Angela McRobbie - Feminism and the Politics of 'Resilience'

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 3as ‘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 3and 4I 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 , 3which 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.

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