Leaning in, pushed out: Postfeminist precarity, pandemic labor, and journalistic discourse

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the postfeminist ideal of “having it all” became more contradictory, as women struggled to juggle work and childcare. This research, using critical discourse analysis, examines how lifestyle and explanatory journalism made sense of this problematic ideal as it became evidently untenable during the pandemic. Here, journalism operates as a discursive structure, obscuring its own complicity in sustaining postfeminist and neoliberal relations around the expectations that surround working mothers.