Material precarity, performative imperative, and burnout from resilience: surfacing the dark side of resilience laboring in women’s entrepreneurial stories

Abstract

Drawing from U.S. women entrepreneurs’ narratives of how they enacted resilience, the current study focuses on the dark side of resilience laboring – when individual resilience efforts and expectations become exploitative, unsustainable, and complicit to maintaining inequitable power structures. Women entrepreneurs’ narratives revealed that their resilience laboring, while contributing to the survival of their businesses, also led to continued struggles in precarious work conditions, well-being crises, and burnout from prolonged resilience practices. To challenge the patriarchal neoliberal values that contribute to the dark side of resilience and advocate for alternative framings and collective praxes, we propose three interconnected lenses to study resilience: a material lens to acknowledge accesses and resources requisite of resilience laboring; a tensional lens that exposes the constant negotiations of unrealistic and paradoxical resilience scripts anchored to identities; and a temporal lens to call out the hegemonic temporal norms prescribed to the ‘successful’ performance of resilience.

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