Gender, Media and Voice by Jilly Boyce Kay

Author:Jilly Boyce Kay
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030472870
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The Perils and Possibilities of Irreverence

This chapter has sought to consider what we might make of the popularisation of gendered irreverence from the perspective of feminism and communicative (in)justice. On the one hand, ‘transgressive’ voice appears to challenge age-old injustices and communicative norms, and to offer radical new possibilities for women’s public speech: it promises that refusing to abide by archaic injunctions for female subservience will deliver untold new democratic possibilities. In doing so, it provides the kind of thrilling hopefulness that is important for propelling social and communicative change. However, in keeping with this book’s insistence that any approach to communicative injustice must be intersectional and grounded in left politics, I have sought in this chapter to complicate the idea that women speaking loudly, irreverently or in ways that seem to challenge oppressive speech norms is inevitably and of itself something to celebrate.

Helen Wood (2019) has identified what she terms a growing ‘irreverent rage’ in media culture. She suggests that the increasing use of the word ‘fuck’, most especially when it is uttered by women, is indicative of a broader refusal to play by the affective, socio-communicative rules of the classed and gendered public sphere. This marks a refusal to be deferent and subservient, as well as a refusal to be shamed. Wood points to politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) who, as a young, left-wing woman of colour in the US is not playing by those rules that would historically compel her to be composed, or deferential, or to aspire to be ‘respectable’. Wood suggests that we might understand AOC’s ‘irreverent rage’ as part of a more hopeful shift in the class and gender politics of the public sphere. She cautions that it is possible that any ‘rise in irreverence might also be related to a general rise in populism and anti-intellectualism which has spawned the triumph of Trump’; however, ultimately, Wood sees this irreverent rage as distinctive from regressive, Trumpian outrage, and as something that is ‘intellectually performative of the uneven and repressed histories of deference and respectability that cut across gender, race, class and sexuality’ (p. 614).

I have similarly argued that we need to distinguish between different kinds of anger that circulate within and animate contemporary media culture (Kay 2019; Chap. 3 in this book). Simply put, not all women’s anger is ‘good’, and not all women’s ‘voice’ is something to celebrate. As Wood’s argument suggests, irreverence does not inherently work in the service of feminism—it depends significantly on what is (not) being revered. Irreverence towards patriarchal cultures and their socio-communicative norms can provide grounds for hope; irreverence that is directed towards refugees, Muslims, feminists, queers, or the poor (the targets of Katie Hopkins’ ‘outspokenness’) is clearly working in the opposite direction. What seems like outrageous defiance and transgression is often itself all too reverent, deferent and subservient to toxic and harmful power structures. Meanwhile, Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s experiences of ‘speaking out’ show the extreme limits of tolerance for women’s talk that is more genuinely ‘irreverent’ or ‘badly behaved’, and the racialised dynamics of that (in)tolerance.

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