The young Australian feminine property investor: class, whiteness and heterosexuality

Abstract

The financialisation of housing is associated with the emergence of new investor subjectivities but, to date, little has been said about how these subject positions are gendered. In contrast, this paper brings a feminist lens to the topic through a textual analysis of the Australian financial self-help book, Smashed Avocado by Nicole Haddow (2019). By illuminating how Haddow’s self-narrated arc (or makeover) from fiscal failure to a successful property owner or ‘Rentvestor’ is inflected by sexuality, whiteness, and class, we highlight previously underexamined dimensions of property investor subjectivity as it is mediated by gender. Furthermore, we argue that gendering of property investment discourses in the feminised genre of self-help, suggests that the growing imperative of fiscal performativity is central to the (re)production of white (settler colonial), middle-class femininity. In concluding the paper, we call for more feminist attention to be given to the uneven geographies of everyday financialisation as they pertain to housing and feminist theorising on the home.

Keywords:

• Asset economy
• financialisation
• gender
• housing
• property investor subjectivity
• self-help

Introduction

This paper examines how the Australian property purchasing self-help manual, Smashed Avocado by Nicole Haddow (2019), engages millennial women in its construction of the problem of and ‘solutions’ to housing unaffordability in Australia. Haddow’s (2019) text, which has been optioned for television, received widespread and uncritical media attention on its release (e.g. Hunt 2019; Harper 2019). Moreover, it is representative of a burgeoning domestic and international market in feminised financial self-help media, which in Australia includes the likes of The Joyful Frugalista (Bird 2019), A Real Girls’ Guide to Money (Zahos 2019), and Unf*ck Your Finances (Browne 2019). These texts all include a chapter on property investment, however, in contrast to these titles, property is Haddow’s (2019) sole focus, thus providing an opportunity to investigate the types of socio-cultural discourses giving shape to new feminised property investor subjectivities.

The title of Haddow’s book, Smashed Avocado (2019) references a widely circulated Australian newspaper column in which the author, a wealthy, white baby boomer, Bernard Salt (2016, 34) moralised about millennials eating $A22 avocado on toast at hipster cafes instead of saving for a home deposit. The term gained traction internationally in 2017 when a 35-year-old millionaire property investor from Melbourne commented to the media that when he was saving for his first house he wasn’t ‘buying avocado on toast’ (Levin 2017). The remarks spurned an international ‘flurry of debate’ (BBC 2017) as they went viral on social media and were picked up by mainstream media-internationally (e.g. Time Magazine, The London Times, GQ Magazine). Since then, avocado on toast has become synonymous with issues of housing affordability and generational inequalities. Haddow’s use of the term is, therefore, an ironic reference, from one millennial to another; nodding to the intergenerational antagonisms about housing (un)affordability (Hoolachan and McKee 2019), and popular discourses of millennials as financially frivolous and entitled (Threadgold 2019). Despite the broad generational address of the title, its distinctly feminine cover palette of ‘millennial pink’ and pastel green indicates that the target audience for Haddow’s (2019) book is young women (see Koller 2008). Thus, even before readers encounter gendered anecdotes about using credit cards to purchase designer fashion or humorous recaps of (heterosexual) romantic blunders, it is clear this book is aimed at instructing and constructing potential feminine property investors.

The gendering of the text is also apparent through line drawings – a mode of illustration associated with chick-lit where they are used to convey fun, informality, and frivolity (Montoro 2012) – of. In this instance, the objects of illustration - fashionable workers’ cottages and Victorian terraces found in gentrified inner-city Australian suburbsalso communicate whiteness and social class. As Shaw (2007, 9) has contended, the celebration of colonial modes of architecture for their heritage value by the white middle-class forms an important part of the settler mythscape of Australia based on Terra Nullius. At the same time, relational Indigenous histories and ontologies of home are marginalised or ignored. The cover thus announces the racialised logics of property ownership, and housing financialisation, which, in settler colonial nations such as Australia, is dependent on Indigenous people’s ongoing dispossession (Fields and Raymon 2021).

Haddow’s (2019) book is illustrative of the financialisation of housing – a term which broadly captures ‘the increasing presence of a range of actors and organisations creating or using real estate management, mortgage, and financial instruments to profit-seek’ (Rogers, Nelson, and Wong 2018, 435). Literature on the financialisation of housing has variously demonstrated: how changes to the operations of mortgage markets have increased both individual and institutional property investment (Fields and Uffer 2016; Grohmann 2021; Van Loon and Aalbers 2017); complex webs of profit generation via securitisation (Adkins, Cooper, and Konings 2020; Krippner 2005; Langley 2008;) the rise of the rentier class (Christophers 2020); and the impact of financing private rental markets on individuals and neighbourhoods (Aalbers 2016, 2017; Fields and Uffer 2016). However, as the focus of this paper is on the micro-level, also referred to as the financialisation of daily life (Martin 2002), or everyday life (Langley 2008), our interest is in exploring the feminisation of the so-called ‘everyman’ archetypal property investor (Hulse, Reynolds, and Martin 2020). This is a position that Haddow (2019) seeks to occupy as announced by the book’s tagline ‘How I cracked the property market and you can too’. This paper, therefore, contributes to the literature on housing financialisation and responds to feminist calls for ‘more complex, less partial geographies of financialisation’ (Pollard 2012, 403), which elevate ‘the body as a spatial category’ (Karaagac 2020, 7).

While Haddow’s (2019) book is an Australian text, the recent boom in women’s financial self-help, and characteristics of the Australian property market are transnational trends as demonstrated by OECD (2023) housing affordability data, and book publications in the United Kingdom (Girls Just Wanna Have Funds by Molly Benjamin 2023) and the United States (We Should All Be Millionaires by Rachel Rodgers 2022), for example. Hence, while we recognise the geographic specificity of financialised housing economies, Smashed Avocado (Haddow 2019) nonetheless reflects the gendering of financialisation as it appears in new, popular discourses of women as economic subjects in general, and the gendering of (racialised and classed) property investor subjectivities in particular. This research is, therefore, relevant to scholars outside of the Australian context.

We begin by situating the paper in the literature which has identified how subjects are inculcated into the shifting socio-spatial, economic, and cultural landscape that is the financialisation of housing. Importantly, Following this, we outline the methodology of the study. Data are presented in three sections which trace the author’s transformation from a failed financial subject to a successful property owner, or ‘rentvestor’. To demonstrate the feminisation of property investor subjectivity, we afford attention to instances where Haddow ties her financial biography to her romantic life. We also focus on the intersections between gender, race and class in her narrative. As part of this discussion, we reveal how Haddow’s (2019) text mobilises older gendered economic subjectivities alongside, newer, emerging discourses of financialised femininity. To conclude, we summarise that while Smashed Avocado (2019) addresses a key feminist concern – housing and home – the proposed ‘solutions’ to housing (un)affordability, offered to millennial women, entrench preexisting gendered wealth inequalities and settler colonial violence.

The financialisation of housing

Over the past two decades, rising rates of housing unaffordability in Australia has seen a decline in owner-occupied tenure, and an increase in renting with just under a third of the population renting from private landlords (ABS 2022). Recent work on residential property prices in Australia has demonstrated growing inequality by examining the dynamics of ‘combined wage disinflation and asset inflation’, arguing it has significantly reorganising class stratification (Adkins, Cooper, and Konings 2021, 548). As acknowledged in the introduction, these characteristics are not limited to the Australian market as scholarship on similar Anglo economies, such as Christopher’s (2020) work on property as rent-generating assets within the UK demonstrates. As asset ownership is increasingly ‘structuring both economies and individual life chances’ (Cook 2023, 1), being ‘in the market’, is now central to both wealth accumulation and wellbeing (Aalbers 2016, 2017; Adkins, Cooper, and Konings 2020).

Crucially, geographers have detailed the racialisation of inequality in housing financialisation (see Dorries, Hugill, and Tomiak 2022; Fields and Raymon 2021); illuminating how white supremacy and settler colonialism, as a ‘materially grounded set of practices’ (Bonds and Inwood 2016, 715) which are dependent on dispossession. Goenpul woman of Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island, Queensland) and Quandamooka (Moreton Bay, Queensland) Country, Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015, xxii) has explained how ‘whiteness, as a form of property, and organising principle’ shapes ‘social relations and economic development’, to deny ‘Indigenous people opportunities to generate wealth’ via displacement and dispossession. We draw upon her work of the ‘white possessive’ to explain how in Australia, as a settler colony, investment in housing property is a (continual) colonial investment in whiteness, from which settler bodies benefit in the form of ‘asset accumulation and ownership’ (2015, 67).

Despite the fact that housing unaffordability in Australia has been driven by decades of neoliberal policy (Gurran and Phibbs 2015), discourse on homeownership remains highly moralised, positioning property as the preserve of the (white) deserving, hard-working, aspirational individual (Allon 2008; Martin 2018). This contradiction between moralised ‘discourses that support homeownership as the “normalised” form of tenure… and the reality of declining affordability’, is also seen in other Western markets (Fikse and Aalbers 2021, 1600). As such, new investor discourses which ‘facilitate and legitimise the material-economic process of household financialisation’ (Pellandini-Simányi and Banai 2021, 785) have emerged. Mapping these discourses has thus been a major area of scholarship on the financialisation of housing.

Early, and oft-cited, work on investor subjectivity by Langley (2008, viii), argued that financialisation is not ‘out there somewhere’ separate from the mundane realities of daily life, but is inherently bound up with our sense of self. The rationalities of the investor subject Langley (2008) described include a confidence for personal financial decisions born out of calculated risk management, careful financial diversification, active planning for the financial life course, and an appetite for opportunity born of ‘managed’ risk. While scholars have been careful to highlight the ‘variegated’ nature of investor subjectivities (Lai 2017; Hall 2011; Fields 2017), Adkins, Cooper, and Konings (2020, 27) have argued that financialisation enrolls ‘whole populations’, albeit to different degrees. This has been demonstrated by Fields’ work (2017) on ‘unwilling’ investor subjects, and Agunsoye’s (2021, 1835) study of the ‘calculative investor’ who ‘enjoys investing’ and the ‘everyday asset manager’ who critically adopts financialized logics in response to the ‘pressures’ of feeling ‘trapped’ (2021, 1829).

Özogul and Tasan-Kok (2020, 481) note that there exist ‘only a few articles’ that address the ‘age, gender, and wealth disposition’, of ‘small-scale individual investors’ active in rental market investment. Two Australian exceptions include the work of Martin (2018) and Hulse, Reynolds, and Martin (2020). In his novel study, Martin (2018) examines popular property investment lifestyle media to demonstrate how such texts rely on the popular cultural trope of the ‘hero’s journey’. Martin (2018) explains how the property investor ‘hero’ is constructed as being an agentic, thrifty, strategic, self-managing, and calculative ‘figure of action and self-determination’ (1067). The hero property investor is repeatedly characterised as non-emotional even as they are called to undertake what is described as a highly emotionally (and financially) rewarding journey. As such, he argues that these discourses draw on the traditions of ‘self-improvement culture which argue for the cultivation of ‘reason, planning and time management’ while also privileging ‘emotion and the affective dimension’ (McGee 2005, 49 in Martin 2018, 1070).

In furthering this work, Hulse, Reynolds, and Martin (2020, 987) write that a ‘notable feature of the investment discourse’ is that the journey ‘is open to everyone to embark upon’. They explain the view that property investment in Australia is for the ‘Everyman’ is manifest in the celebration of the ‘mum and dad’ investors who are discursively constructed as –‘ordinary people, on average incomes, working in ordinary jobs’ showing enterprise and self-responsibility providing for their future (Hulse, Reynolds, and Martin 2020, 996). This group is also celebrated for assisting their children into the housing market through multiple home ownerships (Nethercote 2019). Notably, while the title ‘mum and dad’ presents the average property investment as being a joint female-male partnership, the most common structure is sole male ownership (Core Logic 2023, 8).

To date, scholarship on new subjectivities associated with the financialisation of housing has been little concerned with gender. This is despite what Allon (2014, 12) labels ‘the feminisation of finance’ which is the ‘constitution of “women” as a target group for personal financial products and services’. In an important feminist intervention on the financialisation of housing, she traces women’s systematic exclusion from credit for property to the identification of women as a new market for housing finance. Allon (2014, 25) acknowledges the liberatory potential of inclusion in the discursive terrain of housing financialisation noting it may offer women ‘independence, autonomy, safety and security’, but counsels that ‘what is needed is a closer look at’ the definitions and terms of inclusion on offer. Indeed, this critique of the limits of financial inclusion had been taken up by Roberts (2013) in the gendered and raced exploitations of mortgage finance in America. While the focus of Robert’s (2013) paper was to examine the privatisation of social reproduction through finance (work which has been subsequently expanded, see Karaagac (2020) or Cook (2023)), she points out that the extension of credit does little to counter ongoing inequalities in the labour market (pay gaps, gender segregation, unpaid care, and pre-existing asset-inequality). Hence, while women are welcomed into discourses of finance through postfeminist promises of inclusion and ‘empowerment’, the subjectification processes of financialisation are deeply embedded in the politics of gender, race, and class (Allon 2014; Roberts 2015).

The genre of self-help, of which Haddow’s (2019) text is part, has been described as a ‘prime site for the feminisation of neoliberalism’ (Henderson and Taylor 2020, 155). Across all areas of life – from sex and relationships, to dieting, beauty, home organisation and career progression – self-help schools women in ‘becoming ideal subjects of late capitalist economies’ (Riley et al. 2019, 4). Now, as part of the financialisation of housing, an entirely new sub-genre of women’s self-help, instructing on property acquisition, has emerged. Unlike earlier financial self-help books for women which focused primarily on household spending and household budgeting while merely noting the rise of investing (Joseph 2013; Lee 2014; Cormany 2020), these new texts centre on the asset economy, including the assetisation of housing. They are, as we demonstrate in this paper, consequently constitutive of the gendered property investor subjectivity.

Method

Feminists have demonstrated that self-help books are rich sources of data for illuminating contemporary discourses of idealised femininity (Riley et al. 2019). In this light, we undertook a feminist discourse analysis of Smashed Avocado (Haddow 2019) as part of a larger study of seven Australian financial self-help texts for women. This additional reading, along with news media about Smashed Avocado (Haddow 2019) and commentary about the text posted on Good Reads, strengthened the discourse analysis by providing useful ‘social context’ (Phillips and Hardy 2002, 3).

According to Lazar (2007, 149), feminist discourse analysis is self-reflexive, praxis-oriented, and ‘implicitly comparative rather than universalising’ with a focus on ‘the discursive aspects of the forms of oppression and interests which divide as well as unite groups of women’. It is interested in both the ‘overtly expressed meanings’, as well as ‘attentive to less obvious, nuanced, implicit meanings’, which convey ideologies and are expressions of power (Lazar 2007, 151). She argues that in a feminist approach discourse is understood as an ‘element of social practices’, ‘representations’, and an ‘act of meaning-making’ which are not only socially constituted but also socially constitutive (Lazar 2007, 149, 150). For feminists what is of interest is how ‘gendered relations of power get (re)produced, negotiated, and contested’ in discourse (Lazar 2007, 150).

While feminist discourse analysis can be operationalised in a range of ways (Lazar 2007), our approach began with repeated close readings of the text followed by an examination of ‘its rhetorical stance, its claims to authority, its organisation’ (Dittmer 2009), and its paratextual features such as the books’ cover. Our decision to include the cover in our analysis stems from Genette’s (1997, 407) seminal work which argues that covers, as ‘thresholds’ into the texts, are not simply there to ‘look nice’, and rather than being peripheral are integral to an analysis of a text. For example, in returning to the line drawings on the front cover of the book which we referenced in our introduction as being reflective of the feminised genre of chick-lit, and the settler colonisation of Australia, here we also highlight these illustrations as communicating that middle-class, white femininity positions itself as entitled to wealth (Wilkes 2015).

Following these initial steps, we identified dominant, marginal, and absent systems of meaning about gender in the text and examined how these were influenced by other social locations such as age, race, class, and ability. Taking advice from Jørgensen and Phillips (2002, 141), we gave analytical attention not merely to the singularity of discourses, but to the ‘interplay’ between them. Further, in recognising that ‘discourse can never be just linguistic since it organises a way of thinking into a way of acting in the world’, we asked ‘Who gets to speak? Who is spoken?’ (St. Pierre 2000, 485). As we worked through these steps, we practiced the type of ‘self-conscious analytical scrutiny of the self’ described by England (1994, 82). This meant reflecting on our positionalities as settler white, middle-class young/middle-aged women might have inflected our approach and/or conclusions. Haddow’s transformation and its gendered, classed and racialised logics emerged from this recursive, inductive, and heuristic process.

Confessions of a failed feminine financial subject

Haddow (2019, 1–18) begins Chapter One, ‘The Wake-Up Call’ with an intimate confession. The setting is the eve of her thirtieth birthday in a distinctly white feminine middle-class milieu – posing for Instagram while drinking champagne in a friend’s pool ‘wearing Gucci sunglasses and a designer bikini’, and sporting a ‘high-maintenance haircut’ (2019, 1). Haddow discloses that this relatively glamourous Instagrammable moment was ‘a carefully constructed lie’; explaining that the truth was that, despite the material markers of success, she was struggling with a ‘stupid amount of debt’ (2019, 1).

Entangled with Haddow’s status as a failed fiscal subject in need of transformation is her heterosexual relationship status. There are two specific instances in which she links her irresponsible use of credit to experiences of romantic unhappiness. The first pertains to the breakdown of a relationship, wherein upon seeing her ex-boyfriend had a new girlfriend, she booked a holiday to Europe (2019, 2). In the second instance, Haddow is living in her first shared house, a South Melbourne terrace, and aged 25 at the time, explains being in a relationship where she felt ‘too young to worry about buying a home’ and liked ‘being one half of a couple’, so found herself ‘suppress[ing] any thoughts and concerns about the future because… dealing with our differences would mean going our separate ways’ (2019, 3). Eventually though, Haddow (2019, 3, 4) ‘hunger[s] for more’, and in worrying that she’d ‘traded ambition for comfort’, her career ‘aspiration’ leads her to take a solo trip to New York which she funds through her second credit card (2019, 3, 4). On her return, now with $8000 in credit card debt, Haddow (2019, 4) moves into a shared ‘two-storey, double-fronted four-bedroom terrace in Potts Point’, in Sydney and, as a 27-year-old feels like she’s ‘made it’, freelancing for women’s magazines and commercial television. She discloses that during this time she spends extravagantly on luxury clothing and accessories, holidays, restaurants, take-away meals, and nights out. We are thus introduced to her through the trope of women as debt-ridden shopaholics (Joseph 2013; Lee 2014).

Haddow’s (2019, 8) confessional stance at the book’s outset is significant as it acts as ‘a cautionary tale’, to establish the key message of the book. That is, the housing crisis can be overcome through individual enterprise. On occasion, Haddow (2019, 14) offers some concessions to this narrative noting stagnant wage growth and the high cost of living. However, her overall view is that young people have ‘swallowed the doom and gloom’ about the housing market and in giving up on buying property are ‘pissing away a fortune on booze, dinners, vices, and pointless crap’ (Haddow 2019, 23). Moreover, they see themselves as ‘entitled’ to home ownership unlike older generations (such as the author’s parents) who ‘worked tirelessly’ and ‘start(ed) small’ to get on the property ladder (Haddow 2019, 15). Overall, Haddow fails to situate the housing affordability crisis within the well documented evidence on its actuality and complexities (Pawson, Milligan, and Yates 2020 and Gurran and Phibbs 2015) including that, in Australia ‘housing injustice’ sits ‘inside an already violent relationship of un-homing that make the very conditions for others to make home’ (Porter and Kelly 2023, 817). Instead of addressing race and its intersections with class, Haddow (2019, 21) individualises housing (un)affordability stating: ‘It was absolutely my fault I didn’t own a house yet’.

Similarly, Haddow discusses her reliance on consumer credit without reference to the predatory lending practices of financial institutions, the precarity of creative work, and the legitimate fear of failing to belong by performing the feminine middle-class self ‘correctly’. She describes needing to ‘look the part’ for her career which was at a ‘pivotal’ point even though it was costing her more than she was earning (Haddow 2019, 5). To do so she buys a ‘must have’ dress at a department store while holding her breath as she splits the cost on three different credit cards (2019, 5). She also remembers relying on credit because a ‘freelance invoice hadn’t been paid’, but chastises herself for spending to try to ‘keep up’ with her lawyer, town planner, and investment banker friends (2019, 5). Thus, we are encouraged to read her debt as due to irrational and shallow desires rather than through the social structures of labour, gender, age, class, and race.

In an attempt to pay off her debt and save for a deposit, Haddow returns to the family home, where she is ‘swollen with sadness and shame’ at her spending, debt, and lack of financial know-how (Haddow 2019, 7). Haddow’s individualization of her shame obscures the fact that consumer debt is experienced collectively as a ‘common, defining feature of life under neoliberal capitalism’ (Sparkes 2019, 1419). We can read Haddow’s shame of her financial status at 30 as evocative of middle-class expectations relating to wealth accumulation throughout the life course, and the moral authority which is attributed to, and enjoyed by, the successful property investor subject (Martin 2018; Hulse, Reynolds, and Martin 2020).

Haddow’s (2019) confessions set up the type of ‘attractive, legible’ template Martin (2018, 1067) identifies as a central element of property investor discourse. However, while he finds that ‘the journey’ metaphor predominates, Haddow (2019) instead relies upon a framing device often conflated with postfeminism, that is, the makeover (McRobbie 2008; Gill 2017). In this regard the author’s story is one of self-scrutiny, the undertaking of psychic and physical labour deemed necessary by (middle-class) experts, and ongoing self-regulation so that she is transformed to perform ‘the right kind of femininity’ (Ringrose and Walkerdine 2008, 236).

The (white, Middle-class) makeover: steps to transformation

Whiteness and middle-classness imbue the type of solutions and postures Haddow adopts to become a homeowner, and those she recommends to readers; for example, she suggest readers get a ‘side-hustle’ (2019, 151–159). Reflective of how homeownership is increasingly unaffordable for even white, middle-class populations (Adkins, Cooper, and Konings 2021), Haddow herself undertakes a side-hustle, stating that she couldn’t have bought if she’d relied and ‘lived on a salary alone’ (2019, 22). While Haddow recommends driving for Uber, her additional labour is freelancing for an elite, corporate newspaper The Australian Financial Review; a job secured through her personal network. Hence, even though the additional work stresses Haddow, it is employment that provides economic as well as social and cultural capital with sufficient cachet to lead to other opportunities.

Another recommendation Haddow makes to combat housing market inaccessibility is to ‘get a leg up from… family’ (2019, 17). After moving home Haddow obtains financial advice and support from her accountant father who is ‘appropriately mortified’ at her spending habits (2019, 19). She observes that if she had not had her father she would have had to have consulted a financial advisor. She acknowledges that a financial adviser ‘can be expensive -you could be up for thousands’ so as an alternative recommends finding ‘a trusted family member or friend with a finance background’ and buying them lunch in return for personalised advice (2019, 20). As elsewhere in the book, here Haddow assumes a middle-class disposition in her readers, who have ready access to familial and formal knowledge of finance. Not only was Haddow’s family able to provide expert financial advice but for a negligible boarding cost, provided her with a room of her own, cooked meals, and all utilities; an arrangement which allowed Haddow to save $A25,000 - $A30,000 in twelve months while still having $A170 per week left over for socialising. While she makes somewhat of a concession that ‘moving back in with the folks isn’t an option for everyone’, her solution to renters wanting to save for a home deposit is to ‘live somewhere further out that’s more affordable’ (2019, 29).

In detailing how families can support entering the property market, Haddow canvasses intergenerational property investing, money gifts, offers to go guarantor, or even refinancing the family home. She tells readers these practices are ‘quietly happening all around us’ (Haddow 2019, 38); the personal-plural pronoun ‘us’ again reflects the comfortably white, middle-class spaces she occupies. In an attempt to grapple with her class position, Haddow cites an Australian finance and business academic who tells her there is a ‘stigma attached to getting into the market with help’ (2019, 42). In a defensive manoeuvre, she then cites another academic to refute claims that those receiving help are entitled millennials; writing that parents often provide intergenerational ‘support when it was clear that their child was struggling – when they were seriously considering buying a shithole just to get into the market’ (2019, 39). The pejorative ‘shithole’ in this context presumably refers to homes of poor quality in lower-income neighbourhoods. Haddow (2019) does not attempt to address the politics of poor housing quality or how the wellbeing of those who are forced to live in ‘shitholes’ may be affected by occupying unhealthy housing (Baker et al. 2018).

While the increasing necessity of financial and in-kind intergenerational assistance to support young people competing in the housing market has been documented (see Hoolachan and McKee 2019), the gendered dynamics of these geographies, and their sexual politics, have been afforded little attention (see Cook 2023 for a recent exception). Haddow (2019, 40) speaks to these geographies as she describes ‘losing the space’ to invite prospective ‘dates around to canoodle on the couch’ and thereby ‘actively delaying finding a romantic partnership’. At the same time, she tells readers she was ‘seriously grateful’ to be able to return to her heteronormative middle-class parental home to save for a deposit as ‘I wanted to achieve financial independence more than I craved love’ (Haddow 2019, 40). In short, Haddow articulates a tension between fiscal success and scripts of middle-class feminine heterosexuality.

Haddow’s strongest recommendation to facilitate homeownership which is part of her own ‘journey’, is to become an investor-landlord in the form of ‘rentvesting’ (2019, 49). This relatively new term involves the buyer purchasing in a suburb where they can afford, but living in a suburb they find more salubrious. It is a strategy that has been given impetus through the ‘almost uniquely Australian practice’ of negative gearing (Blundel 2016, 340), whereby owners can offset any losses on a property (e.g. interest paid on the loan, insurance, repairs, maintenance and local government rates), against their net income over the financial year. The policy, which has exacerbated the housing crisis and contributed to new patterns of asset accumulation and class stratification (Adkins, Cooper, and Konings 2021), is acknowledged to be ‘controversial’ by Haddow (2019, 175, 227) but she makes no commentary on its ethics. Similarly, as she champions what she constructs as a creative and entrepreneurial strategy, she makes no mention of its detrimental impacts on lower-income earners and other vulnerable populations such as those with a disability and young people.

Indeed, there is no connection made between rentvesting and her negative renting experiences of having ‘limited rights and endless instability’ while in ‘ratty and unreasonable conditions’ (Haddow 2019, 7). Instead, Haddow’s (2019) discussion of rentvesting, (buying in Mordialloc, a beach-side suburb 23 kilometres from Melbourne’s centre), and renting in the inner city (re)produces class-based spatial stigmas. She describes her new suburb as a foreign country in which she is easily lost and isolated from her friends and family who complain about the distance they need to travel to see her, but find the train trip ‘an hour of entertainment’ (Haddow 2019, 171). We are told many times it is not a ‘desirable’ suburb (Haddow 2019, 148).

In introducing the idea of being a ‘rentvestor’ to her female readers Haddow (2019, 70) uses the title of Beyonce’s song ‘All the Single Ladies’ as a sub-heading, and presents rentvesting as a glamorous undertaking proclaiming:

When I picture a rentvestor, I imagine a savvy young thing with Instagrammable style, who’s casually dropped some coin on a sweet little pad that’s going to spike in value, without having to forego the lifestyle they’ve created for a second.

She continues with a discussion of women’s increased buying power telling readers that today women are not only ‘matching the purchasing power of blokes’, but ‘in some cases they’re outperforming them’ which will see more single women entering the property market (2019, 70). The story of women and home ownership, as told by Haddow, is a positive one of gender equality being achieved which ignores that female homeowners are distinguished by their ‘household type, income and income source’ (Kupke et al. 2014, 886).

Haddow explains that being an investor-landlord requires a specific affective state and for young women it requires modifying feminine emotional excess. The emphasis on emotional-regulation as a reoccurring theme in property investor discourses are well-documented (Martin 2018; Grohmann 2021), however, previous observations have overlooked the fact that men/masculinity are associated with rationality and bodily containment while emotion and bodily excess are associated with women/femininity. It is a stereotype Haddow (2019, 103) leans into as recalls her excitement at the idea of becoming a property owner and needing to caution herself, ‘This is not a love story, it’s an investment’ (2019, 99). In addition to the gendered nature of this call, the demand to adopt an non-emotional disposition of accumulation exposes the onto-epistemological violence of settler women’s performance of ‘white possession’ (Moreton-Robinson 2015)

Haddow also counsels that the ‘first and easiest step’ to homeownership for young people is ‘to believe that homeownership is possible’ (2019, 17). This prescription of a positive, yet calculative, mindset exemplifies what Scharff (2016, 107) refers to as the ‘psychic life of neoliberalism’. That is, the book calls forth optimism and confidence while suggesting that it is the lack of these positive affective dispositions which have led to the housing crisis rather than the well-documented structural inequalities and policy deficiencies (Gurran and Phibbs 2015). As Haddow (2019) urges young women aspiring to homeownership to be tough, strong, focused, disciplined, and rational, we read the shifting of the ontology of home to a definition consistent with financialisation rather than one tied to security and constancy. Rationality, toughness, and ‘emotional resilience’ are also required beyond the property purchase (Haddow 2019, 141). This is relayed through Haddow’s (2019, 179) recollection of rejecting a tenancy application for her unit from a 22-year-old couple who have legal guardianship of a 17-year-old sibling. She describes the dilemma she faced in that while the couple had money in the bank they were on a low income. Despite recognising their disadvantage, she rejects the application. The narrative serves to demonstrate Haddow’s affective credentials as logical, judicious, and uncompromising, and reinforce the need for aspiring feminised financial/investor subject to adopt the same emotional state. The message is to prioritise one’s individual financial agenda over community care.

The message of optimism about women’s housing continues throughout the book. After Haddow (2019, 211) cites an expert interviewee who tells her that there is a growing cohort of older women who are homeless, she turns to two case studies of women ‘taking charge’ of their financial futures. Like other case studies in the text, presented as ‘evidence’, these are an effective didactic tool offering realism and authenticity. They also operate as technologies of gendered neoliberal governance demonstrating ‘good’ and ‘bad’ affects, practices, and values. The first case study is a female builder who built her own tiny house and now has a consultancy business advising others about this housing option. The second case study, which is incongruously titled ‘Building financial independence as a team’ details a woman’s story of her male partner renovating a ‘beach shack’ she bought on the New South Wales coast (Haddow 2019, 217–221). Thus, despite the initial commentary on women’s homelessness, the overarching theme of the chapter is one of empowered, active, and agentic postfeminist subjects who freely make choices to shape their housing futures. It is on this basis that we are invited to interpret the authors’ transformation into a successful feminine property investor.

The successful feminine property investor subject

After living in her apartment for twelve months, the minimum required if accessing tax discounts through the Australian government First Home Owners’ Grant, Haddow is financially stable enough to become a ‘rentvestor’. She leaves the suburb of Mordialloc in Melbourne’s south-east and relocates to her suburb of first choice, Richmond. Her life on the edges of the CBD reads as a postfeminist script for idealised white, middle-class heterosexual femininity: rising at 5:30am for boutique hot yoga, coffee at the local, frequent dinners out, and fashionable updates to the wardrobe.

In the eighteen months she had lived in her property Haddow (2019, 144) lamented that while friends were socialising ‘on a Thursday night, loving life, flirting with boys, eating tacos, and burying their faces in oversized happy-hour margaritas’ she was making a home-cooked meal and watching the news. Now financially secure – and rightly emplaced in the inner-city – she is personally free to be a fun-seeking, girly, consuming postfeminist subject. Haddow represents this lifestyle as something she deserved: ‘I had not been kind to myself for a really long time’ (2019, 186). Notably, shortly after moving back into the city-centre, Haddow also receives a promotion, allowing her to rent without flatmates.

At this stage, Haddow is also ready for romance. She is no longer living at home and has caché to bring ‘to the table’ (Haddow 2019, 41). However, the road to heterosexual coupledom is fraught as it emerges that her venerated status as a property investor comes up against discourses of heterosexual femininity. She worries she has become too financially secure. This is articulated as she recalls a conversation with a romantic interest she invites to her unit. When she talks about the process of purchasing property he becomes withdrawn asking Haddow (2019, 144–145) what he would bring to the relationship:

‘Affection, emotional support’, I joked. But I could see something decisive tick over in his eyes. I wondered if he didn’t see us as equals because I was ahead of him financially…I was no longer a damsel in distress. I had rescued myself. I began to seriously consider what this meant for my future romances.

What Haddow (2019) is reflecting on in the above anecdote is the paradoxical injunction for white middle-class women to be both economically independent and in a monogamous heterosexual relationship. What is clear, is that financialised femininity for young women is contradictory and contingent, and that navigating discourses of successful hetero-normativity and successful financial femininity can be problematic.

Haddow (2019) also expresses some ambivalence about the pressures of financialised capitalism, as she recounts that taking on a new job for a higher wage was a mistake. She writes: ‘My mantra had become: more money… It should have been: change your lifestyle so you don’t need so much money’ (2019, 187). This statement foreshadows what is to come. A year into her new high-paying job, Haddow has an ‘awakening’ which she describes corporeally as ‘not dissimilar to the burnout that was tightening its grip on my insides’ (2019, 197). Despite clearing all credit card debt, building her savings, living in the suburb of her choice, and finally being a property owner she is haunted by unease and anxiety. Finding herself depleted, or ‘officially burnt-out’ (2019, 197), from the previous years of juggling two jobs, long commutes, a sense of social isolation, and careful budgeting, she resigns from her job and takes some time off work. She goes on holiday to Ireland where she said she enjoyed the fact that no one worried about housing prices – an aside which seems at odds with the deleterious impact of the fall of the Celtic Tiger (Kitchin et al. 2012). In the final paragraph, Haddow reflects:

These days my mind is the place I’m focused on furnishing: with good memories and a positive outlook… It’s been six years since I wept at my thirtieth birthday dinner. Now, instead of faking my way through adulthood with a champagne flute in hand, I can raise a glass and honestly say, ‘Cheers, here’s to adulting’ (2019, 234).

The uplifting and triumphant tone on which Smashed Avocado (2019) ends suggests that Haddow is now who she is meant to be. As a property owner and landlord, she is no longer a failed financial subject with ‘bad debt’, but ‘good debt’ from her investment which she can use to distance herself from hypercapitalist values, beliefs, and practices and take up popular racialised and classed discourses of lifestyle minimalism (Meissner 2019). Based on her success she urges other millennial women to mirror her makeover with a call that encapsulates middle-class entitlement, and settler Australia’s ongoing investment in legitimating their right to (dis)possession: ‘It’s time to start accumulating our share of the properties’ (Haddow 2019, 29).

Conclusion

Smashed Avocado (2019) is representative of a newly emerging gendered mode of address in popular financial discourse that constructs a feminised property investor subject. This is a significant departure from the older well-known trope of the fiscally feckless feminine subject. As we have demonstrated, while Haddow presents herself as the ‘Everywoman’, this new subject position is white, middle-class, and heterosexual. As such, we have argued for how these embodied qualities – and their social privileging – have been integral in facilitating her entry into the property market, even as this is not named or interrogated by the author.

We recognise that Smashed Avocado (2019) is evidence of women’s desires for economic knowledge and security and that it provides an easily accessible, feminine, and privately mediated space for (some) women to develop their financial acumen, which we argue is now a component of hegemonic femininity. Even as individuals necessarily make choices in the face of finite options, we nonetheless reinforce that the book colludes with patriarchal ‘white possessiveness’ (Moreton-Robinson 2015) in its failure to recognise Indigenous dispossession, which obscures the relationship between finance, space, place, and settler colonialism, as it advocates for white, individualistic, capitalist regimes of property ownership. This is evident in Haddow’s assumption that her personal experience is relatable which is reflective of the universalising language of whiteness as one of ‘distinct self-assurance’ (Savage 2015, 99). Imbued with entitlement, the ideal subject for financialisation may have to grapple with patriarchal constraints, but as a privileged subject, she benefits from leveraging her whiteness and class for economic security.

We are first introduced to Haddow as part of ‘generation rent’. However, she is transformed and while she remains a renter, she also becomes a landlord. This affords her a moralised hybridity, wherein Haddow is both a responsible property-owning subject as well as a millennial dealing with the challenge of housing unaffordability through her industriousness, creativity, and perseverance. While small-scale property investment, including the strategy of rentvesting, is difficult to critique, as individuals are disciplined into financial markets through relative necessity (within the context of individualised asset-funded welfare), it is nonetheless the case, that Haddow’s (2019) ‘solution’ offers no real solution to the problem of housing for disadvantaged women. The book borrows from, and neoliberally perverts, feminist discourse of autonomy, choice, and freedom inviting women to solve the problem of housing unaffordability via tactics of rent extraction. At the same time, her narration of the ‘journey’, reassures other settler white women that a ‘retreat into sameness -– assimilation for those who can manage it’, is okay, a decision which Rich argues ‘is the most passive and debilitating of responses to political repression’ and ‘economic insecurity’ (1980, 11).

As a successful property owner, we are invited to understand Haddow, the rentvestor, as similar to her masculinised counterpart – calculative, savvy, enterprising, rational, and self-managing. However, unlike her masculinised counterpart, the gendered investor subject must manage the pressures of heteronormative femininity – which privilege and venerate marriage and maternity as central social markers of success for women – alongside the neoliberal demands for economic self-fortitude. In this sense, Haddow’s (financial) biography captures how the ‘embodied responses, drives, and desires’ (Deville and Seigworth 2015, 170), constitute the sociality of the economy. Feminised financial self-help has important implications for how women understand what ‘the economy’ is, or moreover, what it could be. In considering only one kind of body, the white heterosexual body, or the ideal (gendered capitalist) body, the economic solutions offered to women in popular financial advice cultures elide how different bodies require different economies.

By taking up the complexity of this critique – namely recognising that Haddow as an individual is not responsible for housing unaffordability while arguing that she is complicit in (re)perpetuating classed, settler colonial violence in her quest for individual security – we conclude with a suggestion on how we might progress beyond this critique. One idea, we propose, is a popular revision of the text that elevates feminist post-capitalist politics. Such a revision may seek, in the simplest way possible, to educate readers on the moral deficits of relying on strategies of accumulation through dispossession by making clear the connections between stolen land, landlordism and rent extraction, whiteness and settler colonialism, and social inequality, as suggested by Haiven (2017) in his critique of financial literacy education. It might also share suggestions on how to ‘take back’ housing and finance (Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy 2013), providing directions for collective action, such as those provided by Wijburg (2019).

While this is an ambitious suggestion, and no doubt raises a myriad of ethical tensions, we conclude with the pre-emptive rebuttal that feminism has always been a part of the market, and that ‘speaking back’ to our own – other white settler middle-class women – who wield significant economic power is critical work in the process of creating more sustainable and equitable financial futures.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their generous feedback which improved this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marnie Cruickshank

Marnie Cruickshank is an Adjunct Research Fellow at Centre for Social and Cultural Research at Griffith University. After completing her PhD on the topic of Australian women’s financial self-help cultures in 2023, Marnie’s research interest continues to be feminist theorising on the embodied geographies of finance and the asset economy. Marnie has also published in Feminist Media Studies and Australian Geographer.

Barbara Pini

Barbara Pini is a Professor in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences at Griffith University. She has an extensive record of research focused on issues of inclusion and belonging in rural Australia. Her most recent work explores these concerns through contemporary rural life narratives.