Governmentality theory opens up possibilities to explore forms of governance at work in the ‘private spaces’ of the city, such as the home and the body, generally omitted in traditional urban theory (Peake & Rieker 2013). However, despite emphasizing power as decentralized, governmentality studies have been criticized for tending to portray power as top-down governing strategies (Larsson et al 2012), and consequently neglecting resistance and the role of agency (Larner & Walters 2004). It is particularly important in relation to the post-political city (Swyngedouw 2009) to identify spaces of democratic engagement and resistance (Mouffe 2005) and to develop understandings of how neo-liberalism is constitutive of conceptions of ourselves as political subjects (Oksala 2013). Accordingly, this paper also draws on feminist poststructuralist theories of embodied citizenship that focus on the situated formation of subjectivities and agency within the nexus of racialized, classed and gendered power relations (Bilge 2010, Mehta & Bondi 1999, Newman 2012) of the city. Using material from focus group interviews in four Swedish cities, this paper scrutinizes the construction and regulation of women’s agency and their strategies of compliance and resistance. In this way, it is hoped to contribute to feminist theorizing(s) of the contradictions, antagonisms and instabilities inherent in the post-political city.
