2017, which allowed me to complete the work for this volume. I presented an early version of Chapter 3 at Oldenburg University Selbstbildung Project and wish to thank the colleagues there, especially Thomas Alkemeyer, for their support. I presented Chapter 3 in the Department of Sociology at Vienna University in 2017; thanks are therefore due to Elisabeth Holzleithner, Birgit Sauer and Eva Flicker for inviting me. At Goldsmiths I tried out that chapter at the Centre for Feminist Research 2017; especial thanks to Lisa Blackman for encouraging me to do this. Thanks to Sarah Banet-Weiser for inviting me to present Chapter 2 at the London School of Economics in May 2019.
As ever, I am indebted to Goldsmiths, University of London, and my colleagues in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies for their enthusiasm and good cheer. I was also able to complete the manuscript thanks to a period of sabbatical leave in 2018. Thanks also to the team at Polity Press for their friendly professionalism and patience.
Chapter 1 appeared in New Formations, 81 (2013). I am grateful to the publishers for permission to reprint in this current volume.
Introduction
This short book of just four chapters seeks to develop a feminist account of some contemporary dividing practices associated with our current times of neoliberalism.1 Each of the essays examines, in different ways, how social polarization is enacted through popular culture2 and media, and how highly normative ideals of femininity play a role in promoting an increasingly fragmented and splintered society. In a vaguely Butlerian gesture, I understand femininity as a series of historically embedded and institutionally endorsed crafting processes, which take shape and are realized in a wide range of textual and visual practices. These bestow, in ritualistic fashion, modes of recognition on bodies that come to be marked, in their conduct and behaviour as well as appearance, as female. These are also then boundary-marking practices ensuring the perpetuation of heterosexual masculine domination, while also confirming male bodies as in a binary relation with their female counterparts. These crafting processes separate and differentiate the female subject according to class and ethnicity. Femininity, as it is created in the imaginations of the cultural intermediaries of the consumer culture, as well as by various professionals and administrators of the state, is put to use as a mechanism for producing a whole world of distinctions and ‘society of inequality’ (Bourdieu 1984; Foucault 2006). For example, as shown in Chapter 2, the familiar and quite mundane idea of ‘having it all’, a staple feminine lifestyle topic of women’s magazines and discussion point for high-profile women, which Catherine Rottenberg has subjected to strenuous feminist analysis, becomes an elite call to high-income, mostly young, and almost exclusively liberal-minded white women to separate themselves off, to pull further away, so as to protect their social cachet by finding uniquely middle-class solutions to the predicaments of sustained gender inequities at the upper end of the social spectrum (Rottenberg 2018). We come to know and recognize this privileged class status primarily by visual means and through familiar repertoires which draw attention to slimness, perfected grooming techniques, designer wardrobes, elegant accessories and so on. To be within reach of ‘having it all’, is already to be significantly and unambivalently upper middle class. Femininity, more so than before, becomes a finely tuned instrument of social calibration; its focus is on the measurement of goals and the meeting of daily objectives.
To an extent, these norms of femininity emanating from consumer culture and from the contemporary polity mark out a continuity with what I described as the field of post-feminism, led by ambitious and competitive ‘top girls’, for whom feminism as a mass movement was deemed no longer needed, for the reasons of government being seemingly well-disposed to such women as those who might benefit from meritocratic measures, introduced according to the logic of the level playing field (McRobbie 2008; Littler 2017). But this continuity is now interrupted, and in this book I highlight two new elements (there are, of course, many others) that impact on the hegemony of the gender meritocracy and its myth of mobility and opportunity. One is the remarkable and joyful presence of the new feminist campaigning, led primarily by young women, and more typically associated with a left-wing social agenda, and the other is the coming to visibility of women’s poverty, revealing what I label the feminine incarceration effect that comes into play for those women who are propelled downwards, and who find themselves locked into a bleak grey landscape from which social mobility becomes virtually impossible. What I have aimed to do across these four essays is to offer an account of the way in which contemporary neoliberal culture operates at an everyday level for women, according to the gradations of class and ethnicity, systematically undoing and ideologically de-legitimizing previous structures of support that had been born in an (albeit short-lived) era where feminists in the 1970s and 1980s had defended non-stigmatizing welfare and where the model of the white, heterosexual family unit was less uncritically embedded; indeed, when feminist academics talked about the ‘tyranny of the family’ (Barrett and McIntosh 1982). Much of the discussion that follows pivots around questions of work and family life for women in the UK today, as these are refracted through the multi-mediated landscape of entertainment and popular culture. The unifying thread of the contemporary governmentality of young women is the priority of paid work and the significant, but nevertheless secondary, status to be given to family life and intimacy in the guise of what I refer to in Chapter 3 as ‘contraceptive employment’. Just to offer an inflection here: for poor, working-class women, including of course those from ethnic minorities, paid employment is a requirement and a prescribed feature of status and identity; for their middle-class counterparts there is the privilege of ‘choice’, with family, lifestyle and career options interwoven as markers of female success.
The logic of competitive femininity and the loss of a compassionate welfare ethos have led to more openly antagonistic relations visible right across the social fabric, often taking the form of expressions of hatred, cruelty and aggression, as is the case with what has come to be known as the ‘poverty-shaming’ mechanisms of the tabloid print media and Reality TV. Some early signs of this could be found in television programmes dating back almost twenty years, when upper-middle-class white television presenters such as Trinny Woodhall and Susannah Constantine sneered at the bad taste choices of the working-class women who came forward to be ‘made-over’ (McRobbie 2008). More recently, feminist media scholars have focused their attention on Reality TV programmes that seek to scandalize more well-heeled viewers through the genre of what de Benedictis et al. label ‘Factual Welfare TV’, a format that shines a stigmatizing light of media publicity on sectors of the population, typically female, who are poor and reliant on welfare payments (de Benedictis et al. 2017). The success of these programmes, with their huge audiences, has led feminist scholars to interrogate their social meaning, to foreground the injustice of these shaming practices, and to emphasize the highly exploitative formats that portray poor people, mostly poor women, as the victims of their own ‘bad choices’. Drawing on this work, my aim here is to propose a stronger connection between critical social policy studies and feminist media and cultural studies, something already outlined in the recent work by Tracey Jensen, who in turn refers back to the path-breaking book by Stuart Hall et al. (Jensen 2018; Hall et al. 1978). The symbolic meaning of social incarceration that unfolds from within the landscapes of Reality TV programmes (such as Benefits Street) exposes the fallacy of the mobility ethos inscribed within the idea of meritocracy, while absolutely consolidating and confirming the forms of social polarization that several decades of neoliberal economics and anti-welfare agendas have created. Across Chapters 3 and 4 I reflect on the chasm of social and economic difference that has opened up, and on how previous structures of opportunity have been removed. This incarceration effect could be seen most vividly in yet another Reality
