In this chapter, we explore the ways in which girls and young women, as the already luminous subjects of leadership and empowerment discourses, responded to the emerging media formats, heightened public authority, and increasingly polarised gendering of power in the Covid-19 era. In response to what we term the leadership theatre of the UK daily lockdown state briefing, we identify the emergence of ventrolloquism as a resistant and critical means of articulating girls’ and young women’s otherwise unheard and unsolicited critiques of ineffective, performatively masculine state power. Drawing on data collected in focus groups with teenage girls across England, Scotland and Wales before and after lockdown and on a newly emerging Covid-19-era genre of TikTok lip-synching we show consistent patterns of girls’ and young women’s disquiet with populist, androcentric risk-taking and the feminisation of caution. This disquiet found expression in the specific conditions of lockdown media and the trans-media affordances of the freshly booming TikTok platform. This (e)merging genre utilised ventriloquistic practices of remediating state broadcasts and drag impersonation of male politicians to evade the strictures upon girls and women’s voices. We locate this resistant practice within chronic wider concerns surrounding gender, voice and visibility rendered acute by Covid-19.
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Yelin, Hannah Paule, Michele
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Year of publication: 2024Date of RADAR deposit: 2024-03-28