Feminism and the Politics of Resilience
Essays on Gender, Media and the End of Welfare
Angela McRobbie
polity
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Copyright © Angela McRobbie 2020
The right of Angela McRobbie to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2506-5 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2507-2 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McRobbie, Angela, author.
Title: Feminism and the politics of resilience : Essays on Gender, Media and the End of Welfare / Angela McRobbie.
Description: Medford : Polity, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A captivating analysis of neoliberal culture’s hold on womanhood from the leading voice in cultural studies”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019041734 (print) | LCCN 2019041735 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509525065 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509525072 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509525102 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Feminism. | Neoliberalism. | Popular culture--Political aspects.
Classification: LCC HQ1155 .M377 2020 (print) | LCC HQ1155 (ebook) | DDC 305.42--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041734
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041735
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Acknowledgements
My thanks are due to the Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg, for the Mercator Fellowship 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