European Journal of Cultural Studies

Drawing on analysis of media representations and interviews with 25 single women, this article argues that the single woman is abjectified in US–UK popular culture through processes of instability and incoherence, which construct her as a threat to heteronormative femininity and recentres the coupled norm. Yet there are moments of contestation within media portrayals, where her ‘illegibility’ allows for a troubling of the gender binary and opens up spaces for working with and against such oppressive structures. Drawing on Butler’s heterosexual matrix, I show that singledom is produced here as a non-normative heterosexual practice, which radically destabilises femininity and heteronormativity. This article examines not only how single femininity is being culturally delegitimised, but also how single women in the United Kingdom experience such delegitimisation. Through complex processes of what José Esteban Muñoz calls ‘(dis)identification’, the women work with, alongside and against representations of normative coupled femininity. They also tactically work with portrayals of the single woman to self-reflexively construct alternative single feminine subjectivities. Yet more troublingly, even in moments of resistance, the single women make painful identifications with their abject positioning.

Disabled people are largely invisible in China, and disabled women are even more so. Therefore, it is crucial for disabled Chinese women to mobilize their performative bodies to gain visibility in public and resist marginalized and stigmatized identities. This article focuses on ‘Disabled Sisters Best’, an activist group for disabled women in China, as a case to explain how the disabled performative body can provide a site of visualization of disabled Chinese women, why this is feasible and the implications. In particular, this article takes the body as a point of departure to examine disabled women’s bodily experience, body images and social media usage, and explain how their practices of mediatizing the performative body indicate a sort of politics of visibility that may possibly alter how we see disability, sexuality and identity, in addition to altering how they are practiced and what they can be.

In recent years, significant numbers of young middle-class Chinese women have moved abroad to construct an individual ‘biography’ beyond the unequal gendered expectations of the post-reform context. This article reports on a 2019 qualitative study combining interviews and visual analysis of WeChat and Instagram posts to consider how young Chinese women temporarily living in Australia maintain relationships with upper middle class family who have supported their daughters’ overseas ventures. In the wake of sweeping privatization which has encouraged parents to invest in their only children as their ‘only hopes’, online media has allowed parents to be ‘pervasively present’ for distant daughters in these transnational movements. We document participants’ curated self-branding for family on WeChat as a means of managing and negotiating this sometimes interventionist presence. Our participants’ practices reveal a complex juggling act: managing individual desires to optimize the overseas experience but carefully modulating such experience for the parental audience. Post-pandemic follow-up interviews in 2022 also suggest complications in the use of transnational mobility to extend the possibilities of flourishing, with parental pressure to return to a more proximate zone of surveillance in China. Such practices indicate the gendered contradictions young women face: pushed but also desiring to succeed individually in an unequal marketplace, while being further tethered to the family unit.

This article explores how the experiences of soldiers’ wives are mediated in the context of militarised popular culture and following two ultimately unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We show how audiences, representation (in two senses) and gender matter in a qualitative research project with soldiers, soldiers’ wives and veterans, which explores their perceptions of contemporary media representations of British soldiering, and their social media use. In the summer of 2014, we interviewed 31 participants in 5 focus groups for a British Academy funded project. Participants were veterans, veteran support groups, family members (all ‘wives’) and those directly involved with the promotion of the armed forces in various media (the Joint Information Activities Group, Media Operations Team). The focus groups explored media representations of contemporary soldiering across a range of media and genres (TV documentaries, reality TV, drama, newspapers) but also social media use – practices of self-representation. In this article, we focus on interview data from the wives’ groups (as they identify themselves) and find four emergent and overlapping themes: ridicule, comfort, danger and silence. We argue that the mediation of soldier’s wives is an area of pronounced contradiction: one that is important in and of itself for what it tells us about the experience of that group of women and equally important for what it tells us about representation, practice and gender and the ways in which these are entwined in digital culture.

This article analyses the mediated affective practices of the network of #justice-seeking mothers in Iran, who campaign for justice for their children’s deaths at the hands of the state. I situate their melancholic performance of maternal mourning as central to the mediation of a ‘wild’ public intimacy, which contests the state’s attempts to limit and foreclose the spaces of political appearance. This intimate public, I argue, draws on the affordances of visuality and hashtags on Instagram and Twitter to invoke expanded notions of ‘home’ and ‘motherhood’that affectively sustain its political activism. Recent feminist scholarship has emphasised the counter-hegemonic potentials of mourning practices that go beyond the patriarchal family as a reference point, especially in campaigns that seek justice for and recognition of the dead, whether these practices are offline or online. I argue, however, that attention to the ‘relational’ (cultural, social, physical) affordances of digital mourning in this case s reveals that grassroots maternalism may draw its emotional resources from a shifting combination of conventional (familial) and non-conventional forms of kinship. It is this fluid and provisional approach to emotional and political ties that enables the #justice-seeking mothers’ network to mobilise a variety of intimate registers in constructing an affective space of political appearance.

This article explores how Europe’s border crises in the post refugee ‘crisis’ years were discussed in the micro-blog Twitter, through an in-depth analysis of boundary making. Our focus is on the tweets of the top influencers of the hashtag #IStandWithGreece who strategically promoted ideologies ranging from white supremacism to Greek nationalism, glued together by an antimigrant stance during a border ‘crisis’ at Europe’s periphery. This network of intolerance promoted a representation of migrants as ‘pawns’; seen like a chess piece, with no value in their own right, literally pushed towards Europe by Turkey, who elevated them into a sizable threat. Within this, Europe was represented as a paradoxical other, the fallen Self, for not rising up to the opportunity to protect its sovereignty and identity through more securitization. Despite being diffused by extreme antimigrant Twitterers, we argue that these tweets offer a more overtly racist expression of otherwise mainstream European (Union) discourses and politics on migration. Effectively, #IStandWithGreece’s influencers functioned as Europe’s alter-ego mouthpiece, saying the unsayable using social media, and their affordances contributing to the normalization of an oppressive and restrictive European border management.

The polarised Leave/Remain positions offered by Brexit hampered opportunities for Britons to articulate the complexity of their affective political allegiances. Turning our focus on Grayson Perry: Divided Britain (2017, C4, Swan Films), we argue that Perry’s role as artist-ethnographer enabled an exploration ‘from below’ of the tensions occluded by deliberative democratic debate in febrile post-Brexit Britain. Intervening in a conjuncture of which Brexit was symptomatic, Perry’s arts documentary with Channel 4 provided the space to articulate newly configured affective and political affiliations in terms both of Britain as place and Britishness as identity. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s conception of agonistic politics, we argue the programme provided a space of confrontation for groups defined as polarised ‘camps’ to contest and debate through their emotional and symbolic differences which exposed the limitations of the ‘post-political’ formation. However, while the programme visualises Perry’s ‘left populist’ strategy of crafting two similar pots through ethnographic listening and interactions with Leave and Remain communities, we argue the focus on predominantly white communities ultimately offers a limited notion of what ‘a people’ with the potential to revitalise democracy in contemporary Britain could be.

This article seeks to build on sociologist Jo Littler’s notion of the normcore plutocrat, that is, a newly emerging political actor who gains power through performances of ordinariness. We do this by expanding Littler’s work through an engagement with Sianne Ngai’s aesthetic theory. Taking up Donald Trump’s performances as a case study, we attempt to think through the relationship between what Ngai refers to as ‘zaniness’ and Littler’s normcore plutocrat. Given Trump’s abnormal and bizarre antics, this article poses the question of what it means to frame his performances as ‘ordinary’. In attempting to answer this question, we relocate Ngai’s work to an explicitly political register in the attempt to show how Trump’s use of language, abysmal business record and faux-masculinity can be understood as revealing something about ordinary neoliberalism.