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From the gritty landscapes of The Hunger Games and The Walking Dead, to the portrayal of the twenty-first-century precariat in Girls, this book explores how transatlantic visual culture has represented and reconstructed ideas of gender in times of financial crisis. Drawing on social, cultural and feminist theory, these writers explore how men and women experience austerity differently and illuminate the problematic ways in which economic policy can shape how gender is presented in popular culture. Written from the perspective that the popular is indeed political, this book considers film, literature and television's ideological attitudes towards race, sex and disability. It also takes into account how mass culture has responded to austerity in the past and the present, whilst examining the impact that feminism will have in the future.
This timely, necessary collection of essays provides feminist analyses of a recession-era media culture characterized by the reemergence and refashioning of familiar gender tropes, including crisis masculinity, coping women, and postfeminist self-renewal. Interpreting media forms as diverse as reality television, financial journalism, novels, lifestyle blogs, popular cinema, and advertising, the contributors reveal gendered narratives that recur across media forms too often considered in isolation from one another. They also show how, with a few notable exceptions, recession-era popular culture promotes affective normalcy and transformative individual enterprise under duress while avoiding meaningful critique of the privileged white male or the destructive aspects of Western capitalism. By acknowledging the contradictions between political rhetoric and popular culture, and between diverse screen fantasies and lived realities, Gendering the Recession helps to make sense of our postboom cultural moment. Contributors. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Hamilton Carroll, Hannah Hamad, Anikó Imre, Suzanne Leonard, Isabel Molina-Guzmán, Sinéad Molony, Elizabeth Nathanson, Diane Negra, Tim Snelson, Yvonne Tasker, Pamela Thoma
Why have both pop and politics in Britain become the preserve of an unrepresentative elite? From chav-pop pantomimes to retro-chauvinist ‘landfill indie’, the bland, homogenous and compromised nature of the current 'alternative' sector reflects the interests of a similarly complacent and privileged political establishment. In particular, political and media policing of female social and sexual autonomy, through the neglected but significant gendered dimensions of the discourse surrounding ‘chavs’, has been accompanied by a similar restriction and regulation of the expression of working-class femininity in music. This book traces the progress of this cultural clampdown over the past twenty years. ,
In this brilliant polemical rampage, Owen Hatherley shows how our past is being resold in order to defend the indefensible. From the marketing of a "make do and mend" aesthetic to the growing nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed, a cultural distraction scam prevents people grasping the truth of their condition. The Ministry of Nostalgia explodes the creation of a false history: a rewriting of the austerity of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw the development of a welfare state while the nation crawled out of the devastations of war. This period has been recast to explain and offer consolation for the violence of neoliberalism, an ideology dedicated to the privatisation of our common wealth. In coruscating prose-with subjects ranging from Ken Loach's documentaries, Turner Prize-shortlisted video art, London vernacular architecture, and Jamie Oliver's cooking-Hatherley issues a passionate challenge to the injunction to keep calm and carry on.
"As an omnipresent figure of the media landscape, girls are spectacles. They are ubiquitous visual objects on display at which we are incessantly invited to look. Investigating our cultural obsession with both everyday and high-profile celebrity girls, Sarah Projanskyuses a queer, anti-racist feminist approach to explore the diversity of girlhoods in contemporary popular culture. The book addresses two key themes: simultaneous adoration and disdain for girls and the pervasiveness of whiteness and heteronormativity. While acknowledging this context, Projansky pushes past the dichotomy of the "can-do" girl who has the world at her feet and ..."--Publisher description.
Recent years have seen an enormous increase in protests across the world in which citizens have challenged what they see as a deterioration of democratic institutions and the very civil, political and social rights that form the basis of democratic life. Beginning with Iceland in 2008, and then forcefully in Egypt, Tunisia, Spain, Greece and Portugal, or more recently in Peru, Brazil, Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Ukraine, people have taken to the streets against what they perceive as a rampant and dangerous corruption of democracy, with a distinct focus on inequality and suffering. This timely new book addresses the anti-austerity social movements of which these protests form part, mobilizing in the context of a crisis of neoliberalism. Donatella della Porta shows that, in order to understand their main facets in terms of social basis, strategy, and identity and organizational structures, we should look at the specific characteristics of the socioeconomic, cultural and political context in which they developed. The result is an important and insightful contribution to understanding a key issue of our times, which will be of interest to students and scholars of political and economic sociology, political science and social movement studies, as well as political activists.
Nathalie Weidhase conceptualises the female dandy as a figure that simultaneously embodies and disrupts postfeminist notions of femininity, including maintaining a physique conforming to contemporary beauty standards, constant self-surveillance and self-improvement, and the naturalisation of gender difference and heterosexuality. She examines how music videos function as spaces in popular culture where the politics of the feminine can be articulated. These spaces allow female pop stars to be valued as artists with distinct contributions to popular music. Focusing on Amy Winehouse, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, and Lana Del Rey, Weidhase illuminates different characteristics of the postfeminist dandy in popular music. Amy Winehouse's work makes visible the commodification of the female spectacle in popular culture, highlighting how her image and persona were marketed and consumed. Rihanna performs black femininity as postfeminism's abject Other. Lady Gaga queers monstrous motherhood and celebrates female musical lineage. Lana Del Rey's work demonstrates how whiteness operates as a canvas for postfeminist and post-racial fantasies, offering a platform for their deconstruction and critique. In doing so, Weidhase provides a comprehensive understanding of how these pop stars navigate and challenge the intricate landscape of postfeminism, offering a nuanced perspective on contemporary femininity and its representations in popular culture.
Since 2010 Greece has been experiencing the longest period of austerity and economic downturn in its recent history. Economic changes may be happening more rapidly and be more visible than the cultural effects of the crisis which are likely to take longer to become visible, however in recent times, both at home and abroad, the Greek arts scene has been discussed mainly in terms of the crisis. While there is no shortage of accounts of Greece's economic crisis by financial and political analysts, the cultural impact of austerity has yet to be properly addressed. This book analyses hitherto uncharted cultural aspects of the Greek economic crisis by exploring the connections between austerity and culture. Covering literary, artistic and visual representations of the crisis, it includes a range of chapters focusing on different aspects of the cultural politics of austerity such as the uses of history and archaeology, the brain drain and the Greek diaspora, Greek cinema, museums, music festivals, street art and literature as well as manifestations of how the crisis has led Greeks to rethink or question cultural discourses and conceptions of identity.
Between the nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century television transformed from an idea to an institution. In Gender and Early Television, Sarah Arnold traces women's relationship to the new medium of television across this period in the UK and USA. She argues that women played a crucial role in its development both as producers and as audiences long before the 'golden age' of television in the 1950s. Beginning with the emergence of media entertainment in the mid-nineteenth century and culminating in the rise of the post-war television industries, Arnold claims that, all along the way, women had a stake in television. As keen consumers of media, women also helped promote television to the public by performing as 'television girls'. Women worked as directors, producers, technical crew and announcers. It seemed that television was open to women. However, as Arnold shows, the increasing professionalisation of television resulted in the segregation of roles. Production became the sphere of men and consumption the sphere of women. While this binary has largely informed women's role in television, through her analysis, Arnold argues that it has not always been the case.