Smashed avocado: a property market advice manual for millennial women

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article contributes to literature on housing affordability and the ways in which neoliberalism has inflected debates related to the issue through a textual analysis of the property market advice manual, Smashed Avocado: How I Cracked the Property Market and You Can Too by Australian author, [Haddow, Nicole. 2019. Smashed Avocado: How I Bought Into the Property Market and You Can Too. Carlton: Nero]. The text is significant in demonstrating the mediation of neoliberal constraints via self-help/how-to property guides which orient millennials’ inwards, presenting a reading of ‘the self’ as problem and solution, while leaving market orthodoxies undisturbed. In highlighting discourses of individualism, self-responsibility, internalised governmentality, and the classed subjectivities offered in the text, this paper extends existing knowledge by mapping the convergence of neoliberal sensibilities with housing-related self-help literature targeting millennial women. While Smashed Avocado elides classed inequalities between women, and operates within the logics of capitalism, it nonetheless an important site of analysis for thinking through mediated geographies of millennial’s evolving relationship to housing unaffordability in the Australian market.