Alison Phipps

Neoliberalisation and ‘Lad Cultures’ in Higher Education

This article links HE neoliberalisation and ‘lad cultures’, drawing on interviews and focus groups with women students. We argue that retro-sexist ‘laddish’ forms of masculine competitiveness and misogyny have been reshaped by neoliberal rationalities to become modes of consumerist sexualised audit. We also suggest that neoliberal frameworks scaffold an individualistic and adversarial culture amongst young people that interacts with perceived threats to men’s privilege and intensifies attempts to put women in their place through misogyny and sexual harassment. Furthermore, ‘lad cultures’, sexism and sexual harassment in higher education may be rendered invisible by institutions to preserve marketability in a neoliberal context. In response, we ask if we might foster dialogue and partnership between feminist and anti-marketisation politics.

Re-Inscribing Gender Binaries: Deconstructing the Dominant Discourse around Women'S Equality in Science, Engineering, and Technology

This paper tracks and attempts to unravel a persistently dominant discursive construction of the problem of womens under-representation in science, engineering, and technology (SET) education and work: the idea that the interaction of gender stereotyping with the masculine image of SET disciplines and workplaces prevents girls and women from choosing SET subjects and going into SET careers. The discursive framework of ‘Women in SET’ will be examined at both macro and micro levels as it operates in the field of activist and pedagogic activity that has grown around the issue since the 1970s. A Foucauldian analysis will be applied in order to explore the kinds of subject positions this framework enables and excludes. It will be argued that the ‘Women in SET’ framework re-inscribes the gendered binaries that have at a symbolic level defined girls/women and SET as mutually exclusive, and as a result practices based on this framework may be counter-productive because their subjectivating effects on girls and women may undermine their broad political aims.

Rape and Respectability: Ideas about Sexual Violence and Social Class

Women on low incomes are disproportionately represented among sexual violence survivors, yet feminist research on this topic has paid very little attention to social class.This article blends recent research on class, gender and sexuality with what we know about sexual violence. It is argued that there is a need to engage with classed distinctions between women in terms of contexts for and experiences of sexual violence, and to look at interactions between pejorative constructions of working-class sexualities and how complainants and defendants are perceived and treated. The classed division between the sexual and the feminine, drawn via the notion of respectability, is applied to these issues. This piece is intended to catalyse further research and debate, and raises a number of questions for future work on sexual violence and social class.

Rape culture, lad culture and everyday sexism: researching, conceptualizing and politicizing new mediations of gender and sexual violence

Introduction to Special Issue of Journal of Gender Studies entitled Rape culture, lad culture and everyday sexism: Researching, conceptualizing and politicizing new mediations of gender and sexual violence.

‘Lad culture’ in higher education: Agency in the sexualization debates

This article reports on research funded by the National Union of Students, which explored women students’ experiences of ‘lad culture’ through focus groups and interviews. We found that although laddism is only one of various potential masculinities, for our participants it dominated the social and sexual spheres of university life in problematic ways. However, their objections to laddish behaviours did not support contemporary models of ‘sexual panic’, even while oppugning the more simplistic celebrations of young women’s empowerment which have been observed in debates about sexualization. We argue that in their ability to reject ‘lad culture’, our respondents expressed a form of agency which is often invisibilized in sexualization discussions and which could be harnessed to tackle some of the issues we uncovered.

Re)theorising laddish masculinities in higher education

ABSTRACT In the context of renewed debates and interest in this area, this paper reframes the theoretical agenda around laddish masculinities in UK higher education, and similar masculinities overseas. These can be contextualised within consumerist neoliberal rationalities, the neoconservative backlash against feminism and other social justice movements, and the postfeminist belief that women are winning the ‘battle of the sexes’. Contemporary discussions of ‘lad culture’ have rightly centred sexism and mens violence against women: however, we need a more intersectional analysis. In the UK a key intersecting category is social class, and there is evidence that while working-class articulations of laddism proceed from being dominated within alienating education systems, middle-class and elite versions are a reaction to feeling dominated due to a loss of gender, class and race privilege. These are important differences, and we need to know more about the conditions which shape and produce particular performances of laddism, in interaction with masculinities articulated by other social groups. It is perhaps unhelpful, therefore, to collapse these social positions and identities under the banner of ‘lad culture’, as has been done in the past.

Whose personal is more political? Experience in contemporary feminist politics

Whose personal is more political? This article explores the role of experience in contemporary feminist politics, arguing that it operates as a form of capital within abstracted and decontextualised debates which entrench existing power relations. In a neoliberal context in which the personal and emotional is commodified, powerful groups mobilise traumatic narratives to gain political advantage. Through case study analysis this article shows how privileged feminists, speaking for others and sometimes for themselves, use experience to generate emotion and justify particular agendas, silencing critics who are often from more marginalised social positions. The use of the experiential as capital both reflects and perpetuates the neoliberal invisibilisation of structural dynamics: it situates all experiences as equal, and in the process fortifies existing inequalities. This competitive discursive field is polarising, and creates selective empathies through which we tend to discredit others’ realities instead of engaging with their politics. However, I am not arguing for a renunciation of the politics of experience: instead, I ask that we resist its commodification and respect varied narratives while situating them in a structural frame.

Violent and victimized bodies: Sexual violence policy in England and Wales

This paper uses the notion of the body to frame an archaeology of sexual violence policy in England and Wales, applying and developing Pillow’s ideas. It argues that the dominant construction is of sexual violence as an individualized crime, with the solution being for a survivor to report, and with support often instrumentalized in relation to criminal justice objectives. However, criminal justice proceedings can intensify or create further trauma for sexual violence survivors. Furthermore, in addition to criminalizing the violent body and supporting the victimized one, there is a need for policy to produce alternative types of bodies through preventative interventions. Much sexual violence is situated within (hetero) sexual dynamics constructing a masculine aggressor and a feminine body which eventually yields. Prevention must therefore focus on developing embodied boundaries, and narratives at the margins of policy could underpin such efforts.

Speaking up for what's right: politics, markets and violence in higher education

There is a siege on universities on both sides of the Atlantic. The far right is targeting academics and their social justice work, bolstered by a mainstream suspicion of ‘experts’ and ‘elites’, and a general rightward political shift. There is a white supremacist, alleged serial sexual harasser and abuser in the White House, a hardline English government and a ‘new normal’ that involves overt and unrepentant sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination. I have written about the feminist classroom as a ‘safe space’, and the need to protect our most vulnerable students. I have considered how the neoliberal university suppresses the capacities required to do this. I have theorised an ‘institutional economy’ of sexual violence, exploring how institutional (non-)responses are shaped by neoliberal rationalities. In this piece, I discuss how the market framings of sexual violence in the university interact with our contemporary political field and growing hostility to progressive work. Universities are key neoliberal institutions. In neoliberal systems, the role of the state is to safeguard the market through deregulation and privatisation: the rhetoric is that the social good will be ensured by the unfettered operation of market forces. We are all expected to maximise our speculative value within multifarious systems of rating and ranking. Universities supply knowledge commodities for ‘self-betterment’ and economic growth, and to support state relations with capital. Market logics are strongly evident in the metrics academics labour under, the emphasis on higher education as an investment with a return, the ideas of student as consumer and lecturer as commodity. These sit alongside a continuation of older forms of governance: Louise Morley (2012) describes the climate of contemporary HE through a binary of archaism and hyper-modernism. Universities, like neoliberalism itself, deliver the discourse of a meritocratic free market but continue to work in favour of the ruling class. Sexual violence in UK universities made its way on to the agenda after the 2010 National Union of Students (NUS) report Hidden Marks, which found that one in Feminist Theory 2017, Vol. 18(3) 357–361 ! The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1464700117722001 journals.sagepub.com/home/fty

Reckoning up: sexual harassment and violence in the neoliberal university

ABSTRACT This paper situates sexual harassment and violence in the neoliberal university. Using data from a ‘composite ethnography’ representing twelve years of research, I argue that institutional inaction on these issues reflects how they are ‘reckoned up’ in the context of gender and other structures. The impact of disclosure is projected in market terms: this produces institutional airbrushing which protects both the institution and those (usually privileged men) whose welfare is bound up with its success. Staff and students are differentiated by power/value relations, which interact with gender and intersecting categories. Survivors are often left with few alternatives to speaking out in the ‘outrage economy’ of the corporate media: however, this can support institutional airbrushing and bolster punitive technologies. I propose the method of Grounded Action Inquiry, implemented with attention to Lorde’s work on anger, as a parrhesiastic practice of ‘speaking in’ to the neoliberal institution.