ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how a hollowed-out language of women’s empowerment is used by a Malaysian government agency to encourage high-potential mothers on career breaks to return to the workforce for economic competitiveness reasons. The study uses critical discourse analysis with neoliberal feminism as a theoretical lens to interrogate the key discourses in and the persuasive properties of ‘career comeback stories’ published in state-linked websites. To gain further insights into the power relations operating within and through the stories, the study also explores the discursive absences around migrant domestic workers whose reproductive labour ‘frees’ middle-class women to pursue employment. The analysis reveals how the use of a language of empowerment reinforces, obscures and depoliticises systemic injustices. The career comeback stories articulate a ‘happy work-family balance’ discourse that encourages women to improve their personal well-being by combining motherhood with a career. Caregiving remains the province of women, but the individualistic empowerment expressed in the language of the discourse obfuscates the gender inequalities. There is also a pervasive blindness to migrant domestic workers and their contributions to households and the wider society. However, the vocabulary of diversity and inclusion invisibilises hierarchies of class, citizenship and non-citizenship, and production and reproduction.
