What a girl's gotta do: the labor of the biopolitical celebrity in austerity Britain

Kokoli, Alexandra M.; Winter, Aaron

doi:10.1080/0740770x.2015.1057015

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…If the properly aspiring, empowered girl who will grow up to close the gender leadership gap is a new kind of subject necessitating a new regulatory mediascape (Kokoli and Winter, 2015), the campaigns promoting leadership role models for girls can be viewed as a part of that new mediascape in their attempts to tap into in celebrity youth cultures and to shape discourses surrounding women and power. Our findings indicate that popular role-model initiatives are, however, problematic in several ways.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The blurring of celebrity and leadership is also reflective of a wider cultural shift which sees the increasing involvement of celebrities in political movements and processes, and politicians constructing celebrity identities (Adamson and Kelan, 2018;Marshall, 2014). Anxieties over both the celebritisation of leadership and 'improper' forms of celebrity (Allen and Mendick, 2012) inform the restrictive ways in which girls are expected to admire role models, both in terms of the kinds of role model sanctioned for admiration, and within the discursive formations of leadership and celebrity themselves (Kokoli and Winter, 2015). Concerns reproducing conservative models of the public sphere and of what constitutes appropriate representation indicate how role-model solutions rely on the adoption of endorsed figures for admiration but, as an inevitable adjunct, are accompanied by 'media effects' fears of unwholesome influence.…”

Section: Role Models and The Blurred Categories Of Leader And Celebritymentioning

confidence: 99%

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‘I don’t want to be known for it’: Girls, leadership role models and the problem of representation

Paule

Yelin

2021

European Journal of Cultural Studies

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An absence of role models in girlhood is a popularly cited cause of the shortage of women in decision-making positions in adulthood. The power of leadership exists in a close relationship with public visibility, and this relationship is regularly foregrounded in adult interventions that seek to stimulate girls’ leadership aspirations through the public pedagogy of role models. We explore the problematic nature of such popular solutions through a framework suggested by feminist critique of the ‘fetishisation’ of representation, by their media effects foundations and by their alignment with neoliberal logics. Drawing on group interview workshops conducted in five English state schools, we find that role-model solutions offer an overly simplistic view of girls’ engagements with public figures, and that they recognise neither the contemporary conditions of women’s visibility nor how such conditions regulate girls’ imaginings of power along axes of ‘race’ and class as well as gender.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Role Models and The Blurred Categories Of Leader And Celebritymentioning

confidence: 99%

‘I don’t want to be known for it’: Girls, leadership role models and the problem of representation

Paule

Yelin

2021

European Journal of Cultural Studies

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“…News about Diana on this official fan page is about everything from her romance to her first job and first car – this sharing brings her closer to her viewers, letting her supporters have daily glimpses into her private life and creating affective ties necessary for her celebrity to seem authentic. Functioning in a society where a woman’s value pivots on her physical appearance, scholars find it ‘unsurprising that young women are willing to collude with neoliberal media agendas, using them as a launching pad to become famous and/or, at the very least, (precariously) employed’ (Kokoli and Winter, 2015: 162).…”

Section: From Survivor To Resilient Celebrity: Managing Affect On Socmentioning

confidence: 99%

Misogyny, solidarity and postfeminism on social media: The work of being Diana Shurygina, survivor-celebrity

Rajagopalan

2019

European Journal of Cultural Studies

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In a disclosure on Russian talk television in January 2017, 16-year-old Diana Shurygina shared with a national audience the traumatic details of her rape by Sergei Semenov. Using Shurygina’s performances on television and her subsequent participation on social media as a case study, this article analyses the emergence of empathic publics and the construction of celebrity at the intersection of digital media, popular misogyny and postfeminism in Russia. By setting up a vlog, support groups, fan and personal pages on VKontakte (a popular Russian social networking site), Shurygina is able to counter vicious pillorizing by creating a network of empathy and support. The celebrity that Shurygina sculpts in these spaces, however, is postfeminist in its emphasis on individual choice and self-esteem as strategies to overcome all societal ills, in its celebration of hyperfemininity and in its eschewal of radical politics. This article thus considers how digital platforms shape voice, public affect and solidarity on digital platforms but also how complicit that emergent voice is in the neoliberal ‘retraditionalisation’ of gender roles in post-Soviet Russia.

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“…Moreover, Nead explicates a shadowy relationship between the bourgeois family unit and the expanding Empire, noting that a ‘connection between imperial decline and moral laxity is critical’ (p. 82). Alexandra Kokoli and Aaron Winter (2015: 162) have more recently exposed the ruthless treatment of young, often socially vulnerable, female celebrities, in an analysis of feminine biopolitical labour and contemporary media narratives. Their article highlights a widespread moral condemnation of seemingly negligent mothers, who are understood to be responsible for ‘poor health and obesity’, the ‘bad educational performance of herself and her children’, and in the case of 2011 London riots even ‘for the state of the nation’.…”

Section: Witches Mothers and The Hackney Flashersmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Art of Social Reproduction

Horne¹

2016

Journal of Visual Culture

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This article considers how the museum produces knowledge about the past and present of feminist politics through its framing of marginal, activist artworks that have engaged the sphere of social reproduction or care labour. It is contended that neoliberalism’s assault on social reproduction in our current ‘age of austerity’ – which sees responsibility displaced from the state onto individuals – has sparked a reengagement with earlier socialist–feminist discourse and, as a result, we are perceptibly enmeshed within a new age of social reproduction debates. The Hackney Flashers’ germinal photographic project Who’s Holding the Baby? (1976–1978), acquired by Madrid’s Reina Sofia in 2010, is taken as a case study to explore a range of contextual, temporal and historical contradictions in further detail. Examining the ambiguous relocation of this photographic project provokes vital questions about the contribution of culture to the troubled terrains of art, property and care labour in the 21st century.

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What a girl's gotta do: the labor of the biopolitical celebrity in austerity Britain

Cited by 9 publications

References 28 publications

‘I don’t want to be known for it’: Girls, leadership role models and the problem of representation

‘I don’t want to be known for it’: Girls, leadership role models and the problem of representation

Misogyny, solidarity and postfeminism on social media: The work of being Diana Shurygina, survivor-celebrity

The Art of Social Reproduction

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