Monarchy is a feminist issue: Andrew, Meghan and #MeToo era monarchy

‘If You Move in the Same Circles as the Royals, then You’ll Get Stories About Them’: Royal Correspondents, Cultural Intermediaries and Class

“…In 2021, it was revealed that the Royal Household (those working for the monarchy across the royal palaces) have only 8.5% of employees who are from ethnically diverse backgrounds (Meierhans, 2021), and the monarchy has been at the centre of racism accusations throughout 2021 after Prince Harry and Meghan Markle identified structural racism within the institution (CBS, 2021). The British monarchy is a colonialist organisation which is built on white supremacy (Clancy and Yelin, 2021). Therefore, part of the ‘capital’ required for access to the institution is, presumably, whiteness.…”

Brand Royal: Meghan Markle, feuding families, and disruptive duchessing in Brexit era Britain

“…The family has become the pivotal framework for representing Markle for obvious reasons: first, her celebrity is based upon her membership by marriage in a Royal Family that is a political and cultural institution. Endowed with a corporate inflection through its nickname, "The Firm" (Penny Junor 2014; Clancy et al 2021), the Royal Family is "the ultimate establishment of British national patriarchy" (Raka Shome 2001, 324), a disciplinary apparatus for white, heteronormative coupling. In recent years, Prince William's and Kate Middleton's assertively "heteronormative family values [.…”

“I like my baby heir with baby hair and afros”: Black majesty and the fault-lines of colonialism

“…By reaching back to African diasporic pasts that have so often been subjected to the colonialist violence, nullification, neglect and invisibilisation of North Atlantic historymakers, while at the same time looking forward to decolonial and Afro-centric futures that rearticulate and re-incribe Black bodies within the popular consciousness, Marie-Louise Christophe, Meghan Markle and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter have each in turn shaped a powerful politics and aesthetics of Black majesty. This said, the institution of monarchy, which is so deeply intertwined with structures of domination, and its symbolic invocation and re-articulation by rich and powerful cultural interlocutors who often 'erase the intersectional inequalities in institutional and social structures' (Clancy and Yelin 2020), continue to problematise and undermine its radical and revolutionary potency. Black feminist theorist bell hooks's searing indictment of Knowles-Carter's Lemonade and its perceived commodification of the Black female body that she criticised as neither 'radical [n]or revolutionary' opens up questions of who has access within this Black majestic cosmology and how such a poetics and aesthetics of Black majesty can dismantle imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchal systems of domination when it is articulated through the neoliberal language of 'capitalist money making' (hooks 2016).…”