This paper fits with the theme of how gendered identities are reproduced within media representations in the Gender and Communication Section. It draws on empirical data to argue that, amidst a growing number of single women in the US-UK context[1], the figure of the single woman in popular culture continues to be constructed through deeply neoliberalised, postfeminist discourses (Elias, Gill, & Scharff, 2017; Gill, 2007; Taylor, 2012). Existing research has largely examined cultural representations and the lived experience of single woman in isolation, however this research, based on my PhD study, looks at both, to consider how representations of the single woman in popular culture may also be impacting on individual women’s subjectivities.
I draw on Judith Butler’s psychosocial theory of subjectivity formation which understands social regulation as not externally imposed from the outside, but as actively engaged with by the subject at the psychic level (Butler 1997). I am also informed by Christina Scharff’s theory that the psychic life of neoliberalism is experienced as an incitement to manage one’s self as an autonomous, self-critiquing, self-competitive subject (Scharff, 2016). The paper also takes Foucault’s theory of subjectivity and technologies of the self (Foucault, 1988) as its framing, employing the concept of fantasy (Fuss, 1995) as a lens to investigate how the single woman is being discursively constructed and regulated through postfeminist fantasies of individualization, freedom, independence, autonomy, self accountability and self-regulation in US-UK primetime TV shows, advertising, magazines and films. I also examine how single women in London experience such media discourses, based on 25 single women’s self-narratives, and argue that they experience significant psychic tension based on such 'othering' encounters. Methodologically I employ a thematic and a Foucauldian discourse analysis which incorporates an intersectional approach (Crenshaw, 1989) to explore how single women are discursively negotiating or resisting what it is argued are deeply regulatory neoliberalised cultural fantasies which often work to construct the single woman as the ideal postfeminist, neoliberal subject.
This research is increasingly urgent in order to examine how, in the context of a growing number of single women, the hypervisibility of deeply regulatory media representations of single female subjectivities may be impacting on the psychic life of single women.
[1] Over the past 15 years the number of single women (defined as never married or in a civil partnership) has grown sharply, from 27% in 2003 to 33% in 2015 in England and Wales (ONS, 2015), with similar figures for the rest of the UK. In the US, 25% of women were single in 2003, and this had risen to 29% by 2015 (US Census Bureau, 2003; 2015).