Paradoxes of Anti-austerity Protest: Matters of Neoliberalism, Gender, and Subjectivity in a Case of Collective Resignation

This article analyses an episode of collective resignation. Carried out mainly by specialist nurses, this is a proliferating form of worker protest in Sweden that poses a challenge to austerity policy and emerges in a specific industrial-relations context. Mobilizing for collective resignation, activist nurses navigate terrains of neoliberal governance, marketization and flexible labour-market dynamics. The collective resignation is also a form of action underpinned by a discourse of gender equality. Our analysis, which attends to the co-emergence of gendering and subject formation in the narratives of a group of activists and to the use of gender-equality rhetoric in framing collective action, shows how opportunities for collective action arise that also restrain the exercise of agency. In this case, subject formation included contrasting nursing to tropes of archetypical militant workers and negotiating tensions between care and collective action. This involved reproducing and challenging established forms of gendering.