Women leaders, self-body-care and corporate moderate feminism: An (im)perfect place for feminism

This article offers self-body-care as an aspect of corporate moderate feminism and a manifestation of postfeminism for women leaders. It explains how postfeminism as a bodily practice surfaces through women leaders' body work and how women 'top' leaders strategize to stabilize their credibility by identifying their own and other women' body work needs and the steps they take to meet these. Self-body-care extends understandings of body work as part of postfeminist governmentality and contributes to understandings of moderate feminism as that which deflects and reflects feminism and constrains and empowers subjects. As such self-body-care offers an (im)perfect space for disruption and for Gender and Organization Studies (GOS) scholars to pursue the implications and potential of postfeminism. We call for women elite leaders to be part of feminist futures and illustrate self-body-care as an aspect of corporate moderate feminism by highlighting complexity in the postfeminist thesis and reflexively re-examining two of our previous published empirical studies of women 'top' leaders.