Gender, Media and Voice: Communicative Injustice and Public Speech [1st ed.] 9783030472863, 9783030472870

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Gender, Media and Voice Communicative Injustice and Public Speech

Jilly Boyce Kay

Gender, Media and Voice

Jilly Boyce Kay

Gender, Media and Voice Communicative Injustice and Public Speech

Jilly Boyce Kay University of Leicester Leicester, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-47286-3    ISBN 978-3-030-47287-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47287-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustrations: whitemay, Getty Images Cover design: eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Firstly, I am grateful to the journal Feminist Media Histories and their permission to include in Chap. 5 sections from an article published in: Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring 2015), pp. 64–89. There are many people who have been incredibly supportive in multiple ways during the writing of this book, including wonderful friends and colleagues in the School of Media, Communication and Sociology at the University of Leicester. In particular, the Media and Gender research group has been an intellectual and emotional lifeline and a source of inspiration and care. There are too many people to thank here, but my co-convenors Melanie Kennedy and Jessica Bain, as well as the group’s founder Helen Wood, deserve particular thanks. Group members Heather Savigny and Claire Sedgwick provided generous feedback on drafts and have generally been a wonderful support. The Media Cultures research cluster at Leicester, led by the brilliant Alison Harvey, has also provided invaluable feedback on sections of this book. Particular thanks go to Alison, Kaitlynn Mendes, Natasha Whiteman, Melanie Kennedy and Mark Banks for their helpful comments and encouragement. Thanks also to Patrick White and David Bartram who read chapters and provided valuable feedback. This book began its life as a PhD thesis under the supervision of Helen Wood. The more time that passes, the more I realise how lucky I was to have had her guidance at this early moment in my academic career, and she continues to be the best possible mentor, feminist and friend. I can’t thank her enough. Melanie Kennedy and Natasha Whiteman have been the most brilliant colleagues; I depend on their amazing generosity and knowledge in so v

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many ways. Natasha was an excellent study buddy, and she helped keep me on track and get the book over the line with her invaluable scholarly guidance and endless supply of snacks. The University and College Union (UCU) strikes of 2018, 2019 and 2020 have been transformative in my understanding of the power of collective voice. Particular thanks to my fellow ‘Picketers’, Patrick White and Melanie Kennedy, for their ongoing comradeliness. Thanks to my sister Katie for encouraging me to go doorknocking in the 2019 General Election—even though the outcome was heartbreaking, the experience of canvassing with old friends and new was another lesson in the power of solidarity and collective voice. Mareile Pfannebecker has given me the best kind of feedback that has always pushed my thinking in invaluable ways, as well as being an excellent friend over many, many years. Sophie Fullerlove has helped to pick me up and haul me through in ways that I am forever grateful for, over our many years of friendship, but most especially during the writing of this book. Thanks to all my family and friends, including my brother Michael, Mary, Charlotte, Jake, Lorna, Laura Mills, Julia, and so many others. Thanks also to Eli and Isaac! More than anyone else it is my partner Vinnie who has made it possible for me to write this book, making endless cups of tea, whisking the kids off on trips so I could work, and generally being extraordinary. I’m not sure what I did to deserve children like Henry and Tilda, who have been so patient, kind and brilliant. My mum was told when she was a girl, and speaking in ways that were heard as being too loud, that she was not to make ‘a poppy show of yourself’. This book is dedicated to my dad, and especially to my mum, who I hope will now make a poppy show of herself as much as she possibly can.

Contents

1 Feminism and Communicative Injustice  1 2 Feminism, Anger and Voice in the #MeToo Era 27 3 Damaged Goods: The Gender Politics of the ‘Traumatised Voice’ 55 4 ‘Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History’: Transgressive Speech, Gender and Communicative Injustice 81 5 Speaking Bitterness: Rethinking the Televisual Nag101 6 Gossip Girl: The Politics of Women’s Talk on Daytime Television127 7 Out of Place: Women as Linguistic Interlopers in Mediated Political Speech149 8 Voices of Re(s)pair: Towards Communicative Justice171 Index187

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CHAPTER 1

Feminism and Communicative Injustice

Introduction: Furious Wenches The last recorded instance of the use of the ducking stool as a form of punishment in the UK was in the year 1809. The accused was a woman named Jenny Pipes; her crime was that of being a ‘common scold’, and for having uttered ‘foul and abusive language’.1 The ducking stool was frequently used to discipline women who were deemed to be ‘gossips’ and ‘shrews’ in Europe and the English colonies of North America. It was a wooden chair into which the offender was strapped, which was then submerged in water—in this particular case, Jenny Pipes was ‘ducked’ into a cold English river in the small town of Leominster, Herefordshire. This practice, which became prevalent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was designed to publicly shame and humiliate those women whose language was deemed to be transgressive, threatening, rebellious or otherwise unbecoming of women. The story of Jenny Pipes—otherwise known as a ‘furious wench’—caught my attention for many reasons, but mostly because the location of this historic punishment was a town just a few miles from the place where I grew up. The term the ‘ducking stool’ was actually very familiar to me, as a pub in Leominster is named for it. I spent many an evening in The Ducking Stool, but without ever questioning, or being told about, the origins of its name. Jenny Pipes took on a particular 1  This information can be found as part of the display of the ducking stool in Leominster Priory Church, Herefordshire, the UK.

© The Author(s) 2020 J. B. Kay, Gender, Media and Voice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47287-0_1

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resonance for me in the writing of this book, and thinking with her—or at least the very little is known in recorded history about her—helped the key concerns of this book come into sharper focus. What can her story tell us about the ways that women’s voices have been policed, demeaned and punished, and how this relates to changing gender power relations? And how might a historical frame help us to understand the persistent forms of gender inequality and patriarchal power in relation to voice in the contemporary context? While brutal forms of state-sanctioned punishment such as the ducking stool, and the illegal but widely used scold’s bridle (an iron instrument used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that literally silenced women by forcing their tongues down with a metal spike), are no longer in use, it is clear that deep and insidious gendered inequalities persist in relation to voice and public speech. As Mary Talbot points out, the English language has an astonishing variety of words for vocal women, all of which have deeply negative and condemnatory connotations; as well as ‘scold’, these include words such as shrew, gossip, nag, virago, harridan, castrating bitch and battle-axe (Talbot 2010, p. 185). There is no such equivalent genre of terms relating to men and speech. Anne Karpf notes that, throughout much of history, the idealised mode of speech for women has been not to speak but rather the opposite: to be silent (Karpf 2006, p.  156). Aristotle proclaimed that ‘Silence is woman’s glory’ (ibid.); he warned that if women became involved in political activities, their wombs would dry up (Talbot 2010, p. 185). This notion linking women’s public speaking with abject infertility persisted well into the nineteenth century (Karpf 2006, p. 157). In myth, literature and culture, vocal women are routinely punished, and silence is re-installed over and over as a redemptive feminine virtue. In Greek myth, the talkative nymph Echo is punished with the loss of her voice; in fairy tales, the Little Mermaid must forfeit her voice in order to live a fully human life (ibid.) (and in Hans Christian Anderson’s version, literally has her tongue cut out). The feminist linguist scholar Deborah Cameron notes that even now, in the contemporary context, to mute one’s voice as a woman might still bring social benefits and a certain (if circumscribed) power: silence is ‘a form of symbolic capital that women may have something to gain by deploying’ (Cameron 2006, p. 16). My mother was told in her childhood in the 1950s and 1960s, as many girls were, to not ‘make a poppy show of herself’ by speaking too much or too often. In the run-up to the US presidential elections in 2016,

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Hillary Clinton was persistently criticised for her voice, which was often likened to that of a ‘nagging wife’. Helen Wood shows how feminist theory has sought to map the relationship between the gendering of speech and gender inequality more broadly—because the connections are so indivisible (Wood 2009, p. 15). The values and norms that shape dominant understandings about which forms of talk are acceptable for women—and which are aberrant—cannot be separated from wider and material forms of gender inequality. The gendering of speech—the values accorded to ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ speech genres, and the invisibilised but deeply ingrained assumptions about who is entitled to speak in public—all contribute to broader structures of gender injustice and the continuing subordination of women and other ‘others’ in public life and culture more broadly. However, I argue in this book that inequalities in language-use and public speech should also be understood as themselves constituting a deep form of gender injustice.

Women and Public Speech: A Culturally Awkward Relationship The classicist Mary Beard has written about the histories of women’s public speech in western culture, and the profound difficulties associated with women’s public voices, which she argues stretch back to classical antiquity. In Ancient Rome, ‘[p]ublic speech was a—if not the—defining attribute of maleness […] A woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, by definition not a woman’ (Beard 2017, p. 17). She identifies a ‘culturally awkward relationship between women and the public sphere of speech-­ making, debate and comment’ (ibid, p. 8, my emphasis); this relationship has been forged across millennia and still sets the tone for the contemporary public sphere. Indeed, Beard was motivated to write about this topic after her own experience with misogynistic trolling after an appearance on the UK’s topical debate television programme Question Time (BBC One, 1979–present; this show is discussed in detail in Chap. 7). As such, she writes, when it ‘comes to silencing women, Western culture has thousands of years of practice’ (Beard 2017, p. xi). The punishment and humiliation of women who dare to speak out, particularly on political matters, has not been an aberration in the development of the western liberal-democratic public sphere, but rather has been foundational to and constitutive of it (see also Fraser 1999).

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We might understand, then, that pernicious gendered inequalities are ‘baked in’ to the western public sphere. However, it is also important to note that women’s relationship to public speech has not been static or unchanging; the sheer staying-power of misogyny does not equate to uniformity in its manifestations. Rather, women’s relationship to public speech has been changed and resignified in different social, economic and political contexts. For example, Silvia Federici (2018) points to shifts in this regard in the early modern period. She shows how the deteriorating status of women in sixteenth-century Europe was bound up with an intensified devaluing and punishment of women’s speech: this occurred through practices such as the aforementioned ducking stool and the scold’s bridle, as well as the new demonisation of ‘gossips’, and the resurgent imperative for women to be quiet and subservient to their husbands. It was those expressly identified as ‘witches’ and ‘scolds’ who were subjected to the most horrific and humiliating public torture, but the effect was to terrify women as a whole into subservience (Federici 2018, p. 40). Federici’s work also illuminates the ways in which practices that seek to silence, shame and discipline unruly women have been central to the development of capitalist power. Female sociality, she writes, had to be destroyed in order for the land enclosures and appropriation of communal property to occur in the early modern period, because women’s inter-­ relationships and the forms of knowledge they produced and shared represented an intolerable form of communal social power. It was therefore the collective voices of women—as well as the collectivity that women represented—that needed to be silenced, disciplined and dispersed; as Federici argues, the figure of the witch was despised as a kind of ‘communist’ of her time (ibid., p. 33); she was a threat not just to patriarchy but also to private property and capital accumulation. It was in this context that women’s talk more broadly came to be feared, belittled and despised. Whereas the word ‘gossip’ had once signified female friendship and attachment, at the dawn of modern England, it came to signify ‘idle, backbiting talk [….and] sowing discord, the opposite of the solidarity that female friendship implies and generates’ (ibid., p. 35). To this day, the word ‘gossip’ conjures up a figure both of ridicule and of potential threat. Dale Spender (1980, p. 108) notes how women talking together—or ‘gossiping’—actually can be a threat to patriarchy (Federici would also say to capitalism): ‘When women come together they have the opportunity to “compare” notes, collectively to “see” the limitations of patriarchal reality, and what they say – and do – can be subversive of that reality’. The reason

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that patriarchy has been—and continues to be—so invested in the containment of women’s voices is because they represent a genuine threat to its power. And, crucially for the analysis in this book, it is collective rather than individual voice that has the most capacity for subversion, and which I argue we need to privilege in theories of women’s voices. Federici’s conceptual linking of the violent treatment of women’s speech with broader aims of social control and economic appropriation can cue us in to the kinds of women’s voices that are most likely to be castigated and silenced: those which transgress patriarchal ideals of femininity as well as threaten capitalist relations of power. In the early modern period, it was those women whose forms of knowledge and social practices stood in the way of capital accumulation whose speech was most brutally punished. How might similar technologies of power operate in the contemporary communicative context of neoliberalism?

Speaking as a Woman: Voice in Neoliberal Culture Of course, the communicative landscape has changed utterly since women were exhorted to be silent in Ancient Rome, since witches were burnt at the stake in early modern Europe, or since Jenny Pipes was ducked in nineteenth-century Britain. We might say that in contemporary culture, in contradistinction to earlier periods, women and girls are now called upon—and indeed expected—to come forward, to speak up, to express themselves and to ‘find their voice’. In a media culture characterised by ‘popular feminism’ and fuelled by a growing ‘self-esteem’ industry (Banet-­ Weiser 2018), the idea of ‘authentic voice’ and self-expression are increasingly prized as communicative attributes. Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad (2015, 2018) argue that women and girls are now urged to be confident, upbeat, optimistic and resilient—indeed, to be so is less an invitation than it is a new ‘imperative of our time’ (Gill and Orgad 2015, p. 324). As such, the ways that neoliberal culture compels us to speak, and mandates self-­ confidence as a celebrated feminine virtue, appears to represent a profound qualitative shift in the gender politics of the public sphere, which, as we have seen, has previously prized quietude and subservience as idealised communicative modes for women. The development of media and communication technologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has often been associated optimistically with progressive changes towards a more democratic ‘voice’. We can see this in the role of radical newspapers in the extension of the voting

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franchise to women and the working class; a new openness to ‘ordinary’ voices and less didactic forms of public speech associated with radio and television talk (Scannell and Cardiff 1991); the ‘feminisation’ of the public sphere associated with television talk shows in the late twentieth century; and the attendant ways that ‘private’ concerns became legitimate issues for public deliberation (see, e.g., Carpignano et  al. 1990). In addition to these optimistic narratives is the pervasive notion that the proliferation of social media platforms in the twenty-first century has now opened up new and infinite possibilities for self-expression and public dialogue; that hitherto marginalised voices are now apparently liberated from the hierarchies and inequalities of gatekeeping mass media institutions, and are free to speak on their own, unfettered terms. In a broader culture that is structured and underpinned by the post-feminist idea that equality has already been won (Gill 2007, 2017; McRobbie 2009; Tasker and Negra 2007), a powerful notion exists that a public voice is equally available to all: it is there for the taking, made possible by the ‘meritocratic’ playing field of contemporary society (Littler 2017) and the democratising structures of new media culture. As Sheryl Sandberg (2013) put it, women only have to learn to ‘lean in’ and they will reap the rewards. And yet in practice, these promises of voice, and the cultural inducements to speak up and speak out, come up against the brute realities of misogynistic backlash, ridicule, trolling and hate that circulate so easily throughout digital culture (Mendes et al. 2018; Jane 2016; Duffy 2019); as Jack Bratich argues, media culture is riven with forms of ‘micro-­violence’ to the extent that it comprises ‘a cultural will-to-humiliation’ (Bratich 2010, p. 66); to participate in media culture is to be exposed to the misogynistic, racist and queerphobic cruelties of this impulse. Social media might allow women to circumvent the gatekeepers of traditional media in order to communicate and self-express in public contexts, but it also allows for instantaneous forms of gendered abuse. ‘Leaning in’ as a feminist strategy, as Catherine Rottenberg (2018) argues, is both limited as a possibility only to wealthy white women, and fundamentally insufficient to address the structural bases of gender inequality. Women are increasingly visible in mediated culture, but visibility does not equate to political and social recognition or substantive power, as Banet-Weiser argues; indeed, the rise of popular feminism has singularly failed to convert into structural power— unlike popular misogyny, which ‘seems to fold into state and national structures with terrible efficiency’ (Banet-Weiser 2018, preface). Mark Fisher (2011, n.p.) noted how neoliberal corporate culture is endlessly

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inviting us to participate, to ‘join the debate’, to ‘make ourselves heard’; but this invitation is hollow insofar as the terms of debate are configured so as to disallow any interrogation of neoliberalism itself. The increased and diversified opportunities for public voice, then, do not seem to have translated into being listened to (Bassel 2017). The balancing act entailed in locating an acceptably public voice—one that is intimate but does not ‘overshare’; that is not too emotional, not too angry, not too loud; one that is authoritative but not too much so—is a treacherously difficult one to achieve. Indeed, in this book I argue that it is functionally impossible: not because women fail on an individual basis to find this balance, but because the conditions for its possibility do not yet exist. All of this is to point to a deep contradiction in contemporary culture, whereby it seems at once as though it has never been more possible to have a public voice as a woman (or, indeed, as anyone) should one desire one; but also that the social and emotional costs of doing so have never been so immediately and intensely experienced and felt. It also seems as though contemporary culture is increasingly characterised by an egregious gap between the promise of democratic voice, and voice as it actually exists; indeed, the promise of voice for women and other marginalised groups seems to operate as ideological cover for the fact that the conditions of possibility for meaningful voice are so impoverished. This book is an attempt to explore the contradictions that lie at the heart of the contemporary gendered politics of voice. Why is it (still) so difficult to speak in public while female? Why are the terms on which women’s voices are heard and heeded in our culture so narrow and circumscribed? If ‘speaking out’ and ‘expressing yourself’ are part of what Gill and Orgad (2015) call the new ‘confidence cult(ure)’ and the new ‘imperative of our time’, then what are the terms upon which women’s voices are encouraged within neoliberal culture? What kinds of voices are discouraged by—and through—this intensifying imperative to speak with confidence? Why does contemporary culture, in which women are no longer formally discriminated against, still have such trouble with meaningfully accommodating women’s public speech? And how, following Federici, might we understand the demonisation, trivialisation, punishment and fear of women’s voices not only as a function of misogyny, but more specifically as a function of misogyny that manifests within a period of capitalism characterised by what Federici (2019) calls a ‘new round of enclosures’? This new round of intensified capital accumulation, in which the super-­ rich are appropriating common wealth and dispossessing the poor on a

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global scale is, Federici says, necessarily attended by a resurgence of violence against women, and attacks on their reproductive freedoms. Violence against women—whether actual, threatened or symbolic—is intrinsic to capitalist accumulation. For women to speak out and challenge the logic of economic inequality and dispossession, then, entails incredible risks. And yet clearly not all women are at risk in the same way——it is poor women, migrant women, indigenous women, Muslim women, queer women, trans women, sex workers and women of colour who are most at risk of violence and whose voices are most quickly and viciously attacked or silenced. We may need to qualify the notion, then, that the relationship between women and public speech is ‘culturally awkward’ (Beard 2017); this may be the case for white, middle-class, non-disabled, cisgendered and heterosexual women, but the conception of ‘awkwardness’ does not capture the violence inherent in this relationship for those women whose voices cannot—or will not—be assimilated into the neoliberal economic order.

Communicative Injustice The book argues that contemporary culture is characterised by what I term communicative injustice, which relates to the multiple ways in which women, as well as LGBTQ people, people of colour, working-class people, disabled people and other ‘others’ are denied a voice that is sufficiently expansive, complex and meaningful so as to allow them a position of full citizenship and personhood in contemporary culture. The concept of communicative injustice refers to the ways that public speech is fraught with the difficulties of navigating contradictory and often irreconcilable gendered norms around speech and communication. In the contemporary context, communicative injustice refers to the double-bind that women are in when it comes to public speech: they are pulled in opposite directions by the contradictions of a culture that impels them to speak out, but which also punishes them for doing so. Every time that women speak in public, I suggest, they must at some level contend with this contradiction, as well as the implications that flow from this contradiction. Communicative injustice also refers to the ways in which the act of public speech for women is at some level always shadowed and underpinned by the possibility of violence—although this possibility is differentially acute for different women.

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I argue that a cruel reality persists whereby our culture still, in many ways, operationalises silence as an idealised mode of communication for women—but to accept this and to silence oneself denies the possibility of full citizenship. On the other hand, media culture impels us as subjects to self-define and self-promote through creating our own public voice; but for women, the risks and costs of doing so are as real as they are profound. That is to say, if women and girls are now compelled to have a voice, to be visible, to ‘come forwards’ (McRobbie 2009) and ‘be empowered’ (Banet-­ Weiser 2018), then it is necessary to acknowledge the cruel ways in which this impulsion to have a voice is entangled with exposure to misogyny. Communicative injustice, then, describes the impossible situation that women are in when it comes to public speech: to have a public voice and to participate in debate in the public sphere is fundamental to any conceptualisation of citizenship and full personhood—and yet that self-same public sphere is profoundly shaped by its own history of gendered exclusions. To participate in this most fundamental aspect of democratic culture is also, so often, to experience shame, abuse and humiliation. Nick Couldry has written about what he calls the ‘crisis of voice’ under neoliberal culture in the contemporary context, in which media are profoundly implicated in the undermining of ‘effective voice’; he argues that the ‘bare preconditions of speech are being challenged’ (Couldry 2010 p.  4, original emphasis, drawing on Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’). I offer the concept of communicative injustice to explore the ways in which contemporary neoliberal media culture works to curtail the possibility of ‘effective voice’, but I also argue that we must understand the injustices of voice in a longer historical frame, and by paying special attention to gender. Most especially, I suggest that we must confront the extent to which the roots of the contemporary ‘crisis of voice’ run very, very deep. While neoliberal culture entails a devastating crisis of voice and a hollowing out of democratic culture, our theories of voice must also incorporate an understanding of longer histories of patriarchal power and misogyny; that is to say, that to understand the depth, scale and power of communicative injustice will require a feminist analysis which takes account of the historic exclusions of the public sphere, and the ways that these intersect with and are resignified by the contemporary conditions of neoliberalism. I also think that feminist media studies scholarship’s understanding of gender injustices under neoliberalism can be enriched by employing more expansive historical frames, and by paying attention to the conjuncturally specific ways in which patriarchal and capitalist power entwine.

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Women’s Voices and #MeToo in Communicative Capitalism In the contemporary context, the seductive notion that social media has enabled a democratisation of voice is repeated so often that it has become a truism. And yet, as Jodi Dean (2008, p.  103) puts it: ‘Why has the expansion and intensification of communication networks, the proliferation of the very tools of democracy, coincided with the collapse of democratic deliberation and, indeed struggle?’. As such, any notion that the political effects of networked media technologies are characterised by their intrinsically democratising capacities is increasingly hard to reconcile with a world that is becoming more economically unequal, and in which the hegemonic economic system—capitalism—is literally destroying the planet. Dean implicates new networked media technologies in the enabling of what she terms ‘communicative capitalism’ (Dean 2009). In communicative capitalism, she argues, it is through participating in the circulation of content online that we feel political; but in so doing our political energies become reduced to the mere registering of opinion. Actual political power, meanwhile, takes  note of  the existence of these opinions—and then carries on as it was. In these terms, we might see again how it is precisely the seductive illusion that we all now have ‘voice’ that is the problem, not the solution to the crisis. While she comes from a different position on the left to Jodi Dean, Silvia Federici is similarly pessimistic about any claim that digital communications technologies have innately democratising capacities: Behind the illusion of interconnectivity, [computerisation] has produced a new type of isolation and new forms of distancing and separation. Thanks to the computer millions of us work in situations where every move we make is monitored, registered, and possibly punished; social relations have broken down, as we spend weeks in front of our screens, forfeiting the pleasure of physical contact and face-to-face conversations. (Federici 2019, p. 193)

According to Federici’s argument, then, we might understand that digital media technologies have not liberated us, but—on the contrary— are deeply implicated in the production of a damaging and  unbearable social isolation, as well as the ever-more intrusive reach of surveillance capitalism. Federici argues that the possibility of revolutionary change is actually most present in the least technologically advanced countries, and

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that digital communication technologies reduce rather than ameliorate the capacity for progressive social change. Again, we can see the argument here that the contemporary communicative context offers merely a seductive myth that it will facilitate human progress, flourishing and justice—in large part because social media platforms seem to promise voice to every individual, while actually actively undermining the conditions for meaningful communication, connection and collectivity. How might we theorise the possibility of gender justice—or the potential power of women’s voices—in a context of communicative capitalism? Does the new visibility of feminism in networked media culture also follow this logic, whereby the appearance of women’s freedom both substitutes for and obscures an actual lack of the same? In the following chapter, I explore #MeToo, the online movement against sexual harassment and sexual assault, and especially the new optimistic  sense that women are expressing their voices in unprecedented and historic ways, and that they will no longer be silenced. As I discuss, in much of the journalistic (and some of the academic) discourse around #MeToo, a powerful notion is mobilised that women’s mass disclosure of sexual harassment and assault will inevitably and of itself lead to gender equality. Indeed, it is often claimed that the cultures that have tolerated and supported men’s abuse of power are already undergoing significant change. The metaphors of ‘waves’ and ‘floods’ of women’s anger lend themselves to a wider sense that we are moving ineluctably—even organically—towards gender justice. However, in reality, the social and economic structures that have enabled men’s abuse of power have remained, to all intents and purposes, unscathed. As  Catherine Rottenberg (2019) notes, #MeToo has been largely compatible with the hegemonic form of neoliberal feminism that has become unmoored from any dedication to social and economic justice, and which might therefore bring about this necessary structural transformation. This is most especially the case in the US, where Susan Watkins says that #MeToo has done little to address an agenda that would tackle the enabling conditions for sexual harassment—including precarious work, racialized gender stereotypes and criminalized migrant status—and for escaping intimate-partner violence, much of which takes place in the home. (Watkins 2018, p. 74)

Seen through the prism of communicative capitalism, then, the new ‘wave’ of women’s voices occasioned by the #MeToo phenomenon—and

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across media culture more broadly—might only possess a kind of cathartic value, allowing a temporary sense of respite from the cruelties of heteropatriarchal capitalism through the act of ‘feeling’ political, while failing to address the structural bases that produce the oppression in the first place. Moreover, by ‘speaking out’ on social media platforms that seek to encourage voice as a profitable commodity, we are complicit in sustaining the power of corporations that are at the forefront of the ‘new enclosures’. And yet, as I go on to argue throughout the book, this is a rather totalising narrative that reduces all mediated communication to a commodity form that ultimately, inevitably and neatly shores up the power of neoliberal capitalism as well as heteropatriarchy. In this book, I am interested in how the particular forms of media entail different communicative architectures that have particular gendered implications. To that end, I understand ‘voice’ in broad terms and analyse it in a variety of specific manifestations. Using close textual analysis that borrows freely from multiple sources of feminist and cultural theory, I analyse television talk shows, television documentary, stand-up comedy, ‘hashtag’ feminist activism on social media, YouTube videos, political debate television programming and magazine writing. Because communicative injustice manifests in multiple ways that are highly dependent on context, I argue that we need to pay close attention to the particular—and often quite different—ways that voices are marginalised, silenced and policed. Communicative injustice is produced by the intertwinement of misogyny, racism, and the logics of capital accumulation, but this entanglement is context-specific, dynamic and shifting. I also wish to point to the ambivalent potential in some forms of voice, which may point to the disruptive possibilities of communication. There is a whole complex apparatus of material and discursive power that works to privilege the voices of some at the expense of others. A key argument from the book is that we should not simply try to get more women speaking publicly, to ‘empower’ or ‘train’ women up so that their voices are more ‘effective’ within public, political and media culture. These are not bad aims so far as they go, but the book suggests that as a feminist political strategy for voice they are severely limited and limiting. Rather, the book argues, we should radically rethink what counts as legitimate, authoritative and valuable speech—and to seek to transform not the individual voices of women, but the whole communicative terrain. My overall intention is to expose the shakiness of the post-feminist claims that equality has been won, and that new media has flattened out inequalities of voice in the twenty-first century; and to show that any

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progress has been non-linear, uneven and entwined with other kinds of loss—most especially of collective notions of the political (Fraser 2013). At the same time, it is also to show that, while the obstacles to women having full recognition and personhood within the mediated public sphere—as well as the obstacles to collective voice—are deeply ingrained, immense in their proportions, and tightly woven into the fabric of media culture, these obstacles are not static or immovable. Things stay the same, but they also change; as the examples drawn from different moments in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first in this book show, they have changed (see also Sedgwick 2020). This change has not always been for the better (though some of the time it has), but the fact of change itself tells us that these inequalities are not inexorable or unassailable. Communicative injustice, then, is not inevitable—although, as I argue throughout the book, it is necessary to understand and confront the fact that it is probably much, much worse than we already think.

The Unbearable Maleness of Rhetoric In 2017, the website Big Think published a list of the ‘greatest public speakers of all time’ who had ‘forever changed the course of history with their words’ (Johnson 2017). The seven people on the list were Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Adolf Hitler, Socrates, Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin and Mister Rogers. There are many things that could be said about this list, but suffice it to say that the absence of women from this list is striking—and yet wholly unsurprising. Men have long been associated with public and political speech-making, whilst women are associated with speech modes in the ‘private’ and domestic spheres, such as gossip and nagging (these two feminised speech modes are considered in detail in later chapters). Cheryl Glenn and Andrea A.  Lunsford (2014) note how women have very seldom been considered ‘rhetors’ per se—they have been perpetually sidelined in mainstream histories and theories of rhetoric. There have been feminist strategies to recuperate women into the history of political speech-making—for example, to register the exceptional rhetorical skills of many suffragettes. In 2017 Marie Claire magazine published a list of ‘The 10 greatest speeches of all time, by 10 inspirational women’, noting how women ‘regularly lose out in the all-time greatest speeches polls to the weight of history’ (Marie Claire 2017). Their list included Hillary Clinton, Sojourner Truth, Emmeline Pankhurst and Julia

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Gillard. The article stated: ‘Emma Watson’s recent UN ‘He For She’ speech showed us just how important it is for women to continue to speak up and speak out, four centuries after Elizabeth I rallied the troops at Tilbury’s battlefield like Athena reborn’. This list, then, was seeking to add women into the mix—to be a corrective to the historical record which was tipped in favour of men—to insist that great women should be added to the mix of great public speakers. We might think of this, then, as what Joan Walloch Scott (1991) calls the ‘add women and stir’ approach to history—to rebalance the historical record and to give those women who plainly satisfy the criteria for historical significance their dues. But can we—and should we—accept that it is only exceptional individuals with highly developed and culturally specific capacities for powerful public rhetoric who have ‘changed the course of history’? What would it mean to place Jenny Pipes on a list of people whose words had changed history? What would it mean to think about her furious cursing, her shouts and cusses that continued even as she was paraded through the town, and after she emerged from being ducked under water, as a form of public speech that is part of the history of women’s oppression and resistance? What might it mean, following Walter Benjamin, to do the harder work of honouring the memory of the ‘nameless’, rather than the ‘renowned’ (cited in Isenberg 2008)? My approach to communicative justice, then, is not concerned not with recuperating ‘great women’ into a canon of orators, or seeking to compile evidence of women’s communicative capacities as a balancing corrective to dominant assumptions about men’s superior rhetoricity. Rather, my intention is to more fundamentally interrogate the historical, political and social structures that have meant that we conceive of voice in a particular way that contributes to gender injustice, rather than allowing the possibility of challenging it.

What Is Voice? There are several definitions offered in dictionaries for the word voice, both as a noun and as a verb. Prosaically, it can mean: • ‘The sound produced in a person’s larynx and uttered through the mouth, as speech or song’; • ‘A particular opinion or attitude expressed’ (ibid); and • To ‘[e]xpress (something) in words’ (ibid). (Oxford Dictionaries, n.d.)

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However, it can also mean something more abstract, utopian or normative: to have ‘voice’ implies that one has  a stake in democratic life, and has the capacity and opportunity to participate in the collective making of the world. Being able to give an account of oneself, to narrate one’s existence and identity—to have a voice—is seen as fundamental to our conception of what it means to be human (Couldry 2010). But clearly, some people have more capacity and opportunity for being rhetoricians than others, or for being seen and heard as rhetoricians—and those who are understood as having the best skills and capacities for rhetoric, for having a command over language and the ability to transform politics with their words, are men (most usually white, middle-class, cisgendered, neurotypical and heterosexual men). One response would be to say that we should give women the same educational and rhetorical opportunities in order that they, too, could develop the confidence, charisma and command over spoken language that would enable them to be considered great orators. But another response—and one which I think has more value—would be to reject the idea that the speech modes necessary for social and political progress and transformation must be characterised by mastery, charisma and exceptionalism, and to adopt a more radical approach that reconceives of the role of speech in political and social justice. This endeavour, as I argue in the next section, is made more difficult when undertaken in the context of contemporary academia, which understands voice in profoundly depoliticised and individualised ways.

Academic Voices: Speaking in the Neoliberal Academy In contemporary academia, we are encouraged to frame—indeed to brand—our work and ourselves as singular, unique, self-fashioned and wholly original. In the UK, the relentless orientation to the Research Excellence Framework only intensifies this imperative. At this point, according to the guidance that is frequently offered to early career academics who are keen to score highly in the REF, I should be framing the book in precisely these terms: it is innovative, original, path-breaking, paradigm-shifting; it is the first book to do this or that in this particular way; this book is the authoritative text on media, gender and voice. But actually, I don’t know if it is. I hope that it is useful and that it contributes to feminist media and cultural studies thinking about power, inequality and mediation. But the logics of REF and of contemporary academia more broadly are not compatible with the ways that I want to conceive of

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voice in this book—because it is precisely the notion of voice as wholly individual, masterful, polished, entrepreneurial, competitive and self-made that is part of the problem. The book asks how we might rethink and re-value voice as collective, interdependent, vulnerable, faltering, misfiring, awkward and messy. And in doing so, of course, I would want to emphasise how much I am building and benefitting from the work of other scholars and thinkers, and that my own ‘academic voice’ is only possible because of the multiple forms of labour and care of others. Merve Emre (2018, n.p.) has written about the ways in which sexual reproduction is made to ‘look like an autonomous, unassisted act’—one that is carried out only by the two people who ‘create’ a baby—and how this works to privilege some women over others, by altogether obscuring the various and multiple kinds of labour that make possible this reproduction. As Emre argues: ‘all reproduction is assisted’. And of course, all intellectual production is assisted too—and so is the production of voices that are considered to be exemplary, masterful and ‘gifted’. The capacity for rhetoric and linguistic skill, as with academic aptitude, is mostly seen as something innate, something magically bestowed upon individuals, as with those who are said to have ‘the gift of the gab’. But, in fact, access to the material, affective and symbolic resources necessary for developing a ‘strong’ voice—that which exudes confidence, certainty and clarity—is deeply unequal. The reasons why people might not have the kinds of linguistic capital that position them as ‘leaders’ are not to do with their individual deficits, but rather because of a broader cultural terrain that is misogynistic, racist, ableist, classist and queerphobic. In academia, to insist that the best kind of thinking and scholarship should be masterful, self-confident and ‘polished’ may well have an exclusionary effect by downgrading and diminishing the voices of those who are more hesitant, unconfident and less assured, both in written work and spoken interactions. Mel Y. Chen (2014, 177) has written about the ways in which cognitive or intellectual disability ‘represents the near unthinkable for academia’, even though there is an incredible range of neurodiversity in humans—and perhaps the intolerance of cognitive difference is getting worse, not better. Arguably, the changing structures and temporalities of academic scholarship are further entrenching the privilege of voices (and minds) that function in particular, ‘masterful’ ways, to the exclusion of those who are cognitively different or neurodivergent. Chen argues that academic institutions increasingly seek to produce what they call ‘disciplined cognators’ (178), who are able to think, react and speak

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quickly, clearly and masterfully. And yet for so many academics, what Chen calls ‘brain fog’ is a troublesome companion, which—because mental agility, speed and flexibility are the presupposed qualities that academics must have—leads one to feel like a ‘cognitive impostor’ (p. 177). But as more and more academics grapple with anxiety and depression— which Mark Fisher (2012) argued are ever-present as ‘the shadow side of entrepreneurial culture’—as well as burnout and exhaustion from cultures of normalised over-work—it is reasonable to speculate that ‘brain fog’ is more prevalent than is commonly admitted. And yet to admit to such a thing as an inability to think clearly seems almost impossibly shameful. Contemporary academic institutions presuppose that the agile minds of their ‘disciplined cognators’ will reliably and instantaneously produce authoritative forms of expertise, and we are encouraged to fashion our professional identities with this language: we are ‘experts’ and ‘authorities’ who have mastered our disciplines, and can readily deploy this knowledge in rapid response to any new development. The most disciplined cognators of all become ‘stars’. But as academic careers themselves become more and more unequal, precarious and pressured, in ways that we know disproportionately affect women, people of colour and working-class people, perhaps we also need to consider that academia itself is experiencing a ‘crisis of voice’. If academia privileges voices that are slick, polished and performative of their own authority, and devalues those which are not, then what kinds of knowledge might end up being lost? What of voices that are less assured, faltering, awkward or neurodivergent? Travis Chi Wing Lau (2019, n.p.) points to the ways that disability studies offer us a model of ‘an intellectual humility and vulnerability’ that defines the field ‘as an interdependent scholarly enterprise’. What might it mean for academic voices more broadly to adopt this spirit and to refuse the logics of exceptionalism and authority? What might it mean to drop the pretence of cognitive hyper-discipline and accommodate the foggy brains of the neurodivergent, the depressed and the mentally ill? Those voices that thrive within the conditions of the neoliberal academy are arguably those we need to hear much less from. Disability studies points to a different possibility, in which the vulnerability, fallibility and interdependence of all human minds—including those of academics—is a given. Not everybody can—or should—corral their thinking into the narrow  shapes, structures and timeframes imposed by mechanisms such as REF.  I would suggest that it is often  both intellectually dishonest and harmful to claim that we are presenting scholarship that constitutes a

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‘mastery’ of, or ‘authority’ on a particular subject. As such, I want to follow the disability studies scholar Julia Miele Rodas (2018) who offers the chapters of her book on autism and language not as a ‘gesture of authority’ but rather as an ‘act of faith’.

Structure of the Book In keeping with the notion of academic voice as always ‘partial’ and ‘situated’ (Haraway 1988), this book is made up of a number of case studies which do not seek to comprehensively or exhaustively account for the gender politics of voice in media culture, but which point to some of the problems and possibilities in this regard, with a view to developing the central concept of ‘communicative injustice’. Chapter 2: Feminism, Anger and Voice in the #MeToo Era This chapter seeks to develop the concept of communicative injustice through analysing #MeToo, which is often lauded as a movement that has fundamentally transfigured the experience of, and capacity for, women’s voices in media culture. The chapter synthesises critiques of the movement in its western, Anglophonic manifestations, including its ‘political whiteness’ (Phipps 2019), its neoliberal articulation and focus on speaking out as a solution in and of itself (Rottenberg 2019), and the ways the radical possibilities of its consciousness-raising practices have been curtailed by its lack of engagement with revolutionary politics or economic democracy (Sanín 2019). It also explores the thorny gender politics of anger in contemporary culture. While historically women have been denied rage as a political resource, in the #MeToo era, it is often suggested that female anger is being ‘unleashed’, which in turn is giving rise to meaningful voice. The chapter seeks to theorise a more ambivalent relationship between rage and communicative (in)justice, by putting critiques of #MeToo in dialogue with philosophies of anger and ressentiment. Criticisms of #MeToo point to the prevalence of personal narratives of anger directed at individual men—the ‘bad apple’ approach—which are seen to dominate at the expense of structural critique and collective rage. However, this chapter ultimately argues that seeking to banish or pathologise individual anger born from personal woundedness risks doing further symbolic harm to those who have been abused.

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Chapter 3: Damaged Goods—The Gender Politics of the ‘Traumatised Voice’ Chapter 3 considers the relationship between gender, voice and trauma. It returns to consider the shifts in the communicative context associated with #MeToo, in order to explore debates about the narrow terms on which women’s voices are heard—that is, that their voices are only authenticated through the expression of injury, hurt and vulnerability. On the one hand, the increased prevalence of the ‘traumatised voice’ in media culture seems to offer a form of justice for those who have experienced abuse and assault, through the possibility of articulating a narrative about their experiences which is constructed on their own, autonomous terms. However, arguably, as some scholars have suggested, the effect is to reify a communicative logic whereby women and queers are only given recognition and voice by going through the gruelling rituals of ‘turning themselves inside out’ (Nair 2018), or participating in ‘an eternal repetition of pain’ (Brown 1993). That is to say that for to be women listened to is all too frequently conditional on the expression of trauma, and that their voices and stories will not be heard in any other way. The terms of this voice, then, may be highly circumscribed. The chapter specifically considers the stand-up show Nanette by Hannah Gadsby and the media visibility of Monica Lewinsky—both of whom have mobilised a ‘traumatised voice’ to create space in which to be heard, to ‘tell their stories’ and to ‘reclaim their narratives’ of abuse, humiliation and shame. I explore the tensions and possibilities around the traumatised voice, considering how the demonstration of a capacity for silence and communicative self-­restraint has too often become the condition upon which women are permitted to have ‘voice’. Chapter 4: ‘Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History’— Transgressive Speech, Gender and Communicative Injustice Chapter 4 argues that the mere fact of women’s voices gaining traction within public culture cannot be understood always and straightforwardly as an example of gendered communicative justice. In a context of resurgent racism and authoritarian populism, I focus on the ‘media personality’ Katie Hopkins, and her status as a figurehead for the alt-right. I argue that Hopkins implicitly benefits from contemporary discourses that celebrate ‘misbehaving’ or ‘loud’ women. Using Sara Farris’s (2017) work on ‘femonationalism’, I show how Hopkins subtly and insidiously co-opts discourses

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of women’s rights and histories of women’s communicative subordination in order to legitimise her own voice and to advance alt-­right, Islamophobic and white nationalist politics—even as she denounces feminism. In order to show the ways in which this new ‘tolerance’ and even ‘celebration’ of vocal women is deeply unequally distributed, I turn to consider a case from 2017, in which the Sudanese-Australian writer and broadcaster Yassmin Abdel-Magied experienced a traumatic public backlash after expressing ‘controversial’ political views online. The juxtaposition of these two case studies illuminates the racism that undergirds judgements about who gets to speak in ‘transgressive’ ways, or who is permitted to claim that they are being ‘silenced’, and underscores the importance of an intersectional approach to communicative injustice. Chapter 5: Speaking Bitterness—Rethinking the Televisual Nag Chapter 5 considers the history of the trope of the ‘nagging wife’, and how this is so often insidiously mobilised to discredit women’s political speech. Beginning with a discussion of ways that Hillary Clinton has been incessantly criticised for her ‘shrill’, ‘nagging’ and ‘dislikeable’ voice, it discusses how the figure of the ‘nagging wife’ haunts the public political communication of women. It then moves to consider the cultural form of television specifically, which has often been theorised and historicised as a medium that has democratised public speech. However, I argue that these optimistic accounts do not take gender into account, and how women’s voices have run into particular kinds of difficulty within the specific communicative architectures of broadcasting. In order to explore the longer history of the ‘televisual nag’, I analyse a 1973 television debate series No Man’s Land (ATV/ITV, 1973), paying particular attention to the ways that it was critically received and reviewed. The chapter shows how the programme’s explicitly feminist politics were typically interpreted as an egregious affront to television’s idealised gendered modes of address, and that the talk of its feminist participants was construed as a form of televisual nagging. While much scholarship argues that television has democratised public speech precisely because television talk tends to be friendly and non-didactic, this chapter argues that we must account for the gender politics of ‘friendliness’—or the ways in which there is a stronger burden placed on women to perform friendliness—and that women’s speech that is angry, complaining, ‘bitter’, ‘nagging’ or ‘rude’ should not be precluded from being considered ‘democratic’.

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Chapter 6: Gossip Girl—The Politics of Women’s Talk on Daytime Television This chapter stays with the medium of television to consider ‘mediated gossip’ through an analysis of those programmes that have been dismissed as ‘women’s talk’. Talk-based television shows that are produced for and viewed by women are frequently construed as politically powerless communicative ‘ghettos’, disconnected from and subordinate to the more meaningful communicative operations of the public sphere. The chapter first considers the British daytime programme Loose Women, which is often accused of reconfirming women’s subordination through its ‘bitchy’ and ‘gossipy’ talk, as well as its ghettoised status of being broadcast in the daytime. In this way, its orientation to ‘gossip’ is seen as contributing to the political weakness of women more generally. However, the chapter seeks to explore other political possibilities of mediated gossip, and to this effect it considers another women’s programme broadcast at a different historical moment, during the second-wave period: Good Afternoon!, was also often dismissed as a ‘ghetto’ for its location within daytime scheduling. However, it argues that the programme’s designation as mere ‘women’s talk’ gave it freedom and space to include radical political content; in this way, media ‘ghettos’ that are dismissed as politically trivial and insignificant might be reconstrued as ‘counter-publics’. Nonetheless, the chapter notes how women’s television talk now operates in a radically transformed media ecology, so that even ‘ghettos’ are now hyper-visible and therefore subject to much more stringent cultural surveillance. The chapter ends with a call to rethink the radical possibilities of gossip. Chapter 7: Out of Place—Women as Linguistic Interlopers in Mediated Political Speech This chapter offers a feminist analysis of mediated political speech, focussing particularly on the long-running debate programme Question Time, which is often held up as the paradigm of democratic speech in the UK. The chapter seeks to complicate those narratives which claim or imply that the history of mediated public speech evinces clear and linear progress when it comes to the inclusion of women. Within formal political spaces, women have long been positioned as ‘interlopers’—and in mediated political communication, they have been systematically under-represented and rendered as communicatively ‘out of place’. However, it now appears that we are in

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a transformed context: Question Time now has a female presenter and regularly achieves gender parity on its panel. The chapter argues, though, that this ‘progress’ predominantly benefits white, middle-class, cisgendered women. It considers the experiences of the black MP Diane Abbott on Question Time to argue that mediated politics is still characterised by communicative injustice. It also draws on insights from disability theory, arguing that multiple voices are excluded because of the implicit and narrow insistence that ‘democratic’ speech must be confident, fluent and ‘masterful’. Chapter 8: Voices of Re(s)pair—Towards Communicative Justice This chapter revisits the debates set out in Chap. 1 to consider how we might conceive of communicative justice by rethinking communicative failure, breakdown and misfiring as productive for feminism. It also outlines the ways in which an attention to voice can contribute new kinds of insights to feminist media and cultural studies. Engaging with theories of communicative disability which show how ‘fucked up’ our dominant communicative norms are (Yergeau 2018), it argues that inequalities and injustices of voice are even worse than we already take them to be; the hope for change comes precisely from the insights that radical despair—or respair— can grant. Arguing that the rules of the communicative game are set up in such a way that renders most of us bound to fail, it asks what possibilities might follow if, instead of trying to ‘train up’ our voices as individuals, we broke down the existing circuits of communication. It argues that we need to re-conceive of rhetoric; to de-privilege mastery, charisma, confidence, certainty and fluency as prized communicative modes and competencies; and to promote a proliferation of ‘deviant’ and ‘defective’ voices. Recognising that communicative injustice is produced by racism, misogyny, ableism and capitalist power, the chapter—as with the book as a whole—reaffirms the need for a politics of voice that is collective, feminist and queer.

References Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2018. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham: Duke University Press. Bassel, Leah. 2017. The Politics of Listening: Possibilities and Challenges for Democratic Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Beard, Mary. 2017. Women & Power: A Manifesto. London: Profile Books.

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Bratich, Jack. 2010. Affective Convergence in Reality Television: A Case Study in Divergence Culture. In Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence, ed. Michael Kackman, Marnie Binfield, Matthew Thomas Payne, Allison Perlman, and Bryan Sebok. London: Routledge. Brown, Wendy. 1993. Wounded Attachments. Political Theory 21 (3): 390–410. Cameron, Deborah. 2006. Theorising the Female Voice in Public Contexts. In Speaking Out: the Female Voice in Public Contexts, ed. J.M.  Bean, 3–20. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Carpignano, Paolo, Robin Andersen, Stanley Aronowitz, and William Difazio. 1990. Chatter in an Age of Electronic Reproduction: Talk Television and the “Public Mind”. Social Text 25/26 (1990): 33–55. Chen, Mel Y. 2014. Brain Fog: The Race for Cripistemology. Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 8 (2): 171–184. Couldry, Nick. 2010. Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism. London/Thousand Oaks: Sage. Dean, Jodi. 2008. Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics. In Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times, ed. Megan Boler, 101–122. Cambridge: MIT Press. ———. 2009. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham: Duke University Press. Duffy, Brooke Erin. 2019. Gendered Visibility on Social Media: Navigating Instagram’s Authenticity Bind. International Journal of Communication 13 (2019): 4983–5002. Emre, Merve. 2018. All Reproduction Is Assisted. Boston Review 43: 3, Forum 7: ‘Once and Future Feminist’. Available at: http://bostonreview.net/forum/ merve-emre-all-reproduction-assisted Farris, Sara R. 2017. In the Name of Women’s Rights: the Rise of Femo-Nationalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Federici, Silvia. 2018. Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women. Brooklyn: Autonomedia. ———. 2019. Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Brooklyn: Autonomedia. Fisher, Mark. 2011. Speak to Me. Radical Philosophy, Vol. 166, March/April. Available at: https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/166-reviews ———. 2012. Why Mental Health Is a Political Issue. Guardian, July 16. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mentalhealth-political-issue Fraser, Nancy. 1999 [1990]. Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. In The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, 2nd ed., 518–536. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. ———. 2013. Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis. London: Verso.

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Gill, Rosalind. 2007. Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility. European Journal of Cultural Studies 10 (2): 147–166. ———. 2017. The Affective, Cultural and Psychic Life of Postfeminism: A Postfeminist Sensibility 10 Years on. European Journal of Cultural Studies 20 (6): 606–626. Gill, Rosalind, and Shani Orgad. 2015. The Confidence Cult(ure). Australian Feminist Studies 30 (86): 324–344. ———. 2018. The Amazing Bounce-Backable Woman: Resilience and the Psychological Turn in Neoliberalism. Sociological Research Online 23 (2): 477–495. Glenn, Cheryl, and Andrea A. Lunsford. 2014. Rhetoric and Feminism. In The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, ed. Michael J.  McDonald. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–599. Isenberg, Noah. 2008. Walter Benjamin Forever: A Critic’s Coveted Afterlife. The Nation, October 15. Available at: https://www.thenation.com/article/walterbenjamin-forever-critics-coveted-afterlife/ Jane, Emma A. 2016. Misogyny Online: A Short (and Brutish) History. London: Sage. Johnson, Stephen. 2017. 7 People Whose Words Changed the Course of History. Big Think, September 5. Available at: https://bigthink.com/stephen-johnson/ 7-of-the-greatest-public-speakers-in-history Karpf, Anne. 2006. The Human Voice. London: Bloomsbury. Lau, Travis Chi Wing. 2019. The Poetics of Autism. LA Review of Books, May 2. Available at: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-poetics-of-autism/ Littler, Jo. 2017. Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility. London: Routledge. Marie Claire. 2017. The 10 Greatest Speeches of All Time, by 10 Inspirational Women. March 2. Available at: https://www.marieclaire.co.uk/entertainment/ people/the-10-greatest-all-time-speeches-by-10-inspirational-women-79732 McRobbie, Angela. 2009. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Sage. Mendes, Kaitlynn, Jessica Ringrose, and Jessalyn Keller. 2018. Digital Feminist Activism: Girls and Women Fight Back Against Rape Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nair, Yasmin. 2018. Your Trauma Is Your Passport. Available at: http://www. yasminnair.net/content/your-trauma-your-passport-hannah-gadsby-nanetteand-global-citizenship Phipps, Alison. 2019. “Every Woman Knows a Weinstein”: Political Whiteness and White Woundedness in #MeToo and Public Feminisms Around Sexual Violence. Feminist Formations, Online First.

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Rodas, Julia Miele. 2018. Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Rottenberg, Catherine. 2018. The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2019. #MeToo and the Prospects of Political Change. Soundings, Vol. 71, Spring 2019. Sandberg, Sheryl. 2013. Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Sanín, Juliana Restrepo. 2019. #MeToo What Kind of Politics? Panel Notes. Journal of Women, Politics & Policy 40 (1): 122–128. Scannell, Paddy, and David Cardiff. 1991. A Social History of British Broadcasting. Vol. I. Oxford: Blackwell. Scott, Joan Walloch. 1991. The Evidence of Experience. Critical Inquiry 17 (4) (Summer, 1991): 773–797. Sedgwick, Claire. 2020. Feminist Media: From the Second Wave to the Digital Age. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Spender, Dale. 1980. Man Made Language. London: Pandora Press. Talbot, Mary. 2010. Language and Gender. 2nd ed. Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press. Tasker, Yvonne, and Diane Negra, eds. 2007. Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Watkins, Susan. 2018. Which Feminisms? New Left Review, Vol. 109, January/February. Wood, Helen. 2009. Talking with Television: Women, Talk Shows and Modern Self Reflexivity. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Yergeau, Melanie. 2018. Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness. Durham: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Feminism, Anger and Voice in the #MeToo Era

Who will believe thee, Isabel? My unsoil’d name, the austereness of my life, My vouch against you, and my place i’ the state, Will so your accusation overweigh, That you shall stifle in your own report And smell of calumny […] Say what you can, my false o’erweighs your true. (William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 16041)

Festering Moods: The Age of Anger We are living through a time in human history that Pankaj Mishra (2017) characterises as the ‘age of anger’. Mishra’s compelling thesis is that— because modernity has singularly failed to live up to its promises of democracy, equality and freedom, this has given rise to a global structure of feeling of deep ressentiment—what Nietzsche called ‘a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge’ (cited in Mishra 2017, p. 9). In Mishra’s terms, this ‘simmering reservoir’ of envy, humiliation and powerlessness manifests as the resurgence of nationalisms, racisms and misogynies; the global spread of these festering moods has been enabled by the rise of 1  ‘Who will believe thee, Isobel?’ was cited widely in the context of #MeToo, as many people drew parallels between the contemporary sexual abuses of powerful men and the plot of Measure for Measure. See https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/11/15/16644938/ shakespeare-measure-for-measure-weinstein-sexual-harassment-play-theater

© The Author(s) 2020 J. B. Kay, Gender, Media and Voice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47287-0_2

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mass politics and mass media, and most recently by new communication technologies and social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. In a similar vein, Michael Kimmel has written about the newly unleashed, increasingly visible rage of white men in America, who he says are ‘angrier than ever before in our recent history’ (Kimmel 2017, p. 4). He offers the concept of ‘aggrieved entitlement’ to describe the mood of those white American men who are angry because they have not been given what they were led to believe they could legitimately expect from life as white American men. In his book The Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishra similarly notes the growing anger of white men in the west; however, he sees this as part of a much broader picture, in which (for example) the ressentiment-­fuelled hatred of ISIS,2 or reactionary Hindu nationalists in India, are part of ‘global structures of feeling and thinking’ (p.  31, my emphasis). All over the world, ‘the modern promise of equality collides with massive disparities of power, education, status and property ownership’ (ibid.). Increasingly we see this expressed electorally with populist and authoritarian political parties and policies on the rise (in places such as the US, Hungary, India, Germany and Brazil, to name just a few). Political dysfunction, economic stagnation and climate change operate on a planetary scale—we are all negatively bound together through crisis; and globalization and social media technologies have brought us together in a ‘common present’. What emerges in this context is an existential resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and [a] sense of humiliation and powerlessness […] ressentiment, as it lingers and deepens, poisons civil society and undermines political liberty, and is presently making for a global turn to authoritarianism and toxic forms of chauvinism. (Mishra 2017, p. 14)

The notion that anger has (re)emerged as a powerful and propulsive structure of feeling is reiterated in many accounts of populism and anti-­ establishment politics; for example, in Arlie Russell Hochschild’s (2016) study, which points to the mixture of ‘anger’ and ‘mourning’ that has been central to the rise of the Tea Party and the election of Trump in the US; or the idea that the vote for Brexit in the UK was a ‘howl of rage’ (Eatwell and Goodwin 2018). Concerns that we are living in an age of anger and 2  ISIS is the acronym for Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a militant terrorist group which is also known by the abbreviation ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant).

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volatility are increasingly expressed in mediated public discourse: in the UK, BBC Radio 4 ran a series asking ‘Why Are We So Angry?’ (2019), while the Guardian newspaper  dedicated a whole special insert to the question of rage, entitled ‘The Ultimate Guide to Anger’, which reported that ‘the best data that we have suggests that, overall, we are indeed getting angrier’; and, furthermore, that ‘it’s as though our anger has curdled, gone rancid’, hardening into ‘violence and hate’ (Burkeman 2019, 2). Against this gloomy picture, it is the figure of the incel—a man who is involuntarily celibate—who has become, I argue elsewhere, emblematic of this festering mood of humiliation, envy and hatred (Kay forthcoming). Inceldom is now associated not merely with hapless men who are unable to seduce women, but with extreme violence and mass shootings that are committed in the name of ‘incel ideology’. The internet provides particular and powerful new affordances for misogynistic anger to spread and thrive, as Debbie Ging (2017) shows in her analysis of the ‘manosphere’, and this anger seems only to be gaining in political traction and power. As Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018b) argues, while the rise in visibility of popular feminism has not led to any meaningful structural change, the rise of popular misogyny has managed to fold all too easily into structures of power and formal political institutions: ‘networked misogyny’, as she calls it, operates by connecting up ideologies of vicious anti-feminism and hatred towards women, and in so doing consolidates  and  multiplies its power. Central to Banet-Weiser’s thesis is the idea that networked misogyny gains traction where popular feminism is unable to. It seems, then, that it is the rage of men who are humiliated—culturally, economically, politically, sexually—that is the paradigmatic form of rage associated with this particular conjuncture, born of a sense that white men are losing out to—or are ‘left behind’ by—women and minorities, who are understood as reaping the rewards of globalisation. We see this in the pervasive and widespread media narrative that men are experiencing a ‘crisis of masculinity’. From the perspective of communicative justice, this picture provides grounds for deep pessimism: the ‘common present’ into which media technologies have helped to launch us is not functioning as grounds for cooperation, understanding, democratic voice and meaningful solidarity; rather, it has enabled what Hannah Arendt called ‘negative solidarity’. We are bound together in ‘a state of virtual equality enforced by social media’ (Mishra 2017, p.  334, my emphasis). That is to say, that social media seduces and entraps us with its powerful promise of equality for all, whilst simultaneously providing us with overwhelming evidence of the opposite:

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that is, our own humiliating inadequacy that we experience painfully and intensely through our ‘constant exposure to other people’s success and well-being’ (p.  337). The festering anger, infected also with envy, that thrives in such a world is easily read in the figures of the incel, the white nationalist terrorist, the ISIS recruit, as well as in the aforementioned electoral successes of authoritarian chauvinists. But what about the anger of women? There is no equivalent sense that women are being ‘left behind’, and no parallel discussion of a ‘crisis of femininity’ (Kay forthcoming). Women’s anger is often understood within feminist media and cultural studies as productive and progressive; there is an implicit but pervasive sense that women’s anger has been suppressed for too long, contributing to women’s historic subordination; and that therefore a ‘release’ of anger will bring with it new democratic possibilities for voice. I tend broadly to agree with this understanding of the relationship between anger and justice; however, in this chapter, I seek to question the usefulness of too strongly or deterministically understanding women’s anger as a morally pure and righteous emotion, and to clarify more precisely how its role in movements for justice may be understood.

What Is the Gender of Humiliation? All of the academic and journalistic treatments of anger mentioned above, while understanding the role of anger in contemporary politics in somewhat different ways, tend towards a notion of rage and ressentiment that is—I would argue—strongly oriented towards and associated with masculinity (and most usually, white masculinity). In this conceptualisation, anger as a global structure of feeling is born from the rise of economic equality as well as a perceived, unfair elevation of the status of women and minorities. In her study of Tea Party voters in Louisiana, Arlie Russell Hochschild writes that the resentment of her white interviewees was produced in response to what were perceived as the ‘line-cutters’: those people who they saw as jumping to the front of the queue, at the same time as they felt they were being pushed back. Her interviewees drew on what she calls a ‘deep story’ of loss and pain, and a longing for the sense of opportunity that had been promised to them as part of the American Dream; their anger was invariably expressed towards ‘big government’ and its perceived collusion with and preferential treatment of women and minorities. She summarises this festering feeling of anger, humiliation and powerlessness in the following way:

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Blacks, women, immigrants, refugees […] – all have cut ahead of you in line. But it’s people like you who have made this country great. You feel uneasy. It has to be said: the line cutters irritate you. They are violating rules of fairness. You resent them, and you feel it’s right that you do. So do your friends. Fox commentators reflect your feelings, for your deep story is also the Fox News deep story. (p. 139)

While her study also includes women on the American Right who articulate this ‘deep story’ and its associated resentments, it is easy to see how this flavour of anger is distinctly masculinist, and certainly anti-feminist; its most ready emblem in popular culture is perhaps the white man with a ‘Make America Great Again’ red baseball cap, or in the UK, the figure of the Brexit-voting, right-wing, pink-faced, middle-aged ‘gammon’.3 While I agree that the disturbing manifestations of authoritarian populism are being nourished and propelled by angry white masculinity,  I would also  argue that the dominant coding of ressentiment as a form of  white male anger narrows the possibility of understanding the more complex and various ways in which feelings of rage and resentment are manifesting. That being said, there is another kind of anger that is increasingly visible in mainstream culture, but this seems to be qualitatively distinct from—and is seldom discussed in relation to—the regressive rage of Trump voters, racist ‘gammons’ and misogynistic incels. Namely, this is women’s anger that is directed towards sexual abuse and harassment, most obviously as expressed in the #MeToo movement. As such, in parallel to the broader interest in the turn to anger within global politics that is explored by Mishra, Kimmel, Hochschild and others, is a remarkable new interest in and media visibility of women’s anger. Since 2017 especially, popular cultural forms now seem to be newly accommodating and expressive of women’s anger in the era of Trump: the Hulu television series the Handmaid’s Tale, adapted from Margaret Attwood’s classic novel, is often understood as emblematic of this resurgence of feminist rage, and of audiences’ desire to consume and engage with it. The distinctive red costume and hooded white bonnet worn by the ‘handmaids’—the women who are forced to be surrogates in a dystopian future that is premised on women’s 3  A useful description of the ways in which the term ‘gammon’ is used: ‘in the U.K., the meat product known as gammon has recently become shorthand for a certain type of middleaged white man. He’s a Conservative voter, he likely supports Brexit, and his habitual rantings about immigration and the scourge of political correctness have caused him to turn so red as to resemble a pan-fried slab of ham’ (Serhan 2018).

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total loss of reproductive freedom—have been widely taken up in feminist protest, particularly against attacks on abortion rights (see Klein 2019), indicating how popular media texts are shaping and strengthening public expressions of women’s anger. In 2018, the Guardian published an article entitled ‘Mad women: how angry sisterhood is taking over the small screen’, which argued that television’s fascination with rageful heroines was almost unrecognisable from the state of small-screen drama ten years ago, when women’s anger was never construed as productive or appropriate for television narratives; in contrast, the contemporary moment has seen the production of new shows like Jessica Jones, I Love Dick and Good Girl that centre and explore female anger (Bernstein 2018). In the 2019 Disney remake of Aladdin, the character of Jasmine has been ‘updated’, as the Indian edition of Cosmopolitan put it; in marked contrast to demure Disney princesses of yesteryear, she has been made into ‘a Jasmine for the era of female presidential candidates and the #MeToo movement’ (Tiwana 2019). In the film, she sings a song called ‘Speechless’ which includes the lyrics: ‘I won’t be silenced/You can’t keep me quiet/Won’t tremble when you try it/All I know is I won’t go speechless’. The actress who played Jasmine said of this song that ‘She’s angry in that moment’ (cited in Richardson 2019). The popular mood, it seems, is therefore one of popular feminist anger and defiance: a refusal to be silent, and a new willingness to display female rage directed at archaic patriarchal oppression. This phenomenon is often expressed in meteorological metaphors of floods and waves: as a great unleashing of rage that has built up over months, years, decades or even much longer. There is a sense that all that anger that has been repressed is now being productively weaponised in the service of feminism; for example, an article headline in Elle magazine in 2018 read ‘How women are turning centuries of silence into rage’ (Bates 2018). This is part of a wider picture in which feminist activism more broadly has become increasingly visible, such as the Women’s Marches that began after Trump’s inauguration as president in 2017, and through the media appearances of celebrity feminists including Emma Watson and Beyoncé (Hamad and Taylor 2015). The popular ‘turn to anger’ is also readily evidenced by three bestselling new publications by Rebecca Traister (2018), Brittney Cooper (2018) and Soraya Chemaly (2018). Significantly, these three books were all published during the year that Time magazine claimed was defined by female anger: a headline read ‘Women’s Rage Is the Most Powerful Engine of 2018’ (Zacherek 2018). All three books are

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concerned with the value, creativity and political potential of women’s anger. Brittney Cooper’s (2018) book Eloquent Rage argues that anger can function as a kind of ‘superpower’ for black women, although they have been told for so long to eschew rage in order to become ‘respectable’. Black women, she writes, are so often accused of being angry just for existing—but she argues that actually, black women do have so much to be angry about. All of these publications posit that women should embrace rather than disavow anger—and this idea has become much more widely taken up in popular and political culture. While popular culture, and indeed popular feminism, has hitherto been characterised by a repudiation of women’s anger (Banet-Weiser 2018b; Gill 2016), it now appears that there has been a qualitative shift in the ‘feeling rules’ of popular culture (Dobson and Kanai 2018), and that women’s publicly expressed rage is no longer incompatible with dominant communicative norms or commercial media logics. Helen Wood (2019) argues that we are witnessing what she tentatively but hopefully identifies as ‘irreverent rage’—where the increasing use of the word ‘fuck’, both in political  protest and popular cultures, indicates a growing refusal by women to play by the classed and gendered socio-communicative rules of the game. Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill (2019) argue that women’s anger is ‘having a moment’ in media culture; I have similarly argued that women’s anger has become somewhat popularised and celebritised (Kay 2020). Women’s rage—we are encouraged to believe—is now ‘all the rage’ (Kay 2019; Kay and Banet-Weiser 2019).

Feminism and the Furies: Rethinking Gender, Anger and Justice Among those who theorise social and political justice, there exist deeply divergent understandings of the moral appropriateness and productive potential of anger. Throughout most of the history of western philosophy, anger has been seen as morally problematic and politically counterproductive—as something that must be worked against in order to allow for human flourishing. Aristotle defined anger as ‘a desire accompanied by pain for an imagined retribution on account of an imagined slighting inflicted by people who have no legitimate reason to slight oneself or one’s own’ (cited in Nussbaum 2016, p. 17).

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The philosopher Martha C.  Nussbaum (2016, 2020) has written at length about the relationship between anger and justice. For her, anger is normatively problematic and morally  defective because it is intrinsically based upon a wish for payback; this, she says, is fundamentally irrational, because making a perpetrator feel pain can never undo the injustice that was the cause of this anger. Anger, therefore, is a form of ‘magical thinking’ that is delusively invested in notions of ‘cosmic balance’. Anger, she writes, is also normatively problematic because it is inevitably concerned with a slight to one’s status, as the Aristotle quotation alludes to: this, says Nussbaum, can never be a recipe for justice. Acting in anger to try and redress one’s sense of humiliation is never a good idea, she argues. Ultimately she sees anger as ‘stupid’, ‘irrational’, ‘childish’ and ‘undisciplined’, when what we actually need in order to bring about justice is ‘intelligence, control, and a spirit of generosity’ (2016, p. 249). We can quite easily see how these troubling elements of anger—a wish for payback and a perceived slight to one’s status—are central to the kinds of contemporary rage characterised by racism, misogyny and ‘aggrieved entitlement’ that manifest in authoritarian and right-wing populism. In Mishra’s analysis, the ‘age of anger’ is characterised by deeply reactionary politics, and it is easy to see how the conceptualisation of anger as corrosive, counterproductive and morally problematic applies very fittingly to these masculinist expressions of rage and resentment. However, Nussbaum also locates this problematic type of retributive anger within feminist thought and action, and suggests that much feminist struggle is also perturbingly based upon the ‘wish for payback and [for] commensurate pain to befall the aggressor’ (Nussbaum 2020, n.p.). She writes that ‘It is attractive for feminists to believe that victims are always pure and right’, and argues that this belief leads to an uncritical feminist embrace of anger that forecloses the possibility of  more compassionate and just futures. I find Nussbaum’s conceptualisation of feminist anger deeply problematic (see Srinivasan 2016 and 2018 for excellent critiques of Nussbaum’s thesis), but her intervention does call upon us to clarify how and why anger is important to struggles for gender justice. As such, how might we make a case for feminist anger that is qualitatively distinct from retributive rage— and which is not antithetical to hope, love, generosity and creativity? In the opening pages of her book Anger and Forgiveness, Nussbaum discusses the Ancient Greek myth in which the goddess Athena established the official courts and justice system of Athens. Athena did this to replace and terminate the ‘seemingly endless cycle of blood vengeance’ (Nussbaum 2016, p. 1) that had hitherto governed the conduct of Athenians. Blood

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vengeance against wrongdoers had until then been meted out via the ancient, fearsome and hideous goddesses of revenge, the Furies (otherwise known as the Eumenides); but it would now be settled by reasoned argument and well-grounded evidence in the new legal system. Athena gave the Furies a place of honour beneath the city, and this is frequently interpreted as the goddess recognising that the legal system should not seek to entirely expel the ‘dark, vindictive passions’, but to honour, preserve and incorporate them. For Nussbaum, however, this taming of the Furies represents something else—they were subdued but they were also transformed; they were no longer vengeful, angry and bloodthirsty, but reasonable, calm and measured. Athens was now  mercifully liberated from the civil strife and endless cycle of blood vengeance: ‘In the place of anger, the city gets political justice’ (p. 3). The casting of anger as antithetical to political justice is at the heart of Nussbaum’s argument, and has been central to many western philosophical understandings of anger, from Aristotle to Socrates, to the Roman Stoics and Adam Smith (Srinivasan 2016). In this tradition, anger is cast as fundamentally at odds with law and justice, and individuals and societies should therefore work against the instinct to anger—even in the face of profound injury and injustice—and instead cultivate compassion, sympathy and love. But might the first interpretation of the myth—in which the anger of the Furies is not banished, or tamed beyond recognition, but instead both controlled and honoured—offer us a different conceptualisation of the role of anger in the pursuance of justice? There is a rich tradition from black feminist thought that understands anger as mobilising, energising, clarifying and necessary for genuine structural change (e.g. Audre Lorde 1997 [1981]; Cooper 2018). Anger has been denied to women for so long as a communicative, affective and political mode, and this, of course, is part of a more general silencing of women’s voices and the extreme circumscription of terms on which their concerns are heeded. To claim and embrace anger, therefore, is to claim political power and public voice that have too long been denied to women; it subverts dominant assumptions about who is entitled to public anger, and it also brings with it a new kind of political power. To be angry can register as a demand to be heard, and as a refusal to accept the suffocating terms of the social scripts women are compelled to adhere to in the public sphere. In these terms, we can see how it is central to any notion of communicative justice. Amia Srinivasan argues that anger can help us to appreciate and register the nature of an injustice—it can be a morally apt response and need not involve a wish for payback: ‘desire for recognition is not the same as a desire for revenge’ (Srinivasan 2018, p. 131). It is also

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a ‘form of communication, a way of publicly marking moral disvalue, calling for the shared negative appreciation of others’ (p. 132). Audre Lorde points to the importance of anger both in clarifying the cause of injustice and in galvanising us to act: Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in all those assumptions underlining our lives. (Audre Lorde 1997 [1981], 280)

Communicative justice should therefore encompass the right to be angry as well as recognising the important role of anger in public communication about injustice; it is a legitimate, useful and just way to help make moral judgements and to provide fuel for activism.

#MeToo and the Politics of Anger Perhaps most of all, what seems to capture and express the new ‘wave’ of women’s anger in the contemporary moment is the #MeToo movement. Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018a, n.p.) has written: The #MeToo movement has forced all of us to confront female rage — a rage at the injury of being harassed and assaulted, a rage at not being believed, at being called hysterical and out of control. Women’s anger has been explained away for so many years as an inappropriate emotion, as evidence of our inferiority and overwhelming corporeality. But in the current moment, women are insisting that their rage and anger be taken seriously and dealt with. Our rage and anger are spilling over.

While the #MeToo campaign began over a decade ago, initiated by the activist Tarana Burke, it was in 2017 that it gained traction as an online movement, galvanised by the hashtag #MeToo in response to a tweet posted by the actress Alyssa Milano following allegations against the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. The tweet read: ‘If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write “me too” as a reply to this tweet.’ The #MeToo hashtag was then taken up by many thousands of women around the world, who used it to signal that they, too, had been affected by sexual

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harassment and assault. In October 2018, around a year after the initial tweet, the hashtag had been used 19 million times (Brown 2018). As scholars such as Catherine Rottenberg (2019) have pointed out, what marks out #MeToo from other instances of digital feminism is its success: it has managed to ‘galvanise if not mobilise millions of people around the world’. As an example of communicative justice, then, the #MeToo phenomenon may seem to be a paradigmatic success story. By utilising the affordances of popular communicative architectures, it successfully galvanised many people and allowed (primarily) women to disclose sexual assault or abuse in a meaningful, unprecedentedly public way. It also made apparent the existence of hitherto suppressed anger and trauma, mostly of women, on a mass scale. However, in addition to the unsurprising backlash from conservative and misogynist quarters, it has also been criticised from many leftist and feminist  fronts for its severely truncated political potential. Below I outline some of the most salient critiques of the movement. Susan Watkins (2018) writing in the New Left Review characterises the Anglophonic manifestation of #MeToo as ultimately ‘conservative’: It seems to have done little to address an agenda that would tackle the enabling conditions for sexual harassment—including precarious work, racialized gender stereotypes and criminalized migrant status—and for escaping intimate-partner violence, much of which takes place in the home […] The Weinstein business provided the opportunity for a root-and-branch attack on the culture industry. Instead, Hollywood has been pink-washed by the parade of feminist activists across the red carpet, wiping away the stain on its reputation. Having removed a few ‘bad apples’, #MeToo risks leaving the wider system as it is. Ironically, it could end up as a reaffirmation of the type of feminism whose failings helped put Trump in power.

Catherine Rottenberg (2019) has argued that #MeToo shares troubling characteristics with what she has elsewhere identified as ‘neoliberal feminism’ (Rottenberg 2018) – because of its individualist orientation, its disarticulation of the possibility of structural critique, its focus on high-­ profile white celebrities in the culture industries, and the relative invisibility of its black founder Tarana Burke (see also De Benedictis et al. 2019). Alison Phipps (2019), drawing on Wendy Brown’s (1993) theory of ‘wounded attachments’, has argued that #MeToo can be understood as a manifestation of what she calls ‘political whiteness’—because it centres the

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pain and trauma of white women whilst invisibilising the activist labour of working-class women and women of colour who have mobilised against sexual abuse for many decades, and yet who are not heard as part of this conversation. Phipps argues that: #MeToo could largely be interpreted as a conversation between white people: the privileged white women ‘speaking out’ and the privileged white men with platforms to defend themselves against allegations, or those (white men and women) who led the backlash. (p. 9)

The political whiteness of #MeToo is also linked to the ways in which state and judicial systems are looked to by the movement as an apt and just way to punish the perpetrators of sexual abuse: The practice of ‘taking back’ subjectivity and control through ‘taking down’ powerful perpetrators (perhaps ironically) shapes a position of dependence on the state and its institutions, as they are evoked to redress individual injuries through criminalization and discipline. (p. 11)

Understanding the state as ultimately protective rather than oppressive is a stance that further reveals the political whiteness of the movement—a wilful ignoring of the ways that state institutions continue to oppress people of colour, sex workers and other marginalised groups—as well as the ways that black men have been disproportionately criminalised for sexual offences because of enduring racist ideologies about black masculinity. Others have similarly warned that #MeToo is overly amenable to ‘carceral feminism’ (e.g. Press 2018), and that the movement lacks a critique of the racist prison-industrial-complex into which it wishes to condemn the perpetrators of abuse. In short, #MeToo implicitly evinces an understanding of the coercive state apparatuses of police, prisons and the whole criminal justice system as the solution to the problem of sexism and gendered violence, rather than constitutive of the conditions of possibility for such violence. Another critique is that, while #MeToo is often understood as a form of digital consciousness-raising (CR), this overlooks the significant limitations of CR as a feminist practice (some of these limitations are further discussed in subsequent chapters). In an academic panel discussion on #MeToo summarised by Juliana Restrepo Sanín (2019), it was noted that consciousness-raising can take four different forms, which I paraphrase below. It can provide the following benefits:

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1. A shift in perception—which #MeToo successfully did by calling attention to the sheer scale of abuse; 2. Raising consciousness about what feminism is; 3. Providing therapeutic validation and healing from trauma; and 4. Producing revolutionary consciousness, connecting gendered injustice and violence to broader radical movements, with the intention of broadening and deepening these movements’ theories and understandings of injustice As the panel discussion pointed out, #MeToo has succeeded in the first three areas, but there is little evidence to suggest that it is connecting with broader revolutionary movements (Restrepo Sanín 2019). The argument that I made in Chap. 1—that feminist voice must be collectivist and grounded in left politics in order to be ‘effective’ (Couldry 2010)—has important affinities with this key point about revolutionary consciousness. This argument also cues us in to other, longstanding left-wing critiques of consciousness-raising, which has often been seen as a form of indulgent ‘navel-gazing’; in the second-wave period, because CR centred conversations so heavily around the spheres of love and sex, such discussion groups were sometimes seen as a form of ‘white woman’s self-indulgence’ (Sisterhood and After Research Team 2013). In 1971 the Black Women’s Action Committee in the Black Unity and Freedom Party argued for a ‘new and higher consciousness’ that went beyond cultivating ‘self image’: they wrote that ‘[s]uch consciousness must inevitably give the black woman a new “self image”. But of even greater importance is the contribution which this process must make to the black movement in particular and the revolutionary movement in general’ (The Black Woman 1972, cited by Sisterhood and After Research Team 2013). #MeToo’s centring of the fight against sexual harassment as the principle cause of feminism (and not, for example, economic justice) has similarly been critiqued as reflective of the movement’s overriding concern with the pain of privileged white women (for useful discussions, see Leung and Williams 2019, as well as Phipps 2019 and Rottenberg 2019)—and it has been criticised for mobilising anger as a personal response to individual injuries rather than as a collective reaction to structural injustice.

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Payback Time: The Problems and Possibilities of Individual Rage Given all of these critiques, what might we make of the role of anger in relation to #MeToo? I would argue that a focus on anger and ressentiment can help us to bring more sharply into focus some of the conceptual and political problems with #MeToo. Whose anger has been legitimised and made visible—what kinds of anger are being licenced in this changed communicative context, and which are still unspeakable? Is the more radical potential for women’s anger in the #MeToo era being ‘dissipated’ and individualised in carefully managed ways, as Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill (2019) have argued? Is the rage associated with and galvanised by #MeToo altogether too atomised and neoliberalised to make any meaningful intervention or structural change? There are other, perhaps more troubling questions that political theories of anger compel us to consider here. Could the anger that constitutes the affective basis for #MeToo be a form of ressentiment that is based on desires of retribution—what Nussbaum calls ‘retributive justice’, or perhaps of what Wendy Brown discusses as the ‘moralizing revenge of the powerless’ which ultimately only reinscribes and reifies ‘the weak as weak’ (Brown 1993, p. 400; see also Brown 1995)? And is the white women’s anger that is propelling #MeToo implicated in perpetuating racist systems of power? Many feminist critiques of the political limitations and problems of #MeToo (as well as of the relationship between anger and justice more broadly) strongly suggest that the women’s rage that is animating #MeToo cannot be understood as politically innocent or entirely morally righteous. Here, then, I wish to consider the role of women’s rage in more careful detail. To do so I bring some of the philosophical arguments about anger and justice more fully to bear on the debates about #MeToo. While Martha Nussbaum assuredly does not write from a position of revolutionary leftism, her critique of the ‘payback wish’ and ‘status obsession’ problems with anger arguably has some subterranean affinities with the leftist feminist critique of the hegemonic form of #MeToo—for example, Susan Watkins’ criticism of the ‘bad apple’ approach of #MeToo. Watkins and others suggest that the movement has been overly focussed on the individual men who did bad things to individual women, and a desire to punish them as individuals, using the existing legal and political methods and structures of the state. This is seen as highly constrained as a strategy for justice, bound up as it is with an overly inward-looking and

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personal sense of unfairness and injustice that lacks any structural critique. Individualised ‘trauma narratives’ (Berlant 2001, discussed more fully in Chap. 3) have been understood by many feminists as highly limited and limiting because they can serve to deflect attention away from the structural causes of gender injustice that permit the profusion of sexual assault—that is to say, the ways that they are enabled by precarity, poverty, unjust migration policies, racism and other kinds of material oppression. Alison Phipps (2019) discusses the problematic symbolic positionality of ‘white woundedness’ in #MeToo, where performances of white women’s pain and woundability have infinitely more power to elicit sympathy than any tears of black women. For Phipps, the mobilisation of woundability in #MeToo is highly racialised and productive of inequality, effectively downgrading and devaluing the pain of black women; but even white women’s own emancipation might be foreclosed by a political strategy that is characterised by tears and sympathy. Phipps draws on Wendy Brown’s concept of ‘wounded attachments’ to theorise how ‘performances of fragility’ shape the political whiteness of #MeToo. Brown suggests that subjectivities that are constructed around ‘logics of pain’ are ultimately doomed to political failure, trapping the wounded identity in the essentialism it purportedly seeks to escape and subjecting it to an ‘eternal repetition of its pain’ (Brown 1993, p. 408). For Brown, this attachment to pain (we might also say to anger) functions in ways that are deeply politically problematic. It closes off desire for futurity and instincts for freedom, fosters an attachment to pain and resentment, and ultimately leaves one trapped in a state of politically stultifying ressentiment. I would argue that Nussbaum’s conceptualisation of anger as normatively problematic because of its undue attention to personal feelings of harm and unfairness—and a simmering resentment about having one’s status downgraded—implicitly dovetails here with feminist critiques of wounded attachments, even if one approach is grounded in liberal humanism and one in radical left politics. Both see festering pain and anger as a form of narcissism that erodes possibilities for  compassionate liberalism (Nussbaum) and radical collective emancipation (Brown). Here I would like to spend a little time considering the critique of what we might call #MeToo’s ‘individualism problem’, or a tendency towards narcissistic fixation on injustices against the self. Alison Phipps (2019, p. 9) suggests that the ‘speaking out’ of #MeToo can become more a case of ‘speaking over’, and that the message is all too often not ‘me, too’, but ‘me, not you’ (Phipps 2020). Catherine Rottenberg (2017, n.p.) points out that a

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prominent leftist critique has been that ‘#MeToo is about “me”’; and that this forecloses the possibility of collective mobilisation and is fundamentally politically constraining: the individual’s resilience and survival and does not and likely cannot mobilise people politically. Thus, it can easily become part of a neoliberal feminist discussion, which ultimately individualises and atomises each person who uses the hashtag while disavowing the socioeconomic and cultural structures shaping our lives.

We can see this line of critique in Watkins’, Phipps’ and Restrepo Sanín outlined above: #MeToo lacks a connection to a radical movement for economic justice, is overly focussed on the harm done to women’s psychological interiors, and in this way it is rooted in and productive of a racialised and individualist ideology that privileges wealthy white women and undermines radical collectivity. Within the logics of this critique of individualised anger, we can see that individuals’ resentful desires, driven by a wish for payback, can thus be problematically mobilised to punish individual men—the so-called bad apples—while leaving intact a system that is structurally violent, racist and misogynistic. A myopic focus on ‘payback’ and wanting to gain justice for what happened to ‘me’ can work to maintain a narrowly individualistic focus, and to divert angry energies away from more collectivist forms of activism. The desire to seek justice for a slight to one’s own status can also be identified within the dominant narratives of #MeToo: women who wish to stop being held back, to ‘take back control’ and regain a sense of self, to ‘reassert’ themselves and reclaim their power—but without fundamentally transforming the wider field of power relations. As Phipps argues: ‘The practice of “taking back” subjectivity and control through “taking down” powerful perpetrators (perhaps ironically) shapes a position of dependence on the state and its institutions, as they are evoked to redress individual injuries through criminalization and discipline’ (Phipps 2019, p. 11). In short, I would suggest that while Nussbaum sees (almost) all anger as politically unworthy and morally defective, the leftist feminist critiques of #MeToo are not against anger per se—the problem is that #MeToo encourages the wrong kind of anger—or, more specifically, the wrong political expression of that anger. Women’s justified anger is being corralled into individualised trauma narratives that do nothing to challenge structural injustice, and may actively uphold the structures of power that allow

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these traumatic events to occur so pervasively in the first place. According to this argument, anger should be directed not at the ‘bad apples’ or the individual ‘monsters’, but rather at the whole, rotten system within which abuses of power are able to thrive. To paraphrase and extend Susan Watkins’ metaphor, then, the focus should not be on the bad apples that grow on the tree, but the root and branch of the tree, and the whole ecosystem that nourishes it. On the one hand, I find these arguments very compelling, and consistent with the argument I set out in Chap. 1, which insists on the collectivist nature of feminist voice and the vital importance of grounding communicative justice in a wider left critique of capitalism and racism. And yet. I also recognise that the very nature of sexual abuse and harassment is that it is so often experienced at an individual level; it does take away your sense of self—it is done to you by actual, individual people—it is acutely psychically  painful. It is the whole ecology of the apple orchard that enabled you to be abused, but maybe just one (or two or three) apples that actually made you sicken. Capitalism and patriarchy and racism are the ultimate structural enablers of such abuse, but the experience of abuse is intensely and painfully personal. I would argue, therefore, that the presence of a ‘payback wish’, or the desire to avenge a slight to one’s own status, is not good reason not to be angry. Resentful, personal anger at the men who have done bad things does not inevitably work against collective approaches to gender justice. As such, a focus on ‘bad apples’ is an assuredly limited but also partially necessary and understandable approach. It is limited because, as Sara Ahmed (2017) shows, the problem with defining abuse is that it currently depends upon the materialisation of a clear-cut figure of an ‘abuser’—and so seldom does this unequivocally evil monster ever emerge. Abuse is more often much more insidious and slippery than that. Laurie Penny (2019) puts it thus: I hate to be the one to break this news, but “not a convicted multiple rapist” is not, in fact, the gold standard for good male behavior. Most of the ways in which women are sidelined, harassed, worn down, and exploited [...] are more insidious than that. Insidious enough that many of the more pernicious patterns of behavior aren’t, in fact, crimes at all—in part because the legal standard for rape, as Kate Millett memorably wrote, is set not at the level of women’s actual experience but just below the level of coercion that men consider acceptable. And that bar is low, low, low, low enough that it’s surprising how many still fail to clear it.

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On the one hand, then, we might conclude that trying to hold people individually accountable is both ultimately not worth it  – because most abusive behaviour is too insidious, made difficult to identify because of its overwhelming normalisation and invisibilisation within toxic power structures—as well as a diversion from focussing on the ‘real’ work of systemic transformation. But, as Penny’s article also makes clear, abuse does have a devastating impact on the lives, careers and psychological health of individual women, and takes up the time and headspace of countless women more who do the invisible emotional labour of supporting their friends and colleagues in the absence of any institutional redress: Women quietly drop out of professions and workplaces where they are routinely hurt, demeaned, and isolated. The damage is borne in private by the victims themselves, and by networks of women doing the emotional deep-­ cleaning so that men don’t have to be confronted with the damage they’ve done.

One of the many injuries of abuse and harassment is the time that is taken away from those who have been affected. Rebecca Traister, in her book Good and Mad, points to this insidious form of injustice: What would the lives of so many women look like if they did not have to deal with the overwhelming work of dealing with misogynistic abuse, or encountering racism every day (Traister 2018, p. 173)? In short, then, I would suggest that seeking to banish or pathologise anger born from individual woundedness risks doing further symbolic harm to those who have been abused. An emphasis on channelling anger for structural change is of course deeply necessary and non-negotiable for feminism—but asking women to give up their wounded attachment to their anger and trauma may not be politically productive (or morally defensible) in the end. By suggesting that those who have been abused not use their wounded anger in order to confront or challenge individual men, but instead reorient the focus of their anger to structural transformation, comes dangerously close at times to letting those who have abused off the hook. Nussbaum argues that anger is almost never appropriate or worthwhile, and some feminist critiques suggest that anger born from personal pain and woundedness is politically weakening at best, and actively harmful at worst. But perhaps we can rethink the ‘payback wish’ and the anger born of personal woundedness—and insist that the desire to punish the abuser on the one hand, and to take collective vengeance on patriarchy and racism on the other, do not work in opposite political directions.

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It’s the Hope That Kills You Since the initial ‘unleashing’ of women’s anger associated with #MeToo in 2017, and what was often described as a ‘wave’ of anger, trauma and rage, there have been further considerations of the movement’s limitations. There was a great deal of optimism around #MeToo in 2017 and 2018, which was often celebrated as a victory for feminism—that finally, longed-­ for feminist goals were being achieved. For example, Catherine MacKinnon wrote of the movement that it was ‘eroding the two biggest barriers to ending sexual harassment in law and in life: the disbelief and trivializing dehumanization of its victims’ (cited in Traister 2018, p. 214). However, in late 2018 came something of a watershed moment that seemed to shift the mood significantly: the hearings for the US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, where he was accused of sexually assaulting Christine Blasey Ford when they were in high school together. Because this came at such a heightened moment in the context of the mass disclosures of #MeToo, the hearings took on incredible symbolic weight, and were watched extremely closely by many to see if (gender) justice would be done. Blasey Ford’s testimony at the hearings recounted the events that took place: at a party, Kavanaugh and a friend had sexually assaulted her, pinning her down and covering her mouth with a hand. In her opening statement, she said that ‘I am here today not because I want to be. I am terrified. I am here because I believe it is my civic duty to tell you what happened to me while Brett Kavanaugh and I were in high school.’ She recounted the traumatic events, noting that what was seared into her memories was the evident enjoyment the two boys had taken in attacking her: ‘indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter’, she said. Blasey Ford’s communicative mode during the hearings was quiet, acquiescent, compliant, nervous and hesitant. The New York Times ran a piece entitled ‘Blasey Ford’s heartbreaking desire to please’ (Senior 2018), in which the writer noted: ‘her instinct, at every step of the way, was to be transparent, eager, almost agonizingly conciliatory.’ Meanwhile, the accused himself and his Republican senator supporters were far less modulated in their speech. During the hearings, Kavanaugh veered from choking up with emotion to shouting in petulant rage—Alexandra Schwartz (2018) described these scenes of bellicose emoting as the ‘adolescent aggression of conservative masculinity’. Republican Senator Lindsay Graham shouted during the hearings, with visible anger, ‘What you want to do is destroy this guy’s life!’.

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After the hearings, Donald Trump publicly mocked Blasey Ford’s testimony because she was unable to remember certain details surrounding the attack, even though—as an academic expert in neurology and memory— she had carefully explained how this was in fact highly typical after a trauma. Trump mockingly impersonated her at a political rally to a cheering crowd: How’d you get home? I don’t remember. How’d you get there? I don’t remember. Where was the place? I don’t remember. How many years ago was it? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know! I don’t know! What neighbourhood was it in? I don’t know. Where’s the house? I don’t know! Upstairs, downstairs, where was it? I don’t know! But I had one beer. That’s the only thing I remember…And a man’s life is in tatters. (cited in BBC News 2018)

Just before the culmination of the hearings—the vote on whether to confirm Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court—two women, both survivors of sexual assault, confronted Republican Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator (Flake had disclosed his intention to vote to confirm Kavanaugh). The filmed confrontation between the women and the senator went viral; it became a powerful expression of the uncontainable women’s rage that the senate hearings seemed to be unleashing in relation to sexualised abuses of power. One of the women can be heard saying to him: What you are doing is allowing someone who actually violated a woman to sit on the Supreme Court. This is not tolerable. You have children in your family. Think about them. I have two children. I cannot imagine that for the next fifty years they will have to have someone in the Supreme Court who has been accused of violating a young girl. What are you doing, sir?

The other woman can then be heard saying Look at me when I’m talking to you. You’re telling me that my assault doesn’t matter and that you’re going to let people who do these things into power … that you’ll let people like that go to the highest court in the land and tell everyone what they can do to their bodies.4

4   The video can be viewed here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-45691421/the-woman-in-the-elevator-who-confronted-jeff-flake

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After this powerful intervention by these two women, Jeff Flake successfully requested that the vote be delayed by a week; this was in order to give the FBI a chance to investigate the sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh. It seemed as though the women’s public and emotional disclosure had made a real difference to the proceedings. However, after what turned out to be merely a short delay to the inevitable, Kavanaugh was confirmed as a Supreme Court Associate Justice. Because of the overwhelming bravery of women who spoke up and testified—Blasey Ford at the hearing, as well as the two women confronting a senator in the elevator, and all the many thousands of disclosures since the beginning of the online #MeToo movement—there had been a growing hope, and a real sense, that justice would be served. It had seemed that the ‘wave’ of women’s voices had reached a crescendo, and collectively they had brought enough power to finally bring about transformative change. Post Kavanaugh being confirmed, much of this hope seemed to die, and the faith that had been invested in public voice and women’s speech also seemed to shrink away. Writing in the New York Times, Jia Tolentino wrote: It is often assumed that women like me, feminists who have argued for a redistribution of power, have been steadily rejoicing […] when in fact many of us have been exhausted and heartbroken […] I don’t know a single woman who has permitted herself to be as openly furious about being sexually assaulted as Kavanaugh allowed himself to be, in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, when speaking about being accused of sexual assault. Like Ford, we have had to be painfully careful about how we speak. Women’s speech is sometimes wielded, in this #MeToo era, as if it were Excalibur—as if the shining, terrible truth about the lives of women will, by itself, vanquish the men who have exploited and controlled them; as if speech were a weapon that protects those who wield it from hurt. (Tolentino 2018)

I quote Tolentino at length here, as this piece expresses so well three key things: firstly, how speech as a political instrument or weapon is, on its own, simply not enough to overcome patriarchal power structures; secondly, how the idea that speech is an ‘Excalibur’ of justice is actually a deeply cruel and heartbreaking lie that can do harm through its false promise and hope; and thirdly, how for every new optimistic development, feminists must be alert to the treacherous potential—indeed the likelihood—for the dashing of hopes. As Heather Savigny (2020) puts it:

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we need ‘to learn the lessons from the past: what feminist activists have repeatedly learned, is that the sand shifts beneath our feet, the pressure releases after each gain, but then patriarchy reinvents itself.’ What seems at first to be a radical, seismic shift may only be the sands of patriarchy shifting and then re-stabilising. Even anger—that which has seemed so long to be the ultimate taboo  in women’s speech—may be co-opted and contained by the endless abilities of patriarchy and capitalism to shape-shift. By framing the contemporary visibility of anger as a kind of final frontier that has been radically breached, there is an implied sense that justice will inevitably flow from this fact: that the ‘wave’ of anger, like untameable nature itself, will ineluctably carry us towards gender justice. However, as Bridget Haire et al. argue in relation to the furore and backlash surrounding the publication of the ‘Shitty Media Men’ list on Google docs, which publically named specific abusers: Despite the momentum of the #MeToo movement, with its focus on the stories of victim/survivors, the response to the Shitty Media Men list suggests that there is still no protected space for women to tell their stories if that includes the naming of perpetrators. (Haire et al. 2019, p. 213)

This points to the profound limitations that are placed on the anger of the abused: the toleration for that anger rapidly diminishes as soon as it threatens to have meaningful, direct effects. In the case of the backlash against ‘Shitty Media Men’, it is also important to note that it was precisely the personal and individual modality, and the identifying of individual men (we might even say the naming of bad apples), that provoked such an intense reaction.

The Temporality of (Communicative) Justice The painful dashing of feminist hopes discussed in this chapter—and the ways that so many hopes were pinned on the capacities of digital media to challenge patriarchal injustice—cues us in to the need to better understand the specific communicative architectures that we are operating within. William Davies, in his discussion of the temporality of anger, points to studies which show that on Twitter, of any emotion, it is ‘anger [that] has the capacity to travel furthest and fastest’ (2018, n.p.). Davies is clear that anger can lend itself to justice—but that in the contemporary online context, it more often tends towards hatred and violence. It is the

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temporal structure of online anger—‘fast anger’—that closes down the possibility of anger serving justice. Fast anger has become a ‘dominant affective state’ that forecloses possibilities of reflection and listening. In this sense, we can see how anger might constrain, undermine or altogether remove the capacity for meaningful voice. We can also think about the temporality of anger in relation to justice in a longer historical frame. There is a quote attributed to the then-­Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, the accuracy of which is questionable, but which nonetheless points valuably to the need to place political gains and losses in an expanded temporal perspective. The story goes that, when asked in the 1970s what the historical impact of the French Revolution had been, nearly two hundred years after the fact, Zhou Enlai said: ‘It’s too early to tell’. In this sense, it is ‘fast hope’, or a hope or expectation for immediate results from activist struggle, that might deflate and undo us, and derail the possibility of working towards long-term social justice. Perhaps this is the best way to think about #MeToo: rather than foreclosing its political potential by designating it as irredeemably neoliberal, fatally flawed by its lack of engagement with economic justice, or proven to have ‘failed’ at the first hurdle, we should understand it first and foremost as a condition of possibility. It has opened up a kind of space—it may not be a space that is aligned perfectly with, or in a way that is conducive to radical emancipatory justice, but a space has been opened up nonetheless. By thinking about the time of justice in an expanded way, we might escape the trap of feeling doomed when hopes turn out to be dashed—as surely they ever will be. I argue that anger has a central and vital role to play in communicative justice, but that we need an ongoing and nuanced engagement with the terms of that anger, and a sensitivity to whose needs it might be serving and who it might be symbolically and materially  harming. Having spent her book arguing against the moral and political value of anger, Martha Nussbaum closes with the words: ‘give peace a chance’ (Nussbaum 2016, p. 250). But as Amia Srinivasan argues, simply calling for a blanket condemnation of anger obscures the fact that the ability to be angry has never even really been up for debate for women and people of colour. Srinivasan writes that in disavowing anger, ‘we neglect, as we have always neglected, those who were never allowed to be angry, the slaves and women who have the power of neither the state nor the sword’ (Srinivasan 2018, pp. 142–3). Since anger has for so long been denied as a political, affective and communicative resource to those who have been oppressed and abused, perhaps a better feminist response would be: give anger a chance.

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References Ahmed, Sara. 2017. The Figure of the Abuser. Feministkilljoys blog. Available at: https://feministkilljoys.com/2017/11/05/the-figure-of-the-abuser/ Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2018a. Popular Feminism, Structural Rage. LA Review of Books. Available at: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/popular-feminismstructural-rage/ ———. 2018b. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham: Duke University Press. Bates, Laura. 2018. How Women Are Turning Centuries Of Silence Into Rage. Elle, September 11. Available at: https://www.elle.com/uk/life-and-culture/ a23058923/women-are-turning-centuries-of-silence-into-rage/ BBC News. (2018). Trump Mocks Kavanugh Accuser, October 3. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-45727618 BBC Radio 4. 2019. Why Are We So Angry? Available at: https://www.bbc.co. uk/programmes/m0000sw6 Beard, Mary. 2017. Women & Power: A Manifesto. London: Profile Books. Berlant, Lauren. 2001. Trauma and Ineloquence. Cultural Values 5 (1): 41–58. Bernstein, Arielle. 2018. Mad Women: How Angry Sisterhood Is Taking Over the Small Screen, Guardian, March 7. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-andradio/2018/mar/07/mad-women-angry-sisterhood-taking-over-tv Brown, Wendy. 1993. Wounded Attachments. Political Theory 21 (3): 390–410. ———. 1995. States of Injury: Power and Injury in Late Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brown, Dalvin. 2018. 19 Million Tweets Later: A Look at #MeToo a Year After the Hashtag Went Viral. USA Today, October 23. Available at: https:// eu.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/10/13/metoo-impact-hashtag-madeonline/1633570002/ Burkeman, Oliver. 2019. The Age of Rage: Are We Really Living in Angrier Times? Guardian, May 11. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/11/all-fired-up-are-we-really-living-angrier-times Chemaly, Soraya. 2018. Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger. London: Simon and Schuster. Cooper, Brittney. 2018. Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. New York: St Martin’s Press. Couldry, Nick. 2010. Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism. London/Thousand Oaks: Sage. Davies, William. 2018. ‘Anger, Fast and Slow’, Annual Lecture of the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions, November 23. Available at: http:// www.perc.org.uk/project_posts/anger-fast-slow/. Accessed 4 July 2019. De Benedictis, Sara, Shani Orgad, and Catherine Rottenberg. 2019. #MeToo, Popular Feminism and the News: A Content Analysis of UK Newspaper Coverage. European Journal of Cultural Studies 22 (5–6): 718–738.

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Dobson, Amy Shields, and Akane Kanai. 2018. From ‘Can-Do’ Girls to Insecure and Angry: Affective Dissonances in Young Women’s Post-Recessional Media. Feminist Media Studies. Online First. Eatwell, Roger, and Matthew Goodwin. 2018. National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy. London: Pelican Books. Gill, Rosalind. 2016. Post-postfeminism?: New Feminist Visibilities in Postfeminist Times. Feminist Media Studies 16 (4): 610–630. Ging, D. 2017. Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere. Men and Masculinities 22 (4): 638–657. Haire, Christy E. Newman, and Bianca Fileborn. 2019. Shitty Media Men. In #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, ed. Bianca Fileborn and Rachel LoneyHowes, 201–216. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hamad, Hannah, and Anthea Taylor. 2015. Introduction: Feminism and Contemporary Celebrity Culture. Celebrity Studies 6 (1): 124–127. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2016. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: The New Press. Kay, Jilly Boyce. 2019. Introduction: Anger, Media, and Feminism: The Gender Politics of Mediated Rage. Feminist Media Studies 19 (4): 591–615. ———. 2020. Celebritised Anger: Theorising Women’s Rage, Voice and Affective Injustice through Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette. In Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture, ed. Anthea Taylor and Joanna McIntyre. New  York: Routledge. ———. (forthcoming). Abject Desires in the Age of Anger: Incels, Femcels, and the Gender Politics of Unfuckability. In Imagining ‘We’ in the Age of ‘I’: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture, ed. Mary Harrod, Suzanne Leonard and Diane Negra. London: Routledge. Kay, Jilly Boyce, and Sarah Banet-Weiser. 2019. Feminist Anger and Feminist Respair. Feminist Media Studies 19 (4): 603–609. Kimmel, Michael. 2017. Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era. New York: Hachette. Klein, Amanda. 2019. “They Should Never Have Given Us Uniforms if They Didn’t Want Us to Be An Army”: Media in a Time of Crisis. Medium, September 14. Available at: https://medium.com/@AmandaAnnKlein/theyshould-never-have-given-us-uniforms-if-they-didnt-want-us-to-be-an-armycontemporary-245dd5f4573a Leung, Rebecca, and Robert Williams. 2019. #MeToo and Intersectionality: An Examination of the #MeToo Movement Through the R. Kelly Scandal. Journal of Communication Inquiry 43 (4): 349–371. Lorde, Audre. 1997 [1981]. The Uses of Anger. Women’s Studies Quarterly 25 (1/2): 278–285. Mishra, Pankaj. 2017. The Age of Anger: A History of the Present. London: Penguin.

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Nussbaum, Martha C. 2016. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, and Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2020. The Weakness of the Furies. Boston Review, special issue ‘On Anger’, February 19. Available at: http://bostonreview.net/philosophy-religion/martha-c-nussbaum-weakness-furies Orgad, Shani, and Rosalind Gill. 2019. Safety Valves for Mediated Female Rage in the #MeToo Era. Feminist Media Studies 19 (4): 596–603. Penny, Laurie. 2019. Gaming’s #MeToo Moment and the Tyranny of Male Fragility. Wired. Available at: https://www.wired.com/story/ videogames-industry-metoo-moment-male-fragility/ Phipps, Alison. 2019. Every Woman Knows a Weinstein: Political Whiteness and White Woundedness in #MeToo and Public Feminisms Around Sexual Violence. Feminist Formations 31 (2): 1–25. ———. 2020. Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Press, Alex. 2018. #Metoo Must Avoid Carceral Feminism. Vox, February 1. Available at: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/2/1/16952744/ me-too-larry-nassar-judge-aquilina-feminism Restrepo Sanín, Juliana. 2019. #MeToo What Kind of Politics? Panel Notes. Journal of Women, Politics and Policy 40 (1): 122–128. Richardson, Hollie. 2019. Aladdin: Naomi Scott Explains Powerful Feminist Meaning Behind Jasmine’s New Song. Stylist. Available at: https://www.stylist.co.uk/life/aladdin-premiere-london-naomi-scott-jasmine-feministsong-speechless/268567 Rottenberg, Catherine. 2017. Can #MeToo go Beyond White Neoliberal Feminism? Aljazeera. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/metoo-whiteneoliberal-feminism-171213064156855.html ———. 2018. The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2019. #MeToo and the Prospects of Political Change. Soundings 71, Spring 2019. Savigny, Heather. 2020. Cultural Sexism: The Politics of Feminist Rage in the #MeToo Era. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Schwartz, Alexandra. 2018. The Adolescent Aggression of Conservative Masculinity. New Yorker, September 27. https://www.newyorker.com/news/ current/brett-kavanaughs-adolescent-temper-tantrum-before-the-senatejudiciary-committee Senior, Jennifer. 2018. Christine Blasey Ford’s Heartbreaking Desire to Please. New York Times, September 27. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/ opinion/blasey-ford-testimony.html Serhan, Yasmeen. 2018. Pork Legs Are Shaking Up British Politics. Atlantic, May 17. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/ 05/is-gammon-racist/560507/

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Sisterhood and After Research Team. 2013. Consciousness-Raising. British Library. Available at: https://www.bl.uk/sisterhood/articles/consciousnessraising Srinivasan, Amia. 2016. Would Politics Be Better Off Without Anger? The Nation, November 30. Available at: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/arighteous-fury/ ———. 2018. The Aptness of Anger. The Journal of Political Philosophy 26 (2): 123–144. Tiwana, Simrit. 2019. Here’s Why Aladdin’s Jasmine Is the Updated Feminist Princess We Need. Cosmopolitan (Indian edition). Available at: https://www. cosmopolitan.in/life/features/a17558/heres-why-aladdins-jasmineupdated-feminist-princess-we-need Tolentino, Jia. 2018. One Year of #MeToo: What Women’s Speech Is Still Not Allowed To Do. The New  Yorker, October 10. Available at: https://www. newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/one-year-of-metoo-what-womensspeech-is-still-not-allowed-to-do Traister, Rebecca. 2018. Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger. London: Simon & Schuster. Watkins, Susan. 2018. Which feminisms? New Left Review 109: January/February. Wood, Helen. 2019. Fuck the Patriarchy: Towards an Intersectional Politics of Irreverent Rage. Feminist Media Studies 19 (4): 609–615. Zacherek, Stephanie. 2018. Women’s Rage Is the Most Powerful Engine of 2018. Time, September 26. Available at: https://time.com/5404884/womenanger-politics-2018/

CHAPTER 3

Damaged Goods: The Gender Politics of the ‘Traumatised Voice’

Upon entering Google’s website ‘MeTooRising’, the following powerful lines, taken from a poem by Muriel Rukeyser, are the first that greet you: ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.’1 The words are set out in simple white text against a plain black background, before the page cuts to a black and white image of a slowly revolving globe. The same lines were also cited by the US anti-bullying advocate Monica Lewinsky (2014) in an article she wrote which was widely heralded as her ‘comeback’ from her self-imposed absence from public life—after experiencing shame, humiliation and abuse on a global scale. The poetic lines resonate powerfully in the #MeToo era; they point to a whole subterranean world of repressed or unspoken stories about hurt, trauma and abuse, overwhelmingly done to women. They also suggest that these stories have a latent, potent, simmering power, and that women’s testimonies and disclosures could very well rupture the world—split it open, no less. These lines of poetry do not equate the disclosure of abuse with liberation, exactly—but they do suggest that disclosure will be transformative, powerful and even explosive—that for women to speak out and break the silence will change the world utterly, finally and irreversibly. Arguably, in the context of the MeTooRising website, which charts the global trends of the many millions of people who are engaging with 1  ‘MeTooRising’ is Google Trend’s data visualisation website that tracks the #MeToo movement across the world). It is available at https://metoorising.withgoogle.com/

© The Author(s) 2020 J. B. Kay, Gender, Media and Voice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47287-0_3

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#MeToo and speaking out, the citation of these poetic words suggests that this radical breach has in fact already happened. In this chapter, I focus on two particular celebrity  voices that have emerged within the cultural and communicative context of the #MeToo era, both of whom are understood as women who are now finally ‘speaking their truth’. These are two women who were public figures (to different degrees) for many years, but who became much more visible in the wake of #MeToo: the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby and the American activist and media personality Monica Lewinsky. The chapter considers the ways in which both women have come to be associated with the public expression of trauma relating to (different kinds of) abuse—or with what I term a kind of traumatised voice—and how their disclosures of trauma are often construed as a form of empowerment (we might say as an example of communicative justice). As I go on to show, both these women are now widely represented as having ‘taken control’ of, or having ‘reclaimed’ the narratives of their own lives, narratives which had previously been defined by patriarchal logics, and over which they had very little control. They are both typically represented as having expressed trauma and/or anger that was hitherto suppressed or hidden; and in doing so, they are understood as having successfully overcome the shame surrounding the abuses that they had suffered. In short, through ‘breaking the silence’, mobilising a traumatised voice and speaking ‘on their own terms’, these women are seen to be newly empowered—to have shifted the discursive terrain with the sheer power of their individual voices, and to have gained the recognition that was previously denied to them. The chapter explores to what extent the shift in the communicative context— one that now seemingly values women’s voices that express anger and trauma, in contradistinction to a pre-#MeToo context—might be said to ‘offer effective voice’, in Nick Couldry’s (2010) terms—or communicative justice, in mine. The idea that the affordances of contemporary media culture offer ‘effective voice’ or communicative justice for women who have experienced gendered abuse is very powerful. The considerable optimism that attended #MeToo—that is, the notion that social media platforms have enabled mass disclosures that have meaningfully transformed the communicative terrain in ways that productively align with longstanding feminist aims—is so powerful because it is, in not insignificant ways, true. That is

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to say that there has indeed been a kind of discursive sea-change when it comes to women’s public speech concerning sexual misconduct, harassment and abuse. And if silence as an idealised communicative mode has been ‘baked in’ to the conceptualisations of the western public sphere, as I have argued, then a media culture that provides opportunities for testifying about gendered abuse seems to constitute a radical break with these histories of silence. We can usefully recall here Aristotle’s pronouncement that ‘Silence is a woman’s glory’, as well as the etymological connection between ‘testicle’ and ‘testimony’ noted by Nancy Fraser (1990, p. 60)—that is to say, that historically, the possibility of being understood as a credible testifier, as a reliable narrator of events, has not been available to women. In this sense, the simple act of refusing to be silent—of speaking publicly about gendered abuse, harassment and violence, of giving one’s own version of events—is incontrovertibly radical in both form and content: in content because such issues have not been considered worthy, proper or relevant to the public sphere; and, in terms of form for the very fact of being a woman who is speaking publicly at all. In many ways, then, speaking about gendered trauma and abuse is a radical affront to the cruel, unjust logics that structure the public sphere and the multiple ways in which it has devalued women’s voices. Since the #MeToo phenomenon became mainstream and transnational in 2017, countless women have ‘spoken up’ in such a way. This new mobilisation of the traumatised voice—particularly given that it is occurring on a mass scale—carries with it a thrilling promise of communicative justice. And yet, as I argue throughout the book, the promises of voice that are offered in contemporary media culture often function to obscure a profound lack of the same. As many scholars have noted, the upbeat rhetoric around #MeToo as a radical and transformative force typically  overstates its power to tackle structural injustices and obscures its profound political limitations (e.g. Rottenberg 2019; Phipps 2019; Restrepo Sanín 2019; Watkins 2018). And yet, to respond to somebody’s public disclosure of trauma by pointing out how little difference this is likely to make, in the scheme of things, seems like another form of cruelty and injustice. How might we begin to identify the limitations of voice in this context, and the cruel ways that voice is promised, performed and simultaneously denied, without doing further symbolic harm to those speaking subjects who are disclosing painful events and experiences?

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Testimonial Cultures in Late Capitalism While #MeToo is often understood as a phenomenon that is unprecedented and uniquely possible because of new communication technologies and social media in the 2010s, it is in many ways continuous with broader cultural shifts that we can trace back at least to the late twentieth century. As Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey wrote at the turn of the twenty-­ first century: The desire to testify now pervades contemporary culture. The imperative to speak out and to tell one’s story operates across the traditional boundaries of public and private spaces, and is mobilised by disenfranchised subjects and celebrities alike. (Ahmed and Stacey 2001, p. 1)

Lauren Berlant (2001) has critiqued the ways in which, under neoliberalism, contemporary subjectivity is achieved precisely through a proximity to trauma—that is, how the making visible of traumatic experience is in many ways constitutive of neoliberal subjectivity. Berlant notes how the desire for and practice of ‘speaking out’ so often operates according to individualised models of selfhood, rather than collective forms of care or radical politics. In short, she writes, the individual ‘mourning subject’ has come to stand in for and displace the possibility of political action. Ahmed and Stacey (2001) similarly suggest that the search for a ‘cure’ for trauma is most often understood in highly limited ways—in individualistic rather than collective terms, thus perpetuating the ‘model of the heroic self’ (p. 5) who must overcome adversity through drawing on her own emotional resources. It is because of this atomised and individualised context that testifying becomes problematic; speaking out is not inherently an individualistic or individualising act. Nonetheless, we might say that ‘speaking out’ within the frame of this particular historical conjuncture is deeply and knottily entangled with neoliberal testimonial cultures, which feminism cannot either entirely embrace or fully disavow. In order to locate the contemporary conjuncture in an expanded temporal frame, it is useful to recall a not dissimilar moment from the recent past, in which similarly optimistic discourses circulated about the ‘breaking’ of women’s silence and the feminist possibilities of the ‘traumatised voice’. Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray (1993), writing in the early 1990s in the North American context, discussed the deeply ambivalent political implications of what they understood to be the intensifying imperative for victims to ‘speak out’. This was a moment in the history of US media

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culture that seemed to herald an unprecedented new openness to hearing the voices of those who had experienced rape, incest and sexual abuse. The proliferation of what Alcoff and Gray termed ‘survivor discourse’ was increasingly visible on talk shows, magazines and radio phone-ins in the closing decade of the twentieth century. Many other media scholars have discussed the idea, often mooted at the time, that the talk show phenomenon of the late twentieth century constituted a new form of feminist public sphere, because of its new openness to women’s self-disclosures and the privileging of victims’ narratives of rape and abuse. Some argued that this could potentially construct a whole new discursive basis for the political that would contribute to a more inclusive public sphere—one that was accommodating both of women’s voices and of those issues previously designated as ‘private’, and therefore not suitable for properly public discussion (see, e.g., Carpignano et al. 1990; Masciarotte 1991; Squire 1994; Shattuc 1997, 2005; Moorti 1998; Wood 2001, 2009). This shift in the communicative context, Alcoff and Gray suggested, and the many new disclosures of gendered abuse that were occurring as a result, had highly ambivalent implications that required careful analysis. On the one hand they sought to consider the optimistic claim that ‘the act of speaking out in and of itself transforms power relations and subjectivities, or the very way in which we experience and define ourselves’ (p. 260). On the other was the Foucaultian claim that disclosure of trauma and ‘survivor speech’ are all too easily recuperated into hegemonic discourse— in a way that diminishes any possibility for radical subversion. They asked, for example, what feminists should make of the ways in which ‘survivor speech’ was made compatible with the commercialised logics of media entertainment. What I wish to draw attention to here is the inescapable ambivalence of this situation, or to put it in other terms, how the (genuine) emancipatory potential of the ‘traumatised voice’ might also be insidiously undone precisely through the act of its utterance. The individualised speaking mode and the articulation of the traumatised voice through co-­ opting commercial media logics might inevitably lead to the dispersal of its potential power, precisely at and through the intense moment of disclosure. In this way, the mediated disclosures of gendered abuse in the 1990s and those of the #MeToo era in the late 2010s—as well as the thorny contradictions they throw up for feminism—have a great deal in common. It is useful here to compare Alcoff and Gray’s characterisation of the gender politics of disclosure in the 1990s with Sarah Banet-Weiser’s characterisation of the ambivalences and contradictions of #MeToo in the late

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2010s. Banet-Weiser discusses the ambivalence of #MeToo for contemporary feminist politics in the following way: while the public awareness of #MeToo has helped reveal how widespread and normative sexual harassment is, it is also more spectacularly focussed on very visible public figures […] The #MeToo movement is expressed on those media platforms that easily lend themselves to commodification and simplification, those industries that provide platforms of visibility (entertainment, news media) already designed and scripted for any mode of spectacular spotlight. Some of the more spectacular #MeToo moments […] can end up working against the call for social change promised at its beginning, producing more and more visibility—and increasingly narrowing the discourses of that visibility in the process. (Banet-Weiser 2018, loc. 524)

Alcoff and Gray identified the politically paradoxical implications of ‘speaking out’ in 1990s popular culture in the following way: Speaking out [on the one hand] serves to educate the society at large about the dimensions of sexual violence and misogyny, to reposition the problem from the individual psyche to the social sphere where it rightfully belongs, and to empower victims to act constructively on our own behalf and thus make the transition from passive victim to active survivor […] On the other hand, the speaking out of survivors has been sensationalized and exploited by the mass media, in fictional dramatizations well as "journalistic" formats such as [..] television talk shows. The media often use the presence of survivors for shock value and to pander to a sadistic voyeurism among viewers, focusing on the details of the violations with close-ups of survivors’ anguished expressions. (Alcoff and Gray 1993, pp. 262–3)

Considering these two mediated ‘moments’ alongside each other is productive, I would suggest, because it reveals the longer histories of the problems and paradoxes of mediated/public disclosures of abuse for feminism. These paradoxes are especially difficult and painful to grapple with, in no small part because it is precisely that which promises to be empowering—the expression of trauma, the articulation of one’s own narrative, the making visible of a problem that is otherwise so hidden—that seems impossible to achieve without exposure to the disempowering effects of media’s spectacularisation and commodification of traumatised voices. In short, we seem to be faced with an impasse—there is no way out, no way around this paradox. To speak in public at this historical juncture is

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necessarily to speak via communicative architectures that function in ways that are not conducive to meaningful care for those who have been abused. However, to remain silent is itself an intolerable injustice. This irreconcilability—the impossibility of escaping the cruel, gendered logics of media culture—is a central feature of communicative injustice. I want to suggest that the ancient cruelty of the trivialisation of women’s public speech, and the negation and dismissal of women’s trauma, have not been overcome but rather are reconfigured and resignified in the contemporary context. The contemporary twist to this ancient injustice is that while women were once compelled to stay silent, they are now increasingly encouraged to speak up—but the logics of speaking up are entangled with and productive of new forms of cruelty and abuse. In this chapter I explore this form of communicative injustice through the examples of Monica Lewinsky and Hannah Gadsby. I do so to try and tease out more specifically what the nature of these paradoxes, injustices and irreconcilabilities are—so that we might, perhaps, begin to find some way out of the impasse. The chapter is interested in Hannah Gadsby and Monica Lewinsky in particular because, prior to their heightened media visibility in recent years, their possibilities for self-expression, and for giving an account of their respective traumatic experiences, had been significantly curtailed. In Gadsby’s case, her self-expression had hitherto been funnelled through self-deprecation in the stand-up comedy form—through making jokes at her own expense as, in her words, ‘a fat queer woman from a low socio-­ economic background’ (Gadsby 2018). In Lewinsky’s case, in the wake of her affair with Bill Clinton affair, and his subsequent impeachment trial and associated media coverage, she was subjected to extensive vitriol, slut-­ shaming and humiliation which ultimately led to her retreat from public life. However, in both cases, these two women are now widely seen as having proactively changed the communicative scripts to which they had hitherto been constrained. There is a powerful sense, then, that both women have gained discursive control where once they had none; that they have heroically wrested back the power to self-define; and not only that, but that in doing so they have ruptured the power relations of the entire communicative field to make it more hospitable to other survivors’ voices. But to what extent can individual narratives achieve discursive ‘control’? How optimistic should we be about their seeming ability to stake out communicative power? Has the world really split open?

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‘That Woman’: The Silence(ing) of Monica Lewinsky Monica Lewinsky is most widely known as the 22-year-old White House intern who had a sexual relationship with the then US President Bill Clinton, an affair which led to his impeachment trial in 1998. In the wake of this ‘scandal’, Lewinsky became a subject of national and international vitriol, disgust and shame. She became widely known as ‘that woman’, which is how Clinton referred to her in his famous finger-wagging, emphatic public denial of their relationship, when he said at a White House press conference: ‘I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky’. The treatment that Lewinsky was subjected to by President Clinton, his team, and the wider media culture is well documented. She was widely represented as an unstable erotomaniac, a stalker and a fantasist. She was both sexualised and infantilised in large swathes of media coverage. Fox News asked its viewers to vote on the question: ‘Is Monica Lewinsky an “average girl” or a “young tramp looking for thrills?”’. (They duly chose the latter). New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote: ‘It is Ms. Lewinsky [rather than Clinton] who comes across as the red-blooded predator, wailing to her girl friends that the President wouldn’t go all the way’ and ‘It is Mr. Clinton who behaves more like a teen-age girl trying to protect her virginity…Ms. Lewinsky is the one who bristles with testosterone’ (cited in McGann 2018). While the public shaming and humiliation of Lewinsky mobilised age-­ old tropes of the Madonna/whore dichotomy and evinced an ancient hatred of female sexuality, it was also unprecedented in its speed and scale because of the new affordances of the internet for spreading information beyond the purview of traditional mass media institutions. As Lewinsky herself has discussed extensively, it was the news site The Drudge Report that broke the story of what was widely known as ‘the Lewinsky scandal’ (note the ways in which the ‘scandal’ became symbolically tied to her name rather than to his), rather than traditional news organisations. The case is now often discussed as the first instance of internet-enabled global bullying. As a consequence of her experiences of shame and humiliation, Lewinsky retreated into was what she has described as ‘a decade of self-­ imposed silence’ (Lewinsky 2014). Lewinsky has since discussed the profound and devastating effects that the experience of the public shaming had upon her emotional well-being

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and her professional life, including a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, suicidal thoughts, and the inability to gain employment commensurate with her qualifications because of the associations attached to her name. However, in recent years she has emerged as what the popular website Vox calls ‘a powerful spokesperson on power, consent, and #MeToo’ (North 2018). Her voice has been seen as important and distinctive within the #MeToo movement because, while she had hitherto been understood as an equal player in her relationship with Clinton (or rather, as having manipulated him with her powers of seduction, implying that she somehow had more power than him), the changed context meant that many people had begun to reassess the highly problematic and grossly unequal power relations within which their affair took place. This gave rise to new considerations about the nature of consent in such scenarios. As such, Lewinsky’s voice in the #MeToo context can be considered an example of the ‘grey areas’ of sexual abuse (see Hindes and Fileborn 2019) that have increasingly been considered alongside more readily identified crimes and forms of misconduct. The key aspect that I wish to emphasise here is how the changed communicative context appears to offer increased possibilities for Lewinsky to discuss her experiences in more  nuanced, complex and meaningful ways—that is to say, the idea that she is now able to fully and objectively contemplate and express the experiences that she had—as well as to construct her own ‘authentic’ narrative. She has written: ‘Throughout history, women have been traduced and silenced. Now, it’s our time to tell our own stories in our own words’ (Lewinsky 2018). This is part of a prevailing notion that, post-#MeToo, the silence has been broken, the floodgates have been opened, and that now—finally, at last, after decades, centuries, or even millennia of silence—women can and will speak openly, frankly and truthfully, and that their voices will be heard.

Taking Back Control? At the time of writing, it has been announced that Lewinsky is due to work as a producer on the American Crime Story dramatisation of the political crisis  of  Clinton’s impeachment,  in which she had been swept up as a young university graduate. A Guardian headline of an article reporting this news read: ‘Good for you, Monica Lewinsky, for finally taking control of your story’ (Edelstein 2019). In this article, a case is made for the ‘healing power of narrative’, arguing that through ‘calling out the ways in which she’d been mistreated’ Lewinsky was able to ‘reclaim the story of

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her life and tell it on her own terms’. The result, the article goes on, is that we are now witnessing her ‘blaze forth as a role model for women wronged, transforming her life story from a tragedy to that of a hero’s journey’. The discourses of breaking the silence and wresting back control over one’s narrative, and the feminist potential of doing so, have been highly prevalent in representations of Lewinsky in a #MeToo era; another example is Stylist magazine’s headline: ‘Monica Lewinsky’s new television series is a masterclass in reclaiming your own narrative’ (Dray 2019). Even Fox News proclaimed: ‘It’s Monica’s turn to tell her story’. We can see how she has been recast as a ‘hero’ of her own life—someone who has admirably, bravely and successfully taken it upon herself to commandeer her own narrative destiny. It is important to note that she is still subjected to misogynistic and slut-shaming abuse, both by internet trolls and by mainstream conservative media coverage—but the overall shift in media representations of her as an autonomous, self-defining agent is nonetheless striking. On one level, it seems that we could accept or even celebrate the ‘reinvention’ of Monica Lewinsky as an example of communicative justice. It is a not an insignificant step forwards for a woman who was so belittled, bullied and disempowered—who effectively had no control over the way that her public image was constructed—to be able to return to media visibility in a significantly different frame. I think that it is important to note the ways that this has helped her to regain not only a public identity that is more humane, but also, apparently, her own sense of self: as she has said, ‘I’m not a punchline, I’m a human being’ (in Economos 2017). It is widely acknowledged in therapeutic practice that in order to recover from trauma, the traumatised subject needs to develop a coherent narrative: trauma is characterised by a kind of shattering of self-identity, of a loss of meaning and of a sense of self. Developing a strong narrative about what happened to you is broadly understood as essential to healing, because it offers the restoration of meaning and identity which has been so catastrophically lost. In these terms, the discourse of ‘breaking the silence’ is central to recovery: you must speak of that which has caused the trauma in order to make sense of it, and so move beyond it (see, for example, Marzillier 2014). However, as scholars such as Ahmed and Stacey (2001) and Lauren Berlant (2001) point out, these trauma narratives locate both the problem and solution within the individual subject, who must become heroes on their own behalf. We can see parallels here with contemporary ‘resilience’ narratives that Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad (2018) identify, in which middle-class women have become emblematic and idealised

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‘bounce-backable’ subjects who are incited to mobilise their own strength of character to deal with the challenges and injustices of contemporary life, rather than to channel and politicise that energy collectively for structural change. The dominant conceptualisations of ‘breaking the silence’ in relation to Monica Lewinsky—and around #MeToo more generally—assumes or implies that silence-breaking is a one-time, one-off, self-contained and powerful act whose effects will be permanent, profound and transformative. But, as Audre Lorde pointed out, revolution must be understood as a process, and not as ‘a one-time event’ (2018). To ‘break the silence’—in the meaningful sense of changing the whole discursive terrain—cannot be accomplished by a single, spectacularised act of individual disclosure but by an ongoing, non-linear, exhausting and often tedious process of collective engagement and activism. And, as I show in the next section, the cruel logics of contemporary media culture have meant that Lewinsky has in fact made multiple attempts over the years to ‘break the silence’ and to ‘finally’ tell her story. However, these previous interventions that she has made seem to be periodically forgotten. Or perhaps more troublingly, the logic of ‘breaking the silence’ has perversely become a condition of her being heard: her voice seems to have value in the media ecology precisely because it is announced as her ‘finding her voice’ or ‘speaking out’ for the first time, even when this is actually factually erroneous. Her having ‘voice’, then, is necessarily dependent on a strategic forgetting of her previous communicative interventions in order to provide discursive fuel to power the media spectacle of ‘first-time’ disclosure. How many times, we might wonder, can one person ‘finally’ tell the same story? How and why has the trope of ‘breaking the silence’ become an implicit condition of being heard?

‘Breaking the Silence’ as a Logic of Communicative Control I have already discussed the headlines from mid-2019 that proclaimed that Lewinsky is ‘finally’ telling her story on her own terms. Almost identical proclamations were made about her appearance in the 2018 documentary The Clinton Affair, in which she participated extensively as an interviewee, giving her account of the events around the presidential scandal: ‘Monica Lewinsky is finally having her moment’, announced Vox.com (North 2018).

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Earlier, in 2015, she had delivered a TED talk entitled ‘The price of shame’ (also discussed in Banet-Weiser 2018, loc 1391). The New York Times reported on this development with the headline: ‘Monica Lewinsky breaks her silence with a TED talk’ (Bennett 2015). In 2014, Lewinsky wrote an article for Vanity Fair magazine entitled ‘Shame and Survival’ (Lewinsky 2014) which was widely reported as her ‘comeback’. In this she had written: ‘I turned 40 last year, and it is time to stop tiptoeing around my past—and other people’s futures. I am determined to have a different ending to my story. I’ve decided, finally, to stick my head above the parapet so that I can take back my narrative.’ Prior even to this, she had made numerous other attempts to ‘tell her story’; she participated in a Q&A with a live studio audience for an HBO documentary in 2002 entitled Monica in Black and White (during which an audience member shouted the question: ‘What does it feel like to be America’s blowjob queen?’). In 1999, she participated in a major national television interview with Barbara Walters on ABC’s 20/20 programme, which was introduced in the following way: ‘a woman guaranteed a place in history, finally free to tell her own story’. In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, in 1999, the presenter Jenni Murray said to her ‘Some people have been terribly shocked at the things that have come out—the fact that you appeared to have set your cap at him, you revealed your underwear, and some of the things you did together, and they say well she was a shameless hussy. Were you?’. That same year an authorised biography written by Andrew Morton (1999) was published, entitled Monica’s Story, which also sought to narrate events from her own point of view. All of this is to say that there have been repeated attempts to ‘set the record straight’, to give her version of events, to ‘finally’ tell her story. In every case, the response to her interventions has involved misogynistic backlash, slut-shaming in both open and insidious forms, and ridicule. By situating the discourses of ‘breaking the silence’ within a longer temporal frame, we can see that they are recurrent—she has ‘broken her silence’ and ‘finally’ told her story multiple times since 1998. What does this tell us about the conditions put on the audibility of the traumatised voice? I argue that the constant need to announce oneself as ‘finally’ telling one’s story, to be ‘breaking the silence’ over and over, reveals that any idea that women’s voices are now truly being heard and heeded is a fallacy. It also exposes the over-optimism and the myth of the idea that one woman ‘telling the truth about her life’ can ‘split the world open’. After each intervention, it is as though a discursive reset takes place which forgets, erases or obscures her previous attempts at reclaiming voice.

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By tracking the discursive mobilisation of ‘silence-breaking’ over a longer period of time in this one particular case, I want to suggest that the ‘voice’ that has been granted here is conditional on a logic of communicative self-transformation in which the speaking subject must strategically perform silence as a legitimating precursor to every expression of voice. The pattern of this logic is similar to the biopolitical demands placed on celebrities who must constantly ‘reinvent’ themselves—such as those female reality-celebrities who must maintain their value and media visibility through having emotional ‘breakdowns’ from which they then cyclically  recover (Wood et  al. 2017). For a traumatised woman to have her voice heard requires a preceding period (or at least a claim) of ‘silence’ to authenticate and legitimise that voice. I would suggest that this gendered patterning of voices—voices which periodically emerge from ‘self-imposed’ silence— reveals an insidious but largely invisible form of patriarchal power that saturates media culture: a woman who has demonstrated her abilities to self-silence and who then speaks in a ‘measured’, non-bitter, non-­vengeful way is permitted to have a traumatised voice. A woman who reacts angrily, messily, spontaneously, and without decorum and restraint, is not. Here, then, I suggest that we can see a particular example of the use of silence as, in Deborah Cameron’s terms, ‘a form of symbolic capital that women may have something to gain by deploying’ (Cameron 2006, p. 16). Silence has not been banished as a form of communicative injustice but has rather been insidiously  incorporated in contemporary logics of voice:  in important ways, the capacity to speak has become conditional upon women proving that that they can be silent. This begs the question of to what extent, and on what particular terms, women are genuinely being heard when they speak. As Karen Boyle (2019, p. 21) notes in her important analysis on the politics of ‘silence-breaking’ in the context of #MeToo, the problem is perhaps not so much ‘whether it is the silence which has been broken’ as it is our own ‘cultural inability to listen to victim/survivor speech’.

Hannah Gadsby, Anger and Refusal: ‘I Simply Will Not Do that Anymore’ Hannah Gadsby has been widely represented as emblematic of the women’s rage associated with the #MeToo movement—she is a key figure in what I have termed the ‘celebritisation’ and popularisation of women’s anger in recent years (Kay forthcoming). She became globally well-known

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after her stand-up show Nanette was filmed and made available by the transnational streaming service Netflix. Nanette was considered significant because it marked her refusal to go on making self-deprecating jokes at her own emotional expense. While the show begins with fairly standard stand­up comedy fare (jokes about her hometown, her coming-out story, her introvert’s dislike of parties), part-way through, there is a powerful and decisive affective shift. Gadsby reveals that she is quitting comedy because she needs to ‘tell my truth’, and that the traumatic experiences of her life—which include homophobic violence, sexual abuse and rape—are not fully speakable in the context of stand-up; it is not a place where she can genuinely tell her ‘story’. She says during the show: I built a career out of self-deprecating humour. That’s what I’ve built my career on. And… I don’t want to do that anymore. Because, do you understand… [audience applauds] …do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from somebody who already exists in the margins? It’s not humility. It’s humiliation. I put myself down in order to speak, in order to seek permission to speak. And I simply will not do that anymore. Not to myself or anybody who identifies with me. [Audience cheers] And if that means that my comedy career is over, then so be it.

Elsewhere (Kay forthcoming), I have argued that Gadsby’s public refusal to participate in a cultural form that was actively harming her emotional health can be read as what Sara Ahmed (2017, p. 199) calls a ‘feminist snap’—a moment when someone ‘does not take it anymore, when she reacts to what she has previously endured’. By saying ‘I simply will not do that anymore’, Gadsby is exposing the cruel communicative curtailments placed upon women and other marginalised groups in the context of stand­up comedy. This also reveals the ways in which those who are understood as already having a meaningful capacity for voice and rhetoric—in this case, stand-up comedians, who ostensibly have a meaningful platform for self-expression—are actually profoundly constrained by the misogynistic, queerphobic contexts they operate within. The mere fact of having a public voice—one that commands an audience, that is understood as ‘successful’, and that appears to indicate the flourishing of that person—is clearly not sufficient to satisfy the criteria for communicative justice. The conditions upon being able to have a voice—in this case, to put oneself down ‘to seek permission to speak’, to self-deprecate and to self-humiliate in order to be given space to be heard—point to the deep and insidious workings

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of communicative injustice. While with Lewinsky, the periodic deployment of silence allowed for (a modicum of) voice, in this instance we can see how Gadsby strategically deployed self-deprecation in order to be heard. As I have already indicated, Gadsby has been held up as emblematic of the ‘wave’ of women’s anger that has been associated with #MeToo. Critical reviews and audience reactions alike were effusive, even rhapsodic in their praise. The Guardian described the emotional response it had provoked in its audiences as a kind of ‘mass bloodletting’ (Valentish 2018); it was widely seen as capturing, expressing and even healing a mass experience of women’s trauma. Since the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in 2016, and the worldwide Women’s March protests following his inauguration in 2017, there has been a new visibility of women’s anger and trauma in political and popular culture that seems at once  remarkable and yet has ambivalent implications for feminism (Kay and Banet-Weiser 2019). The bestselling non-fiction author Rebecca Traister (2018, p. 2) argued in her book Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger that ‘[t]he contemporary reemergence of women’s rage as a mass impulse comes after decades of feminist deep freeze’. She refers to Nanette as part of ‘the angry art of the new era [….which] captures the furious female energy of contemporary America’ (p. 14). In the wake of Nanette, then, Gadsby thus became an icon of the #MeToo movement and has been repeatedly associated with the productive and positive power of women’s anger in mainstream reviews and commentary (Kay forthcoming). The #MeToo phenomenon has involved a high-profile reassessment of the role of women’s anger in dealing with injustice, trauma and abuse. As well as Rebecca Traister’s bestselling book Good and Mad, Soraya Chemaly’s (2018) book Rage Becomes Her: the Power of Women’s Anger argues that girls are taught from birth to ignore or repress feelings of anger in a way that is harmful to their emotional health, as well as stripping women of a vital political instrument for bringing about social change. Whereas liberal philosophers such as Martha C. Nussbaum (2016) posit that anger is in almost every instance inappropriate, morally problematic and counterproductive, others such as Audre Lorde (1997), Brittney Cooper (2018) and Amia Srinivasan (2018) approach anger as a potentially productive, constructive and animating force that is also a highly apt response to social and political injustice (as I discussed more fully in Chap. 2).

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Upon its Netflix release, Nanette was almost instantly historicised as an emblem and vector of women’s rage in the #MeToo era by the repeated descriptions of the show as ‘angry’. However, a closer analysis of the content of stand-up show itself reveals that anger plays a very ambivalent role in Gadsby’s narrative within Nanette; and anger is, in fact, ultimately disavowed within the show. Gadsby says near the end of the set, in a muted tone: I am angry and I believe I have every right to be angry, but what I don’t have a right to do is to spread anger. Because anger, much like laughter, can connect a room like nothing else. But anger will not relieve tension  — because anger is a tension. It is a toxic, infectious tension and it knows no other purpose than to spread blind hatred and I want no part of it, because I take my freedom of speech seriously, and just because I can position myself as a victim does not make my anger constructive. It never is constructive.

What is significant here, I would like to suggest, is that anger’s role in relation to social and political justice is presented in a very specific and qualified way. The repeated associations of Nanette with a ‘flood’, a ‘wave’ or a ‘mass bloodletting’ of women’s anger in mainstream media reviews suggest that it is propelled by a deep affective force that is ineluctable, revolutionary and unstoppable. However, here we see a much more qualified, modulated and pragmatic approach to rage, which is much more akin to Martha Nussbaum’s notion of anger as counterproductive and morally corrosive. As we saw in Chap. 2 of this book, Nussbaum rejects anger as an instrument of justice because it is based, she says, on defective values, a morally problematic wish for payback, and an excessive focus on a perceived slight to one’s personal status. The only kind of anger that Nussbaum accepts as morally acceptable is what she calls ‘transition-anger’, a ‘forward-looking’ emotion that registers the injustice of a situation but moves on without wishing to enact revenge or reassert one’s own status (Nussbaum 2016, 2020). Nussbaum argues that we need to distinguish between ‘transitional’ and ‘retributive’ anger, the former of which is very rare—most anger, she says, is of the retributive kind, infected with and motivated by the toxic impulse to seek vengeance. Gadsby here seems to align herself with this view that anger is ultimately poisonous and morally damaging. It is deeply telling, I think, that the cultural text that has been repeatedly held up as the emblem of contemporary women’s rage— Nanette—actually disavows anger. What does this tell us about the role of

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women’s anger in the changed communicative field that has been shaped by #MeToo? I argue that this shows how limited the new cultural sanctioning of women’s anger actually is: it suggests that the widely used metaphor of ‘waves’ of anger is less apt than what Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill (2019) call the ‘safety valves’ for women’s rage that contemporary media culture offers. Certainly, Nanette has been critiqued in some quarters for the ways that it conservatively modulates and disarticulates rather than harnesses anger, although these have all been made outside of mainstream reviews. Writing from a critical queer perspective, the writer Peter Maskowitz (2018) has taken issue with Nanette for its disavowal of both anger and comedy: in order to convey her trauma, Gadsby dismisses all of comedy, the uses of queer anger, and the entire premise of self-deprecation as inadequate [….] Comedy can be radical; it’s just that when it is, it’s not typically on Netflix. Queer and trans people have been performing comedy that transgresses how we traditionally think of the form [for years]: sets without easy punchlines that are weird and often unreadable unless you’ve been deep into the lexicon of queerness

In this analysis, it is Nanette’s all-too-easy readability to non-queer audiences that constitutes its political shortcomings. Furthermore, its affective modality of controlled, dissipated anger means that any meaningfully subversive potential is lost: it is too straight, too easily legible within existing normative scripts, and too committed to conservative communicative and socio-affective norms. For the writer Yasmin Nair (2018), who declares Nanette ‘awful’, it is the show’s use of trauma that is deeply problematic. In ways that recall Berlant’s (2001) critique of ‘proximity to trauma’ as a prerequisite for contemporary citizenship, Nair argues that Nanette perpetuates the disturbing idea that trauma is a ‘passport’ to being considered authentic. Trauma, Nair says, ‘is increasingly becoming the mark of honor in today’s vomitous culture of constant revelation’, and that women and queers are especially constrained by these logics. She writes that trauma is a precondition for queers and women to enter into public discourse: there is no coming out without providing first a narrative of having been bashed, or raped, or brutalised in some way and women are not permitted to inhabit public spheres without having demonstrated at least some evidence that they have been physically and emotionally wounded

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In this ‘vomitous culture’, Nair writes, it is women and queer people who are expected to ‘turn ourselves inside out in order to gain recognition or rights’. This creates new forms of exclusion and hierarchy, because ‘those of us with no stories or who refuse to tell our stories are now banished. In its place is a global aesthetic of trauma which alone grants us entrance, even citizenship, in this world.’ This ‘global aesthetic of trauma’, for Nair, has become—disturbingly, regressively—a condition of voice. While the expression of trauma is often read as evidence of meaningful voice—when it is understood as the ‘breaking of silence’, or the challenging of those patriarchal ideals that seek to keep women quiet—Nair instead understands it as a deeply conservative, distinctly unfeminist and unqueer phenomenon. She sees this communicative context as harmful and dangerous because ‘texts like Nanette create dramas of revelation and exposure that serve as templates for everyone else’; while ‘Hannah Gadsby and other high-profile confessors will be fine, with access to the kind of counselling and other services that exist to ease victims of trauma back into everyday life’, the great majority of women and queers without such resources will be damaged by this global imperative to speak in a traumatised voice. Critiques such as Maskowitz and Nair’s are useful counterweights to the overwhelmingly positive reviews in mainstream media that posit Nanette as a heroic narrative form that has the power—in and of itself—to overturn gendered injustices. However, I would suggest that it is not helpful to try and understand Nanette as either ‘awful’ in its communicative normativity and affective conservativism, or as a politically perfect, morally pure expression of righteous female anger, as many mainstream media reviews have otherwise implied. The former critiques of its communicative (hetero)normativity may well be correct in some respects, but I would suggest that they place too much burden on individual women to single-handedly challenge the communicative architectures and scripts that characterise contemporary capitalist culture. They also conflate Gadsby herself, who I would insist we have to recognise as a cultural worker, with the capitalist media and entertainment industries within which she works, as though she was just as globally powerful and privileged as Netflix itself. Nair (2018) argues that Nanette must be understood as a ‘globalized media event’—as part of the political economy of Netflix and its algorithmically enabled, all-consuming orientation to profit (original comedy shows are exponentially cheaper to make than original dramas, and this is the context in which we need to understand Netflix’s commitment to the

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form). Nair’s analysis implies that we must understand the particular ‘voice’ offered in Nanette as a product of global corporate media architectures rather than that of ‘an intimate one-woman show in a tiny, somewhat dingy theater’. However, this analysis misses something very important. Nanette has become globally well-known because of its incarnation as a Netflix comedy special, but it did begin life as a stand-up show delivered in ‘somewhat dingy theatres’ before it was picked up and made available to a mass global audience by Netflix. My own experience of watching it live was in a small theatre with an audience that was mostly made up of women, and largely  queer; at the end, many audience members were holding each other and weeping. I have also screened parts of the Netflix show to my students, and even in this form, consumed in the classroom context, it has prompted profound emotional responses. All this is to say that I find it very difficult to reconcile the critiques of Nanette as part of a ‘vomitous culture’ characterised by ‘emotional manipulation’ (as Nair says), or as a politically insipid and irredeemably conservative product of the ‘wokeness-­ industrial-­complex’ (as Maskowitz puts it). To suggest that Gadsby can somehow simply pay to mitigate against the adverse mental health implications of disclosure—and to blame her so personally for inciting others to do so—seems to me a distinctly unhelpful way to address the broader, structural and deeply entrenched problem of communicative injustice.

No Pain, No Gain? Rethinking Trauma, Voice and Justice The narratives which locate both Nanette and Monica Lewinsky’s ‘comeback’ as part of an ineluctable wave of women’s anger and trauma, whose organic power will smash or subsume patriarchy, are clearly problematic and plainly reductive. In this regard, they share many of the profound limitations of the anglophonic incarnation of the #MeToo movement more broadly, as I discussed in Chap. 2. These hopeful media narratives around Gadsby and Lewinsky are at one level clearly concerned with social justice issues around homophobia and misogyny. However, I would suggest that they are arguably characteristic of a broader, problematic shift within feminism, in which the politics of recognition have split off—or as Nancy Fraser (2013) puts it, gone ‘rogue’—from the politics of redistribution. That is to say, that the ‘cultural politics’ of recognition, which

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foregrounds the emotional grounds of suffering that arise from disrespect (McNay 2008) is a strand of feminism that has split off from the other important strand: the feminist movement for social, economic and redistributive justice. For Fraser, the politics of recognition is essential to emancipation—but it must always be linked to a broader left movement and rendered unamenable to the possibility of recuperation by neoliberalism. In a similar vein, Catherine Rottenberg (2018) argues that feminism has become ‘unmoored’ from social ideals such as justice, equality and liberation. It is this element of going ‘rogue’ or ‘unmooring’ that is the problem—the ways in which feminist discourses, when disconnected from an anti-capitalist or socialist grounding, can serve to buttress the ideological power of neoliberal individualism. The pronounced focus on individual narratives in the texts I have analysed—‘I want my story heard’ as Gadsby puts it; ‘It’s time to tell our own stories’, as Lewinsky has written—can be understood as aligned with the neoliberal trauma narratives that Berlant (2001) and others have identified in which the figure of the ‘mourning self’ replaces a commitment to collective political action. In a similar vein, Eva Illouz (2003, p. 102) discusses Hannah Arendt’s distinction between the ‘politics of justice’ and the ‘politics of pity’. The latter is focussed on the singular plight of a singular person, which has the effect of deflecting attention away from the broader workings of power and structural injustice. As I noted in Chap. 2, Wendy Brown (1993) discusses the contemporary prevalence of identity politics discourse as a kind of ‘wounded attachment’: that is to say, an over-investment in the history and experience of one’s own subjugation. These wounded attachments trap the oppressed identity in an ‘eternal repetition of its pain’ (p. 408), ultimately foreclosing the possibility of imagining alternative, better futures in which these essentialised and wounded identities did not exist. For Brown, the ‘logics of pain’ in contemporary subject formation—which we can arguably see in the fact that both Lewinsky and Gadsby have inhabited the traumatised voice, and have formed their speaking subjectivities around their trauma— close down the more radical politics of democratic emancipation. Put more crudely, the very act of ‘speaking out’ in this way might be insidiously undoing the feminism that it claims to be strengthening. ‘Voice’ in this context might become a way of buttressing heteropatriarchal capitalism rather than challenging it. In many ways, then, the issues thrown up by the politics of disclosure in the contemporary context—a context that we might characterise as the

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‘wokeness-industrial-complex’ or the #MeToo era—are a resignification of, not a departure from, more entrenched paradoxes of gender politics with much longer histories that are endemic to late capitalism. The enduring (irreconcilable?) tension around the traumatised voice is that, on the one hand, it seems to heroically challenge ancient imperatives for women to be silent—and yet on the other, the particular kinds of politics that are articulated through the traumatised voice lend themselves all to easily to spectacle, pity, individualisation and commodification. This deeply entrenched and often painful conflict between different conceptualisations of justice—that of recognition on the one hand, and redistribution on the other—presents a formidable and complex challenge for communicative justice (or any kind of justice). The long histories of women’s communicative exclusion from public life mean that the new opportunities for voice cannot simply be dismissed as an illusory and ultimately meaningless effect of neoliberal culture. Such voices do challenge patriarchal power, at least on some level. And yet the conjuncturally specific injustices we are faced with are produced by the co-articulation of patriarchy and capitalism—and so ‘effective voice’ is that which is able to challenge or undermine this combined toxic power formation. By expanding the analysis of gender, injustice and voice to encompass the injuries of patriarchy and capitalism, we can see how simply being a woman with a ‘strong’ voice does not in itself qualify as communicative injustice, as I go on to argue in Chap. 4. More broadly, I wish to restate my argument that a democratic and just conceptualisation of voice must be collectivist and leftist in orientation. Communicative justice is not about individuals ‘taking back control’ of their stories—rather, we need a collective taking back of the means of communicative production. We often look to long histories of women being silenced in order to celebrate what seems like the triumphant achievement of women testifying and speaking trauma in the public sphere today—or, conversely, to try and understand why speaking in public is still so difficult for women (Beard 2017). The witch-hunts, scold’s bridles and ducking stools of the early modern period are often invoked as evidence of women’s communicative subordination in misogynistic regimes of yore—in the narrative logic of this conceptualisation of gender history, we have made great, progressive strides in challenging the patriarchal basis of the public sphere. But as I discussed in Chap. 1,  the witches who were burnt in the early modern period were a threat not only to patriarchy but also to private property and capital accumulation. Witches, Silvia Federici argues, were despised and

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attacked as the communists of their time; it was the communal power that women represented that was so intolerable and had to be punished (Federici 2014, 2018). To genuinely and meaningfully challenge contemporary power relations—which is how I think we might conceive of the capacity and criteria for ‘effective voice’ (Couldry 2010)—involves transcending individual trauma narratives and the fetishisation of ‘powerful speakers’ (as though TED talks could save the world). In the contemporary context, it is the history not of the great female orator, nor of the woman who ‘takes back her story’, but rather the communist witch who I think can be our guide to communicative justice.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Ahmed, Sarah, and Jackie Stacey. 2001. Testimonial Cultures: An introduction. Cultural Values 5 (1): 1–6. Alcoff, Linda, and Laura Gray. 1993. Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation? Signs, 18. No. 2: 260–290. Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2018. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham: Duke University Press. Beard, Mary. 2017. Women & Power: A Manifesto. London: Profile Books. Bennett, Jessica. 2015. Monica Lewinsky Breaks her Silence with a TED Talk. New York Times.  March 22. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/ 03/22/fashion/monica-lewinsky-ted-talk.html Berlant, Lauren. 2001. Trauma and Ineloquence. Cultural Values 5 (1): 41–58. Boyle, Karen. 2019. #MeToo, Weinstein and Feminism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, Wendy. 1993. Wounded Attachments. Political Theory 21 (3): 390–410. Cameron, Deborah. 2006. Theorising the Female Voice in Public Contexts. In Speaking out: The Female Voice in Public Contexts, ed. J.M.  Bean, 3–20. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Carpignano, Paolo, Robin Andersen, Stanley Aronowitz, and William Difazio. 1990. Chatter in an Age of Electronic Reproduction: Talk Television and the ‘Public mind’. Social sText 25/26: 33–55. Cooper, Brittney. 2018. Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. New York: St Martin’s Press. Couldry, Nick. 2010. Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism. London/Thousand Oaks: Sage. Dray, Kayleigh. 2019. Monica Lewinsky’s New Television Series Is a Masterclass in Reclaiming your Own Narrative. Stylist. Available at: https://www.stylist.

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co.uk/people/monica-lewinsky-bill-clinton-impeachment-american-crimestory-sarah-paulson-beanie-feldstein-tv-series/284569 Economos, Nicole. 2017. I’m Not a Punchline. I’m a Human Being: Monica Lewinsky Debuts Anti-bullying PSA.  Sydney Morning Herald (October 11). Available at: https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/celebrity/im-not-apunchline-im-a-human-being-monica-lewinsky-debuts-antibullying-psa20171011-gyynt1.html. Edelstein, Jean Hannah. 2019. Good for You, Monica Lewinsky, for Finally Taking Control of Your Story. Guardian. August 8. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/08/monica-lewisnky-affairbill-clinton-tv-series Federici, Silvia. 2014. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn: Autonomedia. ———. 2018. Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women. Brooklyn: Autonomedia. Fraser, Nancy. 1990. Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. Social Text No. 25/26: 56-80. ———. 2013. Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis. London: Verso. Gadsby, Hannah. 2018. Nanette Isn’t a Comedy Show. It’s a sledgehammer. Elle. com https://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a22564399/hannah-gadsbynanette-netflix/ Gill, Rosalind, and Shani Orgad. 2018. The Amazing Bounce-Backable Woman: Resilience and the Psychological Turn in Neoliberalism. Sociological Research Online 23 (2): 477–495. Hindes, Sophie, and Bianca Fileborn. 2019. “Girl Power Gone Wrong”: #MeToo, Aziz Ansari, and Media Reporting of (Grey Area) Sexual Violence. Feminist Media Studies, Online First. Illouz, Eva. 2003. Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture. New York: Colombia University Press. Kay, Jilly Boyce. (forthcoming). Celebritised Anger: Theorising Women’s Rage, Voice and Affective Injustice Through Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette. In Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture, ed. Anthea Taylor and Joanna McIntyre. New York: Routledge. Kay, Jilly Boyce, and Sarah Banet-Weiser. 2019. Feminist Anger and Feminist Respair. Feminist Media Studies 19 (4): 603–609. Lewinsky, Monica. 2014. Shame and Survival. Vanity Fair, May 28. Available at: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/society/2014/06/monica-lewinskyhumiliation-culture ———. 2018. Who Gets to Live in Victimville? Why I Participated in a New Docuseries on the Clinton Affair. Vanity Fair, November 13. Available at: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/11/the-clinton-affair-documentarymonica-lewinsky

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Lorde, Audre. 1997/1981. The Uses of Anger. Women’s Studies Quarterly 25 (1/2): 278–285. ———. 2018. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. London: Penguin. Marzillier, John. 2014. The Trauma Therapies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Masciarotte, Gloria-Jean. 1991. ‘C’mon, Girl: Oprah Winfrey and the Discourse of Feminine Talk. Genders 11: 81–110. Maskowitz, Peter. 2018. The Nanette Problem. The Outline (August 20). Available at: https://theoutline.com/post/5962/the-nanette-problem-hannah-gadsbynetflix-review?zd=1&zi=zdfbvgxt. McGann, Laura. 2018. Maureen Dowd Smeared Monica Lewinsky. Now She’s Undermining #MeToo’. Vox.com. Available at: https://www.vox. com/2018/3/25/17159732/maureen-dowd-monica-lewinsky-metoobarry-diller-interview-new-york-times McNay, Lois. 2008. The Trouble with Recognition: Subjectivity, Suffering, and Agency. Sociological Theory. 26 (3): 271–296. Moorti, Sujata. 1998. Cathartic Confessions or Emancipatory Texts? Rape Narratives on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Social Text 57 (4): 83–102. Morton, Andrew. 1999. Monica’s Story. New York: St Martin’s Press. Nair, Yasmin. 2018. ‘No, No, Nanette: Hannah Gadsby, Trauma, and Comedy as Emotional Manipulation. Evergreen Review.. Available at: https://evergreenreview.com/read/your-laughter-is-my-trauma/ North, Louise. 2018. Monica Lewinsky Is Finally Having Her Moment. Vox.com, November 25. Available at:. https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/11/15/ 18095050/monica-lewinsky-clinton-affair-tv-series-interview Nussbaum, Martha C. 2016. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, and Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2020. ‘The Weakness of the Furies’, Boston Review., Special Issue ‘on Anger’, February 19. Available at: http://bostonreview.net/philosophy-religion/martha-c-nussbaum-weakness-furies Orgad, Shani, and Rosalind Gill. 2019. Safety Valves for Mediated Female Rage in the #MeToo Era. Feminist Media Studies 19 (4): 596–603. Phipps, Alison. 2019. “Every Woman Knows a Weinstein”: Political Whiteness in #MeToo and Public Feminisms around Sexual Violence’ Currently under Review by Feminist Formations. Restrepo Sanín, Juliana. 2019. #MeToo, What Kind of Politics? Panel Notes. Journal of Women, Politics & Policy 40 (1): 122–128. Rottenberg, Catherine. 2018. The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2019. #MeToo and the Prospects of Political Change. Soundings 71 (Spring).

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Shattuc, Jane. 1997. The Talking Cure: TV Talk Shows and Women. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 2005. The Shifting Terrain of American Talk Shows. In A Companion to Television, ed. Janet Wasko, 324–336. Malden/Oxford/Carlton: Blackwell. Squire, Corinne. 1994. Empowering Women? The Oprah Winfrey Show. Feminism and Psychology 4 (1): 63–79. Srinivasan, Amia. 2018. The Aptness of Anger. The Journal of Political Philosophy 26 (2): 123–144. Traister, Rebecca. 2018. Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger. London: Simon & Schuster. Valentish, Jenny. 2018. “I Broke the Contract”: How Hannah Gadsby’s Trauma Transformed Comedy. Guardian. July 16th. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/jul/16/hannah-gadsby-trauma-comedy-nanette-standupnetflixValentish Watkins, Susan. 2018. Which Feminisms? New Left Review, 109, Jan/Feb. Wood. 2001. No, YOU Rioted! The Pursuit of Conflict in the Management of “Lay” and “Expert” Discourses on Kilroy. In Television Talk Shows: Discourse, Performance, Spectacle, ed. Andrew Tolson, 65–87. London/New York: Routledge. Wood, Helen. 2009. Talking with Television: Women, Talk Shows and Modern Self Reflexivity. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Wood, Helen, Jilly Boyce Kay, and Mark Banks. 2017. The Working Class, Reality Television and Illegitimate Cultural Labour. In Media and Class, ed. Andrea Press and June Deery. Abingdon/New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 4

‘Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History’: Transgressive Speech, Gender and Communicative Injustice

Introduction: The Politics of Transgressive Talk In a context of popular feminism, the phrase ‘well-behaved women seldom make history’ has taken on a new life. The words were originally written by the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in 1976, in a somewhat niche academic article about the funeral sermons of Christian women. Today this quote can be found on bumper stickers, T-shirts, mugs, babygros, posters and internet memes; it has become a popular feminist slogan that seems to capture a new mood of gender irreverence. It seems to signify the defiant stance of those women who loudly and unapologetically refuse to accept the gendered communicative ideologies that have historically impelled women to be silent. The ubiquity of this phrase seems to represent a radical cultural  break from the popular misogynist maxim ‘Women should be seen and not heard’. Having taken on this new, popularised  life, Ulrich’s phrase has become a slogan of generic resistance, offering the promise of voice to any woman who goes against the normative grain, who challenges communicative conventions, and who refuses to be silent. We might understand the prevalence of this ‘irreverent’ mood as a new form of popular resistance to ancient communicative norms, and clear evidence of feminist progress in the dispelling of anachronistic gender ideologies around voice. Certainly, it seems to challenge the gendered mandate for women to be upbeat, resilient, positive and optimistic, which has so prevailed in late capitalist culture (see Gill and Orgad 2015, 2018; Ahmed 2010, 2011; Davies 2015). © The Author(s) 2020 J. B. Kay, Gender, Media and Voice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47287-0_4

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We can usefully situate this example in a wider context that seems to be increasingly tolerant towards,  and even celebratory of,  ‘transgressive’ women—those who do not conform to traditional imperatives for women to be acquiescent, smiling, or demure. Amy Shields Dobson and Akane Kanai (2019) identify a new accommodation within media culture of what they call ‘affective dissonance’—a certain new tolerance for women’s anger, anxiety, and insecurity, and other ‘ugly feelings’ (e.g. in the HBO series Girls). In her analysis of contemporary popular culture, Jo Littler (2019) has identified what she calls the new social type of ‘mothers behaving badly’ (or MBB). A whole range of popular media texts, Littler shows, now depict the hedonistic behaviour of mothers drinking, partying and otherwise behaving ‘badly’ amidst scenes of domestic chaos. Crucially, while the figure of the MBB appears to radically transgress the boundaries of acceptable maternal behaviour, she is not culturally castigated (as the figure of the ‘welfare mother’ so viciously is; see Tyler 2008 and Jensen 2018). Rather, in this conjuncturally specific moment, she is ‘presented as simultaneously fun, risqué and as justified in adopting these moments of carnivalesque excess’ (p. 2). On the one hand, this new social type seems aligned with feminist aims—for example, in the ways that it ‘expands the repertoire of representations of motherhood’ (p.  4) and ‘rejects the mythology of the perfect’ (p. 17). On the other, however, the media figure of the MBB all too seldom interrogates the ‘classed and racialised nature of its own privileges and always stops short of providing structural social solutions, leaving its prescription within the realm of the small female friendship squad’ (p. 18). Littler valuably suggests that a more hopeful and yet infinitely less visible figure is that of the ‘Parent Behaving Politically’—those parents who mobilise collectively for economic and structural change. Moreover, there are significant limitations as to who gets to ‘behave badly’: as Littler argues, ‘it is hard to imagine the transgressive pleasures of raucous, often barely legal or mildly illegal behaviour being offered to black mothers in the same register’ (p. 16). Shields Dobson and Kanai also argue that the new ‘feeling rules’ of post-feminist media culture—in which anger, insecurity and other ‘ugly feelings’ are increasingly made visible—may only really be permitted ‘when mobilised by some bodies, in socially structured ways’ (Shields Dobson and Kanai 2019, p. 776). In this chapter, I explore, in a similar vein, the ways that contemporary media culture now often seems to venerate ‘vocal’ women—those who are understood as being irreverent, transgressive, and subversive in their public speech. However, as I go

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on to argue, this apparent new tolerance or even celebration of such communicative ‘misbehaviour’ conceals the racialised hierarchies and exclusions that allow some women to transgress in specific ways, and punishes other women for doing the same. Histories of women’s silence and communicative subjugation are now often implicitly and explicitly mobilised. As women increasingly come forward to claim ‘voice’ and stake out space in which to be heard. The archaic communicative past, in which women were ‘silenced’, is invoked and appealed to, in order to advance demands to be heard in the present. For example, Disney’s 2019 remake of Aladdin—with its signature song ‘Speechless’ sung by the princess Jasmine (also discussed in Chap. 2)—seems to capture and express this new mood of loud and unapologetic defiance: it has been described as a feminist ‘anthem’ about women’s refusal to be silent (Rodie 2019), made possible by the wider contextual shifts characterised and propelled by #MeToo (e.g. see Richardson 2019). There is of course much to be welcomed in these changes in the popular media ecology, as there is in the popularisation of women’s anger (Kay forthcoming) and the expanded ways in which women’s public speech is now  often lauded for being ‘strong’, rather than for being modulated, quietened or restrained. But, in keeping with Littler’s approach to the ambivalent cultural politics of the Mother Behaving Badly, I argue in this chapter that the emergence of a celebratory discourse around ‘loud’ women with ‘strong’ voices requires further scrutiny and a killjoy-like scepticism (Ahmed 2017). I suggest that what might seem like spectacular transgressions of communicative norms that seem to indicate a liberation of voice merit much closer attention for the new or shifted hierarchies, exclusions and power relations that they both produce and conceal. In her philosophical analysis of anger, Amia Srinivasan (2018) suggests that we can and ought to distinguish between situations when anger is ‘apt’, and those when it is not. In this vein, I argue that we need to better distinguish between the kinds of angry or ‘misbehaving’ voices that we wish to amplify, elevate or celebrate. That is to say that not all women’s ‘vocal’ speech necessarily constitutes a challenge to dominant structures of patriarchal  power, and indeed it  can function to shore up and legitimise the perpetuation of such power by lending it a ‘progressive’ gendered gloss. To this end, I consider the ‘transgressive’ speech of the media personality and popular figure of the alt-right, Katie Hopkins. As somebody who routinely articulates mediated speech that is racist, homophobic, transphobic,  Islamophobic and anti-feminist, I argue that Hopkins in many

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ways benefits from simplistic and reductive histories of women’s speech, including the invocation of the figure of the ‘persecuted witch’, that position her as a ‘brave’ and ‘trailblazing’ woman who is transgressing archaic gendered communicative norms, pluckily and heroically telling the ‘truth’, and refusing to be ‘silenced’. I then move to consider the example of Yassmin Abdel-Magied, the Sudanese-Australian media personality and writer, who has described herself as ‘Australia’s most publicly hated Muslim’ following the expression of what were understood as her ‘controversial’ opinions about Australian military history. I argue that, unlike Hopkins, Abdel-Magied’s experience can reasonably be described as a contemporary ‘witch-hunt’, because it entailed an extreme and institutionally-­supported form of backlash against a woman who was cast as an intolerable ‘outsider’, and constituted a profound case of communicative injustice. This points to the deep and significant limitations of the new promise of voice for women, whose ‘transgressive’ speech is only lauded when it stays within the circumscribed boundaries of the politically acceptable. It also points to the racism that undergirds judgements about who gets to speak in ‘transgressive’ ways. My analysis of these two cases points to the importance of an intersectional approach to communicative injustice, and the profoundly unequal ways in which voice as a resource is distributed and experienced in contemporary culture. The benefits of speaking out are significantly tempered for all women by the simultaneous costs of doing so—but the costs are much less significant, and the stakes much lower, for white, middle-class, cisgendered women. Before I turn to my analyses of these two case studies, I firstly want to take a small digression to consider how the names of two public houses in the UK can cue us in to the complex histories and politics of women’s transgressive speech, and the problematic politics that are entailed in figuring speech and silence as binary opposites.

Histories of the Tongueless: Rethinking Voice and Silence I opened this book by referring to The Ducking Stool pub in Leominster, Herefordshire, which is so named because the last recorded instance of a person being punished for ‘scolding’ with this instrument in the UK was a local woman (Jenny Pipes) in 1809 (see Chap. 1, this book). I also noted how, despite growing up in this area, I had never been told (and, indeed, had never thought to ask about) the reason for its name. The story of

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Jenny Pipes was not taught to us at school, and neither was it part of any local folklore or legend that I was ever aware of (until I began researching the histories of women’s speech for this book). As such, I have begun to consider how pub names can sometimes cue us into histories of communicative injustice that are otherwise hidden from view. For example, there is a pub in the Derbyshire Peak District in the UK called The Quiet Woman. The pub sign depicts a headless body of a woman as well as the words: ‘Soft words turneth away wrath’. It is so named, according to local legend (and now the local tourist website), after a former pub landlord’s wife, known as “Chattering Charteris” [who] nagged so much that she even started ranting in her sleep. At last her husband could stand it no more and cut off her head. The approving villagers even had a “whip round” to pay for the headstone. (Discover Derbyshire and the Peak District, n.d.)

In Dorset, there is a pub called The Silent Woman Inn. The sign of this pub depicts the body of a woman holding her own head in her hands. Underneath this image reads the text ‘Since the woman is quiet, let no man breed a riot’. According to the pub’s webpages, the legend of its name goes thus: an “unusual” Landlady (one who talked too much, heaven forbid!) gave away the smugglers’ secrets in Wareham market place. Fearful of capture by the ever-present Excise Men, the smugglers silenced her by cutting out her tongue, thus creating that unique phenomenon “The Silent Woman”. We aim to continue some of the traditions started by our predecessors, generations ago, albeit with a 21st Century twist!! (thesilentwoman.co.uk, n.d.)

There are other instances of similar names for pubs in the UK (and in Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native the public house is called The Quiet Woman Inn). However, what I wish to emphasise here are two things: firstly, how in the legends of these two similarly named pubs, women’s ‘deviant’ speech was violently punished in ways that have recurred throughout history, as we have seen.1 The still-powerful trope of the 1  It should be noted that the practice of cutting out women’s tongues as a form of punishment is not an anachronistic relic of the past: in 2018 an elderly woman accused of witchcraft had her tongue cut out by fellow villagers in Bihar, India; in 2013 a man was convicted of cutting out his girlfriend’s tongue in Brisbane, Australia.

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‘nagging wife’ (discussed more fully later in Chap. 5) lends the discursive ­context in which these forms of extreme, misogynistic violence can be invoked with apparent whimsy and light-heartedness (as if the impulse to murder and mutilate vocal women is both reasonable and relatable). Secondly, however, I want to draw attention to the fact that these women were not violently punished just for the simple fact of speaking; it has seldom been the case that women have been compelled to be literally silent or punished simply for having spoken at all. It is the ways that they speak (as in ‘nagging’), speaking too much, and the things that they say (giving away secrets) that singled them out for corrective punishment. As the Peak District pub sign indicates, the nagging wife would not have incurred ‘wrath’ if only she had used ‘soft words’. I wish to draw attention to this because of the prevalence of ‘silence’ in the ways that we popularly understand the histories and politics of women’s speech, and the widespread use of the notion of ‘breaking the silence’, particularly in the contemporary conjuncture (see also Chap. 3). In these pervasive narratives, silence is inscribed and understood as an inherently oppressive condition that has been forced upon women since the beginning of human history, but from which women are ‘finally’ now emerging. This is linked to the ways in which ‘having a voice’ is fundamental to western conceptions of citizenship and personhood, and how silence is construed as its unbearable opposite. As Aimee Carrillo Rowe and Sheena Malhotra (2013, p.  3) argue, feminist communication studies is dominated by a common-sense frame that ‘valorises voice against a backdrop of silence, in which silence is equated with oppression’. For them, however, silence and speech are not binary opposites. Assumptions that silence is always a condition of lack, deficiency or powerlessness are too easily amenable to colonial logics—for example, the silence of ‘subaltern’ women is dominantly read as evidence that they lack agency or any capacity for resistance (see Spivak 1998). Rowe and Malhotra’s argument helps us to see how not speaking may well be done consciously, strategically and because a subject may be all too cognisant of the power context in which she finds herself. We operate according to deep-seated assumptions that it is speaking out which involves agency and autonomy, while being silent is born out of coercion and fear. But, as I argue in this book, in the contemporary western context, women and girls are seemingly compelled to speak out, in ways that cannot be understood as straightforwardly empowering or liberating. In other words, we can see how ‘voice’ and ‘silence’ are not binary opposites

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signifying, respectively, justice on the one hand, and on the other its lack. Insisting that full citizenship—and human flourishing—depends upon the capacity for speech and self-expression also discursively renders those without access to speech, or fluent speech, as ‘nonpeople’, as Melanie Yergeau (2018) argues. What kinds of violence might be done by privileging expressive speech as the gold standard of humanness? The fact that I am writing a book about voice, and arguing that this continues to be denied to women, and that voice should be redistributed as a social and political resource, is not lost on me here. However, I want to argue here that simply equating ‘voice’ with ‘speech’ as though they were interchangeable is problematic and erroneous, and does symbolic violence to those who do not have access to speech for a multitude of reasons—even as I realise that this is what I do myself all too frequently. The above discussion  indicates how the politics around voice and silence are multifarious and highly complex; for the purposes of this chapter, what I wish to emphasise is how we should problematise the equation of speech with empowerment and silence with disempowerment. It is problematic to insist that the capacity for ‘voice’ be performatively evidenced by prominent acts of public speech, as if this were ‘proof’ of democracy, empowerment, and gender equality; or to conceptualise spectacular transgressions of public speech as paradigmatic for feminism; or to assume that speaking out will always and inevitably bring democratising and progressive effects. In order to develop my argument that ‘transgressive’ or ‘irreverent’ women’s voices cannot be straightforwardly equated with gendered liberation or communicative justice, I now turn to consider the case studies, beginning with Katie Hopkins and her discursive location within the alt-right.

Katie Hopkins, Gendered Voices and the Alt-Right In a wider context of rising right-wing populism and the global spread of ressentiment and festering anger discussed in Chap. 2, it is widely acknowledged that more openly racist voices are now permitted to speak in the public sphere; for example, voices which express desires to curb immigration, or turn away refugees, are increasingly seen as representing ‘legitimate concerns’. The new online configurations of white nationalism, misogyny, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are often dubbed the ‘altright’, an abbreviation of ‘alternative-right’. The rise of the alt-right can be understood as part of the masculinist ‘turn to anger’ discussed in Chap. 2,

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and as deeply entangled with the resurgence of misogyny. The alt-right is heavily associated with anti-feminism and the ‘manosphere’ (Ging 2017; Marwick and Caplan 2018). However, this new communicative context that is characterised by ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ (Harsin 2018) has actually given amplifying platforms to many (right-wing) women’s voices. In 2019, the anti-fascist organisation Hope Not Hate published a report which included profiles of the ten most influential far-right figures on social media, and of these ten, four were women. From the US, these included Ann Coulter and Pamela Geller; from Canada, Lauren Southern; and from the UK context, Katie Hopkins (Hope Not Hate 2019). Sara Farris (2017) points to the ways in which anti-Islam agendas and discourses of women’s rights are increasingly co-articulated, and how the figure of the Muslim man is mobilised as the ultimate threat to western societies—in large part through his apparent  hostility  towards women and  gender equality. Significantly, these anti-Islam, ostensibly pro-­ equality discourses are articulated in various ways via an unlikely coalition of political actors. Farris argues that ‘three very different political actors— right-wing nationalists, certain feminists and women’s equality agencies, and neoliberals—invoke women’s rights to stigmatize Muslim men in order to advance their own political objectives’ (Farris 2017, p. 4). Farris terms this peculiar constellation of political actors ‘femonationalism’—this is not so much a conscious alliance as a convergence of these seemingly disparate actors. Farris does not include media personalities as part of this disturbing convergence, but in this chapter I wish to consider how one such alt-right figure—Hopkins—benefits from and implicitly mobilises certain  discourses of gender equality—even as she rails against ‘feminazis’—and aligns this with a virulent anti-Islam agenda. She routinely accuses Islam of ‘sexism’ and ‘homophobia’ and refers to London as ‘Khan’s Londonistan’, suggesting that the Labour Party Mayor Sadiq Khan, who is Muslim, is overseeing an ‘Islamification’ of the capital city. Importantly for my purposes here, her persona is as a provocateur; Hopkins is a media personality who is widely known as a purveyor of offensive and provocative opinions. Her media visibility began when she was a participant on The Apprentice (BBC, 2005–present) in 2006, and her career since then has been built on the deployment of studiedly provocative, ‘outrageous’ opinions. I do not wish to dwell too long on Hopkins, or cite any of her writing, or repeat her racist rhetoric (which is strategically produced to sustain her visibility—and thus her career—within a wider media culture based on an

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‘outrage economy’ [Phipps 2018]). It is worth noting, however, the extent to which she mobilises ‘irreverence’ in order to sustain her media career and legitimise her speech. Her 2017 memoir is entitled Rude, and is full of anecdotes about her having ‘shocked’ men—for example, by talking about her vagina in public. Her Twitter biography, at the time of writing, included the descriptors ‘The Biggest Bitch in Britain’ and ‘Angry Ellen de Generes’. This indicates the ways that she discursively benefits from the celebratory discourses of ‘transgressive’ and even ‘angry’ women that circulate in a time of popular feminism. She is styled as ‘rude’ and ‘subversive’ through her voluble public discussions of female anatomy; she names herself as ‘angry’ and has forthright opinions that are ‘bravely’ expressed—and yet her rhetoric actually reproduces deeply entrenched power structures and ideologies of Islamophobia, transphobia and racism. If ‘well-behaved women seldom make history’ has become something of a popular feminist slogan, then we can see how it can be insidiously repurposed to provide a progressive gloss to racist, reactionary rhetoric. In this sense, Hopkins operates according to the logics of right-wing populism more broadly: that is to say, she adopts the subject position of the ‘outsider’ who represents the ‘people’ against the ‘elite’. She positions herself as someone providing a ‘voice’ for ‘real people’—according to the logics of this positioning, she is simply speaking what millions of people in Britain already think, but who are currently shut out or ‘silenced’  by a media apparently dominated by a ‘liberal elite’. What I wish to draw attention to here are the ways in which she is a beneficiary of the contemporary celebratory posturing around ‘misbehaving’ women. I argue that such a notion is all too amenable to co-optation (explicitly or implicitly) by alt-­ right and populist discourse, and requires more careful feminist consideration and analysis. One such instance where we can see Hopkins (and therefore racism) benefitting from the new celebratory mode around ‘transgressive’ women was in 2014. Hopkins is frequently called a ‘witch’ for her provocative and cruel jibes, and at certain times has attempted to 'reclaim' this apparent slur as a political resource. On Halloween 2014, she wrote a newspaper column for the right-wing Sun newspaper, the online version of which was accompanied by a video in which she was dressed in a full witch costume, complete with prosthetic warts. ‘I am the Misunderstood Witch’, the video caption and its accompanying tweet read. We can see here how Hopkins seeks to recuperate and mobilise histories of women’s communicative subordination to claim a speaking subjectivity for herself that is

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legitimised precisely because it is ‘subversive’, or because she is the misunderstood outsider: a ‘witch’ or a ‘bitch’. It is worth here returning to Federici’s (2014, 2018) account of the witch-hunts of the early modern period, where she shows how women were castigated and punished not simply because they were individually ‘rude’ or ‘outrageous’ but because they represented a genuine, communal  and structural threat to private property and to the development of capitalist society. It is by insisting on this economic aspect of the history of witch-hunts that we can challenge the co-optation of the ‘subversive’ power of witches by right-wing authoritarian racists such as Hopkins. In these terms, as a white, middle-class, right-wing, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic apologist for authoritarian capitalism, Hopkins has no legitimate claim to being a ‘witch’ or for exploiting rhetoric around ‘badly behaved women’ in order to legitimise what is in fact non-subversive speech: that is to say that her ‘rude’ and ‘transgressive’ communicative behaviour is not ‘rocking the boat’, but is precisely subservient to the needs of authoritarian capitalism.

‘Australia’s Most Publicly Hated Muslim’ Yassmin Abdel-Magied is a Sudanese-Australian media presenter, social advocate and writer with a background in mechanical engineering. On Anzac Day in 2017, she posted a tweet that was interpreted by the media and political establishment in Australia as being intolerably controversial. Anzac Day marks the anniversary of the first major military action fought by Australian and New Zealand forces during World War I, and commands a similar kind of veneration to that given to Remembrance Day. Abdel-­ Magied’s short tweet read: ‘LEST. WE. FORGET. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine…)’. The tweet sought to draw attention to the memory of these other atrocities, and the loss of life they, too, had caused, but was immediately construed as an attack on the sanctity and solemnity of Anzac Day, and indeed on Australia itself. Although she swiftly deleted the tweet and apologised, the media backlash against her was instantaneous, vicious and often unrestrainedly racist. Kathy Marks (2017, n.p.) described the media and public response to Abdel-Magied’s tweet in these terms: ‘all hell broke loose’. The vicious response included politicians who described Abdel-­ Magied’s tweet as ‘a sickening insult to the nation’s war dead’; another called for her to ‘self-deport’; her show on the public service Australia Broadcast Corporation (ABC) was cancelled. When she subsequently announced that she would be leaving Australia, radio commentator Prue

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MacSween declared that Abdel-Magied was right to feel ‘unsafe in her own country…because if I’d seen her, I would have been tempted to run her over’ (cited in ibid.). While the alt-right and mainstream conservative media often discuss ‘no-platforming’ and ‘cancel culture’ as threats to free speech—as Katie Hopkins regularly does when people question her right to spread hatred—in Abdel-Magied’s case, she was effectively ‘cancelled’ and ‘no-platformed’ by an entire country  and its media and political establishment. Writing after this traumatic public backlash, Abdel-Magied revealed the dilemma she was faced with when asked by well-meaning people how she was doing in the aftermath of the events: Do I reveal that it’s infuriatingly frustrating to have worked for years as an engineer, only to have that erased from my public narrative? […] That I get death threats on a daily basis, and I have to reassure my parents that I will be fine, when maybe I won’t be? That I’ve resorted to moving house, changing my phone number, deleting my social media apps. […] That I’ve been sent videos of beheadings, slayings and rapes from people suggesting the same should happen to me.

Abdel-Magied had previously been held up as a ‘model minority’—she was named Queensland’s Young Australian of the Year in 2015 and invited to promote Australian multiculturalism overseas at the request of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFAT). However, after the Anzac Day tweet she became (in her words) ‘Australia’s most publicly hated Muslim’ (Abdel-Magied 2017a, b). As a brown Muslim hijabi woman with a highly visible public presence in Australia, Abdel-Magied was already subject to intensive forms of Islamophobia, racism and misogyny. Even before the Anzac controversy, she had written about the online hate she experienced following her decision to ‘pick an ideological fight’ with a well-known white author, when she walked out of a talk by Lionel Shriver who was mocking and lambasting ‘identity politics’. Following this hateful backlash,  AbdelMagied wrote that she realised that her mistake was, as young brown Muslim woman, to have believed that she would be treated as an equal: Put simply, I had flown a little too close to the sun. I’d been given my wings, told I could fly with the flock and contribute to the discussion as an equal, told I could be a part of ‘us’. No one mentioned the feathers were fixed in place with wax, and the sun wouldn’t hesitate to strip them away. (Abdel-­ Magied 2017a, b)

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Abdel-Magied often discusses her experience in terms of trauma and a kind of ontological shattering: ‘One of the most destabilising things about last year was it shattered my understanding of how the world worked. Being a model minority is not going to change the power dynamics in the way I believed it would’ (Abdel-Magied cited in News.com.au 2018). The Pakistani-Australian comedian and media presenter Sami Shah has written about the chilling effect that Abdel-Magied’s experiences have had on people of colour working in the Australian media industries, and the pervasive fear of ‘getting Yassmin-ed’ (Shah 2019). Shah goes on to define what this means: ‘Getting Yassmin-ed is that visceral experience of discovering that access to free speech is not equally divided amongst all Australians, and the consequences of transgression are more severe for some than others.’ It is precisely the ways in which free speech is touted as a universal value, equally applicable to all, which makes the experience of racialised  and gendered backlash against one’s speech so shattering— racialised and gendered reality is disturbingly, disorientingly at odds with the powerful promise of voice and empowerment that is proffered by contemporary media culture. 

Voice, Irreconcilability and Cultural Gaslighting The experiences of Abdel-Magied help to provide important insights into the politics of voice in the contemporary context. Women are incessantly encouraged to ‘find their voice’; as I have argued throughout the book so far, speaking up has become almost a mandate to acquire personhood. ‘Misbehaving’ women are apparently now celebrated—and yet we can clearly see here the extreme limits of these supposed communicative rights and freedoms. It is precisely the disparity and disjuncture between the promise of voice and voice as it actually exists that constitutes the problem here; because of prevailing notions that contemporary culture is eminently ‘meritocratic’ (Littler 2017) and ‘post-racial’ (Mukherjee et  al. 2019), these forms of injustice and inequality are actively hidden. We might understand this as a form of cultural gaslighting—when your experience as a speaking subject is that of abuse, humiliation, and trauma, but the dominant culture proclaims that any such experience is imagined, delusive or a product of the mind of an over-sensitive ‘snowflake’. Meanwhile, the purveyors of this cultural gaslighting—such as Hopkins—who deny that racism and homophobia and misogyny exist within western public spheres—simultaneously position themselves as part of the lineage of communicatively oppressed ‘witches’ and ‘outsiders’.

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The terms upon which Muslim women are granted public voice in contexts such as the UK and Australia are extremely circumscribed. While at the beginning of this chapter I identified a celebratory discourse around ‘misbehaving’ women who transgress gendered communicative norms, the examples I have discussed here indicate the extreme—and yet also invisibilised—racialised inequalities that determine who gets to ‘break the rules’. As a Muslim, Abdel-Magied has discussed the heavy imperative to perform a ‘moderate’ identity, and the profound curtailments this places on her public voice: ‘I have to somehow accept that to be an OK Muslim I have to be moderate? Moderate is such a weak word. I don’t want to be moderately good at anything’ (Abdel-Magied cited in News.com.au 2018). I would suggest here that we can understand this irreconcilability—of being ‘moderate’ and therefore tolerated within the public sphere, or being openly political and therefore effectively banished—in terms of communicative (in)justice. In order to be accepted as a ‘legitimate’ speaker in the public sphere, Muslim women must adopt a communicative mode that is studiedly ‘non-­political’ and ‘moderate’. However, to do so is to tacitly accept a highly constrained capacity for voice that does not permit meaningful or agonistic dialogue: one must effectively accept a position of (in Abdel-Magied’s terms) ‘weakness’. To refuse to do this, however, and to engage in political discussion in ways that pose a meaningful challenge to dominant forms of structural power, means having to deal with threats to one’s safety, intensive abuse and personal trauma. In Hopkins’ case, on the other hand, the fact that her speech is marked as ‘transgressive’ is precisely how she gains a foothold within public discourse: she benefits from the simplified and co-opted histories of witches, subversives and outsiders. In this way, the celebratory discourses of women’s ‘transgressive’ speech can become a political resource for those who are already in positions of privilege, and whose public speech metes out hate and harm. In Chap. 3, in my discussion of Monica Lewinsky and Hannah Gadsby, I pointed to the ways that communicative injustice is characterised by a painful normative irreconcilability. For these two women, access to voice was highly circumscribed: it entailed a temporary embrace but an ultimate disavowal of anger (in Gadsby’s case), and a performance of tightly measured self-control and periodic returns to ‘silence’ in order to legitimise her voice (in Lewinsky’s case). I argued there that the impossibility of escaping the cruel, gendered logics of media culture constitutes a major obstacle to communicative justice. We can see here, too, that Abdel-­ Magied’s case points to a cruel communicative irreconcilability: speak, and

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be abused, and made to feel less than human; or do not speak, and therefore feel less than human. Feminist linguists have pointed to this cruel dynamic in the ways that women’s speech involves choosing between two equally intolerable subject positions: a girl is damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t. If she refuses to talk like a lady, she is ridiculed and subjected to criticism as unfeminine; if she does learn, she is ridiculed as unable to think clearly, unable to take part in serious discussion: in some sense, as less than fully human. These two choices which a woman has – to be less than a woman or less than a person – are highly painful. (Lakoff 1975, p. 48)

I would like to argue that we need to fully and meaningfully confront the implications of this irreconcilability. As I have suggested already, the rules of the communicative game in the public sphere are set up in such a way that it is impossible to ‘win’ (unless, of course, you are an upper-­ middle-­class, white, cisgendered, able-bodied, neurotypical man). There are multiple ways in which the painful impossibility of having meaningful speaking subjectivity in contemporary media culture can manifest, and while gender is a profound axis along which communicative injustice operates—excluding and harming women and gender-nonconforming people—whiteness is also a form of protection from the most extreme and systematic forms of abuse. Because black women are symbolically coded as always-already angry (Cooper 2018; Srinivasan 2018), they are entering the public sphere on terms that render them bound to ‘fail’. Renni Eddo-­ Lodge’s (2018) book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race points to something of the exhausting futility of trying to engage in public debate on the terms that currently exist. As she writes: ‘I can no longer engage with the emotional disconnect that white people display when a person of colour articulates their experience […] Their intent is often not to listen or learn but to exert their power, to prove me wrong, to emotionally drain me’ (Eddo-Lodge, 2018, preface). In my view, then, the impossibility of being able to successfully negotiate prevailing communicative norms for women and other ‘others’—when both ‘playing by the rules’ and transgressing the rules have deeply painful and traumatising consequences—should force us into rethinking more fundamentally the terms that currently exist in relation to communication, power and justice. As I suggested in Chap. 3, communicative justice is not about individuals ‘taking back control’ of their stories—because any sense

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of having meaningful control of one’s narrative in a broader culture that is misogynist, racist, ableist and not conducive to care is simply not achievable. Rather, I argue, we need a more radical and collective approach to redistributing the means of communicative production. I argue that we need a more expansive notion of what it means to have voice—one that does not put the onus on individual speaking subjects to be ‘brave’, to ‘blaze a trail’, and to shoulder the painful contradictions and traumatic consequences of doing so.

The Perils and Possibilities of Irreverence This chapter has sought to consider what we might make of the popularisation of gendered irreverence from the perspective of feminism and communicative (in)justice. On the one hand, ‘transgressive’ voice appears to challenge age-old injustices and communicative norms, and to offer radical new possibilities for women’s public speech: it promises that refusing to abide by archaic injunctions for female subservience will deliver untold new democratic possibilities. In doing so, it provides the kind of thrilling hopefulness that is important for propelling social and communicative change. However, in keeping with this book’s insistence that any approach to communicative injustice must be intersectional and grounded in left politics, I have sought in this chapter to complicate the idea that women speaking loudly, irreverently or in ways that seem to challenge oppressive speech norms is inevitably and of itself something to celebrate. Helen Wood (2019) has identified what she terms a growing ‘irreverent rage’ in media culture. She suggests that the increasing use of the word ‘fuck’, most especially when it is uttered by women, is indicative of a broader refusal to play by the affective, socio-communicative rules of the classed and gendered public sphere. This marks a refusal to be deferent and subservient, as well as a refusal to be shamed. Wood points to politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) who, as a young, left-wing woman of colour in the US is not playing by those rules that would historically compel her to be composed, or deferential, or to aspire to be ‘respectable’. Wood suggests that we might understand AOC’s ‘irreverent rage’ as part of a more hopeful shift in the class and gender politics of the public sphere. She cautions that it is possible that any ‘rise in irreverence might also be related to a general rise in populism and anti-intellectualism which has spawned the triumph of Trump’; however, ultimately, Wood sees this irreverent rage as distinctive from regressive, Trumpian outrage,

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and as something that is ‘intellectually performative of the uneven and repressed histories of deference and respectability that cut across gender, race, class and sexuality’ (p. 614). I have similarly argued that we need to distinguish between different kinds of anger that circulate within and animate contemporary media culture (Kay 2019; Chap. 3 in this book). Simply put, not all women’s anger is ‘good’, and not all women’s ‘voice’ is something to celebrate. As Wood’s argument suggests, irreverence does not inherently work in the service of feminism—it depends significantly on  what is (not) being revered. Irreverence towards patriarchal cultures and their socio-communicative norms can provide grounds for hope; irreverence that is directed towards refugees, Muslims, feminists, queers, or the poor (the targets of Katie Hopkins’ ‘outspokenness’) is clearly working in the opposite direction. What seems like outrageous defiance and transgression is often itself all too reverent, deferent and subservient to toxic and harmful power structures. Meanwhile, Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s experiences of ‘speaking out’ show the extreme limits of tolerance for women’s talk that is more genuinely ‘irreverent’ or ‘badly behaved’, and the racialised dynamics of that (in)tolerance. It was precisely because Abdel-Magied was seen to be not deferential—not playing by the rules of citizenship that people of colour in Australia are implicitly understood to have to play by—that the backlash was so intense and hateful. In the wake of #MeToo there has been, I have argued, a tendency to understand women’s rage as innately progressive and as qualitatively distinct from the kinds of fury associated with regressive political shifts (such as the resurgence of right-wing nationalism and racism). Indeed, populist anger is symbolically coded as white, male and working class, from the media constructions of rust-belt Trump voters in the US, to those of the gilets jaunes in France, and those of the semi-mythologised ‘left-behind’ Brexit voter of the north of England (Bromley-Davenport et al. 2019). Because of the enormous symbolic power of these media narratives and imaginaries, there is a danger, perhaps, of essentialising women’s anger as innately ‘good’: as a countervailing force to regressive masculine rage. Because of the communicative histories in which women’s public speech has been policed and punished—or because of the ways that we tell these histories—there is a danger that we might pronounce any kinds of transgressive or ‘misbehaving’ women’s voices as radical and resistive. Women’s rageful voices, it might seem, are by definition a form of ‘punching up’, and not themselves part of oppressive systems. This is a seductive

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idea—but can all too easily provide a progressive sheen to voices that are in fact profoundly implicated in the perpetuation and resurgence of racism, transphobia and other hatreds. It is by telling the histories of women’s communicative oppression in more nuanced ways that we might best avoid providing inadvertent ideological succour to women’s voices that contribute to authoritarian populism and regressive, toxic, harmful rage.

Conclusion: The Sound of the Silence Nancy Fraser notes the etymological connection between ‘testicle’ and ‘testimony’ (Fraser 1990, p. 60) which points to the ways that, historically, having a male body has granted access to public voice. It also cues us in to the fact that speaking with a female body has meant to be doubted, disbelieved and punished in both open and insidious ways. Coming to terms with this history is important for helping us to understand the gendered injustice in communicative power relations, and the ways in which women’s historic exclusion from the public sphere has a continuing, active power: the long, gendered histories of public speech still shape the highly unequal distribution of communicative power today. However, this does not mean that the ways in which these histories are put to political use are always and inherently progressive and to be celebrated. In recent years, we have increasingly seen the mobilisation of histories of the silencing and subordination of women’s voices. Many women now explicitly or implicitly invoke the violent punishment of witches or other ‘deviant’ women from the past in order to stake out space and legitimacy for their own voices. One disturbing example of this is the rise in transphobic abuse that speaks in the name of ‘gender critical feminism’ on platforms such as Twitter and Mumsnet (e.g. see Hines 2019). In many instances, anti-trans abuse and the ‘right’ to exclude transwomen from women’s spaces is legitimised by invoking the histories of the communicative oppression of women. For example, the campaign group Fair Play For Women, which came into existence because its founding members were ‘concerned that, in the rush to reform transgender laws and policies, women’s voices are not being heard or listened to’, provides the following summary of the long history of gendered communicative subjugation in an article on its website: ‘the misogynistic targeting of women to silence and control is an age-­ old tactic. The burning of witches, honour killings, rape victim shaming, denigration of single mothers to name but a few’ (Fair Play for Women, n.d.). Having mobilised this broad sweep of history, they then compare

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this to the ‘silencing’ of women ‘who engage in the gender identity debate […] Women are being silenced through shame by having their names made public and their views labelled hateful and transphobic. Women are being silenced by rejection with their views discredited or censored’ (original emphasis). I use this example to point to another way in which the histories of communicative oppression of women may be used in ways that are deeply problematic. Again, we can see how ‘silence’—or the claim of ‘being silenced’—functions as a symbolic resource to position this group’s voice as that of an ‘outsider’, or as unjustly  disempowered by oppressive and misogynistic ideologies. It claims histories of gendered silencing for the particular purposes of policing the boundaries of womanhood, effectively disavowing any sense that transwomen might experience ‘silencing’ or similarly be victims of communicative injustice. I want to argue that we should pay closer attention to the ways that ‘silence’ and ‘voice’ are mobilised—and to ask why it is often those who already have more power who are able to claim silence as a symbolic resource and a political weapon. To do that, I would argue, we need to tell better, more intersectional histories of witches and bitches, and to  deinstall the white, middle-class, cisgendered woman as the paradigmatic subject of communicative injustice.

References Abdel-Magied. 2017a. What Are They So Afraid Of? I’m Just a Young Brown Muslim Woman Speaking My Mind. Guardian, July 6th. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jul/06/what-are-they-so-afraid-of-im-justa-young-brown-muslim-woman-speaking-my-mind ———. 2017b. A Little Too Close to the Sun. Griffith Review. Available at: https://griffithreview.com/articles/a-little-too-close-to-the-sun-advocacymodern-age/ Ahmed, Sara. 2010. Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness. Signs 35 (3): 571–594. ———. 2011. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Bromley-Davenport, H., J. MacLeavy, and D. Manley. 2019. Brexit in Sunderland: The Production of Difference and Division in the UK Referendum on European Union Membership. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 37 (5): 795–812. Cooper, Brittney. 2018. Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. New York: St Martin’s Press.

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Davies, William. 2015. The Happiness Industry: How Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being. London: Verso. Discover Derbyshire and the Peak District. n.d. Earl Sterndale. Available at: http://www.derbyshire-peakdistrict.co.uk/earlsterndale.htm Eddo-Lodge, Renni. 2018. Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. London: Bloomsbury. Fair Play for Women. n.d. The Oldest Hate Crime: How Misogyny is Being Used to Strangle Women’s Debate on Sex and Gender. Available at: https://fairplayforwomen.com/misogyny_hate_silencing/ Farris, Sara. 2017. In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Federici, Silvia. 2014. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn: Autonomedia. ———. 2018. Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women. Brooklyn: Autonomedia. Fraser, Nancy. 1999/1990. Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. In The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, 2nd ed., 518–536. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. Gill, Rosalind, and Shani Orgad. 2015. The Confidence Cult(ure). Australian Feminist Studies 30 (86): 324–344. ———. 2018. The Amazing Bounce-Backable Woman: Resilience and the Psychological Turn in Neoliberalism. Sociological Research Online 23 (2): 477–495. Ging, D. 2017. Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere. Men and Masculinities 22 (4): 638–657. Harsin, Jayson. 2018. Post-Truth and Critical Communication. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Hines, Sally. 2019. The Feminist Frontier: On Trans and Feminism. Journal of Gender Studies 28 (2): 145–157. Hope Not Hate. 2019. State of Hate 2019: The People vs the Elite?. Available at: https://www.hopenothate.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/state-ofhate-2019-final-1.pdf Jensen, Tracy. 2018. Parenting the Crisis: The Cultural Politics of Parent-Blame. Bristol: Policy Press. Kay, Jilly Boyce. (forthcoming). Celebritised Anger: Theorising Women’s Rage, Voice and Affective Injustice through Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette. In Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture, ed. Anthea Taylor and Joanna McIntyre. New York: Routledge. Lakoff, Robin. 1975. Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper and Row. Littler, Jo. 2017. Against Meritocracy. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2019. Mothers Behaving Badly: Chaotic Hedonism and the Crisis of Neoliberal Social Reproduction. Online First: Cultural Studies.

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Malhotra, Sheena, and Aimee Carillo Rowe, eds. 2013. Silence, Feminism, Power: Reflections at the Edges of Sound. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Marks, Kathy. 2017. The Anzac Post, Outrage and a Debate About Race. BBC News, August 10th. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ world-australia-40712832 Marwick, A.E., and Robyn Caplan. 2018. Drinking Male Tears: Language, the Manosphere, and Networked Harassment. Feminist Media Studies 18 (4): 543–559. Mukherjee, Roopali, Sarah Banet-Weiser, and Herman Gray, eds. 2019. Racism Post-Race. Durham: Duke University Press. News.com.au. 2018. Yassmin Abdel-Magied opens up about why she left Australia. News.com.au, June 29. Available at: https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/reallife/news-life/yassmin-abdelmagied-opens-up-about-why-she-left-australia/ news-story/15883ba720f9695f7f2163e17ffee3df Phipps, Alison. 2018. Reckoning Up: Sexual Harassment and Violence in the Neoliberal University. Gender and Education. Richardson, Hollie. 2019. Aladdin: Naomi Scott Explains Powerful Feminist Meaning behind Jasmine’s New Song. Stylist Magazine. Available at: https:// www.stylist.co.uk/life/aladdin-premiere-london-naomi-scott-jasminefeminist-song-speechless/268567 Rodie, Cat. 2019. ‘Jasmine’s Song’ from Aladdin Is the New Feminist Anthem our Girls Need. Essentialkids.com.au, May 27. Available at: http://www.essentialkids.com.au/entertainment/movies/jasmines-song-from-aladdin-is-the-newfeminist-anthem-our-girls-need-20190524-h1eqr9 Shah, Sami. 2019. What the Fear of ‘Getting Yassmin-ed’ Says About Free Speech and Racism in Australia. ABC News. Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/ news/2019-05-07/sami-shah-fear-of-getting-yassmined-free-speechin-australia/11054020 Shields Dobson, Amy, and Akane Kanai. 2019. From “Can-Do” Girls to Insecure and Angry: Affective Dissonances in Young Women’s Post-Recessional Media. Feminist Media Studies 19 (6): 771–786. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1998. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea, ed. Rosalind Morris, 21–80. New York: Columbia University Press. Srinivasan, Amia. 2018. The Aptness of Anger. The Journal of Political Philosophy 26 (2): 123–144. Tyler, Imogen. 2008. Chav Mum Chav Scum: Class Disgust in Contemporary Britain. Feminist Media Studies 8 (1): 17–34. Wood, Helen. 2019. Fuck the Patriarchy: Towards an Intersectional Politics of Irreverent Rage. Feminist Media Studies 19 (4): 609–615. Yergeau, Melanie. 2018. Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness. Durham: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Speaking Bitterness: Rethinking the Televisual Nag

Introduction: A Nagging Feeling In 2016, during a speech made by Hillary Clinton as part of her campaigning in the presidential elections, a Fox News host tweeted: ‘Hillary shouting her speech. She has the floor; a more conversational tone might be better for connecting with folks at home’ (Kurtz cited in Crockett 2016). This was but one instance of a much broader pattern whereby Hillary Clinton’s public speaking on the campaign trail would invariably be followed by media criticisms—not of the content of her speech, but of the way that she said it. She was routinely criticised for being too ‘shrill’, unlikeable or loud. Donald Trump, running for president as the Republican candidate, said in 2015 at a campaign rally: ‘Hillary, who is very shrill—do you know the word “shrill”? She can be kinda sha-riiiill.’1 In 2008, when Clinton was campaigning for the Democratic Party nomination against Barack Obama, author Marc Rudov appeared on Fox News to discuss the reasons why male voters appeared to be more inclined to support the male candidate in the race. Rudov said: ‘When Barack Obama speaks, men hear, “Take off for the future!” And when Hillary Clinton speaks, men hear [Rudov jabs his finger in a pointing gesture towards the camera and affects a ‘shrill’ voice]: “Take out the garbage!”’. The on-screen text read ‘Rudov: Clinton’s “nagging voice” is reason she lost male vote’. 1  See https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/trump-defends-calling-hillaryclinton-shrill-i-know-men-are-n432806

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Clinton’s experience of being chastised and belittled for her voice was hardly a new phenomenon in the gendered history of mass-mediated politics. Famously, Margaret Thatcher, who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom between 1979 and 1990, had vocal coaching to deepen her voice and make it more ‘authoritative’ and less ‘shrill’. This strategic intervention into her vocal performances is widely lauded as central to her ensuing career success; as her biographer Charles Moore put it, following the coaching, ‘Soon the hectoring tones of the housewife gave way to softer notes and a smoothness that seldom cracked’ (Moore 2015). Thatcher, it seemed, was able to successfully purge her voice of any qualities that would evoke the spectre of the nagging wife—that is to say, she who does not belong in the public sphere. And yet, even as Thatcher is frequently seen as having been successful in this regard—both escaping the connotations of hectoring housewife and retaining acceptably ‘feminine’ charms—she was still operating within a communicative terrain that was hostile to women’s voices. In television interviews she was interrupted almost twice as often as another prime minister in the 1970s, Jim Callaghan (Karpf 2006, p. 229). This points, perhaps, to the extreme limits of any individual approach to rectifying communicative injustice by working on the self: you can undergo training and develop a ‘strong’ voice as much as you like, but even if you are Margaret Thatcher you will still be manterrupted. The figure of the nagging wife haunts the public political speech of women. As I have argued throughout the book, the misogynistic roots of gendered communicative injustice run very, very deep; it is useful to recall here Mary Beard’s (2017) argument that the gendering of public speech in Ancient Greek and Roman times still shapes the politics of voice in contemporary culture. When women’s voices are heard within the public sphere, they are symbolically registered as being out of place—as irredeemably tainted by an association with the domestic, which also serves as a misogynistic reminder that the domestic is where they belong. As such, when women’s voices are heard as challenging or complaining, this is often mediated and understood through the trope of the nagging wife. In this chapter I seek to tease out more fully the ways in which mass media society has resignified the relationship between women’s voices and public speech; I do so by paying close attention to a specific example of television in the 1970s, in the context of second-wave feminism. By turning to this specific example and considering the communicative architectures and politics of television, I seek to understand how communicative injustice manifests in particular contexts and how different media forms may entail

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their own particular challenges for women’s voices. In particular, I argue that theories of television talk need to take account of the ways in which the domestic context, within which televised speech is received, mediates women’s voices in particular ways. While the domestic reception context of television’s communicative architecture has often been construed as constitutive of its democratising effects, I argue that it has also often worked to bolster, not undermine, the construal of women’s public speech as nagging. Within media studies, the dominant historical accounts of television talk present a generally optimistic account of its relationship to socio-­ political change. Scholars such as Paddy Scannell (1991), Ian Hutchby (2006) and Tolson and Ekstrom (2013) have broadly argued that broadcasting has democratised public speech through facilitating a new openness to ‘ordinary’ voices. In the following section I outline these arguments, most especially Scannell’s notion that broadcast talk is characterised by ‘sociability’. I then complicate this line of reasoning with reference to feminist theories of language and histories of broadcasting. Next, I move to consider the 1973 television programme No Man’s Land, a six-part feminist television series that mixed documentary film with studio discussion, and I explore the ways in which it was understood by many critics as a form of televisual nagging. My analysis suggests that the notion that the ‘communicative ethos’ of broadcasting is fundamentally ‘friendly’ and ‘sociable’—and that this is inherently a democratising ethos—is problematic, gender-blind and ultimately anti-feminist. From the perspective of communicative justice, I argue that we need to understand how the imperative to be ‘friendly’ can function to discipline and constrain women’s voices in particular, since it is women who disproportionately bear the burden of expectation to be friendly. Women who do not smile and acquiesce, but use their voices to complain, are often reviled as ‘nags’; I suggest that we might, therefore, rethink and revalue the political possibilities of nagging as a speech genre.

The Communicative Ethos of Television: Sociability The development and changing nature of democracy and political participation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—as well as social and cultural change in the broadest of senses—cannot be understood without an account of the mass media and the ways that they have dynamically changed the boundaries and meanings of ‘public’ and ‘private’ (Williams

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1974). As I have already suggested, in academic scholarship, the most influential accounts of broadcast talk and the ways that it has transformed public discourse can be related to Paddy Scannell’s notion of ‘sociability’. As Scannell (1991) points out, broadcast talk is an exceptional and, in historical terms, recent form of public talk, which has developed within a highly specific communicative context. The most distinctive characteristic of broadcast talk is that, unlike other forms of public speech (such as that which is uttered from platforms in town halls, at lecture podiums or from lecterns in churches), broadcasting does not have a ‘captive’ audience. Because broadcasting is received within the contexts of the domestic and the everyday, viewers are free to switch the television off or over to another channel if they feel they are being ‘got at’. Quite simply, it is much harder to escape a hectoring speaker if you are physically co-present with them at a formal event, such as being seated in a church congregation. This, for Scannell, means that the broadcast speaker must adapt to these conditions of reception, in which the audience’s attention cannot be taken for granted: communicators must affiliate to the situation of their audience, and align their communicative behaviour with those circumstances. The burden of responsibility is thus on the broadcasters to understand the conditions of reception and to express the understanding in language intended to be recognised and oriented to those conditions. (Scannell 1991, p. 3)

It is within the constraints of this particular communicative context that broadcast talk has developed its own communicative ethos, which Scannell (1991) calls ‘sociability’. This sociable broadcast talk did not appear fully formed from the outset. Broadcasting began with an ‘authoritarian mode’ but then gradually adapted to ‘a more populist and democratic manner and style’ (Scannell 1991, p. 10). It is important to note, then, that this was not a natural or spontaneous feature of broadcasting; it is something that had to be worked at by broadcasters, and the key transformative moment was between the late 1950s and the late 1960s (Scannell 1988). Listening back to radio programmes from the early twentieth century, or watching clips from the first television broadcasts, we can see how the communicative ethos of broadcasting has profoundly shifted in this way. Many early programmes, for example, were simply relays of lectures or orchestral performances, replicating a more didactic communicative ethos.

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As the new communicative ethos of broadcasting developed, Scannell suggests, this brought with it new possibilities for a more open, contestable, public speech that was more sensitive and alert to the needs of those who heard it. We might see the theory of sociability as an earlier form of techno-optimism; from the perspective of this theory, it is the communicative architecture of broadcasting itself that has ineluctably made public speech more democratic—the influence of the domestic reception context on the production of public speech is understood as intrinsically democratising. From this optimistic account, broadcast speech appears to readily align with communicative justice by giving voice to ordinary people, or at least by communicating with them on their own terms. However, as I go on to show, to construe the domestic home as an inherently democratic space can only be done by wilfully ignoring its gender power dynamics under heteropatriarchy. Ian Hutchby (2006) makes an argument that is similar to Scannell’s; Hutchby states that broadcasters have developed a communicative ethos which recognises that broadcast talk is ‘heard in the ordinary spaces of domestic life, and [is] received in the interstices of domestic routines’ (2006, p. 13). Broadcast talk thus seeks to reflect, accommodate and even embrace the particular arrangements of these domestic contexts. In its orientation to the everyday, the intimate, and the ordinary, then, broadcast talk cannot be didactic, hectoring or elitist. Because there is no captive audience, the broadcast speaker must address the audience on their own terms—we might also think of this as addressing them on their ‘own turf’, heard as it is within the spaces of their own homes. Andrew Tolson (2006, p. 9) similarly considers that media talk has an overriding imperative to be ‘friendly’. According to this conceptualisation of broadcast talk, it has transformed the power relations of public speaking and the democratic credentials of public culture more broadly. For Scannell, the development of television talk—as an increasingly open and inclusive mode of speech— has ‘unobtrusively contributed to the democratisation of everyday life’ (Scannell 1989, p. 136). If we were to accept the premise of this thesis, then, it would seem that the development of media and the attendant democratisation of everyday life have indeed contributed to an enhanced form of communicative justice. In one sense, it may seem that these broad changes—that suggest a decisive move away from elitism, paternalism and vertical forms of power— would lend themselves to the possibility of gendered communicative justice. In the case of broadcasting, the orientation to the domestic, and the

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alignment of communicative norms with family and intimate life, might suggest real opportunities for the (re)valuing of women’s voices, given the qualitative transformation of political talk and public voices towards a more sociable, interactive and inclusive mode. However, I take a more ambivalent and critical view, and in this regard I follow David Morley who has provided the following critique of Scannell’s notion of sociability, showing how it cannot be so straightforwardly aligned with democratisation: Sociability is simply not the indivisible Good which Scannell assumes it to be…Sociability, by definition, can only ever be produced in some particular cultural (and linguistic) form and only those with access to the relevant forms of cultural capital will feel interpellated by and at home within the particular form of sociability offered by a given programme. (Morley 2000, p. 111)

Helen Wood (2009, p. 53) similarly raises questions about the notion of sociability as an undifferentiated public good, asking what the gendered politics and exclusions of this communicative ethos might be. In particular, this chapter argues that the imperative for broadcasters to not lecture, hector or ‘get at’ the audience cannot be understood outside of the gender politics of speech. That is because, I argue, women’s voices are more likely to be heard as ‘lecturing’ or ‘getting at’ the audience than men’s; any kind of women’s speech that is not friendly and acquiescent is more likely to register as nagging. And, I would suggest, women’s broadcast voices may be especially prone to being designated as a form of ‘nagging’ precisely because they are heard within the home. We need, therefore, a more developed and critical theory of sociability that takes gender more firmly into account and which understands how the imperative to be ‘friendly’ can constrain as much as enable the production of democratic speech. It is difficult to reconcile the optimistic narrative of sociability and democratisation with many gendered accounts of broadcasting history. Anne Karpf suggests that the arrival and take-up of new media technologies in the twentieth century did very little to change cultural perceptions about women’s voices; in fact, in many ways, they exacerbated the problem. Indeed, she suggests that ‘the history of women’s exclusion from broadcasting represents perhaps the most blatant example of prejudice against women’s voices’ (Karpf 2006, p.  157). The idea that women’s voices were unsuitable for broadcasting was bound up with the very

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emergence of new broadcast technologies; women’s voices were deemed incompatible with radio microphones, both by radio manufacturers and in broader public discourse. In the 1920s, the Daily Express newspaper claimed that ‘Adam has a more natural broadcasting voice than Eve’ (cited in Karpf 2006, p. 157). In the Evening Standard, the wireless correspondent complained that listeners found women’s voices too high-pitched and irritating. A woman did not announce on air in Britain until the 1930s, when Mrs Giles Borrett was hired as a one-off ‘experiment’ (ibid., p. 158), and women only became regular newsreaders during World War II while male workers were away. While there is a widespread assumption that cultural attitudes have transformed in the intervening decades, these prejudices against women’s voices have insidiously persisted: as recently as 1999, a senior member of personnel at a radio station in Manchester described a potential recruit to as ‘a great reporter, a very good journalist, but I couldn’t put her on air with that voice. She sounds like a fishwife or a washerwoman’ (Haworth 2000 cited in Karpf 2006). The ways in which Hillary Clinton’s voice is incessantly heard as ‘shrill’ must be understood within this longer history of mediated women’s voices. More recently still, Elizabeth Warren, who stood for the nomination for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in 2020, has been framed as ‘unlikeable’ because of her voice, which has been described as sounding ‘like nails on a chalk board’.2 While the history of media and voice has patently been characterised by gendered exclusion and inequality, it is important not to produce a double erasure of women by neglecting or dismissing the instances where they have made headway and carved out some space and opportunity for voice. As such, this chapter is concerned not only with the particular and profound challenges that have made media a terrain of struggle for women’s voices, but also to recovering examples that point to the contingent nature of inequality, and the ways that it manifests differently in context-specific ways. This is part of the book’s intention to understand the communicative injustices of media, gender and voice as both very deeply entrenched and, at the same time, contestable and open to change. To that end I now consider a specific example of the mediation of women’s voices on British television in the 1970s.

2  https://thinkprogress.org/massachusetts-senate-challenger-beth-lindstrom-sexistattack-warren-9193d388018b/

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No Man’s Land No Man’s Land was a six-part, pre-recorded debate programme that was broadcast on Saturday evenings in 1973. It was produced by Associated Television (hereafter ATV) and was broadcast on the commercially funded public service ITV network in all television regions of the UK. It is not easily or freely available to view, but the British Film Institute (BFI) holds all six episodes of the programme in its archives.3 To the best of my knowledge, the programme does not appear in any existing recorded histories of television or of the women’s movement, apart from my own existing work on the programme in the journal Feminist Media Histories, upon which this chapter builds (Kay 2015). My analysis here is based on my viewings of the archived episodes, along with surrounding material such as TV listings guides and reviews in newspapers and magazines. No Man’s Land was described at the time as a ‘documentary’, but it can be more accurately described as a hybrid of genres, mixing both documentary television and studio debate with an invited audience. It was comprised of six episodes: ‘Women and Marriage’, ‘Women and Sexuality’, ‘Women and Work’, ‘Women and Education’, ‘Women Alone’ and ‘The Image of Women’. Each episode, therefore, sought to explore a particular area that was salient to the interests of the broader women’s movement. A very large number of the studio audience were well known in the women’s movement, and there were other studio audience members from the spheres of politics and entertainment. Some of the many recognisable audience members across the different episodes included: Germaine Greer, Ann Oakley, Sheila Rowbotham, Elaine Morgan; Labour MPs Edward Bishop and Renee Short (and Frank Field, who would later become one); actresses Prunella Scales, Adrienne Corri and Patricia Cutts; journalists Mary Kenny and Peregrine Worsthorne; the Liberal Life Peer and Fawcett Society president Baroness Seear; Pebble Mill at One and Sun agony aunt Claire Rayner; the writers John Braine and Fay Weldon; Eva Figes, author of Patriarchal Attitudes (Figes 1970); and the ‘natural’ childbirth activist Sheila Kitzinger, among many others. It was a space in which those who might be identified as women’s liberationists (core members whose activism was primarily focused on women’s rights/liberation) were brought into discussion with those who were sympathetic to and/or had specific alliances with the women’s movement. 3  The first episode, ‘Women and Marriage’, had unfortunately been misplaced at the time of this research.

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It also involved those who were openly hostile to the goals of the women’s movement, and as such the programme provides historical evidence of the struggle to make women’s issues a legitimate subject of public, political debate. As such, the programme texts constitute an important historical document in the history of second-wave feminism. Each episode began with opening credits in which an electronic synth version of ‘Wedding March from a Midsummer Night’s Dream’ soon gave way to an insistent, alarm-like musical piece. At the same time, inoffensive flower-shaped images gave way to flashing exclamation marks, which then in turn became the lettering of ‘NO MAN’S LAND’. These opening credits seemed to signal the ways in which the programme was seeking to overthrow stereotypes and myths about women’s ‘appropriate’ roles within society. It can also be read as an interruption to normal broadcast service—as a signal of its radical reworking of the norms of a television debate. At the start of each episode, after the opening titles, the camera cut straight to a head and upper-body shot of the feminist academic and activist Juliet Mitchell, directly facing the camera. She sat on a black leather chair against a plain, pale green background, wearing a brown-black dress.4 She introduced each episode with the same words: ‘Good evening. I’d like to welcome you to tonight’s programme, which is one in our series of six discussions on the position of women in our society.’ The greeting was ostensibly universal and ‘sociable’, ratifying all audience members as ‘welcome’, regardless of who they were. However, the immediate turn to the topic at hand—‘the position of women in our society’—necessarily reworked the sociability into a kind of bidding of the home audience to position themselves as implicated in that which was being debated—as actors within ‘our’ society and, as such, with their own indissoluble connections with the ‘problem’. Crucially, she was not smiling (I return to the politics of smiling later in the chapter). Already, I would suggest, we are able to detect a divergence from the kind of ‘friendly’ talk expected of broadcasters—that which expressly does not wish to ‘get at’, or ‘nag’, its audience. However, rather than understanding its didactic and ‘unfriendly’ mode as ‘undemocratic’, I would like to explore its feminist potential.

4  She wore this dress for at least five of the six episodes and most probably also in the episode that is missing from the archive.

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Having uttered the greeting, Mitchell then proceeded to set out the premise of each episode. For example, in the third episode, ‘Women and Work’, she said: Women make up well over a third of our workforce. Even today we often hear it said that a woman’s place is in the home looking after her husband and her children. Be that as it may, the fact is that the large majority of Britain’s women workers are married women and mothers. We conveniently forget this fact and blithely expect them to do two jobs, at home and at work. And then, because we so complacently believe that really they are at home supported by a man, we pay them less, give them a far narrower range of choice, of training opportunities and possibilities of promotion.

Mitchell’s use of the terms ‘our’ and ‘we’ are interesting for the ways that they again implicate the audience in the problem. Mitchell’s talk here, I would argue, constructs a profoundly social conceptualisation of the audience, not in the sense of being universally inclusive and sociable towards them, but rather in the sense of demanding that each viewer position themselves in relation to gendered inequality: ‘we so complacently believe’, ‘we pay them less’ and so on. This example of television talk, as well as Mitchell’s earnest and serious tone, does not fit easily with the idea that broadcast talk is ‘relaxed and sociable, shareable and accessible, non-­ exclusive, equally talkable about in principle and practice by everyone’ (Scannell 1989, p.  156). Similarly, when Hutchby (2006) states that broadcasters have developed a communicative ethos which recognises that broadcast talk is ‘heard in the ordinary spaces of domestic life, and [is] received in the interstices of domestic routines’ (2006, p. 13), this assumes that this talk seeks to reflect, accommodate and even embrace the particular arrangements of these domestic contexts—as if the domestic sphere is a benign, convivial and power-free space impervious to hierarchy and oppression. In the case of No Man’s Land, however, the talk constituted a welcome but also a discomfiting challenge to the gendered structure of domestic life within which it was received. Television viewing is a negotiated activity that takes place within gendered power relations, and the evening has traditionally been a time when women in heterosexual family contexts may have least control over what to watch (see Morley 1986; and Stoessl 1987). The episodes each followed the same format, whereby Juliet Mitchell greeted the home audience and outlined the topic, before introducing a short film that illustrated

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and explored the ‘problem’ under consideration. For example, in the episode ‘Women Alone’, two films were shown at the beginning of the programme exploring the economic and emotional difficulties of unmarried and divorced women bringing up children on state benefits or what was then known as ‘National Assistance’. After the film was shown, Mitchell then invited discussion on the issues raised with the studio audience, and this studio-based talk comprised the remainder and the bulk of each programme.

From Small Groups to Primetime: Televised Consciousness-raising Much of the feminist literature on television talk shows posits a significant discursive connection between ‘therapeutic’ forms of daytime TV talk and the women’s consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s (Mellencamp 1990; Masciarotte 1991; Livingstone and Lunt 1994; Shattuc 1997; Moorti 2002; Wood 2009). However, it is also important to note here that the feminist debates about the consciousness-raising capacities of talk shows took place from the 1990s onwards—that is to say, the talk show and the consciousness-raising movement were not contemporaneous (as I come back to later). Sujata Moorti elaborates how the particular form of feminist consciousness-­raising has lent itself to being productively replicated within television talk shows. She argues: Typically, in consciousness-raising sessions, speakers make public that which has been kept private, displaying the traditional oppositions between public and private. For the most part, participants confront the effects of sexism in personal terms; collectively, the voices of individual women permit a political analysis of gender-based oppression, which in turn leads to the formulation of a response. (Moorti 2002, p. 151)

Moorti suggests that television talk shows engage with issues raised by the women’s movement precisely through their inclusion of ‘“ordinary” voices’; they ‘privilege subjective experience over subjective knowledge, blur the lines between public and private, and above all are directed primarily at a female audience’ (ibid., p. 152). Patricia Mellencamp extends this argument further, claiming that it is ‘not too far fetched to imagine daytime talk as the electronic syndicated

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version of consciousness raising groups of the women’s movement’ (Mellencamp 1990, p.  218). Whilst the gendered connections between the two forms of talk—television talk and consciousness-raising talk—are largely accepted, Jane Shattuc nonetheless points to the limitations of daytime talk shows; for her, ultimately, they are ‘not feminist’ because they ‘do not espouse a clearly laid out political position for the empowerment of women’ (Shattuc 1997, p.  136). We can see here connections with Lauren Berlant’s (2001) critique of the prevalence of individualised ‘trauma narratives’ within neoliberal culture more broadly, in which the singular ‘mourning subject’ displaces a commitment to collective political action. The crucial step that has been missing from talk shows and ‘testimonial cultures’ (Ahmed and Stacey 2001) more broadly is a political analysis—the impulse to transform social relations and power hierarchies, rather than to gain individualised ‘recognition’ through an act of traumatic disclosure. No Man’s Land is a particularly compelling set of texts to consider in the light of these debates because the programme had so many clear and direct connections with the women’s liberation movement—not least through its key personnel—and it can also be read as being significantly informed by the practice of consciousness-raising which was developing alongside it. Juliet Mitchell, in her 1971 book Women’s Estate, had sought to elaborate and define the concept of consciousness-raising and pointed to its critical importance to the women’s movement: Women come into the movement from the unspecified frustration of their own private lives, find what they thought was an individual dilemma is a social predicament and hence a political problem. The process of transforming the hidden, individual fears of women into a shared awareness of the meaning of them as social problems, the release of anger, anxiety, the struggle of proclaiming the painful and transforming it into the political – this process is consciousness-raising. (Mitchell 1971, p. 61)

As Shattuc and others have argued, it is a missing articulation of problems as fundamentally political and social in nature that constrains the radical potential of talk shows. In consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s within the women’s movement, the transformative power of talk was mobilised precisely with the goal of effecting political change. In the UK (more so than the US), the fact that the feminist movement was connected to a wider left arguably meant that the traumas that were shared in

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such groups were more likely to be understood in relation to the harms of capitalist society and thus to produce ‘revolutionary consciousness’ (Restrepo Sanin 2019). As Nancy Fraser (2013) has argued, the second-­ wave feminist movement was able to hold together a politics of recognition with a politics of redistribution as part of a multi-dimensional movement, in which personal freedom and social equality were both expressly included as part of feminist activism. Fraser argues that the hegemonic form of contemporary feminism has not been able to do this and has catastrophically abandoned a commitment to socialist politics. My discussion of #MeToo in Chap. 2 also discusses the broader feminist turn away from radical redistributive politics and the #MeToo movement’s broad inability to engage with the revolutionary goals of economic justice. For Nancy Fraser, the period of feminism in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s was much more radical because it was part of a broader left struggle—which it sought to transform precisely in the interests of strengthening it: Feminists joined with other currents of radicalism to explode a social-­ democratic imaginary that had occulted gender injustice and technicized politics. Insisting that ‘the personal is political’, this movement exposed capitalism’s deep androcentricism and sought to transform society root and branch. Later, however, as utopian energies began to decline, second-wave feminism was drawn into the orbit of identity politics. (Fraser 2013, prologue)

As part of this wider context in which feminism was foundationally linked with the left, socialist politics were central to No Man’s Land. This came through in the subject matters under debate—work, welfare, poverty and so on—and in the ways that the problems were understood as constitutionally social rather than individual and thus requiring a collective and political response. In these ways, the model of consciousness-raising that informed the programme was connected to broader revolutionary goals.

Class and Voice In the episode ‘Women and Work’, Mitchell introduced two original short documentary films about women and work, filmed in what can be described broadly as a social realist style. The first of these films was about a young, female, middle-class university graduate struggling to establish a

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career because of a lack of promotion opportunities beyond secretarial work, and the second showed ‘the sort of work that is available to the majority of women, who are working class and who are wives and mothers’: the example given was a woman who worked as a night-cleaner. Immediately drawn attention to, then, were the different sorts of problems faced by women according to their class backgrounds and economic positions. Class was emphasised throughout the series as a structural system that exacerbated women’s oppression, as well as differentiating the specific character of that oppression along class lines, as was made clear in the two films on women and work. This is not surprising, given how constitutive the context of socialist politics was for second-wave feminism. Women’s liberation groups had, for example, helped to unionise night-­ cleaners in 1972; according to many accounts, socialist feminism was particularly strong in the early 1970s (e.g. see Wandor 1990; Rowbotham 2013; Fraser 2013). In many ways, second-wave feminism developed as a response to the marginalisation of women activists in the new left. As many feminist activists have pointed out, socialist-feminists—and most especially anti-­ imperialist feminists and feminists of colour—were faced with the difficulty of confronting sexism within the left while still remaining a part of it (Mitchell 1971; Rowbotham 2013; Fraser 2013); as such, feminism’s relationship to the left at this time was ambivalent, but it was nonetheless indivisibly connected to left politics. Fraser’s summary of the socialistfeminist analysis of class and gender in the early 1970s resonates strongly with the topics under discussion in No Man’s Land, and therefore merits being reproduced at length here: [Socialist-feminists] uncovered the deep-structural connections between women’s responsibility for the lion’s share of unpaid caregiving, their subordination in marriage and personal life, the gender segmentation of labour markets, men’s domination of the political system, and the androcentrism of welfare provision, industrial policy, and development schemes. In effect, they exposed the family wage as the point where gender maldistribution, misrecognition, and misrepresentation occurred. The result was a critique that integrated economy, culture, and politics in a systematic account of women’s subordination in state-organized capitalism. (Fraser 2013, chapter 9)

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No Man’s Land points to an example where patriarchal power and capitalist power were both laid out to scrutiny. It is perhaps the articulation of socialist feminist talk that marks the programme out as substantively different to later forms of television talk. In other ways, however, the political potential of the programme’s consciousness-­raising was constrained—precisely because of its address to a mass television audience. Within the women’s liberation movement, it was small groups that formed the basic unit of organisation of consciousness-­ raising (Mitchell 1971, p.  59); these groups were almost exclusively women-only (ibid., p. 56). This allowed for highly personal forms of disclosure within a ‘safe’ space, although, as I have already noted, this was not a power-free space and most often it was white women’s voices that dominated (Sisterhood and After Research Team 2013). While No Man’s Land was produced in a historical time and space when consciousness-raising formed a constitutive part of the women’s movement, and the programme featured many women who directly participated in these groups, on the whole it did not bring intensely personal forms of talk to the fore on television. This perhaps illustrates the fact that public testimonies of trauma and abuse only became culturally commonplace in the 1990s (Ahmed and Stacey 2001). I would also argue that the relative lack of focus on the personal was occasioned by the position of the programme in the schedules, as well as its address to a mass audience, which inevitably included anti-feminist constituents (in terms of both the studio audience and the ‘overhearing’ audience at home). Its status as a ‘serious’ programme is also key to understanding its gendered forms of talk. If consciousness-raising groups provided a ‘safe’ space, made up of small numbers of women, where the ‘personal’ could become ‘political’, then an evening television debate programme did not merely provide a platform to represent and amplify this form of talk: it fundamentally changed the terrain upon which women’s talk operated. Indeed, I would argue that the gender politics of the domestic space—historically imagined by broadcasters as a microcosm of a ‘national family’ structured around heteropatriarchal norms (Morley 2000)—provided a discursive reception context in which feminist talk was a hostile invader. Indeed, as I go on to show, the programme received a high level of backlash, both from members of the studio audience and within critical reviews.

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‘It’s a Load of Rubbish, Darling!’ The final episode in the series discussed the representation of women in the media. Mitchell introduced the topic as such: If you add up the number of columns in the press, or items on the television or radio, that are devoted to discussing seriously the position of women, you will find they are few and far between. But you probably won’t notice this, because you will be swamped day in and day out with images of women. Count how many advertisements use a woman to sell a product, or see how women are bombarded into wanting to look the way that is appropriate to the feminine image. The right fashion, the right make-up, the right way to be. Women have to learn to be perfect wives, perfect mothers, perfect mistresses. Tonight we will look at a short film that illustrates the commercial use made of all these images of women. Then we will turn to a studio audience to discuss the issues raised.

The film looked at the selection process for female models in the advertising industry. It followed a model called Greta as she went about her working day, as well as going ‘behind the scenes’ at a British male-run advertising agency, where female models had their bodies ruthlessly scrutinised as they went about trying to securing work. As well as Greta’s own voice describing her feelings about her career, the film was overlaid with editorial commentary about the objectification of women and the role that advertising played in normalising this. It ended by showing the filming of an advertisement for shaving lotion, with Greta (who had won the job) in a bikini with a male model on a beach. The film provoked strong reactions in the audience. Many in the audience accepted its basic arguments and directed their anger towards the men who worked in the advertising agency (Mary Kenny railed: ‘How dare they? Who do they think they are, Steve McQueen?’). However, others rejected it outright, dismissing it as irrelevant (e.g. Peregrine Worsthorne: ‘It’s nothing to do with Women’s Lib, nothing to do with the position of women in our society’). Another response was to accuse the programme of bias and selectivity (one woman said, rather mockingly: ‘What I would like to know is do any of us know how the gentleman in the advertisement was selected for his role?…All I saw was his bottom coming in at the last minute!’). A final response was to shift attention away from advertising as the key site where harmful ‘images of women’ were produced to the problematic gender politics of television: some audience

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members implicated No Man’s Land itself in the objectification of women. One charge of ‘hypocrisy’ was from Claire Rayner, who interjected that: ‘you are doing the same thing [as the advertising industry]. Your cameraman was not averse to zooming in on her boobs and her bum at the beginning. You’re using exactly the same film to sell this programme as you are complaining about the advertisers. You’re cheating!’ A feminist, female audience member asked: And why is it, Juliet, that you look so very, very different today on television from, er, than when you’re appearing on radio [cut to Mitchell smiling in response] and you don’t care how you look at all? Mitchell: Because I go to make-up before television, because you are made up. Audience member: So you’re just as much playing along with what the television image should be of a presenter [cut to Mitchell no longer smiling]

These comments on Mitchell’s own appearance—and, by implication, her collusion with the heteronormative aesthetic requirements of television—were not then taken up as a theme of discussion. They do point to some of the difficulties that the women’s movement—as ‘the most public revolutionary movement ever to have existed’ as Mitchell (1971, p. 13) had written in her book—encountered in using the means of public communication available to it. The tensions inherent in the project of utilising a commercially funded mass media form to problematise the ‘image of women’ in advertising thus became acutely and uncomfortably apparent. The hostility from many different angles with which Mitchell was confronted—for attempting to use the tools of an intensely mediated society to critique it—point to the compromises and risks that any movement must make in adapting to communicative contexts that are themselves unjust. A particularly uncomfortable sequence of talk occurred when the actress Adrienne Corri, sitting back in her seat with her arms crossed, interjected, at first rather nonchalantly: May I just—I am going to say one thing. Women buy these magazines more than men do, and women are selling this idea to themselves, not to men. [Some applause. Corri shakes head dramatically for emphasis.] So, for god’s sake, admit it.

Mitchell appeared shaken by the dismissive and patronising attitude of the very confident and charismatic Corri, and faltered as she said:

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Let’s break here and come back ’cause I’m not stopping this discussion, we’ll take it up in, in a minute or two when we’ll go to a short film which generalises the theme, that shows the images that men, and women if you like, are putting across to girls and to women, to er, as to, um, er, to which they should, could conform. So if we could take a break now and we, we’ll look at this film and then we’ll come back to these points here.

Watching the exchange, it was difficult not to feel sympathy for Mitchell, whose ‘authority’ as a chairperson was being actively undermined by dissident audience talk, as well as some laughter which was undercutting her own speech. At various points there seemed to be a loss of control of the audience, as several people talked over Mitchell’s interjections, as well as among themselves. Corri provided the most dramatic example of this; as Mitchell moved to discuss the extent to which young women feel coerced into objectifying themselves, she and others began vociferously objecting to this argument. Her voice came through the loudest, and the camera found her, her elbows protruding as she leaned confidently back in her seat: Corri: It’s a load of rubbish, darling! A load of put-up rubbish and none of us are [inaudible] Mitchell [falteringly]: Apart from rather rubbishy anger, could you like, would you like to explain that statement. Corri: It’s absolutely shaming to be here and listen to a lot of potentially very interesting people brought down to the level of this television studio and this programme, it is a lot of crap, and we are made to take part in it and I for one am now leaving. Arrivederci! [One person applauds. She stands up, tosses hair] Mitchell: Why? Corri [Stands with one hand on hip]: ‘Cause you’re very tiresome. And boring, it’s not talking about life or women Mitchell: Apart from showing off — Another audience member, out of view: You’ve been hostile since the moment you opened your mouth [inaudible] Corri: No, I’m dead bored, honey. [She walks off with her handbag; turns around] I’m going to have a drink now! Goodbye, see you later!

This exchange points to the problems inherent in taking radical arguments out of a social movement and into a wider public domain. The ridiculing of the programme as ‘rubbish’, ‘shaming’, ‘tiresome’ and ‘boring’ is again evocative of the denigration of women’s—and most specifically, feminist—speech as nagging: as repetitive, jealous, tedious and something which it is entirely reasonable both not to listen to and to walk away from.

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‘Typically Feminine Self-pity and Nagging’: Media Reviews of No Man’s Land Much of the media criticism of the programme at the time augured the denigration of women’s talk in later criticisms of the talk show (e.g. see Masciarotte 1991; Livingstone and Lunt 1994; Wood 2009). In the Daily Mail, Virginia Ironside’s review of the second programme reveals a contempt for the particular gendering of the talk of No Man’s Land: …any programme that includes vast numbers of emotional people  – like […..] No Man’s Land which shouted about Women and Work – is bound to fail because no chairman (sic) can cope with such vast numbers or prevent hysterics turning the programmes into a yelling match. (Ironside 1973a).

The cacophonous talk was here gendered as hysterical, which in turn was conceived as a kind of failed talk—defective because of its stark difference from the rational procedures of deliberative debate and the presence of ‘hysterical’ voices. In a review of a previous episode Ironside had written that the Juliet Mitchell lot seem to wallow in moaning. It doesn’t dawn on them that a few simple but positive films of shared marriages that really work would have a far greater influence on husbands who still see the sink as ‘women’s work’ than any amount of complaints and what can only be described as typically feminine self-pity and nagging. (Ironside 1973b)

Jean Rook (1973) in the Daily Express wrote that ‘the whole thing was a shrieking shambles. With every girl bitching for herself.’ The programme’s ‘failure’ to produce a compelling and persuasive analysis of marriage was here located in its gendered mode of talk—specifically, in its ‘shrieking,’ ‘bitching’ and ‘nagging’. Furthermore, the deployment of this ‘typically feminine’ mode of speech was positioned as antithetical to progressive gender change. Helen Wood (2009) has shown how criticism of talk shows resonates with and recalls denigrations of the feminine speech genre of gossip. I would suggest that the gendered critical reception of No Man’s Land parallels a related but distinct denigration of women’s talk: that of the speech genre of nagging. Whilst gossip is associated with ‘women’s talk’ in homosocial contexts (discussed more fully in the following chapter), nagging is typically

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understood as a woman’s tenacious and complaining address to men. As Meaghan Morris (1998) has argued, nagging—or ‘the woman’s complaint’—is defined as ‘unsuccessful repetition of the same statements. It is unsuccessful, because it blocks change: nagging is a mode of repetition which fails to produce the desired effects of difference that might allow the complaint to end’ (Morris 1998, p. 15). As such, women who ‘nag’ are accused of creating, and locking themselves into, problems through their own language use. As the programme was broadcast on a Saturday evening—and it was suggested in some of the previews that ITV had deliberately made it go ‘head-to-head’ with Match of the Day—the context of its reception was already imagined as structured antagonistically along gender lines. The discourse around its scheduling seemed to imply that wives might ‘nag’ their husbands to watch it; for example, the Observer (1973) suggested that ‘it should prove something [about Women’s Lib] in most homes – it clashes with Match of the Day’. A Daily Express article was entitled ‘Women’s Lib V. Match of the Day’ (Thomas 1973). Unlike women’s programmes broadcast in the daytime, which have typically been associated with and dismissed as gossip, the potentially provocative scheduling time of No Man’s Land seemed to constitute a more direct affront to patriarchal power relations and was thus vilified in a somewhat different way—that is, it was pilloried as a form of nagging. The explicit links with the women’s liberation movement also meant that the programme’s talk was marked as overtly political in a way not usually associated with talk shows. Jane Shattuc (1997) has suggested that whilst talk shows have often provided a space for women’s issues to be discussed, these shows do not typically confront or attack male power (Shattuc 1997, p. 56). No Man’s Land was substantively dissimilar to later talk shows in this regard, because it explicitly and precisely thematised, named and discussed male power. Against ingrained assumptions about the ‘proper’ place of women’s talk, it was three key features of the programme’s talk— its position in the schedules, its explicit alignment with the women’s movement and its lack of normative ‘sociability’—which marked it out as ‘chaotic’, ‘biased’ and ‘hysterical’.

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Rethinking Nagging: Speaking Bitterness as Feminist Practice The labelling of women as ‘nags’ has a long history, and the term itself constitutes part of what Mary Talbot calls the English language’s ‘remarkable variety of words for vocal, particularly verbally aggressive women’ (Talbot 2013, p. 469), as I discussed in Chap. 1. Deborah Tannen (1992) argues that the widespread labelling of women’s requests as ‘nagging’ is one of the key ways through which women’s speech is devalued. The definition of ‘nag’ is given by the Merriam Webster dictionary as follows: to irritate by constant scolding or urging to find fault incessantly: complain to be a persistent source of annoyance or distraction      (noun) one who nags habitually5

In 2014 many media outlets picked up on an academic study about nagging and duly ran with headlines such as this one published in the Telegraph: ‘Nagging could cost the lives of hundreds of men.’6 We can see here the ways in which nagging is associated with women’s complaints, and how it is vilified as a toxic speech genre that poisons marriages (that is to say, it is women’s complaining, and not the thing they are complaining about, that is construed as the greater problem). Meaghan Morris (1998, p.  15) suggests that the classic scenario of ‘nagging’ goes something like: ‘she nags, he stops listening, nothing changes, she nags’; as such it can be considered a ‘powerless text’, doomed to failure and abjection through the exhausting futility of repetition. However, Morris argues that there is, in fact, ‘always a change of sorts implied by repetition: in this case, her “place” in speech becomes, if not strictly nonexistent, then insufferable – leaving frenzy or silence as the only places left to go’ (ibid.). As such, while nagging seems like a subordinate mode of speech associated with feminine abjection and miserable stasis, it also has the capacity to reveal the insufferability of a situation. We might see this insufferable repetition as culminating in what Sara Ahmed (2017, p. 199) calls a ‘feminist snap’—a moment when someone ‘does not take it anymore, when she reacts to what she has previously endured’.  https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nag  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/10815810/Nagging-could-costthe-lives-of-hundreds-of-men.html 5 6

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There was a practice within second-wave feminism of ‘reclaiming’ pejorative gendered terms with the intention of subverting their meanings— for example, Shrew magazine, Virago publishers and the independent music label Stroppy Cow Records. Rather than accepting idealised modes of women’s speech—which, in a patriarchal context, would have entailed silence or acquiescence—feminists also repurposed ‘feminine’ speech genres such as gossip, ranting and scolding (Caputi 1994, p. 81). I would argue that we might also usefully see nagging as a speech genre with political value for feminism and communicative justice. Juliet Mitchell wrote in Women’s Estate that the concept of consciousness-­ raising was in fact a reworking of a Chinese peasant revolutionary practice of ‘speaking bitterness’ (Mitchell 1971, p. 62). This practice, based on the recognition that the first step out of abjection is to speak of it, ‘is the bringing to consciousness of the virtually unconscious oppression; one person’s realization of an injustice brings to mind other injustices for the whole group’ (ibid.). Here, the normatively negative associations of ‘bitterness’ are reworked into something generative and productive. ‘Speaking bitterness’ resonates in important ways with the impulse to ‘tell yourself’ that Gloria-Jean Masciarotte (1991, p. 83) identified in the discursive contexts of talk shows twenty years later; this re-evaluation and repurposing of feminine speech genres for progressive gender change—in the form of consciousness-raising talk—clearly did go on to become established within mass media forms. However, what is apparent is how the connection with revolutionary politics, which was constitutive of the talk of many consciousness-­raising groups, and evident in No Man’s Land, was seemingly lost as the discourse migrated from activism to talk shows later in the century. What also seems to have been lost is the radical reclamation of bitterness and anger as drivers of revolutionary political change. While Juliet Mitchell’s chairing of No Man’s Land conspicuously lacked a greeting, a smile and a normative mode of sociability, this can also be read as a political intervention into the idealised modes of talk and presentation for women. In her book The Human Voice, Anne Karpf (2006, p. 161) points to some interesting research on the function of the smile in relation to language and gender. Academic work suggests that women tend to be interrupted more when they are smiling—and women are much more likely than men to smile when they begin to speak. Moreover, a ‘woman’s smile seems to serve as an invitation to men to interrupt them, whereas a man’s smile has precisely the opposite effect, inhibiting women from interrupting’ (ibid.). Such research on the complex gender politics of

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language and interaction points to the need for further research on the gender politics of sociability. If the communicative act of smiling is implicated in the reproduction of gender inequality, then it follows, I would argue, that sociability in broadcast talk can also function in problematic ways within the gender politics of language and everyday life.

Conclusion: Bitterness and Justice No Man’s Land was fundamentally predicated on the second-wave feminist maxim ‘the personal is political’; it called attention to those issues not seen as worthy of—or even appropriate for—debate in normatively political programming. Whilst it is difficult to theorise the legacy or impact of No Man’s Land —in large part because of its absence from popular and academic histories—I would like to argue for its importance as a historical text for two reasons. First, it is an important documentary record of discussion involving some key participants in the women’s movement, broadly defined. That is to say, I would also suggest that No Man’s Land constitutes an important set of texts with critical value for our understandings of voice. In particular, it points to the importance and specificity of socialist feminism as a discursive context in the early 1970s. If later talk shows would valorise the discussion of ‘life politics’ which superseded the primacy of ‘emancipatory politics’ (Giddens 1993) within the public sphere, then No Man’s Land points to an example where both redistributive politics and the politics of recognition (Fraser 2013) were articulated together. While I certainly do not wish to simplistically valorise this moment in history as the ‘golden age’ of feminism, I do still want to argue for the importance of revisiting socialist-feminist texts such as No Man’s Land because they demonstrate the possibilities—and also the challenges—that flow from radical affronts to the gender order under capitalism, including its normative communicative modes. The programme’s public address to its home audiences does not sit easily with some established ideas about television’s imperative to be ‘friendly’ and ‘sociable’. Specifically, it points to a particularly gendered problem with regard to the way that Scannell and others have historicised the development of broadcast talk as a public good that has unobtrusively contributed to the democratisation of everyday life most notably through its promotion of a “communicative

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ethos” of more inclusive and extensive forms of sociability among its audiences. (Scannell 1989, p. 136)

No Man’s Land, underpinned by a women’s liberationist politics that sought to disturb, overthrow and radicalise the gender politics of television’s domestic reception context, is conceptually antithetical to this notion of a communicative ethos. This ethos understands ‘the democratisation of everyday life’ through the ‘inclusion’ of audiences on the terms that they already exist. An analysis of No Man’s Land highlights the problematic ways in which the theory of sociability fails to account for gender. Women who have transgressed the limits of ‘acceptable’ speech on television, and who failed to be appropriately ‘friendly’, as did Mitchell, have been castigated as nags, gossips and hysterics. Scannell’s conflation of sociability with democratisation would necessarily position the earnest, ‘unfriendly’ and didactic talk of No Man’s Land as undemocratic. Rather, I would suggest, we should reconceive of women’s talk that is complaining, nagging, angry and riotous as part of that precisely democratic struggle to give women a meaningful voice in the public sphere.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Ahmed, Sara, and Jackie Stacey. 2001. Testimonial Cultures: An Introduction. Cultural Values 5 (1): 1–6. Beard, Mary. 2017. Women & Power: A Manifesto. London: Profile Books. Berlant, Lauren. 2001. Trauma and Ineloquence. Cultural Values 5 (1): 58. Caputi, Jane. 1994. Gossips, Gorgons and Crones: The Fates of the Earth. Santa Fe: Bear and Company. Crockett, Emily. 2016. It Was Hillary Clinton’s Big Moment, and All Some Pundits Could Talk About Was Her Voice. Vox.com, July 29. https://www.vox. com/2016/3/15/11243422/hillar y-clinton-dnc-speech-smileshouting-voice Figes, Eva. 1970. Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society. New York: Persea Books. ———. 2013. Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis. London: Verso. Giddens, Anthony. 1993. Emancipatory and life politics. In The Giddens Reader, ed. Philip Cassell, 333–341. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hutchby, Ian. 2006. Media Talk: Conversation Analysis and the Study of Broadcasting. Maidenhead/New York: Open University Press. Ironside, Virginia. 1973a. TV Last Night. Daily Mail, February 19, p. 19.

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———. 1973b. My Bra Was Hooked on This! Daily Mail, February 5, p. 17. Karpf, Anne. 2006. The Human Voice. London: Bloomsbury. Kay, Jilly Boyce. 2015. Speaking Bitterness: Second Wave Feminism, Television Talk, and the Case of No Man’s Land. Feminist Media Histories 1 (2): 64–89. Livingstone, Sonia, and Peter Lunt. 1994. Talk on Television: Audience Participation and Public Debate. London/New York: Routledge. Masciarotte, Gloria-Jean. 1991. C’mon, Girl: Oprah Winfrey and the Discourse of Feminine Talk. Genders 11: 81–110. Mellencamp, Patricia. 1990. High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age, and Comedy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mitchell, Juliet. 1971. Woman’s Estate. Harmondsworth/Baltimore/ Ringwood: Penguin. Moore, Charles. 2015. Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography. London: Knopf. Moorti, Sujata. 2002. Color of Rape: Gender and Race in Television’s Public Spheres. Albany: State University of New York Press. Morley, David. 1986. Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 2000. Broadcasting and the National Family. In Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London/New York: Routledge. Morris, Meaghan. 1998. The Pirate’s Fiancee: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism. London/New York: Verso. Restrepo Sanín, Juliana. 2019. #MeToo What Kind of Politics? Panel Notes. Journal of Women, Politics & Policy 40 (1): 122–128. Rowbotham, Sheila. 2013. Introduction: Beyond the Fragments. In Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism, ed. Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal, and Hilary Wainwright, 7–25. Pontypool: Merlin Press. Scannell, Paddy. 1988. Radio Times. The Temporal Arrangements of Broadcasting in the Modern World. In Television and Its Audience, ed. P. Drummond and R. Paterson, 15–31. London: British Film Institute. ———. 1989. ‘Public Service Broadcasting and Modern Public Life. Media, Culture and Society 11 (2): 135–166. ———. 1991. Broadcast Talk. London/Newbury Park/New Delhi: Sage. ———. 1992. Public Service Broadcasting and Modern Life. In Culture and Power: A Media, Culture and Society Reader, ed. Paddy Scannell, Philip Schlesinger, and Colin Sparks, 317–348. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage. Shattuc, Jane. 1997. The Talking Cure: TV Talk Shows and Women. London/ NewYork: Routledge. Sisterhood and After Research Team. 2013. Consciousness-Raising. British Library. Available at: https://www.bl.uk/sisterhood/articles/consciousnessraising

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Stoessl, Sue. 1987. Women as TV Audience: A Marketing Perspective. In Boxed In: Women and Television, ed. Helen Baehr and Gillian Dyer, 107–116. London: Pandora Press. Talbot, Mary. 2013. Gender Stereotypes: Reproduction and Challenge. In The Handbook of Language and Gender, ed. Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff. Malden/Oxford/Melbourne/Berlin: Blackwell. Tannen, Deborah. 1992. You Just Don’t Understand. London: Virago. Thomas, James. 1973. Now – Women’s Lib V. Match of the Day’ in Daily Express, January 27, p. 15. Tolson, Andrew. 2006. Media Talk: Spoken Discourse on TV and Radio. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tolson, Andrew, and Mats Ekstrom. 2013. Introduction. In Media Talk and Political Elections in Europe and America, ed. Andrew Tolson and Mats Ekstrom, 1–12. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wandor, Michelene. 1990. Once a Feminist: Stories of a Generation: Interviews by Michelene Wandor. London: Virago. Williams, Raymond. 1974. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Fontana. Wood, Helen. 2009. Talking with Television: Women, Talk Shows and Modern Self Reflexivity. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

CHAPTER 6

Gossip Girl: The Politics of Women’s Talk on Daytime Television

Loose Women is a daytime talk show that is broadcast on the ITV network on weekdays. Its format is made up of a panel of four women in front of a studio audience; they discuss celebrity gossip, current affairs and their own personal lives, from what is described as a ‘female perspective’.1 The programme is very successful, having been broadcast since 1999, and despite some recent dips in ratings, has remained popular.2 However, in some circles, Loose Women is used as misogynist shorthand for talk that is mindless, idle and vacuous. A post on the Digital Spy forum about the programme in 2015 read: ‘A good idea is not to watch this tripe. God knows how many brain cells people lose daily watching this.’ A reply soon came: ‘What do you expect at 12:30 on a weekday? In depth analysis of Keynesian Economic Theory? I’m sure many find it therapeutic to have mindless pap to watch.’ In these two posts we can see many of the deeply gendered criticisms and castigations that have been levelled at daytime talk shows throughout the history of television. To summarise these: daytime TV is bad for you and will rot your brains; the people (women) who watch it do so as a form of mindless escape from their own abject lives; and daytime TV is the opposite of ‘serious’ public discussion that engages with important and worthwhile issues  (see Wood 2009 for a fuller discussion of these gendered value judgements). Another Digital Spy forum post from 2017  As it is routinely described in TV listings.  See https://www.itv.com/presscentre/press-releases/itv-main-channel-having-its-highestshare-viewing-nearly-decade-consolidated-data 1 2

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read: ‘God almighty!! is this trash still going? a panel of leather faced old trollops trying to be cool, banging on about their sex lives and how men are shit.’ As this quote shows, as well as being dismissed as idle chatter, the talk on Loose Women is often (implicitly) construed as a threat to patriarchy. This post points to the misogyny and hatred of feminism that is so often entangled with the dismissive critiques of women’s talk as ‘mindless gossip’; and it is especially women’s talk which is about personal and intimate life which is read as a threat. In this chapter, I consider the gender politics of mediated women’s speech that is specifically understood as gossip. I seek to explore why this mode of speech is so especially vilified, as well as its hidden potential for political subversion. The Cambridge Dictionary has the following entry for the definition of the noun form of ‘gossip’: ‘conversation or reports about other people’s private lives that might be unkind, disapproving or untrue’. To call a person a gossip in its current meaning is a derogatory description, and deeply (albeit often implicitly) gendered; the association of gossip with the feminine speaks to the ways that women are dominantly represented as ‘empty vessels’ who talk too much (Wood 2009, p. 15), as well as being inherently competitive, jealous and ‘bitchy’. These stereotypes persist not only in popular culture but  in academic research: for example, a recent scholarly paper, showcased on the Big Think website, argues that ‘women are more likely to gossip  – as in share reputation-­ damaging information – about women who they perceive to be a threat, directly or indirectly, to their own romantic success’ (Johnson 2018). Apparently, this helps explain ‘why middle schools are often incredibly cruel social environments for young girls’ (ibid.)—rather than, for example, because of misogyny and sexual harassment. The dominant understandings of gossip, then, are deeply bound up with and productive of assumptions about women as their own worst enemies and as constitutionally petty, mean, cruel and shallow. In her popular book Mean Girls Grown Up, the author Cheryl Dellesaga asks: Do grown women gossip and campaign against other women in an attempt to bring them down? Are there cliques in the corporate boardroom as well as the carpool? Can older women be as two-faced as their younger counterparts? As I talked to women – the true experts on these behaviours – their resounding response was, yes! (2005, p. 2).

Part 2 of the book is entitled: ‘Our Own Worst Enemies’. This aligns with a broader social understanding about the difficulties that women face in contemporary society. According to this logic, the ways that women

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are intensely surveilled and judged for their appearance, or emotionally damaged, or socially excluded, are primarily because of the petty jealousies and innate vindictiveness of other women. Gossip is thus framed as an instrument of cruelty, control and shame that women wield in order to hurt one another, and to gain competitive advantages over each other as sexual and romantic rivals. If only they would learn to stop, the logic seems to go, then women’s problems would all be over. Women’s speech, then, is understood in these powerful and pervasive terms as toxic, sabotaging, insidiously cruel and even—remarkably—as the single biggest obstacle to women’s equality and flourishing. However, as I already noted in Chap. 1, the history of the word ‘gossip’ is much more interesting than this contemporary understanding would suggest, and the etymology of the word reveals its subversive and feminist potential. Until the sixteenth century, ‘gossip’ had been a relatively neutral term signifying female friendship and sociality; it was during the rise of the early modern witch-hunts that the meaning began to change (Federici 2018). It was in this context of the increasing policing and punishment of women’s voices—because women’s communal forms of life and knowledge were perceived as an intolerable threat to capital accumulation and rationalisation—that  ‘gossip’ came to signify something else: ‘idle, backbiting talk […and] sowing discord, the opposite of the solidarity that female friendship implies and generates’ (Federici 2018, p. 35). The ongoing castigation of women who are seen to  pettily and vindictively ‘indulge’ in gossip, and the trivialisation of women’s speech as such, shows how this etymological shift linking gossip with ‘bitchiness’ has hardened and endured. I would suggest that it is especially important to note this longer history of ‘gossips’ in order to recall the subversive possibilities of this secretive mode of talk—this history reveals precisely what is seen as threatening about women’s speech: its potential for nurturing women’s solidarities, and for seeding communal and anti-patriarchal power.

‘Women’s Culture’, Gossip and Communicative Justice The feminist linguist scholar Dale Spender (1980, p. 108) has noted the potentially subversive power of gossip and its threat to patriarchal power relations: ‘When women come together they have the opportunity to “compare” notes, collectively to “see” the limitations of patriarchal reality, and what they say – and do – can be subversive of that reality.’ Because gossip privileges the private sphere, involves interpersonal communication

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between women, permits women as speaking subjects and de-privileges ‘expert’ (masculinist) discourse, it can be read as a speech genre of what has often been termed ‘women’s culture’. How might we understand the feminist potential of gossip and ‘women’s culture’, particularly in relation to communicative (in)justice? And, for the purposes of this chapter, how might television talk that takes the linguistic form of ‘gossip’ be understood as a resource for communicative justice? There are deeply divergent feminist understandings of the feminist potential of ‘women’s culture’—and, relatedly, of those speech genres that are coded as feminine and which thus form the linguistic basis of women’s culture. Barbara Welter’s (1966) germinal essay ‘The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860’ framed women’s culture in nineteenth century America  as a superficially seductive but ultimately oppressive space that worked ideologically to keep women in their place: as ‘hostages’ in the home. As with Betty Friedan’s (1963) notion of the ‘feminine mystique’, which seduced women into loyally conforming to rigid and oppressive gender roles, the ‘separate sphere’ of domesticity that women inhabit (both historically and contemporarily) has been constructed in much feminist scholarship  as an overwhelmingly harmful space, ideologically  sustained through its powerful duplicitousness. The idea of ‘women’s culture’ can thus be understood as a cult-like space into which women are enticed, relegated and contained, and within which they hold no power and very limited agentic capacity. In these terms, ‘women’s talk’ that is centred around intimate life and relationships can be construed as complicit in the gendered public/private distinction that reaffirms women’s subordination. A television programme such as Loose Women can be understood as a ‘ghetto’ of women’s linguistic culture—a space of active  disconnection from the public sphere proper, where any power that women might have is insidiously  directed against one another  in the form of invective, and where ‘gossip’ ultimately functions as a way of keeping women in their place. A different reading of the agentic possibilities of women’s culture can be found in other feminist theory and history writing. For example, Caroll Smith-Rosenberg’s article, deeply influential within the field of feminist history, entitled ‘The Female World of Love and Ritual’ (1975), offered a reading of the ‘separate spheres’ ideology that was radically different to both Friedan’s and Welter’s. The rigidly gendered differentiation between the public and private spheres in nineteenth-century America, according to Smith-Rosenberg, actually gave rise to an autonomous, loving, supportive and empowering female world that was bound together by

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women’s shared experiences. Moreover, it provided the necessary historical preconditions for the suffrage movement that would follow it—as such, this form of ‘women’s culture’ was not antithetical to political action, but precisely productive of its conditions of possibility. This article signalled a shift in approaches within feminist history writing that, Sue Morgan suggests, ‘reconstrued the domestic female sphere as a generative site of feminist identity formation that shaped the pattern of women’s subsequent social and political activism’ (Morgan 2008, p. 7). This conceptual frame allows a reading of Loose Women as a space of community and identity-­building, and as one that can potentially provide the valuable preconditions for women’s meaningful intervention into the  political sphere. Similar debates have taken place about the concept of ‘women’s language’, which has been construed both as a site of linguistic ghettoisation and disempowerment—whereby women are socialised into adopting forms of speech that perpetuate their own oppression—and of community and solidarity, whereby women’s language offers a meaningful and generative alternative to masculinist speech norms. A foundational example of the former approach is Robin Lakoff’s concept of ‘women’s language’, introduced in the 1970s: ‘women’s language’ here refers both the oppressive ways in which women are expected to speak, and the ways that they are spoken of. For Lakoff, the very identity of women is ‘linguistically submerged; the language works against treatment of women as serious persons with individual views’ (Lakoff 1975, p. 45). She argued that, in terms of language use, a girl is damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t. If she refuses to talk like a lady, she is ridiculed and subjected to criticism as unfeminine; if she does learn, she is ridiculed as unable to think clearly, unable to take part in serious discussion: in some sense, as less than fully human. These two choices which a woman has – to be less than a woman or less than a person – are highly painful. (ibid., p. 48)

William O’Barr and Bowman Atkins (1980, p. 453) identified the major features of what Lakoff referred to as ‘women’s language’: they suggested that it could be characterised by the extensive use of hedges (‘It’s sort of hot in here’; ‘I guess’; ‘It seems like’; etc.); (super)polite forms; speaking in italics; question intonation in declarative contexts; lack of a sense of humour; and so on. O’Barr and Atkins argued that the term ‘women’s language’ was

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misleadingly deterministic because it is not only women who exhibit a high incidence of these linguistic features, but also other disempowered groups and individuals. They instead suggested that the term ‘powerless language’ would be more appropriate, even though they noted that women’s speech was more likely to be ‘powerless’ than men’s. Notwithstanding these disagreements, these studies share a strong conceptual linking between ‘feminine’ language and powerlessness and marginalisation: that is to say, that women’s speech has been understood as paradigmatic of the inequalities and oppressions made apparent through language use. Jennifer Coates (2011) has problematised the notion that feminine language is merely an expression of subordination under patriarchy. She points out that in much feminist work on language, ‘women’s use of minimal responses, tag questions, and hedging devices in general (epistemic modal forms) has been interpreted as a sign of weakness, of women’s subordinate position to men’ (Coates 2011, p. 220). However, Coates’ own work, among others, emphasises the ‘cooperative’ nature of women’s language. For her, the very idea of ‘powerless language’ as offered by O’Barr and Atkins is problematic because ‘it perpetuates the myth of the intrinsic weakness of women’s language.… We must…fight against the androcentric tendency to assume that, because certain linguistic forms are characteristic of women’s talk, they must inevitably be weak’ (Coates 2015, p.  110). Coates argues that what are taken to be linguistic markers of powerlessness should actually be seen as strategies of cooperativeness and supportiveness. For example, the use of minimal responses, rather than reflecting and shoring up a speaker’s subordinate status, can be used to support the speaker and signal the listener’s active attention (Coates 2011, p. 209). As with the debates within feminist history about ‘women’s culture’, and within feminist media studies about ‘women’s genres’ (Kuhn 1984), ‘women’s language’ is here reconceived not as a place of oppression, powerlessness and containment, but as a generative site of friendship, cooperation and supportiveness—one that should not be denigrated by feminists as irredeemably produced by and collusive with patriarchy, but rather as a productive alternative to masculinist language and culture. This reflects a shift in the 1970s and 1980s, driven by publications such as ‘The Female World of Love and Ritual’ (Smith-Rosenberg 1975) and Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982), which emphasised the political value and empowering potential of women’s language and culture. This tension within feminism was also somewhat replicated and grappled with in feminist media studies, especially in relation to soap opera, which became a

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significant area of investigation for feminist scholars in the late 1970s, during what Charlotte Brunsdon (2000, p. 20) terms ‘the feminist “return to the feminine”’, in which mass media forms for female consumers were becoming legitimised as subjects of critical scholarship. This ‘return to the feminine’ was in part driven by a desire to recuperate the notion of feminine agency (ibid., p.  27) in the face of dominant assumptions that circulated about the ‘passivity’ of female audiences. Work by Dorothy Hobson (1978, 1982), Tania Modleski (1979), Ellen Seiter (1982) and Michèle Mattelart (1982) considered the gendered cultures, rhythms and temporalities of the domestic context in which soap and serial dramas were consumed by women viewers. Soap opera and serial fictions, partly because they seem to epitomise the very specificities of television itself—its ‘seriality, intimacy, domesticity, repetition, and the mundane’ (Brunsdon 2000, p. 31)—have come to occupy a central, privileged and productive site within television studies for exploring the complex relationships between feminism, femininity and popular culture. While the study of soap opera was central to the founding of feminist television studies and its broader relationship to contested theories of structure and agency, later on in the twentieth century, it was the talk show through which this enduring tension within feminism was articulated and negotiated.

Feminism and Television Talk While the talk show became ubiquitous in the 1990s—in line with the broader rise of ‘testimonial cultures’ discussed in Chap. 3 (see Ahmed and Stacey 2001; Berlant 2001)—most scholars note the importance of the preceding period of feminism and other civil rights activisms from the 1960s and 1970s in providing the discursive conditions of possibility for the talk show’s characteristic mode of what Gloria-Jean Masciarotte (1991, p. 83) calls ‘telling yourself’. It was the maxim ‘the personal is political’ that provided talk shows with the possibility of claiming feminist credentials  for themselves, as well as their structural similarities to the consciousness-­raising (CR) group form (although, as we have seen in previous chapters, the extent  to which CR can be said to give ‘voice’ to women as a whole group is contested and unclear).  The links between feminism and television talk shows have been repeatedly drawn in feminist media studies scholarship, because of their arguably shared commitment to amplifying women’s voices.

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The difficulties in learning how to speak publically were not often an explicit concern of second-wave feminism, and yet I would suggest that a struggle against the injustices and inequalities of voice implicitly underpinned the whole movement. In 1970 the first National Women’s Liberation Conference was held at Ruskin College, Oxford University. Four demands were formulated at the conference, which are frequently taken to define the movement: equal pay; equal education and opportunity; twenty-four-hour nurseries; and free contraception and abortion on demand (Wandor 1990, pp. 242–3). Three further demands were added at subsequent Women’s Liberation Conferences: legal and financial independence for all women; the right to a self-defined sexuality—an end to discrimination against lesbians; freedom for all women from intimidation by the threat or use of violence or sexual coercion regardless of marital status—and an end to the laws, assumptions and institutions which perpetuate male dominance and aggression to women (listed in Feminist Archive North 1996). In addition to the seven spheres of inequality identified in the list of demands of the women’s liberation movement, I would suggest that the denial of voice was also understood as a key way through which the oppression of women was enacted and reproduced. Lynne Segal reflected on her experience as an activist during the 1970s that It wasn’t just that women felt frightened to protest politically, but that most of us felt it difficult to speak publicly at all; we were used to relating passively and dependently to the world as presented by men. We were used to being dominated by men; it was hard not to want to be. And it really hasn’t been easy to change this, either then or since. (Segal [1979] 2013, p. 242)

It is significant that speaking became a key site of political activism during the second wave, most notably through the prevalence of consciousness-­ raising groups in the 1970s (Mitchell 1971, p. 61). Indeed, voice has been central to understandings of almost all movements for justice, although this clearly changes depending on the wider communicative terrain at any given moment; to ‘have voice’ and to identify the best methods for achieving this will clearly differ across different contexts. In the contemporary context, the notion of having ‘voice’ in the sense of  a public or mediated presence is, for many people, perhaps much less alien and difficult to come to terms with, at least for those who routinely use social media platforms and have been socialised into the logics of ‘self-branding’ (Khamis et  al. 2017). However, to have meaningful voice in the contemporary

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context clearly cannot simply be equated with speaking in any public way. It is to speak of things and in ways that have the potential to transform the social order. And, as the Segal quote suggests, achieving this kind of meaningful voice has been, and remains, a profound challenge for women. As I have already noted, it was the rise of the talk show in the later part of the twentieth century that has been of especial interest to feminist media scholars. The interest has stemmed from the centrality of women as speaking subjects on talk shows, and the ways that these spaces allowed hitherto ‘private’ matters to become subjects of mass public discussion and debate. This inspired questions and discussions about whether talk shows can be considered to qualify as ‘feminist’—or at least whether or not they align with the broader aims of the movement in productive and valuable ways. Sujata Moorti suggested that television talk shows engaged with issues raised by the women’s movement precisely through their inclusion of ‘ordinary voices’; they ‘privilege subjective experience over subjective knowledge, blur the lines between public and private, and above all are directed primarily at a female audience’ (Moorti 2002, p. 152; see also Moorti 1998). Moorti notes that this televisual form allows for the production of multiple narratives—and that this is especially important in challenging legalistic notions of rape and sexual violence by instead focusing on pain and emotion (Moorti 2002, p. 151). In this way, we might see again how television talk shows have discursive affinities with small group consciousness-raising and how they might valuably bring the radical possibilities of feminist speech forms into a more public realm. As I have already noted, Patricia Mellencamp even claimed that it is ‘not too far fetched to imagine daytime talk as the electronic syndicated version of consciousness raising groups of the women’s movement’ (Mellencamp 1990, p. 218). Other highly optimistic accounts have included that of Paolo Carpignano et al. (1990), who argued that the proliferation of talk shows had to be understood in the context of the crisis of the bourgeois public sphere and of the crisis of the communicative model of politics inherent to it: that of propaganda and persuasion. For them, the television talk show represented a new, more democratic form of politics precisely because it offered an alternative discursive practice to those of traditional politics. It was premised not on debate, closure and conclusion, but rather upon the offering of a series of testimonials. Talk shows offered a reconceptualisation of politics; for Carpignano et al., politics thus could become consolidated through discursive practices rather than within formal institutions

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(ibid., p. 54). Furthermore, for them it was no coincidence that talk shows were directed at women and especially those shows that included a studio audience. They argued: The popularity of these shows is not only due to the transformation of the social agenda in this country [the USA] in the past twenty years, following the changes in the role of women and in society and the awareness brought about by women’s struggles, but also the fact that women’s struggles have redefined the relationship between public and private. (ibid., p. 51)

Exemplifying a more critically pessimistic feminist perspective, Lisa McLaughlin (1993) responded directly to Carpignano et al.’s optimistic conceptualisation of talk shows. She did not deny that second-wave feminism influenced daytime talk shows, but suggested that the feminism of talk shows  needed to be understood as specifically liberal—‘in line with their overall liberal humanist emphasis’ (McLaughlin 1993, p. 51). That is to say, their feminism operated within the confines of a rights-based, individualistic humanism that did not seek to fundamentally reconceive the social order. She concluded: The talk show represents an intersection of discourses, none of which exists apart from the social structure, so that it is unlikely that [it] provides new discursive practices that are so external to traditional modes of political and ideological representations that they are able to militate against them. (ibid., p. 53)

What should we make of this tension within feminist media studies, which is no longer actively struggled over in direct relation to talk shows, but arguably still shapes and underpins the ways that we conceive of structure, agency, silence and voice in mediated communication? Can we get beyond understanding mediated speech forms that are coded as ‘feminine’ as either oppressive or resistive (perhaps even less helpful is an insipid ‘third way’ that seeks to neutralise this tension and simply say that they are both at the same time)? Helen Wood notes the problem that these debates leave for feminist media studies: they leave us at a ‘theoretical impasse…with a bewildering set of arguments that oscillate between good and bad judgements’ (Wood 2009, p. 26). This book is concerned with confronting the painful and profoundly difficult irreconcilabilities of communicative justice, not in order to accept

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defeat, but in order to more creatively find ways out of the impasse. One way of doing this, I would suggest, is a historical approach; history, as myself and Kaitlynn Mendes have argued, is the ‘neglected grandmother’ of feminist media studies (Kay and Mendes 2020). In this book I have sought to look to longer histories in which women’s speech has been attacked, demeaned and ridiculed, for example in the early modern period (Federici 2014, 2018) and in Ancient Greece and Rome (Beard 2017). In Chap. 5, I also looked to the second-wave feminist period to understand how the communicative architectures of mass media forms in the twentieth century came with their own gendered problems for feminism— infused as they were/are with normative assumptions about women’s speech. In this chapter, I also now look to the second-wave period; this is in order to explore the ways in which ‘women’s talk’, ‘women’s culture’ and ‘women’s television’ are slippery, contestable and historically shifting concepts. When it comes to communicative justice, it seems that the academic debates around the feminist potential of talk shows do leave us at an impasse—it is too bewildering to navigate a path through these oscillating judgements between talk shows as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. A recent Independent headline asked us to choose between pronouncing Loose Women as either ‘insult to feminism or women’s safe space’ (Carson 2019). How might we get beyond such either/or  questions? They have doggedly attached to feminist debates about the nature of ‘women’s culture’ for many decades. I want to suggest that looking to an example from 1970s daytime talk-­ based television broadcast on ITV helps us to ask different questions. Asking whether Loose Women is simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’ does not allow us to think about other potential ways in which women’s televised talk or mediated ‘gossip’ might operate. Loose Women does not represent the only possibility of women’s group speech on television—this is where television history can help us to conceive of communicative justice in more expansive ways.

Women’s Programming as Televisual Gossip In the previous chapter, I suggested that, in mainstream print media reviews, the televised women’s talk of No Man’s Land (ATV/ITV 1973) was constructed as a form of nagging, and that the deeply gendered criticisms about this ‘complaining’ mode of address must be understood in relation to its specific position in the schedules late on Saturday evenings, where it was construed as an affront to the gendered hierarchies of

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the evening family space. In this chapter, I turn to consider a ‘women’s’ programme that was also broadcast in the 1970s, but in the very different spatio-temporal context of weekday, daytime television: Thames Television’s Good Afternoon! was a daytime programme broadcast across most of the ITV regions, before moving across to Channel 4  in 1984. While the programme continued in various guises between 1971 and 1988, and whilst I do make some brief comments about some of the broader discursive shifts over the lifetime of the programme, the focus in this chapter is on the ITV programme during the 1970s.3 Drawing on media reviews of the programme from the 1970s (including print media interviews with the programme’s workers), my own viewing of around a dozen episodes of the programme in the British Film Institute (BFI) archives, as well as a close discourse analysis of an excerpt from Good Afternoon!, I reflect on the programme in relation to the wider context of programmes ‘for women’ in the daytime in the 1970s, as well as to the broader feminist movement of this period. I want to situate this programme within debates around the contested relationship between, on the one hand, women’s culture, women’s language and women’s genres and, on the other, ‘public’ feminism. By looking to an example of daytime television talk that was at once addressed to a predominantly female audience, and that engaged with broader left politics by incorporating an economic analysis in its discussions, I seek both to problematise the notion that women’s televised inter-group talk is inherently powerless and oppressive, and to complicate the notion of the opposite: that it is resistive and subversive just by virtue of being women’s talk. Rather, I show that the radical potential of Good Afternoon! came from its privileging of women’s voices, but also, crucially, the ways that this was indivisible from its implicit grounding within left politics. This helps us to understand better the particular terms on which contemporary programmes such as Loose Women are criticised, and to more clearly identify what value or problems they hold for feminism. Loose Women is often implicitly understood as a threat to patriarchy in the sense that it might be seen to ridicule or humiliate masculinity (as the quotes at the beginning of the chapter suggest)—but this does not necessarily mean that it is ‘feminist’ or that it poses a genuine challenge to the gendered socio-economic order. In other words, ‘gossip’ is not in and of itself valuable for feminist politics and communicative justice. Instead, I want to ask what kinds of gossip we might want to 3

 For a fuller discussion of the history of the programme, see Jilly Boyce Kay 2014.

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understand as potentially subversive. As such, I further develop my argument that communicative justice requires collective voice and an engagement with redistributive politics in order to be effective and meaningful.

‘Television for Women’ Since the closure of the Women’s Programming Unit in 1964, there had been no regular or stated commitment to producing television genres specifically for women (Leman 1987; Irwin 2011). The appearance of Good Afternoon! in the 1970s must be understood as part of a broader context in which daytime programmes for women were beginning to reappear— and the notion of what a ‘women’s programme’ might look like was being actively negotiated and struggled over in a wider context of a rising women’s liberation movement. The format of the programme was most often as follows: each day, a different presenter from a core, rotating group of women took the helm, and that episode would be oriented around her particular interests. Episodes variously involved documentary film, interviews with celebrities and politicians, and conversations with ‘ordinary people’ and experts about issues as diverse as homelessness, dieting, feminism, cookery, depression, fashion and home improvement. As I have discussed elsewhere (Kay 2014), Jeremy Isaacs was the controller at Thames who commissioned the programme as part of his explicitly stated strategy to bring more women into the television industry. He later reflected: Now, an extension of afternoon hours offered new opportunities. We might, I thought, have a magazine for women, which would not, repeat not deal with ‘women’s subjects’  – makeup, cooking, embroidery  – but would be presented wholly by women. (Isaacs 2007, p. 224)

We can see here a concerted retrospective effort to historicise the programme as aligned with a particular ‘progressive’ notion of femininity that eschewed the traditionally domestic in order to be legitimised (see Brunsdon 2000 for a broader discussion of this disavowing tendency). In fact, a cursory glance at clips from the programme’s archive on YouTube reveals that these ‘women’s subjects’ were most certainly a part of the output (Mary Berry was the resident cook, for instance, and the regular presenter Judith Chalmers specialised in fashion). There were many other attempts at various points by programme personnel to disavow the descriptor of ‘women’s television’, which was often done to try and align the

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programme with a more progressive notion of femininity or with feminism (see Kay 2014 for a fuller discussion of this). My own research viewing episodes in the BFI archives also confirms that traditionally ‘feminine’ topics were commonplace. Why then, this curious and inaccurate de-­ emphasising or even erasure  of this important constituent of the programme’s identity?  This speaks to the complex politics that arise in conceptualising television talk as being ‘for women’: there are various tendencies to conflate ‘women’s culture’ either with practices that are understood as oppressive effects of patriarchal logics, or as vapid and inferior.

Politics of the Programme: Collective Care and Feminist Address I want to argue that the programme was in many ways influenced and shaped by, but also an active participant in the feminist struggle of the 1970s, and that this was not in spite of, but in many ways because of its designation as ‘women’s programming’. The programme regularly featured topics that were oriented to care—not, as I go on to discuss, in terms of individualistic self-care, but rather in terms of collective care. A typical week’s programming from 1973 shows the diversity of topics that were covered, encompassing traditionally ‘feminine’ subjects as well as broader social issues: Monday:

Judith [Chalmers] takes a consumer’s eye view of fashion and beauty. Tuesday: Jill [Tweedie] talks to people who are concerned  – concerned about such things as loneliness, with women’s rights or with the difficulties of one-parent families. Wednesday: Mary Parkinson and her guests present a half hour of discussion. Thursday: [Mavis Nicholson] Meet the personality of the week, it could be a star, it could be a char, but it is always stimulating. Friday: Sylvia Duncan is joined by a studio audience and together with an expert they discuss some of the problems which are likely to affect viewers.4 4

 Information taken from the TvTip archive, available at: http://bufvc.ac.uk/

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I have discussed elsewhere how episodes were given over to discussing policy around mental health institutions, women’s experiences of abortion, equal pay, contraception, divorce and myriad other political and social issues (Kay 2014, p. 78). Many politicians and other notable people were interviewed on the programme, including April Ashley, a transwoman, at a time when transgender people almost never appeared on television as speaking subjects.5 To take another specific example: newspaper listings for an episode broadcast on January 19, 1977, show how that day’s programme would offer guidance on ‘self-help’ if you were lonely, but also on ‘how you can help someone else whether or not you are’. Whilst not normatively political or overtly feminist in its address, this strong emphasis on help and social concern interpellated viewers as constituents within a broader social fabric, mobilising what can be understood as an ethic of care (Gilligan 1982). This ethic of care was also insistently linked to broader social and political issues and to questions of social justice. As such it can be understood as qualitatively different from the ‘care of the self’ discourses that characterise contemporary forms of factual television (Skeggs and Wood 2012): rather, it mobilised a discourse of collective care. While these instances of Good Afternoon! address may not be able, as I have already suggested, to be characterised as explicitly feminist, they nonetheless point to the importance of second-wave feminism—and its constitutive imbrication with socialist politics—as a key discursive context. As well as feminism providing a discursive context in broad terms for television in the 1970s (Wheatley 2005), it also periodically appeared more explicitly on Good Afternoon!, as with an episode in 1973, which I go on to discuss. This episode was presented by Mavis Nicholson. It opened with dramatic drumbeat overlaying an image of the famous Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) postcard of 1913 which protested the Cat and Mouse Act and simultaneously promoted the magazine The Suffragette. As the drumbeat reached a crescendo of clashing gongs and cymbals, the image cut to a poster publicising a Women’s Liberation national demonstration from 1971 that also listed the four demands of the movement at that time. The effect was to clearly link the feminist struggles of the suffragettes with the contemporary women’s liberation movement, a link that was not universally accepted by many at the time who saw the 1970s 5   Part of the interview can watch?v=5CY2pHMA_cQ&t=142s

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movement as much less legitimate in comparison (Kay and Mendes 2018). The camera zoomed in to a close-up of the open, shouting mouth of the female protestor on the poster. This in turn gave way to a still black-and-­ white image of a gently smiling woman looking downwards; as the camera panned outwards, she was revealed to be a housewife in service to her husband and children, happily and dutifully pouring them drinks as they sat at a table. With this abrupt shift in image, the music also switched to gentle flute music. By framing the programme’s subsequent discussion with these images and their implicitly invoked debates around gender roles and normative femininity, the talk of the programme was clearly situated within an openly feminist framework. After this brief, powerful opening montage, the camera then cut to the studio and specifically to a head-and-shoulders shot of Mavis Nicholson against a plain, unadorned, pale blue background. Her direct greeting to the television audience was as follows: Good afternoon. We’re going to talk today about the presumed role that women have been given: sexy creature, obedient wife, devoted mother; and we’re going to try and see in what ways home, school and society have conditioned us into thinking that this is all really that we should be about; and what kind of difficulties arise if you try to be something else as well.

After the generic greeting, Nicholson’s opening lines clearly indicated the strongly gendered premise of the content of the talk to come; they also indicated a strongly gendered address. That is to say, the audience was presumed to be female; or, more accurately, the ‘ratified’ overhearing audience watching at home that was being invited into the discussion was female. Others (men) were perhaps welcome to ‘listen in’ but without being directly addressed or catered for—the direct address was clearly to women in the context of an unequal society (‘we’re going to try and see in what ways home, school and society have conditioned us into thinking that this is all really that we should be about’). In terms of ‘sociability’, then, it clearly privileged and welcomed some viewers (women) over and above others (men). Its address, in other words, was not universal but discriminating, in that it openly privileged women’s views and experiences. Secondly, this was a non-adversarial, exploratory form of talk (‘we’re going to try…’) which, whilst clearly political in intent, was neither accusatory nor didactic. Here I think it is useful to draw a comparison between this and No Man’s Land, which discussed similar themes of gender, yet

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within a very different discursive context. Whilst the ‘debate’ format of No Man’s Land clearly structured its forms of talk in a particular way—most notably through the deliberate presence in the studio of those hostile to the movement—its place in the schedules as an evening programme also transformed the context within which its ‘feminist’ talk was received. I would suggest that the feminist talk of Good Afternoon! can be conceived as less didactic and more ‘sociable’ not only because it was objectively or intrinsically so but also because the afternoon was marked off as a space within which women’s voices could be more legitimately heard. This, arguably, points to afternoon television in the 1970s not only as a place of regressive feminine identity which was antithetical to the feminist movement, but as a space that, precisely because of its low cultural status, was able to engage with and develop feminist ideas in a relatively freer way, with much less hostility or obstruction. It is significant that whilst I came across ample media hostility to No Man’s Land in my research, effectively accusing it of televisual nagging, I found no such response to this Good Afternoon! episode which actually discussed highly similar topics and whose ‘bias’ in favour of feminism was perhaps even more striking than that of Juliet Mitchell on No Man’s Land. In terms of communicative justice, then, we might wish to rethink those spaces that are seen as ‘ghettos’ of ‘women’s culture’ more in terms of ‘counter-publics’ (Fraser 1990) that can allow marginalised groups to explore, formulate and articulate their strategies, values and demands. Crucially, however, women’s television does not qualify as a counter-­ public simply by virtue of its designation as being ‘for women’. I think that Good Afternoon! points to the possibilities of subversively inhabiting ‘women’s culture’ and turning its low cultural value into a political virtue, as I discuss below. Thirdly, and in relation to both these previous points, I have already begun in this book to suggest that both the ‘mass’ and ‘domestic’ nature of broadcast television reception means that it can never really offer the ‘safe’ space for talk that has been so important for feminist consciousness-­ raising  (a similar argument can clearly be made about the internet). However, I would suggest that in this case, afternoon television, whilst clearly not received by an audience that is literally all-female or profeminist, has nonetheless been afforded a certain amount of discursive freedom and protection—precisely by virtue of its being dismissed and ignored by the broader culture as ‘powerless’. We might say, then, that television ‘for women’ broadcast in the afternoon in the 1970s provided a space that was

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both ‘mass’ because of its national (or at least multi-regional) reach, and ‘safe’ because it was seen as politically inconsequential and was therefore broadly ignored by the establishment. I would argue that Good Afternoon! weaponised the assumption that it would be trivial and politically negligible precisely in order to express politicised feminist views. This might constitute a useful tactic for a feminist approach to communicative justice.

Coming Out of the Kitchen/Coming Out of the Afternoon: Women’s Speech in a Hyper-public Context If we return to the contemporary context, however, and the example of Loose Women, then the spatio-temporal politics of broadcast scheduling have shifted profoundly. While Loose Women is broadcast on television in the afternoon, as Good Afternoon! was, it is also now widely circulated via YouTube clips, as well on Twitter and Facebook and countless other platforms and media outlets. Taken out of what may have once been thought of as a ‘safer’ context of afternoon scheduling, Loose Women is arguably much more vulnerable to hostile scrutiny and judgement. In an ‘economy of visibility’ (Banet-Weiser 2018) the capacity for the hyper-publicness of media texts is an ever-present possibility—and sometimes a threat. We might assume that communicative justice will always be served by feminist media texts becoming as visible as possible—travelling out of their original contexts into new communicative terrains (as in the maxim ‘all publicity is good publicity’). But visibility is not the same as publicity—simply taking women’s speech out to new and expanded audiences is not inherently a good or productive strategy. In this sense, what has been called the ‘context collapse’ (Marwick and boyd 2011) that is characteristic of contemporary media entails the exposure of mediated feminist speech to infinite new possibilities for misogynistic backlash. The communicative context of media has been transformed: while women’s mediated speech has always been constrained by the misogyny and patriarchal norms that it meets within its reception contexts, the rise of the online ‘manosphere’ (Ging 2017) provides a vicious, organised and orchestrated kind of misogynistic ‘response unit’ that women’s mediated speech must now anticipate and negotiate. While in the broadcast age the designation of a television show as ‘daytime women’s programming’ or inconsequential ‘gossip’ may once have afforded it a certain protection from the judgmental scrutiny of

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hostile audiences, in the contemporary networked media context, this is no longer the case. The ways that women must now brace themselves for misogynistic responses—and the ways that this shapes the kinds of things they may or may not say—must surely be understood as one of the most pervasive and insidious forms of communicative injustice. In the context of #MeToo, women’s talk about abuses of power and misconduct has often been denounced as a form of ‘gossip’—as with the ‘Shitty Media Men’ list referred to in Chap. 2, which was widely attacked for its association with ‘unofficial’ and unsubstantiated forms of communication. The association of #MeToo with gossip seems to be a very effective strategy in seeking to discredit its aims: there has been a concerted effort to frame ‘whisper networks’ as shady and unscrupulous and therefore not to be trusted.  In this sense, ‘women’s language’ is again construed simultaneously as inferior and as a threat to patriarchal power. But whisper networks and gossip are often the only recourse that the marginalised have in the absence of formal justice; this is a function and effect of patriarchy to be sure, and is therefore not something to be celebrated. But this subordinated status can be turned back against patriarchy, and used as a political weapon. Emily Janakiram’s (2019) discussion of Federici’s work reminds us of the importance of understanding the subersive potential of gossip through an insistence on conceiving of feminism as a politics of the left: she writes, ‘women’s solidarity is worker solidarity.’ While women today are so often framed as emblematic of the worst excesses of vapid individualism (and we can see this in criticisms of Loose Women), what this insidiously obscures is that women’s speech poses a genuine threat to the current social order, due to its potential for communal power. If we can reclaim gossip from its current meaning as backbiting, competitive, ‘bitchy’ talk to an historically established meaning of solidarity, community and communality, then I think we can much better find our way to communicative justice. As Janakiram argues: ‘Women are the backbone of the working class, and when the working class is silenced, capital wins, which is why we must never be silent. We must continue to gossip.’ We can look to the histories of women’s talk on television to understand that ‘women’s culture’ and talk that is dismissed as ‘gossip’ can function in radical and subversive ways. At the same time, we must also maintain a focus on the new and complex challenges—as well as opportunities—that contemporary media architectures present for feminism.

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CHAPTER 7

Out of Place: Women as Linguistic Interlopers in Mediated Political Speech

In 2019, Fiona Bruce became the first regular female presenter of the BBC’s flagship political discussion television programme Question Time (BBC One, 1979–present). In the run-up to the announcement of the new host, it was noted that most of the contenders to replace the previous chair, David Dimbleby, were women (Loughrey 2018). The emphasis on women in this context was a conscious and deliberate symbolic act: after nearly forty years of being presented by men, of being dogged by accusations of sexism, and of mostly failing to adequately represent women on its invited panel of speakers (see Kay 2014), the appointment of Fiona Bruce as the programme chair was greeted by many as justice at last for gender equality on Question Time. Given the broader prestige of the programme, and its status as a ‘national institution’, the symbolic importance of the post going to a woman was, in many ways, very significant. Bruce’s appointment came at a particular moment in the gendered history of political broadcast media in Britain. As well as the appointment of Bruce to what is understood as the most coveted political presenting job in the UK, it was announced in early 2019 that the leading current affairs programme Newsnight (BBC Two, 1980–present) would have an all-­ female presenting team for the first time in its history (BBC News 2019). This represented an important shift in British political broadcasting, which has been dominated by men since its inception, and has been culturally coded as a preserve of ‘masculine’ talk, to the substantial exclusion of women’s voices. Indeed, as I noted in Chap. 5, the idea that women’s voices © The Author(s) 2020 J. B. Kay, Gender, Media and Voice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47287-0_7

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were unsuitable for broadcasting was bound up with cultural discourses around broadcast technologies right from the beginning; for example, women’s voices were deemed incompatible with radio microphones, both by radio manufacturers and in broader public discourse, and women only became regular newsreaders during World War II while male workers were away. As such, the fact that highly prestigious political broadcasting jobs have recently gone to women—in a media sphere that has so long excluded them—seems to indicate a decisive victory for feminism, and for the struggles of women workers within political television most specifically. However—as I argue in this chapter—the extent to which this might be understood as a ‘victory’ depends very much upon how feminism is defined, and to frame it straightforwardly as ‘progress’ erases other kinds of oppressions and discriminations that continue to flourish. If we are to insist on communicative justice as a collective endeavour, and one that is not merely concerned with elite forms of rhetoric and the most prestigious and socially valued forms of speech, but with meaningful voice for everyone, then the appointment of women to ‘top jobs’ is a highly limited form of progress. In early 2019, very soon after Bruce had begun presenting Question Time, the politician Diane Abbott appeared as a panellist on the programme. Diane Abbott is a Labour Member of Parliament (MP) and has been since she was elected in 1987, becoming the first black woman MP in the UK (Operation Black Vote 2020). She is also the longest-serving black MP in the House of Commons. Significantly, and against the prevailing notion  that British society has become progressively more  non-­ racist and meritocratic, research has shown that she receives more online hate and abuse than any other MP in the UK (Amnesty International 2018); the research shows how the nature of this abuse is both misogynistic and racist, and I would suggest it is also firmly linked to her left-wing politics. As I have argued, while all women’s speech is liable to be devalued, pilloried, and attacked, it is crucial to recognise that it is those women’s voices which pose a threat to the interests of capital, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy that are most violently and systematically vilified. Following her appearance on this episode of Question Time, so soon after the seemingly feminist-friendly appointment of Bruce, the Labour Party filed an official complaint for the ways that Abbott was treated. Analysis showed that she was interrupted more than any other guest, as well as erroneously accused of articulating falsehoods about polling data (Novara Media 2019). People who were among the studio audience described the ways that Bruce had shared innuendos about Abbott’s previous sexual relationship with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn during the ‘warm-up’ to the broadcast

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show, and how when Abbott’s name was mentioned, many audience members broke out into boos. A spokesperson for Abbott said: the only black woman on the panel was jeered at and interrupted more times than any other panellist, including by the chair herself. The media must stop legitimising mistreatment, bias and abuse against Ms Abbott as a black woman in public life. The BBC should be ashamed that their programming is complicit in such behaviour. (Cited in Waterson 2019)

The juxtaposition of the seeming to-be-celebrated advance of women within the sphere of political broadcasting (exemplified by Bruce getting this ‘top job’), with a contemporaneous example of the ways that racism and misogynoir (Bailey and Trudy 2018) continue to pervade contemporary mediated politics, shows how straightforward progress narratives about women’s mediated voices are altogether too reductive and misleading. They elevate white, middle-class women as universal signifiers of womanhood in ways that insidiously conceal the different kinds of challenges that different women face in talk-based political media. In this chapter, I seek to unpack more fully the ways in which inequalities in voice are perniciously reproduced in mediated political speech. In particular, I grapple with the ways that the seductive promise of voice, which I have argued characterises contemporary media culture, has perhaps made it more difficult than ever to identify and call out communicative injustice. Indeed, I argue that the  fact that a small number of women are increasingly visible in high-profile media roles is ideologically mobilised to support myths of meritocracy that obscure rather than alleviate structural gender inequality. This fixation on ‘top jobs’ as the key to gender equality in political communication—construed  both as problem and as solution—misses entirely the more pernicious, intersecting forms of exclusion and inequality that characterise this field. To understand gender equality in these terms— as women finally getting their meritocratic dues in being given the ‘best’ jobs—is not merely a partial and limited analysis, but it actively diverts attention away from more pervasive forms of inequality. As Jo Littler argues, the lens of ‘meritocracy’ facilitates ‘lonely forms of selective empowerment, ones profoundly ill-equipped to deal with the wider structural causes of sexism, racism, environmental crisis and economic inequality’ (Littler 2017, p. 2). I remain with Question Time as the central case study for my analysis, in large part because it is often held up as the paradigmatic form of democratic speech in the UK context. Schools and universities all across the country regularly style their debates as having a ‘Question Time format’

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(i.e. a panel of five speakers, a chair and a studio audience who put topical questions to the invited speakers). Throughout its history, Question Time has been lauded for its ability to hold politicians to account and to facilitate meaningful dialogue between elected representatives and the British public. That is to say, its forms of speech are understood as especially democratically valuable, and intrinsic to the successful functioning of British democracy. In the following section I consider the often reductive ways in which it has been constructed as ‘democratic’ in popular discourse, as well as in media studies literature.

Question Time: ‘Democracy in Action’? Because of its claims to be a democratic forum in which elected representatives can be held to account through direct questioning from the citizenry, Question Time has often been the subject of criticism and media scholarship that is concerned with political communication and Habermasian notions of the public sphere. Brian McNair suggests that the particular form of structured debate between elected representatives and citizens that is found on programmes like Question Time might be thought of as the liberal democratic role of broadcasting ‘in its purest form, mediating between the public and its politicians, providing the former with access to raw political discourse, and providing the politicians with a channel of direct access to the people’ (McNair 2011, p. 76). Whilst McNair goes on to concede that the format in some respects constrains the possibility of debate between elected and governed on equal terms, he nevertheless suggests that programmes such as Question Time evince the decline of deference towards politicians, which is in turn understood as producing higher quality democratic dialogue: audience members are now invited to speak more freely than they once did….The chairman…intervenes on behalf of the audience more aggressively than was traditionally the case, embarrassing the sometimes reluctant panellists into going beyond political ‘waffle’ and answering a question with some degree of clarity and directness. (ibid., p. 77)

The narrative of progress—of an increase in democratic vigour that has necessarily accompanied the decline in deference to political elites—is powerfully reproduced in many of the ways that political media is discussed in academic and popular discourse. In the special retrospective show 25 Years of Question Time (BBC One, 2004) the Conservative Party

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politician Boris Johnson’s comment was typical of the way this narrative is reproduced: ‘My impression now is they throw it out to the audience much more than they used to. It’s become even more democratic, the public get even more of a say than they did before, and that’s no bad thing.’ The media scholar Simon Cottle (2011) has argued that programmes such as Question Time represent a tradition of holding politicians to account that is worth defending, even if in practice they do not fully satisfy the criteria of a properly functioning public sphere. He suggests that the programme provides an ‘agora’ (taken from the Ancient Greek term for a political assembly) that is modelled on the practices of parliamentary democracy. Specifically: The program chair (parliamentary ‘speaker’) officiates from the studio audience (‘represented public’) who is permitted to pose (mainly pre-selected) questions to a panel of ‘representatives’ (MPs from the main political parties and opinionated public figures) who are assembled either side of the program chair. These assembled ‘senior figures’ then hold forth on the various topics put to them. (Cottle 2011, p. 236)

This is all fairly persuasive as far as it goes; but as we saw through Mary Beard’s (2017) writing in Chap. 1, Ancient Greece was not a perfect, pure or universal democracy, even though it tends to be invoked as such in much media scholarship on politics and the public square. Women, slaves, foreigners and the poor were not considered to be citizens, and were thus excluded from any such forms of democratic participation. While this is often considered to be merely an aberration—a historic gender-blindness that has since been rectified with the formal inclusion of women as equal citizens—Nancy Fraser’s (1990) work alerts us to the ways that such exclusions still profoundly shape the contemporary public sphere. As I have argued, these exclusions are so established— constitutive at the instantiation of the public sphere ideal, and reproduced over thousands of years—that they can be understood as ‘baked in’. They now operate in much more insidious ways—and it is precisely because they are invisibilised that they are much more difficult to identify and address. There have also been more critical appraisals of the programme’s democratic credentials. For example, its hierarchical spatial configuration, in which speaking power is concentrated with the political and cultural elites on the panel, has drawn criticism from academic and journalistic critics. The writer Jonathan Freedland has argued that Question Time ‘implicitly

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invit[es] the audience to put questions to those in authority rather than voice their own opinions’ (Freedland 1998, p.  25). Stephen Coleman (2012) has argued similarly that Question Time is merely a form of ‘prosthetic democracy’ or a ‘spectacle of deliberation’. For him, the audience, divested of any real political power or voice, function only as a kind of ‘Greek Chorus’ who ventriloquize the exasperated sounds of the home audience, but do not provide an authentic, deliberative challenge to the panel (Coleman 2012, pp. 24–5). While this small body of Media Studies research on Question Time provides some valuable frameworks for understanding its particular forms of talk, there has been much less attention to the ways that the format, premise and forms of talk on the programme are gendered. A paper written by Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi and Karen Ross (1996) on media representations of women MPs makes some interesting but brief comments on the format of Question Time, noting that ‘the aggressive interrogation and the adversarial politics [are] hardly conducive to sustained policy analysis’ (ibid., 105). They also briefly note an incident on the programme in 1995 in which the Labour MP Clare Short was treated ‘very rudely’ by the host David Dimbleby (ibid., p. 111). I have also written on the gender history of Question Time and the ways that women have been under-­ represented both as panellists and as presenters (Kay 2014). But how might we understand the less obvious, less easily quantifiable, more insidious gender inequalities in relation to voice? To this end, I now move to consider how scholars of feminist linguistics have evaluated the gendering of political talk more broadly, and the ways that women have been rendered communicatively ‘out of place’.

Language, Gender and Communities of Practice In her book Language and Gender, Mary Talbot argues that particular spaces within broadcasting, as within politics more broadly, can be defined as ‘masculinist Communities of Practice’ (Talbot 2010, p.  84). Because women have been historically absent or have occupied only highly marginal positions within spaces such as the British Houses of Parliament, these domains have come to be defined by the norms, values and linguistic practices of white, middle-class men (ibid., p. 186). While women are no longer formally excluded from these spaces, when they do enter them, they are nonetheless entering ‘Communities of Practice that have previously been the preserve of men’ and as such are ‘highly likely to experience

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a sense of marginality’ (ibid.). In these spaces, they are made to feel like ‘interlopers’ (Eckert cited in ibid.). Other studies have shown that there are observable gendered differences in language use within formal political spaces. For example, Bicquelet et al. (2012) found that in debates in the House of Commons on the issue of abortion, there were gendered differences in the rhetorical strategies of politicians, with men more likely to use procedural arguments and women substantive arguments. Similarly, Sarah Childs’ interviews with women Labour MPs in the electoral intake of 1997 found that many of these politicians claimed that ‘women are less combative and aggressive, more collaborative and speak in a different language compared to men’ (Childs 2004, p. 14). Significantly, Sylvia Shaw’s (2014) analysis of gendered language use in the House of Commons found that almost all the illegal interventions in debate—such as speaking out of turn, barracking and filibustering1—were performed by men. Importantly, while parliamentary language is highly rule-bound, these rule-breaking practices have become an integral, if unofficial, part of the communicative norms of the House (ibid.). However, because they are marked as gendered interlopers, these linguistic practices are not freely available to women. Rather, a ‘silence or hyper-controlled language’ is imposed on women, while men, on the other hand, are allowed the ‘liberties of a language that is securely established’ (Bourdieu, adapted by Shaw, ibid.). In other words, those who are more at liberty to break the communicative rules are the people already accepted as ‘insiders’. Communicative injustice, then, might manifest in unexpected ways: for example, in the ways that marginalised groups might adhere much more rigidly to communicative rules, whereas the already powerful are so at ease that they can blithely flout them. While women have sometimes been celebrated for bringing a new, more ‘civilised’ form of discourse to politics, Sylvia Shaw suggests that this, too, can function as an additional linguistic burden for women—another layer of gendered expectations of women that their male counterparts do not have to bear (see also Cameron and Shaw 2018). Significantly, Shaw notes that the harsh judgements made by the media about women’s appearance and behaviour constituted ‘the single main barrier to women’s entry  Filibustering is ‘to deliberately waste time during a debate by making overlong speeches or raising unnecessary procedural points. In this way a Bill or a motion may be “talked out”: stopped from making progress within the time allowed’. See https://www.parliament.uk/ site-information/glossary/filibustering/ 1

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into, and progress within, politics’ (2014). Given that television amplifies the focus on women’s appearance, and that the internet provides what I have suggested is an instantaneous, misogynistic ‘response unit’ to attack women’s public speech, the contemporary mediation of women’s political talk entails profound challenges for feminist communicative justice. In this chapter I want to explore the complex, multilayered and intersectional nature of the injustices and inequalities that structure and underpin mediated political debate. The chapter is less interested in the ways that women speak in political media, but rather how the communicative architectures of political media produce certain kinds of ‘rules’ that actively but insidiously disadvantage speakers who are not white, upper-class, and not  deeply at ease within such ‘communities of practice’. This raises broader questions about which kinds of speech are socially valued, and how we might newly  define and understand what counts as  democratic speech. Historically, since its inception in 1979, Question Time and the wider political culture in Britain has valued a kind of ‘gentlemanly’ debate style—discussion as an ‘art form’ that showcases brilliant and polished rhetorical skill. It was those panellists who could deliver ‘wit’ and ‘eloquence’ who were deemed to be the most masterful and skilled rhetoricians on the programme in its earlier days (see Day 1989, p. 278). More recently, however, there has been a shift in the broader communicative terrain, and panellists are most likely to be revered for performances in which they ‘humiliate’ and ‘own’ their fellow speakers. For example, clips of particular ‘money shot’ moments from the programme, involving spectacular linguistic domination over fellow panellists, circulate widely  on sites such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. The right-wing Daily Express newspaper, following an appearance by Diane Abbott in 2018, ran the headline ‘“I wouldn’t let her run a bath!” Furious Question Time audience member ROASTS Diane Abbott’. The particular communicative modalities of shaming and degradation are now routinely  equated with successful and effective democratic speech. In both these cases—on the one hand, the private-school and Oxbridge-­ infused notions of debate as a gentlemanly art form, and on the other the ‘will to humiliation’ (Bratich 2010)—the communicative landscape is exclusionary and masculinist, although this manifests in contextually specific ways. To this end, I analyse two examples of talk from the programme—the very first episode of Question Time in 1979, and the episode with Diane Abbott in 2019—to argue that while both are instances of gendered communicative injustice, these manifest in conjuncturally

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specific ways. Moreover, I suggest that sexism that is less overt, or less ‘readable’ within dominant cultural frames, may well constitute the most insidious and tenacious form of communicative injustice, because of its deniability in a context characterised by the promise of voice for everybody. However, I first consider the ways in which the programme’s history points to a long-standing ‘gender problem’ that is at once deeply entrenched and yet highly context-specific.

Question Time’s ‘Gender Problem’: Women as Panellists and Audience Members Question Time has, throughout its history, had to grapple with accusations of gender bias and the under-representation of women, in terms of both its on-stage participants and its studio audience. In Brian McNair et  al.’s (2003) study of access broadcasting in Britain, a researcher for Question Time observed: ‘It’s sad to say it, but true that many more men than women apply to take part [as audience members]’ (2002, p. 410). This issue is clearly not limited to Question Time only: similarly, producers on the audience-participation, political debate show Jonathan Dimbleby (1995–2006) on ITV were said to have observed ‘that even where the studio audience is gender balanced (because programme researchers intervene to make it so), men are more likely to make a contribution to the debate, particularly at the start of the programme’ (ibid., p.  410–411). While audience participation is clearly deeply gendered (both in terms of who comes forward as audience members in the first place, and in terms of who feels empowered to speak), there is also a long history on Question Time of men numerically dominating the panel. Most usually, the practice of having more men than women appear as panellists has been justified by the ‘paucity’ of women in public life. For example, in 1990, two consecutive episodes were broadcast without a single female panellist. The presenter at the time, Peter Sissons, was reported to have justified this by saying, ‘There is a big gap, a real shortage of front-line women’ (Independent, 1990). Mark McDonald, the then newly appointed producer of the show, similarly argued that decision-makers remain overwhelmingly male. The nation’s ‘front-line’ women have not been selected for John Major’s [the then Prime Minister] new cabinet. Women comprise 7 per cent of MPs, 1 per cent of senior managers and out of 200 leading listed companies only 21 have female directors. (McDonald 1990, p. 15)

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A few years later in 1995, the gender balance of the programme’s panel again became a subject of public discussion, after Sue Ayling became the producer of the programme. The production company’s intention was that ‘the programme always has two women unless there are unforeseen developments’ (cited in Brown 1995). Against the powerful ‘common sense’ that the programme could not possibly achieve gender parity, based on women’s under-representation in parliament and public life, Ayling provided her own common-sense assertion: ‘If half the population is female I don’t see why half the panel shouldn’t be’ (ibid.). For Ayling, if women were not available in equal numbers to men from Westminster, then this was not the end of the matter; women contributors could also be found in other spheres, such as entertainment and business.2 At various points in the programme’s history, (mostly female) editors and producers have intervened to disrupt the logic of merely ‘reflecting’ the ‘reality’ of gendered inequalities in public life (Kay 2014). These histories help to challenge the seemingly immutable logic that political talk on television is constitutionally limited to ‘reflecting’ existing power structures. However, my research also suggests another layer of difficulty in achieving gender balance; often, throughout its history, when women have been asked to appear on Question Time, they have turned the opportunity down. Having previously appeared twice as a panellist, the writer and broadcaster Bel Mooney wrote in 1990 about the reasons why she had turned down two invitations to appear on Question Time: ‘The programme’s style impels panellists to declare as axiomatic that which is mere postulation, and not many women (including those in politics) are quite so skillful – or arrogant’ (Mooney 1990). For Mooney, it was precisely the programme format—one which seeks to mobilise self-assured, instantly produced, unambiguous opinions—that erroneously conflates masculine arrogance with valuable democratic speech. Such arguments suggest that women’s under-representation on the programme cannot be merely attributed to 2  What is interesting about this ‘good news’ story about women’s representation is how quickly and easily the programme’s own gendered history had been forgotten. In fact, the programme’s first editor, Barbara Maxwell, wrote a letter to the Independent in which she called attention to this act of erasure: ‘it would have been nice if you had congratulated the original Question Time for having created the normality of women as guests on such shows. When I started Question Time in 1979, women rarely got invited on to serious political programmes. I made it an absolute rule that we never did a programme without a woman […]. At that time, it was much harder to find women willing to appear, or experienced enough to risk such tough exposure’ (Maxwell, 1995, 24).

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straightforwardly discriminatory selection practices, but rather that the gendered constitution of the format itself should be called into question, particularly for the ways in which it might be hostile to women’s voices— or indeed, anyone who is not a middle-class, expensively educated white man. This, then, poses an altogether more difficult set of questions for communicative justice, and requires a more thoroughgoing critique of mediated political talk. Another ‘gender problem’ that has been associated with Question Time—albeit retrospectively—is the egregious sexism of its first host, Robin Day. The special retrospective programme 25  Years of Question Time, broadcast in 2004, included a brief consideration of the changing gender politics of the programme. A very short section—about a minute and a half in the hour-long programme—was given over to discussing the category of gender as problematic in the history of Question Time. This was framed narrowly and exclusively in terms of what the journalist Ann Leslie described as Robin Day’s ‘problem with women’. Archival clips were shown of Day interacting in anachronistically sexist ways with female panellists and audience members, for example, by saying ‘Is there a lady who’d like to ask a question, because otherwise if I don’t insist on having a lady I’ll get a lot of rude letters – and there’s a rather lovely one just there.’ The implication here was that sexism was a practice firmly rooted in the past, shocking to contemporary audiences in the 2000s precisely because of its historical distance and difference; as such, the ‘problem’ of sexism was discursively managed and contained through the notion of Day as a politically incorrect but affable dinosaur, decidedly of his time. In contemporary culture, we can see many other examples of what I would suggest is a kind of ideological distancing from these kinds of ‘historical’ gender prejudices and practices. In 2018, a clip of Robin Day and another political broadcaster, Cliff Michelmore, interviewing a new Conservative female MP during the 1970 election night went viral. The BBC clip showed the two male presenters describing Janet Fookes as a ‘lady MP’ and a ‘gorgeous redhead’, noting that she was ‘Miss Fookes’ and not ‘Mrs’ because ‘no man has ever plucked up the courage to ask’ (BBC News 2018). The Independent reported this in the following way: A clip of a female MP being interviewed by the BBC in 1970 has shocked the internet because of the sexist way she was treated […] It certainly makes for uncomfortable viewing and has provoked a strong reaction amongst modern viewers, with many exclaiming disbelief that such interviewing styles ever existed. (Hosie 2018)

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I would argue that it is precisely the construction of ‘modern’ audiences who are ‘shocked’ that such a thing was allowed to happen which reinscribes the present as progressive and sexism-free. #MeToo made it abundantly clear how sexism and sexualised abuses of power are rife within the media and entertainment industries (and much more widely and generally). However, these kinds of ‘can you believe it!’ discourses work to reaffirm the idea that things are so much better now, and that sexism no longer infects public cultures as it did ‘back then’. Beyond the (apparently now-solved and no longer relevant) issue of the host’s inappropriate behaviour, there are other kinds of ‘gender problem’ to consider in relation to Question Time. For example, we might consider the implicit gendering of the issues that are designated as appropriate for political discussion on the programme in the first place. In 2009, the then presenter David Dimbleby discussed in a newspaper interview which topics worked successfully on the programme and which did not. The interviewer surmised from this that the issues that are unlikely to excite the audience are ‘parliamentary matters, the BBC, or tricky ethical issues like euthanasia, abortion or IVF. Far more ‘bankable’ are subjects like knife crime, drunkenness, drugs, the NHS, Afghanistan and, above all, the Iraq war’ (Delingpole 2009). A more contemporary example of a ‘bankable’ subject is Brexit, which at the time of writing heavily dominates debates on the programme (meanwhile, the Domestic Abuse Bill receives barely a look-in3). Matters which have historically been considered as belonging to the ‘private’ sphere—for example, issues of reproductive rights or domestic violence—are somehow rendered out of place in the format; they are ‘tricky’ and an awkward discursive fit for the format. This is clearly not something that is inherent to the medium of television—as the proliferation of confessional, therapeutic and personal talk shows discussed in previous chapters attests—but rather to the particular discursive arrangements of this programme, its designation as formally ‘political’ debate, and the wider political and cultural context in which patriarchal power has delineated subjects as belonging either to the public world of debate or to the private sphere (Wallach Scott 2000). I would also like to draw attention here to how Question Time’s ‘gender problem’ has been conceived of in particular and limited ways. Aside from the archaic sexism of its original host, the ‘gender problem’ has primarily 3  See https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/domestic-abuse-bill-2020-factsheets/ domestic-abuse-bill-2020-overarching-factsheet

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been understood as a problem that is quantitative in nature—that is to say, it has been construed as relating to the numerical under-representation of women onscreen. I go on to discuss the problematic limitations of this approach later in the chapter. I also wish to draw attention to the ways that, in the accounts of women’s marginalisation discussed earlier, sexism and linguistic exclusion are implicitly understood as experiences universally and equally shared by all women. Within these discussions, there is no mention of cross-cutting structures of racism, classism and ableism. As such, I wish to insist in this chapter on an intersectional conceptualisation of communicative justice that does not simply accept the communicative successes of middle-class, white women as evidence of progress and which does not assume that a greater numerical representation of women will lead to communicative justice in and of itself.

The Shifting Sands of Injustice: Conjunctural Specificities in Communicative Injustice In this section, I consider two moments from Question Time’s history: the first ever episode of the programme broadcast in 1979 and the 2019 episode featuring Diane Abbott, first discussed at the beginning of the chapter. I do so in order to demonstrate and understand how communicative injustice manifests in conjuncturally specific ways, and how merely solving one gender ‘problem’ cannot be taken as evidence of wholesale victory. Furthermore, I want to explore the ways in which gendered communicative injustice that is insidious is no less harmful than that which is egregious. Indeed, subtler forms of communicative injustice may play a more significant role in sustaining inequality. Example One: September 25, 1979 Scene setting: This is the first ever episode of Question Time, presented by the well-established broadcaster Robin Day, who famously had a ‘problem with women’, as I discussed earlier.4 Margaret Thatcher was made Prime Minister earlier in the same year, when her right-wing Conservative Party defeated Labour in the general election: she was the first ever female Prime Minister in the country’s history. Despite the significance of this appointment for gender and parliamentary history, Thatcher famously disavowed feminism: ‘I owe 4

 The clip is available to watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73M4JDs6nII

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nothing to women’s lib’, as she famously put it (cited in Smith 2013, 159). Despite the fact that the Prime Minister was a woman, only 3% of all MPs at this time were women.5 Following the programme opening credits, the four panel guests of the first ever episode were introduced in turn by the host Robin Day. These were: the Labour MP Michael Foot, the Conservative Teddy Taylor, the Reverend Derek Warlock and finally the Irish writer Edna O’Brien. A side­on, head and shoulders shot of the panellists showed them each in turn, sitting silently as the (now-famous) introductory music played; the taut, tense tune, played on string instruments, provided a sense of occasion and anticipation. The male panellists were lightly smiling, whereas O’Brien maintained a more neutral expression. O’Brien’s distinctive red hair, bold black-and-white dress with a flower corsage and long earrings differentiated her from the suits, ties, bow-tie and dog collar of the men on the panel. The camera then cut to show the entire panel from behind: they sat in a row behind an oval-shaped table which faced out onto an applauding studio audience, arranged on straight lines of tiered seating. Robin Day, the chair, was sat dead-centre in the panel, wearing his trademark thick spectacles, bow-tie and a folded handkerchief in his jacket pocket. Robin Day: Hello, and er here we are for the first of our weekly Question Times, with an audience in a south London theatre which has been specially converted for television […] And to answer their topical questions I’ve got a pretty rich mixture of personalities here with me. On my far left – that’s just the way it happened – is the Right Honourable Michael Foot MP, master of parliamentary debate, and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, and the reason he’s looking so happy this evening is the thought of next week’s Labour Party Conference. [Audience laughter.] On my far right, Teddy Taylor, former Tory front bencher, and he would almost certainly be in the Conservative cabinet now, as Secretary of State for Scotland, but for the fact that he had a little local difficulty in May, and lost his Glasgow seat at the General Election. Next, the beautiful and gifted Edna O’Brien, novelist, poet and playwright. Her hobbies, incidentally, are the most intriguing of any listed in Who’s Who. She describes them as ‘movement by day, and dreams by night’. Finally the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool, the Most Reverend Derek Warlock and er he’s 5  See https://www.statista.com/statistics/871195/proportion-of-women-mps-in-ukparliament/

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obviously an archbishop with a gift of salesmanship because one of his books is entitled Take One at Bedtime.

The most obvious point to make in relation to the gendering of the talk is Day’s introductory description of O’Brien as ‘beautiful’ when the appearance of the other male panellists was not alluded to. The narrative logic of the 25 Years of Question Time special, discussed earlier, sought to discursively ‘contain’ sexism within the bounds of certain, occasional, inappropriate utterances made by Day. However, I suggest that these utterances, rather than being isolated and egregious examples of sexism that could easily be dismissed, actually had a broader and more pernicious effect on the discourse of the programme. In this case, I argue that O’Brien was marked as an ‘interloper’ into the discourse of Question Time. She is figured as exotic, mysterious and ‘intriguing’; out of place within the hard-­ hitting masculinist premise of the talk; emphatically unlike the male panellists, who are recognisably ‘players’ in the established rules of the ‘game’ of left-right politics. Crucially, however, she is not an unwelcome interloper, as Day’s complimentary introduction and focus on her attractive attributes attests; or rather, because she is an interloper, she is welcome, but only on certain terms. As such, I argue that the sociability (Scannell 1991) of the talk is here extended to men and women differentially; while the greeting to the home audience is ostensibly universal, gender-neutral and offered to all, it actually operates to exclude women from participating as equal players in political talk. What is also important to note here is that Day’s sexism is easily legible, particularly at this historical distance; it appears—in the contemporary register at least—as a benign yet overt form of sexist behaviour that would be widely accepted as inappropriate in today’s political media culture. That is to say, that what now appears as egregious would not necessarily have been interpreted as such at the time (and given Day’s long-­ standing chairmanship of the programme, his ‘problem with women’ was both normalised and tolerated). What I wish to emphasise, however, is the fact that it is now legible as ‘obvious’ sexism. But what kinds of sexism may be illegible in the contemporary context? I now move on to an example in which misogyny—or more specifically misogynoir (Bailey and Trudy 2018)—which is much more pernicious, and not so easily readable within contemporary norms of acceptable speech.

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Example Two: January 17, 2019 Scene setting: This is the second ever show hosted by Fiona Bruce, the programme’s first regular female chair. Debate is dominated by the crisis around Brexit; the Prime Minister is Theresa May, the UK’s second ever female government leader, and also a Conservative; the country has been under a regime of austerity in public spending for nine years. While there have been important gains for social justice movements, the broader picture of inequality provides less grounds for optimism. Since 1979, economic inequality has risen sharply (Equality Trust 2019) and 4.1 million children live in poverty. There have been some feminist gains, and thirty-two per cent of MPs in the UK are now women. However, there is still a gender pay gap in the workforce of 17.3%. The picture around racism is also very mixed: one in thirteen MPs is now from a black or minority ethnic (BAME) background, a significant improvement. However, more broadly, a growing body of evidence points to an intensification of in racist abuse since the 2016 Brexit vote. The new host, Fiona Bruce, stands in front of the studio audience who are in tiered seating. She looks to the camera and says: ‘Tonight we’re in Derby. Welcome to Question Time.’ The signature theme music (still the same score) begins to play, as the camera then cuts to Bruce sat on stage alongside the guest panellists. The panel appears to be diverse: of the five, three are women and two are BAME. Considered in relation to the panel in 1979, this appears to be a much more inclusive panel make-up. Bruce then introduces the speakers: ‘On tonight’s panel: we have Rory Stewart, the current Prisons Minister [Conservative], and former Foreign Office minister; he was also deputy governor of two Iraqi provinces after the war. Labour’s shadow Home Secretary and MP for more than thirty years, and member of Jeremy Corbyn’s close circle, Diane Abbott. Kirsty Blackman, the SNP [Scottish National Party]’s spokesperson on the economy and Deputy Leader of the Party at Westminster; Anand Menon, professor of European politics at King’s College London and director of a think-tank which specialises in the UK’s relationship with the EU.  And last but not least, political journalist, author and ardent Brexiteer – I think it’s fair to say! – Isabel Oakeshott.’ In these introductions, there is no egregious moment of cringe-worthy sexism, as we saw with the first example. Overall, the programme appears to be eminently modern, inclusive and committed to diversity. Indeed, if we were to go by the programme’s previous logics of ‘reflecting’ formal politics, then women and BAME people are ‘over-’represented. However, what I would like to discuss here are the ways in which it is precisely this

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progressive gloss—this veneer of inclusivity and apparent sensitivity to issues of representation—that works to conceal much more pernicious forms of communicative injustice. What is not visible within this frame is the contextual history of racist and sexist abuse that Diane Abbott has suffered, especially since the advent of Twitter and social media. As an audience watching at home, we are not privy to the warm-up comments that Fiona Bruce made about Abbott’s sexual relationship with Jeremy Corbyn, which gives a very different inflection to her on-air introduction of Abbott as a member of Corbyn’s ‘close inner circle’. As I have already discussed, Abbott is then interrupted and undermined throughout the programme more so than any other panellist, and an official complaint is later lodged with the BBC by her team. However, the backlash against her for raising this as an issue is instant and vicious, both on social media and in mainstream media venues. Brendan O’Neill at the right-wing Spiked writes an article entitled ‘Man up, Diane’ in which he accuses her of ‘playing the race card’.  There are countless further examples of this racist and misogynistic backlash. What I think is important to underscore here is the insidious and slippery nature of communicative injustice. Indeed, the experience of communicative injustice is all too frequently followed by a second-order form of injustice, in which one’s traumatic or difficult experience is dismissed or denied. As I suggested in relation to Yassmin Abdel-Magied in Chap. 4, this is tantamount to a form of cultural gaslighting. Given the intensified manifestations of misogyny, racism, and transphobia in the contemporary context—and what we might understand as the ‘anti-woke backlash’ (O’Hagan 2020)—I would argue that we need to develop more robust theories of how communicative injustice works, precisely to guard against the power of the right, who increasingly gaslight those who experience it.

De-centring Masterful Speech Fiona Bruce was asked in an interview for Good Housekeeping magazine in 2019 whether she—as a woman—would have been offered the Question Time chair if she had sought it out ten years ago. She replied: ‘Would I have got a job on Question Time 10 years ago, assuming I was good enough? I very much doubt it. Now that is not an issue anymore.’ She also said that ‘Things have definitely improved, and definitely for older women’, both in terms of equal pay and especially for the representation of women on screen. This optimistic logic—whereby sexism is simply ‘not an issue anymore’—supports a narrative of a perpetual progress, whereby things are getting better and better all the time, inexorably and without the need

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for struggle. Bruce’s appointment as Question Time chair, and the increasing visibility of senior female political broadcasters on television seem to evidence the notion that gender justice is inevitable—that we are already there, or if not quite yet, then so very, very close. From the perspective of communicative justice, this could be construed as a victory; after decades of struggle, Question Time now has a woman host and generally achieves a gender balance among its guests. The fight, it may seem, has been won. However, this points to the extreme limits of simply counting women to determine whether gender justice is present or absent. Attempts to ‘tally’ the number of women on panel shows, and to present the numerical under-representation of women as the problem with mediated politics, are highly reductive ways of understanding how communicative injustice operates. Lisa McLaughlin (1993, p. 615) argues that if we look upon the problem ‘as one of systemic social inequality, made possible through class society and capitalist relations of production, tallying numbers of marginalised individuals employed in media production is destined to be a celebration of incremental gains and continues to leave open the problem of unequal relations based on economic hierarchies’. The format and underpinning linguistic conventions of Question Time work to exclude and marginalise in myriad different ways, not all of which are within the power of producers to tackle. It presumes and expects quick, clear, fluent speech; it privileges those who have existing ‘linguistic capital’; it values rhetorical mastery over substantive political ideas; it operates on an erroneous assumption of equality and ‘meritocracy’ (Littler 2017) and so pretends that racism and sexism do not exist within its bounds; it circulates within a wider media ecology in which sexist and racist ‘response units’ move in immediately to shame, humiliate and gaslight those without the privileges of whiteness, middle-classness and cisgendered maleness. For certain middle-class, wealthy white women, it may be apt to claim that things are getting better—that sexism is no longer an issue, or at least not in the sense that it will hold them back from individually flourishing. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, it may seem as though the arc of the moral universe is bending towards (communicative) justice. In the implicit narratives about gender (in)equality in the history of Question Time and mediated political speech more broadly, there has been an assumption that by tallying the numbers and aiming for gender ‘balance’, communicative justice will be served. It is striking how narrow this conception of justice is. Why is it so much more difficult to imagine including other kinds of rhetoric and speech styles on the programme—for

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example, what Melanie Yergeau (2018) calls ‘autistic rhetoric’? Why is the linguistic universe of Question Time seemingly so closed off to participants whose voices are stuttering, ticcing, who avert eye contact and who do not speak in ways sanctioned by neurotypical, middle-class norms? Why must communicative success on programmes like this equate to ableist notions of mastery, domination and precision? What kinds of knowledges and voices are excluded by the implicit insistence that all speakers must be ‘confident’, clear and fluent? These are the kinds of more difficult questions that I think we should be asking about the mediated public sphere in the contemporary context. As I have argued already, the rules of the communicative game are designed in such a way that most people can only ever lose. To simply argue that we need ‘more women’ on such programmes is problematic in three ways: firstly, such calls inevitably end up benefitting those women who are already most privileged; secondly, the shiny gloss of ‘progress’ that this provides can end up obscuring or even undermining other struggles for justice; thirdly, it narrows the frame of what constitutes communicative justice by re-installing non-disabled and ‘masterful’ speech as the democratic ideal. The demands for communicative justice should be, I think, much bolder.

References Amnesty International. 2018. Black and Asian Women MPs Abused More Online. Available at: https://www.amnesty.org.uk/online-violence-women-mps Bailey, Moya, and Trudy. 2018. On Misogynoir: Citation, Erasure, and Plagiarism. Feminist Media Studies 18 (4): 762–768. BBC News. 2018. ‘Gorgeous Redhead’ Baroness Janet Fookes on 1970 Interview. March 19. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-sussex-43430613/gorgeous-redhead-baroness-janet-fookes-on-1970-interview ———. 2019. Newsnight: Emily Maitlis Heads All-Female Presenting Team. 20 March. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-47638966 Beard, Mary. 2017. Women & Power: A Manifesto. London: Profile Books. Bicquelet, Aude, Albert Weale, and Judith Bara. 2012. In a Different Parliamentary Voice? Politics & Gender 8: 83–121. Bratich, Jack. 2010. Affective Convergence in Reality Television: A Case Study in Divergence Culture. In Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence, ed. Michael Kackman, Marnie Binfield, Matthew Thomas Payne, Allison Perlman, and Bryan Sebok. London: Routledge.

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Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of Injury: Power and Injury in Late Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cameron, Deborah, and Sylvia Shaw. 2018. Gender, Power and Political Speech: Women and Language in the 2015 UK General Election. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Childs, Sarah. 2004. A Feminised Style of Politics? Women MPs in the House of Commons. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 6 (1): 3–19. Coleman, Stephen. 2012. Debate on Television: The Spectacle of Deliberation. Television and New Media 14 (1): 20–30. Cottle, Simon. 2011. Television Agora and Agoraphobia Post-September 11’. In Journalism After September 11th, ed. Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan, 232–251. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. Day, Robin. 1989. Grand Inquisitor: Memoirs. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Delingpole, James. 2009. David Dimbleby Interview: Celebrating 30 Years of Question Time. Daily Telegraph, September 23. Available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/6214852/David-Dimbleby-interview-celebrating-30years-of-Question-Time.html Equality Trust. 2019. How Has Inequality Changed? Available at: https://www. equalitytrust.org.uk/how-has-inequality-changed Fraser, Nancy. 1990 [1999]. Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. In The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, 2nd ed., 518–536. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. Freedland, Jonathan. 1998. Bring Home the Revolution: The Case for a British Republic. London: Fourth Estate Limited. Hosie, Rachel. 2018. Sexist BBC Interview with Female MP in 1970 Shocks Viewers. February 7. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/ bbc-interview-1970-sexist-female-mp-janet-fookes-merton-morden-electiontwitter-a8198711.html Kay, Jilly Boyce. 2014. “Media Virgins vs. Political Lions”: Historicising the Gender Politics of Question Time. In Cinema, Television and History: New Approaches, ed. Laura Mee and Johnny Walker, 182–199. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Littler, Jo. 2017. Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility. London: Routledge. Loughrey, Claire. 2018. Question Time Host David Dimbleby Replacement Contenders ‘Mostly Female’. Independent, September 28. Available at: https:// www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/question-time-newhost-who-david-dimbleby-female-women-pilot-tests-a8559016.html. Accessed 30 Augt 2019.

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Maxwell, Barbara. 1995. ‘Question Time always welcomed women: letter’. Independent, March 5, letters section, p. 24. McDonald, Mark. 1990. A Question of the Real Decision-Makers; The BBC Says It Has a Problem Finding Female Panellists for Question Time. Last Week the Independent Nominated 72 “Front-Line” Women. What Did Mark McDonald, the Producer, Make of Our Gesture? Independent, December 12, p. 15. McLaughlin, Lisa. 1993. Feminism, the Public Sphere, Media and Democracy. Media, Culture and Society 15: 599–620. McNair, Brian. 2011. An Introduction to Political Communication. 5th ed. London/New York: Routledge. Mooney, Bel. 1990. ‘Question Time: Bel Mooney, twice bitten, twice shy’. Independent, December 5, p. 16. Novara Media. 2019. BBC Question Time Bias Against Diane Abbott  – An Examination. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MC71z1oHNrw O’Hagan, Ellie-Mae. 2020. ‘The ‘anti-woke’ backlash is no joke – and progressives are going to lose if they don’t wise up’, Guardian, January 30. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/30/anti-wokebacklash-liberalism-laurence-fox Operation Black Vote. 2020. Rt Hon Diane Abbott MP (Labour). https://www. obv.org.uk/our-communities/black-politicians/diane-abbott-mp Scannell, Paddy. 1991. Broadcast Talk. London/Newbury Park/New Delhi: Sage. Shaw, Sylvia. 2014. Gender and Politics in the Devolved Assemblies. Soundings, 55. Republished by New Left Project and Available at http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/gender_and_politics_in_the_ devolved_assemblies#_ftnref2 Smith, Joan. 2013. Misogynies. London: Westbourne Press. Sreberny-Mohammadi, Annabelle, and Karen Ross. 1996. Women MPs and the Media: Representing the Body Politic. Parliamentary Affairs 49 (1): 103–115. Talbot, Mary. 2010. Language and Gender. 2nd ed. Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press. Wallach Scott, Joan. 2000. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press. Waterson, Jim. 2019. Diane Abbott Accuses BBC Question Time of Legitimising Racism. Guardian, January 18. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/ politics/2019/jan/18/diane-abbott-accuses-bbc-question-time-of-legitimising-racism Yergeau, Melanie. 2018. Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness. Durham: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 8

Voices of Re(s)pair: Towards Communicative Justice

Throughout this book, I have argued that contemporary culture is riven with—or even characterised by—inequalities in voice that constitute a profound, pervasive, but largely hidden and insidious form of injustice. Part of my intention has been to argue that the obstacles to equal and meaningful voice are much more profound, entrenched and pernicious than is generally assumed or supposed, even within much critical feminist scholarship. I have also sought to indicate the myriad and multiple ways that communicative injustice operates. For this reason, the examples that I have offered in this book present only a fragment or glimpse of the many forms that such injustice can take; I do not wish to claim to provide a comprehensive inventory of all the ways in which inequalities of voice are produced, sustained and legitimised—rather, I hope that the concept of communicative injustice may function as a starting point for ongoing discussions about its multifarious articulations in different contexts. Nonetheless, here I summarise some of the key characteristics of communicative injustice as I understand it to manifest in the contemporary context: • While, historically, silence has been the idealised mode of communication for women, in the contemporary context, women and girls are now impelled to speak out—however, this new mandate is for a highly individualised voice that does not pose a meaningful challenge to established forms of power. © The Author(s) 2020 J. B. Kay, Gender, Media and Voice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47287-0_8

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• Contemporary media culture offers a thrilling promise of voice, but this seductive optimism works to conceal a profound lack of meaningful voice. • Voice is too narrowly equated with charismatic, fluent and authoritative public speech; these linguistic resources are unequally distributed across society, and therefore this is a problematic and exclusionary way to frame and idealise voice as a democratic value. • The mandate to ‘speak out’ fails to recognise that the social and emotional costs of doing so are profoundly differentiated by class, race, gender and (dis)ability. • Speaking out is too often promised as a solution in and of itself to injustice—or as what Jia Tolentino (2018) calls an ‘Excalibur’ of justice. However, individual speech is ultimately unable to meaningfully take on structural power—and so a more collective approach is required. • Meaningful, effective voice—or communicative justice—should be conceived not in individual terms, and neither should it simply valorise or promote ‘strong’ or ‘brave’ voices, but rather should seek to transform the whole communicative terrain. We should rethink ‘voice’ as something more expansive than simply the ability to ‘speak out’ and ‘tell your story’ on individual terms and in powerful, spectacularised ways. • We need to challenge the ways that ‘witch-hunt’ is used in the contemporary context. Witches have historically been punished because they were a threat to patriarchy and capitalism—those who uphold these systems of power today cannot be allowed to benefit from positioning themselves as ‘outsiders’ who are ‘silenced’. As such, we need to tell better histories of women’s silencing that centre the threats of women’s voices to the oppressive role of capitalist power. • Voice is most often understood as external to the economic, as in you may have no money or property but you will always have your ‘voice’. It is associated with the politics of recognition rather than redistribution. But this catastrophically suggests that communicative justice is an alternative to economic justice or at least a compensation for it. Communicative justice must therefore be understood as an indivisible part of economic justice and vice versa; one is not possible in the absence of the other.

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This book is rooted in the tradition of feminist media and cultural studies, and as such, in the spirit of this tradition, it has borrowed freely from other disciplinary areas, including political theory and philosophy, black feminist theory, feminist theories of language and gender, and disability studies. The black feminist and poet Audre Lorde’s writing on language, silence and anger has been especially important for me in thinking about the politics of voice and silence. Lorde recognises that to speak is fraught with danger—especially for women, most especially for black women— and in this way, to speak makes us afraid. However, she writes that to remain in silence will not dispel the fear: We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid. (Lorde 2017)

Speaking is dangerous, and painful, especially for black women—but silence is no kind of remedy: as she put it, ‘Your silence will not protect you.’ Sara Ahmed writes, in an introduction to a recent republication of Lorde’s work: it is better to speak out, even if you are afraid of the consequences of speaking out, even if you have to pay a cost for speaking out. Whatever the costs of speaking out, the costs of not speaking out will be too high: as Lorde reminds us, racism and sexism take lives. (Ahmed, in Lorde 2017, p. ix)

To speak is thus essential just in order to survive, but to speak entails costs—for some women much more than others—and this has to be accounted for in a feminist politics of voice. Across the chapters, therefore, I have considered how gendered inequalities in mediated voices intersect with and are exacerbated by other axes of oppression, and I have argued that we need an intersectional understanding of communicative injustice. Put simply, we cannot take evidence of a few privileged white women populating boardrooms, parliaments and political debate programmes— and ‘speaking out’ in these spaces—as evidence of gendered communicative justice. The ‘neoliberal feminism’ that Catherine Rottenberg (2018) compellingly  critiques offers an extremely narrow and exclusionary conceptualisation of women’s empowerment; as Rottenberg shows, it exhorts wealthy women to find a felicitous ‘work-family balance’ while

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systematically failing to acknowledge the labour of poor women, migrants and women of colour—on which this possibility of ‘balance’ depends (Rottenberg 2014, 2018). Any possibility of collective progress, then, becomes hollowed out; feminism is thus becoming increasingly oriented towards and organised around the individual, and in so doing, it is ‘purging itself of all elements that would orient it outwards, towards the public good’ (2018, p. 431). We can also think about the disturbing implications of the rise of neoliberal feminism in terms of voice. Rottenberg shows how the neoliberal feminism of Sheryl Sandberg maintains that as more ‘women begin entering into high level positions, giving strong and powerful voice to their needs and concerns, conditions for all women will improve’ (Sandberg cited in Rottenberg 2014, p. 425). Within this configuration, we can see how the concept of voice is drastically reduced and truncated: it has come to signify merely the atomised voice of the individual who must by herself muster the self-confidence to speak out; other women, it is suggested, will benefit from the trickle-down effects of an individual ‘finding her voice’ (which is equated with moving into a position of corporate power). What is so insidiously, catastrophically lost through the mobilisation of this powerful discourse is any notion of collective voice. I argue that the ‘voice’ that is offered by the various articulations of neoliberal, popular and post-feminism (Banet-Weiser, Gill and Rottenberg 2019) is therefore constitutionally, perniciously and implicitly anti-­ collectivist (and therefore anti-trade unionist). Indeed, the very notion of voice as it is deployed in contemporary culture has come to signify individual speech (in form) and self-actualisation and self-expression (in content). Arguably, ‘voice’ has come to signify individualised thought and action to the extent that its invocation is now more likely to operate in ideological service of capitalism than against it. But the answer is not to simply recover and redeploy a notion of collective voice from a ‘golden age’ of trade unionism or second-wave feminism or post-war social democracy; such conceptualisations of collective voice risk reverting to normative ideas about ‘good’ or ‘powerful’ rhetoric and communication and excluding those voices that are marked as ‘other’ or that are seen as asocial or anti-collectivist or as destabilising the left, such as black or queer or autistic voices. The challenge, I would suggest, is to reconceive of voice as both collective and also teeming. As I argued in Chap. 1, we should rethink and re-value voice as vulnerable, faltering, misfiring, awkward and messy—as a whole teeming host of different and defective voices.

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The Violence of Voice In her book Authoring Autism, Melanie Yergeau (2018) seeks to queer ideas about rhetoric and communicability; she argues that we should radically reconceive of rhetoric, so that it is capable of including those who are understood as lacking the capacity to communicate, or to persuade, or to give a clear and reliable account of themselves and the world, as autistic people routinely are. Rhetoric is often understood as the very thing that makes us human; but within the frame of the dominant conceptualisations of rhetoricity, autistic people have come to be figured as ‘nonpeople’. Against the enormous but hidden violence that operates through these notions of rhetoricity, Yergeau writes: I believe in autistic futures, in autistic people’s cunning expertise in rhetorical landscapes that would otherwise render us inhuman. I believe in the potentialities of autistic stories and gestures, of neuroqueering what we’ve come to understand as language and being. (Yergeau 2018, p. 5) Yergeau wants to radically reconceive of communication and to value those autistic rhetorical forms that are understood as failures, ruptures and embarrassments: as she puts it, ‘I want a rhetoric that tics, a rhetoric that stims, a rhetoric that faux pas, a rhetoric that averts eye contact’ (p. 31). Yergeau’s work is incredibly important as it reminds us how dominant ideas about ‘good’ communication and public voice are deeply ableist— for those who are neurodivergent, or, as Yergeau has it, neuroqueer, the ways in which we are expected to speak, perform and relate are set up in such a way that renders so many bound to fail. To have the capacity for rhetoric, for the art of persuasion, for meaningful social connection through language, is understood as constitutive of being human. And yet autistic people, Yergeau writes, are imagined as being asocial, arelational and as such inhuman. In these ways there is much overlap with the ways that queer people have been othered as antisocial and lacking futurity, because of an assumed lack of investment in a reproductive futurity and an assumed lack of orientation towards the normative social (Munoz 2009; Edelman 2004). The mandate for communicative clarity and fluency pervades our culture, and awkwardness and temporal disjunctures—pauses, delays, ruptures, embarrassments—are seen as antithetical to ‘good’ communication and democratic voice. It is clear that the dominant norms of communication render ‘other’ those people who are seen to be ‘out of step’ or ‘awkward’; eye contact is routinely insisted upon as a non-negotiable part of

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‘good’ communication, as though those who do not make eye contact are simply choosing not to do so, and so opting out of sociability. This is in itself an exclusionary way of framing democratic or other kinds of socially valued speech; it assumes a universal standard of speech norms that everyone should aspire to and which everyone is equally capable of. It is a hidden form of communicative injustice that implicitly punishes those who do not conform to idealised notions of sociality and speech. Talk has been theorised as fundamental to the functioning of liberal democracies: it is the means by which citizens can participate and form consensus through deliberation (Habermas 1989)—but this assumes that talk is a neutral resource that is not itself produced by and productive of unequal power relations. As I discussed in Chap. 4, silence is routinely construed as the unbearable opposite of voice—in western culture more broadly, but also more specifically in feminism, and also in feminist communication studies. In this way, as postcolonial theorists have shown, non-­ western women who do not seem to speak in a register that we associate with freedom and empowerment are read as being ‘silent’ and therefore as lacking agency. To read subjects as ‘silent’ and as lacking the capacity for voice can therefore be a form of symbolic violence that does more to exacerbate racialised and ableist power relations than to alleviate them. As the multiply disabled artist, poet, writer and activist Mel Baggs shows us with hir1 work, cognitively disabled people and those who are nonspeaking (such as hirself) are understood as ‘non-communicative’ and ‘in their own world’; but this represents the neurotypical audience’s inability or refusal to recognise the ways in which sie is always in communicative interaction with the world around hir (see Baggs n.d.; Baggs 2007). By focusing our attention on and valorising ‘voice’ in ways that perpetually privilege and idealise ‘strong’, fluent and commanding forms of public speech—and to encourage people to ‘speak out’, as if to do so is to grant them the highest form of power available to them—we abdicate ourselves of the responsibility and render ourselves incapable of listening to other kinds of voice. What does it mean to tell those who are already oppressed that they need to be louder, more confident—to learn how to look people in the eye and how to speak up? Why should anybody need to speak in a certain, culturally sanctioned way in order to be accepted as fully human, or to be heard, or believed, or taken seriously? Why can’t we learn

1

 Baggs uses the pronouns hir and sie.

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to listen and communicate in terms that do not perpetually reinscribe dominant, ableist communicative norms as the ideal? As Travis Chi Wing Lau (2019, n.p.) puts it, ‘recognizing and embracing autistic rhetoric is […] a defiant act of crip survival, radically unoriented toward fluent speech and thinking that must be coherent, concise, or clear to be valued.’ I think that these insights from disability studies are crucial for those working in feminist media and cultural studies to engage with; they point to a much more radical and thoroughgoing critique of the ways in which communicative inequalities persist. Simply training women to have more ‘confidence’ when speaking only reconfirms ‘fluent speech’ as both norm and ideal. Rather than seeking to assimilate those whose language use and communicative capacities are ‘out of step’ with white, middle-class, ableist, masculinist norms of communication—and here we might include autistic people, queers, women, people of colour and others—what might it look like to base a politics of voice on the cripping and queering of communication? This requires a more radical conceptualisation of communicative justice that fundamentally interrogates the hegemonic norms and temporalities of speech production. As Joshua St. Pierre, who researches stuttering and communicative disability, argues: Understanding that disabled speakers are oppressed and how to resist such oppression requires an awareness of how ableist norms of speech are embedded within, and constitutive of, our political structures and praxis. For example, how do Arendtian forms of political action and Habermasian norms of consensus—norms that are praised as components of deliberative democracy—render as apolitical certain forms of speech production? More to the point, how do norms of intelligibility embodied in the pairing of speech and reason produce and exclude people who do not speak “rationally” within political spaces? (cited in St. Pierre and Tremain 2015)

As Chap. 7 on mediated political debate in this book began to explore, such questions about what kinds of speech are permissible, and therefore what knowledges might be excluded from public political discussion, have been entirely absent in mainstream efforts to make panel shows more ‘diverse’ or ‘inclusive’; these efforts have been exclusively organised around getting more women to appear and have been accompanied by training schemes to help women develop ‘strong’ and ‘powerful’ media speaking voices (Kay 2014).

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It is taken for granted that speakers on discussion programmes such as Question Time will speak with fluency and mastery and will not ‘waste’ time with stuttering or otherwise disabled speech—even though, for example, 1% of the population has a stutter. As St. Pierre argues elsewhere, stuttering is implicitly perceived as an affront to capitalist virtues of maximal productivity, efficiency and pace (St. Pierre 2013); a stuttering speaker who takes twenty seconds or so longer to utter their words is made to feel that they are intolerably wasting others’ time. Speech correction therapy began to burgeon in the early twentieth century in line with economic changes and a shift to jobs that demanded particular communicative skills; as such, the imperative to be an effective communicator can be understood as an exercise of governmentality that seeks to produce docile ‘biopolitical subjects of communication’ (St. Pierre and St. Pierre 2018, p. 151). In other words, the ways that we are all encouraged to become the most fluent and confident speakers that we possibly can seems like a decisively non-political and eminently benign imperative; but actually, it is tightly bound up with capitalist logics and temporalities. We should also note here that while capitalist culture promises us that it alone can grant us meaningful voice and the universal capacity for self-expression, it is precisely those capitalist logics that violently exclude those without speech or whose speech fails to ‘keep up’. Again, we see the seductive promise of ‘voice’ within the logics of contemporary capitalist culture operating as ideological cover for the violence of its own exclusions. The imperative to ‘have a voice’ in contemporary culture can function less as a promise of democracy, participation and self-actualisation than as a technology of governance and exclusion. To identify the hidden violence within the imperative to ‘have a voice’ is not to dismiss or disavow the central importance of voice and communication within movements for justice: it is to ask us to consider much more carefully how terms that are part of the ‘common sense’ of academic or feminist imaginaries—and which seem innocent and intrinsically positive—might function in inadvertent or insidious ways to (re)produce hierarchies.

Voice and Respair I have argued in this book that we need to confront the irreconcilabilities that lie at the heart of communicative injustice—the cruel ways that contemporary culture offers no pure or painless route to having voice; the fact

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that there are always costs to be reckoned with, and that these costs are much more profound for some than others. To be confronted with the stark and unforgiving reality of a situation can often feel like a jolt or an affront; David Wallace-Wells (2019) opens his book The Uninhabitable Earth, which is about the terrible and terrifying truths about climate change, with the words ‘It is worse, much worse, than you think’. This may seem like an unbearable kind of pessimism that causes us to shrink inwards and backwards in despair; but actually, confronting the true scale and depth of crisis or injustice is both despair inducing and ultimately mobilising. Appreciating the profundity and bleakness of a situation allows us to understand that only genuine, large-scale, structural transformation can make a meaningful difference. The climate justice activist Greta Thunberg points to the value of eschewing optimism when she says ‘I don’t want your hope; I want you to panic. I want you to act as if the house is on fire. Because it is’ (Thunberg 2019). The philosopher Amia Srinivasan points to the fact that while it is broadly accepted that injustice exists in the world, it is actually most probably much worse than we think: she writes that ‘our political arrangements are festering with much unrecognised injustice. In other words, things are even worse than we generally take them to be’ (Srinivasan 2018, p. 136). I would similarly argue that things are even worse than we already take them to be when it comes to questions of voice and justice. As I have argued throughout the book, the insidious, pernicious and slippery ways that people’s voices are constrained, policed and silenced seem to be infinitely adaptable. Things seem to get better; communicative taboos get broken down, but then new ones come along to replace them and to regulate and punish the speech of women and other ‘others’ anew; these new manifestations of ancient misogynistic logics are especially cruel because they are articulated at the same time as we are told that we have never had such parity in voice. In my view, the deep terribleness that we are confronted with is grounds for pessimism but not inaction; I think we might think here of the possibilities of radical despair or galvanising bleakness. Respair is an English word that was used in the 1400s, but that then fell out of use for many centuries. It meant fresh hope, a recovery after a period of despair. Sarah Banet-Weiser and I have argued that the term is especially apt for today’s deeply despairing moment; we suggest that we can think of respair as a kind of feminist hope—a hope that comes out of brokenness and which does not disavow rage or insist on the compulsory mustering of optimism as a precondition for social change. Anger and

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hope are not antithetical to one another, and actually, neither are hope and despair (Kay and Banet-Weiser 2019). Wendy Brown’s work points to this false antithesis between hope as galvanising and despair as immobilising when she argues that rather than hope we need ‘grit, responsibility and determination’ (in Brown and Littler 2018). I have argued throughout this book that the classed, gendered and racialised rules of the communicative game that constitute the contemporary public sphere are set up in such a way that renders most people bound to fail. Communicative injustice is worse, much worse, than we think— but I would suggest that confronting this fact can galvanise us rather than freeze us into inaction and inertia. To point to the possibilities of radical despair is not to say that meaningful change and justice are inevitably out of reach, but rather that they will require a much more thoroughgoing and radical approach and that there will inevitably be pain and loss along the way. The hope for change comes precisely from the insights that despair can grant: capitalism and patriarchy have broken so many of us, but then, we were always going to fail. A respairful approach to communicative injustice is one that confronts the irreconcilabilities and impasses that characterise the gendered public sphere. It recognises that there is no way we can win on the terms as they currently exist. As I have argued, there is no pure or painless route to voice—no outcome that can fully circumvent the communicative traps that patriarchy lays. As such, respair or radical despair points to the irreducible need for collective, teeming voice—for not relying on brave or exceptional individuals to speak out and risk the trolls and backlash and (re)traumatisation on their own; for not mistakenly identifying political action and progress merely in the tingling adrenaline rush that one gets in the presence of a powerful speaker; for not equating the expression of voice with justice itself.

Fucking Up That Which Is Already Fucked Up Melanie Yergeau brilliantly argues that dominant norms of communication are ‘fucked up’ because they are so productive of oppressive power relations. The imperative to ‘find your voice’ and ‘speak out’ that I have discussed throughout the book is implicitly premised on ableist notions of communication: on clear, quick thinking and fluent speech, which are also indispensable for the temporalities of capitalism. For those who are neuroqueer, communicatively ‘out of time’, and for those whose speech marks

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them as ‘other’, the notion of ‘finding your voice’ is thus deeply fucked up. Rather than striving to ‘find your voice’, to ‘put yourself out there’ or to construct an individual ‘branded self’ (Hearn 2008) and to succeed according to these exclusionary norms of communication, what might it look like—to cite Yergeau—‘to fuck up that which is already fucked up’ (2018, p. 6)? If we can think about fucking up fucked-up norms of communication in terms of cripping and queering, then we can also think about how to productively fuck up communication in its classed forms. Working-class people have historically been excluded, marginalised or trivialised through the hegemonic power of dominant communicative modes—which in the UK since the Victorian period have been produced through the norms of Received Pronunciation (RP), hierarchies of value in relation to non-­ regional and regional accents, and propagated through the profoundly unequal education system. The very notion of ‘BBC English’ as synonymous with RP indicates the extent to which certain accents and norms of communication have been bound up with and (re)produced by dominant media cultural forms since the early part of the twentieth century. Steph McGovern, a BBC news presenter with a northern English accent, has noted how her ‘posh’ colleagues—who perform similar roles but speak in much more culturally sanctioned ways—earn much more than she does; she also revealed how an audience member had sent her £20 for ‘correction therapy’ for the ‘terrible affliction’ of her accent (cited in Pidd 2018). For those with ‘non-native’ accents, it is possible to enrol on ‘accent softening’ courses, such as that offered by the City Academy, ‘one of London’s leading creative and performing arts academies’: their website says: If you feel that your accent is holding you back, then our Accent Softening courses are perfect for you. With comprehensive, step-by-step guide to gaining a natural and flexible pronunciation of English, you will learn to speak with confidence and personality […] to develop and improve [your] British RP accent for performance. (City Academy n.d.) Helen Wood (2019) has noted how the notion that the working class have a ‘restricted code’ (drawing on Bernstein 1971) when it comes to language use is taken as evidence of linguistic lack or deficit—but then asks what it might look like to embrace this lack of an ‘elaborated code’: to get to the point, to eschew middle-class elaboration and obfuscation, and to give no fucks could be a way of clarifying and naming the cause of injustice, as well as disrupting middle-class, exclusionary norms of communication.

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Wood speculatively names this impulse as ‘irreverent rage’ and considers how ‘truncated’ language might offer some grounds for resistance: “Fuck you” is an embodied, transgressive response that is truncated and catchy in the current hyper-affective social media climate, and its use of taboo perhaps sets in motion the urges to resist the regulatory norms that are meant to keep us in our place. (Wood 2019, p. 610)

These represent two potentially quite different strategies for fucking up that which is already fucked up. We might see how one strategy calls for the accommodation of more awkwardness, digression, non-linearity and communicative weirdness, as well as ‘brain fog’ (Chen 2014) and ‘spaciness’, whereas the other calls for more directness, for catchiness, for getting to the point, for rhetorical clarity and simplicity rather than obfuscation. These strategies are not necessarily equivalent; they do not obviously cohere into a codifiable strategy for feminist intervention into communicative norms. But what they do point towards are the multiple ways in which we might reconceive of communicative justice—there is no ‘right way’ or mandate for intervention. The ways in which people and groups are denied communicative justice are varied, complex and uneven. As such, any approach to communicative injustice must be intersectional and contextual and must welcome a whole, teeming host of different voices that are otherwise marked as deviant or defective: screechy, shy, nagging, brusque, shrill, raucous, stuttering, ticcing, nonverbal, improper, grammatically incorrect, gobby, too loud, too quiet, too confident, too weak—and so on and so on. The approach that I have taken throughout the book has built on and benefitted from feminist work that seeks to subvert—or ‘fuck up’—the logics of capitalism and patriarchy by reclaiming and repurposing the ways that women and other ‘others’ have been cast within them. I have sought to contribute to a feminist politics that is at once a project of ‘dismantling’ and of ‘building’ (Ahmed 2017) —to ‘fuck up’, in these terms, should not be seen as an act of destruction but one of generation. In this way I follow Ahmed’s notion of the feminist killjoy—that is, she who refuses to perform ‘happiness’ according to the logics of heteropatriarchy, she who kills joy, but who uses her killjoy status in a collective project of world-making. This impulse to simultaneously dismantle and build the world can also be found in the anti-naturalist work of xenofeminists and trans and queer activists—those who want to disrupt futurities that are based on

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heteronormative reproduction, not to foreclose or reject the future, but in order to imagine more expansive relationships based on kinship and collective joy (Laboria Cuboniks 2015; Hester 2018; Haraway 2016). Sophie Lewis (2019) has written of the pressing need to abolish the family—but ‘abolition’ should not be understood here as a form of destruction, but rather as a way to set forth a proliferation of relationships of care. Sarah Sharma’s notion (2019) of a ‘feminism of the broken machine’ is a call for feminists to co-opt the status of faulty, misfiring machines that has been designated to them by misogynists—and she argues that we should rethink the possibilities of breakdown because it can be ‘world-disclosing’. This is all to say that killing joy, cracking up, and breaking down can be world-making, world-disclosing, and that these things can entail proliferations of different kinds of socialities and new forms of abundance and care. To fuck-up and fail when this is on patriarchy’s fucked-up terms can be reconceived as a way of illuminating injustice and imagining alternatives. As Jack Halberstam (2011, p.  4) argues, ‘from the perspective of feminism, failure has often been a better bet than success […] gender failure often means being relieved of the pressure to live up to patriarchal ideals.’ If our voices are—in patriarchy’s terms—deficient, faulty, broken, out of step, irrational, unreliable—then perhaps we have little to lose. Rather than seek to develop ‘strong’ voices and become ‘effective’ speakers, what would it mean to live and dwell and speak with broken voices—to break down the circuits of communication—to fuck them up?

References Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Baggs, Mel. 2007. In My Language. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= JnylM1hI2jc&t=3s ———. n.d.. https://ballastexistenz.wordpress.com/ Banet-Weiser, Sarah, Rosalind Gill, and Catherine Rottenberg. 2019. Postfeminism, Popular Feminism and Neoliberal Feminism? Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg in Conversation. Feminist Theory. Online First. Bernstein, Basil. 1971. Class, Codes and Control: Theoretical Studies Towards a Sociology of Language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Brown, Wendy, and Jo Littler. 2018. Interview: Where the Fires Are. Soundings 68: 14–25. Chen, Mel Y. 2014. Brain Fog: The Race for Cripistemology. Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 8 (2): 171–184. City Academy. n.d.

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Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press. Habermas, Jurgen. 1989/1964. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence. London: Polity Press. Halberstam, Judith/Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Hearn, A. 2008. Meat, Mask, Burden: Probing the Contours of the Branded ‘Self’. Journal of Consumer Culture 8 (2): 197–217. Hester, Helen. 2018. Xenofeminism. London: Polity. Kay, Jilly Boyce. 2014. “Media Virgins vs. Political Lions”: Historicising the Gender Politics of Question Time. In Cinema, Television and History: New Approaches, ed. Laura Mee and Johnny Walker, 182–199. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Kay, Jilly Boyce, and Sarah Banet-Weiser. 2019. Feminist Anger and Feminist Respair. Feminist Media Studies 19 (4): 603–609. Laboria Cuboniks. 2015. Xenofeminist Manifesto. London: Verso. Lau, Travis Chi Wing. 2019. The Poetics of Autism. LA Review of Books, May 2. Available at: https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-poetics-of-autism/ Lewis, Sophie. 2019. Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family. London: Verso. Lorde, Audre. 2017. Your Silence Will Not Protect You. New York: Silver Press. Munoz, Jose Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Pidd, Helen. 2018. BBC’s Steph McGovern Says She Would Earn More If She Was Posher. Guardian, February 25. https://www.theguardian.com/ media/2018/feb/25/bbcs-steph-mcgovern-says-she-would-earn-more-ifshe-was-posher Rottenberg, Catherine. 2014. The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism. Cultural Studies 28 (3): 418–437. ———. 2018. The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sharma, Sarah. 2019. A Feminism for the Broken Machine. Talk Given at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, March 29. Srinivasan, Amia. 2018. The Aptness of Anger. The Journal of Political Philosophy 26 (2): 123–144. St. Pierre, Joshua. 2013. The Construction of the Disabled Speaker: Locating Stuttering in Disability Studies. In Literature, Speech Disorders, and Disability: Talking Normal, ed. Christopher Eagle. London/New York: Routledge. St. Pierre, Joshua and Charis St. Pierre. 2018. Governing the Voice: A Critical History of Speech-Language Pathology. Foucault Studies 24: 151–184 (Foucauldian Spaces).

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St. Pierre, Joshua, and Shelley Tremain. 2015. Dialogues on Disability Interview. Discrimination and Disadvantage, October 21. Available at: https://www.philosophycommons.typepad.com/disability_and_disadvanta/2015/10/dialogues-on-disability-shelley-tremain-interviews-joshua-st-pierre.html Thunberg, Greta. 2019. No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference. London: Penguin. Tolentino, Jia. 2018. One Year of #MeToo: What Women’s Speech Is Still Not Allowed to Do. The New Yorker, October 10. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/one-year-of-metoo-what-womens-speechis-still-not-allowed-to-do Wallace-Wells, David. 2019. The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future. London: Allen Lane. Wood, Helen. 2019. Fuck the Patriarchy: Towards an Intersectional Politics of Irreverent Rage. Feminist Media Studies 19 (4): 609–615. Yergeau, Melanie. 2018. Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness. Durham: Duke University Press.

Index1

NUMBERS, AND SYMBOLS #MeToo, 11 A Abbott, Diane, 22 Abdel-Magied, Yassmin, 20 Ableism, 161 Abortion, 32, 160 Academia, 15 Accent, 181 Advertisements, 116 Afghanistan, 160 Agora, 153 Ahmed, Sara, 43 Aladdin, 32 Alcoff, Linda, 58 Alt-right, 20 American Crime Story, 63 Amnesty International, 150 Ancient Greek, 34 Ancient Rome, 5 Androcentricism, 113

Anger, 18 Anzac Day, 90 The Apprentice, 88 Arendt, Hannah, 29 Ashley, April, 141 Associated Television (ATV), 108 Athena, 14 Atkins, Bowman, 131 Attwood, Margaret, 31 Austerity, 164 Australia Broadcast Corporation (ABC), 90 Autistic rhetoric, 167, 177 Awkwardness, 175 Ayling, Sue, 158 B Backlash, 115 ‘Bad apple’ approach, 40 Baggs, Mel, 176 Baldwin, James, 13 Banet-Weiser, Sarah, 5

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 J. B. Kay, Gender, Media and Voice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47287-0

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INDEX

BBC, 149 BBC Radio 4, 29 BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, 66 Beard, Mary, 3 Benjamin, Walter, 14 Berlant, Lauren, 58 Berry, Mary, 139 Beyoncé, 32 Bicquelet, Aude, 155 Big Think, 128 Black feminist theory, 173 Blackman, Kirsty, 164 Black Women’s Action Committee in the Black Unity and Freedom Party, 39 Borrett, Giles, 107 Bourdieu, Pierre, 155 Boyd, D., 144 Boyle, Karen, 67 Brain fog, 182 Braine, John, 108 Bratich, Jack, 6 Brexit, 31n3 British Film Institute (BFI), 108 British Houses of Parliament, 154 Brown, Wendy, 19, 40 Bruce, Fiona, 149 Brunsdon, Charlotte, 133 Burke, Tarana, 36 C Callaghan, Jim, 102 Cambridge Dictionary, 128 Cameron, Deborah, 2 Capitalism, 114 Capitalist, 4 Carceral feminism, 38 Carpignano, Paolo, 135 Cat and Mouse Act, 141 Chalmers, Judith, 139 Charisma, 15

Chemaly, Soraya, 32 Chen, Mel Y., 16 Churchill, Winston, 13 Class, 114 Climate change, 28 The Clinton Affair, 65 Clinton, Bill, 61 Clinton, Hillary, 3, 13, 101 Coates, Jennifer, 132 Coleman, Stephen, 154 Collective care, 141 Collective voice, 174 Communicative ethos, 104 Communicative injustice, 8 Communicative terrain, 172 Communities of Practice, 154 Confidence cult(ure), 7 Consciousness-raising (CR), 38 Consent, 63 Conservative Party, 152 Context collapse, 144 Cooper, Brittney, 32 Corbyn, Jeremy, 150 Corri, Adrienne, 108, 117 Cosmopolitan, 32 Cottle, Simon, 153 Couldry, Nick, 9 Coulter, Ann, 88 Counter-publics, 21 Cultural studies, 173 Cutts, Patricia, 108 D Daily Express, 107 Davies, William, 48 Dean, Jodi, 10 Dellesaga, Cheryl, 128 Department of Foreign Affairs (DFAT), 91 Derbyshire Peak District, 85

 INDEX 

Digital Spy, 127 Dimbleby, David, 149 Disability studies, 17 Disney, 32 Dobson, Amy Shields, 82 Documentary television, 108 Domestic Abuse Bill, 160 Domestic life, 105 Dorset, 85 Dowd, Maureen, 62 The Drudge Report, 62 Ducking stool, 1 Duncan, Sylvia, 140 E Echo, 2 Economy of visibility, 144 Eddo-Lodge, Renni, 94 Elizabeth I, 14 Elle, 32 Emre, Merve, 16 Enlai, Zhou, 49 Equality, 27 Ethic of care, 141 Euthanasia, 160 Eye contact, 167 F Facebook, 28 Fair Play For Women, 97 Fake news, 88 Farris, Sara, 19, 88 Fawcett Society, 108 Federici, Silvia, 4 Feminine mystique, 130 Feminism, 114 Feminist Archive North, 134 Feminist media, 173 Feminist snap, 121 Femonationalism, 19

Figes, Eva, 108 Find your voice, 180 Fisher, Mark, 6 Flake, Jeff, 46 Fluent speech, 180 Fookes, Janet, 159 Foot, Michael, 162 Ford, Christine Blasey, 45 Fox News, 64, 101 Fraser, Nancy, 57 Freedland, Jonathan, 153 French Revolution, 49 Friedan, Betty, 130 Fuck, 95 Fucking up, 181 Furies, 35 G Gadsby, Hannah, 19, 56 Gammon, 31 Gaslighting, 92 Geller, Pamela, 88 Giddens, Anthony, 123 Gilets jaunes, 96 Gill, Rosalind, 5 Gillard, Julia, 13–14 Gilligan, Carol, 132 Ging, Debbie, 29 Glenn, Cheryl, 13 Good Afternoon!, 21 Good Girl, 32 Good Housekeeping, 165 Google, 55 Gossip, 4, 21, 128 Graham, Lindsay, 45 Gray, Laura, 58 Greek Chorus, 154 Greer, Germaine, 108 ‘Grey areas’ of sexual abuse, 63 Guardian, 29

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INDEX

H Habermasian notions of the public sphere, 152 Haire, Bridget, 48 Halberstam, Jack, 183 Handmaid’s Tale, 31 Haraway, Donna, 18 Hardy, Thomas, 85 HBO series Girls, 82 Hearings for the US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, 45 He For She, 14 Hindu nationalists, 28 Hitler, Adolf, 13 Hobson, Dorothy, 133 Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 28 Hope Not Hate, 88 Hopkins, Katie, 19 Humiliation, 29 Hutchby, Ian, 103 I Illouz, Eva, 74 I Love Dick, 32 Incel, 29 Interlopers, 155 Intersectional, 95 Iraq war, 160 Ironside, Virginia, 119 Irreconcilabilities, 61, 93, 136 Isaacs, Jeremy, 139 Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), 28 ITV, 108 IVF, 160 J Janakiram, Emily, 145 Jessica Jones, 32 Jill (Tweedie), 140 Johnson, Boris, 153

Jonathan Dimbleby, 157 Joshua St. Pierre, 177 K Karpf, Anne, 2 Kennedy, John F., 13 Kenny, Mary, 108 Keynesian Economic Theory, 127 Khan, Sadiq, 88 Killjoy, 83 Kimmel, Michael, 28 King Martin Luther, Jr., 13, 166 Kitzinger, Sheila, 108 L Labour, 150 Labour MPs Edward Bishop, 108 Lakoff, Robin, 94 Land enclosures, 4 Lau, Travis Chi Wing, 177 Lauren Southern, 88 Left behind, 30 Left-wing politics, 150 Leominster, 1 Leslie, Ann, 159 Lewinsky, Monica, 19, 55 Lewis, Sophie, 183 Little Mermaid, 2 Littler, Jo, 82 Loose Women, 21, 127 Lorde, Audre, 35 Lunsford, Andrea A., 13 M MacKinnon, Catherine, 45 MacSween, Prue, 90–91 Madonna-whore dichotomy, 62 Malhotra, Sheena, 86 Manosphere, 88 Manterrupted, 102

 INDEX 

Marie Claire, 13 Marwick, Alice E., 144 Mary Berry, 139 Masciarotte, Gloria-Jean, 122 Maskowitz, Peter, 71 Match of the Day, 120 Maxwell, Barbara, 158n2 May, Theresa, 164 McDonald, Mark, 157 McGovern, Steph, 181 McLaughlin, Lisa, 136 McNair, Brian, 152 Mellencamp, Patricia, 111 Mendes, Kaitlynn, 137 Menon, Anand, 164 Meritocracy, 151 MeTooRising, 55 Michelmore, Cliff, 159 Microphones, 107 Milano, Alyssa, 36 Millett, Kate, 43 Mishra, Pankaj, 27 Misogynoir, 151 Mitchell, Juliet, 109 Modernity, 27 Modleski, Tania, 133 Money shot, 156 Monica in Black and White, 66 Mooney, Bel, 158 Moore, Charles, 102 Moorti, Sujata, 111 Morgan, Elaine, 108 Morgan, Sue, 131 Morley, David, 106 Morris, Meaghan, 120 Morton, Andrew, 66 Mumsnet, 97 Murray, Jenni, 66 N Nag, 20 Nagging wife, 20, 102

Nair, Yasmin, 19, 71 Nanette, 19 National Assistance, 111 National Women’s Liberation Conference, 134 Neoliberal, 5 Neoliberal feminism, 173 Netflix, 68 Neurodivergent, 17 Neuroqueer, 175 Neurotypical, 167 New left, 114 Newsnight, 149 New York Times, 45 NHS, 160 Nicholson, Mavis, 140 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 27 No Man’s Land, 20, 103 Novara Media, 150 Nussbaum, Martha C., 34 O Oakeshott, Isabel, 164 Oakley, Ann, 108 Obama, Barack, 101 O’Barr, William, 131 O’Brien, Edna, 162 Observer, 120 O’Neill, Brendan, 165 Operation Black Vote, 150 Orgad, Shani, 5 Overhearing’ audience, 115 P Pankhurst, Emmeline, 13 Parkinson, Mary, 140 Pebble Mill at One, 108 Penny, Laurie, 43 Phipps, Alison, 18, 37 Pipes, Jenny, 1 Politics of recognition, 113

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INDEX

Politics of redistribution, 113 Popular feminism, 5 Populism, 89 Post-feminist, 12 Post-truth, 88 Powerless language, 132 Q Queensland’s Young Australian, 91 Question Time, 3 The Quiet Woman, 85 R Racism, 151 Radical despair, 179 Radio, 107 Rayner, Claire, 108 Recognition, 73, 112 Redistributive justice, 74 Remembrance Day, 90 Research Excellence Framework, 15 Respair, 22, 179 Ressentiment, 18, 27 Robin Day, 159 Rodas, Julia Miele, 18 Rogers, Mister, 13 Roman Stoics, 35 Rook, Jean, 119 Rosenberg, Caroll Smith-, 130 Ross, Karen, 154 Rottenberg, Catherine, 6 Rowbotham, Sheila, 108 Rowe, Aimee Carrillo, 86 Rudov, Marc, 101 Rukeyser, Muriel, 55 S Sandberg, Sheryl, 6 Sanín, Juliana Restrepo, 18, 38

Sarah Childs, 155 Savigny, Heather, 47 Scales, Prunella, 108 Scannell, Paddy, 103 Schwartz, Alexandra, 45 Scold’s bridle, 2 Scott, Joan Walloch, 14 Scottish National Party (SNP), 164 Second-wave feminism, 102 Seear, Baroness, 108 Segal, Lynn, 134 Seiter, Ellen, 133 Shah, Sami, 92 Shakespeare, William, 27 Sharma, Sarah, 183 Shattuc, Jane, 112 Shaw, Sylvia, 155 Shitty Media Men, 48 Short, Clare, 154 Short, Renee, 108 Shrew magazine, 122 Shrill, 107 Shriver, Lionel, 91 Silence, 9 Silence-breaking, 67 The Silent Woman Inn, 85 Sissons, Peter, 157 Sisterhood and After Research Team, 39 Smile, 122 Smith, Adam, 35 Soap opera, 133 Sociability, 103 Socialist, 113, 114 Socialist-feminists, 114 Socrates, 13, 35 Speaking bitterness, 122 Speech correction therapy, 178 Spender, Dale, 4, 129 Sreberny-Mohammadi, Annabelle, 154 Srinivasan, Amia, 35 Stacey, Jackie, 58

 INDEX 

Stewart, Rory, 164 Stroppy Cow Records, 122 Studio debate, 108 Stuttering, 167, 177 Subaltern, 86 The Suffragette, 141 T Talbot, Mary, 2 Tannen, Deborah, 121 Taylor, Teddy, 162 Tea Party, 28 TED talk, 66 Television talk shows, 6 Thames Television, 138 Thatcher, Margaret, 102 Thunberg, Greta, 179 Tolentino, Jia, 47 Tolson, Andrew, 103 Trade unionism, 174 Traister, Rebecca, 32 Transphobic, 97 Transwomen, 97 Trauma, 19 Trauma narratives, 41 Traumatised voice, 19, 56 Travis Chi Wing Lau, 17 Trump, Donald, 28 Truth, Sojourner, 13 Twitter, 28 U Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, 81 V Vanity Fair, 66 Virago, 122 Vox, 63

193

W Wallace-Wells, David, 179 Walters, Barbara, 66 Warlock, Reverend Derek, 162 Warren, Elizabeth, 107 Watkins, Susan, 11, 37 Watson, Emma, 14, 32 Weinstein, Harvey, 36 Weldon, Fay, 108 Welter, Barbara, 130 White, middle-class women, 151 White women, 115 Witches, 5 Witch-hunt, 84 Women’s culture, 132 Women’s genres, 132 Women’s language, 132 Women’s liberation movement, 141 Women’s Marches, 32 Women’s programme, 139 Women’s Programming Unit, 139 Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), 141 Women’s talk, 21 Wood, Helen, 3 Workforce, 110 World War I, 90 World War II, 107 Worsthorne, Peregrine, 108 Wounded attachments, 41 X Xenofeminists, 182 Y Yergeau, Melanie, 87 YouTube, 28