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.

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 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 3 as ‘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 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 label ‘visual media governmentality’, to middle-class young women to extend their enthusiasm for their careers, with the proviso that the home too becomes the site of new domestic pleasures, this time with a vaguely feminist gloss, ensuring a shared division of labour in the home. As part of what Wendy Brown refers to as neoliberal rationality, this emphasis on the family as an enterprise that can be worked on for better and more enjoyable ‘returns on investment’ eliminates all traces of earlier socialist feminist attempts to socialize the family through state investment in nursery provision for all (Brown 2015). No longer is it possible to refer to household duties as drudgery; the task at hand is to find so many new pleasures of the hearth, meanwhile allocating those tasks that entail repetitive and unrewarding labour to low-paid migrant women. In short, I am arguing that privileged middle-class women will aim for leadership jobs in order to crash through the glass ceiling, while also showing themselves to excel in parenting and in creating and maintaining a beautiful home. Their working-class and materially disadvantaged counterparts must prioritize earning a living and taking care of their children as best they can.

In Chapter 2, written some six years later than Chapter 1, there is something of a reversal of neoliberal leadership-feminism, as popular culture proposes what could be envisaged as a move back towards liberal feminism, in the light of the pathologies that contemporary life has exacted on the female subject. The chapter reflects also on two interrelated changes that have interrupted the competitive dynamics of neoliberal rationality as it is directed towards young women. One of these is the anti-capitalist feminism, which has had a remarkable impact, and with this is the specific dilemma that the new era of feminism then poses to the world of consumer culture. Has there been a significant drop in sales of so many beauty products? How does the magazine industry respond to the new demands of seemingly feminist consumers? The other change is the perceived high cost to female ‘well-being’, which is wrought by the punitive regime of the self-monitoring subject. Sarah Banet-Weiser, extending her previous co-authored work on ‘commodity feminism’, has undertaken an exhaustive account of how feminism has found its way into the heartland of popular culture, often through the activities of well-known female celebrities who have also welcomed the #MeToo movement (Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser 2012; Banet-Weiser 2018). A whole landscape opens up of female empowerment, which becomes the motif that permits capitalism to make some moves towards welcoming, or even appearing to embrace young women’s commitment to feminism.

In Chapter 2, I ponder two related points, asking how far can feminism go in its incursions into the landscape of capitalism’s consumer culture before it meets its limits, before it is defined merely as a fad about to pass its sell-by date; before it is once more shunned? If the new feminism mounts an attack on capitalism, what is the response? Banet-Weiser rightly points to the rise of popular misogyny spearheaded by an online culture dominated by young men. I pursue a different tack in this chapter by outlining the emergence of a set of discourses that seek both to supplant and supplement feminism by means of a kind of palliative offering in the form of what I call the ‘perfect-imperfect-resilience’ or p-i-r, which steps forward to offer young women a popular therapeutic strategy that permits some aspects of feminism to be retrieved and drawn upon for support.

With this high visibility of feminism I also draw attention to the argument of Boltanski and Chiapello, who examine the ways in which capitalism has revitalized itself by absorbing elements of the anti-capitalist movements of the late 1960s (social critique or artistic critique) on the basis of their potential for innovation (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). This leads me to propose that new feminist research projects might look closely, with ethnographic detail, at the cultural producers, including the gatekeeper, editors and other decision-makers; in particular those people who are charged with this task of translation.

The second issue I reflect on connects with the perceived harms to women of competition and endless self-assessment. Here I draw attention to the politics of resilience, which in turn entails a scaling down of the principles of neoliberal ‘leadership-feminism’ in favour of a more ordinary and less exceptional set of expectations. Liberal feminism proves itself to be more accommodating to the management of self for the modern-day middle-class gender regime. With such an emphasis on the widespread mental ill health of the female subject I also query the absence of a feminist psycho-analytical vocabulary, which would interrogate the basis of this female complaint and the prevalence of self-beratement. The writing of Adam Phillips and also Judith Butler permits a pathway away from the tyranny of the sovereign self in favour of a more relational and dependent idea of the subject who asks, from the start: ‘Who are you?’

Chapter 2 brings together, then, three specific themes: the displacement function played by the p-i-r; the profit from feminism; and the need for an ethics of care and of vulnerability by means of a psychoanalytical feminism, which de-centres the sovereign self, opening up an unstable female subjectivity as livable in her relation to others. Overall, the chapter reveals some of the tensions that emerge in relation to the driving force of a neoliberal leadership-feminism that has gripped hold of so many popular discourses and textual artefacts directed at women.

In Chapter 3, the focus of attention is on what is required for a feminist cultural studies perspective on the social polarization effect born out of more than three decades of neoliberalism in the UK. This entails a critique of the work of prominent Marxists David Harvey and Wolfgang Streeck for their inattention to sociologically important changes to the gender regime. The writing of Stuart Hall provides a stronger steer for investigating the way in which political economy is translated at ground level to transform the vocabularies that prevail in the workplace, the home and the local neighbourhood. It is everyday language, in particular that deployed by the tabloid press, which implants a new terminology of welfare and which provides a groundswell for public approval to cuts to benefit payments on the grounds of claimants being typecast as feckless, cheating and lazy. Women, especially single mothers, are poverty-shamed, and this drives a further wedge not just between these working-class women and their middle-class counterparts but also at an intra-class level. This suggests that the anti-welfare agenda comprises a moving horizon to target the majority of the low paid who are also current recipients of in-work benefits. There is a war of attrition reminding us of how key to neoliberal rationality is the attack on social democracy as the guarantor (within limits) of welfare. (In fact, social democrats have been at the forefront of the drive to reduce welfare since the mid 1990s, but it has proved even more integral to the neoliberal project to get rid of any lingering traces.) There is substantial pressure on women not just to be employed, but also to prioritize working life and to abide by the rules of ‘contraceptive employment’. If there is a shaming effect on single mothers as they come to embody all the failings of welfare dependency, the logic is to avoid this status except under exceptional circumstances, such as an abusive relationship. The stigmatizing stereotypes and the demeaning images are also boundary-marking activities, which enact a vernacular of social polarization on a day-to-day basis.

In Chapter 4, I more fully interrogate the landscape of poverty-shaming, looking specifically at Reality TV, where I also pay attention to racializing logics, which append whiteness at that point at which working-class women lose the privilege of being deemed without race on the basis of their downward mobility. The figure I consider, who starred in the series Benefits Street, was named White Dee to differentiate her from her friend and neighbour, who was black (Dee Samora). The programme demonstrates so many of the microscopic tensions and contradictions of popular culture to which I referred in note 2 of this introduction. Even as she is shamed, White Dee embodies proud, unbowed working-class femininity. She asserts herself as someone with moral capacity supporting her neighbours by escorting them to hospital or helping them with benefit problems. She also challenges the stereotypes of the welfare scrounger heaped upon herself and her neighbours by the tabloid press and by wider audiences providing online comments. Following through on the politics of race within debates on welfare, I conclude the chapter by referencing the work of so many black scholars who have drawn attention to the positioning of black people as outside welfare in its entirety and seen as undeserving subjects, whose labour is nevertheless required in order for the welfare apparatus to operate for the benefit of white British society. This racial logic of the British welfare state forces a rewriting of any even vaguely rosy account of the achievements of social democracy in this respect, forcing also reconsideration of the times of the so-called ‘affluent worker’ (Shilliam 2018; Virdee 2019).

I end this book with some brief ruminations on social polarization and the intensification of poverty, which are all but disguised by the emphasis, now so firmly established in the popular imagination, on welfare cheats and benefit ‘scroungers’. Arguably women who do rely on benefits, in or out of work, now find themselves more emphatically symbolically incarcerated than was the case in the past. The precarious lives they are forced to lead must be done so without the trained advisers and support workers who might have been able to utilize a non-stigmatizing vocabulary, which was in place from the mid 1970s, before being replaced by the new system of public management some twenty years later. Thus, we see neoliberalism proceed by multiple processes of substitution and displacement. Kinder words and more equal encounters are edged out of social interactions with vulnerable sectors of the population. Spaces,⁵ images and words are made to comply with the requirements of the boundary-marking practices that enforce stricter social polarization, giving rise to new forms of daily antagonism and aggression. To undo this whole terrain of everyday life and institutional culture, feminist scholars and activists would need to imagine a new and quite different social field predicated on reparative and restorative welfare and a municipal commons comprising public spaces that would counter the incarceration effect. Alongside this we might also envisage forms of media and popular culture that would refute the genres which currently continue to degrade those who have suffered from the intensification of poverty.