Purging the neoliberal poison? Marina Diamandis and the cultural grammar of popular left politics

Situating Marina

Born in 1985 to a Greek father and Welsh mother, Marina Diamandis first came to prominence in the late 2000s, and released her critically acclaimed debut album The Family Jewels, under the stage name Marina and the Diamonds, in 2010. Since then, she has released a further four studio albums, all of which have been critical and commercial successes in the United Kingdom. She dropped the epithet ‘Marina and the Diamonds’ in 2018, and has performed under the mononym ‘Marina’ since. Stylistically, her music adopts an unashamedly pop sensibility, and much of her best work arises from her capacity to craft infectious pop ditties. However, her iteration of pop music is inflected with influences from electronica, indie music and even cabaret. Consequently, her relationship with pop has never been straightforward: her pop trappings belie a critical and subversive sensibility that puts her at a distance from the mainstream.

What is more, Diamandis is known for her unusually devoted and loyal fanbase (of which I am myself a part, albeit considerably less zealous and committed than some!). Her lyrics – which deal with themes such as sexuality, identity and alienation – often have a deep affective resonance for her fans, many of whom are ‘alternative’ or in some way distanced from dominant cultural norms. Indeed, she commands a particularly passionate gay male following, and she is on record as speculating that around 60 percent of her concert audience consists of gay men (Azzopardi, 2012). Her stylistic distance from mainstream pop is also manifested in part via her long-standing engagement with socially conscious themes in her lyrics, particularly in relation to gender and sexuality. Songs such as ‘Girls’ (2010), ‘Sex Yeah’ (2012) and ‘You Can’t Pin Me Down’ (2015) all offer engaging ruminations on dynamics of gender, sex and femininity. What is more, her 2012 album Electra Heart is essentially a concept album in which the title character assumes various different feminine archetypes over the course of the album. Her orientation towards the more highbrow end of pop is also manifest in, for example, the reflective blog posts she used to write early in her career, and the fact that she gave a lecture to the Oxford Union in 2016 on the travails of the pop music industry. However, as indicated, the politics of her work prior to 2020 was usually implied rather than explicit, and linked to a micropolitics of sexuality, identity and so on. Recent singles such as ‘Man’s World’ and ‘Purge the Poison’, in contrast, evince an explicit political stance. The former is a bold feminist call to arms, while the latter offers an even more assertive embrace of feminist and wider left politics, explicitly name-checking capitalism, racism, misogyny, war, #MeToo and the imprisonment of Harvey Weinstein. ²

The more explicit politics of Marina’s recent work has been enthusiastically endorsed, and to some extent enhanced, by her fanbase. ‘Purge the Poison’ was met with unbridled enthusiasm from some of the more politicised sections of her fan community, often in rather creative ways. For instance, within days of ‘Purge the Poison’s release, fans began playfully affirming the song’s radical credentials, in part by making humorous comparisons between Marina and Marx. A popular Twitter meme emerged among Marina fans in which they wrote ‘rip karl marx you would’ve loved purge the poison by marina’. A further Twitter meme saw Marina fans wryly comment on her anti-capitalist credentials by claiming that ‘Marina could have written The Communist Manifesto, but Karl Marx could never have written Purge the Poison’, sometimes amended to refer to Capital rather than The Communist Manifesto. The most widely tweeted instance – and, as far as I can gather, the first instance of this being tweeted in English (by Twitter user @nynagermanotta) – was also accompanied by a mock-up of Marina’s face next to the faces of Lenin, Engels and Marx, in the style of a Soviet-era propaganda poster (see Figure 1). ³ The politicisation of Marina’s work has also been felt at her concerts. At her performance at the 2022 Lollapalooza festival in Brazil, she made an impassioned plea to her fans about the importance of sometimes bringing politics into pop, before shouting ‘fuck Putin and fuck Bolsonaro!’, to the rapturous delight of her anti-Bolsonaro audience, who proceeded to chant ‘Fora Bolsonaro’ (‘Bolsonaro Out’) in response. The incident was one of several incidents of anti-Bolsonaro sentiment at the festival, which prompted Bolsonaro’s political party, Partido Liberal, to lobby the supreme court to issue a ruling prohibiting ‘“ostentatious and extemporaneous” electioneering from musicians performing at Lollapalooza’ (Phillips, 2022). Marina then responded on her Twitter account by suggesting that ‘censorship is alive and well’. Her engagement with Brazilian politics continued with the recent presidential elections, in which left-wing former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated Bolsonaro. Marina responded by tweeting simply ‘Thank God’ alongside a link to a report on the election in The Guardian, much to the delight of her Brazilian fanbase.

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Figure 1.

Marina, Lenin, Engels and Marx, posted by @nynagermanotta, 15/04/21. Used with permission.

Popular feminism and popular left politics

The politicisation of Marina’s recent work reflects a broader trend in contemporary popular culture, whereby popstars and other cultural figures have increasingly embraced feminist, anti-racist and even socialist themes, either in their work or, more usually, in their public pronouncements. Consider, for example, Beyoncé, whose 2016 Lemonade album has given rise to several pieces of work examining its politics and reception (Edgar and Toone, 2019; Olutola, 2019). In addition, Taylor Swift’s ‘political awakening’ around 2018, which saw her align politically with the Democrats in the United States while also voicing support for feminism and anti-racism, has been subject to a timely scholarly analysis from Simone Driessen (2022). What makes the respective politicisations of Beyoncé and Taylor Swift notable is that prior to the mid-2010s, both had consciously sought to distance themselves from politics, projecting a relatively ‘safe’ and apolitical image. From the mid-2010s onwards, however, in the context of Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and Trump’s electoral success, the tide began to turn.

A comparable left politicisation of popular celebrity culture has also occurred, to a certain extent at least, in the United Kingdom. Left-winger Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party from 2015–2020 drew sustenance from the support he enjoyed from several high-profile pop stars, including Stormzy, Rag ‘n’ Bone Man, Dua Lipa, Ed Sheeran and Clean Bandit (the latter of whom collaborated with Marina on their 2018 hit ‘Baby’). But this partial-left politicisation of popular culture has not been restricted to popular music: it also manifests in feminist, anti-racist and left-wing themes appearing in, for example, popular television series such as Squid Game or Doctor Who, mainstream sport (witness, for example, the controversies surrounding the England team in the Euro 2020 soccer championships) and in socially mediated online spaces, such as, for example, the rise of so-called ‘influencer activism’ (Abidin and Cover, 2019).

These various developments suggest that Marina’s recent output should be read in the context of a wider conjuncture in which there has been something of a convergence between popular culture and left politics, the latter conceived broadly to include feminism, anti-racism, queer politics and socialism/anti-capitalism. But this begs the question of how to make sense, conceptually, of these developments. Fortunately, there is already much interesting work within cultural studies and adjacent fields seeking to tackle these questions. Jemima Repo (2020), for instance, has documented the contradictory logics through which the aesthetic and cultural practices of feminist activism have become subject to commodification. Similarly, Kanai and Gill (2020) have offered a persuasive assessment of the affective dynamics of what they call ‘woke capitalism’, the process through which a ‘seeming embrace of left-wing identity politics’ in fact entails the ‘corporate extraction of value from the struggles for recognition led by historically marginalised groups’ (Kanai and Gill, 2020: 11).

Kanai and Gill’s work is part of an ongoing effort in feminist cultural studies to read the peculiar fortunes of feminism – and adjacent forms of progressive politics – in a broadly neoliberal terrain. Particularly helpful in this regard is the concept of ‘popular feminism’, exemplified by Sarah Banet-Weiser’s recent work, which seeks to make sense of the newfound ubiquity of feminist discourse in the current conjuncture. For Banet-Weiser (2018a), popular feminism evinces three key features. The first she lifts from Stuart Hall’s (1998 [1981]) famous essay ‘Notes on Deconstructing the Popular’: namely that popular feminism is a terrain of struggle in which different articulations and forms of feminism compete for hegemony. However, some forms of feminism fare better in this struggle than others: ‘most of the time’, writes Banet-Weiser (2018a), ‘the popular feminism that is most visible is that which is white, middle-class, cis-gendered and heterosexual’ (p. 13). Consequently, the critique offered by popular feminism is typically ‘expressed in a friendly, safe way’ (Banet-Weiser, 2018a: 15), while more overtly critical or oppositional feminisms, such as those emanating from black, queer or intersectional perspectives, are subject to exclusion and marginalisation. The other two features of popular feminism are explained thus (Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer, 2017: 884):

[second], contemporary feminism is circulated in mainstream and commercial media where masses of people can consume it. We see feminism represented and practiced in digital spaces such as blogs, Instagram, and Twitter, in addition to broadcast media and film (the record-breaking opening weekend of the Hollywood film Wonder Woman is merely the latest iteration of this). We also need to contend with a third expression of the popular: popularity, a condition of being liked or admired by like-minded people and groups. As many of us remember from high school, this kind of popularity brings out cliques, exclusions, and backlash, which brings us back to the popular as a terrain of struggle for power.

This account of popular feminism is highly instructive. Indeed, I would suggest it can be taken further than Banet-Weiser herself takes it: in the age of what Kanai and Gill (2020) call ‘woke capitalism’, Banet-Weiser’s analysis of popular feminism can be usefully stretched to encompass left politics more generally. As indicated earlier, many of the features which Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer ascribe to popular feminism – hypervisibility, contestation and popularity/exclusion – also pertain to adjacent forms of left, progressive and radical politics (Dean, 2020). Thus, it makes sense to speak of ‘popular left politics’ as a distinctive cultural and political landscape which includes popular feminism while also encompassing new forms of popular anti-racist, queer, and socialist/anti-capitalist politics. In mapping the contours of ‘popular left politics’, I use feminist cultural studies primarily as a framework for understanding the broader logics through which various strands of left, progressive and radical discourse has seeped into contemporary commercial and celebrity culture. However, in so doing I recognise that the concrete relationships between feminism and adjacent forms of left politics are uneven and contested. For instance, while it is the case that the age of popular feminism has brought about a heightened familiarity and fluency with feminist discourse among many on the socialist left, feminism is still often subject to various techniques of dismissal and marginalisation (Craddock, 2020), while the well-documented tensions between feminist and anti-racist politics endure (Phipps, 2020). Thus, while feminist cultural studies is essential in helping understand the broad phenomenon of popular left politics, the latter must be seen – as Banet-Weiser suggests – as a contested terrain in which socialist, queer, feminist and anti-racist politics co-exist in a manner that is frequently fraught and conflictual.

This article builds on this burgeoning literature, in feminist cultural studies on the intersections of feminist resistance and popular culture, in three main ways. For one, in offering a close engagement with Marina’s recent work, it seeks to cultivate a more granular analysis of the ways in which popular feminism and popular left politics are expressed and articulated. Banet-Weiser’s analysis, for instance, while hugely valuable, is rather broad brush in scope, and invites further consideration of the precise texture of concrete manifestations of popular forms of feminist and left politics. Second, my analysis in the following sections builds on work by Angela McRobbie (2015) and Akane Kanai (2020, 2021), both of whom have stressed the vital role that logics of perfectionism play in shaping the contours of popular feminist politics and, indeed, contemporary cultural life more broadly. I suggest that the specific way in which Marina embodies a popular feminist/left politics reflects a common tendency towards purity and perfectionism in politicised forms of contemporary culture. And, finally, my reading of Marina’s work has several implications for how one conceptualises the relationship between popular feminist/left politics and neoliberalism. More precisely: my worry is that existing work on popular feminism risks under-appreciating the ways in which the expression of ostensibly radical and anti-neoliberal politics may itself be subject to neoliberal logics of competition, perfectionism and individualisation. In pursuing these arguments, the following section offers a close reading of Marina’s recent work – especially the ‘Purge the Poison’ single – alongside other examples, to offer a more precise account of the cultural grammar – that is, the specific discursive and affective textures – that popular feminist/left politics assumes in the current conjuncture.

‘Purge the poison’ and the cultural grammar of popular left politics

In this section I want to suggest that a consideration of Marina’s recent output, and especially ‘Purge the Poison’, can be instructive in helping us identify the precise discursive, affective and – to some extent – epistemic shape of popular left politics, amid a conjuncture in which certain strands of contemporary popular music – and indeed pop culture more broadly – are subject to a left politicisation of sorts. Indeed, Diamandis herself has conceded as much. In an interview with New Musical Express around the time of the release of Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land, she noted that there had been a cultural shift over the course of her career, such that current audiences would be more receptive to explicitly political pop songs such as ‘Man’s World’ and ‘Purge the Poison’ than they would have been 10 years previously (Levine, 2021). As such, Marina’s work affords us the opportunity to study more precisely the contours of the cultural grammar through which popular feminist/leftist politics are expressed.

Against this backdrop, let us now examine ‘Purge the Poison’ in a little more detail. ‘Purge the Poison’ is a driving, catchy pop tune with an incessant beat: although much of the instrumentation is guitar-based, the song’s structure – like much of Marina’s work – has a style and feel somewhat reminiscent of 80s-style electropop, a feeling enhanced by the synthwave-style aesthetics in the song’s promotional music video. The song’s lyrical content can be organised into three key themes, each of which, I suggest, exemplify the wider cultural grammar of popular left/feminist politics. These themes relate to, first, a distinctive conception of knowledge, identity/experience and affect; second, a specific kind of representation of the self and, third, a particular way of representing the other. I discuss each of these in turn.

Neoliberalism and popular left politics

The above analysis begs the question of why, precisely, the grammar of Marina’s embrace of left/feminist politics assumes the shape that it does. A possible answer can, perhaps, be found through an engagement with the rich body of work on the relationship between left politics and neoliberalism. Most of this work approaches neoliberalism as a critical object from a left perspective (see, for example, Hall, 2011), often implicitly or explicitly assuming that opposition to neoliberalism is a key constitutive feature of any self-respecting left politics (Lepori, 2020). However, much existing research on the cultural politics of neoliberalism suggests that certain forms of left, feminist and anti-racist politics do not stand unambiguously in opposition to neoliberalism, but in fact serve to consolidate its dominance. Indeed, this is now a familiar argument in cultural studies, although it is framed slightly differently by different authors.

Paul Gilroy, for instance, has powerfully documented how principles of empowerment and self-determination drawn from traditions of black radicalism have come to underpin what he calls a ‘black vernacular neoliberalism’, such that anti-racist sensibilities have, in some instances, come to actively promote and consolidate neoliberal values (Gilroy, 2013). Similarly, Catherine Rottenberg (2018) has written extensively about the rise of a specifically neoliberal modality of feminism – epitomised by the ‘lean-in’ ethos of former Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg – which seeks to empower ambitious women in the workplace, but at the expense of a collective struggle against patriarchal relations of domination. Banet-Weiser’s work – referred to earlier – casts the rise of popular feminism, in part, as a story of the displacement and marginalisation of more radical politics by forms of feminist culture that accommodate, rather than challenge, the neoliberal status quo. Political theorist Nancy Fraser has put it even more polemically, casting feminism as the ‘handmaiden’ of neoliberal capitalism through its valorisation of women’s participation in the capitalist labour market (Fraser, 2009).

A related argument – but made from a slightly different perspective – can be found in the late Mark Fisher’s (in)famous essay ‘Exiting the Vampire’s Castle’, a searing critique of the cultural norms prevalent on what he calls ‘Left Twitter’ (Fisher, 2013). Although Fisher does not mention ‘neoliberalism’ by name, he does, nonetheless, accuse ‘Left Twitter’ of adopting a competitive liberal individualist approach to politics, which he likens to a ‘Vampire’s Castle’. He claims that the latter is characterised by three main modes of desire: ‘a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd’ (Fisher, 2013, no pagination, my italics). As a result, Fisher paints a grim picture of a left politics in which narcissism has trumped solidarity, and in which individual left activists compete – largely on Twitter – for status and attention largely by highlighting perceived faults in others.

Although the above narratives about the relationship between left/feminist politics and neoliberalism are in many respects quite different, they share a certain logic. They all juxtapose a normatively good, radical feminist/left politics alongside a bad, complicit, neoliberalised iteration of feminist/left politics (see Eschle and Maiguashca, 2018). The precise content afforded to each of these varies: for Fraser, the ‘good’ is very much linked to a revitalised socialist feminism; for Banet-Weiser, it is to be found in black, queer and intersectional feminisms; for Fisher, it is to be found in a rejuvenated politics of class unburdened by (what he perceives to be) the distractions of liberal identity politics.

However, my analysis of Marina’s recent work suggests that these implicit distinctions between ‘good’ (anti-neoliberal) and ‘bad’ (co-opted, neoliberal) left/feminist politics are difficult to sustain: even ostensibly anti-neoliberal forms of politicised popular culture can and do adopt a grammar that aligns with the imperatives of neoliberal culture. Another way of putting it would be to say that a discourse which is anti-neoliberal in content need not necessarily trouble the wider logics of neoliberal culture if that discourse assumes a formal grammar in tune with neoliberalism. Akane Kanai has noted a similar dynamic in a discussion about the relationship between intersectional and neoliberal modes of feminist subjectivity. She cautions against reading ‘the rise of intersectionality as a straightforward “corrective” to the neoliberal feminist landscape’ (Kanai, 2020: 28), given that attachments to (an ostensibly anti-neoliberal vision of) intersectionality can and do circulate as part of a public presentation of self that accords with neoliberal logics of individualism, perfectionism and self-promotion.

As such, if it is indeed the case that politicised cultural figures such as Marina are ‘neoliberal’ in some way, this is not because they themselves espouse explicitly neoliberal discourse. What needs further analysis, then, is precisely the visibility and currency afforded to ostensibly radical and anti-neoliberal forms of discourse within relatively mainstream cultural spaces. Marina’s uncompromising critiques of patriarchy, militarism, capitalism and climate catastrophe are one example. But one could also consider the ways in which Beyoncé’s lyrics and aesthetic (particularly around the time of the Lemonade album) explicitly mobilise a radical anti-racist politics that draws on the political traditions of Black feminism and Black Power (Olutola, 2019). We now inhabit a cultural landscape in which Taylor Swift writes Instagram posts critiquing ‘structural racism’ and songs that reference a ‘fuck the patriarchy’ keychain (see Driessen, 2022), while Ariana Grande tweets that ‘it ain’t feminism if it ain’t intersectional’. This serves, I would argue, to complicate Banet-Weiser’s suggestion that ‘spectacular, media-friendly expressions such as celebrity feminism and corporate feminism achieve more visibility, and expressions that critique patriarchal structure and systems of racism and violence are obscured’ (Banet-Weiser et al., 2020: 7).

Contra Banet-Weiser, the current conjuncture is precisely one in which feminist and wider left expressions that critique patriarchy, racism and structural violence can and often do assume a ‘spectacular’, media-friendly form. This in turn means that if there is a co-optation or blunting of left/feminist radicalism by neoliberalism, it occurs not only primarily by rendering anti-neoliberal discourse marginal but also, paradoxically, by actively sanctioning certain anti-neoliberal discourses, so long as the formal grammar they assume accords with the competitive and individualistic logic of digitally mediated neoliberal culture. Another way of putting it would be to say that projecting an image of left/feminist radicalism can become a modality of digitally mediated self-branding, in which one’s radical politics become part of one’s unique online persona, a way of differentiating oneself from others in a crowded market for attention. This is perhaps most obvious in the context of so-called ‘influencer activism’ (Abidin and Cover, 2019; Sarkar, 2021), but the logic of digital capitalism is such that the distinction between social-media influencer and ‘ordinary’ politically engaged citizen becomes increasingly blurry (Khamis et al., 2017; Törnberg and Uitermark, 2021).

It should, therefore, come as no surprise that the landscape of popular left politics is, as Akane Kanai (2020) has suggested, premised upon an outward projection of perfectionism, purity and innocence, alongside a disavowal of one’s own complicity, for to acknowledge one’s own complicity would be to potentially risk jeopardising one’s reputation and market value. This might explain why it is that politicised pop culture figures such as Marina tend to project a public image of purity and perfection, an image which is often further compounded by the reverence that such figures are afforded by their fanbase. To be clear, I am not attributing an intentionality to Marina or any other cultural figure: I am not suggesting that the purity and perfectionism she projects in songs such as ‘Purge the Poison’ is in any way cynical, calculating or inauthentic. Rather, I simply want to suggest that Marina’s work is symptomatic of broader tendencies within the cultural and political landscape she inhabits.

To end this section, I will aim to clarify the political stakes of the analysis offered thus far. The line of argument pursued might suggest an endorsement of what Eschle and Maiguashca (2018) call a ‘strong co-optation’ thesis when characterising the relationship between feminism/left and politics and neoliberalism. That is to say: my analysis can be read as a pessimistic account of the capacity for neoliberal logics to domesticate and contain even those discourses and cultural processes that are, ostensibly, in opposition to neoliberal hegemony. And, to a large extent, that is an accurate reading. To use Stuart Hall’s parlance, my account has emphasised the ways in which logics of containment have tended to take precedence over possibilities for resistance. This has happened in two main ways. First, Marina and her fans invoke a vision of feminist/left politics which is purist to the point of being otherworldly, such that the possibility of impurity, complicity or entanglement is subject to sustained disavowal. This is then compounded by the logics of competitive individualism that shape the digital public sphere, such that the projection of a certain kind of left/feminist purism or perfectionism becomes a modality through which to cultivate a distinctive personal brand and accrue value, status and reputation (Davies, 2021).

Second, the case of Marina potentially also highlights the limitations of a progressive politics mediated by fandom and celebrity culture. As Kanai (2020) correctly notes, much popular feminist and popular leftist discourse is sustained by ordinary citizens staking out their political positions by either aligning with, or rejecting, the pronouncements of high profile politicised celebrities. This has the consequence of, first, sustaining a hierarchical relationship between the celebrity and the fan, potentially foreclosing possibilities for more horizontal, grassroots forms of solidarity and, second, attenuating our collective political imagination by affording disproportionate attention to the utterances and practices of celebrities. One recent example of the latter concerned the accusation of fatphobia levelled at Taylor Swift for her video for the 2022 single, ‘Anti-Hero’. Rather than give rise to a discussion of the wider gender and race politics of food consumption, body image and so on, the incident soon descended into a fractious and highly personalised debate involving Taylor Swift fans (‘Swifties’) about whether or not Swift herself was in the wrong (see D’Souza, 2022, for further background and context).

However, my emphasis on logics of containment should not be overstated. The case of Marina – as well as other politicised fandoms – also demonstrates the possibilities for left politicisation that can emerge out of the passionate affective attachments that sustain relationships between fans and their fan object, as well as within the fan community (see Hinck, 2019). Consider, for example, the ways in which queer and left-wing Marina fans in Brazil have integrated Marina’s image and aesthetic into their shared cultural reference points. This became apparent following the recent presidential elections in Brazil, which several Marina fans celebrated by sharing on social media a photoshopped image of Marina wearing a ‘PT’ T-shirt (PT = Partido dos Trabalhadores = Workers’ Party, i.e. Lula’s political party). So although the case of Marina is testament to the ways in which politicised celebrity/fan relationships can and do contain or attenuate possibilities for collective left politics, we should not lose sight of how, under certain circumstances, celebrities and their fandoms can enable, rather than foreclose, various modalities of anti-neoliberal resistance.

Conclusion: anti-neoliberal culture in neoliberal times

The aim of this article has been to intervene into ongoing debates about the relationship between feminism, left politics and popular culture, offering a conjunctural analysis of a moment in which there has been something of a left/feminist politicisation of several strands of contemporary popular culture in predominantly Anglo-American contexts. In particular, I suggested that Marina’s work – as well as its reception from fans and audiences – can help us identify several constitutive features of what I have called the cultural grammar of popular left politics, that is to say, the precise discursive and affective contours that recent left/feminist politicisations of popular culture assume. These include, first, a conception of knowledge as linked to the revelation of truth grounded in identity and experience; second, a projection of purity and perfectionism of self and, third, a projection of complicity onto others. I further suggested – again drawing in particular on Akane Kanai’s recent work – that these features of the cultural grammar of popular left politics are testament to the impact of neoliberal culture on the discursive, affective and subjective character of even ostensibly anti-neoliberal forms of politics and culture. This in turn means that the distinction between a ‘bad’, co-opted, neoliberal feminist/left politics and a ‘good’, radical, anti-neoliberal feminist/left politics is increasingly difficult to sustain. The paradox of the current conjuncture, then, is that even ostensibly anti-neoliberal political and cultural discourses can – in large part thanks to the logics of reputation, competition and individualisation that shape socially mediated political engagement – become subject to the imperatives of a neoliberal public sphere. Much contemporary left activist and academic discourse – including within cultural studies – implicitly assumes the possibility of a political and cultural space – or personal identity – that sits unambiguously outside neoliberalism. The perhaps rather pessimistic conclusion of this article, however, is to cast doubt on the viability of such a position. That is not to suggest that neoliberalism cannot be resisted. Rather, it is to suggest that any resistance to neoliberalism must start, rather like Marina does in ‘Oh No’, from a sustained and honest analysis of our own complicities with, and entanglements within, the logics of neoliberal culture.