4, facetiously titled Skint: Friends Without Benefits,3 which pitched itself, as if in debate with the changes in circumstances to poor communities brought about by the Conservative government’s welfare reforms, including the now notorious Universal Credit. Among others, the programme featured a young single mother who was required, as part of her access to benefits, to walk round local shops asking if they had any vacancies. That in every case the answer was a resounding no merely confirmed her abject status, something that encircled all who took part in the programme.
What I am foregrounding here is a kind of cultural analysis that pays attention to how normative femininity articulates a world of small intra-class distinctions, which compel women to endorse and realize ideas of respectability and self-responsibility; and how women who fail to adhere to these principles are subjected to widespread forms of punishment meted out through the instruments of visual media governmentality. The exposure of the bodily failings of profoundly disadvantaged women is accentuated by the new media interfaces, which pitch experts in self-help and make-over culture as mentors, in favour of the more traditional and qualified social workers trained in equal opportunities and in women’s rights. Such tactics as these, operating within popular culture, elide entirely the profound material effects of social polarization and incarceral femininity, which have made it well-nigh impossible for poor working-class women, and especially mothers, to improve their situation, on the basis of multiple factors, from the high cost of childcare, to reliance on casual work with unpredictable hours, both of which make it difficult to gain more skills. Again, it is the small details that enforce this state of entrapment; for example new job applications in the lower skill sectors are nowadays pre-filtered by online systems, and recruitment for jobs such as basic office work and administration are outsourced to agencies that oversee the first stage of online applications, so that the chances of being called for an interview, and with this the opportunity perhaps to shine face-to-face, are inevitably curtailed. This acts against women with low levels of qualifications in a wider context, where women in general have acquired higher qualifications, including further and higher education degrees and diplomas. So this sense of failure and of being locked out of opportunities is all the more apparent.
Focusing on the media and popular culture as a favoured public space for debates about liberal feminism in Chapter 1 (which was written in 2012 and first published in 2013), I trace a passage from liberal feminism to neoliberal feminism through the prism of family life and maternity. Where work and employment for women have emerged across the polity as the defining mark of status and womanhood, anxieties that family and parenting must now take second place have led to an intensification, within the world of entertainment, leisure and consumer culture, of attention to family life. So alluring and enjoyable are the new pleasures of the hearth that it becomes incumbent on women to double their efforts after work to become a new kind of ‘angel in the house’.4 This pathway is given a feminist gloss by figures such as Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Facebook, who is author of the best-seller titled Lean In, and who goes so far as to encourage younger women to look for a pro-feminist type of husband who will willingly do his fair share of household duties and childcare (Sandberg 2012). These ideas play a role in precipitating new seemingly up-to-date models of conservative feminism, of the type endorsed by the former UK Prime Minister, Theresa May, who, at the time of writing Chapter 1, was Home Secretary. This is a resoundingly white middle-class cultural formation of women’s citizenship, which, as I show in the chapter, has its historical roots in the late nineteenth century when virtuous white middle-class women were encouraged to envisage their good housekeeping acumen as a kind of professional task and, in so doing, also taking responsibility for the ‘future of the race’. I come back in Chapter 4 to the question of colonial power and how that gets to be subsumed into the edifices of the British welfare state. The main argument in Chapter 1 is concerned with this modern-day injunction, realized by means of what I label ‘visual media governmentality’, to middle-class young women to extend their enthusiasm for their careers, with the proviso that the home too becomes the site of new domestic pleasures, this time with a vaguely feminist gloss, ensuring a shared division of labour in the home. As part of what Wendy Brown refers to as neoliberal rationality, this emphasis on the family as an enterprise that can be worked on for better and more enjoyable ‘returns on investment’ eliminates all traces of earlier socialist feminist attempts to socialize the family through state investment in nursery provision for all (Brown 2015). No longer is it possible to refer to household duties as drudgery; the task at hand is to find so many new pleasures of the hearth, meanwhile allocating those tasks that entail repetitive and unrewarding labour to low-paid migrant women. In short, I am arguing that privileged middle-class women will aim for leadership jobs in order to crash through the glass ceiling, while also showing themselves to excel in parenting and in creating and maintaining a beautiful home. Their working-class and materially disadvantaged counterparts must prioritize earning a living and taking care of their children as best they can.
In Chapter 2, written some six years later than Chapter 1, there is something of a reversal of neoliberal leadership-feminism, as popular culture proposes what could be envisaged as a move back towards liberal feminism, in the light of the pathologies that contemporary life has exacted on the female subject. The chapter reflects also on two interrelated changes that have interrupted the competitive dynamics of neoliberal rationality as it is directed towards young women. One of these is the anti-capitalist feminism, which has had a remarkable impact, and with this is the specific dilemma that the new era of feminism then poses to the world of consumer culture. Has there been a significant drop in sales of so many beauty products? How does the magazine industry respond to the new demands of seemingly feminist consumers? The other change is the perceived high cost to female ‘well-being’, which is wrought by the punitive regime of the self-monitoring subject. Sarah Banet-Weiser, extending her previous co-authored work on ‘commodity feminism’, has undertaken an exhaustive account of how feminism has found its way into the heartland of popular culture, often through the activities of well-known female celebrities who have also welcomed the #MeToo movement (Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser 2012; Banet-Weiser 2018). A whole landscape opens up of female empowerment, which becomes the motif that permits capitalism to make some moves towards welcoming, or even appearing to embrace young women’s commitment to feminism.
In Chapter 2, I ponder two related points, asking how far can feminism go in its incursions into the landscape of capitalism’s consumer culture before it meets its limits, before it is defined merely as a fad about to pass its sell-by date; before it is once more shunned? If the new feminism mounts an attack on capitalism, what is the response? Banet-Weiser rightly points to the rise of popular misogyny spearheaded by an online culture dominated by young men. I pursue a different tack in this chapter by outlining the emergence of a set of discourses that seek both to supplant and supplement feminism by means of a kind of palliative offering in the form of what I call the ‘perfect-imperfect-resilience’ or p-i-r, which steps forward to offer young women a popular therapeutic strategy that permits some aspects of feminism to be retrieved and drawn upon for support.
With this high visibility of feminism I also draw attention to the argument of Boltanski and Chiapello, who examine the ways in which capitalism has revitalized itself by absorbing elements of the anti-capitalist movements of the late 1960s (social critique or artistic critique) on the basis of their potential for innovation (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). This leads me to propose that new feminist research projects might look closely, with ethnographic detail, at the cultural producers, including the gatekeeper, editors and other decision-makers; in particular those people who are charged with this task of translation.
The second issue I reflect on connects with the perceived harms to women of competition and endless self-assessment. Here I draw attention to the politics of resilience,
