ICA presents Hello, and welcome to Feminist Networks and the Conjuncture, a podcast brought to you by the International Communication Association. My name is Sarah Banet-Weiser and I am a joint professor in the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Over the course of this podcast series, I have been talking to amazing feminist scholars about this current moment of social crisis — thinking through what this crisis means for feminism and the possibility for social change. In this episode, I'll be talking to my wonderful guests, Francesca Sobande and Jilly Kay about femme-vertising and capitalism, pink pill feminism, and the history of silencing women's voices in public spaces.
Hi everyone. I am so thrilled to have Dr. Francesca Sobande and Dr. Jilly Boyce Kay here today on the podcast. I'm going to introduce them. First of all, Dr. Francesca Sobande is a lecturer in Digital Media Studies at Cardiff University in Wales. She's also the communications co-chair of the international Race and the Marketplace research network. And her work broadly explores the power and politics of media in the marketplace, particularly by focusing on digital remix culture, Black diaspora and archives, feminism, creative work, pop culture, and devolved nations. Dr. Sobande is the author of the book The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain and she is co-editor with Akwugo Emejulu of To Exist is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe. Her forthcoming work includes the book Black Oot Here: Black Lives in Scotland, co-authored with Layla-Roxanne Hill, and she's also engaging in more writing on the fraught relationship between consumer culture, digital culture and social justice. So welcome, Francesca.
Thank you. I'm so delighted to be here and looking forward to the conversation ahead.
Next, Dr. Jilly Boyce Kay is a lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leicester. She specializes in feminist media and cultural studies. She's the author of the recent book Gender, Media and Voice: Communicative Injustice and Public Speech and her work more broadly focuses on the historically shifting relationships between feminist politics and popular media culture. Her recent publications include work on trans exclusionary centrist feminism, as well as online femme-cell communities, which stands for involuntary celibate women. And these feed into developing projects that she's working on on the ecologies of pink pill, feminism and digital culture. She's the co-convener of the Media and Gender Research Group and editor of Cultural Commons, a short form section in the European Journal of cultural studies. So welcome, Jilly.
Thank you. I'm really pleased to be here. And yeah, also really looking forward to the conversation.
I can't wait to delve into all of these things, the fraught relationship between feminist politics, creative media production, popular media culture. Francesca, I'm gonna ask you to talk about your book first.
Yeah, thank you. I wanted to start by saying that the work that you both do has absolutely shaped my own. So I think when it came to approaching this particular book, the The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain, I was especially informed by feminist media studies work that has really grappled with questions to do with identity, inequality, ideology. And those moments when we see forms of consumer culture activity or marketplace dynamics being a site of both the expression of community and potentially forms of resistance, solidarity building, but also a place where there are moments of commercial co optation. There are moments when something that has liberationist potential, it's essentially diluted or it's denuded because of the powerful impact of various commercial entities. So this project, it was developed for my PhD which involve focusing on the media experiences of Black woman in Britain with a focus on digital experiences, especially on various social media platforms, such as YouTube, Twitter. And essentially involve me speaking to Black women around Britain, between England and Scotland in particular, about what they were doing online, what they were creating online, and how they were actively turning away from mainstream media often to produce content that was so glaringly absent and was by Black women for Black women and often involved in some cases developing career in various creative and cultural industry spheres.
Thank you so much. I can't wait to dive in with both of you about this like fraught and messy, messy context that is simultaneously liberatory and containing. Jilly, why don't you tell us about your book first, and then we'll get into that conversation.
So my book is called Gender, Media and Voice: Communicative Injustice and Public Speech. Really, the book is trying to understand why it's so difficult to have meaningful voice in contemporary culture. And also this paradox in which were both sort of spectacularly promised voice through the kind of new architectures of digital media culture, and yet still kind of haunted by what a really kind of long standing in justices forms of misogyny. And so I'm trying to think in the book about how we have to think about the silencing or denial of voice in a really long history. So I look at contemporary media culture, and think about how while we don't have really brutal forms of punishment of women's voices now such as the ducking stool, or the scolds bridle, which were kind of around in the 16th and 17th centuries, there are really insidious forms of silencing, of the denial of meaningful voice. So I look at kind of lots of examples from celebrity culture to think about the various insidious ways in which meaningful voice is denied.
I was thinking a lot about your work and using your work in this book that I'm co-authoring with my Ph.D. student Kat Higgins on believability and this kind of notion of what it means in the 21st century to be silenced — especially in the kind of context of sexual violence. And just thinking about the relationship between the ducking stool and the NDA and the trajectory of those things that are about different forms, obviously, of violence, but about the ways in which silencing is built into so many of our structures, you know, in terms of moving forward and speaking out. And a lot of my work, it was this sort of rut that I got into of saying, we have to parse the contradictions, right. It's always about parsing the contradictions. And that was, you know, this way of talking about nuance or gesturing towards nuance or complicated terrains, or ambivalence and messiness. And both of you do this so beautifully in your work — how do we parse through these contradictions of both liberatory creativity and containment and silencing?
Yeah, I feel as though parsing through those contradictions is always going to be important. So I'm in complete agreement with you there. And I think some of the ways that can be done for me, first and foremost, it starts by recognizing the agency of so many of the individuals we're speaking about and who our work focuses on. And I think when I embarked on my research project, I was so conscious that when Black women were discussed in various scholarly and academic spaces, they were discussed in ways that didn't involve recognition of their agency, recognition of the fact that Black women are navigating digital spaces with a real awareness of both the potential for enriching experiences the prospect of making use of technology to push against forms of structural oppression, whilst also knowing that the commercial is always present, the market logic is there. So I think contradictions that we're trying to grapple with involve thinking through questions to do with power to do with agency, I'm moving beyond these reductive binary opposition's of so called positive and negative, like you said, it's all very messy. And something I've been thinking a lot about recently to do with these sorts of topics include silence as a statement. So I'm thinking a lot about forms of digital disengagement on the part of Black women, what it means when Black women actively turn away from certain spaces, remove themselves, retreat, when silence becomes an active form of presence. And when you were speaking about different examples of silencing, I was thinking about how these discussions to do with silence and the various ways that operates, whether it's someone who is silenced, or somebody who is making use of silence as a political tool. I feel as though that's one of many examples of these different tensions that are at play, and how they're really shaped by who has what power and how they do you or don't express that.
Yeah, that's so interesting. I mean, I think that this notion of positive and negative and all of the binaries, right, that we're always encouraged to think through, you know, again, this is liberation, or this is violence. It just also reminds me that there are so many assumptions that we have about who the liberal subject is, and especially the gendered liberal subject, someone, like Jilly, that you're talking about, can or cannot use her voice in a public sphere in a public space, and to think about taking those concepts of liberal subjectivity. Silence, I was thinking when you're talking Francesca also something like opacity versus transparency, right? Everyone's like, oh, we should be transparent. And you know, I mean, transparency is also a tool of surveillance, right, especially on Black and brown bodies, and —
Absolutely.
Re— kind of reimagining those terms, I think is so important. And, Jilly, I know that you talk about this too, in terms of the media representations of women in your book, so maybe, how do you parse through these contradictions?
I think what you're both saying there about some silencing is really interesting, because I guess silence is so often equated with a lack of agency and to assume that a silent subject to somebody without agency is another form of symbolic violence. So I think, yeah, the tactical uses of silence or withdrawal is really interesting. I mean, I guess I always just find myself coming up against this kind of impasse. Is it good? Is it bad, this kind of, you know, and thinking of ways to get beyond that, I think is really vital. I guess what I tried to argue in my book, is that actually to speak out in the contemporary conjuncture, if you don't occupy a privileged or powerful position, it can be liberating, very disempowering — I mean it always will be those two things at the same time, because it's just not possible because we don't have the conditions of possibility to have that kind of what I would call communicative justice. The only solution is structural transformation. So I guess I try and see the hope and the despair of thinking, Okay, well, recognizing the severity of the situation, and just how deep the injustice is, is part of the kind of necessary step to that more hopeful possibility of structural transformation. Yeah, I think recognizing the connections between hope and despair, liberation and disempowerment are really useful things to do.
Thinking about hope and despair, at the same time, and what does that confrontation yield us. And this word that is a old word that is rarely used is the word called respair that Jilly brought to my attention. And I will say, Jilly, that I think that I've heard from so many students who also find this really important concept to think about what it means, like how do we reimagine these concepts instead of moralizing? We need to historicize. And I think historicizing these moments allows us to get to respair. And in fact, risk bear is a historical concept, right? And so I was wondering if you could maybe speak a little bit of that. It just reminded me, Jilly, when you were talking about this question how important it is for us to historicize the participation of, say, Black women and creative practice when looking at the digital lives?
Yeah, I think it's just so, so vital. I know when I did my Ph.D., I focused predominantly on interviews with other Black women in Britain. But when it came to working on this book, I wanted to spend a lot more time with archives and digital archives in person archives coming across so much material was such a reminder of the fact that the media experiences of Black women in Britain, including their digital experiences, they're not new. And although they're often discussed as though they are so they're emergent as though there isn't a history there. There were so many examples of forms of collective organizing the ways that Black women have been working in community with one another as part of different efforts really to address issues to do with the media industry and their material conditions more broadly. And I was thinking a lot about what we were saying earlier on to do with parsing contradictions and opacity, something that I started to touch on in the book, but have been working on more since then, especially in relation to Black history and black lives in Scotland. And what I feel is really, really essential to archives. And what we can learn from them is the fact that sometimes experiences are spoken about as though they're hidden or as though they exist out there somewhere that nobody can reach. And hard to reach is a term that's often used in relation to Black people or black communities in Scotland. But there are so many forms of recognition. So I think this notion of opacity in relation to black archives, and black cultural memory is something that I'm so interested in, especially when we are often focusing on visibility in digital spaces, and sometimes solely focusing on what feels as though it is public, so to speak, or is more visible to certain groups than others. I'm interested in the intimacy of those digital experiences that aren't necessarily visible, legible or translatable for many different reasons that are intentional.
Thinking about those archives and thinking about what is untranslatable and not resorting to hard to reach metaphors, but instead thinking about the various reasons why this is untranslatable, or this is untransferable. And I think that that's so important. Jilly, in your book, you really delve into history in very specific and explicit ways, but also tie these histories from the ducking stool to the palace to contemporary representations of gender. So maybe could you talk a little bit about that trajectory.
I wanted to think about it in this really long sweep of history. To think about, in part how we have to understand, I guess, denial of voice and disempowerment and silencing in the history of capitalism, as well as of patriarchy, and the you know, the entertainment of capitalism and patriarchy and how that relationship shifts over time. So I use some of the work of Silvia Federici in the book just because she points out how moments of intense capital accumulation in history have also been the moments of intensifying misogyny. And so I think what she shows is so interesting is that in the 16th and 17th century when you kind of had the rise of capitalism in Britain, she writes about this was when you had the rise of the witch hunts, the demonization of women as gossips, you know, and and abroad are demonization of women's speech, which obviously misogyny has always existed, but it kind of you have these moments of resurgence and intensification. And she says that we're now in a kind of new period of neoliberal enclosures and dispossession. And you know, it's no accident that then you get this kind of intensification and resurgence of misogyny again, so I really wanted to think about the, you know, this kind of backlash that I guess that we're in at the moment in this kind of longer historical frame to try and think about gender and misogyny not as just some kind of abstract categories, but as things which are part of a wider economic system which intersect with other categories of oppression. So I guess I really wanted to think about it in those terms. And also just to show how the relationship between feminism and media is also much more complex than we think it is. And again, I think it's like what Francesca was saying about agency, it's about you know, that to think that women have just been not there in the history of media culture is kind of another form of silencing another kind of double erasure. And it's important to find these moments of possibility. So yeah, so I guess I find this historical approach really useful for thinking about how we can situate our conjuncture in relation to capitalism and material power. And archival research is one way that you can do that because these things get erased from popular memory. So yeah, so I think historicizing is absolutely absolutely vital.
Yeah, I think that what you just said is absolutely key, that we need to pay close attention to how erasure works. One of the things that has been so important, I've been just rereading Federici, myself, one of the things that I think is so powerful about her work is she really, really forces us to rethink this sort of inevitability of everything, the inevitability of capitalism. In order for capitalism to emerge as a dominant force, the mechanisms of capitalism had to reroute and recategorize women in general. So the healer became the witch, the midwife became the heretic, all the different ways in which these kinds of valorized skills and occupations of women have to be reimagined as something that denigrates them in order for capitalism to function, right? Because it is by design, about racism and sexism in different ways. And so I mean, maybe we can actually kind of turn more to capitalist formations themselves in Francesca, your work on woke washing, and thinking about the co-optation of gender and race and corporate culture and in commercial culture has been so generative for me in thinking through those damn contradictions, and how we think about them, and I pay as you know, I pay a lot of attention to ads and think about them and think about like, what is my own affective response to the latest Nike ad about the, you know, women wearing hijab or whatever it is? And so maybe, could you talk a little bit about femme-vertising, and woke washing and how this is a yet another part of this creative industry that is woven through with contradiction?
I think it's been quite something to witness how it's all developed since around about, particularly from 2017, 2018 when I started to pay more attention to all of this. And I feel as though when reflecting on from 2020, to this point where we've seen Black Lives Matter organizing, different forms of liberationist work emerge in ways that brands are absolutely taking notice of and responding to, even if they've never uttered words such as dismantling white supremacy before and I think a lot of my work so far on this has involved analyzing adverts myself looking at the history and the image of brands and how they essentially make use of various practices as part of how they manage their reputational risk. More recently, I've started to speak to people about their perceptions of what might constitute so called woke washing. So learning right now, in this moment, especially when factoring in the impact of the pandemic, what do people really think about when they see a brand issue a statement, whether it's a black square, whether it is a claim to be supporting certain organizations. And what's so fascinating speaking of contradictions, is some recent work that I did on this led to many people highlighting the same brands as both examples of organizations, they felt were doing a great job and an examples of organizations that weren't. So the same companies that people were most skeptical of for the same companies that other people were praising. And it just speaks so perfectly to exactly what we're dealing with right now. I think that some of the examples in media marketing that might be viewed as woke washing or femme-vertising can involve representations that some people might feel are very reductive, the flattens the fullness of people's humanity and lived experiences. And I'm just very mindful when it comes to doing research what it means to try and engage with these issues, people's lives, people's histories, social movements, in a way that doesn't involve reproducing these forms of itemized commodifying or commodified itemizing and actually moves away from a focus on visibility and representation without addressing sort of the nuances of opacity as we've been speaking about, and the fact that forms of recognition don't necessarily involve an expectation of being made public in the way that brands will tend to push as being the be all and end all when it comes to what addressing inequality means and structural shifts, and the fact that changing new features in a campaign is sometimes held up as a revolutionary act.
Thinking about words and the concepts they conjure, like visibility, recognition, transparency, opacity, and think about how we can rethink these terms as something that is not you know, that that visibility, what are the accesses to visibility? You know, I mean, many of my students are doing work on media representation, and it's really, really important and representation does still matter. But it's not a simple question — how does it matter? You know, and in what ways? And it's not just about counting the number of bodies that we see on screen or, you know, measuring the length of time that they speak. I've been curious, Jilly, about your work on pink pill feminism. I wanted to ask you to speak a little bit more, because there's this idea that Francesca talks about about pink washing, or that that's in line with femme-vertising and is pink pilling borrowing in that sense, or what does it mean?
Well, good question. I think it's a kind of mutation of feminism in online spaces, and in a way that is quite disturbing. So actually, like what pink pill refers to, or the way that it's used as a female version of the red pill phenomenon, incels and pickup artists and so on, and the kind of broader manosphere. And actually, what I've noticed emerging in online spaces is well, it's almost like a kind of mirroring of that. So I know that you talk about in your book, Sarah, but kind of funhouse mirror hearing effective popular feminism and popular misogyny. I think this is another kind of mirroring of manosphere logics, but so femme-cells are a part of that. So involuntarily, celibate women, female dating strategists, transphobic feminists. And so you get this whole kind of like ecology of feminism, which says that it's very different to the manosphere, but actually is using the same kind of logics of like biological essentialism, red pill philosophy of accepting the brutal truth about the fundamental differences between men and women. It's this kind of mutation of feminism, which I think is quite kind of disturbing. And I was thinking about this, and I think popular feminism has really set the scene or allowed, you know, it's created the conditions for this, because this dominant form of feminism, which has been so visible has been so split off from any kind of collective movement, that it allows feminism to be co opted in all of these different ways. You know, I think it's a potentially quite dangerous form of feminism, because it's highly transphobic. It's highly essentialist. And we see the rise of obviously transphobia in the UK, and more and more in the US now. And it's this really disturbing mutation, I think of a kind of biologically essentialist form of feminism, which is really flourishing in these online spaces.
Again, it's so important to track that. And what that does, in part is that it allows for a sort of amplification of this idea that somehow feminism is the dominant source of power in the world right now. And so I think that that is that funhouse mirror that we need to pay attention to. I also just want to say that one of the things that I think is so wonderful about your work is your insistence on the history of media, the history of representation, the history of voice, the history of silence, and opacity, and then connecting that to a contemporary digital context. And I just wanted to thank you both, because I think that your work has really, really helped me figure out that kind of saying to parse through the contradictions. So thank you both for your work.
Thank you so much, Sarah, and for having us. And yeah, and your work or both of your work continues to be incredibly inspirational.
Yeah, I just want to echo that and say thank you. This has been incredible. And so I just really appreciate the chance to have this conversation and look forward to us. Hopefully having more in the future too.
Feminist Networks and the Conjuncture is a production of the International Communication Association Podcast Network. This podcast series is brought to you by the Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication, established as a joint effort between the schools of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California. Our producer is Lucia Barnum, our production consultant is Nick Song, and our executive producer is Aldo Diaz Caballero. The theme music today is by Lance Conrad. I want to thank again, my wonderful guests Francesca, Sobande and Jilly Kay. And to learn more about me, my guest today and our podcast series, check out the show notes in the episode description. Thanks so much for listening.
