Looking on the bright side: Positivity discourse, affective practices and new femininities

From policy to personal practice, injunctions harness the positive effects of affects are pulsing through global emotion regimes. Scholarship tracing this phenomenon links push for positivity – and other seemingly “entrepreneurial” neoliberal cultural formations. Within beyond psychology, feminist analyses highlighting gendered address these formations their imbrication with contemporary femininities. While raises important questions about implications imperatives, an absence fine-grained empirical work means little is known regarding how discourse taken up lived out. We draw from interviews 24 women facing distinctive emotional management demands (influencers, mothers service workers) investigate inflects everyday living. Our analysis presents two affective–discursive repertoires that participants drew on explain positivity: as attractive relationality agentic cognitive style. also identified four figures who central talk, three affective– discursive practices linked keeping emotions in check, virtuously declining negativity triumphant positivity. conclude that, while offering new appealing feeling positions, may reaffirm profoundly unequal patterns practice regulation.