored to highlight the “human” side of Hong Kong, thus its main thrust was focused on a series of promotional videos that featured different Hong Kong citizens. While the series of promotional videos feature both celebrities and common folk, familiar faces, such as international film star Chow Yun-Fat, have stolen the limelight. Although Chow Yun-Fat has achieved global success in his film career, he is well-known for being local as well. Praised by local media as “The Son of Hong Kong,” Chow Yun-Fat is famous for living an ordinary local life, despite his enormous success. As such, Chow Yun-Fat was the choice to promote Hong Kong to the world, as this campaign focuses on locals.“Faces of Hong Kong” tactfully used Kowloon City, Chow Yun-Fat’s favourite neighbourhood, as the main setting. In the video there were lots of signatures local stores where Chow has been hanging out for several decades. “Over the years, other parts of Hong Kong have changed a lot, but Kowloon City is a place that still feels the same. Much of what I remember from my childhood is still here. The way of life, the atmosphere, the friendliness of the neighbourhood. It’s the same for me now as it was back in the sixties.” Chow’s voice-over in the video might sound sweet to many years, but my “re-search” of Kowloon City told a different story. If the feeling of being at home is based on “security, familiarity, community and a sense of possibility,” which are actually the underlying themes of the “Faces of Hong Kong” promotional videos, the case of Kowloon City exposes a harsh reality that insists on showing a different picture: these key feelings have no place in the redeveloped district.

Photo 1: Kowloon City wet market; across the street once stood the famous local restaurant Dragon Palace.

Photo 2: New Citygate Chinese Herbal Medicine Store on the left; across the street once stood the district’s largest department store, International, boasting a history of more than 50 years.

My pedestrian inquiry started with Kowloon City’s public wet market, Chow Yun-Fat’s favourite. Just across the road from the market stood a well-known local restaurant called Dragon Palace, but it was closed in 2012 and was subsequently torn down to make way for new luxury apartments (Photo 1). Unfortunately, this was not an isolated event. On the other side of the public market, the same developer demolished another old residential building to make way for its real estate project entitled “Billionaire Avant.” One block away from the public market stands three famous local stores: New Citygate Chinese Herbal Medicine Store (Photo 2), Hoover Cake Shop (Photo 3) and Kung Wo Soya Bean Factory (Photo 4). In the “Faces of Hong Kong” video, Chow Yun-Fat tastes delicious egg tarts at Hoover and consumes thirst-quenching soya bean milk at Kung Wo. These are undoubtedly landmark stores with a long history. However, on the same street many old buildings have already been swallowed up by developers. In the promotional video, Chow Yun-Fat works excitedly with the staff of New Citygate Chinese Herbal Medicine Store. The store is still there but the building just across the road, once housing the district’s largest “international” department store and boasting a history of more than fifty years, was pulled down not long after the video was released. Urban redevelopment is not uncommon in metropolis regions such as Hong Kong; however, what is most troubling is that the retailers of the new buildings are often completely different from their predecessors. As profit is the raison d’être of property developers, it is not surprising that the street stores in the luxurious redeveloped buildings target chain-store renters who can afford higher rates (Photo 5). It is a shame that the recent changes in Kowloon City, which might become a “generic district” in the near future, has told a story opposite to a local sense of belonging.

Photo 3: Hoover Cake Shop on the left; a new luxury apartment project across the street.

Photo 4: Kung Wo Soya Bean Factory on the right; a new luxury apartment project across the street.

Photo 5: A new building with street shops occupied by chain stores.

While “Faces of Hong Kong” highlights the stories of Hong Kong people from all walks of life, they are simply used to illuminate the values of “Asia’s World City,” which desperately brands Hong Kong as a generic global city. Generic cities that embrace neoliberal capitalism are very similar in nature. It is difficult if not impossible to have a strong sense of belonging if the “homes” in these cities are all equals. The problem is that both China and the West would like Hong Kong to further develop into a generic commercial city. The fluid, vibrant, and hybridized everyday life practices, a vital source of multiplicity in Hong Kong over the past fifty years, have been under threat in the past decade or so. Hong Kong citizens recently expressed that it is ever more important to safeguard core local values. Apart from values, sadly, local space cannot remain unfazed as well. Urban redevelopment has been sped up by not only rampant capitalism but also integration with the Mainland, the free tours from which, for instance, profoundly alters the ecology of the local market. The example of Kowloon City has shown that “to belong” has already become a luxury for many Hong Kong people.

[For the full article, see Yiu-Wai Chu, “‘Faces of Hong Kong’: My City? My Home?,” forthcoming in International Journal of Cultural Studies. Currently available as an OnlineFirst publication: http://ics.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/02/25/1367877915572186.abstract]

All photos taken by the author on 23 October 2013.

When the lockout began, Dave Zirin observed that the NFL was pursuing this tactic simply because it could. He then laid out the material case for the NFL’s stance, contextualizing the league’s grotesque profits and extremely aggressive approach to labor relations within broader trends in American corporate culture. Yet Zirin’s analysis under-emphasizes the ideological and discursive dimensions of this situation. I contend that this lockout encapsulates the manner in which the material and ideological conditions of struggle between labor and capital have been reconfigured during thirty-plus years of neoliberal discourse and policy. The fetishization of the ‘free’ market and individual autonomy, the privileging of private interests over the public, and an increasing hostility towards organized labor have taken hold in the United States. We now find ourselves in a moment at which wealth is being funneled upwards as public debt balloons and poverty and unemployment continue to increase. Despite all this, we continue to see a persistent skepticism about organized labor and government intervention within the general public. In this context, the NFL intuitively understood that it could lock out its officials with impunity because public sentiment was inherently opposed to these workers.

This was widely apparent during the referee lockout. One seldom saw the non-union referees referred to as ‘scabs’; rather, media commentators called them ‘replacement officials’. Similarly, game analysts and commentators were often reluctant to criticize the ‘replacement’ officials (though there have been suggestions that some were duped). My own survey of user comments on articles concerning the substitute officials on Profootballtalk.com suggested that many readers were unsympathetic to the NFLRA with numerous hostile comments posted. Perhaps most curiously, while fans and commentators critiqued the performance of these officials and lamented the diminished quality of games – see the meme pictured above – few seemed to connect this to the NFL’s decision to lock out its professional referees after the NFLRA refused to accept the NFL’s take-it-or-leave-it offer during negotiations before the season. Fewer still made the obvious connections between this event and other recent labor disputes.

Here we have a massively profitable billion-dollar sports league that was willing to compromise the quality of its product, the safety of its players, and its own reputation in order to gain some meager savings – as low as $62,000 annually per team, according to some reports. Per Peter King, the primary sticking point in negotiations was apparently the retirement plan; the NFL sought to shift all referees from a defined benefit plan to a defined contribution, market-based plan. While the referees initially balked at this, early reports concerning Wednesday’s deal indicate that this measure is set to go through in 2016. Despite their efforts to hold out, and their apparent leverage after Monday’s debacle, the refs ultimately became only the latest group of American workers to lose their pensions. A turn of events that would have been unthinkable three decades ago now barely elicits a raised eyebrow; in this case, the few criticisms of the deal have been drowned out by the cheers for the return of the real refs and the apparent salvation of the NFL season.

So, what can we take from this sequence of events? None of what has transpired here is new. These points bear repeating, however, because events such as this represent brief moments of clarity in which the material and ideological power dimensions of a given moment are exposed. It is perhaps a fitting sign of the times that, just as public consciousness of the stakes of this struggle seemed to be building, it was punted into the past through a hasty resolution. But the fact that this dispute even got to this stage is itself an indication of the extent to which the management-labor dichotomy has faded in the collective public mind. With this week’s agreement, this lockout becomes merely another disparate event in as yet unconnected cluster of struggles from the Wisconsin Uprising to the recent Chicago Teachers Union strike to the myriad private-sector labor disputes that dot our blighted economic landscape.

As with those events, it is unclear whether or not there will be any meaningful residual activity emerging out of this most visible struggle. Indeed, this is perhaps the defining quality of our time: the difficulty envisioning and articulating connections across classes, spaces, and events. As with the public-sector workers and the teachers in the preceding events, football fans could not seem to see their own diminished circumstances and prospects for the future in the referees struggle to hold the line against the league. This fading conflict now stands as yet another indication that the terrain of struggle that defined the twentieth century has yielded to something else. This new moment demands new ways of conceptualizing and articulating the dimensions of a more amorphous and atomized struggle over material goods and ideological territory.

I believe that the difficulty we’ve experienced in imagining and articulating these new ways attests to the all-encompassing tension between the nostalgic cul-de-sac of the ‘American Century’ and the pervasiveness of neoliberal ideologies. The way we never were, to borrow Stephanie Coontz’s phrase, looks better and better as the status quo continues to deteriorate. Then again, three decades of rampant individualism have limited our ability to conceive of ourselves in terms of broader social entities. The lockout should provide a stern indication that the old terrain of struggle has been reconfigured in material and ideological terms. Its lesson is surely that, if those of us who labor do not get engage in the practice of imagining new ways of community-building, organizing, and resisting, we will undoubtedly face diminished prospects in the future. Of course, its deeper lesson may be that the twentieth century is fated to be remembered as a brief golden cycle in a much darker longue durée.

The CCA began in a stirring fashion with a pair of panels entitled “The Crisis of Universities, Parts I and II”. These panels were related to a special issue of TOPIA that is set to focus on these issues. Ian Angus addressed the diminishing availability of standpoints for reflection at a moment in which these institutions are changing extremely rapidly. He utilized changes to the form and function of university libraries, citation systems, and the rise of the network society to interrogate the effects of three decades of neoliberal policies on the university. Bob Hanke applied cultural theory to pedagogical practice in order to conceptualize the changing nature of pedagogy in these institutions while outgoing University of Western Ontario Faculty Association President James Compton drew on his recent experiences in labor negotiations to address the pervasive trend towards micromanagement and rationalization in the Canadian university system. Alison Hearn then addressed the emergence of various metrics to measure performance in this new ‘spectacular economy of the university’; her talk on performance audit and promotion practices clarified some of the key changes occurring in our educational institutions. These panels affirmed the extent of the threat that the neoliberal political climate poses to the university and confirmed the need for broader collective action as the university enters a time of increased scarcity and scrutiny.

Darin Barney gave a thought-provoking presentation about the Alberta town of Battle River’s purchase of its branch railway line as a democratic act constituted through the collective embracing of an uncertain but self-determined fate. Calling his work ‘critical agricultural studies’, Barney inquired into how infrastructural technologies mediate the experience of geographical spaces and what happens when communities refuse to embrace the twin poles of the imperative of technological progress and the nostalgia for lost lifeways. Tamara Shepherd, Sara Grimes, and Leslie Shade combined to offer a stimulating panel on youth engagement with digital spaces, the gender dynamics inherent in those activities, and the pressing need for adequate policy initiatives in these areas.

The CCA also featured excellent keynote addresses by Lisa Nakamura and Charlotte Brunsdon. Nakamura’s talk, entitled “Race, Labor, and Indigeneity: The Birth of the New Media in the American West”, presented a pre-history of ‘new media’ that focused on the ways in which various dominant groups or entities in American society (i.e. adherents of the counterculture movement, technology firms) have appropriated or exploited Native American culture to suit their own ends and interests. Examples included the application of Navajo weaving skills in the production of complex tech hardware and the fetishizing of the native American’s authentic relationship to the natural environment on the part of hippies, which Nakamura adroitly connected to discourses of techno-utopianism. Nakamura utilized this discussion to explore the social relations involved in the material production of digital devices and to expose the race and gender dynamics involved in those processes. Suggesting at one point that women were the first form of software for the ways in which female workers operated the first mainframe computers, Nakamura drew an insightful distinction between ‘free workers’ (those who possess various forms of mobility) and unfree workers (those who do not). This discussion reaffirmed the persistent need to write against overly optimistic assessments of digital technology and the utility of historical work in this endeavor.

Charlotte Brunsdon’s talk, which was co-sponsored with the Film Studies Association of Canada, focused on British Film and Television history and emphasized the need for an historiographical re-assessment of the audio-visual arts in Britain. Brunsdon focused on the issue of medium specificity and the ways in which various media forms depict other media forms and thus help to fix their discursive meanings for populations. Her focus on this area was in part a function of her belief that, as platforms become less important in the face of digital convergence, it is becoming more important for texts to assert or specify the sort of attention that they require. Brunsdon contended that medium specificity is a function of accumulated textual gestures rather than a property of media themselves. She analyzed examples of the ways in which British films have depicted television at different points in time in order to make the case that television has evolved from a force that constitutes a threat to the domestic space to an institution that often helps to constitute ‘home’. However, this progression has lent the medium a socio-cultural meaning that tends to overpower it. Brunsdon argued that British television in the late twentieth century carries a metaphorical weight of banality and liveness that overwhelms any sense of historical fact. Thus, as the films Brunsdon featured demand a mode of engagement that is ‘not like watching television’, they also reiterate discourses of medium specificity that obscure our actually existing relationships with those media. Brunsdon then concluded by making the historiographical claim that Britain’s audiovisual culture is properly located on television and not on film, as has often been argued. “We’ve looked in the wrong places,” she said, as a sort of exhortation to use digital convergence as a means to look anew at historically-established discourses of textual specificity.

CCA 2011 featured an abundance of papers, gatherings, and activities that stretches far beyond my limited space here. It was a deceptively intimate conference that was defined equally by a fierce sense of intellectual curiosity and political urgency and by a pervasive sense of warmth and conviviality. This was my first CCA, but I can already say that I am eager to return for CCA 2012 in Kitchener-Waterloo.