The limits of “no limits”: young women’s entrepreneurial performance and the gendered conquest of the self

Abstract

Numerous programs have been set up to support women entrepreneurs on the basis that inequality results from incompatibilities between gendered emotional culture and the affective governmentality of the entrepreneurial paradigm. In the context of Spanish entrepreneurial training programs, this article identifies technologies of the self in young women's narratives of successful entrepreneurship. Using a crossed-narrative approach, as part of three case studies, we conducted 14 interviews with program participants and 6 with program trainers. The analysis shows that, to overcome their supposed deficiencies, the participants understood that female entrepreneurialism required unlimited efforts to self-modulate their emotional dispositions. The analysis identified three broad cultural narratives that frame entrepreneurialism as an epic quest, a vocation or calling, and a ludic pursuit of pleasure. Each of these provides an interpretative frame within which the limitless efforts demanded of feminized entrepreneurialism were resemanticized into three moral values that characterized the story protagonists (heroism, sacrifice, passion). The article further explores the vulnerability of young women to the depoliticization of entrepreneurialism by analyzing emotional suffering and lack of well-being, distancing, ambivalences, and microresistances to the hegemonic paradigm.