From Suits to Royals: The politics of Meghan Markle's racial ambiguity

Woldemikael, Eve; Woldemikael, Olivia

doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2021.102439

Cited by 3 publications

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“…It is often treated as both vulnerable and dangerous" (1966, p. 95). As well as cultural discomfort with Markle's racialized ambiguity as a biracial woman (Woldemikeal & Woldemikeal, 2021;Washington, 2020), the reception of Markle's racialized maternal identity reveals the intolerability of these ambiguities in a society invested in policing such boundaries and the hierarchies at stake in them. For all these reasons, Markle offers an example through which to examine the contemporary mediation of motherhood and the disciplinary impulses that construct the M/Other.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disciplining the M/Other: Examining Contemporary Mediated Motherhood Through the Case of Meghan Markle

Clancy

Yelin

2021

Women's Studies in Communication

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The pregnant body in the cultural imagination has long been constructed in relation to taboos and cultural anxieties that deem it something to be kept private (Stensvold, 2015;Douglas, 1966;Hanson, 2004). In spite of this, since the 1990s, the pregnant body has been hypervisible in popular culture. From the naked photographs of Demi Moore for Vanity Fair in 1991 (Tyler, 2011) to contemporary discourses of the "yummy mummy" (Littler, 2013), the surveillant gaze to which women are subjected intensifies around the pregnant body. The tenor of this discourse varies depending upon the identity of the pregnant person in question, with the pregnant body that is celebrated typically being white, middle-/upper-class, heteronormative, cisgendered, feminine, and ablebodied and "Other" bodies being publicly castigated (Said, 1978;Ahmed, 2010). As Clare Hanson argues, pregnancy is "the mechanism by which society reproduces itself [and as such] is no means a private matter, but is peculiarly susceptible to social intervention and control" (2004, p. 6). In contemporary media cultures, pregnancy, and the bodies of pregnant people, are public property for scrutiny and judgement.Discourses around pregnancy are shaped by the way we treat women in the public eye as objects to be scrutinized (Holmes & Negra, 2011). As a public figure, Meghan Markle is already a site of intense "proliferation of discourse" (Yelin & Clancy, 2020, p.3), sparking discussions about her celebrity, race, gender, feminist agenda, royal credibility, and progressive political values. As a divorced, American, Catholic-raised woman of color, she disrupts the white-supremacist, nationalist, patriarchal norms that the British royal family relies upon (Clancy & Yelin, 2021). Since her wedding to Prince Harry in May 2018, she has been the sustained focus of coverage in media around the world, particularly in the UK tabloid media. Many of these pieces became increasingly critical, with racist and sexist abuse of Markle abounding across popular culture. These discourses only exacerbated when she announced her pregnancy with Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor in October 2018, before she gave birth in May 2019.Markle exists at an intersection of maternity, race, celebrity, and royalty, which are all vectors of public judgement, opprobrium, and/or ownership. As this special issue will show, these vectors also maintain, reproduce, complicate, and contradict one another. As Markle is a woman of color at the heart of institutional colonial, white supremacist power, her pregnancy upturns the presumed whiteness of the British CONTACT Laura Clancy

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disciplining the M/Other: Examining Contemporary Mediated Motherhood Through the Case of Meghan Markle

Clancy

Yelin

2021

Women's Studies in Communication

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

Pramaggiore

Kerrigan

2021

Feminist Media Studies

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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.

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From ‘low-class’ and ‘talentless’ to ‘narcissist and pathological liar’: a functional-pragmatic approach to Meghan Markle’s negative evaluation on X

del Saz-Rubio

2024

Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics

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This paper looks into how aggression against Meghan Markle is deployed in a sample of X replies that address her directly through the lens of Appraisal Theory coupled with impoliteness. A sample of tweets containing the seed word “Meghan Markle” was retrieved with Export Comments (December 2022–April 2023). Replies were run through the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count-22 to assess the tone and prevalence of emotions in the corpus. Results indicated high values for negative emotions, interpersonal conflict, and moralization words. Then, a random sample was manually codified to identify the use frequencies for the Attitude system’s affect, judgment, and appreciation categories when employed to convey hostility against the public figure. Tweets were overwhelmingly negative and explicitly conveyed through the negative judgment of Meghan Markle’s previous sexual and professional life. The veracity of her words and actions was also a source of aggression while tapping into the widely accepted stereotype that depicts women as liars or as incompetent and lacking determination, while some tweets also touched upon her mental instability. Findings reveal that aggressive tweets on X rely on appraisal resources and impolite-related language to promote and perpetuate culturally bound and traditional beliefs about women that ultimately reflect an underlying patriarchal system.

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From Suits to Royals: The politics of Meghan Markle's racial ambiguity

Cited by 3 publications

References 1 publication

Disciplining the M/Other: Examining Contemporary Mediated Motherhood Through the Case of Meghan Markle

Disciplining the M/Other: Examining Contemporary Mediated Motherhood Through the Case of Meghan Markle

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

From ‘low-class’ and ‘talentless’ to ‘narcissist and pathological liar’: a functional-pragmatic approach to Meghan Markle’s negative evaluation on X

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