Angela McRobbie

Angela McRobbie (born 1951) is a British sociologist and cultural theorist whose work spans media, feminism, youth culture, fashion, the creative industries, and neoliberal transformations of labor. She is one of the major figures in British cultural studies and feminist media studies. Since the 1970s, she has examined how popular culture, labor markets, education, media, and the state participate in producing models of femininity adapted to changing forms of capitalism. At the center of her later work is the question of how neoliberalism co-opts the language of feminism — freedom, choice, self-realization, independence, creativity — and transforms it into a technology for managing women’s labor, ambition, and subjectivity. Her books *The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change* (2008/2009), *Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries* (2016), and *Feminism and the Politics of Resilience* (2020) constitute one of the most important contemporary diagnoses of postfeminist neoliberalism. ### Introduction: Feminism after Co-optation McRobbie does not describe feminism as a straightforward story of progress, nor as a movement that first succeeded and was later displaced. Her diagnosis is more complex: contemporary culture does not simply reject feminism. It partially acknowledges, incorporates, disarms, and redeploys it against women. Feminism is “taken into account” precisely in order to declare that it is no longer necessary. McRobbie often describes this shift as a postfeminist logic. Young women are expected to benefit from rights won by previous generations, but without the language of collective politics. They are supposed to be ambitious, educated, entrepreneurial, sexually free, stylish, and self-reliant — on the condition that they understand both success and failure as matters of individual self-work rather than effects of class, racial, gendered, or economic structures. ### Intellectual Biography and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Angela McRobbie emerged from the tradition of British cultural studies, especially the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham. There, during the 1970s, she developed a feminist critique and revision of classical youth-subculture research. Early cultural studies often focused on boys, male subcultures, street style, music, and class resistance, while overlooking girls or treating them as a passive background. Together with Jenny Garber, McRobbie challenged this perspective in **“Girls and Subcultures,”** arguing that girls’ culture could not be analyzed with the same tools used to study spectacular male street subcultures. Girls’ cultural forms were more likely to develop in the spaces of the home, the bedroom, magazines, pop music, fashion, friendship, and romantic fantasy. This did not make them less political. It simply required a different way of seeing. ### Early Research: “Jackie” and Girls’ Culture One of McRobbie’s most important early texts was her analysis of the magazine **“Jackie,”** focused on the ideology of adolescent femininity. McRobbie examined how girls’ magazines organize ideas about love, sexuality, attractiveness, relationships, and the future. She was interested in how popular culture does more than reflect gender norms: it actively produces patterns of desire and behavior. In later work, McRobbie returned critically to these early analyses, acknowledging that her initial approach relied too heavily on a model of ideological media “effects” on female audiences. Over time, she became increasingly interested in the tensions between subordination and pleasure, discipline and agency, imposed femininity and the ways girls and young women make use of it. ### Feminism, Popular Culture, and Girls’ Subjectivity McRobbie is among the thinkers who treat popular culture as a serious field for the production of subjectivity. Magazines, television, fashion, music, advertising, makeover programs, social media, and the creative industries are not merely superficial decoration around social life. They are sites where norms of femininity, success, attractiveness, bodily self-work, ambition, and independence are produced. In this sense, her work continues Stuart Hall’s understanding of culture as a field of struggle over meaning. McRobbie asks more specifically how those meanings organize the lives of girls and women under neoliberalism. ### *The Aftermath of Feminism* **The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change** is one of McRobbie’s most important works. In it, she analyzes the moment when feminism is presented as a historically completed success. Women supposedly already have access to education, employment, sexual freedom, consumption, and public visibility. Further feminist claims can therefore be portrayed as excessive, anachronistic, or unnecessary. McRobbie shows that this image is ideological. “After feminism” does not mean a world after patriarchy. It means a world in which patriarchy has learned to speak the language of choice, empowerment, individual success, and consumer freedom. ### Postfeminism For McRobbie, **postfeminism** does not simply refer to a historical period following feminism. It is a cultural and political formation that operates through the ambivalent incorporation of feminism. Postfeminism tells young women: you can do anything, but only at the price of abandoning collective politics. You can be strong, attractive, educated, ambitious, and independent, but if you fail, the responsibility is yours. Postfeminism transforms structural inequalities into individual challenges. Instead of asking about class, race, care, wages, violence, access to resources, and working conditions, it asks about self-confidence, organization, style, psychological resilience, and the capacity to “make better choices.” ### Double Entanglement One of McRobbie’s central concepts is **double entanglement**. It describes a situation in which contemporary culture simultaneously invokes feminism and renders it obsolete. Feminism is acknowledged as something that has already done its work, and precisely for that reason can be set aside. This is not a classical backlash in which feminism is simply attacked from outside. The mechanism is more subtle. The system says: of course women have rights; of course they can study, work, earn money, and make their own decisions. At the same time, feminism is represented as something from the past — unattractive, excessively angry, too collective, and incompatible with the modern language of aspiration. ### Top Girl One of McRobbie’s most important figures is the **top girl** — the successful young woman who embodies the postfeminist ideal of neoliberal subjectivity. She is educated, ambitious, disciplined, attractive, entrepreneurial, consumer-savvy, and committed to self-development. She appears to prove that feminism has won. McRobbie shows, however, that the top girl is a profoundly ideological figure. Her success is represented as the outcome of individual choices, talent, and self-work rather than particular class, racial, educational, and economic conditions. The top girl is made to stand as evidence of possibility while simultaneously disciplining women who do not succeed. If she can do it, then you should be able to as well. ### The New Gender Contract The figure of the top girl is linked to McRobbie’s concept of the **new gender contract**. Under this contract, young women gain access to education, work, mobility, consumption, and sexual freedom, but in return are expected to relinquish the language of collective claims. They are encouraged to invest in themselves without challenging the structure. They may be free, but not political. This contract is particularly effective because it does not operate through prohibition. It operates through promise. It promises success, self-realization, and independence. That is precisely what makes it so difficult to recognize as a form of discipline. ### Postfeminist Masquerade McRobbie also develops the concept of **postfeminist masquerade**, drawing on psychoanalysis and theories of femininity as performance. Within postfeminist culture, women are expected not only to succeed but to do so in an appropriately feminized way: attractive, controlled, stylish, sexually legible, and elegantly consumer-oriented. Women’s entry into work, education, and public visibility therefore does not eliminate the pressure of femininity. It often intensifies it. A woman is expected to be competent but not overly aggressive; ambitious but still attractive; independent but emotionally self-regulating; visible but non-threatening. ### Makeover and the Discipline of Transformation McRobbie analyzes makeover culture as one of the central mechanisms of postfeminist pedagogy. Makeover programs, advice manuals, magazines, and advertising teach that every woman can transform her body, style, home, career, and emotional life if she is willing to do the necessary work on herself. The makeover appears to tell a story of emancipation: you can change, start again, become a better version of yourself. In McRobbie’s account, however, it is also a disciplinary mechanism. Transformation becomes a personal obligation. The individual must continually update, adapt, improve, and optimize herself. ### *Be Creative* In **Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries**, McRobbie shifts her analysis toward the creative industries. She examines the moment when creativity is presented as the promise of a new form of work: freer, more flexible, more creative, more individual, and more closely aligned with passion. McRobbie shows that this promise frequently conceals precarity, low pay, instability, self-employment, the absence of social protections, and the transfer of risk onto the individual. Creative work is made to look like freedom while often requiring individuals to manage insecurity on their own. ### The Dispositif of Creativity A central concept in *Be Creative* is the **dispositif of creativity**. McRobbie draws on the Foucauldian concept of the apparatus or dispositif to describe a network of institutions, policies, discourses, media, education, urban programs, and market practices that collectively produce creativity as a moral obligation. The dispositif of creativity says: be yourself, follow your passion, turn your talent into a career, create your own job, invest in your brand, build networks, remain flexible, and never stop developing yourself. It sounds like emancipation, but functions as a technology for governing subjectivity. ### Creativity as an Obligation For McRobbie, creativity is neither an innocent capacity nor pure self-expression. Under neoliberalism, it becomes an obligation. The individual must be creative not only in art but in managing her own life, CV, image, networks, finances, housing, body, and crises. Creativity is transformed into a means of transferring responsibility from institutions to individuals. If you do not have stable employment, create your own job. If you lack security, become entrepreneurial. If you are exhausted, manage yourself better. If you are unsuccessful, perhaps you have not yet made your creativity marketable enough. ### The Creative Worker as a Neoliberal Model McRobbie shows that the figure of the creative worker is not marginal to the labor market. It increasingly serves as a model for the future of work. The freelancer, project-based cultural worker, designer, artist, stylist, editor, content producer, or young entrepreneur in the creative sector must perform many functions at once: create, promote, sell, network, manage accounts, apply for funding, remain visible, and stay permanently available. This is a model of work in which the boundary between life and labor nearly disappears. Subjectivity becomes a business. Lifestyle becomes a portfolio. Relationships become capital. Passion becomes an argument against economic claims. ### Self-Employment and the Transfer of Risk Self-employment is a particularly important figure within the creative industries. It is represented as independence but often means bearing the costs of the market alone: gaps between commissions, illness, burnout, unpaid preparatory labor, equipment, taxes, insurance, and irregular income. McRobbie shows that neoliberalism does not need to prohibit collective politics directly. It is enough for every problem to be dispersed into individual career trajectories. Collective struggle over working conditions gives way to private struggles for visibility, networks, and the next commission. ### “Do What You Love” McRobbie’s work connects closely to critiques of the ideology of **do what you love**. In the cultural and creative sectors, work is often represented as a privilege, passion, and form of self-realization. If you are doing what you love, low pay, instability, and overwork begin to appear less scandalous. McRobbie shows that this language of loving one’s work allows the system to evade responsibility. Creative labor comes to resemble traditionally feminized care work: it is supposed to be performed out of vocation, emotional commitment, and personal need, and is therefore treated as though it cannot be directly priced. ### *Feminism and the Politics of Resilience* In **Feminism and the Politics of Resilience**, McRobbie develops a critique of resilience as a new form of neoliberal governance. She examines how the concept of resilience — the capacity to recover, endure, and adapt after crisis — migrates from the languages of psychology, therapy, and management into gender politics. Resilience promises women strength. It says: you will cope, survive, become stronger, learn to adapt. But for McRobbie, this promise is deeply suspect. Instead of asking why the conditions of life are so exhausting, resilience teaches people how to endure them more effectively. ### Resilient Girl The **resilient girl** is another figure in McRobbie’s gallery of postfeminist subjects. After the top girl and the creative worker comes the girl who is expected not only to succeed but also to manage failure, crisis, poverty, burnout, rejection, and instability. This figure is ideologically powerful precisely because it appears as care. The system says: we want you to be strong. In practice, however, attention shifts from structural conditions to individual psychological capacities. If you cannot cope with work, poverty, pressure, and isolation, the problem becomes your insufficient resilience. ### Resilience as Depoliticization McRobbie shows how resilience can operate as a technology of depoliticization. Collective claims are replaced by psychological training. Critique of the labor market gives way to self-care. Questions about wages, housing, care, violence, and social protections are replaced by questions about stress management. This does not mean that caring for oneself is irrelevant. McRobbie does not mock the need to survive. Her critique addresses the moment when the language of resilience replaces politics. Once structural violence is rewritten as a personal challenge, the system ceases to be the object of political claims. ### Self-Care as an Ambivalent Practice In McRobbie’s account, self-care is ambivalent. It can be a necessary practice of survival, especially for people who are overburdened and lack support. Yet it can also be appropriated by neoliberalism as a private technology for managing crisis. At that point, it no longer sustains life collectively but serves to restore the individual’s capacity to remain productive. Self-care then becomes a process of repairing oneself in order to return to the very conditions that produced the exhaustion. ### Undoing Feminism One of McRobbie’s most important diagnoses concerns **undoing feminism**. This does not operate through a simple prohibition of feminism. Instead, feminist achievements are rewritten in ways that strip them of their political character. Women’s access to education is reframed as individual ambition. Their entry into the labor market becomes entrepreneurship. Sexual freedom becomes attractiveness and consumer confidence. Critiques of violence become matters of establishing better personal boundaries. In each case, the structural victories of feminism are individualized. ### The Neoliberal Gender Regime McRobbie describes the emergence of a **neoliberal gender regime**. It is not simply a return to old patriarchy in its earlier form. It is a new arrangement in which women are invited into the labor market, education, consumption, and cultures of success, but under the logic of individual responsibility. This regime does not merely tell women to stay at home. More often, it says: go to work, be visible, earn money, look good, develop yourself, be happy, be resilient. Its violence lies in turning freedom into an obligation. ### Consumer Culture and Female Success Consumer culture plays a crucial role in McRobbie’s account. It supplies images of modern femininity: fashionable, independent, active, slim, attractive, employed, sexually confident, and adept at managing her own life. Women’s success becomes translated into appearance, style, body, career, relationships, and emotional self-control. This is crucial: postfeminist freedom is not freedom from discipline. It is discipline in the form of choice. Women are expected to desire for themselves what the market already demands of them. ### The Creative Industries McRobbie analyzes the creative industries as an especially important laboratory of neoliberalism. Fashion, media, design, music, club culture, content production, art, and small creative enterprises promise work that appears more exciting than conventional employment. They promise autonomy, lifestyle, passion, and the possibility of creating one’s own path. At the same time, these sectors depend on instability, unpaid internships, portfolio labor, low fees, project-based employment, reliance on networks, and intense competition. This is where McRobbie locates the mechanism of co-optation: the language of freedom conceals an economy of risk. ### Fashion as a Field of Labor and Aspiration Fashion is particularly important to McRobbie because it brings together women’s creativity, labor, style, class, consumption, and entrepreneurship. In *British Fashion Design* and later work, she analyzes how young designers and creative workers move between the promise of self-expression and the realities of the market. Fashion makes especially clear that creativity is always material. It requires money, infrastructure, contacts, time, materials, space, production, distribution, and promotion. The myth of individual talent conceals these conditions and particularly often obscures classed and gendered barriers to entry. ### McRobbie, Stuart Hall, and the Cultural Studies Tradition McRobbie remains one of the most important critical inheritors of Stuart Hall’s tradition. Like Hall, she understands culture as a field of struggle over meaning. Like him, she approaches popular cultural forms as spaces of ideology, resistance, and negotiation. Her distinctive contribution lies in consistently shifting this analysis toward girls, women, creative labor, female ambition, and the neoliberal co-optation of feminism. ### Relation to Rosalind Gill and the Debate on Postfeminism McRobbie’s work is often read alongside Rosalind Gill, who developed the concept of **postfeminist sensibility**. Both analyze a culture in which women’s freedom becomes bound to self-discipline, sexual subjectivity, bodily self-work, and individual responsibility. McRobbie, however, places particular emphasis on the relationship between postfeminism and the state, labor, education, and the creative industries. Her project is therefore not only an analysis of media representation but also a critique of the political economy of women’s self-realization. ### Critiques and Limitations McRobbie has been criticized for focusing primarily on young women in Western, Anglophone cultural contexts and for not always attending sufficiently to racialized differences, migration, disability, or queer and trans experiences. Her figures — the top girl, the creative girl, the resilient girl — often emerge from representations of women who have already been admitted, to some extent, into the field of aspiration. This limitation does not invalidate her theory. It identifies where the theory can be extended. McRobbie’s framework can be pushed further by asking who can become a top girl at all, who is permitted to be creative, whose resilience is treated as natural, and whose burnout is recognized as a systemic problem. ### Significance for the Theory of Creative Labor McRobbie’s significance for the theory of creative labor lies in showing how the promise of self-realization can become a form of exploitation. Creative work is not simply a more enjoyable version of work. It is a field in which passion, identity, ambition, and fear of failure are built directly into the economy. McRobbie helps explain why so many people working in culture experience their work as simultaneously desired and devastating. This is not a psychological contradiction but a structural one. The system operates precisely by binding people to work through the promise of meaning. ### Significance for Feminism McRobbie matters to feminism because she shows how the language of emancipation can be turned against the emancipatory project itself. Freedom of choice can become an obligation to choose. Independence can become economic isolation. Success can become a tool for shaming those who do not fit the model of success. Resilience can become a prohibition on political anger. Her theory warns against a feminism detached from critiques of capitalism, labor, class, the welfare state, and material conditions. Feminism reduced to individual empowerment can easily become fuel for the market. ### Key Concepts **Postfeminism** — a cultural formation that acknowledges some feminist achievements in order to declare feminism politically unnecessary. **Double entanglement** — the simultaneous invocation and disarming of feminism by culture, media, markets, and the state. **Top girl** — the figure of a young, ambitious, educated, and disciplined woman whose success is made to demonstrate that gender inequality has been overcome. **New gender contract** — an arrangement in which women gain access to education, work, and consumption in exchange for relinquishing collective feminist politics. **Dispositif of creativity** — an apparatus of institutions, policies, media, and discourses that constructs creativity as an obligation of self-realization and entrepreneurship. **Creative worker** — the figure of the flexible, mobile, self-employed person who manages her own brand, risk, visibility, and crisis. **Resilient girl** — the figure of a woman expected to survive instability, poverty, burnout, and violence through continual work on her own psychological resilience. **Undoing feminism** — the process through which feminist achievements are appropriated and stripped of their collective political meaning. ### Key Publications | Year | Title | Significance | |---|---|---| | 1978 | *Jackie: An Ideology of Adolescent Femininity* | Early analysis of girls’ magazines, romantic individualism, and the production of adolescent femininity. | | 1991 | *Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen* | Key collection of writings on girls, youth culture, magazines, music, and the feminist revision of cultural studies. | | 1994 | *Postmodernism and Popular Culture* | Study of popular culture, postmodernism, representation, and shifts in cultural theory. | | 1998 | *British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry?* | Analysis of British fashion as a field of creativity, labor, entrepreneurship, and class constraint. | | 1999 | *In the Culture Society: Art, Fashion and Popular Music* | Study of culture, art, fashion, popular music, and transformations of the culture society. | | 2005 | *The Uses of Cultural Studies* | Introduction to and reinterpretation of the tools of cultural studies. | | 2008/2009 | *The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change* | McRobbie’s major work on postfeminism, the top girl, the new gender contract, and the undoing of feminism. | | 2016 | *Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries* | Key study of the dispositif of creativity, creative industries, self-employment, and the neoliberal promise of self-realization. | | 2020 | *Feminism and the Politics of Resilience* | Study of resilience as a technology of depoliticization, the retreat of the welfare state, and neoliberal management of women’s crisis. | | 2024 | *Feminism, Young Women and Cultural Studies: The Birmingham Essays from 1975 Onwards* | Return to McRobbie’s early Birmingham writings and their significance for feminist cultural studies. | ### Significance Angela McRobbie is one of the most important contemporary cultural theorists because of the consistency with which she has shown how capitalism learns to speak the language of feminism. Her work reveals that “freedom,” “choice,” “creativity,” “self-realization,” “resilience,” and “empowerment” are not inherently emancipatory concepts. Under particular conditions, they can become technologies of discipline. McRobbie’s most important contribution lies in describing female subjectivity as a site of neoliberal production. The young woman is expected to do more than work. She must continually invest in herself, manage herself, improve herself, promote herself, heal herself, and take responsibility for her own failures. In this sense, McRobbie’s theory is a critique of a world in which patriarchy does not disappear but changes its language: from prohibition to choice, from subordination to aspiration, from discipline to self-realization. McRobbie does not reject women’s ambition, creativity, or desire for independence. She takes them seriously. Her question is instead: who profits from those desires, what structures organize them, and why does the freedom promised to women so often become the solitary obligation to cope with a world that has no intention of changing?