Kate Gilchrist, London School of Economics
During the first few months of 2020, when the world was in the first grip of the Covid-19 pandemic, one of the UK’s top-trending shows on TV streaming service Netflix was Love is Blind. While many US and UK reality TV dating shows have followed a similar format , this one saw couples communicating from separate ‘pods’, meeting in-person only once they had agreed to marry. Thus, ironically the US show (filmed before the pandemic) used socially distanced techniques to allow couples to get to know each other in a tactic intended to foster ‘deep intimacy’. Only once they agreed to a lifetime of commitment, were they able to meet in person. It could be argued that the overwhelming success of this show, in a moment of actual social distancing, demonstrated an increased yearning for romantic, coupled intimacy. While it remains to be seen how the pandemic might alter collective understandings of intimate life, it is interesting to contrast this with a media event which occurred only a few months earlier which apparently ‘celebrated’ singledom. This incident concerned the high-profile Hollywood actress Emma Watson. In November 2019, Watson coined a new phrase by announcing her decision to ‘self-partner’ in top fashion magazine Vogue (Lees, 2019). Her embrace of singlehood generated headlines around the world, and the phrase ‘self-partnered’ was discussed and dissected in multiple subsequent articles, by Watson herself and others. The resignification of singledom as ‘self-partnered’ perhaps struck a chord because it appeared to go against the grain of what every 30-year-old woman – the average age of marriage and childbearing in the UK – ‘should’ want if she is to conform to what continues to constitute ‘success’ in intimate life, that of coupledom and marriage (Finlay and Clarke, 2003). While Watson was quick to clarify that she was ‘still dating’ and therefore arguably still open to some form of coupling, what seemed to catch the headlines is that she asserted her happiness at such a ‘choice’ at the pivotal age of 30.
While many feminist scholars have shown that single women in popular culture are becoming increasingly visible (Negra, 2004; Taylor, 2012) these two brief examples highlight the deep contradictions in how UK-US contemporary culture constructs gendered subjectivities in relation to singledom and coupledom and is the fundamental interest that animated my doctoral research, which was conducted between 2017-2020. The thesis analysed eight cross-genre texts which circulated in contemporary US-UK popular culture: TV shows Chewing Gum, Fargo, The Good Wife, The Bridge, films How to Be Single and Francis Ha, a special edition of ELLE magazine dedicated to single women, and an advert for Ford Cars. I also interviewed 25 single women (aged 20 to 66) living in London about their understandings and experiences of being single. My findings showed that our collective fantasies of single femininity – both at the cultural and individual level – continue to repeat stigmatising historical tropes of deviancy, dysfunction and vulnerability. Further these historical themes are being reinvigorated in the contemporary moment through an entwinement with what have been called ‘postfeminist’, themes of independence, self-surveillance, self-transformation and affective self-regulation (Taylor, 2012; McRobbie, 2015; Gill, 2016).
I argue that postfeminist discourses of singledom in the contemporary moment intensively produce and regulate female subjectivity as a ‘technology of the self’ (Foucault, 1982). The single woman is induced to pleasurably engage in physical and affective self-transformation and cultivate a liberated, independent, ‘authentic’ single self – or risk stigmatisation. Yet, in the interview accounts, the women revealed both the impossibility of achieving such a self, alongside a desire to still achieve it. The incitement to cultivate a particular form of desirable embodiment and heterosexual attractiveness was distressingly inescapable for the women I interviewed, even for those who did not want to engage with such discourses. The single women I spoke to were interpellated into performing significant affective self-regulation, often feeling compelled to transform themselves into emotionally self-regulating, self-empowered, emotionally independent subjects. Their accounts suggested that this self-surveillence was experienced as overwhelming, while still being captivatingly impossible to resist.
Yet it is not all bad: the women I spoke with also actively negotiated and at times reconciled these anxieties in their engagement with cultural representations of singledom. They took up, disrupted and reconfigured cultural discourses of singledom to make sense of and (sometimes pleasurably) reconcile the psychic conflicts that they encountered and the disparities between the ‘ideal’ female single subject and their lived reality (Walkerdine, 1984). For example some of the older single women I spoke to created radical alternative valuations of time and visions of the future which centred alternative relationship structures, and countered the stigmatising images of the ‘single old maid’ (Lahad and Hazan, 2014). Interviewees also drew upon deviant representations of single femininity – such as Saga Noren in The Bridge who does not conform to social norms – as a release from the acutely regulatory pressures of normative coupled femininity. Finally, the women told of highly diverse fantasies of intimate life which, while less utopian and more complex than the media discourses, offered them alternative spaces of belonging and recognition that drew upon, but also subverted, discourses of normative coupledom.
My research demonstrates that feminist scholarship and feminism as a whole – which has often ignored single women – must continue to focus on how the intersection of femininity and singledom affects women’s psychic lives and everyday experiences. Indeed, in the context of growing numbers of single women, and the widening of social inequalities on multiple levels, it becomes of vital importance to investigate how our collective understandings of intimate relations limit what the late Lauran Berlant called ‘legitimate’ ways of being in the world, and who is allowed, or not, to ‘have “a life,” that adds up to something (Berlant, 2008, p. 7).
References
Berlant, L. (2008) The Female Complaint. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. doi: 10.2307/466188.
Finlay, S. J. and Clarke, V. (2003) ‘“A Marriage of Inconvenience?” Feminist Perspectives on Marriage’, Feminism and Psychology, 13(4), pp. 415–420. doi: 10.1177/09593535030134002.
Foucault, M. (1982) ‘The Subject and Power’, Critical Inquiry, 3rd edn. London : Penguin, 8(4), pp. 777–795.
Gill, R. (2016) ‘Postfeminism and the new cultural life of feminism’, Diffractions, (6), pp. 1–8. Available at: www.diffractions.net.
Lahad, K. and Hazan, H. (2014) ‘The terror of the single old maid: On the insolubility of a cultural category’, Women’s Studies International Forum. Elsevier Ltd, 47(PA), pp. 127–136. doi: 10.1016/j.wsif.2014.08.001.
Lees, P. (2019) ‘No Emma Watson On Being Happily “Self-Partnered” At 30’, Vogue, December.
McRobbie, A. (2015) ‘Notes on the Perfect: Competitive Femininity in Neoliberal Times’, Australian Feminist Studies. Taylor & Francis, 30(83), pp. 3–20. doi: 10.1080/08164649.2015.1011485.
Negra, D. (2004) ‘Quality Postfeminism? Sex and the Single Girl on HBO’, Genders, (39). Available at: http://www.genders.org/g39/g39_negra.html.
Taylor (2012) Single women in popular culture : the limits of postfeminism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Walkerdine, V. (1984) ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come: Young Girls and the Preparation for Adolescent Sexuality’, in McRobbie, A. and Nava, M. (eds) Gender and generation. Basingstoke : Macmillan.
Notes
This blog is adapted from my doctoral thesis, the full version of which is available here.
Biography
Dr Kate Gilchrist is currently an MSc/MA supervisor/academic advisor at the London School of Economics and King’s College London, and is drafting a monograph on single femininity. Her research interests include postfeminist culture, gendered subjectivity, Butlerian psychosocial theory. Her PhD from the London School of Economics (2021), examined how gendered subjectivities are constructed by, and produced through, popular cultural discourses and lived experience of singledom. To do so, the thesis explored how the figure of the single woman is constructed in contemporary popular culture and the ways in which such representation may be impacting on the individual subjectivities of single women. It took Foucault’s theory of subjectivity as its framing, employing the concept of fantasy to investigate how the single woman is being discursively constructed and regulated through fantasies in popular cultural representations in the US-UK and in single women’s narratives of lived experience. The analysis took an intersectional approach to consider how gendered subjectivities are intersected by multiple axis of identity, including race, class, sexuality, disability and age. It also drew upon psychosocial, postfeminist and popular feminist theory. The research was funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council.
Technologies and transformations of the self: Negotiating the single woman in US-UK popular culture (by Kate Gilchrist)
