Spike, sex and subtext: intertextual portrayals of the sympathetic vampire on cult television

The vampire Spike of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the latest in a long line of a mbiguous but sympathetic vampires which have caught the public imagination, stretching back to Polidori’s Byronesque vampire, Lord Ruthven. This article argues that the vampire image that circulates across contemporary vampire fan cultures is one that exceeds any individual depiction of the vampire; the sympathetic vampire operates as a metatext for vampire fans who draw on textual cues to interpret vampires sympathetically, even when the text itself does not. In the case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the text overtly encourages a sympathetic subtextual reading of Spike by linking his glamour, sex appeal and rebellion to a hinted-at unseen suffering, which is easily recognized by fans. Fans read Spike’s bad-boy pose as symbolic of hidden pathos. Indeed, the text adopts conventions associated with fan fiction in order to encourage and sustain a surrounding fan culture

Muslim Women, Citizenship and Racism: From the Symbol of Nation to Anti-national Threat

The criteria for Muslims being labelled as anti-national is increasingly simplified. As Britain is rapidly shrinking itself into a province while glorifying its imperial past and historical power, the racialisation of citizenship has set up a further national hierarchy. Citizenship is no longer a right but a “privilege”. The nation is often discursively gendered female and that women are used as symbolic markers of cultural purity and national honour, so that policing women has been historically justified as “protecting the nation”. This paper critically examines the prominence of representations of Muslim women in racist discourse, including the relationship between gendered anti-Muslim racism and the creation of a hostile policy environment which undermines the rights of Muslim citizens in the name of security. Media and political representations of Muslim women are both durable and flexible; so, while early twenty-first media and political narratives presented Muslim women as ‘victims’ (of Islam and Muslim men) to justify war leading up to the invasion of Afghanistan, more recent reworkings present veiled Muslim women as a ‘terror threat’. This current representation has its roots in the undermining of anti-colonial struggles (such as the Algerian struggle for independence from the French empire in the early to mid-twentieth century) but is now put into service for a range of political purposes, particularly sanctioning violent border policies and justifying a growing body of discriminatory assimilationist laws. This paper assesses in detail the case of Shamima Begum, who had her UK citizenship revoked in 2019 following a lengthy legal battle. Through qualitative analysis of UK Home Office statements, blogs and press releases and their circulation in news media, as well as legal judgements on the case and their circulation in the news media. This paper exams how Begum’s revoked citizenship by the British state and her treatment in the press, exemplifies much of the purposes and gendered structure of contemporary anti-Muslim racism. It argues that both state and media actors constructed the then 15 year old as a ‘terror threat’ as part of a move to put into law and justify the notion of ‘contingent citizenship’ in a context in which many British Muslims and members of the British Windrush generation are being denied citizenship and the rights that go with it

The British State, Citizenship Rights and Gendered Folk Devils: The Case of Shamima Begum

The revoking of Shamima Begum’s citizenship exemplifies much of the purposes of contemporary anti-Muslim racism and underlines its significant gendered element. Both state and media actors constructed the 15-year old as a problematic other, both to justify conditional citizenship ideologically, and to use her case to strengthen and add to the framework for making it legal. This comes in a context in which British Muslims and members of the British Windrush generation are being denied citizenship and the rights that go with it. We argue that Shamima Begum’s construction as a gendered folk devil must be understood in the context of nation states shifting their purpose and legitimacy from ‘civil rights’ to ‘national security’ and strengthening two-tier citizenship rights to control residents of colour, increase the state’s authoritarian purpose and, as part of an ongoing process, to transform the concept of ‘national security’ into legal reality, to further militarise the state and its borders against the ‘migrant crisis’ and, ultimately, to stifle dissent

Disrupting or reconfiguring racist narratives about Muslims? The representation of British Muslims during the Covid crisis

This article examines British newspaper coverage of Muslims during the first wave of the Coronavirus crisis. A well-established trajectory of research shows that Muslims are negativized in mainstream media representation in the UK. However, it became obvious from the outset of the pandemic, that ethnic minority key workers were disproportionately affected by Coronavirus. This, alongside high levels of support for NHS staff, had the potential to challenge and shift established narratives about Muslims as questions of structural discrimination became the subject of news media discourse. This article examines whether these events were able, even momentarily, to disrupt dominant narratives about Muslims in the UK or whether the pandemic provided further opportunity for Othering discourses to be perpetuated. In the context of a tumultuous political landscape, where the politics of immigration have been linked to the politics of austerity, Muslims have been scapegoated as a threat to the nationalist project. In this context, the identifier ‘Muslim’ is only deemed relevant if it signifies ‘difference’, or to distinguish between good versus bad Muslim/immigrant. Hence, in the context of the reporting of Coronavirus, racist discourses have been reshaped as Muslim key workers are distinguished in the reporting from other Muslims. We examine how these representational practices play out through an analysis of four British newspapers (The Sun, Daily Mail, The Telegraph and The Mirror) over a months’ coverage at the peak of the crisis (April, 2020)

Critiquing the Vocabularies of the Marketized University

Article in special issue of 'Media Theory' on "Critique, Postcritique and the Present Conjuncture" Critique is in crisis. Spaces in the university, where critique once flourished under the banner of academic freedom, have been appropriated and hollowed out of meaning. External pressures from the failed project of privatisation of higher education in the UK result in internal pressures from a marketized model of university management that sees critical thinking as branding content to influence market share, rather than relevance for (social) science. This paper considers how the deeds and vocabularies of neoliberalism and the market operate in academic institutions to shape the context in which critical scholarship takes place – a context in which alternative possibilities of what education should or could be for outside of “growth”, “choice” “value for money” and preparation for work, are becoming increasingly rarely envisioned. Simultaneously, academic institutions have appropriated some of the vocabulary of critique, hollowing it out so that it can be consumed without challenging the business objectives that now structure higher education. The thoroughgoing renaming of institutional practices and their sanctioned practice and operation in the context of the ongoing destruction of the university as a public good are tied to the new institutional practices, in an effort to pressurise those who work in higher education to accept that there is no alternative. We consider the consequences of these practices and argue that, in this context, critical scholarship must also be tied to resistance, both to the vocabularies of the neoliberal university, as well as to its actions. Critique ought to expand our understanding of the possible while demonstrating that existing reality in academia and beyond can be contested in practice

Celebrity culture and exploitation: the case of reality TV

There has been much important work on the role that celebrity culture has played in providing working class audiences with a popular image of meritocracy – fuelled as it has been historically by the myth that anyone can ‘make it’, the sham that fame and fortune are open to all and are desirable (Dyer, 1979). Contemporary television culture has advanced that myth, as more and more ordinary people seem to ‘make it’ on reality TV, even while they are often denigrated. However, instead of focusing on representation, this paper will examine the role of ordinary celebrity in the political economy of the television industry. Producers of reality television came to rely on formats built around ‘ordinary’ celebrity in order to undermine the power of unions representing workers in the US and UK television industries at the end of the 1990s. As in other industries, television attempted to address the challenges thrown up by the development of digital technology, increased competition and rising costs by attacking workers conditions. Unscripted, devoid of actors and less dependent on the skills of other creative and technical personnel, reality TV was able to temporarily side-step unionised labour in the US, while in the UK government policy forced public service broadcasters to outsource to independent companies, who were, unlike the workers in the BBC, non-unionised and often on precarious contracts. Thus an examination of the political economy of reality TV completely undermines the claims made by cultural populists that ordinary celebrity represents ‘democratainment’ (Hartley, 1999 and 2008). But it also opens up questions about the more critical view that reality TV is part of a broader shift in patterns of the social relations of exploitation (Andrejevic 2003, Terranova 2004), whereby ’free’ activities like the ‘work of watching’ TV’ or using the internet are considered to be a mode of exploited labour when media organisations ‘capture’ it and turn it to profit. This is seen to mark a new ubiquitous mode of exploitation that extends out of the factory and workplace and into the ‘social factory’ which is considered to be commensurate with the prominence of media communication and of digitised information in contemporary capitalism (Castells 1996). From this perspective all our activities can by understood as a form of exploitation, where work and leisure are collapsed together in an inescapable web of capitalist domination. This paper will challenge that view by returning to the explanation of exploitation found in Marx’s labour theory of value, to argue that there are important differences between the exploited labour of workers in the media industries and the way that audiences are taken advantage of. Furthermore, the requirement of the television industry to make a profit necessitates attacking the conditions of those who work in the industry and this directly clashes with workers’ need to minimize the rate at which surplus is extracted from their labour, (that is, the rate of exploitation) in order to have a decent life, or at least to be able to sustain themselves. Paradoxically, those companies who exploit workers also directly rely on the surplus value they create, which gives workers in the television industry the collective capacity and potential power to resist, and in the process perhaps, to call for new forms of television reality, both in form and in meaning

Liberalism is not Friend of Gender Equality’

Historically, liberal thought was not aligned with female emancipation or gender equality. The idea that women were inferior to men and needed to be kept in a state of dependency was not a betrayal of liberalism – instead, it was at the heart of liberal thinking