Abstract
Burnout is widely recognised as a major public health problem, which has been explicitly linked to the modern urban environments and lifestyles of late capitalist culture (e.g. Han, Chabot). It has plagued the modern workplace for decades and is nowdays carefully monitored across Europe. In the face of the unprecedented challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic, rising numbers of burnout have been reported, which arguably signal a parallel mental health pandemic, affecting women and minorities in particular (Dzau et al. 2020). In this paper, I discuss the notion of burnout culture from gender and diversity perspectives. In particular, I will ask what, and if so how, (postcolonial) feminist theorizations and artistic imaginations could contribute to the scholarship on the self-sufficient entrepreneurial individual in our postmodern society, in particular, his or her exhaustion and other related mental and affective states. Analysing a number of recent artistic and literary imaginations of millenial women and millenial work, I hope to bring into view how ideas of care (work) and capitalism’s care crisis which have thus far been largely sidelined, or not properly been considered, could add to current scholarship of contemporary burnout culture.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2024 Special Focus—Traveling Concepts: The Transfer and Translation of Ideas in the Humanities
KEYWORDS
Burnout, Gender, Postcolonial, Art, Literature
