Digital Feeling

174 Pages·2023·3.458 MB·English

by  Adrienne Evans, Sarah Riley

Digital Feeling
Adrienne Evans · Sarah Riley
Digital Feeling
“Digital Feeling is innovative, theoretically rich and timely. This book takes schol-
arship on postfeminist media cultures into new directions by considering postfemi-
nism as a structure of feeling. Using diverse and engaging case studies, this book
taps into a digital culture that is highly oriented towards feelings, vibes and moods.”
—Clare Southerton, Lecturer in Digital Technology and Pedagogy,
La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
Adrienne Evans • Sarah Riley
Digital Feeling
Adrienne Evans Sarah Riley
Centre for Postdigital Cultures School of Psychology
Coventry University Massey University
Coventry, UK Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand
ISBN 978-3-031-23561-0 ISBN 978-3-031-23562-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23562-7
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A
cknowledgements
We want to express how grateful we are to Rosalind Gill and Angela
McRobbie. So much of our thinking starts with their generative work and
is the soul of our own feeling and writing.
We would also like to thank the editors of New Sporting Femininities:
Embodied Politics in Postfeminist Times, Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking
Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism and Digital Intimate Publics and Social
Media, who have given us room to develop some of our earlier thoughts
on some of the subjects covered in this book, especially in Chaps. 3,
4 and 5.
We thank Adrienne’s colleagues in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures
at Coventry University, especially Janneke Adema, Lindsay Balfour,
Miriam De Rosa, Gary Hall, Mel Jordan, Marcus Maloney, Sarah Merry
and Elpida Prasopoulou, for helping create generous spaces to explore the
ideas in this book; and Francien Broekhuizen, Silvia Diaz-Fernandez,
Poppy Wilde, Virginia Yiqing Yang and Esme Spurling for all the fascinat-
ing conversations. Thanks also to the international community of the
AHRC Postdigital Intimacies Network that Adrienne co-organises with
Jessica Ringrose, and which includes so many inspirational colleagues.
Finally, we would like to thank our family, friends and partners; plus,
Adrienne’s two dogs for their love and support; and, also, Dan the Cat,
whose own signature style of grumpiness is very much missed and whose
companionship was the original inspiration behind Chap. 6.
v
c
ontents
1 Postfeminist Sensibility as a Structure of Feeling 1
2 Gender, Race, Nation … and Barbie Savior 27
3 Sweat Is Just Fat Crying 55
4 Making-Up Enterprising Selves 87
5 Hot Men on the Commute 115
6 Cute! Cats! Intimacies of the Internet 139
7 Epilogue: Digital Feeling 163
Index 169
vii
CHAPTER 1
Postfeminist Sensibility as a Structure
of Feeling
A Postfeminist sensibility
In this book, we locate much of our discussion of subjectivity in digital
culture within the context of a postfeminist sensibility. A postfeminist sen-
sibility was described in Rosalind Gill’s (2007) pivotal work as having sev-
eral elements: a shift from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification; a
transformation ethic, where the self is constantly worked on; femininity as
a bodily property; individualism, choice and empowerment understood
through consumerist logics; a deepening of self-surveillance, self-
monitoring and self-disciplining; and a return of biological essentialist
arguments about the ‘nature’ of gender. These elements were contextual-
ised within a cultural discourse of gender equality as achieved and thus any
residual sexism should be understood as playful and ironic (Gill, 2007).
Such sense-making suggested that feminism was no longer needed and
could withdraw to “a retirement home in an unfashionable rundown holi-
day resort” (McRobbie, 2004, p. 512).
But within this celebratory context, some feminist analysts saw instead
the flourishing of new forms of gender power. They associated a postfemi-
nist sensibility with a ‘re-traditionalisation’ of gender, whereby women
were encouraged to participate in traditional gender practices such as work-
ing on the self to look heterosexually attractive, but—with an added post-
feminist twist—to understand this work as driven by their individual choice
as empowered women and underpinned by their biological hardwiring
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2023
A. Evans, S. Riley, Digital Feeling,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23562-7_1
2 A. EVANS AND S. RILEY
(e.g. McRobbie, 2009, 2020). This re-constitution of traditional female
gender practices as modern and empowering was seen as a response to a
liberal feminist agenda that called for greater freedoms and equality in rela-
tion to women’s pay, employment, education, motherhood, public partici-
pation and domestic labour. Such an agenda held the potential for radical
social change, a potential reduced by a postfeminist sensibility that offered
women a sense of empowerment through an individualism that made
redundant collective, political activism for social change.
Postfeminism offered women new subjectivities that allowed them to
understand themselves as empowered through particular practices and
associated sense-making (e.g. beauty work as a pleasurable choice).
Drawing on Foucault (1975), in opening up possibilities to understand
oneself in particular ways, postfeminist sensibility is a form of disciplinary
power. Postfeminist sensibility is also an example of a new form of post-
truth non-linear power (Cosentino, 2020; Riley, Evans & Robson 2019,
Riley et al., 2022). Non-linear power works through complexity and con-
tradiction, whereby the subsequent confusion and uncertainty creates in
people a desire for the stability of past certainties, such as those offered by
traditional gender roles. One example of complexity and contradiction in
postfeminist sensibility is the bringing together of individual choice and
biological essentialism. The contradiction that women are both agentically
choiceful and driven by their biological hardwiring creates the context
where, for example, the recent fashion for marriage (which feminists had
previously critiqued as a patriarchal institution) is understood as evidence
of women’s ‘natural’ drives to be married, since in an apparently free and
equal society women choose marriage (Broekhuizen, 2020). The contra-
dictory logic that women’s desires for marriage are both their individual
choice and hardwired also helps make the idea that women are choosing
marriage a logical argument, since whatever ‘side’ you take (biology or
individual choice) justifies marriage and makes invisible or illogical any
consideration of socialisation or social pressure (thus also making it illogi-
cal to argue for social or cultural change).
Understanding that new forms of power work through complexity and
contradiction is also helpful for analysts interested in contemporary subjec-
tivities. Typically, analysts look for coherent cultural or psychological pat-
terns and practices, but with this approach we miss the way postfeminist
sensibility works through ambiguity, contradictions and disparity. The bril-
liance of Gill’s formulation of a postfeminist sensibility, then, has been in
allowing analysts to recognise this set of fluid and disparate elements to be
1 POSTFEMINIST SENSIBILITY AS A STRUCTURE OF FEELING 3
interconnected, and to understand that complexity and contradiction is in
part how it works to maintain unequal gender power relations through a
language of freedom, choice, individualism and empowerment (Riley
et al., 2017).
This language of freedom, choice, individualism and empowerment is
also folded into consumerism. For example, the socio-historic idea that
women still desire and prioritise marriage and motherhood over other
aspects of their lives is given a postfeminist twist when this (biological)
desire is fulfilled through making free, individual, consumer choices regard-
ing their means of conception (e.g. IVF, egg freezing), choice of different
parenting styles (see, e.g., the range of self-help guides from Battle Hymn
of the Tiger Mother (Chua, 2011) to The Attachment Parenting Book (Sears
& Sears, 2001)) and consumer choice when decorating the home and the
nursery, evident across a range of Pinterest and Instagram groups/accounts
(see Rossie, 2018; Riley, Evans & Robson, 2019). In this example, two
seemingly contradictory discourses—biological essentialism and individual
choice—work in tandem, maintaining both women-as-agentic-economic
consumer and woman-as-natural-mother, both working together to secure
economic participation and women’s ‘second shift’ at home.
The interconnections between consumerism and postfeminism are
enabled, in part, by the “profound relation between neoliberal ideologies
and postfeminism” (Gill, 2007, p.163). Neoliberalism is largely taken to
mean an economic doctrine of free market capitalism that promotes mar-
ket competition and entrepreneurialism. Neoliberalism is important for
researchers interested in subjectivity because there is a psychological ele-
ment to such free market capitalism, whereby citizen subjects are hailed as
highly individualistic, consumer-oriented, self-reliant and productive, able
to treat the self as a reflective project. In this sense-making, the self is a
‘company of one’, to be managed as though the self was in a market,
including understanding the self through the logics of advertising, promo-
tion, exchange and competition (Banet-Weiser, 2012; Bowsher, 2019;
Brown, 2015; Dardot & Laval, 2014; McGuigan, 2013; Read, 2009;
Rose, 1996). Neoliberal subjectivities are seen in digital culture, where
individuals are required to participate in forms of self-branding, especially
in social media, online forms of dating and ‘hook up’ culture, and in rela-
tion to employment, including the ‘gig’ economy and other precarious
digital forms of labour (Woodcock & Graham, 2020; Duffy & Hund,
2015; Pruchniewska, 2018; Illouz, 2007, see also Chap. 4 in this book).
4 A. EVANS AND S. RILEY
Gill (2016) describes a postfeminist sensibility as “a patterned yet con-
tradictory sensibility connected to other dominant ideologies (such as indi-
vidualism and neoliberalism)” (p. 621). In this book, we draw on this
description to understand postfeminism as a gendered form of neoliberal-
ism, where neoliberal subjectivity and constructions of ideal femininity
meet at an important historical intersection (Evans & Riley, 2014; Gill,
2008, 2017). Making the association between postfeminism and neoliber-
alism is important for helping us situate the reproduction of inequalities,
since both make invisible the way social problems are often the result of
long-lasting inequalities embedded in structures of class, race, ethnicity,
sexuality and so on. Postfeminism, as a gendered form of neoliberalism,
offers personal, often consumer-oriented, solutions to inequalities emerg-
ing from the continuation of inequality based on social structures (Brown,
2015; Gill, 2008, 2017; Riley, Evans & Robson, 2019). We also under-
stand both neoliberalism and postfeminism as adaptable and fluid tech-
nologies. Drawing on Ong’s (2007) analysis of neoliberalism as a “mobile
technology”, co-existing “with other political rationalities” (p.4), we see
postfeminism and neoliberalism as co-existing rationalities that reproduce
themselves at various sites across the globe by adapting to local contexts,
with their attendant histories, cultures and political specificities.
In this book, we draw on a body of work that has been mapping post-
feminism sensibility as it emerges in digital culture. Over a decade of
research on postfeminist sensibility has developed the concept, both in
terms of scholarship for thinking about a postfeminist sensibility and in
tracking it as it adapts across social/cultural change and geopolitical and
economic spaces. Here, we use the original framework of postfeminist sen-
sibility described above, since it offers important base-points for thinking
about postfeminism (and neoliberalism) and we also draw on more recent
discussions of postfeminist sensibility that have focused on three key issues.
These are: first, the shaping of postfeminist sensibility in digital flows and
through online culture; second, a new attention to the role of emotion and
affect in the way postfeminist sensibility saturates contemporary culture;
and, third, the resurgence of feminist activity, including ‘popular’ or ‘neo-
liberal’ feminism, which further complicates what is meant by a ‘postfemi-
nist sensibility’. We turn to each of these areas below.