Jackie Stacey

Untangling Feminist Theory

The question of feminist theory has produced heated debate on many Women’s Studies courses. Indeed, there has frequently been a division between those who want to read theory and see it as vital for feminists to engage with in order to challenge existing forms of academic knowledge and practice, and those who have found it, at best, dry, boring and irrelevant, and at worst, so steeped in patriarchal traditions that any feminist engagement with it signifies complicity with the oppressors.

Imaging Feminism, Imaging Femininity: The Bra-Burner, Diana and the Woman Who Kills

The ® gure of the feminist has been widely represented in the British media for so long as to have become one of the most familiar symbols in the contemporary political landscape and cultural imagination. Whilst the mainstream press continues to circulate the stock-in-trade cliche s of bra-burners and ruthless career-driven superwomen, these stereotypes increasingly operate in tension with a broader media discourse about a potential compatibility between the previously polarised categories of feminism and femininity. The compatibility between these two categories is exempli® ed in a (presumably ironic) article on the a 1990s Feminist Bunny Girlo (see Fig. 1) in the Times on 30 January 1999. The headline, a Enter the 1990s feminist Bunny Girlo , precedes an article which begins: a The world’s ® rst Playboy casino in nearly two decades is to be staffed by British bunny girls valued for their feminism and independence as well as beauty in a bobtail corseto (p. 1). Referring back to a arch-feministo Gloria Steinem’s undercover expose of the Playboy regime 36 years ago, in which she argued that bunny girls were like a less honest and less well-paido prostitutes, the article places the antagonism between feminism and femininity ® rmly in the past: a Stuart Zakim, Playboy’s vice-president, is so con® dent of Playboy’s feminist credentials, that he was not ruf ̄ ed by the prospect of hordes of latter-day Ms Steinems coming to tomorrow’s auditiono (p. 6). According to Helen Rumbelow, the Times reporter, the 1990s feminist bunny girl offers the a girl power generation the chance to storm a citadel of 1960s sexismo (p. 1). This new-found reconciliation between feminism and femininity is evident in the extensive press coverage of a new feminismo and a girl powero since the early 1990s. In 1993, for example, coinciding with the publication of her book Fire with FireÐ The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century, Naomi Wolf was accorded the front page and a lengthy article in the Times weekend magazine. Two close-up photographs of her face are accompanied by the headlines, a Feminists Didn’t Used to Look Like Thiso and a Reclaiming the F-Wordo . The article is introduced with explicit reference to her physical appearance: a Time was when you couldn’t describe a feminist as gorgeous. Naomi Wolf is this and much more: successful, clever and articulateÐ and fed up with the sisterhood’s dead-end political correctness and victim-speako (6 November 1993: 19). So-called a new feminismo is thus billed as the glamorous make-over of the old-fashioned, drab and over-serious a women’s liberationistso of the past. Similarly, the Spice Girls are hailed in the press as embodying the new

The cinematic life of the gene

What might the cinema tell us about how and why the prospect of cloning disturbs our most profound ideas about gender, sexuality, difference, and the body? In The Cinematic Life of the Gene , the pioneering feminist film theorist Jackie Stacey argues that as a cultural technology of imitation, cinema is uniquely situated to help us theorize “the genetic imaginary,” the constellation of fantasies that genetic engineering provokes. Since the mid-1990s there has been remarkable innovation in genetic engineering and a proliferation of films structured by anxieties about the changing meanings of biological and cultural reproduction. Bringing analyses of several of these films into dialogue with contemporary cultural theory, Stacey demonstrates how the cinema animates the tropes and enacts the fears at the heart of our genetic imaginary. She engages with film theory; queer theories of desire, embodiment, and kinship; psychoanalytic theories of subject formation; and debates about the reproducibility of the image and the shift from analog to digital technologies. Stacey examines the body-horror movies Alien: Resurrection and Species in light of Jean Baudrillard’s apocalyptic proclamations about cloning and “the hell of the same,” and she considers the art-house thrillers Gattaca and Code 46 in relation to ideas about imitation, including feminist theories of masquerade, postcolonial conceptualizations of mimicry, and queer notions of impersonation. Turning to Teknolust and Genetic Admiration , independent films by feminist directors, she extends Walter Benjamin’s theory of aura to draw an analogy between the replication of biological information and the reproducibility of the art object. Stacey suggests new ways to think about those who are not what they appear to be, the problem of determining identity in a world of artificiality, and the loss of singularity amid unchecked replication.

The child and childhood in feminist theory

Feminism’s relationship to children and childhood has never been far off the political agenda but its theorization has been slow to follow. As long ago as 1987, Barrie Thorne’s article in the first edition of Gender & Society highlighted the absence of the conceptualization of children and childhood within feminist analyses; and in the humanities, Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, problematizing the desire for knowledge and mastery in adult theorizations of the child, was first published in 1984. But until recently there has been little explicit discussion of how the child and childhood have been, and more importantly, should be understood within feminist theory and politics. Beyond the various swings between proand anti-maternalism (which largely reiterated prevailing oppositions between child-indulgent and conventional femininities versus child-hating and familiar versions of misogyny) the subject of childhood has not featured as prominently within feminist debates as it might have done, given that, as Karı́n Lesnik-Oberstein argues in this special issue, ‘the child and gender are of course mutually implicated at every turn: the child both denies and founds gender and is the lynchpin of the family’. This picture is now rapidly changing with feminist engagements with the question of children and childhood and, more recently, with the figure of the child gaining increasing attention. Work such as Carolyn Steedman’s Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority (1995), Lauren Berlant’s The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997), Claudia Castañeda’s Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds (2002) and Erica Burman’s Developments: Child, Image, Nation (2008a) has now carved out a set of debates that moves across the fields of history, literature, cultural studies, critical psychology and development studies. Lee Edelman’s influential No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), focusing the project of

Feminist Theory: Capital F, Capital T

When I first encountered what might loosely be referred to as ‘feminist theory’ in the early 1980s it was presented to me as a series of competing explanations of women’s oppression. The emphasis was very much upon how existing theories might be extended and reworked to provide answers to questions about how to challenge inequality. How and why had women been systematically excluded from power and from public life, and how and why had their contributions to culture been undervalued and trivialised; furthermore, how had their restriction to particular domains, such as the so-called more private spheres of domesticity, sexuality or informal labour, been organised against their interests? The aim was to explain the problems in order to transform the patriarchal relations of all spheres of social, cultural and economic life. In addition to adapting existing theories, feminists inside and outside the academy produced both new analyses of social exclusions and visions of a culture transformed. It seemed to me that ‘feminist’ was the central category and ‘theory’ was regarded through a more or less instrumentalist lens as a resource for our political purposes.

Animation and Automation – The Liveliness and Labours of Bodies and Machines

Written as the introduction to a special issue of Body & Society on the topic of animation and automation, this article considers the interrelation of those two terms through readings of relevant work in film studies and science and technology studies (STS), inflected through recent scholarship on the body. Drawing upon historical and contemporary examples, we trace how movement is taken as a sign of life, while living bodies are translated through the mechanisms of artifice. Whereas film studies has drawn upon work ranging from production history to semiotics and psychoanalysis to conceptualize the ways in which the appearance of life on the cinema screen materializes subjectivities beyond it, STS has developed a corpus of theoretical and empirical scholarship that works to refigure material-semiotic entanglements of subjects and objects. In approaching animation and automation through insights developed within these two fields we hope to bring them into closer dialogue with each other and with studies of the body, given the convergence of their shared concerns with affective materializations of life. More specifically, an interest in the moving capacities of animation, and in what gets rendered invisible in discourses of automation, is central to debates regarding the interdependencies of bodies and machines. Animation is always in the end a relational effect, it seems, while automation implies the continuing presence of hidden labour and care.

Wishing away ambivalence

Robyn Wiegman traces her attachment to ‘paranoid reading’ practices through her early domestic environment that ‘lacked sufficient ways to anchor anyone in an explicable world’ (Wiegman, this volume: 7). Following this account of what we might call Wiegman’s childhood bipolar habitus, I locate my equivalent attachment to such reading practices in a familial history whose modes of disavowal seem with feminist hindsight to be best described as a ‘structure of feeling’ – those ‘social experiences in solution’ that Raymond Williams famously named as forms of culture not immediately available, yet whose ‘particular deep starting points and conclusions . . . [nevertheless] give the sense of a generation or of a period’ (1977: 133– 134, 131, emphasis in original). If the original concept of ‘structures of feeling’ predominantly described social phenomena, I extend its remit here into the realm of familial dynamics, which, since second-wave feminism, have been theorised as always more than merely personal. When I was growing up in the suburbs of south London in the 1960s and early 1970s, this structure of feeling governed the respectable middle-class British family in which the bad things that happened were not just ‘not spoken about’, they were lived through repetitions of denial that made paranoid readings a necessity. My own investment in mastering the critical practices of exposure was not, as for Wiegman, occasioned by the idea of reading as ‘a rich affective resource for navigating the at times awful, at times exhilarating, paces of everyday life’ (Wiegman, this volume: 7), but rather, by the promise of understanding the textures of hidden transactions and devious narratives, and of providing sufficient oxygen to navigate the claustrophobia of living with deceptions in plain sight. To read between the lines and to see beyond appearances was to contradict the attribution of anxiety to individualised failure, and to undo the personalisations of those practices of disavowal: in other words, to hold out the hope of undoing the structures of feelings to which I struggled never to become fully accustomed. With the now taken-for-granted language of feminism, the costs that governed the contradictions of sexual respectability for the baby boomer generation were

Cancer knowledge in the plural: queering the biopolitics of narrative and affective mobilities.

In this age of DIY Health—a present that has been described as a time of “ludic capitalism”—one is constantly confronted with the injunction to manage risk by means of making healthy choices and of informed participation in various self-surveillant technologies of bioinformatics. Neoliberal governmentality has been redacted by poststructuralist scholars of bioethics as defined by the two-fold emergence of, on the one hand, populations and on the other, the self-determining individual—as biopolitical entities. In this article, we provide a genealogical-phenomenological schematization (GPS analysis) of the narration of cancer in relation to “sexual minority populations.” Canonical discourses concerning minority sexualities are articulated by means of a logic of “inclusion and reification” that organizes the interiorization of norms of embodied relationality, and a positive liaison with biomedical technologies and techniques in the taking up of a rhetorical style of biographical compliance. Neoliberal DIY Health logics conflate participation with agency, and institute norms of recognition that constrain visibility to: citizens who make healthy choices and manage risk, heroic cancer stories, stories of the reconstruction of states of normalcy, or of survival against all odds. Alternatively, we trace the performative articulations of queer narrative practices that constitute an ephemeral, nomadic praxiology—a doing of knowledge in cancer’s queer narration. Queer cancer narrative practices represent a relationship to health and embodiment that is predicated, not on normalcy, but predicated on troubling norms, on artful failure, and on engaging in a kind of affective mapping that might be thought constitutive of a speculative bioethical relation to the self as other.

Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship.

In a historical investigation of the pleasures of cinema, Star Gazing puts female spectators back into theories of spectatorship. Combining film theory with a rich body of ethnographic research, Jackie Stacey investigates how female spectators understood Hollywood stars in the 1940s and 1950s. Her study challenges the universalism of psychoanalytic theories of female spectatorship which have dominated the feminist agenda within film studies for over two decades. Drawing on letters and questionnaires from over three hundred keen cinema-goers, Stacey investigates the significance of certain Hollywood stars in womens memories of wartime and postwar Britain. Three key processes of spectatorship - escapism, identification and consumption - are explored in detail in terms of their multiple and changing meanings for female spectators at this time. Star Gazing demonstrates the importance of cultural and national location for the meanings of female spectatorship, giving a new direction to questions of popular culture and female desire.