CRCC to host the symposium ‘Reactionary politics, women, and popular culture’

The Centre for Research in Culture and Communication at Loughborough University will host the symposium ‘Reactionary politics, women, and popular culture’ on 21st May, 2025.

The event will feature a keynote by Professor Angela McRobbie (Goldsmiths), the pre-eminent scholar of gender, feminism and popular culture.

In the one-day symposium, held at the East Midlands campus with some provision for online presentations, papers will focus on feminised popular culture in the context of resurgent reactionary politics. 

Feminist media and cultural studies scholarship has long wrestled with the complex and historically shifting relationships between feminism, gender politics, and popular culture. While there is increasing recognition of the role that women are playing in the rise of the organised far right – a phenomenon emblematised by Marine Le Pen – what remains under-researched and under-theorised is how female-centric popular culture is responding to, shaped by, or entangled with these reactionary forces.    

We are living in a time of rising right-wing authoritarianism, racism, anti-migrant hatred, and the insurgent “anti-gender” movement – including attacks on gender studies. Scholarly attention has increasingly trained on the role that masculinist digital culture plays in these phenomena, including the rise of the manosphere and the alt-right, reactionary “wellness” influencers, anti-feminist “manfluencers” such as Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, and the growing power of the anti-feminist “red pill” philosophy. These have all been subjected to critical scrutiny because of their constitutive role in the spreading moods of nihilism, resentment and hate. 

But what should we make of popular culture and digital media forms that are addressed to women – what role do tradwives, “dark feminine” influencers, the “4B” movement, and so-called “reactionary feminists” play in this conjuncture? To what extent are social media genres of feminine fitness content, women’s wellness influencers, and female dating influencers entangled with reactionary forces?  

This symposium invites papers that analyse this “reactionary turn” in feminised popular culture and digital media. We particularly encourage submissions from postgraduate students and early career scholars. In addition, we welcome submissions from those whose work focuses on non-anglophone, non-western contexts.  

Questions that papers may consider are: 

How does reactionary politics interpellate women through popular culture and digital media forms? 

How should we understand the shifting role of popular feminism in this reactionary conjuncture?

What new theoretical frames do we need to understand the perplexing new entanglements of feminised cultural forms with reactionary politics?

To what extent do these emergent forms of reactionary, female-centric popular culture represent a break with post-feminism, and to what extent may they be continuous?  

How might we theorise these phenomena which take shape in culture and media? What specific role is being allocated to culture in the production of female subjects aligned with these reactionary and far right politics? 

Submissions should be sent to j.kay@lboro.ac.uk by 22 January 2025 

Please include an abstract of 300 words and a short author biography 

Please state whether the paper will be presented in-person or online