Claire O'Callaghan

All in this together? Feminisms, academia, austerity

Since the onset of widespread economic crisis in 2008, varied policy-makers, critics, lobbyists and charities have vocalised concern about the impact of austerity measures on women’s lives across the globe. Evidence repeatedly suggests that far from being ‘all in it together’ – as the UK coalition government’s rhetoric suggests – austerity measures ‘undermine women’s rights, perpetuate existing gender inequalities and create new ones’ (European Women’s Lobby 2012, p. 4). Typically, austerity is defined as a fiscal procedure associated with ‘the George Osborne paradigm in which we live’ (Elmhirst 2010, n.p.). It is ‘an economic policy: deficit-cutting, slashed spending and the mysterious evaporation of benefits’ (Elmhirst 2010, n.p.). In this sense, ‘austerity’ is a term synonymous with the credit crunch rhetoric of ‘cuts’. But, as numerous commentators have pointed out, the definition and effects of these terms are not necessarily the same. While ‘cuts’ refers to ‘specific budgetary cuts leading to specific cuts in services’ and ‘austerity’ denotes ‘a general reduction in government spending’ (Lanchester 2010, p. 5), austerity is also, as Bramall (2013, p. 3) argues, ‘a complex ideological phenomenon’ that produces and enables socio-cultural politics as well as financial policies. Reflecting this, varied political groups have drawn attention to the gendered effects and contexts of austerity policies. The Fawcett Society, a UK-based organisation which campaigns for ‘women’s equality and rights – at home, at work and in public life’, published a policy briefing in March 2012 which offered a comprehensive account of the detrimental effect of austerity measures upon women’s equality. ‘The Impact of Austerity on Women’ indicates that women make up 64% of the entire public sector (Fawcett Society 2012, p. 6); they will thus be disproportionately affected by job losses in this area, with women on lower-income jobs and from Black and Ethnic groups being particularly vulnerable (Fawcett Society 2012, p. 7). The number of women on Job Seekers Allowance is at the highest figure for 17 years, and women who are single parents of children over the age of 5 must struggle with the shift from Income Support to Job Seekers Allowance, meaning that if they are unable to take any job they might be offered, their benefits will be cut (Fawcett Society 2012, pp. 8–9). Women of or approaching pensionable age must work for longer but also face losing money from their pension scheme (Fawcett Society 2012, p. 12). As a recent article by the Feminist Fightback Collective (2011) has argued, cuts to public services and benefits are liable to impact upon women in particular as they still perform a disproportionate amount of domestic labour in the form of caring responsibilities: ‘Shifting work into the home, where it is done “for free”, is a convenient way of hiding the hard realities of austerity behind closed doors’ (p. 77). And, of course, not all women are equal. When issues of class, race and disability intersect with broader gendered inequalities, the irony of Cameron’s illusion of us being ‘all in this together’ only becomes all the more apparent. Collectively, then, women’s wages, the gendered impact of cutbacks and benefits, and funding for women’s rights, services and gender equality have disproportionately affected – and are affecting – women in ways that are not

“The Grossest Rakes of Fiction”: Reassessing Gender, Sex, and Pornography in Sarah Waters's Fingersmith

This article argues that Sarah Waterss Fingersmith (2002) revisits feminist debates arising from the “sex wars” of the 1980s and 1990s in which feminism was divided over its approach to female sexual representation. I argue that the novel rehearses varied debates on gender and pornography, and I suggest that Waters uses such perspectives to provide her own deconstruction of heteropatriarchal representations of lesbianism in pornography.

A Wilde scoundrel: Villainy and “Lad Culture” in the filmic afterlives of Dorian Gray

This chapter examines the intersection of villainy and male sexual politics at play in film adaptations of Oscar Wilde’s classic novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), predominantly (though not exclusively), Oliver Parker’s recent reworking, Dorian Gray (2009). I argue that not only does Parker problematically heterosexualise Wilde’s anti-hero but that the representation of male heterosexuality he offers reflects the questionable ideals of contemporary ‘new laddism’, a culture predicated on the celebration of sex, drugs, sexual exploitation, and violence. I suggest that rather than critiquing this negative expression of masculine heterosexism (and villainising it), the film instead glamorises the troubling behaviours of the ‘new lad’. As such, in stark contrast to Wilde’s original text, Parker’s film demonstrates the difficulty of associating villainy with particular sexual behaviours in the new millennium.