Hillary, Hashtags and Hermione: Young women's political engagement, celebrity and the new media landscape

Abstract

This interdisciplinary thesis advances existing debates regarding the importance of understanding the complex and contradictory nature of young women’s engagement with an increasingly mediatised and celebritised political landscape. Based on interviews with young women aged between 18-30 years and living in either London or Sydney in 2015, the thesis demonstrates how the changing media sphere – in terms of both medium and message – has reshaped young women’s political engagement (as it can be broadly understood). For these women, evolving interaction with various new media platforms, as well as the deployment and influence of a diverse range of celebrified politicians and politically-engaged celebrities, has played a significant role in redefining that engagement. The primacy of new media and celebrity to understanding young women’s political activities – both in terms of their own characterisations, and my subjective reading – also emphasises how these two factors are thoroughly, and increasingly, intertwined. By demonstrating the (often complementary) relationship between parliamentary-based and online forms of political engagement, the cross-platform circulation of pervasive ideologies regarding gender, race and sexuality, as well as the enduring relevance of characteristics associated with post-feminism (and within a climate of a "renewed" feminist movement), this thesis also disrupts the traditional, stereotypical and largely redundant binaries of "old" and "new" politics, "old" and "new" media and, similarly, "old" and "new" conceptions of feminism. Drawing on the interrelated fields of gender studies, media studies, youth studies and celebrity studies, this thesis clearly emphasises that the nexus between politics, media and celebrity not only increasingly dictates how politics is (quite literally) performed among this particular demographic, but also how feminist activism and identification are generally expressed and enacted in contemporary Western contexts.