Brand Royal: Meghan Markle, feuding families, and disruptive duchessing in Brexit era Britain

Abstract

Focusing on mainstream and tabloid news reporting and ancillary texts, this article analyses the media presentation of Meghan Markle's intersectional identities through a rhetoric of the feuding famous family. We argue that the media discourse centred on family conflict and domestic drama used to characterise Markle's position as a royal during the Brexit era both surfaces and suppresses the significance of her existential challenge to the normative racial, class, national and gendered attributes associated with British royalty. That discourse also obfuscates and trivializes the power struggle over the significant economic capital and political "soft power" associated with the British Royal Family brand.

A Critical Discourse Study on Meghan and Harry’s CBS Primetime Interview

“…Additionally, Meghan's identity as a mixed-race woman also contributes to influencing others as she represents the non-white community, especially women. Meghan is also a well-known feminist (Pramaggiore & Kerrigan, 2021) who always believes in equal rights among women and people of colour (Adam, 2018;Young, 2019). In light of this, the couple's well-known high profile celebrity status enables them to influence others with their words as they have supporters around the world, thus giving them a sense of social domination in discourse.…”

“…Furthermore, Dewangga (2021) did a study on Harry and Meghan's interview in Australia on 28 November 2017 by examining the violation of Grice's maxim in the interview. In a more recent study, Pramaggiore and Kerrigan (2021) studied the media representation of Meghan Markle's intersectional identities and emphasised more on the notion of feminism. Still, neither study has analysed the self-other representation in Meghan and Harry's CBS primetime interview from both CDA and narrative inquiry perspectives.…”