Gendered market subjectivity: autonomy,privilege, and emotional subjectivity in normalizing post-socialist neoliberal ideology

ABSTRACT

Most prior studies of marketplace ideology foreground consumer agency as identity co-creation or opposition to ideology. In this research, I consider how the logics of the dwindling state and global neoliberalism discursively form consent in post-socialist Zagreb, Croatia. I use recollections and small group discussions to compare women’s class and generationally based experiences of the daily family meal and work, during Yugoslav exceptionalism and privatization. Changing social relations normalize the gendered subjectivity of neoliberalism in post-socialist Zagreb, characterized by autonomy, the privilege of the younger generation, and the emotional subjectivity of anxiety and loss. Linking consumer experiences to the changing role of the state and market ideologies contributes to scholarship on globalization, gender, the socio-historic patterning of consumption, and marketplace ideology, by demonstrating that changes in ideology and state disrupt and replicate privilege to create new, gendered market subjectivities and social inequalities, normalized through changing everyday social relations.