European Journal of Cultural Studies

Twenty years of the European Journal of Cultural Studies is a cause for celebration. We do so with a festive issue that comes together with our first free open access top articles in three areas that readers have sought us out for: postfeminism, television beyond textual analysis and cultural labour in the creative industries. The issue opens with freshly commissioned introductory essays to these three thematic areas by key authors in those fields. In addition, the issue offers new articles showcasing the range of the broad field of cultural studies today, including pieces on the politics of co-working, punk in China, Black British women on YouTube, trans-pedagogy and fantasy sports gameplay, featuring work by emerging as well as established scholars. Our editorial introduction to this celebratory issue offers reflections on how both the journal and the field of cultural studies have developed, and on our thoughts and ambitions for the future within the current conjuncture as we ‘move on’ as a new editorial team.

This article revisits the notion of ‘postfeminism’ 10 years after its formulation in critical terms as a sensibility characterizing cultural life. The article has two broad aims: first to reflect upon postfeminism as a critical term – as part of the lexicon of feminist scholarship – and second to discuss the current features of postfeminism as a sensibility. The first part of the article discusses the extraordinary uptake of the term and considers its continuing relevance in a changed context marked by deeply contradictory trends, including the resurgence of interest in feminism, alongside the spectacular visibility of misogyny, racism, homophobia and nationalism. I document a growing attention to the specificities of postfeminism, including attempts to map its temporal phases, its relevance to place, and intersectional developments of the term. The second part of the article examines the contours of the contemporary postfeminist sensibility. I argue that postfeminism has tightened its hold upon contemporary life and become hegemonic. Compared with a decade ago, it is much more difficult to recognize as a novel and distinctive sensibility, as it instantiates a common sense that operates as a kind of gendered neoliberalism. It has both spread out and intensified across contemporary culture and is becoming increasingly dependent upon a psychological register built around cultivating the ‘right’ kinds of dispositions for surviving in neoliberal society: confidence, resilience and positive mental attitude. Together these affective, cultural and psychic features of postfeminism exert a powerful regulatory force. This article forms part of ‘On the Move’, a special issue marking the twentieth anniversary of the journal. It also heads up a special online dossier on ‘Postfeminism in the European Journal of Cultural Studies’.

Over 20 years, the European Journal of Cultural Studies has been an important resource for those writing and thinking about television, and this article reflects on the rich material contained in the long run of issues published since 1998. As part of ‘On the Move’, the Special Issue to mark the 20th anniversary of the journal, it also introduces the special online dossier of articles on television. It offers an impressionistic reflection on the author’s experiences of engaging with work on television as it has appeared in this journal. In homage to Raymond Williams, that great writer about television (and much else), this article focuses on three key words which seem crucial to this enterprise – journal, television and European.

In keeping with the spirit of this Special Issue, this article takes a retrospective view – analysing two decades of research on local, city-based cultural economies in the dominant context of the ‘creative industries’ policy paradigm. We begin by exploring our own position in the field – as early arbiters for the cultural industries – and the political and economic context which informed our own (shared) efforts to further progressive claims for culture, amidst the transforming post-industrial city of the 1990s. The subsequent rise of a creative industries discourse – in the United Kingdom and beyond – had a transformative effect on those progressive claims, not least in bringing to the fore a more economistic, capital-driven model of urban renewal which served to undermine many of the promises that had been invested in popular urban culture under social democracy. How this shift was played out in the academic literature – and its political consequences – is the theme of the remainder of the article. This article forms part of the Special Issue ‘On the Move’, which marks the 20th anniversary of the European Journal of Cultural Studies. It also heads up a special online dossier on ‘Creative Industries in the European Journal of Cultural Studies’.

YouTube and video bloggers (vloggers) have been a source of academic interest, yet few studies explore the representation or experiences of Black women on YouTube. The video blogs (vlogs) of Black women yield symbolic digital resources which young Black women may engage with in self-exploratory, self-educating, resistant and collective ways. This article reflects on 21 in-depth interviews with young Black women in Britain, aged 19–33 years. It addresses how their engagement with Black women’s vlogs intersects with identity and ideological work, including participation in Black digital diasporic dynamics. Influenced by research about Black women and media culture, resistant YouTube activity, as well as race and everyday uses of celebrity, this article explores the YouTube usage of young Black women in Britain, while reflecting on what this reveals about their lives in the early 21st century. This article forms part of ‘On the Move’, a special issue marking the twentieth anniversary of the European Journal of Cultural Studies.

When the Olympian and reality television star formerly known as Bruce Jenner appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair in 2015 under the headline ‘Call me Caitlyn’, there was widespread celebration of this unprecedented moment of transgender visibility. However, the positive reception of Jenner as an out trans celebrity has become increasingly complicated by the conservative Republican politics she identifies with. This article examines how those tensions inform the reality series I Am Cait, which repeatedly features Jenner in political conflict with a group of trans activists who are helping to facilitate her public transition. It asks whether the ‘education’ of Jenner that becomes the primary narrative of the text reaffirms or troubles the neoliberal ideology at the core of her conservatism. In order to explore this, I examine the series’ framing of productive gender normative citizenship, the intersection of its corrective pedagogies with the reality television context in which they take place, and the series’ representation of transgender heterogeneity. This article forms part of ‘On the Move’, a special issue marking the twentieth anniversary of the European Journal of Cultural Studies.

Self-employed media and cultural workers are key users of co-working spaces, where a growing number of independent workers share desks and office amenities, escape the isolation of working from home and seek contacts for paid work. Informed by interviews with coworking space operators and members, this article assesses coworking as a response to precarity. We argue that social and political ambivalence is intrinsic to the culture of coworking. First, we situate coworking in a political–economic context, claiming that coworking emerged as a worker-developed response to changing economic conditions but, in its current form, is increasingly commodified and ultimately reinforces labour flexibilization. Second, we survey meanings attached to coworking, highlighting tensions between coworking’s counter-corporate identity and its recapitulation of neoliberal norms. Third, we address subjectivity formation, proposing that coworking spaces are a stage for the performance of network sociality. We conclude by considering coworking’s political potential as a platform for collective action. This article forms part of the Special Issue ‘On the Move’, which marks the twentieth anniversary of European Journal of Cultural Studies.

While the biographical approach is widely employed in applied and theoretical social research, it is less fully developed in the specific field of (post-) subcultural studies. The article demonstrates the utility of the biographical method for (post) subcultural studies by presenting research on the punk phenomenon in an authoritarian social context within China. The discussion draws upon a qualitative study based on interviews with 34 Chinese punk musicians. Although the article focuses on one of these musicians in particular, the arguments are informed by broader research findings. Specifically, emphasis is placed on examining how the punk musician experiences the gradual process of deepening commitment to the punk scene and, through this, the multiple levels of power relations in his life. It is argued that the biographical approach can highlight the subjectivity of individual participants in their everyday practices and the wider social context in which they are actors. This article forms part of ‘On the Move’, a special issue marking the twentieth anniversary of the European Journal of Cultural Studies.

This article investigates the cultural implications of the internationalization of contemporary fantasy sports. In particular, it exposes previously unexplored distinctions between season-long North American and European fantasy sports (the two most prominent world markets). In order to contextualize these distinctions, first, this article provides a concise history of both North American and European fantasy sports, delineating briefly the philosophies that shaped them. Second, it examines the contrasting paradigms (i.e., the models by which fantasy sports are imagined, designed and played) of North America and Europe’s most popular fantasy sports – North American and European football – paradigms that reflect to various extents the hypercommodification and dehumanization of the athletes involved. On the basis of this examination, the article argues that the two frameworks produce disparate fan identities – that of ‘owners’ in North American fantasy football and of ‘managers’ in European fantasy football. Third, it makes a case for three possibilities as to how and why these differences may have arisen. Thus, the article utilizes the differences in the two models as a foundation for its contentions regarding the potential reasons for these distinctions and their cultural significance. This article forms part of the Special Issue ‘On the Move’, which marks the twentieth anniversary of European Journal of Cultural Studies.

Raymond Williams is one of the most important and influential cultural theorists. Although he wrote on communication(s), the main reception of his works is today predominantly focused on his works on literature and culture. This article therefore presents an overview of his notion of communication and asks: How does Raymond Williams conceive of communication? How can we use his communicative materialism today for understanding digital communication? Williams advanced a materialist understanding of communication. His elements of a materialist communication theory help us to illuminate communication in the context of the base/superstructure problem, and ideology as a peculiar form of instrumental communication. He provides concepts that we need for a materialist understanding of digital media. The article concludes that we need the approach of communicative materialism for grounding a Marxist theory of communication that is relevant to the analysis of digital media. This article forms part of ‘On the Move’, a special issue that marks the twentieth anniversary of the European Journal of Cultural Studies.

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 Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Why Cultural Studies? is a searing, single-authored polemic by Gilbert B Rodman on the current state of cultural studies and a rallying call to reinvigorate the project by resuscitating its leftist impulses. In this article, I consider what these two books might offer in the way of intellectual, political and emotional resources for hope in the contemporary conjuncture; the ways that the books negotiate the inevitable partiality and the hidden personal politics of their own narratives; as well as the ways they implicitly invite personal, subjective reflection about one’s relationship to the histories and traditions of cultural studies. I end with a reflection about the challenges, but also the generative value, of revisiting painful and difficult debates within the field.