Abstract
Thatcherism in 1980s’ Britain and Reagan in the United States marked the dominance of a globalised market individualism that tended to disdain the poor, unemployed and dispossessed as work shy ‘scroungers’. But Thatcher’s championing of the right to buy council houses struck a chord in working-class communities that felt potentially empowered through ownership. Her focus upon individual rights and her antagonism to the nationalised industries she sought to privatise tended to subvert tradition relationships of authority and deference.
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Notes
For some helpful discussions of Thatcherism and the ways she was able to win working-class support for some of her policies and the part she played in undermining traditional relationships of authority see, for instance, Martin Jacques and Stuart Hall, eds, Thatcherism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983).
For some illuminating discussions of the cultural and social revolutions of the 1960s and ways they challenged traditional relationships of authority see for instance Victor J. Seidler, Recreating Sexual Politics: Men, Feminism and Politics (London: Routledge, 1991).
Discussions about the different traditions of democracy and the forms of representation they are tied to are offered in David Held, Models of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986).
Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘A Room of Her Own’ can be found in A Room of Her Own (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001). Some helpful reflections upon Woolf’s relationships with the feminism of her times see, for instance, Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Vintage, 1997).
For some helpful reflections upon the changing nature of authority within Western cultures see, for instance, Richard Sennett, Authority (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993) and his more recent Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality (London: Penguin, 2003).
Attempts to hold feminisms responsible for the breakdown of authority relationships within the family and within the larger culture more generally are investigated in Judith Stacey, In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996).
See also discussions in N. Walter, The New Feminism (London: Virago, 1998)
B. Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture (London: Routledge, 2004)
J. Butler, Undoing Feminism (New York: Routledge, 2004)
R. Gill, Gender and Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006)
L. Adkins, Revisions: Gender and Sexuality in Late Modernity (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2002)
A. McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London: Sage, 2009).
The relationship between feminism and democracy through its different phases is explored in Anne Phillips, Engendering Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
For an exploration of how democracy can come to terms with issues of difference see Anne Phillips, Democracy and Difference (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993).
See also Seyla Benhabib, Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996)
V. Bell, ed., Performativity and Belonging (London: Sage, 1999)
G.C Spivak, The Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)
E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985)
J. Halberstram, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005)
Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London: Sage, 2009).
For some discussion of the attempts by New Labour to use the criminal justice system to deal with issues of what they framed as ‘anti-social behaviour’ see, for instance, Stuart Walton, The Politics of Anti-social Behaviour (London: Routledge, 2008)
Peter Squires and Dawn E. Stephen, Rougher Justice: Anti-social Behaviour and Young People (London: Willan Publishers, 2005).
Discussion about the changing gender relations within education and the different assessments made around the relative under-achievement of boys is offered in D. Epstein, J. Elwood, V. Hey and J. Maw, eds, Failing Boys?: Issues in Gender and Achievement (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998).
A helpful discussion of changing conceptions of authority within modern societies is given in Richard Sennett, Authority (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993).
It is also a central theme in Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991) and his Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992)
See also, Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002)
U. Beck and E. Beck-Gernscheim, The Normal Chaos of Love (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995) and Individualization (London: Sage, 2001)
Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
Some of the structural changes that have fostered the possibilities of a different vision of politics, sometimes referred to as Blair’s Third Way have been reflected upon in Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right (Cambridge: Polity, 1994). He develops a framework for radical politics that draws freely upon what he calls ‘philosophical conservatism’ in the service of values normally associated with the Left.
Some of the thinking that has informed the New Labour project was previously set out in the discussions fostered by the left of centre Demos. See, for instance, Geoff Mulgan, Politics in an Antipolitical Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994) where he argues that politics has transcended its origin in national institutions and spread into new domains of social life, from the global arena to the bedroom. In place of the old politics based around states and markets, he argues that a new politics based around the quality and reciprocity of relationships is emerging.
See also, L. Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003)
J. Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997)
R. Braidotti, Transpositions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006)
Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition (London: Routledge, 1997).
For some helpful discussion of the gang cultures that have emerged within inner city areas and the kind of masculinities they have helped sustain see, for instance, Clair Alexander, The Asian Gangs: Ethnicity, Identity, Masculinity (Oxford: Berg, 2000).
See also Les Back, New Ethnicities and Urban Cultures (London: UCL Press, 1996) and The Art of Listening (Oxford: Berg, 2007).
For some discussion of the role of the media in the events around Diana’s death and the ways this reflected and challenged certain tendencies within the media see, for instance, T. Hall, ‘The People Led, We Followed’, The Times (10 September 1997)
A Ruddock, Uunderstanding Audiences: Theory and Method (London: Sage, 2001)
J. Richards, S. Wilson and L. Woodhead, eds, Diana: The Making of a Media Saint (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999)
Ross Gill, Gender and the Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006)
D. Morley, Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992)
C. Brunsdon, Screen Tastes: Soap Opera to Satellite Dishes (London: Routledge, 1997)
C. Driscoll, Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002)
J. McGuigan, Cultural Populism (London: Routledge, 1992)
J. Curran and T. Liebes, eds, Media, Ritual and Identity (London: Routledge, 1998)
Roger Silverstone, Why Study Media? (London: Sage, 1999)
N. Couldry, Media Rituals: A Critical Approach (London: Routledge, 2005).
For some discussion of communitarianism as it was developed politically through the writings of Amitai Etzione see, for instance, The Spirit of Community (1982) and The Monochrome Society (2001). These were notions that New Labour was soon left behind as it reached towards more managerial forms of target setting as a way of the central administration being able to affirm control over institutions and organisations.
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© 2013 Victor Jeleniewski Seidler
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Seidler, V.J. (2013). New Capitalism, Authority and Recognition. In: Remembering Diana. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371903_10
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