POLITICAL SCIENTISTS David Chandler and Julian Reid discuss the neoliberal subject as a frantic maker of choices. They argue that such an anxious quest for control through an individualized form of decisionism presents the only weapon against uncertainty and risk. In the following, I show that, in three recent comedic treatments, female executives in corporate leadership roles are portrayed as dangerously vulnerable, in the sense that they expose the conceptual flaws of neoliberal self-referentiality. I define neoliberal self-referentiality as the solipsistic worldview of actors engaged 24/7 in a system where everything is marketized. According to the corporate data portal Statista, for 2016, the overall percentage of German women in leadership positions falls between 12.5 and 16.9 percent, with companies with 101–550 employees occupying the lower end of the spectrum and those with more than 10,000 employees showing the somewhat higher percentage of women in management. Since Germany boasts a predominance of small and mid-size companies, companies with fewer women in leadership positions, that is between 12.9 and 14.1 percent, are more common than larger corporations with their somewhat higher percentages. These figures indicate that women lag significantly behind in leadership positions in the German business workplace. Female managerial positions involve control over budgets and authority over subordinates, but are often subject to review by superiors as well. The power of female managers to implement their own decisions is often relative. In the neoliberal marketplace, female middle managers continue to be under pressure to self-optimize by combining their business acumen with so-called “soft skills” for employee management, all the while monitoring their bodies for slimness and youthful attractiveness. If they boldly state an economic decision at a business meeting, they may receive criticism for being too strident or unethical. Performance reviews may describe women with emotive clichés as supportive rather than aggressive, implicitly denying them leadership potential. At the same time, the business world is the only arena where there is a sustained engagement with the concept of female leadership, as there is a constant feedback loop of job performance surveys and profitability.

Traditionally, women are taught to self-monitor their bodies and their conduct to a much greater extent than men. Therefore, as the Germanists Hester Baer, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Maria Stehle have argued, “neoliberalism constructs women as its ideal subjects.”

LEFTIST CULTURAL CRITIC Jeffrey Nealon argues that “we’ve experienced an intensification of postmodern capitalism over the past decades, an increasing saturation of the economic sphere into formerly independent segments of everyday cultural life.” The new global economy elevates competitiveness to its guiding principle, mandating a national quest to maintain “Konkurrenzfähigkeit des Standorts Deutschland” (competitiveness of Germany as a business hub). At the same time, since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s, intensified technologies of the self, widely promoted by popular culture and the advertising industry, insinuate that individuals should take a functionalist approach toward themselves as sites of experience, or conceive of themselves and their physical bodies as reified projects for self-marketing and improvement in a normative marketplace. This imprinting is so pervasive that it is difficult to resist; it presents itself in the guise of self-actualization, or even as entertainment.

The writers under consideration in this chapter present a strong critique of neoliberalism by addressing these pervasive effects. Katharina Hacker, Nikola Richter, Julia Schoch, and Judith Schalansky want readers to question which common goods are foundational for a liveable society, what the proper ratio of work versus leisure is, and how to recover or attain for the first time a sense of shared intimacy. Moreover, their works critique the evacuation of the public good as a shared civic responsibility from the public sphere, chronicling the neoliberal shift onto individuals as entrepreneurs, “equipped,” in economist Mirowski's judgment, “with promiscuous notions of identity and selfhood, surrounded by simulacra of other such selves … a world where competition is the primary virtue, and solidarity is a sign of weakness.”

While women's bodies were already commodified and relegated to the status of consumers in the Western capitalist marketplace, women in the neoliberal era are disproportionately affected by this renewed punitive intrusion into their psyches, urging them to submit to the dictates of perpetual self-interventions in the guise of a new freedom to realize the self. Moreover, as Hester Baer has pointed out, compared to women in other EU countries, German women are underrepresented in leadership positions in the workplace, and those who work are more likely to do so parttime.