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 TV programme recently broadcast by Channel 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