Feminism and the Politics of Resilience : Spectacular girls and the place of psychoanalytic approaches in feminist media and cultural studies during the Coronavirus crisis

Abstract

In this review of Feminism and the Politics of Resilience, Angela McRobbie’s conceptualisation of the ‘perfect-imperfect-resilience dispositif’ is praised as offering a clear demarcation from McRobbie and others’ previous work on the earlier de-politicised and individualist era of postfeminism. It calls for more work in the field of feminist media and cultural studies to consider psychoanalytic approaches to questions around pleasure, affect and compulsion in girls’ and women’s popular media culture. In light of the Coronavirus crisis and with a reflection on the spectacular visibility of girls and former young female celebrities in recent mainstream media, this short essay explores two lines of inquiry in response to Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: first, what has the period of the pandemic done to the potent power of the p-i-r? And second, how might we be both careful to recognise the binaristic ways in which the girl subject is culturally constructed, while being sure not to reproduce such ‘ontologised dualisms’ of girlhood in our writing?

In the competitive Higher Education climate of the Research Excellence Framework in the United Kingdom ¹ and the broader context of hypervisible self-promotion and self-branding, as academics we’re called upon to invent new concepts, claim new terms and publish quickly. Angela McRobbie’s (2020) latest book is a grounding reminder of the value of – as she puts it – tentative, conjunctural analysis in feminist cultural studies (p. 61). In feminist media and cultural studies of the past 10–15 years we’ve seen a somewhat overzealous commitment to identifying and making sense of mediated feminine subjects as exemplars of a contemporary postfeminist and neoliberal subjectivity. Over that time the terms postfeminism and neoliberalism have sometimes been collapsed and blurred, often becoming catch-all labels for a much bigger and messier context of interweaving and shifting political, social, cultural, and local discourses.

McRobbie’s book is clear to demarcate that earlier, de-politicised and individualist era of postfeminism – of roughly 1997–2007 (p. 43) – and it tracks the ‘shift from liberal to neoliberal feminism and back again’ (p. 56). The book’s key concept of the perfect-imperfect-resilience dispositif (the p-i-r) is not simply an evolved or advanced state of postfeminism; postfeminism being that turn-of-the-21st-century context epitomised by cultural texts such as Bridget Jones’s Diary (dir. Sharon Maguire, 2001) which McRobbie (2004) previously wrote about – inspiring a wealth of feminist work on the subject including my own entry into the field as a student. Instead, emerging in the recent context of activist feminism, the p-i-r is the everyday ‘feminine pop culture’, which ‘bridges the gap between feminism and capitalism, delivering something that is palatable and that will not deter advertisers’. (McRobbie, 2020: 61) Unlike the earlier era of postfeminism in which feminism was positioned as redundant, the p-i-r is politicised with feminist rhetoric; but it is a feminism which is both profitable and central to ‘resilience training’ (McRobbie, 2020: 46).

While not a central strand of her argument, within the book is a refreshing call to reconsider the place of psychoanalytic approaches in feminist media and cultural studies. Psychoanalysis has had a contentious relationship to feminist theory and as such has largely fallen out of fashion in our field (certainly as a prominent approach) for the past 30 or so years. While there isn’t space in this short essay to trace the various psychoanalytic traditions and their uses for and critiques by feminist media and cultural scholars, broadly speaking the move away from psychoanalysis was due to its perceived essentialising and universalising conceptualisation of gender, at least in the Freudian and Lacanian traditions. Such binaristic psychoanalytic understandings of gender (male/female, presence/absence), for which sexuality is central and within which heterosexuality is inevitable, were not perceived to fit with post-structuralist and postmodern understandings of gender and identity, which would shape much of the work in our field. Significantly, those psychoanalytic conceptualisations of gender were perceived to ignore culture and context, and importantly, were understood to be apolitical; as Juliet Mitchell (2001) states, ‘Psychoanalysis is not and has never claimed to be a political discourse. Feminism is nothing if it is not this’ (p. 16).

However, McRobbie makes it clear that contemporary forms of new and popular feminisms and the p-i-r weigh greatly as psychic dispositions. She draws our attention to the pleasure, familiarity and unforbiddenness of self-beratement in contemporary women’s popular culture, persuasively making the case that a psychoanalytic critique may help us to make sense of our continual enjoyment of a popular culture that incites self-criticism and self-hatred. She asks (McRobbie, 2020), ‘What is the basis of our attachment to self-beratement and to the genres which preserve and perpetuate this activity, even as they also seek to repair the damage done?’ (pp. 63–64). To many it might seem daunting or out-of-place to turn to turn to psychoanalysis in our feminist critiques of feminine popular culture and popular feminism, particularly in the context of textual analyses and a focus on representation and ideology. However, in order to answer such psychically-focused questions around pleasure, affect and compulsion, I’d argue that we cannot ignore psychoanalytic approaches. As similarly stated by Mitchell (2000 [1974]) with regards to feminist analyses of texts and representations, there is an argument ‘for the importance of a return to the original project of using psychoanalysis to help understand the transmission of sexual difference within ‘ideology’’ (p. xxvii). McRobbie’s suggestion, then, for more space to be given in feminist media and cultural studies to psychoanalytic consideration is exciting and fruitful, and should be taken up within the field. Perhaps as a starting point we might revisit the work of Judith Butler, as McRobbie does in this book, as offering a bridge between Foucauldian understandings of power, and psychoanalytic conceptualisations of the psyche, in order to make sense of how the subject is formed by power both socially and psychically (Judith Butler, 1997).

At the time McRobbie was writing the book, none of us could have imagined the global Coronavirus crisis which was just around the corner. It is this context into which the book was released, and which inevitably framed my own reading of it. In light of this, then, I have two points of inquiry which have emerged in response to Feminism and the Politics of Resilience. First, what has the period of the pandemic done to the potent power of the p-i-r? In Spring 2020, via the echo chambers of social media, on broadcast television and other mainstream popular media, the idealised subjects of lockdown – imagined as white, (predominantly) middle-class women in Western Anglophone contexts – were incited to be as happy and productive as possible: mastering the art of making soda bread, learning a new language, or to keep crafting and carrying on with Kirstie Allsopp (Channel 4, 2020) from our homes (c.f. Martin, 2021). But since that time, young female celebrity culture – one of the main sites for the ‘visual media governmentality’ as McRobbie (2020) terms it in the book (pp. 33–34) – has been a hypervisible space for critiquing resilience.

I refer here to various documentaries about former teen celebrities who transitioned into adult womanhood under intense media scrutiny, such as The New York Times Presents ‘Framing Britney Spears’ (Hulu, 2021), Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil (Lovato, 2021), This Is Paris (Hilton, 2020) and Miss Americana (dir. Lana Wilson, 2020). Other notable recent celebrity media ‘flashpoints’ (Banet-Weiser, 2018b) include Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s television interview with Oprah Winfrey (CBS, 2021), Chrissy Teigen leaving Twitter due to toxic online harassment (c.f. Rao, 2021), and at the time of writing, Britney Spears’s highly mediated court statement against her conservatorship during which she criticised her family, management team and paparazzi media for the traumatising and demoralising abuse she has been forced to endure (Spears, cited in Aswad, 2021). Each of these celebrities explicitly call out the misogynistic, abusive media culture which produced and circulated their image, and the ways in which they have either protected or removed themselves from it – or in Spears’s case, is publicly pleading to be removed from it. At the same time, one could read these examples as the very embodiment of the p-i-r: after all, these women are represented as strong, resilient survivors, and they nonetheless remain within the workings of capitalist celebrity culture and what Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018a) calls the ‘economy of visibility’.

I remain with these examples for my second point of inquiry. The figure of the girl is so often the central nexus of the p-i-r, and as I’ve discussed previously in Cultural Commons (Kennedy, 2020), during the global Coronavirus pandemic the figure of the ‘girl’ has been the spectacularly visible icon of resilience. On the one hand girls are seen energetically smiling and dancing their way through lockdown on TikTok to tens of millions of followers, like Charli D’Amelio or Addison Rae. Indeed perhaps TikTok is the epitome of what McRobbie terms – drawing on Jacqueline Rose’s Lacanian psychoanalytic work – the ‘mode of repetitive looking’ (p. 35) that is so key to girls’ culture: social media feeds filled with seconds-long videos of fun positivity playing on an endless loop. On the other hand, grown-up girl celebrities are calling out the toxic, misogynistic celebrity culture of the 2000s of their teen years (the height of the post-feminist era McRobbie wrote about previously) in the recent ‘post- #MeToo’ documentaries mentioned above, featuring Britney Spears, Demi Lovato, Paris Hilton and Taylor Swift. Indeed, these documentaries can be seen to fit into the contemporary moment of feminist campaigning and the seemingly left social agenda that McRobbie notes (p. 51) in the book: a context of

a wave of political awareness, protest and determination to challenge gender inequality. The p-i-r inserts itself within this fast-moving space, tempering its agenda for sexual justice by proposing a set of values more accommodation to contemporary capitalism.

These TikTok accounts and post-#MeToo documentaries complicate our existing understandings of the ways in incitements to resilience operate, but they nonetheless function in an economy of metrics to heighten the visibility and brand value of their celebrities.

Perhaps it should be no surprise that in a year in which we were called upon as citizens to be resilient, ² the luminosity of celebrity girls is brighter than ever: girls who have publicly articulated strength in the face of online bullying and harassment, or trauma and mental health struggles following sexual abuse, addiction, and a toxic celebrity media industry. I am returning us to McRobbie’s (2009) previous use of the Deleuzian concept of luminosity to describe the ways in which, during that earlier period of postfeminism, ‘Young women [were] put under a spotlight so that they become visible in a certain kind of way’ (p. 54) via a range of governmental technologies in the ‘new sexual contract’. Such luminosity – the way in which objects or subjects are given power through visibility created by flashes or shimmers of light (McRobbie, 2009: 60) – produces ‘spectacular modes of femininity’ (McRobbie, 2009). Again, we might say that D’Amelio or Rae on TikTok, or Spears, Lovato et al. in their documentaries exemplify this. I’m not suggesting that the global Coronavirus crisis has created the conditions for such luminosity, but the two overlap in a broader conjunctural moment of resilience – perhaps even intensifying the injunction to resilience in the very public face of the pandemic.

So my question here is: as feminist media and cultural studies scholars – and scholars of girlhood studies for which McRobbie’s work has been foundational – how might we be both careful to recognise the binaristic ways in which the girl subject is culturally constructed (success vs failure, ‘top-girl’ (McRobbie, 2009) vs workless single mother), but while avoiding the perpetuation of ‘ontologised dualisms’? I take the term ontologised dualisms from Russell Dudley-Smith and Natasha Whiteman’s (2020) critique of the ways in which social researchers tend to sort and label categories in relation to one another through the use of binaries. However, this can sometimes

impose the same and the other in ways that become self-evident to the extent that they can be taken as orders of being. These are ontologised dualisms in the sense that they are habitually taken for granted and naturalised by those recognising them. (Dudley-Smith and Whiteman, 2020: 50)

(Again, this is arguably a risk of some strands of psychoanalysis, hence its perceived out-of-placeness within contemporary feminist media and cultural theory). For Dudley-Smith and Whiteman (p. 48), ‘even the clearest, and least essentialised, research engagements can stumble over how to talk about gender without falling into the categories they critique’. As McRobbie (2020) notes, ‘the imperfect is in binary relation to the perfect’ (p. 44). The book has valuably prompted me to turn to my own analyses of mediated girlhood and ask: How can we recognise and critique the (as McRobbie puts it) divisive and polarising tactics such as those analysed in Feminism and the Politics of Resilience, while being sure not to assume or reproduce such ontologised dualisms of girlhood in our writing?