'At the heart of James Turner', explains the voice-over (spoken by former Coronation Street actor Tony Hirst), 'is the single mum, 'White Dee''. I'm just an ordinary, everyday person – Deirdre Kelly, The Guardian 2014ġ.1 The first episode of Benefits Street (Channel Four, Love Productions, 2014) begins with a 36-second segment titled 'Meet White Dee' that establishes Deirdre Kelly (named in the programme as 'White Dee' from the outset) as the central protagonist of the drama to follow. I think a lot of people have seen that I'm exactly like them. She expects the taxpayer to fund her life on benefits – Conservative MP Philip Davies, 2014.

White Dee is bone idle and doesn't want to work another day in her life and has no intention of finding a job. Introduction ery time people look at White Dee … it will serve as a reminder to people of the mess the benefits system is in and how badly Iain Duncan Smith's reforms are needed. Keywords: Austerity, Media, Gender, Welfare, Care, Social Class In this way, we argue that these public struggles over White Dee open up spaces for urgent feminist sociological enquiries into the gender politics of care, labour and social reproduction. However, we also examine how White Dee functions as a potential object of desire and figure of feminist resistance to the transformations in self and communities engendered by neoliberal social and economic policies. We detail how Benefits Street operates through forms of classed and gendered shaming to generate public consent for the government's welfare reform. To do this we locate and unpick the paradoxical desires coalescing in the making and remaking of the figure of 'White Dee' in the public sphere. Focusing on Benefits Street, and specifically the figure of White Dee, this rapid response article offers a feminist analysis of the relationship between media portrayals of people living with poverty and the gender politics of austerity.

Where I Fly by K.M. Allen