Journal
PINNED: Introduction by Deniz Arzuk
Although this research had been in the works for over a decade, this website is the product of the Covid-19 lockdown period. It is oddly fitting to launch it at a time when the effects of the 1980s and 1990s, from the erosure of social security, to individualisation, and to intersectional inequalities, are felt more dramatically than ever.
NEW: Guest post by
Gareth Millward
“Rather than simply being about ‘discipline’ – ensuring that children followed the rules laid out by adults – the act of missing school became folded into wider concerns about qualifications, attendance league tables, and nebulous ideas of ‘quality’ that abounded in the increased visibility and impact of ‘market liberalism’ in wider British politics at this time.”
Guest post by
Natalie Coulter
The girl is “understood” purely in market terms, not as a citizen with collective needs and desires, not a complex heterogenous category with diverse experiences of girlhood based on class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, etc. But instead as a consumer, assumed to be a white, middle class, able bodied, heterosexual girl, whose value is based on her ability to purchase products.”
Guest post by
Dominic Dean
“Today’s American and British Right owes much to the 1980s. Nevertheless, we are now in the future that the dominant politics of the 1980s failed to fully imagine, much as Ronald Reagan’s ‘Let’s Make America Great Again’ slogan laid the seed for, yet failed to anticipate, its Trumpist reincarnation.”
Guest post by
Anna Sparrman
“A liberal view on child sexuality was replaced by a child protection discourse which has become entangled with the paedophilication of children’s everyday lives. As an outcome of this, two parallel discourses on the sexual child are competing.”
Guest post by
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson
“While in some ways the 1980s marked a distinctive shift in experiences of childhood, in other ways the 1980s marked a culmination of trends which had begun in earlier decades..”
Guest post by
Charlotte Faircloth
“In a ‘neoliberal’ era, with its emphasis on self-management, ‘good’ parents (mothers) are child-centred, reflexive, informed consumers, able to ‘account’ for their parenting strategies to minimise any sort of risk to their children.”
Guest post by
Katherine Kruger
“The solution to subverting the pernicious ideal of innocence for the Riot Grrrls did not lie simply in changing habits of consumption. Instead they urged girls to harness the public fear of consumer children by becoming ferocious, active producers of culture, rather than passive consumers…”
PINNED: Guest post by
Rachel Rosen
“Neoliberalism is not just out there, but in here. Literally. It is in our subjectivities, our intimate relationships, and the everyday objects which we use for survival, connection, and leisure.”
Guest post by
Laura Tisdall
“Shocking Pink, from its very first issue, laid out the issues facing young women by explicitly reckoning with age as an axis of oppression in a way that Spare Rib tended to avoid. In this way, although the magazine set itself up as in opposition to mainstream eighties teenage magazines like Jackie, Oh Boy and Blue Jeans, it also posed a challenge to adult-led feminist movements.”
Guest post by
Lucy Pearson
“‘we live […] in an age where television, radio, the press and the internet have rendered the secrets adults may wish to keep from children impossible to hide. […] Our best hope is to help them become fleet of mind, understanding, tolerant and above all, able to make decisions for themselves.’”
Guest post by
Jennifer Crane
“The tensions in these debates also reflected broader tensions in the 1980s themselves: new strands of individualist thought, new interest in listening to and publicising children’s voices and opinions, and the work of a sensationalist media interested in narratives of family, failure, and success.”
Guest post by
Helen King
“These young readers are supported to ask difficult or taboo questions. They are allowed space to articulate and perhaps process feelings of shame, grief and outrage, and they are guided to recognise and critique racist discourses.”
Guest post by
Michael Lambert
“In the depths of the social and economic deprivation of 1980s and 1990s Britain, this constituted a firm neoliberal commitment to a strong state when necessary – when the family was challenged – but otherwise with minimum welfare services, resources or social security, which were dispensable.”
Guest post by
Karen Sands-O’Connor
“Children’s perspective on being Black and British was often even more directly political than anything written by adults.”
Guest post by
Kate Cairns
“Reflecting neoliberal ideals of personal responsibility and market-driven change, the protagonist of this story was the environmentally conscious consumer: one who recognizes the harmful impact of their careless choices and vows to change their ways. (…) Left out of this story was the disproportionate impact of ecological devastation in poor communities, Indigenous communities, and communities of color.”
Please get in touch if you would like to contribute to the project with a piece, an image, or an idea.
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