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Reclaiming Subjectivity in The Neoliberal Postfeminist Sexual Objectification Matrix- Exploring Sexual Objectification, Mental Health, and Relationship to Self

This poster presentation aims to use autoethnographic research as a means of using contemporary post-structural feminism to explore sexual objectification in a neoliberal postfeminist era. I use my personal experience of moving to the United States 15 years ago and describe the impact cultural norms of femininity had on my identity, sexuality, and mental health. I hope to bring awareness to academic authors that specialize in post-structural critique of cultural discourses and practices around key words like self-objectification and hyper sexualization.

Coming to America was a profound culture shock. Though I had traveled back and forth from Australia throughout my life, permanently moving to the United States, particularly to the South, was a seismic shift in how I understood womanhood. By the time I was twenty-nine, I had already lived what many might call a bohemian life: raised in an educated, multicultural community by international parents deeply embedded in the arts, I had studied at an art school and spent my early twenties traveling, experimenting, and seeking. I believed myself to be worldly and liberated. Yet upon arriving in America, I quickly learned that the politics of femininity operated differently here, and that these cultural norms, though invisible at first, would profoundly shape my identity, sexuality, and mental health.

Encountering Southern Womanhood

In the American South, womanhood was not only a personal identity but a moral performance. Expectations around femininity were deeply intertwined with religiosity, respectability, and appearance. Without fully realizing it, I began to internalize these codes. I absorbed conflicting messages: to be desirable but not promiscuous, respectable yet attractive, career-minded but not threatening to male ego. The cultural ideal seemed to merge patriarchal respectability politics with postfeminist rhetoric of empowerment.

This paradox produced constant dissonance and disembodiment. I lived inside competing imperatives: be confident but not assertive; be sexy but wholesome; be independent but marriageable. The result was a fragmented sense of self, a disconnection between body, mind, and spirit. I was living, without yet knowing it, as what Rosalind Gill (2007, 2016) calls the postfeminist neoliberal subject: a woman who “freely chooses” to self-optimize, perform confidence, and sell empowerment as a personal brand.

Becoming the Postfeminist Neoliberal Subject

Through years of reflection, therapy, and feminist study, I came to understand how social norms molded me into this postfeminist subject. In neoliberal culture, empowerment is redefined as self-management, the ability to optimize one’s body, career, and emotions through consumption and discipline (Gill, 2016; Scharff, 2016). Women are encouraged to see themselves as projects of endless improvement, measured through market logic.

I began to live this logic intimately. My femininity became a branding exercise: curated social media profiles, filtered photos, dating-app bios filled with social-justice slogans that masked deep insecurity. I mistook market visibility for intimacy and self-worth. I embodied what Gill and Orgad (2018) call confidence culture: a system that translates feminist ideals of agency into the command to “be confident” and “love yourself” so long as you remain desirable and productive.

The “ideal woman” in this world drives a luxury SUV, glows with wellness, practices self-care as consumption, and performs both independence and submission with seamless grace. She is educated but aspires to marry “up.” Proximity to a powerful man becomes a form of personal capital. This fusion of empowerment and dependency, what McRobbie (2008, 2015) terms the postfeminist sexual contract, was seductive. It promised belonging, safety, and legitimacy.

I learned to desire being desired. After two short-term marriages, one to a charming hussler capitalist, the other to a “reformed” evangelical rock-star turned accountant, I found myself addicted to substances, to attention, and to the illusion of control through seduction. Online dating became a site of both agency and alienation. Each swipe offered validation; each encounter deepened my fragmentation. I curated myself for consumption, a performance of liberation that masked loneliness and spiritual emptiness.

Self-Objectification and the Fractured Self

In recovery, I turned to scholarship to make sense of this emptiness. Objectification Theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997) provided a vocabulary for my lived experience. The theory explains that women in patriarchal cultures are socialized to view themselves through the male gaze, internalizing an outsider’s perspective on their own bodies. This self-objectification leads to anxiety, body shame, and diminished capacity for authentic experience. It is a form of psychic alienation, a denial of one’s full humanity.

When I looked at myself, I did not see myself. I saw a version of me reflected through others’ eyes, filtered through cultural scripts of worthiness and desirability. This constant self-monitoring, what Foucault (1977) described as the panoptic gaze, became internalized surveillance. I policed my expression, appetite, and sexuality. In the neoliberal and postfeminist landscape, such surveillance is recast as empowerment: women are told that controlling their bodies, careers, and online images is freedom. Yet this form of control is submission disguised as choice.

The result was chronic cognitive dissonance, a fractured sense of self suspended between competing identities: the liberated feminist, the devout wife, the high-achieving scholar, the addict seeking escape. My social media became a mirror maze of selves. Visibility replaced connection. I was everywhere and nowhere at once.

Postfeminist and Neoliberal Logic

To understand my own complicity, I turned to feminist cultural theorists who dissect the ideological frameworks that produce these contradictions. Postfeminism, as Gill (2007) and McRobbie (2008) argue, is not simply “after” feminism but a sensibility that incorporates and undermines it. It celebrates women’s success while erasing the structural inequalities that persist. Postfeminism reframes collective struggle as personal choice, positioning women as individually responsible for their happiness, beauty, and success.

Neoliberalism, a political and cultural rationality that prioritizes market values, individualism, and entrepreneurial selfhood, provides the economic backbone for this ideology. Within neoliberal logic, every aspect of life becomes subject to optimization and competition. As Scharff (2016) shows, neoliberalism reshapes the psychic life of individuals: we internalize market pressures as personal desires.

In this system, femininity becomes a labor of self-branding. Pleasure, empowerment, and sexual freedom are marketed back to women as commodities. The body becomes both workplace and billboard. My own pursuit of empowerment through visibility, consumerism, and relationships was thus not purely personal—it was the embodiment of a broader neoliberal and postfeminist discourse that conflates freedom with conformity.

Belonging as Survival Strategy

Through therapy and autoethnographic reflection, I realized that my self-objectification was a survival strategy. As a migrant woman in the South, belonging felt conditional on conformity. Assimilation required me to perform the kind of femininity that signaled respectability—thin, disciplined, heterosexual, and modestly successful. My attachment to status and my pursuit of marriage were all attempts to secure belonging and protection in a culture where women’s value is measured by appearance and relational capital.

My identity was thus shaped by both cultural coercion and adaptive intelligence: I learned to read social cues, to translate my worth into acceptable forms of femininity. Yet the cost of belonging was authenticity. The more I perfected the façade, the more estranged I became from my body, my desire, and my inner life. Recovery required dismantling this façade not only through sobriety but through feminist consciousness.

Reclamation Through Feminist Inquiry

My academic journey became a process of reclamation. Feminist theory offered both critique and healing. Reading Simone de Beauvoir, Sandra Bartky, Audre Lourde, bell hooks, and later Gill, Scharff, and McRobbie helped me see how personal pain connects to systemic power. I learned that my dissonance was not individual pathology but a social symptom of living within intersecting systems of patriarchy, capitalism, and white middle-class aspiration.

Drawing on poststructural feminism, I began to deconstruct how language, media, and ideology construct “the feminine” as an object of consumption. Gill’s (2016) analysis of digital self-surveillance resonated deeply: every “like” on Instagram became a micro-dose of validation within a neoliberal economy of visibility. Scharff’s (2016) exploration of neoliberal subjectivity illuminated how even activism and authenticity are monetized. McRobbie’s (2015) work on competitive femininity exposed how “choice” feminism often masks anxiety, exhaustion, and precarity.

These insights reframed my story not as failure but as evidence of how neoliberal power operates through desire. My yearning for beauty, love, and belonging were not flaws—they were human needs exploited by a system that sells identity as salvation.

Implications for Feminist Practice and Research

This critical autoethnography underscores the importance of integrating mental health discourse with feminist cultural analysis. Women navigating postfeminist neoliberal culture often experience self-objectification, anxiety, and depression not merely as individual struggles but as outcomes of systemic contradictions. Therapeutic and educational practices should therefore attend to the socio-cultural dimensions of distress, linking body image, self-esteem, and relational issues to media representations and neoliberal imperatives of self-management.

For researchers, this calls for methodologies that foreground embodied subjectivity and reflexivity. Autoethnography, in particular, enables scholars to trace how macro-structures—capitalism, religion, patriarchy—are inscribed on lived experience. It bridges the personal and the political, making visible the emotional costs of neoliberal femininity.

Educational and community programs could foster critical media literacy, encouraging young women to decode postfeminist messages and develop resistance strategies rooted in collective empowerment rather than individual competition. Feminist pedagogy must move beyond empowerment rhetoric to cultivate critical consciousness—an understanding that genuine liberation involves dismantling, not performing, the systems that commodify us.

Conclusion: Reclaiming Subjectivity

Writing this narrative has been both an academic and spiritual practice, a process of reclaiming subjectivity from the grip of objectification. Where once I sought validation through visibility, I now seek authenticity through awareness.

Drawing on Gill (2007, 2016, 2018), Scharff (2011, 2016), and McRobbie (2008, 2015), I recognize how neoliberal and postfeminist discourses produce women as self-policing subjects whose value lies in appearance, productivity, and relational success. These frameworks obscure the structural roots of inequality and turn feminism into a brand.

To loosen these constraints is to engage in decolonizing the self—to dismantle internalized hierarchies of worth and rediscover being beyond performance. In reclaiming my subjectivity, I resist the commodification of womanhood and affirm the possibility of a relational, embodied, and critically conscious self.

This work is not only about me; it is about countless women navigating similar contradictions. It is an invitation to name the systems that shape us, to speak from the fractures rather than hide them, and to transform self-awareness into collective insight. Through feminist inquiry, sobriety, and creative practice, I continue to unlearn the language of objectification and remember what it means to be whole.

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References

(APA 7th edition formatting recommended for submission)

Fredrickson, B. L., & Roberts, T. A. (1997). Objectification theory: Toward understanding women’s lived experiences and mental health risks. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21(2), 173–206.
Gill, R. (2007). Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10(2), 147–166.
Gill, R. (2016). Post-postfeminism?: New feminist visibilities in postfeminist times. Feminist Media Studies, 16(4), 610–630.
Gill, R., & Orgad, S. (2018). The shifting terrain of sex and power: From the “sexualisation of culture” to #MeToo. Sexualities, 21(8), 1313–1324.
McRobbie, A. (2008). The aftermath of feminism: Gender, culture and social change. Sage.
McRobbie, A. (2015). Notes on the perfect: Competitive femininity in neoliberal times. Australian Feminist Studies, 30(83), 3–20.
Nussbaum, M. (1995). Objectification. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 24(4), 249–291.
Scharff, C. (2016). The psychic life of neoliberalism: Mapping the contours of entrepreneurial subjectivity. Theory, Culture & Society, 33(6), 107–122.
Zurbriggen, E. L., & Roberts, T. A. (2013). The sexualization of girls and women as a primary antecedent of self-objectification. In E. L. Zurbriggen & T. A. Roberts (Eds.), The sexualization of girls and girlhood: Causes, consequences, and resistance (pp. 22–50). Oxford University Press.