Melanie Waters

Sexing It Up

In Third Wave Agenda (1997), Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake describe third wave feminism in terms of its engagement with the legacy of questions that have been overlooked, oversimplified or unresolved by the work of the second wave (1997, 23). There are few questions that present themselves to a new generation of feminist thinkers quite as forcefully as that of pornography. Despite the current reinvigoration of academic interest in the politics of pornographic representation — as well as the questions of sexuality, identity and personal autonomy that circulate around it — third wave feminism’s contribution to the pornography debate remains largely unexcavated. In this chapter, I will analyse the vexed issue of pornography through the lens of contemporary feminist thought, evaluating the extent to which the diversified approach of third wave feminism might function as a corrective to ‘prescriptive’ second wave accounts of female sexuality and its construction within Western culture.

Poetry and autobiography

It has become a commonplace of critical studies of autobiography to begin by establishing the difficulties of defining the object of scrutiny. For Linda Anderson, it is an ‘unruly field’ characterised by ‘pervasiveness and slipperiness’ (2). So, too, Laura Marcus highlights ‘the fundamental problem of the instability or hybridity of autobiography as a genre’ (7), while Candace Lang notes how difficult it is to ‘outline or evaluate the various positions on how to define autobiography’ (6 n5). For Sidonie Smith, the closer we look, the less we are able to see: ‘as more and more critics talk about autobiography, the sense of its generic conventions, even its very definition, has begun to blur’ (3). This is an impasse which seems terminal to Paul de Man; he argues that ‘generic discussions [ . . .] remain distressingly sterile’ and inevitably ‘founder in questions that are both pointless and unanswerable’ (920, 919). Given the fluidity and opacity of the terms of the debate, how much more complicated, and exponentially more interesting, it becomes when we add another genre*/poetry*/to the epistemological mix. And although de Man’s point is well made (his argument is that in seeking to define the characteristics of a distinct genre of autobiography, we overlook the possibility that autobiography is ‘not a genre or a mode, but a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts’ [emphasis added] [921]) it is precisely in asking questions of the generic (which are also the linguistic and cultural) relationships between these forms that we can best understand how they operate. The essays in this special issue of Life Writing address the relationship*/which might be one of contiguity, overlap, opposition, or identity*/between poetry and other forms of autobiography. They ask what are the gaps that divide the two? What are the areas of common ground? Does widening the term ‘autobiography’ to create a larger, more inclusive field of ‘life writing’ as has been common and useful of late, bring poetry within the same fold as conventional (prose) forms or does it leave poetry still marginalised, still pushed to the edge of an otherwiseexpanding practice? What does it mean to talk about ‘poetry’ in this context? What kinds of poetry have typically been considered and how have they been read? What is the effect of introducing new forms and new reading perspectives? What, the following essays ask, might poetry and autobiography learn from each other about issues of shared concern*/about language, subjectivity, authenticity,

‘Yours in Struggle’: Bad Feelings and Revolutionary Politics in Spare Rib

Abstract When Spare Rib first launched in July 1972, its glossy pages promised to explore the ‘new’ politics of womens liberation through the familiar form of the magazine. From editorials exploring how it feels to work collectively to letters from readers expressing the emotional toll of discrimination, Spare Rib makes a consistent effort to provide spaces in which the feelings associated with women’s liberation can be articulated and explored. This article examines the extent to which affect theory might help to illuminate the virulent discourse of feeling in Spare Rib. Foregrounding the high premium placed on personal testimony, both within the women’s liberation movement and in Spare Rib specifically, it explores a mixed selection of published correspondence and reflective editorials in order to assess how ‘bad’ feelings, in particular, might serve as a magnet’ around which the politics of feminism can be negotiated and critiqued.

The Horrors of Home: Feminism and Femininity in the Suburban Gothic

In The Aftermath of Feminism (2009), Angela McRobbie draws on a constellation of imagery that has become peculiarly prevalent in recent feminist scholarship. In order to describe the variety of “postfeminist” phenomena she identifies, McRobbie takes repeated recourse to the notion of a phantasmatic feminism that haunts popular culture. While this “ghost of feminism” (22) presents itself as a “hideous spectre of what feminism once was”, it bears little correspondence to any “real” feminism and instead adopts as the basis of its spectral visage the cartoonish features that are so frequently, if erroneously, ascribed to second wave feminists. In this way, explains McRobbie, feminism is fantastically and insistently (re)configured as a “monstrous ugliness” which sends “shudders of horror down the spines of young women today, as a kind of deterrent” (1). Evocative and striking, these macabre formulations of feminism’s “ghostly” status have been an increasingly common point of reference in feminist discourses since the 1990s. From Avery Gordon’s work on psychoanalysis to Terry Castle’s critique of queer representation in The Apparitional Lesbian (1993), the spectral metaphor has been deployed as a means of symbolizing and interrogating women’s historical (in)visibility and cultural inheritance. Given the centrality of these issues to contemporary debates about postfeminism, it is perhaps no surprise that the apparitional trope has been invoked with growing regularity in the twenty-first century.

Bad Sex and the City? Feminist (Re)Awakenings in HBO’s Girls

This chapter argues that Dunham’s Girls (2012–) makes a deliberate attempt to resuscitate second-wave debates about female sexual and reproductive autonomy that ‘postfeminist’ fictions had once appeared to lay to rest. By asking what is at stake in the show’s candid treatment of consent and abortion, this chapter not only investigates the controversies that have arisen over Dunham’s feminism, but also argues that it is by identifying what distinguishes Girls from a previous generation of female-centred fictions that we might better understand the evolving currency of feminism in popular culture.

Mediated and Mediating Feminisms: Periodical Culture from Suffrage to the Second Wave

Abstract This introduction positions the feminist periodical in relation to the material histories and cultures of feminism. In it, the authors make the case for a sustained analysis of feminist periodical culture in Britain from the final years of the campaign for female suffrage to the demise of Spare Rib in 1993. They argue, moreover, that the rich scholarship on suffrage and post-suffrage magazines suggests methodologies and strategies for investigating feminist magazines throughout the twentieth century and exploring their media ecologies. Drawing on recent critiques of feminist historiography, the authors posit that, as mediating objects and sites of activism, periodicals can tell stories about feminist histories, but they can also problematize those stories, refusing to plug historical gaps and resisting the production of a singular and unified history of feminism.