ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 considers the place of “self” in pervasive popular cultural and media narratives about women’s personal and professional lives. It explores the double standards and double-binds involved in both motherhood and childfree life choices (both of which can, by misogynistic sleight of hand, carry implications of inappropriate female selfishness), and examines the imperative to care that is intensely gendered, by revisiting the literature of “ethics of care,” especially Carol Gilligan’s classic text, In a Different Voice (1982). It also interrogates discourses of female ambition and female leadership, which fail to conform to a specifically gendered expectation of self-sacrifice. Creative, but not necessarily feminist, selfish or self-ful forms of resistance to these gendered expectations are explored via the writings of controversial novelist and journalist Lionel Shriver and via a consideration of the inspirational figure of Serena Williams as a representative of a “pure – female – drive to win.”
