Royalty and Its Representation in Popular Culture
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Modern and historical royal families are a popular area of scholarly interest, with power and politics the centre of much research. Royalty is also a popular area of study in a range of other areas including gender, class, material culture, celebrity studies, consumption practices, and cinematic representations. Much of what we understand about royal families comes from mediated images, meaning we see a public version of kings and queens and their children. These images are
heavily curated and stage-managed, with the aim of affirming them and their values in a positive social and national light. While some royal families are in decline, others such the House of Windsor and the House of Saud remain very visible and hold significant cultural and historic value. Popular culture uses the label ‘royals’ not just for royal family members, but it is largely used to denote someone who has hit the top of the game, like Tina Turner the Queen of rock'n'roll, or those seen as the Queens of daytime TV.
Disney has made a habit of endearing royalty to its audiences with its imaginary famous queens and kings. In these few examples it is apparent that royalty is mediated, romanticised, imagined, and contested within a range of historical and cultural spaces.
Because most people will never get to meet a member of a royal family, we are keen to know what their lives are like behind the palace walls. It is perhaps this desire to peek behind the walls that explains our interest in watching films and television about royals and buying magazines with royals on the cover, amongst a number of other ways we seek to engage with royalty. Royalty, especially British royalty, also needs to engage with us. They need to maintain their relevance and authority, so making public appearances provides opportunities – even if heavily managed and curated – for the public to see them, and ideally to consolidate public affection for them.
Popular culture representations – in the media and other cultural and social spaces – provide audiences with a broader canvas on which to examine the power and relevance of royalty. How they are represented and framed in popular cultural can explain and challenge normative meanings about the roles they play in modern society and allow us researchers and audiences to consider royalty in regard to gender, age, biopower, class, empire, and colonisation.
Given the death of Queen Elizabeth II on 8 September 2022 and the coronation of her son Charles III and his wife Camilla as King and Queen on 6 May 2023, there is increased global and Commonwealth interest in royals of both the past and the present. It also coincides with public discussions about the future of the British monarchy. While the royal family find themselves at the dawn of a new era, King Charles was born in 1948 and is 75 years old, and there is disquiet in the House of Windsor, positing that it is timely to examine the space and place of the British royals in contemporary society. But the British royal family is one of 43 nations with sovereignties. The British royal family is arguably the best-known royal family, and it is also a wealthy royal family, worth an estimated US$88 billion. However, if we correlate wealth to power, it is the royal families of the Middle East who dominate the list of the world’s most powerful.
The Saudi royal family are thought to be worth more than US$1 trillion, the richest royal family in the world. The wealth of these two families alone may mean that there is popular interest in their lives. However, as royals with significant wealth and power bring influence, that too increases interest. Such influence means their relationships, fashion, children, and lifestyles are endlessly speculated about, giving royals a celebrity status. It is this celebrity status that drives royal consumption.
In Lisa J. Hackett’s exploration of historic British royal memes, this issue’s feature article, she delves into the cultural transmission of royals through Internet memes. In the age of rapid communication and viral trends, Internet memes play a significant role in shaping cultural narratives about not only current royals, but royalty in history. As a form of social communication produced for users by users, memes are also circulated, imitated, and transformed as they are consumed. In a digital culture they provide avenues for royalty to be satirised, parodied, and critiqued via humour, with the use of intertextual references. As such, memes are cultural artifacts which reflect and remake the commodification of royal celebrity. When thinking about royals of the past, memes can shape current meanings about long-ago kings and queens.
This case study of historical royal memes shows the framing of Elizabeth I with contemporary pop songs, Lady Jane Grey with Netflix films and former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss, Shakespeare’s Richard III’s ‘Winter of Discontent’ reference with play on words like ‘disco tents’ and ‘discount tents’, as well as the intertextuality of Blackadder and Joni Mitchell. In these memes, which are both fluid and static, audiences form, unform, and reform meanings about historic royals.
Dennis Olsen’s article "Consuming Royalty: Promotional Narrratives and the British Royal Family" examines the intersections of the British royal family and consumer culture, with a focus on the coronation of King Charles III. Conducting a content analysis of visual elements, captions and/or hashtags of sponsored posts, stories, and reels that promoted the British monarchy in the week leading up to the Coronation on 6 May 2023, Olsen found that there is a shifting landscape when it comes to the British royals, tradition, lifestyle, and consumption. He demonstrates that while brands from diverse corporations contribute enduring appeal of the British royals, and with narratives appearing to bridge the gap between royalty and the public, contemporary promotional narratives did shift focus from the sovereign and royal family to the broader institution of royalty. In "The Royal Treatment: Fans and Fan Practices of the House of Windsor" by Bridget Kies, the focus is on examining how celebrity and star studies can understand how public personae are manufactured, with reference to cultural representations of the British royal family in a number of cinematic and textual examples. She posits that both fan and fan practices deliver not only royal fan affect: there is also evidence of anti-fandom in some cultural products.
Jo Coghlan’s discussion of British royal traditions and practices, historical and contemporary, posits that much is invented about the House of Windsor. From Empire Day to Royal tours to the commodification of images of the royals on tea towels and magazine covers, British royal iconography has intruded into the daily lives of Australians. She argues that not only have the British royals entered our public imaginations, but they have done so as part of a hegemonic project to successfully consolidate their legitimacy and exert their colonial right over Australia. It is in examining the everyday ways in which the British royals are embedded in Australian society that apathy if not opposition to Australia becoming a republic is found. In "Violence and Power of the Modern British Monarch: A Case Study of the Reaction to Princess Diana’s Death", Anna Molkova asks a series of sociological questions to understand if the British monarch can ‘reign but not rule’ in a modern democratic society, with reference to the cases of Princess Diana and King Charles III.
The last two articles in this issue examine non-British royalty in its socio-cultural contexts. Huw Nolan and Amy Tait examine the television series The Great (2020-2023), a satirical comedy-drama television series created by Australian screenwriter Tony McNamara. Combining historical facts with intentional anachronisms, views of the eighteenth-century aristocracy and Catherine the Great’s journey from outsider to enlightened Empress provide a backdrop to reflect on a range of societal and ethical themes. A close reading of The Great in "‘Don’t Say Neigh, Say Yay...’: Human-Animal Relationships in TV’s The Great and Their Potential Impact on Modern Audiences" reveals how animals are treated within the royal court, serving as a symbolic reflection of the era’s hierarchical structures and ethical norms. It also considers the juxtaposition of archaic, often barbaric practices with modern views on animal welfare, prompting viewers to reevaluate their moral perspectives on human-animal relationships, in this case in a broader royal context.
Lastly, Simona Strungaru’s article "A Kingdom of Possibility: The International Rise, Affluence, and Influence of the House of Saud" provides a unique insight into the world’s most wealthy royal family, the Saudi Arabian royal family, the House of Saud. With a history dating back to the eighteenth century, the House of Saud has overseen the development of a relatively young nation (formed less than a century ago) to a state that has undergone significant transformations in terms of economics, technology, regional and international influences, and social and cultural change. With a focus on Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (known colloquially as MBS), the article examines how MBS has become a household name since appearing in the public eye in 2015 when, at only 29 years of age, he was appointed by his father King Salman as Defence Minister and Secretary-General of the Royal Court. His quick advance in rank and position to Crown Prince in 2017 and Prime Minister in 2022 has led most political and social commentators appropriately to consider MBS as the de facto ruler of present-day Saudi Arabia.
https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/3044