Jilly Boyce Kay

This article offers a conjunctural analysis of mediated women's anger in the wake of the #MeToo movement. It asks: what does it mean that the historic rise in the visibility of women's anger (at sexism, misogyny and gendered abuse) emerged at the same historical moment as the rise of reactionary forms of political anger (associated with authoritarian populism, ethnonationalisms, misogyny, racism and the ‘anti-gender’ movement)? By putting two very different ‘tales’ about anger in the 21st century in dialogue – two tales which are seldom analyzed or considered in relation to each other – I hope to contribute to the growing body of feminist scholarship which interrogates the complex politics of mediated anger, as well as the perplexing mutations of popular feminism in an era of what Pankaj Mishra calls the ‘age of anger’. In particular, the article argues that a media theory of anger is required to understand the ways that women's anger is shaped, fomented and directed through the highly specific communicative architectures of contemporary digital media. While scholars have extensively theorized and investigated the reactionary politics of the manopshere, I argue that we can also find similar logics of bio-essentialism, political fatalism and hatred of social justice in what I call the femosphere . This is a gender-flipped version, or ‘mirroring’ of the manosphere, which has its own communities, influencers and intellectual ‘gurus’. In this way I argue that popular feminism – or at least significant strands of it – has taken a reactionary turn, and that some of the affective energies associated with #MeToo have become shaped by, entangled with and fused with the aggression, nihilism and anti-equality logics of the ‘age of anger’.

In recent years, the ‘mirror’ has emerged as a key metaphor for theorizing contemporary digital culture, with its disorienting communicative architectures and bewildering social and political effects. This short piece considers what the dynamic of ‘mirroring’ in digital culture means for the relationship between gender politics and an increasingly authoritarian right. In the digital hall of mirrors, feminist ideas and practices are mimicked, co-opted and warped into perplexing new formations. This happens through manosphere figures and ‘manfluencers’ who mirror feminist practices and discourses, weaponizing them for anti-feminist ends. But we also see uncanny doubles of feminism in the visibility of ‘tradwives’, ‘dark feminine’ dating influencers and self-proclaimed ‘reactionary feminists’. We argue that the tendency is toward a nihilistic anti-politics – or what we call a ‘vampire anti-feminism’ – whose goal is to suck out feminism’s life force, and to kill the possibility of collective political resistance. We argue that grasping the dynamics of ‘mirroring’ in digital culture is crucial for analyzing contemporary gender politics as it plays out in an increasingly reactionary terrain.

This article analyses the shifting media visibilities of femcels: women who self-identify as being involuntary celibate. It first considers the ‘original’ femcel community which emerged on Reddit in 2018, and which was based on often-despairing, even nihilistic, text-based discussion. It then considers the more recent shift to ‘femcelcore’: a social media aesthetic or ‘vibe’, communicated through short, apparently ironic videos on TikTok. We contextualise ‘original’ femceldom within the ‘femosphere’, a complex ecology of female-centric online communities that mirrors the deeply fatalistic, gender-essentialist, ‘red-pilled’ logics of the manosphere, and we situate ‘femcelcore’ within recent histories and aesthetics of ‘sad girl’ culture. Despite their differences, both iterations of mediated femceldom ostensibly reject patriarchal notions of feminine ‘perfection’; they seem to offer a critique of neoliberal feminism, and to comprise a potentially feminist online community, and as such, we consider whether this phenomenon may signal a radical break with the hegemonic postfeminism of recent decades. However, we argue that both iterations of femceldom ultimately provide a weak and highly problematic basis for collective feminism. Drawing on Robyn Marasco’s concept of ‘womanly nihilism’ we argue that, rather than pursuing a feminism of solidarity and collective strength, these mediated femceldoms are rooted in logics of pain and fatalism; they mobilise strategies of self-numbing, dissociation and irony, coupled with the rejection of social hope. They signify not a collective feminist movement, but a fatalistic, dissociative, ‘anti-hope’ retreat from transformative politics, and a turn to the individualising dynamics of TikTok ‘vibes’. Building on Asa Seresin’s notion of ‘heteropessimism’, we introduce the concept of ‘heteronihilism’ to make sense of the widespread mood of ‘giving up’ that is increasingly entwined with, and expressed through, the radicalisation of negative heterosexual experience. We therefore introduce a new theoretical lens for analysing the politics of gender, sexuality and popular media, in a context of a growing and complex backlash against ‘liberal feminism’.

This chapter explores debates pertaining to women's public speech about gendered violence and trauma, specifically in an Anglo-American context and in the wake of #MeToo. On the one hand, the chapter considers the profound problems that ensue from “speaking out” through the communicative architectures of late capitalist media culture – with their powerful logics of co-optation, depoliticisation, spectacularisation and commodification. However, it argues that we must also critique and resist a countervailing argument – that which assumes that any kind of “traumatised voice” that speaks through these communicative architectures is complicit in neoliberal hegemony and the undermining of collective voice. It problematises some of the critiques of #MeToo which imply that it is a movement motivated and driven by forms of ressentiment and vengeful anger, and which suggest that personally-experienced trauma, woundedness and rage have no place in movements for justice and radical liberation. The chapter then turns to analyse mediations of disclosures of sexual abuse by the politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the comedian Hannah Gadsby. It considers how these two women have been accused – from both the political right and left – of emotionally manipulating their audiences, exploiting their trauma for personal gain, and thus of helping to foreclose the possibility of more radical democratic futures and social solidarity. It argues that such suggestions of complicity and culpability constitute structural silencing – an insidious form of what I term “communicative injustice”.

In this essay, I discuss my appointment as co-editor of this journal within the context of its history across its 25 years of life thus far, as well as within the field of cultural studies more broadly. I briefly consider the value and crucial importance of conjunctural analysis, cultural studies’ complex but crucial relationship to Marxism, and the generative feminist possibilities of engaging with, rather than ignoring or wholly disavowing, ‘classic’ theories of media and culture that may be problematic or limited. I also briefly identify some areas of inquiry that I see as important focal points for future cultural studies scholarship, particularly around contemporary mutations of popular and conservative feminisms, popular left politics, and the ‘culture wars’.

This article draws on the work of Raymond Williams to argue that under covid-19 the dominant ‘ways of seeing’ the countryside and the city in Britain are working to obscure the structural violence of capitalism. Cultural narratives of ‘exodus’ from the city abound in British media, fuelling a material ‘race for space’ as the middle class rush to buy up rural properties. The ‘cottagecore’ social media aesthetic has proliferated, offering privatized solutions to the crisis through nostalgic imagery of pastoral escape. At the same time, nineteenth-century discourses of dark, diseased cities have been rearticulated, providing ideological support for racist migration policies. Exploited migrant workers in Leicester are framed as ‘modern slaves’ in the city’s ‘dark factories’; their bodies are transcoded as ‘dirt’ which must be ‘rooted out’ of the nation. We argue that these binary narratives and aesthetics of a bountiful, white countryside and an infested, racialized city lead to an ‘unseeing’ of the deep structural causes of inequality. We develop Williams’s analysis to show how these cultural imaginaries also sustain the gendered and racialized division of labour under capitalism, arguing that the country-city distinction, and the material injustices it obscures, ought to become a central focus for cultural studies.

This is the introductory essay to a special edition of Cultural Commons, the short-form section in the European Journal of Cultural Studies. This special edition marks the centenary of Raymond Williams’s birth in August 2021. It maps out some of his key work and considers how Williams’s thinking is both foundational for cultural studies – in its ‘bloodstream’ – and yet is now often overlooked, unattributed or unacknowledged. While Williams’s work was limited in the sense that it did not register or account for gender or race, and thus at times has been amenable to regressive interpretations, the essay also considers how his writing has provided theoretical models, political inspiration, and intellectual resources for feminism and anti-imperialism. It concludes by reflecting on the deep, enduring radicalness of his thinking, and argues that rather than disavow it for the silences, absences and limitations, we might continue to build upon, extend and pluralise what remains a rich, vital and urgent body of work.

This editorial introduction explains that in conceiving of this special issue, we were particularly interested in how mediated practices intersect with political contexts within a transnational frame. We set out to explore how gender-based social movements are currently circulating via transnational media, and thus afford diverse kinds of interventions in issues of social justice. Each article in this issue starts from a specific location and traces the trajectory of media texts and gendered collective subjects as they both move within and across national boundaries. Differences within specific uses of “transnationality”, located within grounded feminist critiques, emerge from reading these cases together. While the articles in the special issue do not deal centrally with the topic of the global COVID-19 pandemic, their critiques of the role of gender in transnational media—in various contexts—all point to the pressing need to think beyond the politically limiting optics of national histories and the boundaries of the nation-state, which we would argue is needed now more than ever.

This short essay provides an introduction to the Commentary and Criticism section of the special issue on ‘Gender and Transnational Media’. These shorter pieces are able to respond more rapidly to the co-constituting, ever-shifting socio-political sands of contemporary gender and transnational 10 media, and thus further expand and update the conceptual terrain of the issue’s theme. The six pieces point to the urgent need for feminist media scholars to respond to the travelling templates, digital mash-ups and local mutations of misogyny and racism, 130 to understand how their affective power is generated in and through their movement through digital s Siripace, and to rethink our conceptual tools accordingly.