Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity

316 Pages·2014·1.699 MB·English

by  Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker (eds.)

GenderinG the recession

GenderinG
the
Media and Culture in an
Age of Austerity
recession
Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, editors
Duke University Press / Durham and London / 2014
© 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper ♾
Typeset in Quadraat and Meta by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Gendering the recession : media and culture in an age of austerity /
Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, editors.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5687-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5696-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Sex role—Economic aspects. 2. Global Financial Crisis, 2008–
2009. 3. Women—Employment. 4. Women in development. 
i. Negra, Diane, 1966– ii. Tasker, Yvonne, 1964–
hq1075.g463 2014
331.4—dc23 2013042832
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments / vii
introduction. Gender and Recessionary Culture / 1
Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker
one. Escaping the Recession? The New Vitality of the Woman Worker / 31
Suzanne Leonard
two. “Latina Wisdom” in “Postrace” Recession Media / 59
Isabel Molina- Guzmán
three. “We Are All Workers”: Economic Crisis, Masculinity,
and the American Working Class / 81
Sarah Banet- Weiser
Four. What Julia Knew: Domestic Labor in the Recession-E ra
Chick Flick / 107
Pamela Thoma
Five. Dressed for Economic Distress: Blogging and the “New”
Pleasures of Fashion / 136
Elizabeth Nathanson
six. The (Re)possession of the American Home: Negative Equity,
Gender Inequality, and the Housing Crisis Horror Story / 161
Tim Snelson
seven. House and Home: Structuring Absences in
Post–Celtic Tiger Documentary / 181
Sinéad Molony
eight. “Stuck between Meanings”: Recession- Era Print
Fictions of Crisis Masculinity / 203
Hamilton Carroll
nine. Fairy Jobmother to the Rescue: Postfeminism and
the Recessionary Cultures of Reality tv / 223
Hannah Hamad
ten. How Long Can the Party Last? Gendering the
European Crisis on Reality tv / 246
Anikó Imre
bibliogrAphy / 273 contributors / 299 index / 303
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors would like to thank Shelley Cobb, Monica Cullinan of the James
Joyce Library at University College Dublin, Nick Daly, Tamara Falicov, Paula
Gilligan, Debbie Ging, Aisling Jackman, Karen Jackman, Liam Kennedy and
the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin,
Anthony McIntyre, Gerardine Meaney and the ucd Humanities Institute,
Moya Luckett, Christopher Holmes Smith, Ciaran Toner, and Erica Wetter.
For help in assembling the final manuscript we particularly thank Elizabeth
Rawitsch and Rachel Hall. Working with Courtney Berger, Liz Smith, Heather
Hensley, and Willa Armstrong at Duke University Press has been a pleasure.
The editors gratefully acknowledge the permission of Oxford University
Press to partially reprint material by Sarah Banet- Weiser first published in
Aftermath: The Cultures of the Economic Crisis, edited by Manuel Castells, João Ca-
raça, and Gustavo Cardoso.

INTRODUCTION DIANE NEGRA AND YVONNE TASKER
Gender and Recessionary Culture
After a decade and a half of frenetic economic activity in the West, now often
remembered as a boom period, the semicollapse of the global financial sys-
tem in 2007–8 inaugurated a set of profound cultural shifts. During the boom
the celebration of a market mind- set overarching all aspects of life coincided
with an intensification of polarized gender norming that we and others have
written about under the aegis of postfeminism. Postfeminist culture’s key
tropes—a preoccupation with self- fashioning and the makeover; women’s
seeming “choice” not to occupy high-s tatus public roles; the celebration of
sexual expression and affluent femininities—are enabled by the optimism
and opportunity of prosperity (or the perception of it). Framed by what com-
mentators have dubbed the Great Recession, this book asks whether and to
what extent the conceptual and theoretical accounts of gender developed in
an earlier and distinctly different economic era still apply.
While fields ranging from economics to sociology to equality studies
have much to contribute in analyzing the recession’s social character, media
studies offers a unique disciplinary pathway for interpreting recession cul-
ture given its focus on the analysis of collective symbolic environments that
hold enormous sway in shaping public views. Indeed, we contend here that
our economic lives are both shaped by and embedded within popular and rep-
resentational culture. As a consequence, any account of the economic con-
ditions of the global recession will be incomplete without taking into con-