Seminar: “Hey you! Smile” Depoliticizing girlhood in the neoliberal marketplace
Dr Natalie Coulter, Communication Studies, York University, Toronto
October 7, 2019
3:30-4:30
F2.009 (Burwood)
VMP 36918
Girls are told that the must always be having fun. From Donald Trump’s sarcastic tweets of Greta Thunberg as being “a happy young girl” to the ubiquitous advertisements of girl’s laughing, girls are expected to be constantly in a hyper state of funness. In this paper I will argue that fun functions as a form of affective labour that depoliticizes the girl. Using Sarah Ahmed’s critique of the affective labour of the happy housewife, and also Dan Cook’s work on fun and childhood, my work theorizes how fun has become an effective/ affective tool in the production of the neoliberal citizen. Fun acts as a “moral cover” to legitimate advertisers and marketer’s incursion into our lives and reifies the subjective positions of being a consumer (Cook 2009). Fun also functions as a means to depoliticize girls as political subjects. Drawing on a feminist reading of affect theory, this paper will further explore how the labour of fun is a gendered performance that produces the ideal neoliberal consuming subject, depoliticized and complicit in the workings of capitalism.
About the Speaker
Natalie Coulter is an Associate Professor at York University in the department of Communication Studies and is the Director of the Institute for Digital Learning and culture (IRDL) at York University. She is currently working on a SSHRC funded project entitled Evangelisms, Entanglements and Superfans: Young People’s Creative Labour in the Visibility Economy that integrates how young people’s creative labour (both online and offline) is harnessed in the promotional ecologies of the children’s media and entertainment industry. She co-edited Youth Mediations and Affective Relations, with Susan Driver (2019, Palgrave Macmillan). Her book Tweening the Girl: The Crystallization of the Tween Market was published in 2014 (Peter Lang). She has published in the Journal of Consumer Culture, Canadian Journal of Communication, Journal of Children and Media, Popular Communication and Jeunesse. She is a founding member of the Association for Research on the Cultures of Young People (ARCYP).
