Imogen Tyler

'Celebrity chav': Fame, femininity and social class

This article argues that celebrity is an increasingly significant means by which reactionary class attitudes, allegiances and judgements are communicated. In contradistinction to claims that the concept of social class has lost its analytic value in the context of contemporary consumer society and the growing ideological purchase of meritocracy and choice, the article contends that class remains central to the constitution and meaning of celebrity. A central premise of this article is that celebrity culture is not only thoroughly embedded in everyday social practices, but is more radically constitutive of contemporary social life. This claim is examined through a consideration of the ways in which celebrity produces and sustains class relations. The article argues that a new category of notoriety or public visibility has emerged and is embodied in the figure of the working-class female celebrity within celebrity culture and wider social life.

Designed to fail: A biopolitics of British citizenship

Tracing a route through the recent ‘ugly history’ of British citizenship, this article advances two central claims. Firstly, British citizenship has been designed to fail specific groups and populations. Failure, it argues, is a design principle of British citizenship, in the most active and violent sense of the verb to design: to mark out, to indicate, to designate. Secondly, British citizenship is a biopolitics – a field of techniques and practices (legal, social, moral) through which populations are controlled and fashioned. This article begins with the 1981 Nationality Act and the violent conflicts between the police and black communities in Brixton that accompanied the passage of the Act through the British parliament. Employing Michel Foucaults concept of state racism, it argues that the 1981 Nationality Act marked a pivotal moment in the design of British citizenship and has operated as the template for a glut of subsequent nationality legislation that has shaped who can achieve citizenship. The central argument is that the existence of populations of failed citizens within Britain is not an accident of flawed design, but is foundational to British citizenship. For many ‘national minorities’ the lived realities of biopolitical citizenship stand in stark contradistinction to contemporary governmental accounts of citizenship that stress community cohesion, political participation, social responsibility, rights and pride in shared national belonging.

Welcome to Britain: The Cultural Politics of Asylum.

Questions of asylum and immigration have taken centre stage in national and international debate and figure prominently in the domestic political agendas of wealthy states and nations. In Australia, Europe and the US, harsh and punitive asylum and immigration laws are being enacted incrementally and asylum-seekers are subject increasingly to detention. Through a focus on the detention of asylum-seekers in the UK, this article makes a critical intervention in current theoretical debates around asylum.Focusing on the writing of Giorgio Agamben, this article suggests that within political and cultural theory, there has been a turn to the figure of the asylum-seeker (and the refugee) as a trope for theorizing the political constitution of the present. By opening up a critical dialogue between humanitarian, media studies and abstract theoretical accounts of immigration detention, this article produces a critique of the ways in which theory appropriates the figure of the asylum-seeker.

Immigrant protest: an introduction

The last decade has witnessed an explosion of ‘immigrant protests’, political mobilizations by irregular migrants and pro-migrant activists. This special issue on ‘immigrant protest’ has emerged in response to this rise in the visibility of immigrant protests, and its central aim is to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on migrant resistance movements and to consider the implications of these struggles for critical understandings of citizenship. This introduction maps out some of the central issues and themes emerging from the contributions to this issue, exploring the tensions between integrationist and autonomous approaches and theories of migrant activism and resistance and between migrant and activist strategies of invisibility and visibility. By bringing immigrant protests to the heart of debates about citizenship, we hope to further extend discussions about the limits and the possibilities of citizenship as the material and conceptual horizon of critical social analysis and political participation and practice today.

The Riots of the Underclass?: Stigmatisation, Mediation and the Government of Poverty and Disadvantage in Neoliberal Britain

The riots in England in August 2011 comprised one of the most significant events of civil unrest in recent British history. A consensus rapidly emerged, notably within political commentary, print journalism, television and online news media coverage of these five nights of rioting, that these were the riots of the underclass. This article explores how and why the conceptual and perceptual frame of the underclass – a frame through which child poverty and youth unemployment are conceived as consequences of a cocktail of ‘bad individual choices’, an absence of moral judgement, poor parenting, hereditary or genetic deficiencies, and/or welfare dependency – was mobilised as a means of explaining and containing the meaning of these riots. It briefly traces the longer cultural and political history of the underclass as an abjectifying category and then examines how this framing of the riots was used to generate public consent for the shift from protective liberal forms of welfare to penal neoliberal ‘workfare’ regimes. In his response to the riots, Paul Gilroy argued that ‘one of the worst forms of poverty thats shaped our situation is poverty of the imagination’ (Gilroy 2011). Following Gilroys call for alternative political aesthetics and in order to engender critical sociological perspectives that might contest the downward social mobility and deepening inequalities which neoliberal social and economic policies are affecting, the aim of this article is to fracture the consensus that these were the riots of the underclass. By exposing the underclass as a powerful political myth, it is possible to transform public understandings of poverty and disadvantage and vitalise understandings of neoliberalism as class struggle.

Pregnant Beauty: Maternal Femininities under Neoliberalism

Since the mid-1990s there has been an extraordinary proliferation of representations of maternity within popular culture, arts, literature, politics, consumer culture and ‘everyday life’. The fascination with celebrity pregnancy and motherhood, the emergence of ‘momoir’ literary genres, a new emphasis on the maternal in the visual and performance arts and the ascendance of ‘Maternal TV’ reality formats, are indicative of this new visibility. The maternal is no longer confined to traditionally domestic or child-orientated spaces, such as private homes, hospitals, parks and playgrounds, but is present in spectacularly public forms: think of British artist Marc Quinn’s 12ft statue of a naked, heavily pregnant, disabled artist Alison Lapper, in Trafalgar Square, London in 2005 (see Betterton, 2006) or pregnant beauty contests (see Longhurst, 2000). Pregnancy and motherhood have even taken centre stage in mainstream politics: a global media storm surrounded the French Justice Minister Rachida Dati when she announced her pregnancy as a lone mother, and later made a very public and glamorous return to work five days after a Caesarean section in January 2009. In the United States the 2009 presidential election produced some striking maternal imagery: pro-life Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin went on the election trail brandishing a four-month-old son and a pregnant teenage daughter, whilst pro-choice Ivy League educated attorney Michelle Obama declared herself the nation’s rightful ‘mom in chief’. This plethora of maternal publicity is not simply a matter of representation, but signals the emergence of a range of new maternal identities and practices. For example, the internet has enabled the rise of a phenomenal ‘digital motherhood’; in Britain millions of mothers are online, creating blogs, sharing foetal scans and ‘celebrity style’ pregnant photographs in ‘bump galleries’, swapping tips and commiserating with each other in the chat rooms of sites such as Mumsnet, and uploading childbirth movies to video-sharing platforms (see Longhurst, 2009). So whilst it has been claimed that girls are the ‘privileged’ subjects of neoliberalism (see McRobbie, 2009) this is also the era of ‘maternal femininities’. Maternity has never been so visible, so talked about, so public and so deeply incoherent. This chapter will examine the sexual politics of maternity under neoliberalism through a focus on one key contemporary maternal figure, which I will term ‘pregnant beauty’. One of the defining contradictions of neoliberalism is that it is packaged as concerned with individual freedom, choice, democracy and personal responsibility. In reality, as David Harvey argues, neoliberalism is a class-based economic project that systematically strips assets from the poor (including welfare provisions) and concentrates wealth within a tiny global elite (individuals and corporations). As a system of governance neoliberalism has fabricated new subjectivities capable, as Nikolas Rose phrases it, ‘of bearing the burdens of liberty’ (1999, p. viii). Within a neoliberal society the ability (and desire) to work and to spend are key measures of value and ideal neoliberal subjects cooperate with their subjectification within these markets (and compulsive consumption and workaholism are symptomatic pathologies). As Angela McRobbie argues, popular culture is a privileged terrain for the production of neoliberal values (2009, p. 29). This terrain becomes legible through the appearance of specific figurative types, figures who move across and through different popular media and accrue meaning, form and value as they travel. In this chapter I will argue that pregnant beauty represents a particular neoliberal amalgam of maternity and femininity, and is deserving of closer analysis. In the last decade, feminist theorists have successively argued that young motherhood, especially lower-class lone motherhood ‘carries a whole range of vilified meanings associated with failed femininity’ (ibid., p. 732; see Tyler, 2008). Maternity is understood in this context as a ‘failed femininity’, in relation to a specific neoliberal femininity determined by economic productivity and flexibility. Young motherhood is constituted as a site of failure, not primarily because of a perceived sexual immorality, but because maternity signifies an unwillingness to work (or shop). It is the imagined economic redundancy and welfare dependence of this population which is repugnant. Thus the idealisation and celebration of youthful maternity in the figure of pregnant beauty may appear anachronistic. In what follows I will consider how pregnant beauty complicates feminist accounts of young motherhood, and reconfigures maternity as a neoliberal femininity. I will argue that pregnant beauty is highly spectacular and contradictory ‘maternal femininity’ that combines signifiers of (sexual) freedom, consumption, choice, agency and futurity in a powerful and seductive post-feminist cultural ideal. This chapter traces the origins of this figure within Anglo-American celebrity culture; it then outlines some of the consumer practices through which pregnancy has been reconfigured into an aesthetic ‘project of self’. It argues that the emergence of pregnant beauty signals the deeper commodification of maternity under neoliberalism, a process which is reshaping maternal experience and contributing to lived gender inequalities. I will conclude by reflecting on politics and aesthetics and asking whether a political maternal aesthetic might, nevertheless, form the basis of an anti-neoliberal feminist politics.

‘Benefits broods’: The cultural and political crafting of anti-welfare commonsense

In the aftermath of the global banking crises, a political economy of permanent state austerity has emerged, driven by and legitimated through a hardening anti-welfare commonsense. We argue that, while there is an excellent evidence base emerging around solidifying negative public attitudes towards welfare, critical policy studies needs to attend to the cultural as well as the political economies through which an anti-welfare commonsense is formed and legitimated. We adopt a ‘cultural political economy’ approach to examine the cultural and political crafting of ‘benefit brood’ families within the wider public sphere, to examine the mechanisms through which anti-welfare sentiments are produced and mediated. Through a case study of Mick Philpott, we demonstrate how ‘benefits broods’ operate both as technologies of control (through which to manage precariat populations), but also as technologies of consent through which a wider and deeper anti-welfare commonsense is effected.

‘Who put the “Me” in feminism?’ The sexual politics of narcissism

This article examines what is at stake in the attribution of narcissism to femininity and feminism and the routes through which arguments about ‘feminist narcissism’ became central to the popular abjection of feminism. It emphasizes the central role of narcissistic theories of identity in enabling feminist theory to prise open the mechanisms of feminine identity and thereby expose and critique the sexual politics of identity practices. The article argues that theorizing the politics of narcissism opens up ways of thinking through some of the pressing and complex questions which face women today, questions of self-identity, self-esteem, body image, cultural idealization, normativity, incorporation, consumption and agency.

Naked protest: the maternal politics of citizenship and revolt

This article explores immigrant protest, citizenship and their relationship, through an account of a ‘naked protest’ by a group of mothers, refused asylum seekers and ‘illegal immigrants’ at Yarls Wood immigration removal centre in England and ends with an account of the use of the ‘naked curse’ in a protest by an indigenous group of mothers against global oil corporations in the Niger Delta. Woven together from activist materials, news reports, interviews, documentaries and historical data, I recount and mobilise these protests to think about ‘the scaling of bodies’ (Marion-Young 1990) and citizenship under neoliberalism, and the routes through which motherhood is mobilised as a site of political agency and resistance to processes of disenfranchisement. I argue that these maternal protests challenge the ‘catastrophic functionalism’ of Agamben-inspired accounts of ‘bare life’, and offer an alternative lens through which to perceive the ethical and political claims made by abject populations (Papadopoulos et al. 2008, p. 198). In thinking through and with these naked protests, this article reframes the sexual politics of citizenship and brings questions of maternity and natality to bear on citizenship studies.

The Tactics of Asylum and Irregular Migrant Support Groups: Disrupting Bodily, Technological, and Neoliberal Strategies of Control

States are exercising an increasing array of spatial strategies of migration control, including in the area of asylum migration. Drawing on interview data with thirty-five British and American irregular migrant and asylum support groups (MASGs), this article explores the spatial “tactics” (De Certeau 1984) employed by MASGs in response to strategies of migration control. We consider their infiltration of highly securitized physical spaces like detention centers and courts. We analyze their appropriation of control technologies and discuss their exploitation of inconsistencies within the neoliberalization of controls. These tactics highlight the importance of resistive actions that are carried out “within enemy territory” (De Certeau 1984, 37). As such, they represent a complementary set of actions to more radical forms of protest and consequently enrich our understanding of the diversity of forms of resistance.