%0 Journal Article
%T ¡°¡®Eat, Pray, Love¡¯ Bullshit¡±: Women¡¯s Empowerment through Wellness at an Elite Professional Conference
%A Ethel L. Mickey
%J Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
%@ 1552-5414
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0891241617752409
%X Professional women¡¯s groups and conferences aim to improve women¡¯s status in the workplace through networking and the exchange of resources. This article applies a critical feminist lens to one women¡¯s conference, illustrating how the collective space paradoxically individualizes women¡¯s career experiences. Drawing upon participant observation at the Innovative Women in Business Conference, I explore how the conference¡¯s goal to connect businesswomen is replaced by a focus on women¡¯s empowerment through individual control and wellness. The conference encourages women to engage in wellness practices such as egg freezing to improve their personal market value. By focusing on strategies to ¡°have it all,¡± the conference reconfigures the feminist value of empowerment to convert gender inequality to an individual affair. While most women embrace the neoliberal feminism of the conference, I find that many women attendees employ tactics to resist the wellness demands, or what one attendee refers to as ¡°¡®Eat, Pray, Love¡¯ bullshit.¡± This women-only conference represents a neoliberal, entrepreneurial intervention contributing to the (re)production of a self-regulating, feminist subject
%K neoliberal feminism
%K professional networking
%K empowerment
%K wellness
%K entrepreneurialism
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0891241617752409