Whose menopause revolution? Investigating the UK’s ‘Davina effect’ and the contemporary menopause market

© 2024, Sage. This is an author produced version of a paper published in European Journal of Cultural Studies, uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self- archiving policy. The final published version (version of record) is available online at the link. Some minor differences between this version and the final published version may remain. We suggest you refer to the final published version should you wish to cite from it. Having made two documentaries about menopause broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK 2021 and 2022, enduringly popular British TV presenter Davina McCall’s films are perceived to have had such social impact that she now has the rare distinction of having an ‘effect’ named after her. The first film, Sex, Myths and the Menopause, is credited with diminishing the stigma historically surrounding menopause, while extolling the benefits of Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) for some to treat menopause symptoms. Hence when requests for HRT spiked after the first film, ‘the Davina effect’ was adopted by the media to explain the widespread ensuing HRT shortage. This article is not focused on interrogating the films themselves but unpacking the media narrative that followed in the uses of the term ‘the Davina effect’. Its corpus comprises UK press coverage of the ‘menopause revolution’ and of the Davina documentaries; textual analysis of the films; and testimonies and research drawn from the medical and health professions, while utilising existing media and cultural studies paradigms to provide conceptual context, situating the ‘Davina effect’ as the latest novel entry in a longstanding history of media effects debates. While the films have been praised for bolstering a new era of menopause awareness, it argues that ‘the Davina effect’ instantiates and services how the so-called ‘menopause revolution’ (Gordon, 2021) has evolved largely in neoliberal terms, regularly centring the need to respond to the perceived crises of middle-class white women, at the cost of a more intersectional and inclusive conception of menopause. Further, it apportions knowledge, fear and blame around HRT shortages in a manner which deflects attention from the larger economic, political and cultural contexts that have nurtured the ensuing alarm. Yet, importantly, the Davina effect may also facilitate a transgressive image of menopausal women as determinedly contesting their marginalisation. <br/

Silk blouses and fedoras::The female detective, contemporary TV crime drama and the predicaments of postfeminism

This article examines the markedly contrasting fates of two recent female protagonist led police series, the dismally received Prime Suspect USA (NBC, 2011) and widely celebrated The Fall (BBC, 2013– ), asking what the reception of each suggests about the state of play for women in TV crime drama in today’s postfeminist culture. What do women cops need to do to make the cut in an era in which, on the one hand, it seems they are more prevalent and have more opportunities than ever before (Gerrard, 2014); but also, on the flip side of this, in which they must somehow offer something ‘extra’ to survive in an era where the presence of a female detective in itself is no longer an innovation or novelty? In an era in which, to adopt Angela McRobbie’s much-cited phrase, ‘feminism has been taken into account’ (2007: 255), how can these series’ invocation of feminism or ‘feminist issues’ be understood as fundamental to their respective demise and triumph? I argue that, crucially, Prime Suspect USA’s account of sexist bullying in the NYPD was greeted as hackneyed and overblown, where The Fall spoke adroitly to a media culture in which ratings can be won via a superficial but glossily packaged nod to the female detective’s postfeminist ‘progress’, while relishing misogynistic violence. Hence the article also asks, what implications does an inquiry of the kind undertaken here – where interrogation of the genre combines comparative text-based analysis with critical reflection on the author’s own perturbed response to the eroticisation of violence against women in The Fall – have for future models of feminist criticism of TV crime drama? </jats:p

The One with the Feminist Critique: Revisiting Millennial Postfeminism with Friends

In the aftermath of its initial broadcast run, iconic millennial sitcom Friends (NBC, 1994–2004) generated some quality scholarship interrogating its politics of gender. But as a site of analysis, it remains a curious, almost structuring absence from the central canon of the first wave of feminist criticism of postfeminist culture. This absence is curious not only considering the place of Friends at the forefront of millennial popular culture but also in light of its long-term syndication in countries across the world since that time. And it is structuring in the sense that Friends was the stage on which many of the familiar tropes of postfeminism interrogated across the body of work on it appear in retrospect to have been tried and tested. This article aims to contribute toward redressing this absence through interrogation and contextualization of the series’ negotiation of a range of structuring tropes of postfeminist media discourse, and it argues for Friends as an unacknowledged ur-text of millennial postfeminism