Postfeminist stylistics, work femininities and coaching: a multimodal study of a website

The aim of this paper is to examine representations of work femininities on a British website offering coaching specifically aimed at women. It builds on and contributes to studies of postfeminist representations but with a specific focus on work femininities and coaching webpages. Although studies on postfeminist representation have analysed the way young women’s, embodied and sexualised femininities are depicted across a wide variety of mainstream media, there has not been a study that focuses on the representation of work femininities on coaching websites. My approach matter because feminist authors critique popular psychology and link it to postfeminism and neoliberalism but as yet studies have focused on self-help books and magazines and not new media. Furthermore, coaching websites are an important medium for circulating postfeminist work femininities and psychological advice, produced through the digital labour of women entrepreneurs. Through my analysis of one website, influenced by feminist social semiotic multimodality literature, the paper contributes to postfeminist theory and organisation studies by explaining how ‘postfeminist stylistics’ reproduce postfeminist tropes and depictions of relational and individualised entrepreneurial femininities visually and textually (Lewis, 2014).