Alison Winch

‘We can have it all’:The girlfriend flick

Focusing primarily on films made in 2008 and 2009, this article examines the phenomenon of the girlfriend flick. Films such as Sex and the City, Baby Mama, The Women, and Bride Wars depict female friendships priority in intimate culture, celebrating supportive and loving relationships over heterosexual romance. Exploring these films through the intersection between feminism and postfeminism, this article asks whether the girlfriend flick transcends limited understandings of sisterhood to include difference and to constructively explore conflict between women. This article argues that these films advocate a retreat into a segregated female sphere; not as radicalisation, but as a space where women monitor each others drive for physical perfection and/or marriage and motherhood. Ultimately, they depict female friendship as maintaining “representable” femininities and producing sameness.

‘Your new smart-mouthed girlfriends’: postfeminist conduct books

Postfeminist popular culture celebrates womens entitlement to makeover and female sociality. This article examines the confluence of body image and expert girlfriendship in the conduct books, What not to wear (Susannah Constantine and Trinny Woodall) and Skinny bitch (Kim Barnouin and Rory Freedman). These co-authors brand themselves ‘best friends’ and market this female relating as evidence of expertise. Extending their friendship to their readers, they create an intimate female site in order to guide the reader into making normative choices around body image. In particular, they employ strategies of policing and surveillance, appealing to self-responsibility. The girlfriends write the body through an ethical code, employing the rhetoric of guilt, punishment and humiliation if the consumer fails to conduct herself and those around her correctly. I ask what happens when policing is applied to female friends: how far is female friendship, or girlfriend culture, governed by the neoliberal market forces into privileging the mechanics of makeover? What is the significance of having women dictate how other women relate? How far are women involved in the public shaming of other women?

Why 'intergenerational feminist media studies'?

Abstract Feminism and generation are live and ideologically freighted issues that are subject to a substantial amount of media engagement. The figure of the millennial and the baby boomer, for example, regularly circulate in mainstream media, often accompanied by hyperbolic and vitriolic discourses and affects of intergenerational feminist conflict. In addition, theories of feminist generation and waves have been and continue to be extensively critiqued within feminist theory. Given the compelling criticisms directed at these categories, we ask: why bother examining and foregrounding issues of generation, intergeneration, and transgeneration in feminist media studies? Whilst remaining sceptical of linearity and familial metaphors and of repeating reductive, heteronormative, and racist versions of feminist movements, we believe that the concept of generation does have critical purchase for feminist media scholars. Indeed, precisely because of the problematic ways that is it used, and the prevalence of it as a volatile, yet only too palpable, organizing category, generation is both in need of continual critical analysis, and is an important tool to be used—with care and nuance—when examining the multiple routes through which power functions in order to marginalize, reward, and oppress. Exploring both diachronic and synchronic understandings of generation, this article emphasizes the use of conjunctural analysis to excavate the specific historical conditions that impact upon and create generation. This special issue of Feminist Media Studies covers a range of media forms—film, games, digital media, television, print media, as well as practices of media production, intervention, and representation. The articles also explore how figures at particular lifestages—particularly the girl and the aging woman—are constructed relationally, and circulate, within media, with particular attention to sexuality. Throughout the issue there is an emphasis on exploring the ways in which the category of generation is mobilized in order to gloss sexism, racism, ageism, class oppression, and the effects of neoliberalism.

Here comes the brand: Wedding media and the management of transformation

We interrogate how strategic management discourses intersect with the image of the bride as she is addressed and presented in wedding media. By examining celebrity magazines, bridal self-help forums and Living TVs Four Weddings, we argue that wedding medias explosive growth is linked to a rise in branding culture and its exploitation of womens apparent aspirations for visibility. Wedding media branding appropriates romantic narratives of traditional femininity, such as achieving the perfect bridal look and finding and marrying ‘the one’. Simultaneously, it offsets and validates this traditionalism through associating the spectacle of wedding consumption with the self-determining power to manage transformation.

Mediated intimacies: bodies, technologies and relationships

In Ken Plummer’s groundbreaking study on intimacy, he notes that the word intimacy first appears in a Western dictionary in 1632 to mean ‘inmost or innermost thoughts and feelings’ (2003, p. 11). This coincides almost exactly with the emergence of René Descartes’ rational subject of modernity, equipped with his distinctive interior life (1637/1927). Over the course of modernity, various discourses of intimacy have evolved to designate types of relationship that the modern subject [implicitly male, white, heterosexual, bourgeois, reproductive] might establish with a variety of others. ‘Traditional’ discourses of intimacy have referred to physical contact, sex, romance or passionate love, invariably with a spouse. Newer discourses of intimacy have emerged that refer to the non-sexual relationships of family life (Chambers, 2013). More recently, a range of social and cultural theorists who have theorized the relationalities that became possible in the conditions of late modernity, have argued, in different ways, about the democratization of intimacy. ‘Elective intimacy’ (Chambers, 2013; Davies, 2014), ‘pure relationships’ and ‘plastic sexuality’ (Giddens, 1992), non-normative, casual and promiscuous intimacies (Berlant & Warner, 1998: Reay, 2014) have become the focus of interest, as have forms of intimate labour (Boris & Parrenas, 2010) that involve personal care, physical closeness, or familiarity and private knowledge (Bernstein, 2007; Boris & Parrenas, 2010; Constable, 2009; Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2003; Wolkowitz, 2006; Zelizer, 2005; see Burke, 2016 for a discussion). These have drawn attention to the expansion of the range of others that late modern subjects can legitimately be intimate with, as well as the modes of intimacy they might practice. They trace the development of ‘the sphere in which we become who we are, the space in which the self emerges’ (Oswin & Olund, 2010). At the same time, while the sphere of the intimate excites considerable fascination and attention, it continues to be seen as relatively unimportant within the wider scheme of political and public life. This is partly because of the division between the capitalist sphere of production and the site of social reproduction, upon which capitalism depends but does not necessarily support or sustain (Fraser, 2016). Yet politics, economics and intimacy remain profoundly interconnected. What, then, is mediated intimacy? In some sense, all the forms of intimacy outlined above are mediated – in that they require a medium through which intimate relations can be established between the subject and the other. Whether it is language, the basis of Jamieson’s ‘disclosing intimacy’ (1998) in which intimacy is established through the disclosure of information previously understood to be too private to share. Or whether it is through affect and the varying intensities of Lauren Berlant’s theorizings of intimacy (1998). With this said, mediated intimacy has emerged as a specific term in recent debates on intimacy in sociology and media and cultural studies and has, thus far, two distinct, if overlapping meanings. The first was developed by Rosalind Gill, in relation to the ways that discourses of intimacy, specifically sex and relationship advice, are mediated in women’s magazines (2009). This conceptualization of the term has been taken up by a variety of scholars looking at sex and relationship advice in a variety of contexts (Barker, Gill, & Harvey, in press; O’Neill, 2015). The second meaning of mediated intimacies comes from Deborah Chambers’ book on relationships on Facebook, and, building on a range

“DRINKING A DISH OF TEA WITH SAPHO”: THE SEXUAL FANTASIES OF LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU AND LORD BYRON

Byrons admiration for Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was exceptional in a period when her reputation was still suffering from Alexander Popes and Horace Walpoles virulent misogyny. Byron was fascinated by her and claimed to have read her Turkish Embassy Letters (1763) by the age of 10. His letters reveal an erotic attraction towards this scholarly woman. When he was residing in Venice, he discovered the passionate letters that Montagu had sent to her young Venetian lover over 60 years earlier. These letters reveal a series of performative sexual identities constructed in relation to a lover. This article argues that Byron can be productively read through his alliances with earlier, sexually transgressive literary figures. More specifically, Montagus works, as well as her queer ethnomasquerades, were influential in his writing of Don Juan (1819), and also in his creation of a Byronic celebrity persona. For both writers, philhellenist and Orientalist discourses enable possibilities of self-imagining and celebrity spectacle. Montagus depictions of passionate travelling and heroic sexuality reveal continuities across the borders of canonized literary periods.

The Girlfriend Gaze

The film Mean Girls (2004) is a teen comedy representing girls’ high school cliques. The heroine, Cady (Lindsay Lohan), has been home-schooled by her zoologist parents and at the beginning of the film she moves back to the US after living on the African continent for 12 years. At school, the innocent Cady is confronted with a variety of in-groups, including The Plastics: so-called because of their Barbie doll aesthetic. The Plastics are ruled by the Queen Bee, Regina (Rachel McAdams), who is blonde, wears pink and is the most powerful girl in the school. She controls her girlfriends — and the other students — through regulating body image and style; no one can be as perfect as her. Her attitude towards other girls is revealed when one of The Plastics, Gretchen, asserts that ‘seven out of ten girls have a negative body image’. Regina replies, ‘Who cares? Six of those girls are right.’ She abuses the students by denigrating their weight, and she also participates in slut-shaming by calling the other girls sluts and whores. These forms of regulation intersect with misogyny. As one of the teachers, Ms Norbury (played by Tina Fey, who is also the writer and therefore a privileged mouthpiece for certain ideas) warns: ‘you all have to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it OK for guys to call you sluts and whores.’ The Plastics are intrigued by Cady and they befriend her.

“just hanging out with you in my back yard”: Mark Zuckerberg and Mediated Paternalism

Abstract In a video that showcases a new Facebook feature, Mark Zuckerberg chats to his users, telling them that he’s “just hanging out with you in my backyard.” In this video-which is on his Facebook page-Zuckerberg discloses the domestic space of his backyard, revealing his interaction with family and friends. Depicted hosting a barbeque while watching the electoral debate, Zuckerberg performs an affective white postfeminist paternity (Hamad, 2014) by talking about hunting, eating meat, and being a father. This video is key in explaining how Zuckerberg affectively models patriarchal power. We argue that this PR exercise (for both him and Facebook which are portrayed as inextricably linked) functions to represent Facebook as enabling an empowered “community,” rather than being just an instrument of data accumulation. In particular, Zuckerberg’s affective paternalism is also a means to recoup and obfuscate patriarchal power structures. Zuckerberg’s Facebook page constructs an intimate paternalism in relation to his domestic sphere, but also to his followers, and this works to legitimate his corporate and global paternalism. The ways in which he is portrayed through signifiers of an emotional fatherhood work to gloss his power as the third richest man in the world.

Generation: The politics of patriarchy and social change

In this first instalment of our Soundings series on critical terms, we look at the idea of ‘generation’, a term which has become highly prevalent within political discourse since the financial crisis. As with all the concepts in this series, the idea of generation is differently mobilised by different political actors. Right-wing thinkers use generation in a sense that can be traced back to Edmund Burke to mean the transmission of property and culture through time, while other commentators draw on meanings derived from Mannheim to refer to the experiences of particular cohorts at times of rapid political change. For activists on the left, it is important to distinguish between these different connotations of generation. The Burkean approach has regressive implications, for example in the justification of austerity as a way of protecting future generations from debt; and the Mannheimian understanding, although not as conservative, needs to be connected to an intersectional analysis that looks at other identity markers alongside those of age - such as class, race, gender and sexuality - so as to avoid flattening differences within cohorts and impeding solidarities between generations.

Does Feminism Have a Generation Gap?: Blogging, Millennials and the Hip Hop Generation

Abstract This article explores a number of instances when generation is invoked and discussed in three feminist blogs: the UK The Vagenda (2012–), the US-based Crunk Feminist Collective (2010), and the UK Feminist Times (2013–14). More specifically, it examines how generation is discussed in terms of a feminist identity, especially in relation to intergenerational conflict. I contextualize a textual analysis of these blogs within a conjunctural and intersectional understanding of generation. That is, I look at how these narratives of intergenerational feminism are produced or emerge from specific UK and US historical conditions, and the organization of social forces within them. I also look at how they map on to popular media discourses about generation. In addition, this article explores the ways in which generational identity intersects with categories of race, gender, class, sexuality and place.