When Resilience Becomes a Cage: The Weaponisation of Resilience Discourse Against Multiply Marginalised People

How resilience discourse gaslights the marginalised, stabilises systemic harm, and converts survival into institutional virtue — and why we must reclaim narrative sovereignty.

Resilience is praised as virtue—but for the multiply marginalised, it's a cage. This essay critiques resilience discourse as neoliberal control, reclaiming survival as knowledge, not performance.

Introduction — The Seduction and Violence of Resilience Discourse

They like to call us resilient.

It is one of the most flattering compliments liberal modernity knows how to give. It sounds gentle. Admiring. Empowering, even. In its softer form, it arrives with nods and earnest smiles: “You’ve overcome so much.” In its more institutional register, it appears in policy documents and keynote speeches, woven into funding proposals and mission statements about inclusion, equity, access. It offers recognition — but recognition of what, exactly? The violence that required survival is left politely unspoken. Only the survival is praised.

For some of us, that violence has long been visible. But for others, it has remained conveniently illegible. Until fairly recently, my own body rarely read as “multiply marginalised.” The markers were there, but quietly: the chronic disorder that leaves me immobilised for days, the autism that shaped my ways of knowing, the gestalt language processing that delayed literacy into adulthood, the queer sensibilities that nested beneath social camouflage. I was already disabled. I was already queer. But the world read me as “resilient,” not precarious. Not until I transitioned — until hormones slowly began to make what was always true somewhat more visible — did some of those markers become legible enough for the world to rearrange its reading.

Resilience, in the neoliberal imagination, functions precisely in this way: it allows institutions, systems, and bystanders to admire survival without confronting the conditions that made survival necessary. It converts pain into performance, fortitude into spectacle. What is rewarded is not the refusal of harm, but the capacity to absorb it gracefully. It is a kind of gaslighting made virtuous.

This is where the Power Threat Meaning Framework offers a very different lens. Rather than seeing resilience as moral virtue, PTMF understands survival as patterned adaptation — the creative, embodied meaning-making that emerges in response to systems of power and threat. The question is never simply how did you overcome? but what has been done to you? and what does your survival say about the forces you’ve had to navigate?

Throughout this piece, I want to examine how resilience discourse, as it is commonly mobilised, serves not liberation but containment. As Webster and Rivers (2018) suggest, and as Al-Kassimi (2019) so sharply observes, resilience becomes not a refusal of harm but a technology of governance — a soft weapon wielded against the very people it claims to uplift.

Resilience as Neoliberal Containment — Shifting Responsibility to Individuals

When I was first starting to walk again after one of the worst flare-ups of my nerve disorder, I remember the nurse smiling warmly as I steadied myself on the parallel bars. “You’re so strong,” she said. “You’re a fighter.” And I was — or at least, I had learned to be. But what she did not say, and perhaps could not say, was that I was strong because I had no choice. That I had been required to adapt to a body that often betrayed me, to systems that offered little accommodation, and to medical institutions more interested in my perseverance than my relief. My strength was celebrated. The structures that demanded it were not examined.

This is the essence of neoliberal resilience discourse: the artful relocation of harm from systems to individuals. As Webster and Rivers (2018) argue, resilience becomes not a critique of power, but a mask that conceals it. Institutions absolve themselves by valorising the very people they have marginalised, recasting systemic failures as personal triumphs of character. The disabled student who succeeds despite inaccessible classrooms becomes proof that the system works. The queer worker who navigates hostile workplaces with grace becomes an emblem of diversity progress. The autistic child who learns to mask becomes “a success story.”

Mckeown and Glenn (2017) describe this as resilience’s post-crisis reboot — a rebranding of neoliberal governance that emerged sharply after the financial crashes, when state and market failures could no longer be fully denied. Rather than address the root causes of harm, resilience discourse offers an elegant workaround: train individuals to absorb shock, to bend without breaking, to manage their own survival within hostile conditions. In this model, resilience is not freedom from harm, but skill in managing its inevitability.

Leese (2021) reminds us that this logic predates even contemporary trauma frameworks. Before PTSD became a recognised diagnosis, resilience was already being deployed as a way to reframe suffering — especially in contexts like war, where systemic violence had to be narratively managed for public consumption. The suffering soldier was not a victim of geopolitical violence, but a hero of internal fortitude.

Education offers perhaps one of the most insidious examples. As Hess (2019) shows, resilience discourse is increasingly embedded in schools, where students from marginalised backgrounds are taught “grit,” “growth mindset,” and “emotional regulation” as substitutes for structural reform. The message is clear: adapt, persevere, manage your response. The system remains unchanged. The burden of change rests entirely on the child.

In this way, resilience functions as containment. It allows institutions to appear benevolent while maintaining harm. It converts systemic violence into a test of personal character — and then celebrates those who pass.

Resilience as Perpetual Performance — The Expectation to Adapt to Ongoing Harm

There is a strange dissonance that happens when you traverse two pathways in the same institution — one built to see you, the other built to erase you.

When I sought my autism diagnosis, it was years of dead ends, dismissals, and what can only be called institutional gaslighting. I was told, repeatedly, that my struggles weren’t real. That my processing delays were laziness. That my executive dysfunction was bad diet, poor sleep, or simply personal failure. I was expected to keep trying, to keep proving myself in a system that refused to recognise me — and when I persisted, that persistence was admired. You’re so determined. You’re so strong. Strength, in this context, was simply the name they gave to my refusal to vanish.

When I later came out and entered Kaiser’s gender clinic, I encountered something utterly foreign: care that actually saw me. The affirming embrace I received for my gender identity stood in stark contrast to the years of friction I had faced as an autistic adult. Suddenly, my resilience was no longer required to force recognition; it was simply acknowledged. I could exist, and be believed.

This is the seductive cruelty of resilience discourse under neoliberal governance: not simply the celebration of survival, but the expectation that survival itself will become performative. As Reid (2012) frames it, resilience becomes “the art of living dangerously” — the normalisation of precarity, where danger is reframed as opportunity, where navigating systemic threat is rebranded as evidence of character.

Mckeown, Bui, and Glenn (2021) describe how modern neoliberal systems govern not by eliminating vulnerability, but by managing it. Resilience becomes the state’s preferred technology of control: you will absorb instability. You will adapt endlessly. You will prove your worth precisely by how well you navigate conditions designed to destabilise you.

Al-Kassimi (2019) illustrates this with painful clarity in the context of disaster response — where governmental failures in crises like Hurricane Katrina are reframed through the lens of resilient communities, as if the endurance of Black and poor residents absolves the state of its abdication. The resilient subject becomes the moral alibi of the system.

For those of us who are multiply marginalised, this performance of resilience becomes a constant negotiation: how much of ourselves must we render legible in order to be granted care? How many hoops must we jump through to secure even basic recognition? When my autistic embodiment was deemed invisible, resilience became the price of simply being allowed to ask. When my trans embodiment became visible, resilience was no longer demanded — not because the system had become just, but because visibility had finally aligned with what the system was prepared — and in California, legally required — to recognise.

The performance of resilience is not freedom. It is a cage constructed from relentless self-management. The applause comes only if you keep dancing.

The Aestheticisation of Marginalised Survival — Resilience as Mascotry

In my professional world, I am surrounded by messaging that insists I am valued.

School districts love to celebrate their “commitment” to diversity. The posters go up during Pride Month. The training slides include neurodiversity graphics. The websites feature stock images of smiling trans youth, of autistic students engaged in class. Administrators open staff meetings with carefully worded acknowledgments about “safe spaces for all identities.” And yet — these declarations rarely seem to apply to the adults in the room. The supports promised to students stop at the classroom door. The queer, trans, autistic educator is implicitly absent from the narrative, or worse: held up as proof that inclusion works, whilst being left to navigate hostile or indifferent systems largely alone.

I am, to them, proof of resilience.

This is the aestheticisation of survival: marginalised people converted into symbols of institutional virtue. As Subramanian (2022) observes in her analysis of hijra representation in Indian media, the public celebration of “resilient happiness” often serves to obscure the ongoing violence these communities endure. Visibility becomes carefully managed performance — enough to generate liberal pride, never enough to challenge structural harm.

In education, the pattern is much the same. Webster and Rivers (2018) document how resilience discourse is used to suppress legitimate anger in marginalised students. Instead of recognising the exhaustion that comes from constant accommodation to inaccessible systems, schools praise students who endure, who adapt, who “stay positive” despite barriers that should never have existed. The student who smiles through systemic neglect becomes an emblem of success.

Hess (2019) extends this critique into curriculum, where educational storytelling often strips marginalised narratives of their political content. Stories of oppression are reframed as personal triumphs, detached from the structures that created the conditions for harm. The message is clear: your story is welcome here, so long as it resolves into uplift. Anger, grief, and righteous refusal are inconvenient to the institutional brand.

As an autistic, trans educator, I am positioned as both participant and prop. My existence is taken as evidence that the system works — that inclusion is real, that progress has been made. But this celebration demands my complicity. I must remain digestible. My continued survival is praised, so long as I do not speak too loudly about the constant frictions, the daily negotiations, the unacknowledged labours of masking, of self-regulation, of navigating structures never built with me in mind. The truth is that my entry into this profession — this district — was not some triumphant ascent into inclusion. It was traumatic. Humiliating. Degrading. I was broken down by systems that claimed to welcome me, but instead weaponised every difference as deficit. I wrote an entire book about that initiation — No Place for Autism? — not as a victory lap, but as a field manual for surviving institutions that claim equity whilst practicing something else entirely.

To be made into a symbol of resilience is to be recruited into the institution’s self-congratulatory narrative. It is not solidarity. It is containment.

Alternative Frameworks — Collective, Decolonial, and Narrative-Sovereign Resilience

I still remember the expression on my colleague’s face the first time they observed me lead an Initial IEP meeting.

I began, as I always do, by asking the student — and their parents — a question no one else in the system had ever thought to ask: In which language do you dream?

For a moment, my colleague simply stared. The question wasn’t on the district forms. It wasn’t part of the state-mandated eligibility matrix. It didn’t fit into the tidy compliance boxes we are trained to check. And yet, it was the only honest starting point. Because to support a student — to truly see them — one must first understand which world they inhabit. Which metaphors shape their mind. Which language carries their interior self.

No one ever asked me that question when I was in school. No one asked because the system didn’t care to know. The system was satisfied with my apparent progress, even as I graduated high school effectively illiterate — a gestalt language processor whose meaning-making never fit the linear, phonics-driven models that dominated instruction. My resilience was not recognised as creative adaptation, but pathologised as deficit, or ignored entirely.

That moment in the IEP room reflects what Glynn and Cupples (2022) describe in their work with Guatemalan Indigenous communities: resilience as collective survival and epistemic sovereignty, not neoliberal individualism. In these decolonial frameworks, resilience is not about personal grit, but about the preservation of relational knowledge systems under ongoing conditions of threat. Survival here is not proof of the system’s fairness; it is testimony to the ingenuity of communities who refuse erasure.

Kenney and Müller (2024) extend this framing, describing “community resilience” as a form of collective immunity — a kind of cultural antibody developed against systemic harm. It is not about the performance of stoicism, but the weaving of relational networks that redistribute care, knowledge, and protection across generations.

This is where the PTMF fully resonates. PTMF does not require us to celebrate resilience as virtue. It invites us instead to understand resilience as patterned adaptation to power structures that constrain agency. The question is not: Why did you overcome? but: What threats shaped your adaptation? How have you made meaning from survival? What collective knowledge do you carry forward despite systems designed to silence you?

In this sense, my asking “In which language do you dream?” is not simply a culturally responsive gesture. It is a refusal. A refusal to reduce the student to test scores, to deficit narratives, to compliance matrices. It is an act of narrative sovereignty — inviting the student to be known on their own terms, not as data points in an institutional spreadsheet.

True resilience, when reclaimed from neoliberal capture, is not a cage. It is kinship. It is meaning. It is survival with story intact.

Resilience as an Instrument of Power — The Soft Weaponisation of Neoliberal Control

There is a quiet violence in watching your own story be filtered, ranked, and sorted by algorithms. I have tested this enough times to know the pattern. When I share the polished version — the version that frames my survival in familiar, digestible tropes of personal triumph, resilience, and uplift — it performs well. The algorithms reward me with reach. The metrics tick upward. The story gets shared.

But when I write the deeper work — the heavily researched critiques, the systemic analysis, the painful personal reckonings — the reach collapses. The system knows which stories comfort its logic of progress, and which stories threaten to interrogate it. My resilience is permitted, so long as it remains palatable.

This is not accidental. It is a feature of neoliberal governance itself — what Al-Kassimi (2019) names as resilience’s role within governmentality. The system does not require the elimination of harm. It requires the containment of dissent. Resilience discourse allows institutions to acknowledge that suffering exists whilst redirecting the moral burden back onto individuals and communities themselves. If you survive, it is proof of your character — not evidence of structural violence.

In labour markets, as Dobbins and Plows (2022) observe, resilience discourse allows precarious work conditions to persist under the veneer of flexibility, adaptability, and personal agency. Workers are praised for their entrepreneurial spirit whilst wages stagnate, protections erode, and the social safety net is gutted. The system remains volatile, but the narrative is one of opportunity — for those “resilient” enough to endure.

Mckeown et al. (2021) extend this analysis into the broader political architecture: resilience becomes a stabilising force for neoliberal states. Rather than solve crises, governance structures learn to manage them. Crises become permanent features, not failures. The ability of individuals and communities to absorb instability is framed as evidence of a functioning system, not its abdication.

And now, in the United States, we are watching this logic harden into law. The state increasingly signals to private industry that it may freely abandon its shallow commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. “Anti-woke” legislation, attacks on DEI programs, and performative culture wars give capitalism permission to drop the pretence of inclusion entirely. The few fragile gains previously secured through performative resilience discourse are being actively dismantled — replaced not by honesty, but by erasure.

Which is why I will gently ask you, dear reader: if this work resonates with you — if you believe that these deeper stories deserve to be heard — please share them. Share them widely. Share them beyond the comfort of algorithmic feed curation. Because whilst neoliberal governance is masterful at suppressing inconvenient narratives, it remains vulnerable to human networks of care, solidarity, and refusal. The more of us who carry these stories forward, the harder they are to bury.

Conclusion — Refusing the Cage: Resilience as Knowledge, Not Performance

They call it resilience. I call it running on fumes.

The official numbers tell a tidy story. Inflation, according to government metrics, is manageable. But anyone who lives here — who shops for groceries in Los Angeles, who pays rent, who watches their insurance premiums rise, who tries to survive while the price of simply existing spirals upwards — knows that these official numbers are as carefully managed as the resilience narratives themselves. If we look instead to alternative indices — the Shadow Stats models, for instance — the gap between reported stability and lived reality yawns wide.

Even as a unionised worker — protected, in theory, by collective bargaining — my wages have not kept pace. Each contract cycle becomes a negotiation not for advancement, but for triage. As UTLA and LAUSD return again to the bargaining table, tying wages to inflation remains somehow off-limits. Rents remain unbound, profits rise, and yet workers are told to be reasonable. To be pragmatic. To be resilient.

These are the true sites of struggle. Not the celebratory language of diversity posters or institutional hashtags, but the ground-level extraction of labour, of purchasing power, of futures foreclosed by systemic design. This is not resilience. This is managed deprivation, wrapped in the language of perseverance. The stock market continues to post record highs, but that is not the economy. The real economy — the one most of us inhabit — is measured not in shareholder confidence, but in purchasing power parity. And by that measure, we are not thriving. We are being quietly, relentlessly squeezed.

This is why I return, again, to the PTMF — because PTMF offers something neoliberal resilience cannot: the possibility of narrative sovereignty. It allows us to name the threats. To understand our adaptations not as moral virtues, but as patterned responses to systemic harm. As Webster and Rivers (2018) argue, the task is not to enact resilience, but to disrupt the very discourse that demands it.

Refusing the cage does not mean denying our survival. It means reclaiming its meaning on our own terms.

And so, to those of you who continue to read, who share this work, who subscribe — especially my paid subscribers — I want to offer my sincere thanks. In times like these, your support is not simply appreciated. It’s necessary. These essays take time. They take labour. They take emotional fuel in a world that seems determined to extract every last drop. Your support helps keep that fuel tank from running dry. It helps make this refusal sustainable.

We do not exist to prove our capacity to endure.
We exist to write new stories. To build new structures. To refuse.

Reference List

Al-Kassimi, K. (2019). The logic of resilience as neoliberal governmentality informing Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Harvey. Potentia: Journal of International Affairs. https://doi.org/10.18192/potentia.v10i0.4509

Dobbins, T., & Plows, A. (2022). Contesting the politics of neoliberal resilience: regional labour market resilience from a workers’ perspective. Regional Studies, 57(1), 26–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2022.2052274

Glynn, K., & Cupples, J. (2022). Stories of decolonial resilience. Cultural Studies, 38(4), 537–566. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2144398

Hess, J. (2019). Moving beyond resilience education: musical counterstorytelling. Music Education Research, 21(5), 488–502. https://doi.org/10.1080/14613808.2019.1647153

Kenney, M., & Müller, R. (2024). Relations as immunity: Building community resilience. Medicine Anthropology Theory. https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.11.1.7266

Leese, P. (2021). Resilience before PTSD: or, Robert Vas vs The Bomb. Critical Military Studies, 8(4), 428–442. https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2021.1885597

Mckeown, A., & Glenn, J. (2017). The rise of resilience after the financial crises: A case of neoliberalism rebooted? Review of International Studies, 44(2), 193–214. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210517000493

Mckeown, A., Bui, D. H., & Glenn, J. (2021). A social theory of resilience: The governance of vulnerability in crisis-era neoliberalism. (No journal name provided). [No DOI]

Reid, J. (2012). The neoliberal subject: Resilience and the art of living dangerously. (No journal name provided), 143–165. [No DOI]

Subramanian, P. (2022). Clapping along or clapping back: Of the discourse of Hijra community’s resilient happiness in Y-Film’s Hum Hain Happy. Society and Culture in South Asia, 9(1), 81–103. https://doi.org/10.1177/23938617221076181

Webster, D. R., & Rivers, N. (2018). Resisting resilience: Disrupting discourses of self-efficacy. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 27(4), 523–535. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2018.1534261