Jilly Boyce Kay

• Senior Lecturer at Loughborough University

In recent years, the ‘mirror’ has emerged as a key metaphor for theorizing contemporary digital culture, with its disorienting communicative architectures and bewildering social and political effects. This short piece considers what the dynamic of ‘mirroring’ in digital culture means for the relationship between gender politics and an increasingly...

This article analyses the shifting media visibilities of femcels: women who self-identify as being involuntary celibate. It first considers the ‘original’ femcel community which emerged on Reddit in 2018, and which was based on often-despairing, even nihilistic, text-based discussion. It then considers the more recent shift to ‘femcelcore’: a socia...

This paper considers the rise of “reactionary feminism” within popular culture, suggesting a possible departure from, or mutation of, the hegemony of neoliberal and postfeminisms of recent decades. It locates reactionary feminism as key to the growing backlash against “liberal feminism,” pointing to emergent popular feminist discourses of “brutal t...

In this essay, I discuss my appointment as co-editor of this journal within the context of its history across its 25 years of life thus far, as well as within the field of cultural studies more broadly. I briefly consider the value and crucial importance of conjunctural analysis, cultural studies’ complex but crucial relationship to Marxism, and th...

This article draws on the work of Raymond Williams to argue that under covid-19 the dominant ‘ways of seeing’ the countryside and the city in Britain are working to obscure the structural violence of capitalism. Cultural narratives of ‘exodus’ from the city abound in British media, fuelling a material ‘race for space’ as the middle class rush to bu...

This is the introductory essay to a special edition of Cultural Commons, the short-form section in the European Journal of Cultural Studies. This special edition marks the centenary of Raymond Williams’s birth in August 2021. It maps out some of his key work and considers how Williams’s thinking is both foundational for cultural studies – in its ‘b...

This editorial introduction explains that in conceiving of this special issue, we were particularly interested in how mediated practices intersect with political contexts within a transnational frame. We set out to explore how gender-based social movements are currently circulating via transnational media, and thus afford diverse kinds of intervent...

This short essay provides an introduction to the Commentary and Criticism section of the special issue on ‘Gender and Transnational Media’. These shorter pieces are able to respond more rapidly to the co-constituting, ever-shifting socio-political sands of contemporary gender and transnational 10 media, and thus further expand and update the concep...

This article analyses (broadly lower middle-class) women’s responses to the arrival of commercial television in the UK in the 1950s, and seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of British women’s relationship to television, consumer capitalism, and modernity in the mid-twentieth century. While women are dominantly figured as especially...

This chapter provides a review of existing literature on the shifting representations of feminist activism in the press from the 1900s to 2017, as well as a discussion of the ways feminists have created their own print materials to agitate for social change. The chapter also provides two original case studies, including how militant Irish suffrage...

This volume presents a research-led, interdisciplinary examination of existing scholarship as well as new research on twentieth-century newspaper and periodical history across Britain and Ireland during a key period of change and development into the twenty-first century. It covers an important period of expansion (1900-2017) in periodical and pres...

This chapter offers a feminist analysis of mediated political speech, focusing on the UK’s long-running debate programme Question Time. Women have long been positioned as ‘interlopers’ in mediated politics—they are systematically under-represented and rendered as communicatively ‘out of place’. However, it now appears that we are in a transformed c...

This chapter considers the history of the ‘nagging wife’ trope, and how this is insidiously mobilised to discredit women’s political speech. It analyses the 1973 television debate series No Man’s Land, paying particular attention to the ways that it was critically received and reviewed. It shows how the programme’s explicitly feminist politics was...

This chapter explores the thorny gender politics of anger in contemporary culture. While historically women have been denied rage as a political and communicative resource, in the #MeToo era it is often suggested that female anger is being ‘unleashed’, and therefore finally giving rise to meaningful voice. The chapter seeks to theorise a more ambiv...

Drawing on feminist theories of voice, this introductory chapter considers how, historically, the idealised communicative mode for women has been silence. While women’s speech has often been violently punished with brutal methods such as the ducking stool and the scold’s bridle, in the contemporary context, it now seems that women are encouraged—ev...

This concluding chapter summarises the book’s key arguments and sets out some of the central features of communicative injustice. Engaging with theories of communicative disability which show how ‘fucked up’ our dominant communicative norms are (Yergeau, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness, 2018), it argues that inequalities an...

This chapter explores the highly complex relationship between trauma and voice. It focuses on the mediated voices of two women in the context of #MeToo, both of whom are understood as now finally ‘speaking their truth’ and ‘taking back control’ of their traumatic narratives. The chapter’s analysis of media narratives around Lewinsky suggests that t...

This chapter interrogates the specific, racialised ways in which contemporary media seems to increasingly celebrate women’s speech that is ‘transgressive’ and ‘misbehaving’. It considers the alt-right media personality Katie Hopkins, arguing that she co-opts simplistic histories of women’s silencing, including the figure of the persecuted witch, in...

This chapter considers ‘mediated gossip’ through an analysis of television programmes that have been dismissed as ‘women’s talk’ or otherwise construed as politically powerless communicative ‘ghettos’, and explores the political problems and possibilities that arise from this. It considers the daytime programme Loose Women, which is often accused o...

This short essay considers how, in conditions of widespread lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic, domestic space has become hyper-visible. It argues that, in the mediated aesthetics of the crisis, we have seen a resurgence of mystificatory images of the heteronormative private household through celebrity culture. It considers how the injunction...

This edited collection interrogates the hyper-visibility and stubborn endurance of the wedding spectacle across media and culture in the current climate. As a feminist project, rather than straight-forwardly renounce the wedding spectacle, this collection offers an interrogation of its myriad forms and practices to illuminate the paradoxes, contrad...

This book explores the increasing imperatives to speak up, to speak out, and to ‘find one’s voice’ in contemporary media culture. It considers how, for women in particular, this seems to constitute a radical break with the historical idealization of silence and demureness. However, the author argues that there is a growing and pernicious gap betwee...

This article traces the ways in which the British suffragette Emily Wilding Davison was represented in national newspapers between 1913—the year she died—and 2013, the centenary of her death. We identify three key discourses through which Davison has been represented in four British newspapers throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-fi...

This review article critically considers two recently published books, both of which contend with the complex relationship between cultural studies’ history, present and future, albeit in extraordinarily different ways. Cultural Studies 50 Years On: History, Practice and Politics, edited by Kieran Connell and Matthew Hilton, is a collection of essa...

In recent years digital technology has made available a vast archive of old media. Images of the past - accessed with the touch of a finger - are now mingled with those of the present, raising questions about how visual culture affects out connection with history and memory. This collection of new essays contributes to a growing debate about how...

This article explores the six-part television debate series No Man's Land, which was broadcast on ITV in Britain in 1973. It argues that the program is a historically significant example of the public orientation of the women's liberation movement and its engagement with, rather than straightforward hostility toward, the mass media. The program was...

This article explores the history of Good Afternoon!, a British daytime magazine programme produced by Thames Television between 1971 and 1988. Focusing on its emergence in the 1970s, I consider the ambivalent ways in which it was figured as a programme for women, and the instability of this category in the discursive context of second-wave feminis...

This study analyses the discursive framing of the British government’s economic policies by BBC News Online. Specifically, it focuses on the coverage of the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review in 2010, in which the details of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s broader ‘austerity’ agenda were released. Using frame analysis informed by critical...

This profile looks at how students at the University of the West of England (UWE) undertook direct action in protest against the British government's cuts to educational funding in the higher education sector. Situating the in the broader context of the struggle against cuts to education, the authors observed the organisation of students, interview...