Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Spectacular girls and the place of psychoanalytic approaches in feminist media and cultural studies during the Coronavirus crisis

In this review of Feminism and the Politics of Resilience, Angela McRobbie’s conceptualisation of the ‘perfect-imperfect-resilience dispositif’ is praised as offering a clear demarcation from McRobbie and others’ previous work on the earlier de-politicised and individualist era of postfeminism. It calls for more work in the field of feminist media and cultural studies to consider psychoanalytic approaches to questions around pleasure, affect and compulsion in girls’ and women’s popular media culture. In light of the Coronavirus crisis and with a reflection on the spectacular visibility of girls and former young female celebrities in recent mainstream media, this short essay explores two lines of inquiry in response to Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: first, what has the period of the pandemic done to the potent power of the p-i-r? And second, how might we be both careful to recognise the binaristic ways in which the girl subject is culturally constructed, while being sure not to reproduce such ‘ontologised dualisms’ of girlhood in our writing?