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Programme Overview
Time / Bob Kayley Studio / Studio 2 / B147 / Studio 19-10 am / Registration (foyer)
10-11.30am Keynotes / Sue Thornham
Maureen McNeill
11.30-11.50am Break / Coffee
11.50-12.50pm Parallel
Sessions / Pedagogy
Claire Molloy and students
Rebecca Feasey / Practice/ New Media
Roshini Kempadoo
Rachel Armstrong
12.50-1.40pm Break / Film Screening
This is What a Feminist Looks Like / Lunch
1.40-2.40pm Parallel
Sessions / Discursive Issues
Lisa Purse
Ruth McElroy
Karen Wilkes
2.50-3.50pm Parallel
Sessions / Methodology
Kathryn Geraghty
Meeta Rani Jha / Definition
Susan Berridge
Clare Walsh
Vicky Ball / Institution
Ursula Troche
Kristin Aune
3.50-4.10pm Break / Coffee
4.10-5.10pm Keynote / Christine Geraghty
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Detailed Programme
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Detailed Programme
9-10 am Registration Bob Kayley Foyer
10-11.30amKeynotes Bob Kayley Studio
Sue Thornham (University of Sussex): ‘(Post)Feminism and the Academy’
Maureen McNeill (University of Lancaster): ‘Relative Neglect: Some Reflections on Feminism and Cultural Studies.’
11.30-11.50am CoffeeStudio 1
11.50-12.50pmParallel Sessions
Pedagogy: Studio 2
Chair: Anita Biressi (RoehamptonUniversity)
FilmThis is What a Feminist Looks Like + Presentation by Claire Molloy, Frances Gilbert, Joanne Bowers, Sarah Holbrook, Emma Denby and Ami Guest (LiverpoolJohnMooresUniversity)
Rebecca Feasey (BathSpaUniversity): ‘Female Students and Feminist Media Criticism: The Pleasures and Frustrations of Teaching Gender Studies’
Respondents: Kathryn Geraghty (UniversityCollegeCork), Pamela Church-Gibson (LondonCollege of Fashion), Jan Miller (LondonCollege of Fashion)
Practice/ New Media:B147
Chair: Clarissa Smith (University of Sunderland)
Roshini Kempadoo (University of East London): ‘Counter-practices to the Caribbean archives: the feminised narrative of Amendments.’
Rachel Armstrong (University of East London): ‘Feminism and Medical and Artistic Practice’
Respondent: Sharif Mowlabocus (University of Sussex)
12.50- 1.40pmLunchStudio 1
Film Screening Bob Kayley Studio
This is What a Feminist Looks Like
1.40-2.40pmParallel Sessions
Empirical:Studio 2
Chair: T.B.C.
Elke Weissmann (EdgeHillUniversity): ‘Count(er)ing the Feminisation of Television’
Respondent: Heather Sutherland (University of Reading)
Discursive issuesB147
Chair: Heather Nunn (RoehamptonUniversity)
Lisa Purse (University of Reading): ‘The digital is political: fighting ‘entertainment’ alibis in the researching and teaching of mainstream digital effects cinema’
Ruth McElroy (University of Glamorgan): ‘Consuming Retrosexuality: On Screen, In Class, In Life’
Karen Wilkes (University of East London): ‘You’re Worth It! Exploring Notions of Entitlement in Contemporary Visual Texts’
Respondent: Vicky Ball (University of Sunderland)
2.50-3.50pmParallel Sessions
Definition:Studio 2
Chair: Karen Boyle (University of Glasgow)
Susan Berridge (University of Glasgow): ‘Role Models for Whom? The Pedagogic Advice Mode of Contemporary Feminist Television Scholarship’
Clare Walsh (University of Bedfordshire): ‘The feminist mystique: why ‘feminism’ has become a dirty word.’
Vicky Ball (University of Sunderland): ‘British feminine-gendered fiction and the feminization of television’
Respondent: NiallRichardson (University of Sussex)
InstitutionB147
Chair: Caroline Bassett (University of Sussex)
Ursula Troche (University of East London): ‘Media for activism on feminism, politics and society’
Kristin Aune (University of Derby): ‘Teaching feminism and popular culture: thoughts on third-wave feminist pedagogy’
Respondent:
Methodology Bob Kayley Studio
Chair: Sue Thornham (University of Sussex)
Kathryn Geraghty (UniversityCollegeCork): ‘Public or Private? The Challenge of Combining Feminist and Internet Methodologies’
Meeta Rani Jha (Working Lives Research Centre, LondonMetropolitanUniversity): ‘Bombay Cinema Practice and Feminist Cultural Methodology’
Respondent:
3.50-4.10pmCoffeeStudio 1
4.10-5.10pmKeynote Bob Kayley Studio
Christine Geraghty (University of Glasgow): ‘What was Feminist about Women and Soap Opera? Reflections on Feminism and Television Studies’
5.10pmEnd of Conference
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Abstracts in Alphabetical Order
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Rachel Armstrong: ‘Feminism and in Medical and Artistic Practice’
The scientific method is the most successful ideology of the twentieth century and not only fuels our industry but also shapes our experience of culture and society. Currently there is no feminist critique of science that calls for change at the level of scientific ‘facts’ which are assumed to be untouchable truths. Scientific research uses a traditional methodology that has lacked critical appraisal by its own systems of enquiry since it is too close to its own methods of production. An arts based practice led research project can make provocations through research and references that are not usually considered to be part of a scientific narrative, yet can explore its social and philosophical implications for a broader community which facilitates public investigation. My research currently investigates alternative discourses of science which may then be performed using a range of media and I am particularly interested in developing a socialist feminist perspective of scientific theory as the framework for my performances.
Project Development:
Although at the earliest stages of my research I have begun to investigate scientific assumptions at their most fundamental level and my reading has deconstructed classical evolutionary theory and through a re-working using Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, I have developed a “Cytoplasmic Manifesto” that agitates that significant evolutionary development takes place by permission of the maternal lineage through the cooperative entity called the cytoplasm, or cell matrix. This counterpoises the traditional Neo-Darwinist perspective that puts cell organization at a hierarchical level whose locus of control is centered at the nucleus.The project will develop as a series of investigations that will be workshopped to different audiences speculating on the significance of reconfiguring the locus of control if indeed there is one at all within the unity of biological identity termed the ‘cell’. It aims to agitate for considering collectives within cell function that give rise to multiple identities. The outcome will be performance based but will also include a range of texts that will be published through various outlets such as print and online, as lectures to artists, scientists and the general public.
Kristin Aune: ‘Teaching feminism and popular culture: thoughtson third-wave feminist pedagogy’
The decline in undergraduate women’s studies in the UK has been accompanied by a burgeoning – and perhaps mainstreaming – of gender modules in humanities and social science degree courses. This is often portrayed as an example of the depoliticization of academic feminism. Similarly, young women, who have entered higher education in rapidly increased numbers over recent decades, are viewed in popular discourse as post-feminist, more interested in shopping than social change. But the first decade of the new millennium has seen a burgeoning new ‘wave’ of feminism amongst young women in the UK – with the most prominent examples being websites like The F-Word, annual FEM conferences, regional campaign groups like London Feminist Network and the Ladyfest arts festivals. This, however, has gone largely unnoticed by academic feminists. For the new generation of feminists, media and culture are paramount, and they are becoming newly politicised by an increasingly sexualized and body-focused culture and through university study. As a younger feminist who has begun teaching on feminism and popular culture in response to student interest, and who has recently begun researching the new forms of UK feminism, I wish to offer some reflections on this new climate. This workshop would argue that the growth of UK ‘third-wave’ feminism represents a new opportunity for feminist teachers and scholars of culture and media. It advocates a third-wave feminist pedagogy that learns from and builds on earlier feminist pedagogical work and adapts to the new context of young women’s lives.
Vicky Ball: ‘British feminine-gendered fiction and the feminization of television’
Since its inception, a central and defining strand of feminist media studies has been concerned with the feminine-gendered identity of particular media forms; that is, how feminine-gender identity impacts on the cultural forms which do the constructing; on the way in which they are perceived in culture as well as how feminine-gendered identity is constructed within particular texts (Gledhill 1997: 345). Indeed, as earlier research by feminist media academics have firmly established, areas of culture tied to the ‘feminine’ have not only been marked out as gendered in comparison to the ‘masculine’ norm but they have enjoyed only low cultural status and are critically denigrated because of their association with women and femininity.
This paper explores the continuing relevance of these concerns in a postfeminist context in which, as McRobbie (2006) has argued, feminism is acknowledged within the cultural landscape as having been ‘taken into account’ (2006: 61) and the new female power is perceived to be personified through cultural shifts such as the ‘feminization of culture’ and the ‘feminization of television’. In this paper I will suggest that discourses of postfeminism provide an unproblematic ‘narrative of progress’ (Harris 2006:1) for women and values constructed as ‘feminine’. More specifically, I will address a particular paradox: that is, while the spaces and discourses associated with women now occupy a more culturally central position, ‘feminine’ forms of drama, such as the female ensemble drama, remain the subject of critical neglect.
Susan Berridge: ‘Role Models for Whom? The Pedagogic Advice Mode of Contemporary Feminist Television Scholarship’
An embrace of women’s viewing pleasures is often posited as a central tenet of third wave and post feminist television scholarship and a key distinguishing feature between contemporary versions of feminism and its second wave, which is falsely perceived as being overly censorious. However, paradoxically, much of this contemporary feminist criticism is embroiled with a ‘pedagogic advice mode’ on how women should ‘read’ television texts and characters, thereby neglecting to take account of the complex and active ways in which viewers make meaning and take pleasure from texts (Brunsdon and Spigel, 2008: 5). This advice mode is particularly prevalent in feminist criticism of television programmes that are intended for or watched by young females, assuming these viewers to be less discerning than adults and, therefore, in need of feminist guidance on how and what to watch. This paper will explore the implications of this advice mode, both in relation to feminist television scholarship and feminist studies more widely. My hypothesis is that rather than educating female students on how to critique sexist ideologies imbued in television texts, the pedagogic advice structure of this criticism perpetuates stereotypical notions of females being more vulnerable and passive than men and, furthermore, serves to alienate young women from feminism by creating a sense of distance between the feminist academic and the young female viewer.
Kathryn Geraghty: ‘Public or Private? The Challenge of Combining Feminist and Internet Methodologies’
I have just completed the taught section of a Masters in Women’s Studies, at the University of Ireland, UniversityCollege, Cork, and am beginning the research for my minor thesis. I would like to outline my specific attempts to combine feminist methodology with internet methodology. Here, I will give particular emphasis to the ethics of internet research, and discuss what constitutes private space online. I am currently formulating my research methodology and have been particularly influenced by the work of Elgesem (n.d.); Sharf (1999); Mann and Stewart (2000) and Eysenbach and Till (2001).
For my research I am examining young women’s participation in a social networking/alt. porn website, called . I can give you more details of this research topic if you wish, but my proposal to you focuses on my experiences, rather than on my research and its possible outcomes.
Meeta Rani Jha: ‘Bombay Cinema Practice and Feminist Cultural Methodology’
In my research I investigated the crucial role of Bombay cinematic discourse (also popularly known as Bollywood) in shaping British Asian consumption practices and subjectivity. Bollywood or Bombay cinema practice is a key site where British Asian gendered cultural norms are constituted and reconfigured. Bombay cinema engagement provides an emotional space to debate the discourses constituting the terrain and boundaries of South Asian sexual pleasure, acceptability, transgressions and individual formation as well as to articulate a critique of both Asian sexual norms and Western sexual and racialised ideals.
In this paper I explore the reasoning behind my methodological framework. I wanted to analyze a transnational circuit of complex and dynamic conjectural power relations forming cultural meanings, values and norms. Therefore I adopted a feminist critical reflexive ‘circuit of culture’ methodological approach to reveal the power relation between a researcher and her respondents and examined the responsibility of the researcher in representing her research subjects. I wanted to research and produce knowledge which both filled the gap in existing knowledge about British Asian subjects and which also challenged many of the dominant Orientalist and racist ideas about them. In my research I hoped to provide a space for the voicing of stories of everyday culture of a marginal group. Activists from feminist, black, queer and disability movements used similar methods of voicing of counter stories, as a powerful form of critique of mainstream epistemology. They retrieved the telling of stories as a political act – to voice was to visibilise oneself against the grand narratives of patriarchy, racism, heterosexism and able-bodied normalisation. The voices of these groups of people had been erased out of history and knowledge production.
I elaborate on the accountability and transparency of the research by using a plural and critically reflexive methodological approach. In addition, using grounded theory, ethnographic ‘thick description’ and the evaluative mechanism of accountability and plausibility, a feminist researcher can produce a rich and dense map of cultural meanings. I explore how we understand the experience of research, the researched and ourselves. In the particular experience of doing research (spending time, knowing the interviewees), one starts to believe that this gives one access to particular forms of knowledge which others may not know about; that it is authentic and privileged. As Haraway points out, it is a complex politics of location at stake not relativism. A politics of location recognizes that I can have commonalities with my respondents but these are by no means universal (Haraway, 1988).
Roshini Kempadoo: ‘Counter-practices to the Caribbean archives: the feminised narrative of
Amendments’
This presentation explores the Caribbean archives and the Trinidad archive (1838 – 1938) in particular as being inherently problematic in two ways. On the one hand, the tendency is towards a conservative and conventional mode of archival conservation and curation; while on the other, there is a persistent way in which the Trinidad colonial archive is limited by the inherent absence of particular and personalised narratives. I would like to present the artwork Amendments (2007) as a fictional interactive work that interprets historical material of the Trinidad archive to centralise the Trinidadian women’s presence and everyday experience of the colonial period. As a creolised practice, Amendments offers a metaphoric method for the retrieval and reconfiguration of archival accounts formulated in the ‘language’ of the male colonial figure. The artwork also allows for an expansion of social and historiographical space to take account of the imagined horizons and everyday practices of the plantation worker experience.
Ruth McElroy: ‘Consuming Retrosexuality: On Screen, In Class, In Life’
This paper seeks to identify some of the televisual and filmic sites for the making of retrosexualities, understood as depoliticising interventions in contemporary consumer culture. I begin by outlining competing definitions of retrosexuality, before offering a typology of screen-based retrosexualities across both dramatic and factual entertainment forms. Drawing upon the work of feminist scholars such as Arthurs, Hollows, Gill, and McRobbie, I argue that the nostalgic object has come to stand as the televiusal and filmic object of a stylised consumerist self-formation, offering modes of connection and commonality against difference. In particular, I am interested in the screen’s capacity to animate self-reflexivity, not only through participants and actors, but through its own animated self-recollections, epitomised in the recent BBC Wales drama, Life on Mars and its impoverished sequel, Ashes to Ashes. Screen fantasies of the past – and their dramatisation of sexual relations – are then considered in both classroom and academic professional contexts for the kinds of discourse they may elicit and those they adroitly deny the feminist media scholar working in universities where Gene Hunt’s contemporaries may still thrive.
Claire Molloy and students: ‘This is What a Feminist Looks Like’
The film is a short 10 minute documentary that was made by a group of 5 female 3rd year undergraduates on the BA Screen Studies programme at LiverpoolJohnMooresUniversity. One of the main motivations for making this documentary, for the students, was to attempt to make sense of what it means to identify as a feminist at this point in time. The documentary manages to mix a balance of humour and serious enquiry as it looks at stereotypes of the 'feminist' and then asks 'what does a feminist look like?'.
The documentary has a brief introduction to feminism as a movement. It includes interviews with four people who identify as feminists and it is centrally concerned with challenging the stereotypes of feminism. It is also keen to highlight the ways in which feminism is rejected in popular culture and to ask why women no longer wish to be associated with feminism.
The students and I will discuss motivations, feelings and thoughts behind the film and in the production process.
Lisa Purse: ‘The Digital is Political: Fighting ‘Entertainment’ Alibis in the Researching and Teaching of Mainstream Digital Effects Cinema’
Confronted by the increasing ubiquity of digital effects spectacle in current popular cinema, various writers (Aylish Wood, Stephen Prince, and Kristin Whissel amongst others) have started to excavate the ways in which digital imaging may produce meaning within the film text, and provoke certain responses in the spectator. And yet such writing, while extremely valuable, stays almost silent on the political dimensions of the representations produced by digital imaging. At the same time, in the media discourses and multiplying plethora of movie paratexts circulating around film texts such as King Kong (2005), Sin City (2005), 300 (2007), Beowulf (2007) and Speed Racer (2008), a myopic fetishisation of digital technologies and digital image production noticeably points the spectator towards a mythic utopian vision of capitalist-technological empowerment, and away from detailed perusal of the films’ representational dynamics. Such movies hardly offer innocent pleasures, indeed they most often re-present reactionary and often deeply prejudiced representations of gender, race, and sexuality, with women’s bodies spectacularised, objectified, and/or insistently digitally ‘sanitised’. This paper will meditate, and I hope foster necessary debate, on the following directly personal but also critically pertinent questions: Are the alibis Hollywood pushes – that such films should be framed and explained away as ‘only entertainment,’ ‘just’ a comic book adaptation (for example), ‘just’ feats of digital technology as pleasure – preventing many researchers of film from engaging properly with the underlying politics of these movies? Is ‘entertainment’ of this kind not worthy of extended critical engagement, is there a resignation operating about the neo-conservative nature of our neo-liberal US and UK cultures, or no appropriate avenue or audience for protesting readings? And how do we teach the ideological operations of such texts to students who emerge in this contemporary moment of amnesia and erasure – erasure not least of both the ideological work of (second wave and third wave) feminism, and of the ideological work that shapes these digitally imaged ‘others’.