On joining the editorial team of European Journal of Cultural Studies in its 25th year

Abstract

In this essay, I discuss my appointment as co-editor of this journal within the context of its history across its 25 years of life thus far, as well as within the field of cultural studies more broadly. I briefly consider the value and crucial importance of conjunctural analysis, cultural studies’ complex but crucial relationship to Marxism, and the generative feminist possibilities of engaging with, rather than ignoring or wholly disavowing, ‘classic’ theories of media and culture that may be problematic or limited. I also briefly identify some areas of inquiry that I see as important focal points for future cultural studies scholarship, particularly around contemporary mutations of popular and conservative feminisms, popular left politics, and the ‘culture wars’.

My tenure as an editor of the European Journal of Cultural Studies begins a quarter of century after the journal made its entrance into the world. The first issue of EjCS was published in 1998; the journal came into being after the founding editors – Pertti Alasuutari, Ann Grey and Joke Hermes – had met at the ‘Crossroads in Cultural Studies’ conference at Tampere University, Finland, in July 1996. The very first words published in EjCS, in the editors’ introduction to the inaugural volume, were: ‘Cultural studies has always been contested terrain’. And indeed, many of the early articles published by the journal wrestled with large-scale, meta-reflections on the field: about cultural studies’ political purpose; the possibilities (but also seductive dangers) of its utopian rhetoric; and the vexed issue of its ‘origins’ (e.g. Ang, 1998; Grossberg, 1998; McNeil, 1998; Wright, 1998).

It is sobering to reflect on how much has changed since the inception of EjCS. At the time of the journal’s founding, the ‘third-way’ phase of neoliberalism was firmly in its ascendancy. ¹ The third way was ‘new’ in that it combined a Thatcherite embrace of marketisation, anti-trades unionism and privatisation, burnished with a rhetoric of ‘equality of opportunity’ – in contrast to the overt homophobia, misogyny, ethno-nationalism, and what Stuart Hall called the ‘regressive modernisation’ of the Thatcher project (Hall, 2021 [1998]). The ‘third way’ seemed to align with feminism, anti-racism and gay rights, but only on highly individualised, marketised terms – those which posed no meaningful challenge to neoliberal capitalism (see Littler, 2013, 2017). Cultural studies scholarship then, as now, has been crucial in getting a theoretical handle on the complex cultural politics of these moments, and their attendant possibilities and dangers for the left. For example, Angela McRobbie’s (2004, 2008) pathbreaking work on ‘postfeminism’ identified a ‘double entanglement’ in neoliberal media culture, whereby an acceptance of certain, ostensibly feminist notions (choice, empowerment, etc.) was articulated alongside a disavowal of collective feminist struggle. This was not a straightforward ‘backlash’ against feminism, but it played a key role in its ‘disarticulation’, and popular culture was a central site upon and through which this ‘complexification of backlash’ played out. Cultural studies scholarship within this journal (and in other journals and contexts beyond) has been crucial to theorising the ambivalent and contested role that culture, media and other forms of ‘everyday meaning-making’ have played in the broader reconfigurations of power.

Looking back at the journal’s emergence at the turn of the millennium, the social, political and cultural terrain in 2023 appears to be transformed. Of course, media technologies have been radically altered and developed, and have become ever-more imbricated in the most intimate zones of our lives. This has allowed for certain new aesthetic and expressive possibilities, and altered forms of connectivity and sociality, but it has also helped to usher in what James Bridle (2018) calls a ‘new dark age’ of deep political uncertainty, algorithmic surveillance, and power that is almost impossible to scrutinise. Ted Striphas (2015), in this journal, has pointed to the exponential rise of what he calls ‘algorithmic culture’; this is a form of culture that postures as open and democratic, but whose decision-making processes are deeply privatised and unaccountable. The outcome of this is not the hoped-for forms of ‘common culture’ or ‘crowd wisdom’, but a situation in which culture increasingly operates as ‘authoritative principle’, containing and suppressing antagonism. Other scholarship shows further glaring chasms between the democratic promises of digital culture and its actually existing, oppressive realities; for example, Ruha Benjamin’s (2019) research argues that while the tech industry makes spectacular promises of its own racialised neutrality and even benevolence, racial hierarchies are encoded and entrenched in its discriminatory designs. Helen Wood (2018), writing about a media sex scandal that went ‘viral’, suggests that the inter-relationship between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media is not so much transforming misogyny and class relations as it is symbolically intensifying classed and gendered disgust. Paul Gilroy (2019) discusses how the right has been able to exploit new media technologies, and particularly how a technologically sophisticated, white-supremacist ‘alt-right’ has developed ‘an elusive command of political and psychological communication via the libidinal and affective aspects of new technology in general, and social media in particular’ (p.3). Ultimately, for Gilroy (ibid.), this allows for a ‘re-branding’ of fascism, which, within this social media ecology, is now made to appear as ‘daring’ and ‘transgressive’.

Cultural studies are especially well placed to grasp the multidimensional nature of crises, and, specifically, the role of culture within them, which is often overlooked, dismissed or underplayed in other academic or political accounts. For example, in his book On Microfascism, Jack Bratich notes how we must not (only) conceptualise or recognise fascism as something ‘extraordinary’, spectacular, or as an organised ‘state affair’. Rather, we must pay close attention to the ordinariness of fascism within the domain of culture; he writes that:

culture is always political: not just in the sense of expressing political dynamics formed in other spheres, but as the realm where values, power relations, subjective encounters, and capacities for connection and freedom develop (Bratich, 2022: 19)

It is precisely by taking seriously those realms that are otherwise understood as non-political, non-productive, and non-material – realms which encompass the ‘ordinary’, the ‘everyday’, the ‘domestic’, ‘consumption’, and so on – and paying attention to how and where they interact with the official economy and the state – that we can better understand the operations of capitalist, racist and heteropatriarchal power.

Marxism without guarantees

As a project associated with the post-war New Left, cultural studies in many ways began as a ‘conversation’ with Marxism (see Hall, 2021). It sought to ‘radically amend’ some of the classical Marxist conceptions of culture and ideology, as Raymond Williams (1989 [1958]) put it – but this was with a view to building upon, expanding, and complicating ‘traditional’ Marxism, rather than disavowing it tout court. Stuart Hall (1986) pointed to the political potential born of the ‘theoretical tensions’ in the encounter between Marxism on the one hand and ‘cultural’ approaches (such as discourse analysis) on the other hand, and he lamented the ways that this theoretical tension had come to be ‘untied’, the conversation with a Marxist tradition most usually abandoned (p.32). He famously spoke of the need for a ‘Marxism without guarantees’; this is an approach which both eschews the reductionist economistic view of culture and ideas as simple expressions of the material base, but which also refuses the notion that culture and ideas can ever have power or effects that are wholly autonomous from material conditions. Raymond Williams’ methodology of ‘cultural materialism’ laid some of the crucial groundwork for this approach which would become the hallmark of so much cultural studies scholarship (see Moran, 2021).

In her book Feminism and the Politics of ‘Resilience’, Angela McRobbie (2020) recognises the value of the critiques of capitalism advanced by Marxist scholars Wolfgang Streeck and David Harvey; but she also points to the anti-feminist assumptions undergirding their arguments – for example, Streeck’s suggestion that it is middle-class women entering the workforce who have been responsible for the decline in ‘worker militancy’ and trade union power (pp.82–86). She also points out how much Marxist sociology and theory lacks any sustained analysis of culture and the media, and she draws on the work of Hall and O’Shea (2013) to demonstrate the crucial, complex roles that language, ideas and representation play in the reproductions and adaptations of neoliberal power.

My own research interests lie primarily in the complex and historically shifting relationships between feminism(s) and media culture, and my work has focussed on questions of gender, voice and ‘communicative injustice’ within popular and political culture (Kay, 2020, 2022). I have also written about the gendered politics of anger in the context of the #MeToo movement (Kay, 2019; Kay and Banet-Weiser, 2019; Kay, 2023). More recently, I have turned to study the ‘femosphere’, the diverse ecology of women’s online communities including ‘femcels’ (Kay, 2021) and ‘female dating strategists’, which, on the one hand, have arisen in defensive reaction against the misogynistic manosphere, and yet which, on the other, tend towards replication of its genetic determinism, gender essentialism and anti-utopian, fatalistic, nihilistic politics (Kay, 2022). In all of this work, I have been profoundly influenced by, and continue to be inspired by, feminist media and cultural studies scholarship and the vibrant academic community of scholars within this field.

Engaging with difficulty

I am also drawn to the notion of cultural studies as a ‘magpie’ academic project, one which ‘has its own distinctive cast’, and yet which ‘likes to borrow glittering concepts from other nests’ (Barker, 2004: xvii) and in this regard I have been influenced by feminist political theorists, disability scholars, and philosophers such as Amia Srinivasan, Audre Lorde, M. Remi Yergeau, Wendy Brown and Nancy Fraser. I also value the work of scholars who critically engage with thinkers and ideas which may be problematic or insufficient in many ways, but which still offer the valuable potential for feminist critique and analysis. For example, Sarah Sharma (2022) engages with Marshall McLuhan’s distinctly non-feminist theory of ‘the medium is the message’, and argues for a feminist ‘retrieval’ of it, without reinstalling McLuhan as the ‘great father’ of media studies or pledging any allegiance to him. For Sharma, this media theory can (and should) be used for ‘feminist ends’. Gail Lewis (2007) has drawn on the work of Raymond Williams, which despite its ‘failure to incorporate racialising practices into his conceptualisation and analysis of culture’, still has important value as a model for helping us to understand how ordinary culture and everyday practices are racialised and racialising.

In a paper I co-wrote with Helen Wood, we took Raymond Williams’ theorisation of the ‘country and the city’ – where he argues that the false dichotomisation of these two realms has played a key ideological role in sustaining capitalism – and we sought to develop and extend his approach with feminist and anti-racist theory. We did this to understand how the city-country distinction within cultural representation both obscures and supports the specifically heteropatriarchal and racialised bases of capitalist power (Kay and Wood, 2022). For me, the thinkers we engage do not need to offer a complete or perfect theoretical framework to be of value; to disavow, dismiss or refuse all such forms of scholarship is to miss out on the intellectual and feminist possibilities that may be generated by thinking with and/or against them.

While I now see cultural studies as my intellectual ‘home’, having worked at this journal as an editorial assistant since 2015, and then as editor of the short-form Cultural Commons section from 2020 to 2023, I was something of a latecomer in my academic career to cultural studies. I had studied certain strands of critical, cultural and feminist theory during my undergraduate study in English Literature in the 2000s (see Kay, 2017), but it was not until I undertook a PhD in feminist television studies supervised by Helen Wood (an editor of this journal between 2011 and 2023) that I came into sustained contact with something called ‘cultural studies’. It was then that I began to read writers such as Charlotte Brunsdon, Stuart Hall and Angela McRobbie. I found their writing – and the ways that they openly grappled with the thorniest and most complex of questions – exhilarating and vitalising, both intellectually and politically. Indeed, it seemed to me that they made engaging with difficulty their central task – facing head-on into questions about the relationships between feminism and femininity, class and race, capitalism and culture. I have always been drawn to the ways that cultural studies scholars, when confronted with problems that others may see as too difficult, too knotty, too insurmountably complex or unpindownable to negotiate, do not skip past, evade or sidle around them. Rather, to borrow a term from Donna Haraway (2016), they stay with the trouble. While undoubtedly most humanities and social science scholars would define their scholarship as having interests in questions of power, politics and injustice, what I have always found so stimulating and urgent about cultural studies was that interrogating and intervening in these things are the whole point.

Openness and specificity

It has often been noted how cultural studies, and its most valuable political and intellectual contributions, are characterised by a sense of both looseness and specificity – in disciplinary and historical terms, respectively. While hostile and conservative critics of cultural studies mistakenly read this sense of ‘openness’ as a substandard non-rigorousness or methodological sloppiness, cultural studies scholarship is actually characterised by a radical insistence on specificity, through the particular approach of conjunctural analysis. For Jeremy Gilbert (2019), conjunctural analysis entails ‘very precisely mapping the specificity of the present, of situating current developments historically, of looking out for political threats and opportunities’; and insisting on ‘the crucial importance of the question “what does this have to do with everything else?” when examining any phenomenon, however minute’ (p.5). The openness, uncertainty and radical doubt of the cultural studies project are its strengths, not weaknesses; this is a point that was emphasised in the founding editorial introduction of this journal: ‘[o]f course cultural studies has a somewhat unclear identity, but this openness is its greatest quality [. . .] our guiding principle will be that the traditions and future of cultural studies are best served by keeping an open mind’ (Alasuutari et al., 1998: 7–10).

Cultural studies analyses of particular texts, forms or events should always be co-articulated with a committed analysis of context; and this demands difficult, politically engaged, critical-intellectual work on the part of the researcher/writer. To identify the salient elements of the broader context within which to situate and theorise texts is challenging, often painstaking work; as Charlotte Brunsdon (2021) writes, the ‘determination of what constitutes the contextual is in some ways the key methodological question’ (p.7, my emphasis). Writing about Stuart Hall’s approach to analysis, Brunsdon (2021) notes that his ‘interest in a particular text is always part of a larger project: nothing less than an anatomy of the balance of forces, the vicissitudes of power and resistance’ (pp.2–3). It is this approach to research on cultural texts, practices, phenomena, and institutions – one that always locates them within a broader critical context, and that conducts conjuncturally specific analyses as part of a larger intellectual and political project – that I see as especially important.

When this journal was founded, part of its vision was to expand the dominant conception of cultural studies as narrowly defined by anchoring in Britain, and to ‘de-centre’ Birmingham as the originary site of the field (Wright, 1998). The inclusion of ‘European’ in the journal’s title was not so much a strong affiliation with a particular geo-political territory or identity, so much as a pragmatic signalling of the editorial team’s locatedness in the UK, the Netherlands and Finland. More recently, the desire to explicitly signal the journal’s transnational interests beyond ‘Europe’, as well as the need to bring ‘race’ much more squarely into the critical purview of cultural studies, were articulated by Anamik Saha and Yui Fai Chow upon their appointments as editors (Chow and Saha, 2020). This chimes with broader feminist, anti-racist and decolonial calls for critical cultural studies scholarship – that which moves beyond the politically foreclosing frames of single nation-states, as well as beyond hyper-specialisation within bounded topic areas – and instead which employs ‘transversal categories to connect seemingly unrelated cases’, as Radha S. Hegde (2021) puts it (p.704). This transversal, transnational – or, in Paul Gilroy’s terms, planetary – cultural studies is needed to illuminate the interconnected, multidimensional nature of contemporary crisis; a crisis which is both global in scale, and yet which is distributed and experienced in extremely uneven and unequal ways.

Looking ahead

A few years ago, as the journal celebrated its 20th anniversary, the editors noted how readers had particularly sought out the journal for scholarship in three key areas: postfeminism; television (especially that which went ‘beyond textual analysis’); and labour within in the creative/cultural industries (Hermes et al., 2017). Three new articles on these respective topics were commissioned (Banks and O’Connor, 2017; Geraghty, 2017; Gill, 2017), and three associated ‘dossiers’ of publications from the EjCS archives were assembled ² ; these three key areas continue to be important focal points for the journal. In keeping with the cultural studies ethos of intellectual openness and capaciousness, I do not wish to set down any prescriptions for the kinds of scholarship that I might like to see published, but there are some areas of inquiry that I see as important and generative sites for research and theorisation, as the journal moves into the second quarter-century of its life.

First, the cultural politics of what Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018) calls ‘popular feminism’, and also popular ‘left’ politics more broadly, seem to be in a(nother) period of flux or mutation. New forms of hitherto apparently unassimilable political discourses – specifically anti-capitalist and intersectional feminist discourses – are becoming mainstreamed; or at least they appear to be. In this journal, Jonathan Dean has argued that the emergence of a popular left politics in recent years, and its articulation within popular culture (with the singer-songwriter Marina Diamindis an exemplar), does not necessarily challenge neoliberal hegemony, even when an apparently anti-capitalist position is articulated. Dean (2023) argues, rather, that ‘ostensibly anti-neoliberal sensibilities are, paradoxically, afforded a certain status, cachet and visibility within digitally mediated neoliberal culture’ (p.3). Referring to Stuart Hall’s argument that popular culture can be an arena for both ‘containment’ and resistance’, Dean suggests that the former logic is more active in the contemporary conjuncture.

At the same time, a regressive ‘gender critical feminism’ is now becoming increasingly pronounced and endorsed in mainstream media; unlike the ‘popular feminism’ identified by Banet-Weiser (2018) that manifests in celebrity and pop culture, this form of feminism does not merely remain at the level of visibility, but is gaining traction and feeding into electoral politics and official policy-making. This is a form of ‘feminism’ which, aligning as it does with a broader movement against ‘gender ideology’, is easily and enthusiastically taken up by various shades of neoliberal, centrist and right-wing politics – even as it appropriates ‘progressive’ or ‘radical’ political symbols (such as those of the suffragette movement ³ ). All of this, in different ways, points to the need for critical scholarly attention to the ways that feminism – and specifically left, trans-inclusionary, intersectional and abolitionist feminisms – can be disarticulated or contained even as certain strands of ‘feminist’ discourse appear to be mainstreamed, legitimised or popularised.

However, as per Gilbert’s formulation, conjunctural analysis involves looking for ‘opportunities’ as well as ‘threats’. In this cultural studies spirit – of identifying more hopeful glimmers and counterhegemonic tendencies alongside pessimistic analyses of containment – Jo Littler (an editor of this journal) points to a remarkable resurgence of ‘left feminism’ since the global financial crisis of 2008, which is manifest in multiple feminist and workers’ movements in different geographical contexts (Littler, 2023). This resurgent left feminism also finds expression in popular media – such as Netflix’s Enola Holmes 2 and its representation of the 1888 matchgirls’ strike against toxic working conditions in east London, bringing the history of women’s labour struggles into the popular realm (Littler, 2022).

Second, while I recognise that historically some debates within (and against) cultural studies have often been unproductive, and even painful, I also find it instructive to understand and engage with those who criticise or disagree with the very premises and purposes of cultural studies, particularly from left perspectives (such as Vivek Chibber, 2017, 2022). Such engagement with cultural studies’ critics on the left can help to sharpen analysis, renew a sense of political purpose, and maintain cultural studies’ foundational, vitalising, if always-contested relationship with Marxist thinking. This kind of engagement seems particularly important at the moment, in the context of the ‘culture wars’, in which spurious ‘debates’ about trans women, critical race theory, ‘identity politics’ and ‘cancel culture’ dominate headlines, media commentaries, and politicians’ cynical soundbites. Many voices on the left argue for simply not engaging with such ‘cultural’ questions, and rather keeping political energies focussed squarely on ‘economic’ or ‘bread and butter’ issues. However, while the culture wars are indeed cynically and harmfully fomented, manipulated and exploited by the reactionary right, this does not mean that we should think of such issues intrinsically as a ‘distraction’ from ‘real’, ‘material’ issues – or as ‘merely cultural’, in Judith Butler’s formulation. As Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (2022) argues:

the view of ‘culture wars’ as purely distractions from ‘real’ political struggle is seriously mistaken. The idea that concrete, ‘material’ issues ought to mean a narrow focus on jobs and the economy – and not, say, uteruses – seems hard to justify

Cultural study approaches, particularly from those feminist traditions which have always understood politics to encompass social reproduction, and to transgress the public/private binary, can thus help to add vital nuance to analyses of the ‘culture wars’, while refusing the bad-faith, regressive terms of the ‘debates’ through which they are dominantly conducted.

I hope that I can play a part in continuing this journal’s role in cultivating, defending and promoting a critical scholarly space; one that maintains a sense of radical openness at the same time that it is grounded in cultural studies traditions of left critique, feminism, anti-racism and social justice. No one working in the contemporary university (or academic publishing, for that matter) can claim to be immune from, or to occupy a position of distanced purity or externality in relation to the neoliberal disciplinary power mechanisms of marketisation, metricisation, rankings, ‘impact factors’ and so on. But one of the reasons that I feel so privileged to be a part of this journal is its ongoing commitment to cultural studies not only as an intellectual, but equally importantly as a political, project. This is a project whose value should not be conceived according to the soul-sapping, intellectual irrelevancies that are neoliberal metrics, but according to the contributions it makes to analysing how power and injustice operate – and thus to providing, in the words of Raymond Williams, resources of hope.