Contemporary Masquerade: Work-Life Balance and Modern Tragedies of (Mis)Perceived/(Mis)Placed Social Agency

Abstract

Within contemporary life, women struggle within discourses of stay-at-home mothering and working mother in terms of the detriment to a child’s development. Although contemporary research tends to isolate work-life balance as a separate set of conflicting discourses to study, I suggest that this isolation is misleading. Work-life balance encompasses every aspect of a woman’s speaking being or conscious home, social, caring and working experiences. Considering work-life as allencompassing allows for interesting interpretations when framing women’s work-life experiences within the confines of a language that seeks to dissect them into discrete parts. Furthermore, conflict surrounding work and life is not new and provide a cornerstone of traditional psychoanalytic theories of human development. Within this paper, I consider contemporary discourses of work-life balance, within the context of Riviere’s psychoanalytical concept of masquerade and Lacanian psychoanalysis that rereads Freud’s original works as a theory of discourse.