Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822356961 ISBN 13: 9780822356967

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

This timely, necessary collection of essays provides feminist analyses of a recession-era media culture characterized by the reemergence and refashioning of familiar gender tropes, including crisis masculinity, coping women, and postfeminist self-renewal. Interpreting media forms as diverse as reality television, financial journalism, novels, lifestyle blogs, popular cinema, and advertising, the contributors reveal gendered narratives that recur across media forms too often considered in isolation from one another. They also show how, with a few notable exceptions, recession-era popular culture promotes affective normalcy and transformative individual enterprise under duress while avoiding meaningful critique of the privileged white male or the destructive aspects of Western capitalism. By acknowledging the contradictions between political rhetoric and popular culture, and between diverse screen fantasies and lived realities, Gendering the Recession helps to make sense of our postboom cultural moment. Contributors. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Hamilton Carroll, Hannah Hamad, Anikó Imre, Suzanne Leonard, Isabel Molina-Guzmán, Sinéad Molony, Elizabeth Nathanson, Diane Negra, Tim Snelson, Yvonne Tasker, Pamela Thoma

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture and Head of Film Studies at University College Dublin.

Yvonne Tasker is Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of East Anglia.

Negra and Tasker are the coeditors of Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, also published by Duke University Press.

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GENDERING THE RECESSION

Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity

By Diane Negra, Yvonne Tasker

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5696-7

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, vii, 
INTRODUCTION. Gender and Recessionary Culture Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, 1, 
ONE. Escaping the Recession? The New Vitality of the Woman Worker Suzanne Leonard, 31, 
TWO. "Latina Wisdom" in "Postrace" Recession Media Isabel Molina-Guzmán, 59, 
THREE. "We Are All Workers": Economic Crisis, Masculinity, and the American Working Class Sarah Banet-Weiser, 81, 
FOUR. What Julia Knew: Domestic Labor in the Recession-Era Chick Flick Pamela Thoma, 107, 
FIVE. Dressed for Economic Distress: Blogging and the "New" Pleasures of Fashion Elizabeth Nathanson, 136, 
SIX. The (Re)possession of the American Home: Negative Equity, Gender Inequality, and the Housing Crisis Horror Story Tim Snelson, 161, 
SEVEN. House and Home: Structuring Absences in Post–Celtic Tiger Documentary Sinéad Molony, 181, 
EIGHT. "Stuck between Meanings": Recession-Era Print Fictions of Crisis Masculinity Hamilton Carroll, 203, 
NINE. Fairy Jobmother to the Rescue: Postfeminism and the Recessionary Cultures of Reality TV Hannah Hamad, 223, 
TEN. How Long Can the Party Last? Gendering the European Crisis on Reality TV Anikó Imre, 246, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 273, 
CONTRIBUTORS, 299, 
INDEX, 303, 

CHAPTER 1

SUZANNE LEONARD

Escaping the Recession?

THE NEW VITALITY OF THE WOMAN WORKER

In February 2011, a plucky American five-year-old became an overnight YouTube sensation with her adamant, direct address declaration, "I don't want to marry somebody if I don't have a job first.... I don't care if I marry you. I don't care if I marry another man. I care if I do something that's special." In emphatic terms, the unnamed speaker designates her job rather than her relational prospects as her chance to do something special, a mind-set also reflected in demographic research over the last forty years, which finds marriage to be of diminished significance in the eyes of multiple constituencies of Americans. As with other videos that feature precocious young white girls parroting feminist logics, this one stars a small child voicing a very adult observation. Yet, despite her young age, the speaker is also perfectly in sync with a postfeminist moment wherein securing work—and particularly the lucrative and self-actualizing kind—has begun to supplant marriage as the aspirational event of mediatized female lives.

Feminism has long supported the prospect of female labor as a route to financial empowerment while at the same time drawing attention to structural obstacles that thwart economic achievement, such as the wage gap, lack of adequate day care support and family-friendly work policies, and women's concentration in low-paying service industries. Such histories are largely papered over in the little girl's monologue, however, for her stated devotion to her career more obviously confirms an ideological and economic dynamic that Angela McRobbie identified in 2009 as the "visibility of the well-educated working girl" around whom terms like "capacity, success, attainment, enjoyment, entitlement, social mobility, and participation" swirl. Girls' claims to citizenship rest on these presumed attributes, and McRobbie observes that "the ability to earn a living is also the single most important feature of the social and cultural changes of which young women find themselves to be the privileged subjects." The successful girl exists, in turn, as proof that even during one of the worst economic crises of recent history, postfeminist thought regimes continue to emphasize and inculcate notions of equality and choice, messages that resonate particularly with those who enjoy race and class privilege, evidenced in this case by the speaker's whiteness, the upper-middleclass milieu she apparently inhabits, and the fact that the video was allegedly posted and edited by her eleven-year-old sister, a singer-songwriter.

More than a mere affirmation of hegemonic notions of postfeminist femininity, this video establishes a commensurability between discourses of gender, labor, and marriage, an equation that has been particularly salient in organizing life cycle temporalities in a recession economy. The blithe association this video makes between women, work, and upward mobility, and its seeming disinterest in anything men have to offer in that respect, resonates with a predominant emphasis on females triumphing in a recessionary moment more aptly described as one in which the majority of Americans are suffering. The false assumption that assertiveness equals ascendance, and that career success represents an option available to women at all points in the life cycle likewise reflects a common discursive positioning of women as impervious to a financial crisis that has nevertheless devastated men. Such thought paradigms paradoxically position women's professional aspirations as taken for granted, and yet at the same time legible only in light of their relational prospects with men or male partners. In this essay, I untangle these various recessionary discourses, highlighting how myths of male potency are fractured and disrupted by narratives of economically independent women. Such regimes latently emphasize not only the differing prospects of employment and marriage for the sexes, but also establish hierarchies based on what it means to be employable and marriageable, categorizations that are inevitably raced and classed. As I identify, increasing polarization between men and women in the professional and marital economies refracts through contemporary recessionary rhetorics and foments multiple social divisions.

Masculinity in Crisis—Again

From its inception, the post-2007 economic crisis has been understood in gendered terms. While the crisis undeniably brought issues of financial instability and hence class to the forefront of the collective consciousness in ways that they had not been for quite some time, the perception that the recession affected males and females differently, and to different degrees, quickly gained prominence. The crisis featured a collision of events originating with the subprime mortgage crisis and housing market collapse, catastrophes that led in turn to the sudden bankruptcy of a number of Wall Street investment banks. These failures precipitated multiple government bailouts (Aig, Ford, and Chrysler), and ricochet effects were felt in the global economy (particularly apparent in the European debt crisis). This downfall was vertiginous, and in many ways incomprehensible, a confusion stemming from the fact that average citizens are largely bereft of a theoretical framework through which to understand the workings of financial capital. Like the concepts and practices they describe, lexical terms like "speculation," "securities," "credit-default swaps," and "derivatives" are untethered from any sort of concrete material reality. To combat such abstractions, media outlets increasingly humanized the crisis, recounting numbers of job losses, vigilantly monitoring unemployment statistics, and reporting on average citizens whose homes had been foreclosed upon. In such scenarios, if the market collapse was precipitated by forces often too nebulous to visualize, the effects of it were all too easy to behold. In particular, mapping the recession onto actual job and home losses helped to order an...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822356961
• ISBN 13: 9780822356967
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 316
• Herausgeber: Negra Diane
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland