Angela McRobbie

Postmodernism and popular culture

Postmodernism and Popular Culture brings together eleven recent essays by Angela McRobbie in a collection which deals with the issues which have dominated cultural studies over the last ten years. A key theme is the notion of postmodernity as a space for social change and political potential. McRobbie explores everyday life as a site of immense social and psychic complexity to which she argues that cultural studies scholars must return through ethnic and empirical work; the sound of living voices and spoken language. She also argues for feminists working in the field to continue to question the place and meaning of feminist theory in a postmodern society. In addition, she examines the new youth cultures as images of social change and signs of profound social transformation. Bringing together complex ideas about cultural studies today in a lively and accessible format, Angela McRobbies new collection will be of immense value to all teachers and students of the subject.

Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded Up Creative Worlds

This article proposes a recent acceleration in the nature and pace of work and employment in the UK culture industries. Multi-skilling and de-specialization are a result of growth, change and competition in the arts and media sector. Creative work increasingly follows the neo-liberal model, governed by the values of entrepreneurialism, individualization and reliance on commercial sponsorship. One consequence for the relatively youthful workforce is the decline of workplace democracy and its replacement by ‘network sociality’, which in turn is influenced by the lingering impact of dance and club culture. Independent work finds itself squeezed, compromised or brokered by the venture capitalists of culture as government encourages the ‘freedom’ allowed by this kind of labour.

Top Girls? Young women and the post-feminist sexual contract

This article argues that, particularly in the last decade, an address by government to young women in the ‘advanced democracies’ of the west, and in this case in the UK, entails the provision of what might be understood as a new sexual contract. In the post-feminist guise of equality, as though it is already achieved, young women are attributed with capacity. They are urged to become hyper-active across three key sites where their new found visibility then becomes most manifest. Within the field of consumer culture this takes the form of the ‘post-feminist masquerade’ where the fashion and beauty system appears to displace traditional modes of patriarchal authority. Likewise the emergence of the ‘phallic girl’ appears to have gained access to sexual freedoms previously the preserve of men, the terms and conditions of which require control of fertility and carefully planned parenthood. The new sexual contract is also embedded within the fields of education and employment. Here too young women (top girls) are now understood to be ideal subjects of female success, exemplars of the new competitive meritocracy. These incitements to young women to become wage-earning subjects are complex strategies of governmentality, the new ‘career girl’ in the affluent west finds her counterpart, the ‘global girl’ factory worker, in the rapidly developing factory systems of the impoverished countries of the so-called Third World. Underpinning this attribution of capacity and the seeming gaining of freedoms is the requirement that the critique of hegemonic masculinity associated with feminism and the womens movement is abandoned. The sexual contract now embedded in political discourse and in popular culture permits the renewed institutionalisation of gender inequity and the re-stabilisation of gender hierarchy by means of a generational-specific address which interpellates young women as subjects of capacity. With government now taking it upon itself to look after the young woman, so that she is seemingly well-cared for, this is also an economic rationality which envisages young women as endlessly working on a perfectible self, for whom there can be no space in the busy course of the working day for a renewed feminist politics.

Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture

This timely collection brings feminist critique to bear on contemporary postfeminist mass media culture, analyzing phenomena ranging from action films featuring violent heroines to the “girling” of aging women in productions such as the movie Something’s Gotta Give and the British television series 10 Years Younger . Broadly defined, “postfeminism” encompasses a set of assumptions that feminism has accomplished its goals and is now a thing of the past. It presumes that women are unsatisfied with their (taken for granted) legal and social equality and can find fulfillment only through practices of transformation and empowerment. Postfeminism is defined by class, age, and racial exclusions; it is youth-obsessed and white and middle-class by default. Anchored in consumption as a strategy and leisure as a site for the production of the self, postfeminist mass media assumes that the pleasures and lifestyles with which it is associated are somehow universally shared and, perhaps more significantly, universally accessible. Essays by feminist film, media, and literature scholars based in the United States and United Kingdom provide an array of perspectives on the social and political implications of postfeminism. Examining magazines, mainstream and independent cinema, popular music, and broadcast genres from primetime drama to reality television, contributors consider how postfeminism informs self-fashioning through makeovers and cosmetic surgery, the “metrosexual” male, the “black chick flick,” and more. Interrogating Postfeminism demonstrates not only the viability of, but also the necessity for, a powerful feminist critique of contemporary popular culture. Contributors . Sarah Banet-Weiser, Steven Cohan, Lisa Coulthard, Anna Feigenbaum, Suzanne Leonard, Angela McRobbie, Diane Negra, Sarah Projansky, Martin Roberts, Hannah E. Sanders, Kimberly Springer, Yvonne Tasker, Sadie Wearing

Notes on ‘What Not To Wear’ and post‐feminist symbolic violence

meeting ground for mainstream social theory and contemporary feminist theory. Brings feminist theory face to face with Pierre Bourdieu s social theory. Demonstrates how much Bourdieu s theory has to offer to contemporary feminism. Comprises a series of contributions from key contemporary feminist thinkers. Defines new territories for feminist theorizing. Transforms and advances Bourdieu s social and cultural theory.

YOUNG WOMEN AND CONSUMER CULTURE

This article is presented as an intervention in the field of feminist media and cultural studies with particular reference to consumer culture. It is concerned with the seeming evasion of critique which can be detected in a number of recent feminist responses to the way in which modalities of ‘popular feminism’ have found themselves incorporated into womens genres of television, such as, in particular, the US series Sex in the City. This usage or instrumentalization of feminism (in its most conventionally liberal feminist guise) also provides corporate culture with the means of presenting itself to young women as their ally and even champion of ‘girls’ while at the same time earning seeming approval for adopting the mantle of social responsibility, which makes the concept of popular feminism more problematic than it first appeared. Such appropriation of popular feminist discourse by the commercial domain prompts a self-critique on the part of the author alongside an analysis of recent approaches toward consumer culture in cultural studies. The article continues by presenting a schematic account of how the commercial domain increasingly supplants state and public sector institutions in the intensity and dedication of its address to girls and young women. Whilst some may argue that the intersection of youthful femininity and the commercial sphere is not a new phenomenon, what is being explored here is the connection between this intensification of attention and the logic of current neo-liberal economic rationalities. The argument is, therefore, that it is by these means including the instrumentalization of a specific modality of ‘feminism’ that there emerges into existence a neo-liberal culture, with global aspirations, which has as its ideal subject the category of ‘girl’.

The Politics of Feminist Research: Between Talk, Text and Action

For feminists engaged in research; historical, anthropological, literary, sociological or otherwise, there is really no problem about answering the question, ‘who do we do feminist research for?’ Yet to state simply ‘for women’, is to obscure a whole range of issues which invariably rise to the surface in the course of a research project. Exactly how these issues are handled plays an important part in shaping the entire research procedure. That is to say, when a politics, its theory and aspects of its practice (in this case feminism) meet up with an already existing academic discipline, the convergence of the two is by no means unproblematic. Often the urgency and the polemic of politics, all the things about which we feel strongly and which we desperately want are quite at odds with the traditional requirements of the scholarly mode; the caution, the rigour and the measured tone in which one is supposed to present ‘results’ to the world. Frequently we worry about the extent to which we, unwittingly, impose our own culture-bound frame of reference on the data, and about how, so often, our personal preferences surface, as though by magic, as we write up the research.

Dance and Social Fantasy

One of the first books I remember reading, I mean really reading, still lies within quotable reach on a bookshelf upstairs. It would hardly qualify as unusual taste for a seven-year-old girl, then or now. For some reason I prefer not to look at Dancing Sta?, (a children’s biography of the life of Anna Pavlova written by a woman called Gladys Malvern) again. I would rather leave it lying there and rely instead on memory for what struck me about it then and how that relates to my concern in this paper..

Notes on the Perfect: Competitive Femininity in Neoliberal Times

Abstract This article argues that at a point in time when feminism (in a variety of its forms) has re-entered political culture and civil society, there is, as though to hold this threat of new feminism at bay, an amplification of control of women, mostly by corporeal means, so as to ensure the maintenance of existing power relations. However the importance of ensuring male dominance is carefully disguised through the dispositif which takes the form of feminine self-regulation. The ‘perfect’ emerges as a horizon of expectation, through which young women are persuaded to seek self-definition. Feminism, at the same time, is made compatible with an individualising project and is also made to fit with the idea of competition. With competition as a key component of contemporary neoliberalism, (pace Foucault) the article construes the violent underpinnings of the perfect, arguing that it acts to stifle the possibility of an expansive feminist movement. It recaptures dissenting voices by legitimating and giving space in popular culture to a relatively manicured and celebrity-driven idea of imperfection or ‘failure’.

Bridging the Gap: Feminism, Fashion and Consumption

The article confronts two issues, first the question of women and consumption and second the fashion industry as a feminized sector. In the first instance the argument is that recent scholarship on consumption has been weakened by an inattention to questions of exclusion from consumption and the production of consumption. Income differentials as well as questions of poverty have dropped off the agenda in this debate. Attention instead has been paid to the meaning systems which come into play around items of consumption. This has led to a sense of political complacency as though consumption is not a problem. For the many thousands of women bringing up children at or below the poverty line it clearly is. The second part of the article takes the fashion industry as an example of a field where perspectives on both production and consumption are rarely brought together. This produces a sense of political hopelessness in relation to improving its employment practices, especially for very low paid women workers. The argument here is that greater integration and debate across the production and consumption divide could conceivably result in policies which would make this sector whose employees on a global basis are predominantly female, a better place of work.