‘All about Eve’: Mothers, Masculinities and the 2011 UK Riots
| Date | 01 October 2014 |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.12033 |
| Published date | 01 October 2014 |
| Author | Fidelma Ashe |
| Subject Matter | Article |
‘All about Eve’: Mothers, Masculinities and
the 2011 UK Riots
Fidelma Ashe
University of Ulster
The riots that erupted in English cities in August 2011 were provoked by a complex mix of socio-economic factors.
Sidelining structural explanations for the civil disorder,conser vative commentators argued that dysfunctional families
had caused the riots. Reinforcing traditional connections between criminality, the family and welfare, conservatives
contended that the absence of fathers in lone mother-headed families explained both the dynamics of the civil disorder
and the aggressive behaviour of some of the youngmen involved. Such claims located both the causes of the riots and
solutions to expressions of violent masculinities in the familial sphere.Employing the framework of critical studies of
men and masculinities this article interrogates these narratives and maps their depoliticising effects. Additionally, it
exposes how the effects of a range of social problems wereprojected on to poor, lone mothers, reinforcing a range of
regulatory narratives and practices that target this social group.
Keywords: UK riots; lone mothers; absent f athers; masculinities; feminism
The riots that erupted in London and spread to other English cities in the summer of 2011
represented an aggressive claiming of commercial spaces by young people.1The city centres
affected by the riots became sites wherein a mix of violence, protest, looting and pleasure
were enabled and rapidly coordinated through mobile communication technologies that
engendered ‘instant communities’. Images of the civil unrest and its concrete effects on
individuals, communities and commercial centres exposed clearly the deep social antago-
nisms created through the processes of policing, discrimination, poverty, social exclusion
and the conspicuous consumption that marks contemporary UK society. Predictably,
accounting for the riots became a point of discursive controversy as narratives about the
moral irresponsibility of the participants and their parents vied with structural analyses for
explanatory hegemony.
Regardless of the complexity of the social problems that the images of violent spectacles
in English cities reflected, the debates around causation that followed the riots became
heavily inflected with gendered narratives as conservatives appropriated and reinforced
traditional connections between criminality, the family and welfare. Consequently, the riots
had the effect of generating narratives about normative masculinities and femininities in the
public domain, rendering the intimate aspects of life such as sexuality,reproduction and the
body sites of social commentary,regulation and discursive struggle.This article engages with
these narratives and the cultural and political conditions of their production to map
critically the gendered politics that marked the riots.While the article places gender at the
forefront of the analysis,it does not imply that gender can be abstracted from the complex
mix of social factors that provoked the riots. Nor does it extricate gender from other
identities, thereby divesting identity of its intersectional character (see Butler, 1990;
Connell, 1995). Instead,its central aim is to expose the importance of further integrating
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doi: 10.1111/1467-9248.12033
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2014 VOL 62, 652–668
© 2013The Author.Political Studies © 2013 Political Studies Association
a gender analysis into broader critical discussions of the riots. More specially, utilising the
conceptual tools of critical studies of men and masculinities,2the article examines mascu-
linity as a dynamic in the civil disorder and exposes how the narratives about masculinities
that followed the rioting operated to depoliticise its causes.Additionally, it illustrates how
these narratives reinforced insidious and regulatory discourses around lone motherhood.It
concludes by assessing the links between these processes and the strengthening of a politics
of resentment in the UK.
Masculinities and the Riots
In her analysis of the 1991 UK riots, Beatrix Campbell (1993) observed how men and
women respond differently to relative deprivation. The ‘thin, pale boys’ in her study
responded violently to conditions of economic crisis; women responded by building up
forms of community support.While a cross-section of the local community participated in
the 2011 summer riots, in general those who participated were ‘mainly young and male’
(Lewis et al., 2011, p. 2).3The violence these young men expressed prompted Cynthia
Cockburn and Ann Oakley (2011) to call for an analysis of ‘the culture of masculinity’.
As the suspects were charged,considerable detail was published by the Ministry of Justice.The
press focused on the age,ethnicity, neighbourhood and employment status of offenders.Yet by
far the most dramatic divergence the statistics revealed was gender: 92% of the first 466
defendants were male.Something yet more significant went unremarked:of the 124 individuals
charged with offences involving violence, all were male ... What we saw was a palpable
concern with the youth, class and race of rioters but a lack of analysis of the key fact the
statistics illustrate: the culpability, and cost, of masculinity. As so often, masculine antisocial
behaviour was just the wallpaper.
Subsequently, they asserted that ‘The culture of masculinity can be, and should be,addressed
as a policy issue’ (Cockburn and Oakley, 2011). While it was predictable that the
government-commissioned interim report on the riots published by the Riots
Communities and Victims Panel (2011) would not deal directly with gender issues in any
critical fashion, the much more sophisticated analysis produced by The Guardian newspaper
in collaboration with researchers based at the London School of Economics (LSE) enabled
both young men and women to speak about their different experiences of participating in
the riots (The Guardian/LSE, 2011).These interviews exposed how the dynamics of sexual
difference operated in relation to the violence that marked the riots.In general,women and
girls represented a cluster of participants who were not directly involved in the violent
aspects of the riots but participated in looting (The Guardian/LSE, 2011).
Yet while the Guardian\LSE research exposes how participation in the riots was highly
gendered, the application of an explicit feminist framework opens further areas of analysis,
and Cockburn and Oakley’s (2011) call for a closer investigation of the role of masculinities
in the civil disorder represents an important avenue for feminist investigation.The analytical
focus of the next section addresses their observation that masculinities played an important
yet inadequately scrutinised role in the riots, but reformulates Cockburn and Oakley’s
(2011) claim that masculinities were elided in the debates that followed the riots.While the
term masculinities rarely entered these debates, young men’s gendered identities – in other
MOTHERS, MASCULINITIES AND THE 2011 RIOTS 653
© 2013The Author.Political Studies © 2013 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2014, 62(3)
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