Jack Monroe and the cultural politics of the austerity celebrity

This article conceptualises home cook Jack Monroe as an ‘austerity celebrity’, a mediated figure who forged her public persona directly through articulations with austerity culture. Drawing on an intertextual analysis of her blogs, cookbooks, interviews, speeches and representations across the media, I argue that Monroe demonstrates the paradox of anti-austerity celebrity in becoming economically successful as the face of modern poverty. Monroe’s navigation of a dual identity of celebrity and activist manifests in her critique of the government, her middle-class precarity, her status as a mother and her queer identity which requires consistent ‘authenticity labour’. In Monroe’s case, this labour is visible as a constant and politicised struggle over the terms of her ‘authenticity’. While unable to manage her more complex middle-class, queer identity, which confronts the established grounds of ‘feckless mothers’, the UK tabloid media attempts to frame Monroe’s success as a rags-to-riches style narrative reinforcing hegemonic rhetorics of resilience and creativity as routes to overcoming adversity. This analysis of the struggles at work in Monroe’s mediated presence demonstrates how the moral imperatives for women to offer to resourcefully manage the ‘challenges’ of austerity cuts, arguably draws attention away from austerity as structurally and politically motivated.