Tracey Jensen

Welfare Commonsense, Poverty Porn and Doxosophy

This article critically examine how Benefits Street - and the broader genre of poverty porn television - functions to embed new forms of ‘commonsense’ about welfare and worklessness. It argues that such television content and commentary crowds out critical perspectives with what Pierre Bourdieu (1999) called ‘doxa’, making the social world appear self-evident and requiring no interpretation, and creating new forms of neoliberal commonsense around welfare and social security. The article consider how consent for this commonsense is animated through poverty porn television and the apparently ‘spontaneous’ (in fact highly editorialized) media debate it generates: particularly via ‘the skiver’, a figure of social disgust who has re-animated ideas of welfare dependency and deception.

‘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.

Riots, Restraint and the New Cultural Politics of Wanting

In the aftermath of the 2011 English riots, many political elites, journalists and public commentators obscured the material, sociological and economic factors which contributed to the unrest and instead connected the riots to a problematic kind of ‘wanting’ – wanting the wrong kinds of things, in a manner and degree that was constructed as illegitimate and vulgar in a time of austerity – and thus constructing the riots as a problem of excessive greed, rampant materialism and social decay. This article reflects upon how the riots played a key role in the political production of a new cultural politics of wanting, whereby wanting is made problematic, suspect, a sign of material fixation and of irresponsible consumerism. It reflects upon this cultural politics within the current austerity regime which manifests through a celebration and romanticisation of post-War restraint and re-animation of thrift practices and frugal living.

Sluts that Choose vs. Doormat Gypsies: Exploring affect in the postfeminist, visual moral economy of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding

The UK primetime series My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (Channel 4, 2010, 2011, 2012) offered audiences the opportunity to be armchair matrimonial ethnographers, to reveal the courtship curiosities of “one of the most secretive communities in the UK.” In spite of claims to social realist documentary, however, we argue that this programme has clearer resonances with “sexposé” reality television, producing and circulating a moral, visual economy premised upon the cultural figuration of “the gypsy bride.” The gypsy girl and gypsy bride are marked as victims of male gypsy oppression, of “backwards” and repressive cultural practices, of age-inappropriate sexualisation and “excessive” consumerism, and is thus defined by her failure to be a good aspirational postfeminist subject. In this paper, we explore the intersecting discourses around gender, sexuality, class, and race operative within Gypsy Wedding and analyse online forums responding to the programme. We use psychosocial methodologies and theories of affect to argue that the gypsy bride becomes a figure of abjection, desired and despised, and that the (readily accepted) invitation to be appalled by her “oppression” reveals the strategic potency of postfeminist notions of empowerment and the racist, sexist, and classist agendas it can serve.

I. `Speaking as a mother': notes on becoming a researcher and not getting onto Supernanny

The gold standard of objectivity in research, the idea that it is possible to produce knowledge that is timeless, reproducible and interchangeable (and that only knowledge that fulfills these criteria can be valued), has been under sustained fire from a range of feminist, postcolonial and queer writers. In her discussion of the legacy of poststructuralist textual criticism, Elspeth Probyn (1993) states that ‘as researchers, we don’t know what to do with our selves’, and advocates ways of putting experience and the self to work in research. In a related vein, Sandra Harding (1993; Hirsch and Olsen, 2003) makes a plea for the marginal voices to ‘speak up’ as a strategy for deconstructing knowledge itself. Similarly, Code (1993) criticizes the normalizing processes that occur when researchers become attached to the idea that the world is describable as if from a ‘view from nowhere’. In these accounts, the researcher’s self, far from being an unwelcome intrusion into the production of knowledge to be kept silent, is foundational to knowledge itself. Add to this heady mix the renewed interest in the emotional politics of research and a wider ‘reflexive turn’ in a range of disciplines, including cultural studies, anthropology and sociology, and we find ourselves with some interesting space in which to experiment with innovative methods and to bring the secrets of the researching self to the fore; autoethnography, poetic sociology, radical empiricism, critical autobiography. We all speak from somewhere – the task, perhaps, is not to find ways to erase this ‘somewhere’, but to examine it, use it and unpick it. What does it mean to speak from somewhere? What does it do? What can we do with it? My research examines the discourses of class, gender and respectability that are negotiated by and through the narratives of transformation within the genre of parenting makeover television. My interest in parenting culture began – perhaps

Sluts that Choose Vs Doormat Gypsies

The UK primetime series My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (Channel 4, 2010, 2011, 2012) offered audiences the opportunity to be armchair matrimonial ethnographers, to reveal the courtship curiosities of “one of the most secretive communities in the UK.” In spite of claims to social realist documentary, however, we argue that this programme has clearer resonances with “sexposé” reality television, producing and circulating a moral, visual economy premised upon the cultural figuration of “the gypsy bride.” The gypsy girl and gypsy bride are marked as victims of male gypsy oppression, of “backwards” and repressive cultural practices, of age-inappropriate sexualisation and “excessive” consumerism, and is thus defined by her failure to be a good aspirational postfeminist subject. In this paper, we explore the intersecting discourses around gender, sexuality, class, and race operative within Gypsy Wedding and analyse online forums responding to the programme. We use psychosocial methodologies and theories of affect to argue that the gypsy bride becomes a figure of abjection, desired and despised, and that the (readily accepted) invitation to be appalled by her “oppression” reveals the strategic potency of postfeminist notions of empowerment and the racist, sexist, and classist agendas it can serve.

Mothers and the academy

The difficulty of combining motherhood with a professional career has long been known. Women and men may be equal in the eyes of the law, in equal pay legislation, in equalities documents, in the earnest intentions of recruitment, promotion and mentoring programmes throughout the world that aim to improve the representation of women in senior workplace positions. Despite all this, the fact remains that in the twenty-first century, the worst thing a woman can do for her career is get pregnant. The gender pay gap exists everywhere, but its precise size varies from one country to another: in the UK it is stubbornly stuck at around the 20 per cent mark (meaning that from mid-October onwards the average employed woman effectively works for free, when compared with her average male peer) and this can be accounted for mainly by maternity. Childless men and women earn comparable amounts: it is only if and when they start to create families that fathers’ earnings begin to accelerate, while the salaries of mothers start to stagnate. In addition, in the UK, the Maternity Alliance estimates that up to thirty thousand women lose their jobs each year as a result of becoming pregnant. A tiny fraction of these pursue legal redress: such discrimination is considered acceptable. In universities, mothers do not fare much better. Although becoming an academic might ostensibly seem to be a flexible career option in a progressive

Sluts that Choose Vs Doormat Gypsies: Exploring affect in the postfeminist, visual moral economy of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding

The UK primetime series My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (Channel 4, 2010, 2011, 2012) offered audiences the opportunity to be armchair matrimonial ethnographers, to reveal the courtship curiosities of “one of the most secretive communities in the UK.” In spite of claims to social realist documentary, however, we argue that this programme has clearer resonances with “sexposé” reality television, producing and circulating a moral, visual economy premised upon the cultural figuration of “the gypsy bride.” The gypsy girl and gypsy bride are marked as victims of male gypsy oppression, of “backwards” and repressive cultural practices, of age-inappropriate sexualisation and “excessive” consumerism, and is thus defined by her failure to be a good aspirational postfeminist subject. In this paper, we explore the intersecting discourses around gender, sexuality, class, and race operative within Gypsy Wedding and analyse online forums responding to the programme. We use psychosocial methodologies and theories of affect to argue that the gypsy bride becomes a figure of abjection, desired and despised, and that the (readily accepted) invitation to be appalled by her “oppression” reveals the strategic potency of postfeminist notions of empowerment and the racist, sexist, and classist agendas it can serve.

The Cultural Politics of Austerity: Past and Present in Austere Times, by Rebecca Bramall

Isin and Ruppert develop relevant for all readers of this journal, not just those who concentrate on digital media, while still retaining enough specificity to comment directly on digital media and digital acts. Being Digital Citizens contributes a nuanced, flexible, and still elegantly workable conceptual framework to scholarship around contemporary political activity, particularly that unfolding through the internet.