Significant others? Friendships between women and neoliberal relational lives Event as iCalendar
(Gender Studies, Psychology)
28 March 2019
12 - 1pm
Venue: Pat Hanan Room, Te Puna Reo / Cultures, Languages and Linguistics Building (207-501)
Maree Martinussen | University of Auckland
The author Jane Westaway has written that women don't write about their friendships because they are "like clean air - vital, yet taken for granted and almost invisible". These important relationships are also often marginal in academic research about women's lives.
In this seminar I will analyse data from interviews, group discussions and vignette methods carried out with women in 'early midlife' (late twenties to late forties), in Aotearoa New Zealand. I examine how women wrestle with the dilemma of needing to carve out a space for friendships, while also attending to the demands of motherhood, long term sexual relationships and careers. I suggest that when women do get the opportunity to 'just hang out', they contravene hegemonic postfeminist injunctions to self-manage and self-transform.
