Framing the cuts: an analysis of the BBC’s discursive framing of the ConDem cuts agenda

This study analyses the discursive framing of the British government’s economic policies by BBC News Online. Specifically, it focuses on the coverage of the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review in 2010, in which the details of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s broader ‘austerity’ agenda were released. Using frame analysis informed by critical theory, we analyse three online BBC features and compare their framing of the economic crisis – and the range of possible policy responses to it – with that of the government’s. In addition, we analyse editorial blogs and training materials associated with the BBC’s special ‘Spending Review season’; we also situate the analysis in the historical context of the BBC’s relationship with previous governments at moments of political and economic crisis. Contrary to dominant ideas that the BBC is biased to the left, our findings suggest that its economic journalism discursively normalises neoliberal economics, not necessarily as desirable, but certainly as inevitable

'The race for space':capitalism, the country and the city in Britain under Covid 19

This article draws on the work of Raymond Williams (1973) to argue that under covid-19 the dominant ‘ways of seeing’ the countryside and the city in Britain have been a key way of obscuring the structural violence of capitalism through which the virus is experienced. Cultural narratives of ‘exodus’ from urban areas have abounded in British media, fuelling a material ‘race for space’ as the middle class rush to buy up rural properties. Across social media, the ‘cottagecore’ aesthetic has proliferated, offering privatised solutions to the crisis through nostalgic imagery of pastoral escape. Nineteenth century discourses of the city in which bodies become transcoded as ‘dirt’ were rearticulated: the racialized bodies of migrant workers were framed as ‘modern slaves’ in the ‘dark factories’ of Leicester; this became the nation’s ‘dirty secret’ which needed to be ‘rooted out’’ and blamed for the spread of the virus. We argue that these binary narratives and aesthetics of a bountiful, white countryside and an infested, racialized city are working to obscure the deep structural causes of poverty, inequality and immiseration. We develop Williams’s analysis to show how these cultural imaginaries also help to sustain the gendered and racialized division of labour under capitalism, arguing that the country-city distinction, and the material inequalities it obscures, ought to become a more central focus for cultural studies itself

Book review: Consumerism on TV: Popular Media from the 1950s to the Present

[First paragraph] n the twentieth century, the development of consumer society in the West was inextricably bound up with the development of television, and the medium continues to be a key site where the culture of consumerism impacts upon and even becomes part of our subjectivities. This is one of the central claims of the new edited collection Consumerism on TV: Popular Media from the 1950s to the Present, which presents original chapters on the multiple, complex and historically shifting relationships between television and consumption from the mid-twentieth century to the contemporary moment. In the preface, the editor Alison Hulme argues that there is ‘a psychology of consumption built into the very fabric of much popular television in the twenty-first century’ (xiv), and it is this complex intertwinement that the diverse range of chapters seeks to interrogate. It is not just the representations of consumerism on television screens that the collection is concerned with, but also how the very modes of television continue to shape thinking around consumption and subjectivity

Re-enchanting the crisis: reflections on rurality, futurity, and Covid-19 in the UK

Since the sudden, mass experience of spatial contraction through lockdown in the Covid-19 pandemic, ‘nature’ has come to the symbolic fore in diverse and teeming ways. Amidst the anxiety, anger and the escalating inequalities, I have been struck – from within my particular context in the United Kingdom – by a discernible aesthetic shift in my social media feeds, where there is a new visibility of, and perhaps a re-enchantment by, the natural world. My Facebook and Instagram feeds are now fertile grounds for friends’ photos of wildflowers, spring blossoms, spinneys and streams, whether in country fields, home gardens or municipal parks. Other friends are sharing images of their first forays into home horticulture, surprised by their own joy at sprouting beans in windowsill pots. [Opening paragraph from introduction

Introduction: Anger, media and feminism: the gender politics of mediated rage

Over the last few years, we have been witnessing an extraordinary new visibility of women’s anger. Since the election of Trump in the US and the unprecedented disclosures of gendered abuse that characterised #MeToo, female anger seems to be registering in ways that it has seldom done in recent decades. As Rebecca Traister (2018, 2) puts it in her bestselling book Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger—itself a part of the remarkable boom in publishing on female fury—“The contemporary reemergence of women’s rage as a mass impulse comes after decades of feminist deep freeze.” Significantly, this new registering of rage is occurring not only in the sphere of politics and protest as they are normatively understood; women’s anger is increasingly legible within popular and commercial cultural forms. Rage, it seems, is becoming all the rage. In relation to television, the feminist writer Laura Bates (2018) has pointed to “a plethora of furious female on-screen heroines, from tough-talking survivor Jessica Jones to rebel handmaid Offred.” Elsewhere, I have suggested that we are witnessing a “celebritisation” of anger, in which globalised media culture appears to be newly accommodating of (certain kinds of) female fury in the wake of #MeToo, as part of popular culture’s broader turn to “wokeness” (Jilly Boyce Kay Forthcoming)

Arriving late to the party? Histories of cultural studies as resources of hope

This review article critically considers two recently published books, both of which contend with the complex relationship between cultural studies’ history, present and future, albeit in extraordinarily different ways. Cultural Studies 50 Years On: History, Practice and Politics, edited by Kieran Connell and Matthew Hilton, is a collection of essays that emerged from a 2014 conference that explored the legacy and influence of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Why Cultural Studies? is a searing, single-authored polemic by Gilbert B Rodman on the current state of cultural studies and a rallying call to reinvigorate the project by resuscitating its leftist impulses. In this article, I consider what these two books might offer in the way of intellectual, political and emotional resources for hope in the contemporary conjuncture; the ways that the books negotiate the inevitable partiality and the hidden personal politics of their own narratives; as well as the ways they implicitly invite personal, subjective reflection about one’s relationship to the histories and traditions of cultural studies. I end with a reflection about the challenges, but also the generative value, of revisiting painful and difficult debates within the field

Abject desires in the age of anger: incels, femcels, and the gender politics of unfuckability

This chapter questions why, in contemporary culture, involuntary celibacy is so narrowly associated with white masculinity. To this end, it explores the hyper-visible figure of the white male incel, but also draws attention to the little-known contemporary phenomenon of “femcels” – or women who are involuntarily celibate – and the ways that they are rendered illegible because of widespread assumptions that any women can find sexual partners. It situates this illegibility of the femcel in a broader context in which women’s psychic suffering, exclusions and humiliations are not countenanced as political problems – if they are made visible at all. White male ressentiment, humiliation and exclusion, on the other hand, are continually politicized and offered up as emblems of the angry zeitgeist, and white men are understood as uniquely disadvantaged and “left behind” by globalization. The chapter considers a range of media representations of both incels and femcels in relation to feminist theories of romantic suffering, white supremacy and sexual redistribution. It argues that exclusions from sex and intimacy can be considered as political problems; the risk of tying questions of sexual redistribution to misogynistic and racist notions of entitlement, it suggests, might be avoided by centring such debates on femcels.</p

Gender and authenticity in contemporary popular culture and advertising

Within the fields of feminist media and cultural studies, questions around authenticity and gender have become increasingly pronounced in recent years. This chapter outlines the scope of this work by not only examining the extent to which digital media culture increasingly trades in ideas of ‘realness’ and of ‘being yourself’ but also the consequences of this for particular marginal groups, including women, queer and feminised people. Three significant avenues for research around authenticity are also discussed: masculinity, authenticity and victimhood; feminism, trauma and ‘authentic voice’; and feminism, transphobia and ‘authentic womanhood’.</p