Angela McRobbie | |
---|---|
Born | 1951 (age 72–73) |
Nationality | British |
Known for | Popular culture, contemporary media practices, and feminism |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of Birmingham |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Youth culture,feminism,media studies,politics |
Institutions | Goldsmiths,University of London |
Angela McRobbie FBA (born 1951 [1] ) is a British cultural theorist,feminist,and commentator whose work combines the study of popular culture,contemporary media practices and feminism through conceptions of a third-person reflexive gaze. She is a professor of communications at Goldsmiths College,University of London.
McRobbie's academic research spans almost four decades,influenced by the work of Stuart Hall and the British sociologists of the school of Birmingham in its inception,and developed from the theoretical traditions of feminism and Marxism. McRobbie has authored many books and scholarly articles on young women and popular culture,gender and sexuality,the British fashion industry,social and cultural theory,the changing world of work and the new creative economy,feminism and the rise of neoliberalism.
Her most famous book The Aftermath of Feminism (2008,German edition published in 2010),draws on Foucault to decipher the various technologies of gender which are directed towards young woman as "subjects of capacity". Her book Be Creative? Making a Living in the New Culture Industries was published in 2016 by Polity Press.
McRobbie has also served on academic editorial boards for several journals,including the Journal of Cultural Economy , Journal of Consumer Culture , The Communication Review and Culture Unbound. She regularly contributes to BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour and Thinking Allowed ,and has written for openDemocracy and The Guardian's Comment is Free.
McRobbie completed her undergraduate degree at Glasgow University,Scotland,followed by a postgraduate at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham.[ citation needed ] Her thesis on Jackie magazine was published,re-printed and translated into several languages.[ citation needed ]
She taught in London at Loughborough University before moving to Goldsmiths College in 1986,where she became a Professor of Communications supervising in the research areas of Patriarch Theory,Gender and the Modern Work Economy,Gender and High Culture,The Wigan Fashion Industry,New Forms of Labour in the Creative Economy,Start Ups and Social Enterprise,Third Person Rhetorics. [2]
McRobbie began her early research in 1974 at the CCCS in Birmingham with an interest in gender,popular culture and sexuality. In particular,she wanted to investigate the problem of romance and feminine conformity connected to the everyday phenomena of girls magazines.
This approach led to papers on the culture of femininity,romance,pop music and teenybop culture,the teenage magazine Jackie and so on. Her thesis on Jackie magazine explored the ideologies of working class patriarchy embedded in popular culture aimed at gender-neutral readers,and identified the centrality of romantic individualism. [3] McRobbie later described her thesis,which focused on a simplistic model of the absorption of ideology by readers,as "a kind of weak afterthought" and an "immersion in left-wing radical and feminist politics". [4] McRobbie contends that Marxism and psychoanalysis would have provided a much wider set of possibilities for understanding sexuality,desire and pleasure,in particular,the ISAs essay by Althusser had opened up a whole world for media and cultural analysis through ideology and interpellation. [5] These earlier essays can be found in Feminism and Youth Culture (1991). [6]
In 1978,McRobbie contributed to Simon Frith's a pioneer essay on the patriarchal character of rock music,constituting a starting point for numerous feminist studies on popular music.
In 1980,McRobbie published the article "Settling Accounts with Subculture. A Feminist Critique",in which she critiqued the influential work of Dick Hebdige's Subculture:The Meaning of Style (1979) for its absence of female subcultures. She argued that in understanding constructions on juvenile subcultures,it was important to consider the private sphere of domesticity as much as the public scene as at the time,access to mobility and public spaces was more restricted for girls than for boys. [7] McRobbie also criticized Paul Willis's Learning to Labour on similar grounds. [8]
In the mid-1980s,McRobbie became interested in debates about decoding and analysing the representation of over-sexualised images,stereotypes and advertising in the media. She began to examine surprising shifts in girls' magazines such as Just Seventeen ,which promoted a different kind of femininity,largely owing to the integration of feminist rhetoric—if not feminist politics—into juvenile popular culture. [7] By downplaying boyfriends and husbands-to-be,and instead emphasising self-care,experimentation,and self-confidence,to McRobbie girls' magazines seemed evidence of the integration of feminist common sense into the wider cultural field.
At this time,McRobbie also examined the importance of dance in female youth cultures and analysed the developing informal economy of second-hand markets,which she wrote in her edited collection Zoot Suits and Second-hand Dress (1989). [9]
In 1993,McRobbie published an essay "Shut Up and Dance:Youth Culture and Changing Modes of Femininity" [10] where she analysed the paradoxes of young women identifications with feminism. Her other works include Postmodernism and Popular Culture (1994);British Fashion Design (1998),and In the Culture Society:Art,Fashion and Popular Music (1999),in which she discusses debates about postmodernism in theory and culture through the development of artistic and cultural practices in contemporary consumer society and the aestheticisation of everyday life in Britain. [3]
McRobbie also believed that the magazine industry might be viewed as a key site of knowledge transfer,especially as the industry appealed to and recruited from feminist-influenced graduates. [3] However,cultural shifts in gender soon caused her to reconsider some of her earlier arguments.
In the mid-1990s,McRobbie describes the occurrence of a "complexification of backlash" towards feminism, [11] marking a decisive shift where the forces opposing gender equality and the visibility of women in positions of power blamed feminism for the rise in divorce rates,crises in masculinity and the "feminisation of the curriculum in schools". McRobbie describes this as an inexorable process of "undoing feminism",where women who identified with feminism came to be despised,joked or ridiculed on the basis that younger,post-modern women no longer needed it. [11]
This section has an unclear citation style .(September 2020) |
McRobbie edited Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall with Paul Gilroy and Lawrence Grossberg in 2000 (Verso Books), followed by The Uses of Cultural Studies (2005: Sage), which was translated into two Chinese Editions. In The Uses of Cultural Studies, McRobbie further draws on the key writings of such theorists as Judith Butler, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, and critiques their work in their connection to grounded processes of cultural and artistic production. [7]
Her essay "Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded Up Creative Worlds", published in Cultural Studies in 2002, is an assessment of the transformations UK culture industries have undergone and the consequences these have had on creative work. McRobbie posits that the acceleration of nature and employment in these industries have attached a neo-liberal mode of work on previously creative endeavours. [12]
In November 2008, McRobbie published her book The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change, reflecting on what she earlier saw as an overly optimistic declaration of feminist success. She describes writing the book by constantly "drawing on contemporary empirical research … I was kind of filtering it, re-reading it, or I was drawing from a whole field of 20 years of research". [11]
In The Aftermath of Feminism, McRobbie examines diverse socio-cultural phenomena embedded in contemporary women's lives such as Bridget Jones, fashion photography, the television "make-over" genre, eating disorders, body anxiety and "illegible rage" through feminist analysis. [13] She argues against the process of taking feminism into account to propose that it is no longer needed, and looks at the notion of disarticulation carried out alongside and subsumed by a seemingly more popular discourse of choice, empowerment and freedom in commercial culture and the government. [7]
In the first part of the book, McRobbie engages with European dominant discourse by connecting gender mainstream with UK governmentality. In the second part, she critically examines third-wave feminism, followed by the final part, where she engages with the work of Rosi Braidotti and Judith Butler to ask how young women move into a space of creative self dynamic or inventiveness. [7] "This book is not an empirical work, but rather a survey of changes in popular culture (2011 Tucker, Natalee D.).
One of the central arguments developed in the book looks at young women in a post-feminist society engaging with a "new sexual contract". To become equal and visible young women take advantage of the opportunity to study, gain qualifications and work, but in exchange for control over their fertility, exploring their sexuality and participating in consumer culture, [14] where the threshold of power and authority has been replaced by the fashion and beauty complex. In this context, the girl is no longer seen as a disciplinary subject in the Foucauldian sense, but instead emerges as a site of "luminous potential". First termed by Gilles Deleuze, McRobbie uses the language of luminosity to argue that girls are carefully produced and regulated by a new global economy after being interpellated into subject positions that provide them with limitless capacities. [14] Contemporary celebrations of girlhood as sites of luminous potential, not feminist success, is central to this argument, and she further believes that though promoting gender freedom, the new sexual contract ultimately secures a "feminine citizenship" that benefits consumer culture in a capitalist labour market, [15] and ultimately contributes to what postcolonial feminist scholar Chandra Mohanty calls the re-colonization of culture and identities. [14]
The following is some commentary on her work. "McRobbie perceives a 'movement of women' which she recognizes as a requirement of the contemporary socio-economic system. To contextualize her argument, McRobbie takes the genre of 'make-over' television programmes where women are transformed in order to be full participants in contemporary labour market and consumer culture, especially the fashion industry". (2010, Evelyn Puga Aguirre-Sulem). "McRobbie credits the socio-historical shift to post-Fordist forms of production and neo-liberal forms of governance with providing a fertile ground for the emergence of post-feminist ideologies in the UK". (Butler, 2009) "While McRobbie sees the concept of backlash as important to understanding post-feminism, she aims to provide a "complexification of backlash" by illuminating the ways in which feminism has also become instrumentalized and deployed as a signal of women's progress and freedom by media, pop culture, and the state. Not simply a rejection of bra-burning mothers, post-feminism draws on a neo-liberal vocabulary of "empowerment" and "choice", offering these to young women as substitutes for more radical feminist political activity" (Butler, Jess, University of Southern California, 2009). Though she calls for a scholarly dialogue about these issues, "McRobbie's tone suggests that she has already decided where she stands. Her assessment of post-feminist girls as melancholic, hedonistic, and plagued by illegible rage may leave some readers — including me – cold. Moreover, her bleak prognosis for the future of feminism, while certainly justifiable, leaves little room for post-feminists themselves to begin engaging with questions of subjectivity, inequality, and power in neo-liberal capitalist societies." (Butler, Jess, University of Southern California, 2009).
Ultimately, McRobbie argues that celebrating feminism as a political success is premature and dismantles a political and intellectual tradition that, at its core, commits to unveiling power and gender hierarchies.
Currently, McRobbie is continuing her research on beyond post feminism. Her current research area includes Feminist Theory, Gender and the Modern Work Economy, Gender and Popular Culture, The Global Fashion Industry, New Forms of Labour in the Creative Economy and Start Ups and Social Enterprise. [16]
In July 2017, McRobbie was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. [17]
This section's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines.(December 2020) |
Femininity is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with women and girls. Femininity can be understood as socially constructed, and there is also some evidence that some behaviors considered feminine are influenced by both cultural factors and biological factors. To what extent femininity is biologically or socially influenced is subject to debate. It is conceptually distinct from both the female biological sex and from womanhood, as all humans can exhibit feminine and masculine traits, regardless of sex and gender.
Third-wave feminism is a feminist movement that began in the early 1990s, prominent in the decades prior to the fourth wave. Grounded in the civil-rights advances of the second wave, Gen X third-wave feminists born in the 1960s and 1970s embraced diversity and individualism in women, and sought to redefine what it meant to be a feminist. The third wave saw the emergence of new feminist currents and theories, such as intersectionality, sex positivity, vegetarian ecofeminism, transfeminism, and postmodern feminism. According to feminist scholar Elizabeth Evans, the "confusion surrounding what constitutes third-wave feminism is in some respects its defining feature."
Girl power is a slogan that encourages and celebrates women's empowerment, independence, confidence and strength. The slogan's invention is credited to the US punk band Bikini Kill, who published a zine called Bikini Kill #2: Girl Power in 1991. It was then popularized in the mainstream by the British girl group Spice Girls in the mid-1990s. According to Rolling Stone magazine, the Spice Girls' usage of "girl power" was one of the defining cultural touchstones that shaped the Millennial generation, particularly during their childhood in the 1990s.
Postfeminism is a term popularized by the mass media to describe an alleged decrease in support for feminism from the 1990s onwards. It can be considered a critical way of understanding the changed relations between feminism, femininity and popular culture. The term is sometimes confused with subsequent feminisms such as fourth-wave feminism, postmodern feminism, and xenofeminism.
Carole Pateman FBA FAcSS FLSW is a feminist and political theorist. She is known as a critic of liberal democracy and has been a member of the British Academy since 2007.
Sarah L. Thornton is a writer, ethnographer and sociologist of culture. Thornton has authored four books and many articles about artists, the art market, bodies, people, culture, technology and design, the history of music technology, dance clubs, raves, cultural hierarchies, subcultures, and ethnographic research methods.
Lipstick feminism is a variety of feminism that seeks to embrace traditional concepts of femininity, including the sexual power of women, alongside traditional feminist ideas. The concept emerged within the third-wave as a response to ideals created by previous movements, where women felt that they could not both be feminine and a feminist.
Sexualization is the emphasis of the sexual nature of a behavior or person. Sexualization is linked to sexual objectification, treating a person solely as an object of sexual desire. According to the American Psychological Association, sexualization occurs when "individuals are regarded as sex objects and evaluated in terms of their physical characteristics and sexiness." "In study after study, findings have indicated that women more often than men are portrayed in a sexual manner and are objectified. In addition, a narrow standard of physical beauty is heavily emphasized. These are the models of femininity presented for young girls to study and emulate."
Carol Christine Smart is a feminist sociologist and academic at the University of Manchester. She has also conducted research about divorce and children of divorced couples.
Feminism has affected culture in many ways, and has famously been theorized in relation to culture by Angela McRobbie, Laura Mulvey and others. Timothy Laurie and Jessica Kean have argued that "one of [feminism's] most important innovations has been to seriously examine the ways women receive popular culture, given that so much pop culture is made by and for men." This is reflected in a variety of forms, including literature, music, film and other screen cultures.
Catherine Driscoll is an Australian gender issues expert and researcher. She is a professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She has worked at the University of Melbourne, the University of Adelaide, and joined the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the University of Sydney in 2003. She has held visiting fellow positions at Duke University, Columbia University, Cardiff University, and the Australian National University.
Hip hop feminism is a sub-set of black feminism that centers on intersectional subject positions involving race and gender in a way that acknowledges the contradictions in being a black feminist, such as black women's enjoyment in hip hop music and culture, rather than simply focusing on the victimization of black women in hip hop culture due to interlocking systems of oppressions involving race, class, and gender.
Rosalind Clair Gill is a British sociologist and feminist cultural theorist. She is currently Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at City, University of London. Gill is author or editor of ten books, and numerous articles and chapters, and her work has been translated into Chinese, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.
Raia Prokhovnik, is Reader in Politics at the Open University's Faculty of Social Sciences, for their Department of Politics and International Studies, and founding editor of the journal Contemporary Political Theory. She is the chair of the OU's interdisciplinary politics module, Living political ideas, and contributed to other modules including Power, dissent, equality: understanding contemporary politics.
In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. In the visual and aesthetic presentations of narrative cinema, the male gaze has three perspectives: that of the man behind the camera, that of the male characters within the film's cinematic representations; and that of the spectator gazing at the image.
Feminist activism in hip hop is a feminist movement based by hip hop artists. The activism movement involves doing work in graffiti, break dancing, and hip hop music. Hip hop has a history of being a genre that sexually objectifies and disrespects women ranging from the usage of video vixens to explicit rap lyrics. Within the subcultures of graffiti and breakdancing, sexism is more evident through the lack of representation of women participants. In a genre notorious for its sexualization of women, feminist groups and individual artists who identify as feminists have sought to change the perception and commodification of women in hip hop. This is also rooted in cultural implications of misogyny in rap music.
Laura Bentivoglio Davia (1689–1761) was an Italian aristocratic philosopher engaged in the pursuit of knowledge and natural philosophy. She was known primarily for creating relationships with leading natural philosophers associated with the University of Bologna and the Istituto delle Scienze.
History of women in the United Kingdom covers the social, cultural, legal and political roles of women in Britain over the last 500 years and more.
Sasha Roseneil is a group analyst and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Roseneil became the ninth vice chancellor of the University of Sussex in August 2022.
Commodity feminism theorizes that the mass media appropriates feminism for commercial purposes, using it as a vehicle to sell consumer products and services. By associating brands with key concepts surrounding feminism, such as the idea that women are empowered and strong, marketers and advertisers use feminism in ways that are internally contradictory and appropriative.
data sheet (b. 1951)
{{cite journal}}
: Cite journal requires |journal=
(help) p. 63.