‘Video Replay: Families, films and fantasy’ as a transformational text: Commentary on Valerie Walkerdine’s ‘Video Replay’

In this commentary I explore the significance of Valerie Walkerdine's paper ‘Video Replay: Families, Films and Fantasy’. I review its impact in 1986 and then discuss how some of its ideas about subjectivity and popular culture – specifically film - can be developed in the contemporary context. A recurring fantasy of Rocky II and its reception is that of social and psychological transformation. I address this theme by drawing on the work of Christopher Bollas to argue that Walkerdine's psychosocial analysis continues to facilitate, across a range of contexts, some of the transformational processes described in her article

Turning to Flirting: Politics and the Pleasures of Boris Johnson

Johnson is often cited as the celebrity politician par excellence, whose eccentric yet charismatic persona provides an antidote to the technocratic, managerial style closely associated with New Labour governments since 1997. Johnson’s image is meant to be that of an un-spun ‘Tory toff’, whose brand of English eccentricity is said to appeal to people across party political lines. I want to argue that alongside the idiosyncratic nature of his political persona, Johnson’s playful performance as Mayor of London also provides an example of a wider, flirtatious turn in British political culture, a phenomenon which has come to the fore as part of the mediatisation of politics in a post-ideological era of postmodern political parties

Spinning, Spooning and the Seductions of Flirtatious Masculinity in Contemporary Politics

This paper explores the relationships between masculinity, flirtation and fantasy within the promotional arena of politics and PR. Flirtation is associated with coquetry and play, connoting a lack of seriousness, and in political flirtation, the desire to move between different opinions and ideas. Flirtation is often linked with femininity. Yet against a backdrop of masculinity in crisis, the study of flirtation, with its connotations of ambiguity and frustrated desire, is useful to explore the uncertainties of masculinities today. Dilemmas about flirtation as a tantalising performance resonate with misgivings about the seductive nature of political spin and the desire of politicians to woo audiences by flirting to the camera. Taking examples of politicians such as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Barack Obama, this paper discusses the possibilities of flirtatious masculinity as a counter-hegemonic strategy within the symbolic battleground of Western politics, a struggle largely played out in print and digital media

Framing the Mobile Phone: The Psychopathologies of an Everyday Object

This article proposes that the affective processes that shape our relationship to the world of digital consumption and communication can be illuminated further when viewed through a lens of object relations psychoanalysis. We focus on the use of the mobile phone as both an object in the world and of the psyche in order to reflect upon its uses as an evocative object that shapes the psychosocial boundaries of experience in everyday life. We argue that in contrast to the concepts of interpersonal communication that can be found in some domains of popular culture and in communication studies, object relations psychoanalysis can be usefully deployed in order to explore the unconscious attachments that develop in relation to consumer objects, allowing for the complexity of feeling and reflection that may emerge in relation to them and the potential spaces of the mind. The mobile phone’s routine uses and characteristics are widely understood. At the same time, the mobile phone invites critical reflections that identify a paradoxical object of both creative and pathological use. Such reflexivity includes the mobile’s relationship to the complexity of psychosocial experience within the contemporary cultural moment. Applying the ideas of psychoanalysts Donald Winnicott, Thomas Ogden and Christopher Bollas, we argue that one explanation for why the mobile phone continues to attract not only enthusiastic cultural commentary but also a degree of apprehension across academic and popular-discursive settings can be found in its capacity to both disrupt and connect as an object of attachment and as a means of unconscious escap

Masculinity, affect and the search for certainty in an age of precarity.

This article examines the affective dynamics of masculinity as a psychosocial process within a mediatised realm that includes parts of the informal cyberspace known as the Manosphere. Focusing on the relationship between masculinity and discourses of men’s rights, we explore the implications of the shifting psychosocial and political legacy of that relationship since the late 20th century for the shaping of masculinities today, where the psychosocial dynamics of victimisation and of being ‘done to’ are recurring themes. We ground our analysis of contemporary masculinity through a case study of the online media coverage of the controversial Canadian Professor of Psychology, Jordan Peterson, and discuss the nature of his appeal for his followers on Reddit and YouTube. Peterson has become a celebrity public intellectual and his pronouncements on issues such as free speech, education and gender politics resonate for those men who feel confused and persecuted by the forces of feminism and identity politics. We argue that Peterson’s affective appeal is linked more widely to a public mood underpinned by a defensive wish for certainty in an age of precarity

On not being a fan: Masculine Identity, DVD Culture and the Accidental Collector

Recent work on DVD and home cinema technologies, audience and the context of reception has tended to focus on fandom, privileging the fanaticism that underpins the etymology of that term. This article is premised on focus group work that suggests, in counterpoint, that many contemporary collectors of DVDs do not see themselves as ‘fans’. What does this mean for the discourses that are developing around the consumption of new media technologies and their role in everyday life? Drawing on interview material, this article discusses the relationship between Western masculinity and the phenomenon of DVD collection. It considers the pleasures of this activity alongside the spaces of resistance it produces and we argue that commentary that interprets such phenomena in terms of fetishism does not account fully enough for what is at stake. Drawing on object relations psychoanalysis, we suggest that the material object of the DVD works in tandem with its psychical equivalent to produce new spaces of exploration and creativity for men. Against the backdrop of the commonplace assumption that masculinity is in ‘crisis’, we suggest that men make use of technologies to forge new spaces of interaction with one another, arguing that this creates new formations through which to think about the cultural structuration of homosociality and its creative potential

The Psychodynamics of Casino Culture and Politics

The metaphor of the casino, with its associations of risk, uncertainty and illusion resonate at different levels of the contemporary cultural and political imagination where notions of chance and luck – together with the arbitrariness of being either a ‘winner’ or a ‘loser’ are pervading themes. This article discusses the notion of casino culture as a psycho-cultural formation and its relationship to the emergence of what I call ‘casino politics’. The article deploys a psycho-cultural approach that combines cultural and political analyses with object relations psychoanalysis in order to examine the cultural and unconscious investments that underpin the ideology of casino culture and its politics – particularly in the contemporary context of Brexit politics in the UK and Donald Trump’s Presidency in the US, where manic fantasies associated with gambling are mobilised as a defence against loss and uncertainty

Affect and Emotion

Psychoanalytic theory can shed light on the emotions and affects that are rooted in the unconscious processes and that are stirred up in relation to political events. Global socioeconomic crises, together with the mediatization of party politics and its links to a celebrity-oriented promotional culture, have contributed to the emotionalization of contemporary politics. Its affective dynamics can be found in the populist content and style of the 2016 UK Brexit referendum and in the 2016 US presidential campaign. This chapter applies psychoanalytic understandings of affect to examples taken from those campaigns, where the emotive language of love, hate, and desire has been used to court the electorate

Affect and Emotion

Psychoanalytic theory can shed light on the seemingly irrational feelings or ‘affects’ that are rooted in the unconscious and which are stirred up in relation to political processes and events. Global socio-economic crises together with the mediatisation of party politics and its links to a celebrity-orientated promotional culture, have all contributed to the emotionalisation of contemporary politics. Its affective dynamics can be found in the populist content and style of the recent UK Brexit referendum, or in the 2016 US Presidential campaign. This chapter applies psychoanalytic understandings of affect to examples taken from those campaigns, where the emotive language of love, hate and desire have been used to court the electorate