Catherine Driscoll

CONVERGENCE CULTURE AND THE LEGACY OF FEMINIST CULTURAL STUDIES

This essay elaborates upon some of the feminist legacies underwriting the work of Henry Jenkins, particularly the 2006 book, Convergence Culture, to develop a set of priorities for media and Cultural Studies research following in its wake. Focusing on critical uses of the term ‘subculture’, and its convenient fit with Internet scholarship to date, and moving to an analysis of the notion of ‘participatory culture’, we question how easily the practices of online media consumption can be separated from the wider structuring conditions of everyday life. Our recent research on fan communities and information workers highlights the labour and leisure conditions contributing to the experience of online community, fan-based or otherwise. These contrasting examples show the many non-voluntary dimensions that accompany participation in ‘convergence culture’, and how these are experienced in specific ways. The gendered intimacy of fan fiction communities and the coercive nature of technologically mediated white collar employment each reveal the stakes involved in allowing the practices of a minority to stand as the optimistic vision of the imminent media landscape.

The mystique of the young girl

The collective Tiqqun’s 2001 tract, Raw Materials for a Theory of the YoungGirl, in which they stress the way modern girl culture represents the triumph of capitalism, has recently drawn fresh attention. Here I consider the argument about girls made in this text and its perhaps surprising relevance to contemporary feminist accounts of girlhood and girl culture.

The Moving Ground: Locating Everyday Life

I want to ask here about what Michel de Certeau calls ‘‘the place from which one deals with culture’’ in an essay of that title, considering both his deployment within cultural studies and his understanding of ‘‘everyday life,’’ which is still the most influential focus for that deployment. Certeau begins his essay by claiming that ‘‘nothing authorizes me to speak of culture,’’ and yet ‘‘a field of inquiry and its borders need to be staked out. I would like to devote a few sentences to a site of reflection on culture.’’ 1 The volume of translations in which this essay is included, Culture in the Plural, is explicitly addressed to cultural studies and its interest in Certeau’s model of the everyday. As a result, it is opposed to the ‘‘authorized’’ organization of life, along with those who ‘‘speak of ’’ or ‘‘deal with’’ culture, until ‘‘the everyday’’ becomes ‘‘the marginality of a majority,’’ at which point ‘‘practice ceases to have its own language.’’ 2 What seems imperative, then, is placing Certeau’s thought on the everyday within the broader frame of his work. Certeau specifies the everyday as the ‘‘cultural activity of the non-producers of culture, an

Subjects of distance: the modernity of the Australian country girl.

The rural is widely associated with traditions that modernity is presumed to disrupt or displace. But rurality is an idea produced by modernity, and endlessly engaged in and by dialogues about modernization. This paper considers the figure of the country girl as an image of distance from modernity. Insofar as she is always coming from the outside of a presumed modern identity and experience that is fixed by its urbanity, the country girl in Australian popular culture clearly has parallels in other places and other cultures. My focus here is on the difference the country girl articulates in a broad Asian-Pacific context discussed as coming ‘late’ to modernity. The country girl is always arriving at an encounter with modernity that identifies what modernity costs and what it offers. Her difference is not only a dramatic foil that throws the subject of modernity into sharp relief but offers up stories about modernity as something that must be learned.

INTRODUCTION: Gender, modernity and media in the Asia-Pacific

This collection of essays began from a symposium on ‘Gender and Modernity in the Asia-Pacific’ hosted by the Gender and Modernity Research Group at the University of Sydney. Our aim for that symposium was to bring together in Australia researchers working on issues in and around the Asia-Pacific region in Cultural Studies, and related fields, in order to think about how the intersection of the terms gender and modernity might provide a shared basis for exploring relations between that region’s disparate cultural locations, practices and identities. In particular, working together from Sydney with one of us also based in Hong Kong, we were interested in how this conceptual intersection affords a view of an ‘Asia-Pacific’ region in which Australia is vitally involved and not just an institutional platform for analysis from the geopolitical border of that region. It also seemed to us that focusing on the Asia-Pacific from a Cultural Studies point of view might offer something important to Western English-language scholarship on gender and modernity. Such scholarship tends to be dominated by historical analysis in which modernity is a long view of now irreversible change and discussions of the gender of modernity belong to historical analysis of changes wrought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and/or by a spatializing EuroAmerican field synchronically centred on the pre-eminent importance of transAtlantic exchanges. In this context, a conjunction of ‘gender and modernity’ and ‘the Asia-Pacific’ foregrounds transnational currents and cross-cultural dialogues that are not only historical but also insistently present tense. What we did not expect was the thematic consistencies that emerged. This collection does not represent all the papers presented at that symposium, but rather a selection highlighting several key themes. The first is the role of popular media in negotiating the ongoing and changing internal tensions of modernity, not only for the nation-states that regulate, frame, import, export and often fund discrete media industries (Chua and Iwabuchi 2008, Gokulsing and Dissanayake 2009, Siriyuvasak 2010, Chua 2012), sometimes as part of a project of ‘policing . . . cultural distinctiveness’ (Domı́nguez and Wu 1998, p. 3), but above all for the everyday lives of people as cultural participants. In this

Chanel: The Order of Things

Abstract This article considers the importance of fashion to both modernism and modernity and the importance of modernism to understanding fashion. It does so through a close consideration of the example of Chanel—not the biographical woman Chanel, or even the label Chanel, but rather the Modernist moment in fashion we have come to call “Chanel.” The position of ground-breaking innovator in the field of womens fashion that is widely assigned to Chanel is one form of the modernist break that produces both “the avant-garde” and “the classic.” Using such an understanding of Chanel, this article examines the intimacy between fashion and modernity through Modernist aesthetics, modernist writing on fashion and culture, and that critical attitude Michel Foucault calls “modernism.”

On popular music: Teaching modernist cultural studies

This essay argues for the significance of thinking about the continuity between modernism and Cultural Studies in understanding how students respond to the key themes and approaches of Cultural Studies. It takes the experience of using the work of Theodor Adorno to introduce students to what Cultural Studies has to say about popular music as a central example to discuss the ongoing relevance of modernist debates to the field of popular music studies, and the discourses on popular music with which students are familiar when they come to Cultural Studies analysis of popular music. Finally, it argues that thinking about Cultural Studies as a continuation of modernism into the present gives students better critical and historical contexts not only for what is done under the name of Cultural Studies but why it matters.

In the name of the nation: Media classification, globalisation, and exceptionalism:

This article examines the relationship between exceptionalism and nationhood in media classification. The history of age-ratings is an international one, and the present challenges associated with digital media circulation are similarly international. We argue that the nation nevertheless provides an appropriate frame for understanding age-rating by attending to the ways national agencies have struggled to articulate the specificity of their work based on the specificity of domestic constituencies. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, our central examples include the resistance of the Motion Picture Association of America to age-based film classification, the British Board of Film Classification’s examination of American films in the 1980s, contemporary Japanese videogame regulation, and the emergence of the International Age Rating Coalition. We argue that national exceptionalism is itself generalised and that media content regulation is less about producing national culture than about laying claim to a nation by differentiation.

Chinese feminists on social media: articulating different voices, building strategic alliances

ABSTRACT This article considers the importance of social media to contemporary Chinese feminism, in the process introducing two important groups, Feminist Voice and Women’s Awakening, who have used social media platforms for their activism in the past few years. Various online strategies have been taken up by their young members to ensure the best outcome for their advocacy. In particular, these feminists use social media to articulate a specific presence, or voice, that would be more difficult to sustain using more traditional modes of Chinese feminism. And they also attempt to cultivate relationships with mainstream journalists, building alliances they hope will encourage more gender-conscious reporting and more positive representations of feminism. While social media does not overcome all the obstacles to feminism that is becoming more visibly influential in China, these media groups stand out as key voices in Chinese feminist and youth activism today, with implications for how we understand contemporary feminism on an international scale.

Glass and Game: The Speculative Girl Hero

This chapter considers the emergence of a popular literary type: the girl action hero. While she has earlier and even ancient antecedents, since the 1990s a newly action-oriented girl hero has become especially significant in fiction oriented towards children and young adults. She is not only resilient but wilfully determined; while she will take responsibility for others, she decides which others and under what conditions. She is brave, resourceful and in the end powerfully effective when seeking her own ends; where she is self-sacrificing, she chooses action for the greater good, comprehending what it costs her. She may be proud, but she rejects vanity and, quite explicitly, any suggestion that commodified femininity will represent or enable her capacities; she is the agent of her own aspirations and seeks to modify the actions of others to suit her own. This chapter will look at how this figure differs from fictional girl protagonists before her, and how these virtues are represented in some exemplary popular fiction. It will also examine how this girl hero works in dialogue with other popular media and with feminist cultural critique.