Welfare Queens, Thrifty Housewives, and Do-It-All Mums

In this paper, we consider how the cultural politics of austerity within Britain plays out on the celebrity maternal body. To analyse the symbolic function of mediated celebrity maternity within austerity, the paper draws on a textual analysis of three celebrity mothers: Kate Middleton, Kim Kardashian, and Beyoncé. We show how these celebrity mothers represent the folk devils and fantasy figures of the maternal under austerity—the thrifty, happy housewife, the benefits mum, and the do-it-all working mum—and attempt to unpick what cultural work they do in the context of austerity within Britain.

The final and definitive version of this article is published in Women & Performance (Aug 2015), in the special issue 'Texting Girls: Images, Sounds, and Words in Neoliberal Cultures of Femininity', guest-edited by Kimberly Lamm. DOI:10.1080/0740770X.2015.1057015 This article debunks the wide-spread view that young female celebrities, especially those who rise to fame through reality shows and other forms of media-orchestrated self-exposure, dodge ‘real’ work out of laziness, fatalism and a misguided sense of entitlement. Instead, we argue that becoming a celebrity in a neoliberal economy such as that of the United Kingdom, where austerity measures disproportionately disadvantage the young, women and the poor is not as irregular or exceptional a choice as previously thought, especially since the precariousness of celebrity earning power adheres to the current demands of the neoliberal economy on its workforce. What is more, becoming a celebrity involves different forms of labour that are best described as biopolitical, since such labour fully involves and consumes the human body and its capacities as a living organism. Weight gain and weight loss, pregnancy, physical transformation through plastic surgery, physical symptoms of emotional distress and even illness and death are all photographically documented and supplemented by extended textual commentary, usually with direct input from the celebrity, reinforcing and expanding on the visual content. As well as casting celebrity work as labour, we also maintain that the workings of celebrity should always be examined in the context of wider cultural and real economies.

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2015

Aesthetic Labour, 2017

Situated in debates on the visibility of the maternal in contemporary neoliberal culture, this chapter focuses on the construction of the 'stay-at-home' mother (SAHM) in popular representations. We look critically at the construction of celebrity Jools Oliver and fictional character Bridget Jones (Fielding, 2013), to show how aesthetic labour has become a central feature demanded of the good SAHM, while it is simultaneously naturalised, marginalised and masked. We argue that the hiding of aesthetic labour functions to support SAHMs' construction as dependent and domestic carers, rather than active aesthetic and maternal labourers. Thus, we conclude, contemporary representations inscribe the SAHM into the realm of 'the perfect' (McRobbie, 2015) through her individualized, autonomous, 'free' choosing to exercise aesthetic labour and body self-disciplining, and collude in its masking.

European Journal of Communication, 2015

This article analyzes the construction in the UK media of the ‘stay-at-home mother’, a maternal figure who received increasing visibility during the recession and its aftermath. Based on a content analysis of UK national newspaper coverage of stay-at-home mothers (2008–2013), this article argues that the stay-at-home mother emerges from its press coverage as a neoliberal postfeminist subject. On the one hand, the coverage complicates claims about antifeminist backlash and women’s harking back to passive femininity. On the other hand, it fails significantly to undermine maternal femininity’s entanglement with neoliberalism, and reinforces the process described by McRobbie as ‘disarticulation’, by separating between middle-class mothers and working-class mothers.

Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 2019

At a time when parenthood seems to have become almost mandatory regardless of sexual orientation, and children serve as fashionable props on Instagram profiles and in lifestyle magazines, this article examines the way in which pregnant femininity and maternity is engulfed by neoliberal discourses of aestheticisation and disciplining of the body. It offers a cultural discourse analysis of the body politics of pregnant femininity through the lens of exoticised celebrity motherhood. In order to understand present day celebrity pregnancies, it draws upon the new ‘cult of motherhood’ and revolves around Kim Kardashian and Beyonce Knowles as case studies in exoticised celebrity motherhood, through a discursive analysis of the publicity surrounding both women’s pregnancies. It sees them as being part of a larger narrative that racializes and exoticises shapely (non-white) bodies, while disciplining both women – yet to varying degrees- within the contemporary Anglo-European norms of beauty. Given the educational and pedagogical role of celebrities and their construction of a ‘public-private self’ (Marshall 2010), global celebrity figures Kim Kardashian and Beyonce Knowles-Carter are seen offering a ‘grammar of conduct’ (Skeggs and Wood, 2011) around which the moral, and the maternal, self is being articulated and gauged.

This article analyses the emergence of the new social type of the 'yummy mummy' by examining the constellation of narratives circulating through and around it in British culture. It contends that, whilst it has some notable precursors, the idea of the yummy mummy marks a fairly substantial cultural shift given the weight of the western Christian tradition that has overwhelmingly positioned the mother as asexual. Coming into being in part through an increasing social divide between rich and poor, this stock type most often serves to augment a white, thirtysomething position of privilege, shoring up its boundaries against the other side of the social divide (so-called 'pramfaces'). At the same time it is part of a wider fetishisation of the maternal that coexists with profoundly gendered inequalities in relation to childcare in particular. Drawing from a range of sources, and in particular autobiographical celebrity guidebooks and 'henlit' novels, the article argues that the figure of the yummy mummy functions to elide such social contexts, instead espousing a girlish, high-consuming maternal ideal as a site of hyperindividualised psychological 'maturity'. 'Successful' maternal femininity in this context is often articulated by rejecting 'environmentally-conscious' behaviour and in attempting to render what are presented as excessive eco-delusions both abject and transparent. This tendency, the article argues, is indicative of the conservative nature of the phenomenon, which is forced to belittle and disavow wider structures of social, political and ecological dependency in order for its conservative fantasy of autonomous, individualising retreatism to be maintained.

Sociological Research Online, 2014

Focusing on Benefits Street, and specifically the figure of White Dee, this rapid response article offers a feminist analysis of the relationship between media portrayals of people living with poverty and the gender politics of austerity. To do this we locate and unpick the paradoxical desires coalescing in the making and remaking of the figure of ‘White Dee’ in the public sphere. We detail how Benefits Street operates through forms of classed and gendered shaming to generate public consent for the government's welfare reform. However, we also examine how White Dee functions as a potential object of desire and figure of feminist resistance to the transformations in self and communities engendered by neoliberal social and economic policies. In this way, we argue that these public struggles over White Dee open up spaces for urgent feminist sociological enquiries into the gender politics of care, labour and social reproduction.

2016

This thesis investigates how the processes and practices of reproduction have been transformed not only by the ascendant political rationality of neoliberalism but also by women’s struggles that have reconfigured motherhood, the domestic home and the gendered organisation of employment. Through exploring both the 1970s feminist demand for “free 24- hour nurseries” and the contemporary provision of extended, overnight and flexible childcare, care that is often referred to as “24-hour childcare”, the research contributes to feminist understandings of the gendered and racialised class dynamics inside and outside the home and the wage. The research repositions the ‘Woman Question’ as, yet again unavoidable and necessary for comprehending and intervening in the brutalising consequences of capitalist accumulation. Situated within the Marxist feminist tradition, the work of reproduction is understood as a cluster of tasks, affective relations and employment that have historically been cons...

European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2010