Jilly Boyce Kay
Biographic Data
| ID | 1634907 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jilly Boyce Kay |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jilly Boyce |
| FAMILY NAME | Kay |
| SIGNATURE | KAY J B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Leicester |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9548-296X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 102 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Through the looking glass: Feminism and reactionary politics in the digital hall of mirrors
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 authoritarian right. In the digital hall of mirrors, feminist ideas and practices are mimicked, co-o…
The reactionary turn in popular feminism
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 truths,” “material conditions,” and women as a “sex class.” I analyse three seemingly diverse iterati…
A tale of two angers: The manosphere, the femosphere and the gender politics of mediated rage
This article offers a conjunctural analysis of mediated women's anger in the wake of the #MeToo movement. It asks: what does it mean that the historic rise in the visibility of women's anger (at sexism, misogyny and gendered abuse) emerged at the same historical moment as the rise of reactionary forms of political anger (associated with authoritarian populism, ethnonationalisms, misogyny, racism and the 'anti-gender' movement)? By putting two ver…
From femcels to ‘femcelcore’: Women’s involuntary celibacy and the rise of heteronihilism
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 social media aesthetic or ‘vibe’, communicated through short, apparently ironic videos on TikTok. We cont…
I am against Americanizing England. Ordinary TV does not seem to have an elevating influence”: Class, gender, public anxiety, and the responses to the arrival of commercial television in the Mass Obse…
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 prone to being seduced by commercial culture at this time, our analysis of material from the Mass Ob…
Gender and Transnational Media
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 interventions in issues of social justice. Each article in this issue starts from a specific location and tra…
Introduction to a commentary and criticism section on gender and transnational media
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 media, and thus further expand and update the conceptual terrain of the issue’s theme. The six pieces point to the urgent need for feminist media scholars …
A life lasts longer than the body through which it moves: An introduction to a special Cultural Commons section on Raymond Williams
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 ‘bloodstream’ – and yet is now often overlooked, unattributed or unacknowledged. While Williams’s work…
The race for space’: Capitalism, the country and the city in Britain under Covid-19
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 buy up rural properties. The ‘cottagecore’ social media aesthetic has proliferated, offering privatize…
Stay the fuck at home!”: Feminism, family and the private home in a time of coronavirus
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 to ‘stay the fuck at home’ may work to conceal pervasive forms of gendered violence within domestic…
Introduction to the first edition of Cultural Commons
Re-enchanting the crisis: Reflections on rurality, futurity and Covid-19 in the United Kingdom
Cultural commons: Critical responses to Covid-19, part 2
It feels like we launched Cultural Commons – a short-form section committed to voicing radically contextualist, rapid response analyses – at an opportune moment, just as the world seemed to spin off its socio-political axis amid a global catastrophe. The crisis context of Covid-19 is generating reflections and re-evaluations that are pouring out in myriad forms, and it is now almost impossible to keep abreast of the pace of change and the reach o…
Culture and commoning in a time of coronavirus: Introduction to a Cultural Commons special section on Covid-19
Introduction: Anger, media, and feminism: the gender politics of mediated rage
Over the last few years, we have been witnessing an extraordinary new visibility of women’s anger. Since the election of Trump in the US and the unprecedented disclosures of gendered abuse that characterised #MeToo, female anger seems to be registering in ways that it has seldom done in recent decades. As Rebecca Traister (2018, 2) puts it in her bestselling book Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger—itself a part of the remarkab…
Xenofeminism
Feminist anger and feminist respair
How bad things have become. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say: how bad things have always been, but it is only now that some people with particular kinds of class and race privilege are beginni
Gender, Media and Protest: Changing Representations of the Suffragette Emily Wilding Davison in British Newspapers, 1913–2013
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-first: delegitimisation, recuperation and trivialisation. In doing so, this paper provides original in…
Arriving late to the party? Histories of cultural studies as resources of hope
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 essays that emerged from a 2014 conference that explored the legacy and influence of the Centre for Cont…
Speaking Bitterness
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 produced by women who were active in the women's liberation movement; it was presented by the femin…
The Sunday Times among Them: Good Afternoon!, and the Gendering of Afternoon Television in the 1970s
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 feminism. Drawing on archival material in the form of programme texts, publicity material, listings guides …
Domesticating the Airwaves
Maggie Andrews, 2012, Continuum, London & New York, 267 pp. (pbk), ISBN 978-1-4411-3986-3 Maggie Andrews' Domesticating the Airwaves arrives at a rich and productive moment in the field of feminist
Framing the cuts: An analysis of the BBC’s discursive framing of the ConDem cuts agenda
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 theory, we analyse three online BBC features and compare their framing of the economic crisis – and…
The UWE Student Occupation
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, interviewing them and holding focus groups to get a full picture of the growth of the movement and the UWE oc…
Feminist anger and feminist respair
How bad things have become. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say: how bad things have always been, but it is only now that some people with particular kinds of class and race privilege are beginni
Framing the cuts: An analysis of the BBC’s discursive framing of the ConDem cuts agenda
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 theory, we analyse three online BBC features and compare their framing of the economic crisis – and…
Stay the fuck at home!”: Feminism, family and the private home in a time of coronavirus
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 to ‘stay the fuck at home’ may work to conceal pervasive forms of gendered violence within domestic…
Introduction: Anger, media, and feminism: the gender politics of mediated rage
Over the last few years, we have been witnessing an extraordinary new visibility of women’s anger. Since the election of Trump in the US and the unprecedented disclosures of gendered abuse that characterised #MeToo, female anger seems to be registering in ways that it has seldom done in recent decades. As Rebecca Traister (2018, 2) puts it in her bestselling book Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger—itself a part of the remarkab…
Culture and commoning in a time of coronavirus: Introduction to a Cultural Commons special section on Covid-19
The race for space’: Capitalism, the country and the city in Britain under Covid-19
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 buy up rural properties. The ‘cottagecore’ social media aesthetic has proliferated, offering privatize…
Through the looking glass: Feminism and reactionary politics in the digital hall of mirrors
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 authoritarian right. In the digital hall of mirrors, feminist ideas and practices are mimicked, co-o…
Cultural commons: Critical responses to Covid-19, part 2
It feels like we launched Cultural Commons – a short-form section committed to voicing radically contextualist, rapid response analyses – at an opportune moment, just as the world seemed to spin off its socio-political axis amid a global catastrophe. The crisis context of Covid-19 is generating reflections and re-evaluations that are pouring out in myriad forms, and it is now almost impossible to keep abreast of the pace of change and the reach o…
The reactionary turn in popular feminism
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 truths,” “material conditions,” and women as a “sex class.” I analyse three seemingly diverse iterati…
Re-enchanting the crisis: Reflections on rurality, futurity and Covid-19 in the United Kingdom
From femcels to ‘femcelcore’: Women’s involuntary celibacy and the rise of heteronihilism
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 social media aesthetic or ‘vibe’, communicated through short, apparently ironic videos on TikTok. We cont…
I am against Americanizing England. Ordinary TV does not seem to have an elevating influence”: Class, gender, public anxiety, and the responses to the arrival of commercial television in the Mass Obse…
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 prone to being seduced by commercial culture at this time, our analysis of material from the Mass Ob…
Gender and Transnational Media
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 interventions in issues of social justice. Each article in this issue starts from a specific location and tra…
A life lasts longer than the body through which it moves: An introduction to a special Cultural Commons section on Raymond Williams
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 ‘bloodstream’ – and yet is now often overlooked, unattributed or unacknowledged. While Williams’s work…
Introduction to the first edition of Cultural Commons
The UWE Student Occupation
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, interviewing them and holding focus groups to get a full picture of the growth of the movement and the UWE oc…
The UWE Student Occupation
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, interviewing them and holding focus groups to get a full picture of the growth of the movement and the UWE oc…
Domesticating the Airwaves
Maggie Andrews, 2012, Continuum, London & New York, 267 pp. (pbk), ISBN 978-1-4411-3986-3 Maggie Andrews' Domesticating the Airwaves arrives at a rich and productive moment in the field of feminist
Framing the cuts: An analysis of the BBC’s discursive framing of the ConDem cuts agenda
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 theory, we analyse three online BBC features and compare their framing of the economic crisis – and…
The Sunday Times among Them: Good Afternoon!, and the Gendering of Afternoon Television in the 1970s
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 feminism. Drawing on archival material in the form of programme texts, publicity material, listings guides …
Speaking Bitterness
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 produced by women who were active in the women's liberation movement; it was presented by the femin…
Arriving late to the party? Histories of cultural studies as resources of hope
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 essays that emerged from a 2014 conference that explored the legacy and influence of the Centre for Cont…
Gender, Media and Protest: Changing Representations of the Suffragette Emily Wilding Davison in British Newspapers, 1913–2013
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-first: delegitimisation, recuperation and trivialisation. In doing so, this paper provides original in…
Introduction: Anger, media, and feminism: the gender politics of mediated rage
Over the last few years, we have been witnessing an extraordinary new visibility of women’s anger. Since the election of Trump in the US and the unprecedented disclosures of gendered abuse that characterised #MeToo, female anger seems to be registering in ways that it has seldom done in recent decades. As Rebecca Traister (2018, 2) puts it in her bestselling book Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger—itself a part of the remarkab…
Xenofeminism
Feminist anger and feminist respair
How bad things have become. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say: how bad things have always been, but it is only now that some people with particular kinds of class and race privilege are beginni
Stay the fuck at home!”: Feminism, family and the private home in a time of coronavirus
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 to ‘stay the fuck at home’ may work to conceal pervasive forms of gendered violence within domestic…
Introduction to the first edition of Cultural Commons
Re-enchanting the crisis: Reflections on rurality, futurity and Covid-19 in the United Kingdom
Cultural commons: Critical responses to Covid-19, part 2
It feels like we launched Cultural Commons – a short-form section committed to voicing radically contextualist, rapid response analyses – at an opportune moment, just as the world seemed to spin off its socio-political axis amid a global catastrophe. The crisis context of Covid-19 is generating reflections and re-evaluations that are pouring out in myriad forms, and it is now almost impossible to keep abreast of the pace of change and the reach o…
Culture and commoning in a time of coronavirus: Introduction to a Cultural Commons special section on Covid-19
I am against Americanizing England. Ordinary TV does not seem to have an elevating influence”: Class, gender, public anxiety, and the responses to the arrival of commercial television in the Mass Obse…
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 prone to being seduced by commercial culture at this time, our analysis of material from the Mass Ob…
Gender and Transnational Media
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 interventions in issues of social justice. Each article in this issue starts from a specific location and tra…
Introduction to a commentary and criticism section on gender and transnational media
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 media, and thus further expand and update the conceptual terrain of the issue’s theme. The six pieces point to the urgent need for feminist media scholars …
A life lasts longer than the body through which it moves: An introduction to a special Cultural Commons section on Raymond Williams
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 ‘bloodstream’ – and yet is now often overlooked, unattributed or unacknowledged. While Williams’s work…
The race for space’: Capitalism, the country and the city in Britain under Covid-19
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 buy up rural properties. The ‘cottagecore’ social media aesthetic has proliferated, offering privatize…
From femcels to ‘femcelcore’: Women’s involuntary celibacy and the rise of heteronihilism
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 social media aesthetic or ‘vibe’, communicated through short, apparently ironic videos on TikTok. We cont…
Through the looking glass: Feminism and reactionary politics in the digital hall of mirrors
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 authoritarian right. In the digital hall of mirrors, feminist ideas and practices are mimicked, co-o…
The reactionary turn in popular feminism
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 truths,” “material conditions,” and women as a “sex class.” I analyse three seemingly diverse iterati…
A tale of two angers: The manosphere, the femosphere and the gender politics of mediated rage
This article offers a conjunctural analysis of mediated women's anger in the wake of the #MeToo movement. It asks: what does it mean that the historic rise in the visibility of women's anger (at sexism, misogyny and gendered abuse) emerged at the same historical moment as the rise of reactionary forms of political anger (associated with authoritarian populism, ethnonationalisms, misogyny, racism and the 'anti-gender' movement)? By putting two ver…
Political science (21 works) · Law (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Law (16 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · Politics (14 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (13 works) · Media studies (12 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Feminism (9 works)