Difficult style in other fields

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I am taking a course on scientific writing and today we analyzed a text brought by another student. Apparently, it is the standard style of how people write in her field. I found very hard to understand the abstract:

Dobson, Amy Shields, and Akane Kanai. "From “can-do” girls to insecure and angry: Affective dissonances in young women’s post-recessional media." Feminist Media Studies 19.6 (2019): 771-786.


It feels that written communication has become very complex in some disciplines, but it is not only due to jargon. I feel it is over-complicated, but this over-complication is considered good writing. It reminds me of legalistic documents (in that case texts are over-complicated on purpose so that only people in the field can understand them). 

Anyway, I tried to change the text according to what I understood, just as an exercise. I tried to keep the vocabulary of the field like "feeling rules" and "affective dissonance", whatever they mean. I am still not happy with the result, but it is getting there.


Scholars in gender studies have begun to investigate gendered affective behaviour in neoliberalism. This behavior includes: drive for perfection, confidence, and complying with feeling rules, - while balancing resilience and approachability. In this context, we want to understand how post-recessional television displays affective dissonances with the neoliberal perception of success - in particular, the neoliberal “girlpower” myth and the idealization of a highly individualistic career-oriented lifestyle. These neoliberal myths have recently been questioned, especially in USA television, through the display of young women’s anger, insecurity, anxiety, and misplaced confidence. We analyse how displaying young women’s suffering may produce, on the one hand, affective dissonance with feminist aims of social transformation; and on the other hand, the exclusion of feminity. This analysis helps to better understand tensions in the psychic and affective life of post-feminism and feminine subjectification in the neoliberal, post-recessional socio-cultural context.

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