‘I wanted to offer my sympathy … woman to woman’: Reading The Crown during a conjuncture of crisis

Laurie Clancy, Sara De Benedictis
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引用次数: 2

Abstract

The fourth season of Netflix's award-winning The Crown was released during a moment of crisis, when the UK was under a second lockdown to stem the Covid-19 pandemic. National restrictions, and the pandemic more generally, have exposed a 'crisis of care' in the UK and around the world. With schools closed and many working at home, people, particularly women, have been faced with the 'double burden' of childcare, domestic care, other caring responsibilities and paid work. The pandemic also drew further attention to classed, gendered and racialised polarities, with symbols of privilege (like access to a garden) made spectacular as lockdown restrictions were tightened. Enter The Crown. Series 4 focuses on the 1970s and 1980s, particularly centred around intimacies of three well-known female figures: Margaret Thatcher, the Queen and Princess Diana. The Crown's representation of Thatcher and the Queen speaks to broader issues of failed femininities, the collapsing of private/public and home/work, specifically through mothering and unpaid care work/paid labour; class privilege and cultural capital; the politics of 'wokeness'; and moral responsibility. The Queen is portrayed as the guardian of moral responsibility, the mother of the nation and the British empire, while Thatcher is shown to push forward neoliberalism and free market ideologies. But ultimately these representations are two sides of the same coin. Through the oppositional representations of the Queen and Thatcher the show raises contemporary critiques of neoliberalism, gender and the aristocratic imperial state, only to empty its political potential because such representations are spoken by these elite women, in the context of their families and the home. Such issues have a particular cultural and collective resonance at a conjuncture of lockdown and the pandemic.
“我想表达我的同情……女人对女人”:在危机关头读《王冠
Netflix屡获殊荣的《王冠》第四季是在危机时刻播出的,当时英国正处于第二次封锁状态,以遏制新冠肺炎大流行。国家限制措施,以及更广泛的疫情,暴露了英国和世界各地的“护理危机”。由于学校关闭,许多人在家工作,人们,特别是妇女,面临着儿童保育、家庭护理、其他照顾责任和有偿工作的“双重负担”。大流行还引起了人们对阶级、性别和种族化两极分化的进一步关注,随着封锁限制的收紧,特权象征(如进入花园)变得引人注目。王冠登场。第四季聚焦于20世纪70年代和80年代,特别是围绕着三位著名女性人物的亲密关系:玛格丽特·撒切尔、英国女王和戴安娜王妃。王冠上撒切尔和女王的形象反映了更广泛的女性主义失败的问题,私人/公共和家庭/工作的崩溃,特别是通过母亲和无偿护理工作/有偿劳动;阶级特权与文化资本;“觉醒”政治;以及道德责任。女王被描绘成道德责任的守护者,是国家和大英帝国的母亲,而撒切尔则被描绘成推动新自由主义和自由市场思想的人。但最终,这些表现是同一枚硬币的两面。通过对女王和撒切尔夫人的对立表现,该剧提出了对新自由主义、性别和贵族帝国的当代批评,只是为了消除其政治潜力,因为这些表现是由这些精英女性在她们的家庭和家庭背景下说出的。在封锁和大流行的时刻,这些问题具有特殊的文化和集体共鸣。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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