Gender and class in Britain and France

This article examines the treatment of women's oppression in feminist theory, focusing on the engagement of second wave feminists with the concept of class and its relation to gender. This examination is carried out with reference to British and French feminisms, identifying the main trends and shifts that have developed over the last 35 years and noting that while these are undoubtedly influenced by a particular national context they are also shaped by increasing European integration and social, political and cultural exchanges at a global level. The authors find evidence of a number of similarities in the questions that feminist theorists have asked in Britain and France but also demonstrate that there are significant differences. They conclude that areas of convergent theoretical interests will extend along with cross-border flows of peoples and information

What a girl’s gotta do: the labour of the biopolitical celebrity in austerity Britain

This article debunks the wide-spread view that young female celebrities, especially those who rise to fame through reality shows and other forms of media-orchestrated self-exposure, dodge ‘real’ work out of laziness, fatalism and a misguided sense of entitlement. Instead, we argue that becoming a celebrity in a neoliberal economy such as that of the United Kingdom, where austerity measures disproportionately disadvantage the young, women and the poor is not as irregular or exceptional a choice as previously thought, especially since the precariousness of celebrity earning power adheres to the current demands of the neoliberal economy on its workforce. What is more, becoming a celebrity involves different forms of labour that are best described as biopolitical, since such labour fully involves and consumes the human body and its capacities as a living organism. Weight gain and weight loss, pregnancy, physical transformation through plastic surgery, physical symptoms of emotional distress and even illness and death are all photographically documented and supplemented by extended textual commentary, usually with direct input from the celebrity, reinforcing and expanding on the visual content. As well as casting celebrity work as labour, we also maintain that the workings of celebrity should always be examined in the context of wider cultural and real economies

Facilitating healthy dietary habits:An experiment with a low income population

First published online: October 2020This paper tests an intervention aimed at facilitating (cognitively) the adoption of healthy dietary habits. We provide easy-to-understand information about the risks of developing diabetes or heart diseases and give easy-to-follow dietary recommendations to minimize these risks. We implement two variations, one consisting of generic information, the other consisting of information tailored to the individual, the latter resembling newly developed online health assessment tools. On top of the information treatment, we implement a second experimental variation encouraging people to spend more time thinking about their decisions. We find evidence that the information intervention leads to healthier choices in the short run, but mostly in the generic treatment. Surprisingly, we find that people are on average pessimistic about their health, and therefore receive good news on average when the information is tailored to them. We find no evidence that increasing the time available to make choices leads to healthier choices, and find no evidence of long-term changes in habits. These results do not support a bounded rationality explanation for poor dietary choices. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

The cultural politics of human rights and neoliberalism

Do human rights offer the potential to challenge neo-liberalism? I argue that rather than understanding human rights as ideology, as obscuring or legitimating neo-liberalism, it is more productive to see both human rights and neo-liberalism as hegemonic projects. In this article I explore convergences and divergences between dominant discourses and practices of human rights and neo-liberalism around key ideas ‘the state’, ‘the individual’ and ‘the nation’, to clear a space for appreciation of the cultural politics of human rights: divergences in constructions of responsibility and hierarchies of value of concrete individuals offer openings for challenging ideas and practices of neo-liberalism through campaigns for human rights