Dr Hannah Yelin

Public engagement through ‘traditional’ and social media is an increasingly important way for scholars to communicate research with wider audiences, with academics encouraged to maintain a public profile to disseminate work. This has important activist potential for radical knowledge production, but only if all voices can participate on equal, safe terms. No existing work on digital hate accounts for the diversity of the academic community, and therefore we cannot adequately account for how certain voices are being excluded from public debate.  

Drawing on data from 85 survey responses and 13 in-depth interviews with UK academics across disciplines, this article argues that the risks of visibility are unevenly distributed in ways that exacerbate harm to already marginalised groups. Our data challenges popular notions that visibility is its own reward. We demonstrate how visibility exposes academics to the kinds of online misogyny, racism, ableism, classism, xenophobia, homophobia, fatphobia and transphobia that characterise cultures of online hate. We reflect upon how academics in the ‘wrong’ body are denied intellectual authority in public debate through abuse targeting their intersectional identities and right to belong. Our data finds that digital hate not only affects academics’ careers, but also causes significant physical and mental harms that seep into academics’ personal lives. There cannot be meaningful, radical potential in public knowledge sharing if we cannot protect those most at risk of harm in the process.

An absence of role models in girlhood is a popularly cited cause of the shortage of women in decision-making positions in adulthood. The power of leadership exists in a close relationship with public visibility, and this relationship is regularly foregrounded in adult interventions that seek to stimulate girls’ leadership aspirations through the public pedagogy of role models. We explore the problematic nature of such popular solutions through a framework suggested by feminist critique of the ‘fetishisation’ of representation, by their media effects foundations and by their alignment with neoliberal logics. Drawing on group interview workshops conducted in five English state schools, we find that role-model solutions offer an overly simplistic view of girls’ engagements with public figures, and that they recognise neither the contemporary conditions of women’s visibility nor how such conditions regulate girls’ imaginings of power along axes of ‘race’ and class as well as gender.

This article examines the attitudes of state-school educated girls under contexts of neoliberal austerity at a moment when discourses surrounding inherited privilege and race intensified in popular culture. Using interviews with 50 girls aged 13-15 at the time of the wedding between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, we examine attitudes to Meghan as a public figure, institutional royalty as a concept, and Meghan’s symbolic ability to bridge tensions of progression and regression around the royals. In so doing, we shed light on how girls respond to and internalise ideas about power, work and inheritance. We offer new understandings of monarchy and celebrity; and girls’ negotiations with popular discourses of meritocracy and privilege. We address a dearth of empirical analyses of public perceptions of royal celebrity, and provide insights into the mediation and reception of Meghan as a new member of the monarchy and the broader inter-penetrations of race, and gender she represents. The girls’ feelings about Meghan are viewed alongside celebrities who the girls discussed through royal rhetoric of queendom and bloodline: Oprah and Beyoncé. Around Meghan’s celebrity dynamism the girls construct economies of royal ‘work’ and related meritocratic ideas of ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’ royals. Consistently the girls’ discussions disrupt ideas of hereditary power, ultimately, calling to rescind public funding of the monarchy. 

Over twenty years ago, the phenomenon surrounding Prince Harry's mother Princess Diana received interdisciplinary critique from scholars around the world for the ways in which it spoke to wider issues of gender, class, race, post/colonialism, media, celebrity and inequalities. We hope that this special issue will begin a conversation of a similar scale around a figure we see as equally deserving of analysis against the current sociopolitical landscape. The British monarchy is remarkably...

This paper examines data from our research into Girls, Leadership, and Women in the Public Eye within a framework suggested by Janet Newman’s (2015) distinction between individual ‘aspiration’ and collective ‘hope’ in political contexts of austerity. The project responds to the contemporary turn to the agentic, aspiring girl as the solution to the gender leadership gap in the future. It explores ways in which girls are enjoined to imagine leadership via high-profile campaigns, and their own envisionings developed through their local experiences and their encounters with highly visible women across a range of media. Our data reveals differences between the aspirational, individualist leadership models promoted to girls and their own preferences for more collaborative leadership as a means of achieving wider social change. We suggest that the concept of ‘leadership’ presented to girls needs to be challenged in terms of its gendered individualism and its failure to capture ways in which they desire to participate in decision making.

Drawing upon lived experiences, this article explores challenges facing feminist academics sharing work in the media, and the gendered, raced intersections of ‘being visible’ in digital cultures which enable direct, public response. We examine online backlash following publication of an article about representations of Meghan Markle’s feminism being co-opted by the patriarchal monarchy. While in it we argued against vilification of Markle, we encountered what we term distortions of research remediation as news outlets reported our work under headlines such as ‘academics accuse Meghan of dropping feminism like a hot potato’. Negative responses were polarised: anti-Meghan (drawing upon racist, anti-feminist, pro-empire, pro-Brexit/Trump rhetoric), and pro-Meghan (both general royal enthusiasts, and a smaller subsection viewing Markle in terms of politicised black uplift). In response, we received accusations of sexist, racist bullying, debate over definitions of feminism, claims feminism has gone ‘too far’, variously worded directives to ‘shut up’, gendered personal insults, and threats of doxxing. This article examines the tenor of public discourse around feminism and visible feminists. It questions the responsibility of institutions benefiting from public intellectuals for the wellbeing of employees in the public eye, particularly in the anti-intellectual socio-political context of Brexit and Donald Trump, where the costs for ‘visible’ women and feminist activism are ever higher. It also considers our responsibility as researchers to ensure our contributions to public discourse do not exacerbate existing harms of a white-supremacist, classist society. This article interrogates the risks – of misrepresentation, hyper-visibility, and reputational, psychological and potentially physical harm – faced by those engaging in acts of public feminism.

This article outlines the concept of doing celebrity: whereby celebrity and pop stardom are presented as a deliberately constructed set of actions and behaviours, rather than an ontology. It does so by conceptualising celebrity as something one does, not something one is. The article examines Grace Jones’ 2015 memoir, I’ll Never Write My Memoirs, as an example which contravenes theclaim – in both celebrity culture and autobiography – to offer up access to an authentic self. This article reveals an embrace of performativity over authenticity that Jones presents as part of a wider art practise. This self-representational move claims the masculinised status of creative agent and author of the star image and seeks a level of cultural value otherwise often denied to the female pop star celebrity. The concept of doing celebrity, therefore, opens up new ways to consider the means available to public women to navigate the negative value judgements associated with female celebrity as a cultural field.

For a brief period, discourses of feminism were brought into discussions of the British royal family through the figure of Meghan Markle. Such a conjuncture demands a closer look at the monarchy's relationship to feminism. This article considers the figure of a ‘feminist princess’ in the context of an inherently antifeminist institution and alongside the deeply antifeminist figure of the ‘wayward prince’ - both specifically in the case of sexual abuse accusations against Prince Andrew, and historically in mythic stock representations from history and folklore. In so doing, we reveal the limits to the feminist discourses possible ‘from within’ the monarchical institution. We argue that monarchy relies upon interwoven structures of colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and racism, and as such is incompatible with feminism's work towards dismantling intersecting systems of oppression. No amount of royal campaigns for ‘women's issues’ can elide the fact that the very existence of the monarchy is a feminist issue.