Jilly Boyce Kay

This paper considers the rise of “reactionary feminism” within popular culture, suggesting a possible departure from the hegemony of neoliberal and post-feminisms of recent decades. It locates reactionary feminism as key to the growing backlash against “liberal” or “girlboss” feminism, and points to emergent popular feminist discourses of “brutal truths”, “material conditions”, and women as a “sex class”. I analyse three seemingly diverse iterations of the reactionary feminist turn: its political-intellectual articulation in the writings of anti-progressive “post-liberal feminists”; its manifestation within the “femosphere” - the online, female-centric communities which have arisen in response to the manosphere and popular misogyny - focusing specifically on the “Female Dating Strategy”; and dating influencers on TikTok and YouTube, sometimes framed as “Andrew Tate for girls”. Reactionary feminism appears to have certain similarities with leftist, intersectional feminism; it has a strong critique of hyper-individualism, and explicitly centres issues such as misogyny, the devaluation of women’s work, and the politics of care. However, I argue that while it purports to oppose misogyny and the manosphere, it mirrors many of its regressive logics, and is characterised by an aggressive sense of fatalism, gender essentialism, and the mobilisation of individual strategies in the face of structural injustices.

This article draws on the work of Raymond Williams (1973) to argue that under covid-19 the dominant ‘ways of seeing’ the countryside and the city in Britain have been a key way of obscuring the structural violence of capitalism through which the virus is experienced. Cultural narratives of ‘exodus’ from urban areas have abounded in British media, fuelling a material ‘race for space’ as the middle class rush to buy up rural properties. Across social media, the ‘cottagecore’ aesthetic has proliferated, offering privatised solutions to the crisis through nostalgic imagery of pastoral escape. Nineteenth century discourses of the city in which bodies become transcoded as ‘dirt’ were rearticulated: the racialized bodies of migrant workers were framed as ‘modern slaves’ in the ‘dark factories’ of Leicester; this became the nation’s ‘dirty secret’ which needed to be ‘rooted out’’ and blamed for the spread of the virus. We argue that these binary narratives and aesthetics of a bountiful, white countryside and an infested, racialized city are working to obscure the deep structural causes of poverty, inequality and immiseration. We develop Williams’s analysis to show how these cultural imaginaries also help to sustain the gendered and racialized division of labour under capitalism, arguing that the country-city distinction, and the material inequalities it obscures, ought to become a more central focus for cultural studies itself.

This is the introductory essay to a special edition of Cultural Commons, the short-form section in the European Journal of Cultural Studies. This special edition marks the centenary of Raymond Williams’s birth in August 2021. It maps out some of his key work and considers how Williams’s thinking is both foundational for cultural studies – in its ‘bloodstream’ – and yet is now often overlooked, unattributed or unacknowledged. While Williams’s work was limited in the sense that it did not register or account for gender or race, and thus at times has been amenable to regressive interpretations, the essay also considers how his writing has provided theoretical models, political inspiration, and intellectual resources for feminism and anti-imperialism. It concludes by reflecting on the deep, enduring radicalness of his thinking, and argues that rather than disavow it for the silences, absences and limitations, we might continue to build upon, extend and pluralise what remains a rich, vital and urgent body of work.

This article analyses (broadly lower middle-class) women's responses to the arrival of commercial television in the UK in the 1950s, and seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of British women's relationship to television, consumer capitalism, and modernity in the mid-twentieth century. While women are dominantly figured as especially prone to being seduced by commercial culture at this time, our analysis of material from the Mass Observation archives shows that women in this context were more likely than men to be resistant and hostile to the idea of "sponsored programming". We also show how women's responses reflected and reproduced elitist discourses about "Americanization" as well as the susceptibility of the working classes to the vagaries of commercial culture. We therefore call for a more nuanced and transnational conceptualisation of the historically shifting relationship between women and television.

This short essay considers how, in conditions of widespread lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic, domestic space has become hyper-visible. It argues that, in the mediated aesthetics of the crisis, we have seen a resurgence of mystificatory images of the heteronormative private household through celebrity culture. It considers how the injunction to 'stay the fuck at home' may work to conceal pervasive forms of gendered violence within domestic space, as well as reaffirming the private, capitalist home as a place of safety and stability. Drawing on the work of family abolitionist feminism, the essay argues that we might turn the hyper-visibility of the private heteronormative home against itself, by exposing its inbuilt dangers, inequalities, and cruelties-and by imagining how much better home could be.

This article traces the ways in which the British suffragette Emily Wilding Davison was represented in national newspapers between 1913 - the year she died - and 2013, the centenary of her death. We identify three key discourses through which Davison has been represented in four British newspapers throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first: delegitimisation, recuperation and trivialisation. In doing so, this paper provides original insights into the ways that the fight for women’s rights has been figured in different historical moments. A key argument is that over time, Davison’s militant actions – once cast as those of a hysterical lunatic - have slowly come to be recuperated and legitimised as part of the story of British democracy. However, this discursive shift cannot be straightforwardly celebrated as a progressive move in representations of women’s movements, as Davison is frequently invoked to delegitimise contemporary feminism. Our analysis charts the extent to which Davison has been visible (or not) in newspapers through different historical periods; the specific ways in which Davison’s image was transformed along with broader changes in women’s status; and it considers the political implications of these (in)visibilities and representations for contemporary feminism.

This review article critically considers two recently published books, both of which contend with the complex relationship between cultural studies’ history, present and future, albeit in extraordinarily different ways. Cultural Studies 50 Years On: History, Practice and Politics, edited by Kieran Connell and Matthew Hilton, is a collection of essays that emerged from a 2014 conference that explored the legacy and influence of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Why Cultural Studies? is a searing, single-authored polemic by Gilbert B Rodman on the current state of cultural studies and a rallying call to reinvigorate the project by resuscitating its leftist impulses. In this article, I consider what these two books might offer in the way of intellectual, political and emotional resources for hope in the contemporary conjuncture; the ways that the books negotiate the inevitable partiality and the hidden personal politics of their own narratives; as well as the ways they implicitly invite personal, subjective reflection about one’s relationship to the histories and traditions of cultural studies. I end with a reflection about the challenges, but also the generative value, of revisiting painful and difficult debates within the field.

This article explores the six-part television debate series No Man's Land, which was broadcast on ITV in Britain in 1973. It argues that the program is a historically significant example of the public orientation of the women's liberation movement and its engagement with, rather than straightforward hostility toward, the mass media. The program was produced by women who were active in the women's liberation movement; it was presented by the feminist Juliet Mitchell; and its studio audience was populated by, among others, many women who were aligned with the movement. The format of No Man's Land mixed short documentary films that were explicitly concerned with the structural oppression of women and discussion with a studio audience in response to the themes of these films. The article reflects on how television texts such as No Man's Land tend to be absent from existing popular and academic histories; it suggests that dominant understandings of the relationship between the mass media and the women's liberation movement as mutually antagonistic frequently function to close off the spaces where such texts might be considered. Through close analysis of the program and its reviews in print media, it considers the problems and possibilities of and constraints on early second-wave feminists who appropriated and operated within mass-media—and specifically televised—forms. It also points to the importance of socialist feminism as a discursive context for British television in the early 1970s.

This article explores the history of Good Afternoon!, a British daytime magazine programme produced by Thames Television between 1971 and 1988. Focusing on its emergence in the 1970s, I consider the ambivalent ways in which it was figured as a programme for women, and the instability of this category in the discursive context of second-wave feminism. Drawing on archival material in the form of programme texts, publicity material, listings guides and media reviews, I also explore the ways in which the progamme's status as an afternoon programme was inscribed with gendered assumptions about class, taste, and labour.

Within feminist media and cultural studies, questions around authenticity and gender have become increasingly pronounced in recent years. This chapter examines the extent to which digital media culture increasingly trades in ideas of ‘realness’ and of ‘being yourself’, but also the particular implications of this for women, queer and feminised people. Three significant avenues for future research around authenticity are discussed: masculinity, authenticity and victimhood; feminism, trauma and ‘authentic voice’; and feminism, transphobia and ‘authentic womanhood’.

This chapter considers the rapid rise in media visibility of the Tasmanian comedian Hannah Gadsby since 2017 through an analysis of her stand-up show Nanette, which was filmed in 2018 as an original Netflix stand-up com­ edy special, and the wider cultural commentary around her. It argues that Gadsby’s globalised success must be understood in relation to the spread of a broader affective mood in celebrity culture in the wake of the #MeToo move­ ment – one that is characterised by the increased registering and visibility of women’s anger. To this end, it explores both the possibilities and limitations of ‘celebritised anger’ in a transnational media culture that appears to be increasingly attuned to identity politics – or what has been called the ‘woke­ ness industrial complex’. I argue that the imperfect political conditions occa­ sioned by capitalist media culture can only allow for a ‘messy anger’ that does not fully meet the requirements for an effective feminist anger, but that this messy anger has some value nonetheless. I consider how Gadsby’s own articulation of her ambivalent relationship to anger can help us to under­ stand the deep forms of ‘affective injustice’ (Srinivasan 2018) that structure and underpin contemporary media culture. I also explore the ways in which Gadsby is routinely figured as hailing from a deeply conservative small-town in Tasmania, Australia’s most southern state, and the subtle ways in which this might work to contain some of the more radical possibilities of rage.

This chapter questions why, in contemporary culture, involuntary celibacy is so narrowly associated with white masculinity. To this end, it explores the hyper-visible figure of the white male incel, but also draws attention to the little-known contemporary phenomenon of "femcels" - or women who are involuntarily celibate - and the ways that they are rendered illegible because of widespread assumptions that any women can find sexual partners.  It situates this illegibility of the femcel in a broader context in which women’s psychic suffering, exclusions and humiliations are not countenanced as political problems - if they are made visible at all. White male ressentiment, humiliation and exclusion, on the other hand, are continually politicised and offered up as emblems of the angry zeitgeist, and white men are understood as uniquely disadvantaged and “left behind” by globalization. The chapter considers a range of media representations of both incels and femcels in relation to feminist theories of romantic suffering, white supremacy, and sexual redistribution. It argues that exclusion from sex and intimacy can be considered as political problems; the risk of tying questions of sexual redistribution to misogynistic and racist notions of entitlement, it suggests, might be avoided by centring such debates on femcels.

This chapter analyses the seldom-studied cultural form of wedding videography, which it argues is being transformed because of the growing imperative to share across architectures of social media; increasingly, wedding videos are thus taking on a more “public” and hyper-visible character. It specifically analyses British-Asian wedding videos, arguing that this new public visibility, coupled with the “convivial” mode of the genre, means that wedding videos might constitute “alternative archives of belonging” whose celebratory images stand in marked contrast to mainstream media representations of British Asians, and most especially of Muslims. At the same time, the mode of conviviality means that histories of colonialism, racism and oppression are obscured in the narratives of the videos which are also bound up in the making of “new hierarchies of belonging” (Back et al. 2012).

This introductory chapter sets out many of the prevailing ideas about wedding culture, explains the rise and rise of the wedding spectacle, the curious paradoxes that it raises, and our intensifying attachments to its cultures and imagery. While acknowledging the importance of a political economy approach, the chapter revisits ideas about spectacle, to argue for sustained feminist analyses of the practices of the wedding spectacle in order to understand its tenacity in times of austerity, and while there is declining need for marriage as an institution. The chapter argues for staying with the wedding spectacle’s troubling ambivalences and returns to feminist cultural studies’ ideas about pleasure to explore our affective attachments to the wedding spectacle in a context of disappointment with the heteronormative terms of romantic love. The chapter includes summaries of the other chapters in the book and concludes with our contention that an interrogation of the wedding spectacle might be useful precisely because it helps to make visible our more complex desires.

This chapter calls for a more sustained analysis of ‘ordinary’ or ‘reality’ celebrity as work. It reflects on the relationship between the symbolic refusal of acknowledging celebrity work as work and contemporary class politics. Existing literature tends to read off the labour models of reality celebrity via texts, where promotional culture is seen to straightforwardly exploit participants. However, we call for more empirical research into the embodied and gendered experiences of ‘ordinary’ celebrity workers – their time and toil – to create space for the possibility of a labouring subject, and to interrogate this terrain as ‘illegitimate cultural work’.

This chapter analyses the BBC1 reality programme Wanted Down Under, considering how it encourages participants and audiences to worry over contemporary conditions of family life in a broader context of austerity via a feminised address to the daytime audience. Families are invited to ‘test’ whether they should move to Australia, where the promise of a ‘good life’ might still be possible, calling participants to be ‘responsible migrants’ against the background of Britain’s colonial legacy. The programme raises tensions between aspirational futurity and sentimental attachment as a form of ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011) and a gendered structure of anxiety in the contemporary cultural milieu.

In her discussion of contemporary postfeminist media culture, Rosalind Gill argues that while in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, feminist discourses were expressed in the mainstream media as “external, independent, critical voices,” by the 1990s, feminism had moved from its position of externality to become “part of the cultural field” (Gill, 2007, p.161). For Gill, this move into the mainstream, or the incorporation of “feminist-inspired ideas” into a new form of mediated “common sense,” cannot be read as an unproblematic success for feminism. The various incorporations, appropriations and co-optations of feminism by mainstream media and political cultures have been of deep concern to many feminist scholars, because in the processes of the ‘mainstreaming’ of feminism, the radical impulses and collectivist politics of the movement are so often erased. Angela McRobbie (2009, p.12) points to the ways in which certain individualist elements of feminism are “taken into account” by postfeminist popular culture, while at the same time the women’s movement is positioned as a “spent force,” as something that is no longer necessary, and which belongs firmly to the past. As such, a form of liberal, individualistic, depoliticized feminism has become a legitimized part of the contemporary cultural field, while the collective and radical nature of the women’s movement is simultaneously cast out, pilloried, and rejected.  Feminism and anti-feminism have become inextricably “entangled” (Gill, 2007) with one another. The ‘feminism’ that is visible in media culture, then, is as a kind of “shadow feminism, a substitute and palliative for the otherwise forced abandonment of a new feminist political imaginary” (McRobbie, 2009, p. 90). Elsewhere, Nancy Fraser names this as the “uncanny double” of feminism (Fraser, 2013, chapter 9), which has “split off” from the movement proper; it is, for Fraser, a deeply problematic form of feminism that has “gone rogue” (ibid.).
In many academic feminist accounts, it is the 1990s that marks the moment in which postfeminism becomes entrenched in media culture, and in which the radical possibilities of future feminist solidarities are closed off. While I find these arguments compelling, they give little sense of how feminist discourse moved from ‘outside’ to ‘inside’ media culture; how a “rogue” feminism “split off” from the movement and took on its own form of life; or, indeed, how the gender politics of pre-1990s media culture may also have been messy, entangled, and complex.
In this chapter I explore how one example of British media culture was tightly bound up with the shifting and contradictory gender politics of the mid-1980s, and seek to theorize the nature of this relationship. To this end, I consider a program broadcast on Channel 4 in 1985 entitled Watch the Woman, which offered itself as a “glossy women’s magazine” for television, targeting a young, ‘aspirational,’ upwardly mobile female audience. In a book about memory, this television text may seem an odd choice for analysis, because it is now almost entirely forgotten, and it occupies no obvious or tangible place within popular memory. Even at the time, it was not heralded as culturally significant; it was summarily dismissed by critics, and it did not win a commission for a second series. However, as I go on to show, an analysis of this rather unique program can offer critical insights into the shifting dynamics of gender politics at this moment, and contribute to a more nuanced history of gendered media culture in the late twentieth century. I want to suggest that there is value in looking back from the contemporary neoliberal and postfeminist conjuncture to a particular moment in the mid-1980s when a “rogue” feminism was, in fact, already emerging.

In this chapter I analyse the BBC programme Question Time to consider how the gendered talk of televised political debate - regulated by notions of public service, balance and impartiality – has permitted, legitimised, excluded, or marginalised women’s voices. I consider how the particular, ostensibly gender-neutral forms of sociability of Question Time are, in fact, deeply gendered, and what the implications of this surreptitious, undeclared gendering might be.

This chapter is presented in three sections: in the first section, I outline some of the key theoretical and methodological debates in relation to the analysis of media talk. I consider the analytical utility of key concepts in broadcast talk scholarship, and particularly that of " sociability " and its relationship to democracy and everyday life; however, I also take into consideration some critiques of this concept, specifically in relation to questions of gender and power. In the second section, I develop some of the arguments alluded to in the previous chapter about gender and language, in order to further productively complicate the notion of television's " sociability ". In the third section, I move to reflect on the selection of the case studies which make up this thesis, considering the particular constraints of working with television archives, and the difficulties of 'finding' feminism within them. I consider some of the practical constraints of conducting time-pressured discourse analyses with television programmes that are only available within physical archives, and how my research has necessarily been shaped by these constraints.

This thesis uncovers and analyses the relationship between forms of talk on British television between 1970-1990, and the uneven transformations in gender politics that occurred in this period, which encompasses both the second wave feminist movement and the rise of neoliberal politics. It presents five historical case studies of talk-based television programmes from across this time period: No Man’s Land (Associated Television/ITV, 1973), Good Afternoon! (Thames Television/ITV, 1971-1984), Pictures of Women: Sexuality (Channel 4, 1984), Watch the Woman (Channel 4, 1985), and Question Time (BBC One, 1979-present). These case studies offer a deliberate selection of television texts that differ according to their institutional contexts; their position in the schedules; their status in existing broadcasting histories; their discursive arrangements; and their modes of address. The thesis seeks to consider how the communicative ethos of television talk has been gendered in three key ways: at the level of production - in the sense of when, how, and why television spaces have been opened up for gendered forms of talk in relationship to wider shifts in gender politics; at the level of the text - in terms of how the discursive arrangements of talk-based programmes have worked to include, exclude, legitimise or disavow women’s voices; and at the level of critical reception - in the sense of how television talk has been evaluated in profoundly gendered terms. The thesis is methodologically innovative because it theorises gendered forms of television talk in relationship to histories of television production, as well as to broader political, cultural and gender histories. It carries out important empirical ‘recovery work’ of hidden women’s television histories through the presentation of original archival research. It also presents theoretical work, which re-evaluates the distinctive communicative ethos of television – or its “sociability” in light of feminist theories of language, gender and power. Moreover, it sheds some historical light on why the institutional parameters of television still delimit the available spaces for women's speech.

June Deery's Reality TV is a timely intervention into the rapidly developing area of inquiry around this television genre. The book is both concise and thorough; it ambitiously seeks to capture and understand both the evolution of this media phenomenon, and the ongoing and multifarious academic debates which attend it. Any attempt to take stock of this televisual genre – one that has now been a significant part of the Anglophonic media landscape for twenty or so years – constitutes a dizzying and colossal task. This is especially so, given that reality television as a genre is unwieldy, endlessly transmogrifying and notoriously difficult to define; furthermore, the body of scholarship that Deery seeks to apprehend here is continuously proliferating, and its theoretical frameworks are increasingly complex and sophisticated. Nonetheless, with this book Deery has negotiated a clear path through this welter of information, history and ideas. It is explicitly aimed at a broad audience, and does not assume prior knowledge or familiarity with the academic literature that has grown around reality television (or RTV, as Deery abbreviates it). Its style is laudably clear, uncluttered and lucid; each of its seven chapters identifies a key theme in the RTV scholarship and presents a discussion that will be helpful for both undergraduate and postgraduate students seeking to better understand this fascinating and still-developing area. While it points to some key ideas in the academic literature and signposts helpfully to further reading, it is not densely loaded with academic references, preferring instead to synthesise some of the major scholarly themes and patterns into an condensed, general and accessible overview. The book focuses on both US and British television, as well as on the relationship between their " cross-pollinating markets " [p. 13]. In the introductory chapter, entitled " Definitions, History, Critiques, " Deery presents a wide-ranging discussion of RTV. We are taken on a whistle-stop tour of the history of the genre since the year 2000, which Deery identifies as the moment marking " the start of the first wave of full-blown reality TV as most use the term today " [p. 15]. This chapter covers the historical precedents of the genre (and, indeed, addresses the question of whether it can be considered a " genre " at all); it explores its connections and overlaps with other genres, including fictional genres; it considers RTV's economic logics, and its especial affinities with the deregulated, multi-channel environment of cable and satellite; and it outlines some of the key ethical and academic areas of interest that have been piqued by the rise of the genre. The chapter is a valuable and robust defence of reality television as an object of critical analysis: for Deery, RTV comprises a legitimate, productive and serious area of critical inquiry, the study of which can yield important and unique insights into the contemporary workings of politics, culture, society and identity. It tackles head-on some of the widespread conceptualisations of RTV as straightforwardly harmful, trivial or culturally debasing, and instead points to its cultural significance and the need to understand why the genre is at once so widely watched and yet so fiercely denigrated.

Today, television is an everyday technology – it is an established feature of our homes, and an ordinary part of our domestic routines. But what did people make of television in the 1940s, when for the vast majority it was still a strange, new and unfamiliar medium? How did people think that television would impact on their everyday lives, their family relationships and their domestic habits? Some answers to these questions can be found in the archives of Mass Observation, the pioneering social research organisation that was launched in 1937 to document everyday life in Britain. In 1949, it asked how people felt about having television in their own homes, and how this might affect their “home leisure pursuits”.

What kind of relationships are fostered by contemporary network society and celebrity culture? In Presumed Intimacy: Para-Social Relationships in Media, Society and Celebrity Culture, Chris Rojek explores how we form relationships with mediated others founded on the assumption of personal disclosure, ranging from online friends to celebrities, and how these can be co-opted by power structures for deeply dubious but ruthlessly effective ends. This theoretically expansive book is an indispensable addition to our understandings of contemporary media, culture, politics and society, writes Jilly Boyce Kay.

The television talk show phenomenon took hold in the 1990s particularly in Western countries, but it has its precedents in earlier radio broadcasting. The talk show broadly refers to a style of unscripted discussion that privileges audience participation. The label has been used to describe a range of formats from celebrity interviews, conversations between elite peers, roundtable discussions, to talk between “ordinary people,” usually in a studio audience. It gained wider media attention and notoriety through participants’ engagement in rowdy and even violent behavior. The talk show has opened up an arena for “ordinary people” to speak in public, which has spurred a broad range of evaluations. More public-issue shows have been credited with providing a forum where formal institutions meet the public, leading some to describe them as “infotainment” or “democratainment”; other shows have emphasized spectacle and conflict and have been labeled “trashy” or “freakshows.” Key theoretical terrain operates around assessing the success of the talk show in constructing a form of public sphere. The feminization of talk has also been discussed as valuable to a broader project of feminism. The space for giving voice to diverse social groups has also been discussed in relation to identity politics and recognition. On the other hand, the emphasis upon spectacle has sometimes been taken as a broader marker of television’s faltering role in the commercialization and dumbing down of the media. The industry’s use of the general public for cheap programming has generated interest in the ethical production of talk and the politics of ownership. Similar questions have underpinned debates around the relationship between the talk show and formal politics, questioning the democratic nature of debate and the influence over critical journalism. Work from a linguistic background has been interested in the talk itself and how the forms of interaction are developed and performed in the broadcast setting. Although the production of scholarship on the talk show has slowed down somewhat as the genre has morphed into various other types of unscripted talk and reality television, some key themes still endure. The global spread of the format has led to the assessment of the talk show in relation to formations of national identity and sometimes even political struggle. Some celebrities have taken advantage of the forms of audience connection that the talk show invites, spawning a host of literature on the Oprah phenomenon. There is also an ongoing interest in the talk show audience and how talk is received at home as part of broader projects of self-reflexivity and interpretation, placing the genre at the forefront of discussions about media participation.

Last night I saw Pride, the film about London-based lesbian and gay activists who supported a Welsh mining community under vicious attack from a Tory government in the 1980s. Throughout the screening, if I wasn’t laughing, then I was crying; I cried for the car journey home; I watched the trailer again online, and laughed and cried some more. There was something so unexpected and joyous about the bringing together, in a mainstream film, of what are so often figured as two separate histories on two very different political trajectories: that of lesbian and gay liberation, and that of Trade Unions and workers’ rights.

The film follows a group of men and women as they form a group called Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM); we see their initial difficulty in getting the National Union of Mineworkers to accept their support, forcing them to sidestep the union and contact a mining community directly; and then the friendship that develops between the queers and the Welsh mining town in spite of dissent – both in the form of homophobia among some miners, and incredulity among some gay people that they should be asked to support conservative communities that had seemingly been so hostile to their own rights and freedoms. The deepness of the friendship, and the sincerity and unexpectedness of the solidarity that develops between the two groups is genuinely heart-warming. And it really happened!

Discussing the film as I left the cinema with my friend, the overriding sense we had was how come we didn’t know about this? How come these histories are so hidden from view, even to those – like us – who are actively engaged in researching the gender and sexual politics of this period, or are members of the Labour Party? (At the end of the film we learn how, partly due to a block vote from the National Union of Mineworkers, the Labour Party passed a motion to support equal rights for gays and lesbians at their conference in 1985.) Having a story about left-wing politics told in such an appealing, funny, and feel-good way made me feel very optimistic; how often are Trade Unions, striking workers and LGBTQ people represented so sympathetically, variously, and non-stereotypically in other media contexts?

As with feminism, the importance of left-wing, socialist politics as a founding context for gay liberation from the 1960s onwards is often erased, elided or forgotten. Instead, the language of women’s, lesbian and gay liberation is selectively co-opted into individual success narratives: empower yourself, better yourself, be true to yourself. As Laurie Penny argues in her most recent book, while initiatives such as It Gets Better are undeniably valuable in many ways, they are essentially neoliberal parables, locating the route to “betterness” through individual escape from backward communities. What Pride does is immensely important, I think, because it shows how – through hard, political work, patience and tolerance – it is both possible and valuable to change things not just for yourself, but – dare I say it – for a better society. Identity politics and redistributive politics, liberty and equality, are here shown to be not irreconcilable political forces pulling in different directions, but synthesised and united in solidarity in the face of a common enemy.

And yet, whilst Pride does offer the possibility of a more nuanced configuration of social and political movements in popular memory, it leaves feminism as a casualty, cast out from any position of legitimacy within this new formation. Annoyingly, and I think rather lazily, feminism is figured in the film as the irrational spanner in the political works, senselessly unpicking the newly formed seams of comradeship based on their own flimsy claims of exclusion. For example, as LGSM discuss the urgent question of how to raise money for a much-needed new bus for the mining community, a feminist in the group apparently finds this a fitting time to demand a discussion about female subordination within LGSM. We have seen no evidence to support this accusation in the film, and so it is figured as a ludicrous distraction from the ‘real’ cause. Some feminists go on to form a ‘breakaway’ group, Lesbians Against Pit Closures, who are thereafter only a peripheral and rather frivolous presence in the film (and yet this documentary made by LGSM paints a rather less ridiculous picture of this group and the reasons for their decision to form it).

More legitimised in the film are the Welsh women organising to support the strike, and especially Sian James (played by Jessica Gunning), the articulate and organisationally brilliant wife of a miner, whose own political learning during the process eventually led to her becoming an MP in 2005. At one point in the film, women in the workers’ club in Dulais break into a moving collective rendition of the protest song ‘Bread and Roses’. Their singing expresses their solidarity, commitment and love for their community, and as they sing, something like a look of surprise and recognition flickers across the faces of the visiting lesbian feminists: it implies, I think, that they suddenly and unexpectedly witness ‘true’ and ‘authentic’ feminism in a place they thought it could not exist. In many ways this continues the theme of unexpected solidarities across class and sexual lines, but given the film’s wider context in which lesbian feminism and separatism are figured as somewhat ridiculous, if not harmful to the wider cause, it seems that their veganistic, alternative and ‘radical’ feminism is somehow ‘lesser’ than the organic strength of the Welsh women, whose power as women has grown in a more harmonious solidarity with their menfolk and the Union. In any case, the film somehow does not quite manage to incorporate feminism into its otherwise expansive vision of cross-movement unity.

And yet. Even though the perennial marginalisation of second-wave feminism as a movement of secondary importance is always disappointing and deeply irksome, I am still in love with this film. It takes motifs from recent history that have been so thoroughly demonised, so consistently positioned as retrograde and anachronistic – trade union banners, political protest songs, the words ‘solidarity’ and ‘socialism’ – and re-makes them as symbols of political progress, as expressions of legitimate resistance against a hated and ruthless enemy. What’s not to love?

Australia with Simon Reeve, a three-part series on BBC2, seemed the perfect occasion for some dedicated television watching. It was broadcast on Sunday evenings at 9pm, which always feels like a legitimate time to be watching television. I am a committed Austra-phile, and always try to watch, listen to or read anything about Australia that crops up in the British media (which increasingly seems to happen these days. The Guardian newspaper, for example, just recently launched an Australian edition of its website). This particular obsession may or may not stem from the fact that I am married to a Tasmanian, and that I know more than I ever expected to know about the intricacies of Australian Rules Football, Tasmanian state politics and marsupial mammals.

Simon Reeve’s programme was framed in its promotional materials as an offbeat adventure series; the impulse of the programme seemed to be to challenge the assumptions and stereotypes that have long abounded in Britain about the land ‘down under’.  On his personal website, Reeve comments:

“So much of what we think we know about Australia is wrong. I loved having a            chance to challenge pre-conceptions about the country and the locals on this adventure. We used to think of Australia as a quaint European backwater on the other side of the planet. But Australia’s changed. It feels fresh, new and diverse. And rather than being cut-off, it’s perched on the edge of Asia, the most dynamic region of the planet. Australia has just the right balance of familiarity and exoticism to make for an endlessly appealing adventure. I was bowled over by the confidence, the humour, and the optimism of the country.”

In the opening to episode one, he indicated this angle with the tagline: “It’s not just cricket and kangaroos!”; in the trailer for the series, iconic images of the Sydney Opera House, koalas, surfers and the national flag are juxtaposed with those of asylum seekers held prisoner-like in detention centres, and destitute Aboriginal towns; images of pristine natural wildernesses are cut with bush-fires and mining-sculpted landscapes, with biker gangs and a military tank heading directly towards the camera.  “You think you know Australia? Think again”, the trailer both concluded and promised.

The very choice of Simon Reeve as the presenter suggests a left-field, unorthodox perspective – he is primarily associated with television travel programmes in politically obscure, ‘exotic’ or dangerous countries; for example, Meet the Stans (BBC2, 2003), in which he travelled around Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan; or his exploration of ‘breakaway states’ in the critically acclaimed Places That Don’t Exist (BBC2, 2005). He is a very likeable presenter whose enthusiasm is often quite infectious, and you often get the impression that he is far more politically astute than he lets on.

If the choice of presenter was (deliberately) unconventional, the idea of having a well-known, charismatic presenter ‘explore’ a country – and ‘challenge’ our assumptions about it – is now an established part of our television culture. Indeed, it seems now inconceivable to have a travel documentary or series in which the presenter is not central to the very premise and identity of the programme: think of Paul Merton in India (Channel 5, 2010), Joanna Lumley’s Nile (2010), or any of the (rather brilliant) Michael Palin programmes, to name but a few.

So why this programme, and why now? Australia with Simon Reeve seems to me rather similar to many other travel programmes about the ‘emerging economies’ made in recent years – about places like Brazil, China and India.  Like these other series, Reeve’s series suggests an urgent need to understand an economically important country, to know it, to come to terms with it. The emergence of these kind of programmes is possibly best understood within the context of Britain’s decline as an imperial power on the one hand, and its increasingly entrenched economic crisis on the other. These televised travelogues are as much to do with Britain as they are with the countries explicitly under scrutiny – they are attempting to negotiate the shifting character of British identity in a politically precarious time.

In Australia, Simon Reeve meets a British expat, Steve, who used to be a bin-man in Hull. He is now earning a very decent salary in Perth as a lorry-driving instructor, along with many other blue-collar workers in Australia. “We’re living the dream,” he tells Simon as they drink a beer together. Australia has been called the ‘lucky country’ since at least the 1960s, and this idea, although not explicitly expressed in the programme, resonates particularly strongly in this telling of Steve’s story. The depressing context of recession and the large-scale loss of blue-collar jobs in Britain provide the symbolic grounds for this utopian idea of Australia to be expressed upon.

The tension between prosperity, consumption and economic growth on the one hand, and the impact on the environment on the other, is central to the programme. Across the three episodes, Reeve visits coal plants, mines, fisheries, and wineries that produce bottles of plonk on a hyper-industrial scale. Against this, he also visits farmers who are fiercely resisting the encroachment of mining on their land, and the Great Barrier Reef under threat from the proliferation of crown-of-thorns starfish in the polluted ocean water. We bear (sanitised) witness to the culling of three different species across the series – the starfish, the ubiquitous and poisonous cane toads, and some of the three quarters of a million camels that roam wild in Australia. The culls take place in the interests of conservation of the indigenous flora and fauna. These particular environmental issues – along with climate change, the depletion of natural resources, bushfires and water shortages – are presented as enormous and pressing challenges, but are nonetheless contextualised within the national ‘story’ of Australia as an optimistic, resourceful and forward-looking country. The upbeat soundtrack and sweeping, panoramic shots of awe-inspiring landscapes lend themselves to this overarching narrative of progress.

The tone and pace of the programme shifts markedly, however, in its treatment of what is constructed as the ‘Aboriginal problem’ of the country, or the “dark aspect of Australia” as Reeve names it, as he drives into an impoverished Aboriginal settlement in western Australia. Before we even meet an Aboriginal person (three-quarters of the way into episode one) their existence is symbolically expressed to us through close-ups of burnt-out, upturned cars with smashed-in windows. Later, in episode three, Reeve visits another Aboriginal town in the Cape York Peninsula. Whilst Reeve is clearly sympathetic to the population of this town, riven with social problems and violence, his analysis of the solution is frustratingly simplistic and depressingly ahistorical: “Blame for many of the problems afflicting Aboriginal people today can no longer all be pinned on the white establishment”, he says; Aboriginal communities have “their own ingrained problems”. Welfare-dependency is constructed as the key problem for this community – I found this piece of neoliberal logic particularly disheartening.

On the other hand, I was much more encouraged by Reeve’s visit to one of five detention centres for asylum seekers in Darwin. Rather than interview asylum seekers in the facility – which would have entailed allowing the immigration authorities to censor their tapes – Reeve and the crew decided to speak to detainees through the fences of the facilities. The images of children’s hands reaching through the fence, and the undeniably prison-like characteristics of their existence, were a particularly powerful illustration of what detention in this context really means. I don’t think that interviewing people within the facility would have been able to articulate this in such a moving and affective way, even if this would have involved getting to know individuals’ personal stories much better. For me, this scene ‘humanised’ the detainees precisely by showing the inhumanity of their existence within an ostensibly free and democratic country.

I also particularly liked the part in episode three where Reeve travelled to Cronulla beach in Sydney – the scene of sectarian violence in 2005 – where a group of young Australian Muslim women had formed an Aussie Rules football team. It seemed to be a rather visually effective way of challenging ideas of who gets to be an ‘authentic’ Aussie, as well as the notion that ‘Muslim culture’ and ‘western values’ are two discrete, incompatible systems. His presenting style is affable and enthusiastic, and in this case also quite nuanced.

The shift away from seeing Australia as a “quaint backwater”  (read: culturally backward, politically insignificant, economically uninteresting) – to a dynamic, progressive, and, crucially, rich country; a force to be reckoned with, and an entity that demands to be understood – can be clearly identified in programmes such as Reeve’s. It does seem that the impulse to explore and profile an entire country – particularly one the size of Australia – inevitably means that certain stories, such as that of Aboriginal dispossession and poverty, are only afforded a despairing footnote in the overall narrative, because they do not fit with the ‘national story’.

And he didn’t go to Tasmania. None of these programmes ever go to Tasmania. But that is a whole other blogpost for another Austra-philic day.

This paper seeks to trouble some of the dominant historical narratives in which the ‘1950s housewife’ is figured as emblematising the shift to surburbanised, home-based entertainment through her apparently easy alignment with consumption, passivity, and therefore with television itself. Against these enduring classed and gendered assumptions about television, the feminine, and the commercial in the post-war period, we present archival material found in the the Mass Observation archives which record the gendered responses to the arrival of ITV - and advertising - in 1955. As such, this paper is concerned with questions of women’s labour as they actively negotiated the entry of commercial television into domestic space, and particularly how they began to critique the aesthetic features of advertising. Historians of television have detailed how the coming of ITV was greeted by critical derision and deep anxiety about its potentially debasing effects on the national culture; in this regard, commercialization was conflated with Americanization, with feminization, and with passivity. More broadly, historical and popular discourses about the 1950s reproduce the figure of the housewife as both ushering in and emblematising the shift to a modern, atomized, suburbanised consumer society. Janet Thumim (2002) has shown how repeated elisions between ‘television audiences’, the ‘feminine’ and the ‘consumer’ reinscribe assumptions about women’s central but ultimately passive role in these broader social, cultural and economic changes. However, by recovering voices from the Mass Observation archives, we will begin to challenge the easy alignment of the housewife with consumption and asocial domesticity. Instead, we will detail the ways in which women brokered the arrival of ‘commercialised’ culture as they laboured to negotiate the consumer address to the post-war home.

Don’t Tell the Bride is a highly successful reality television programme that has been broadcast in Britain since 2007, and which now has around a dozen locally produced international versions. The narrative premise and popular appeal of the programme pivot around its gendered ‘role reversal’, whereby bridegrooms are given total control over the wedding budget and planning, and brides are shut out of any decision-making. As such, it trades in reductive gendered tropes and assumptions – for example, by invoking the ‘bridezilla’ figure, a maniacal control-freak whose behaviour borders on the hysterical – at the same time that it plays with and subverts traditional models of gendered labour around wedding culture.

This paper will draw on theories of postfeminism (Gill 2007; McRobbie, 2009), gender re-traditionalization (Adkins 1999) and emotional capitalism (Illouz 2007) to explore the ways in which Don’t Tell the Bride is bound up with broader, uneven transformations in gender politics. Focussing primarily on the British version of the programme, but taking in international formats for comparison, it will analyse how the centrality of gender binaries to its narrative formula reproduces but also resignifies modes of feminine and masculine subjectivities. It will also consider how class politics are a central and yet unspoken modality through which the affective labour of the participants is produced.

At the same time, the paper will consider how the programme is emblematic of contemporary debates and shifts around public service broadcasting in the British context. While the programme was broadcast for many years on BBC3, a public service ‘youth’ channel, it has now moved to the ‘grown up’ BBC1. In the summer of 2016, it will move to the commercial broadcaster Sky 1, where it is promised that the programme will become “pacier” and will more squarely centre on the dramatic “reveal” of the wedding gown. As such, the paper will consider what role changing screen mediations of weddings are playing in the wedding industrial complex – and particularly how the affective realm of reality television is implicated in remaking class and gender identities, politics and power relations.

This paper considers the capacity of British television to give voice to women in the contemporary context. Television has frequently been understood to be a democratising medium, whose promotion of ‘ordinary’ voices and ‘sociable’ or ‘friendly’ forms of talk has contributed to a less elitist, more open, and less rigidly class-bound culture (Scannell, 1991; Tol-
son, 2006). It has also been argued that television has ‘feminised’ the talk of the public sphere, thereby opening up possibilities for re-valuing and legitimising women’s voices through its intimate address to domestic audiences. And yet, in other ways, television appears to have profound difficulties in achieving gender equality in its forms of public discussion, as
ongoing debates around the under-representation of women on panel shows such as Question Time (BBC1, 1979-present) and Mock the Week (BBC2, 2005-present) attest. This paper argues that in order to overcome these inequalities of voice in television’s public spheres, we need a more developed theory of the gender politics of the medium’s communicative architecture; that is to say, we need to understand how the imperatives for voices on television to be ‘friendly’, ‘ordinary’, or ‘sociable’ might have disciplinary as well as democratising functions - especially for women. The paper points to examples of women’s talk on television that has been construed as ‘nagging’, ‘hysterical’, ‘bitching’ and ‘gossiping’ and argues that such talk should not be precluded from being considered democratic.

This paper explores the production of an aesthetic of ‘worklessness’ through an analysis of the social media profiles of con-
temporary reality celebrities. In a broader context where the boundaries between work-time and leisure-time are increasingly blurring, reality celebrities use platforms such as Twitter and Instagram both to produce a presentation of self ‘at leisure’ and simultaneously to extract value from these images via product placement and sponsorship of their posts. As
such, a paradox exists whereby the ‘always-on’ labour models of reality celebrity are at once made highly visible (as they are enacted through the public platforms of social media); and yet they are also hidden, as the aesthetic products of this labour - images of sunbathing, nightclubbing, shopping, or working on the body the gym - are coded as ‘leisure’ time. It suggests that the paradox of performing ‘worklessness’ is more acute for working-class reality celebrities, and that the devaluation of their labour as not ‘real’ work must be understood within a broader economy of intensifying disgust for the ‘workless’ working classes.

This paper considers the contemporary cultural economy of reality television, and how its mobilization of hyper-visible celebrity offers some promise of social mobility for young people in a context of widening inequality. Moving beyond debates about representation and reality television as “poverty porn”, it considers the limited spaces through which reality television participants become cultural workers, and the intense forms of promotional labour in which they engage to extend and expand their media lives - often across less formalised sites such as nightclubs,  beauty salons, and social media. It also analyses the work
of publicists and agents who broker and extract value from these activities. By drawing on earlier work on celebrity and media such as Fame Games (Turner et al, 2000), we consider both the intensification of bio-political labour models in the current climate, and how the figuring of this labour as illegitimate contributes to redefinitions of classed identity.

This paper considers a little-remembered British television programme from 1973 entitled No Man’s Land. It argues that this one-off, six-part studio debate series is an important but largely forgotten text in the history of mediated second wave feminism. No Man’s Land had a strongly socialist-feminist premise: it explicitly critiqued the subordinate position of women in society; it was presented by Juliet Mitchell, while key members of its production team were feminist women; and its studio audience was populated with prominent activists from the women’s liberation movement. Significantly, it was broadcast on ITV on Saturday evenings. In this paper, I explore print media reviews of the programme, in which its politicised mode of talk was conceived as a form of ‘nagging’, unwelcome on the small screen in the spatio-temporal context of the family home. I consider this in relation to what Paddy Scannell calls the “distinctive communicative ethos” of broadcast talk, whereby audiences must not be made to feel as though they are being “got at” in their homes. In this sense, television’s “sociability”, Scannell suggests, constitutes a form of talk that is “democratic”. The paper will present examples of the ‘unsociable’ and ‘nagging’ gendered talk of No Man’s Land, and will also use feminist linguistic theory, to rethink what kinds of talk we might count as being ‘democratic’ on television.

This book explores the increasing imperatives to speak up, to speak out, and to ‘find one’s voice’ in contemporary media culture. It considers how, for women in particular, this seems to constitute a radical break with the historical idealization of silence and demureness. However, the author argues that there is a growing and pernicious gap between the seductive promise of voice, and voice as it actually exists. While brutal instruments such as the ducking stool and scold’s bridle are no longer in use to punish women’s speech, Kay proposes that communicative injustice now operates in much more insidious ways. The wide-ranging chapters explore the mediated ‘voices’ of women such as Monica Lewinsky, Hannah Gadsby, Diane Abbott, and Yassmin Abdel-Magied, as well as the problems and possibilities of gossip, nagging, and the ‘traumatised voice’ in television talk shows. It critiques the optimistic claims about the ‘unleashing’ of women’s voices post-#MeToo and examines the ways that women’s speech continues to be trivialized and devalued. Communicative justice, the author argues, is not about empowering individuals to ‘find their voice’, but about collectively transforming the whole communicative terrain.

This book interrogates the hyper-visibility and stubborn endurance of the wedding spectacle across media and culture in the current climate.

The wide-ranging chapters consider why the symbolic power of weddings is intensifying at a time when marriage as an institution appears to be in decline – and they offer new insights into the shifting and complex gender politics of contemporary culture. The collection is a feminist project but does not straight-forwardly renounce the wedding spectacle. Rather, the diverse contributions offer close analyses of the myriad forms and practices of the wedding spectacle, from reality television and cinematic film to wedding videography and bridal boutiques. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, the chapters illuminate the paradoxes, contradictions, disappointments, cruelties and pleasures that are intimately bound up with the wedding spectacle.

Written by leading and emerging feminist scholars, the chapters range across different national and cultural contexts to explore how the gender politics of weddings are changing and adapting to a new cultural and social landscape. This in-depth analysis of the wedding spectacle will appeal to academics and researchers in the fields of gender and mass media, cultural studies, feminist studies, and intercultural communication.