“The best thing about having Meghan join the royal family is that she actually has Black in her”: Girls making meaning around Meghan Markle, the monarchy and meritocracy

Abstract

This article examines the attitudes of state-school educated girls under contexts of neoliberal austerity at a moment when discourses surrounding inherited privilege and race intensified in popular culture. Using interviews with 50 girls aged 13–15 at the time of the wedding between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, we examine attitudes to Meghan as a public figure, institutional royalty as a concept, and Meghan's symbolic ability to bridge tensions of progression and regression around the royals. In so doing, we shed light on how girls respond to and internalise ideas about power, work and inheritance. We offer new understandings of monarchy and celebrity; and girls' negotiations with popular discourses of meritocracy and privilege. We address a dearth of empirical analyses of public perceptions of royal celebrity, and provide insights into the mediation and reception of Meghan as a new member of the monarchy and the broader inter-penetrations of race, and gender she represents. The girls' feelings about Meghan are viewed alongside celebrities who the girls also discussed through royal rhetoric of queendom and bloodline: Oprah and Beyoncé. Around Meghan's celebrity dynamism the girls construct economies of royal ‘work’ and related meritocratic ideas of ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’ royals. Consistently the girls' discussions disrupt ideas of hereditary power, ultimately, calling to rescind public funding of the monarchy.