In 1969, the American radical feminist Carol Hanisch produced a paper called ‘The Personal is Political’. Already a veteran of civil rights and feminist groups such as New York Radical Women, Hanisch was troubled by the separation of women’s personal experiences from the work radical feminists were doing to dismantle the large-scale gender order. She emphasised the importance of discussion and sharing of experience between women, not least in disposing of the ideology of self-blame. ‘Can you imagine’, she wrote, ‘what would happen if women, blacks and workers…would stop blaming ourselves for our sad situations? It seems to me the whole country needs that kind of political therapy.’ To her, gendered personal problems were micro-level experiences of macro-level political power, disguised by such an ideology as nothing more than selfish worries. Collective action, at the turn of the seventies, was the key to overthrowing such opression - but the first step was sharing and examining those concerns which ideologies tell us to keep unexamined and private.

The radical feminist revolution of the far left never arrived and, arguably, neither did the awakening of political consciousness that Hanisch was advocating. Many women in this country now have a personal and political agency far beyond what they and their predecessors enjoyed in the early seventies, but many would argue that, in our neoliberal times and at the end of the unspeakable decade we’ve just departed, the personal is as political as ever - yet the link often remains to be made. In fact, the examination and display of that which has long been held personal and private now dominates our public culture. We forget how regimented that public/private boundary used to be, and how crucial it was for maintaining power relations (like ones of gender) that we’ve only begun to challenge comparatively recently. We still too often fail to observe how currents swirling around the private/public border shape our everyday lives.

It’s impossible to talk about all this without bringing in the transformative power of technology, and that’s exactly how Beyoncé addresses the issue in her recent ditty ‘Video Phone’. Beyoncé (along with Lady Gaga, who guests in the single version and its video) presents a nightmarish siren call from a monomaniacal female standpoint. All she wants is, in various ways, to be on his video phone, as well as the things that come with being there. There’s no questioning that the two singers know what they’re saying. Here, privacy gives way to not just a kind of display but something more, a sort of representation fetish. The addressee and owner of the titular phone, obviously male, is described in senses and signs, not emotionally - his swaggering walk, the smell of his cologne - and in return he compliments B on her bag and her nails. This is the exchange of symbols as substitutes for feelings, so no wonder the ultimate sexual-romantic fulfillment is to appear in avatar on the phone screen of one’s significant other when one calls them; the actual call and its content are no great shakes.

Beyoncé and Gaga offer a satire of the digital morass in which we flounder, and of the evaporating effect technology can have on deep emotional attachment. What to make, though, of the way class is invoked in Beyoncé and Gaga’s first video outing together, however ‘ironic’ it may be? Hanisch’s article attended to the gender binary in arguing that personal life is always subject to political power, but there’s no reason not to point to class culture as well. Beyoncé’s appearance in much of the ‘Video Phone’ clip is strikingly classed, as are her lyrics and behaviour. The slack-jawed, gum-chewing, crunking, latex bikini-wearing vixen nagging to be filmed is a far cry from the classy, defiant and muscular everywoman of ‘Single Ladies’. By the end of ‘Video Phone’ we’ve seen her in poses and clothes that invoke a licentious, almost nihilistic black femininity that  belongs more to paranoid newscasts than music-industry fantasy - invoked knowingly, for sure, but still tellingly. It’s the use of such dreaded class, gender and racial imagery that lends ‘Video Phone’ its satirical punch. This relatively edgy subtext associates the social functions invented by the advent of the video phone with deviant behaviours, themselves further bound up with conditions of class, race and gender. And what’s so awful about these deviant people? They don’t observe that crucial boundary between public and private that preserves our society’s decency, and their private failings are on display for us all to judge.

Hanisch, or some of her radical feminist cohorts, might have called this the epitome of oppression. The woman, or more appropriately the standpoint advanced as a caricature by Beyoncé & Gaga, is familiar from moralistic media discourse - one who, dwelling in undesirable conditions (probably through circumstances that are nobody’s fault in particular) chooses to flout the rules designed to keep irresponsible trash from social ascent. The ‘sexting’ panic still blaring in the USA is testament to this, the undignified group in question (horny teenagers) tripped up by their inferior age and their out-of-control hormones but still wrestling with the loaded notions of personal choice and self-restraint.

So what does all this mean, politically speaking? Hanisch didn’t use ‘political’ so narrowly as to refer to the mechanics of the democratically elected state, but we who will remember this Labour administration can certainly identify a politicisation of the private in that sense. Now that full-body scanners able to see through clothing are arriving in UK airports, Beyoncé’s video fetishist might as well give up on pursuing techno-savvy males and spend her time hanging round Heathrow Terminal 4 instead. State-issued biometric ID Cards, criminal record checks for visitors to schools, and the ultimate personal violation via torture all speak of an assumed transparency of the physical/psychological person, their private life and acts, and their public existence, even as these spheres remain separate in so much of what we say and hear.

Perhaps, to the thinkers of a rapidly aging New Labour, the personal doesn’t exist apart from the geopolitical any more, given that it only takes one man to blow up a plane with a pair of chemical y-fronts. This, however, is rich coming at the end of a 30-year economic war to safeguard the individual as the basic unit of society, with all the personal freedoms that that implies. This ‘war’ was, at its outset, fought in opposition to an empire where privacy existed in no practical sense for most of its citizens. And the neoliberal project hasn’t only lost sight of its civil-libertarian streak, if it ever had one; it’s leaving as its legacy the faulty doctrine of economic individualism, under which personal agency is deemed capable of overriding inequalities of gender, education, age, race, and more or less anything else. If our circumstances and life chances really are dictated entirely by individual action rather than by social structure, why is socio-economic position by family income in the UK still correlated with life expectancy?

Are those lower down the class structure more likely to exercise less frequently, eat more trans-fat, smoke and drink to excess, and generally fail to self-regulate? Perhaps; but the skewed prominence of such risky behaviours among the disadvantaged, as is assumed in much of the class discourse we hear these days, is still oversold as a private, individual matter merely requiring a bit of personal effort. Class, or the discussion of it, is just one example of a structural problem made to seem personal by overly individualistic thinking, in policy and culture alike;  even with three political leaders taking the stage in election debates this year there’ll be little offered in the way of deep structural change, least of all from the hotly tipped winner.

Was Carol Hanisch right? Is the first step to really changing our lives the crucial acknowledgment that what seems personal is subject to political power? The last ten years have shown us both what awesome destructive powers individuals can wield with the right (or rather, wrong) motivations, and also how state power’s response is so often to govern private life as a public concern, even whilst apparently safeguarding its freedom in rhetoric. Beyoncé and Lady Gaga fit right in with their astute caricature, showing us how the access to and surrender of privacy has itself been fetishised in a West paranoid about liberty and its risks. As we set sail in our new decade, we would do well to remember that the personal really is political; those who claim otherwise in their pursuit of power must be held to account, or else we risk repeating the last decade’s dreadful mistakes.