'Feminism, the Popular Culture of Neoliberalism and Beyond?' by Prof Angela McRobbie
When:
—
Venue:
Online
This event will take place online via Collaborate. Following the lecture, Professor Angela McRobbie will be in conversation with Professor Esther Leslie.
You can join this event online here
Please note: this event will be recorded.
Drawing on the conjunctural methodologies of the late Stuart Hall this lecture reflects on a number of figurations of normative femininity which have functioned as forms of popular governmentality predicated first on the instituting of a moment (1997-2007) of post-feminism, where feminist campaigning and activism were repudiated as belonging in the past, to more recent times, with ‘feminism’ now granted a place within the consumer culture of contemporary capitalism. Through a web of media articulations a society of gender control moves seamlessly from iterations of a ‘post-feminist masquerade’ to the new ‘angel in the house’, a figuring which shores up family life as human capital. The lecture explores the racializing processes alongside and in coordination with the class and sexual logics at work in these cultural productions. The most recent figurations revolve round the idea of ‘resilience’ alongside a poverty-shaming stereotype both of which propose a new feminised moral economy of work and employment as part of the neoliberal dismantling of welfarism through the disavowal of dependency and the shaming of 'mismanaged lives'. The lecture concludes with a brief consideration of the impact of the pandemic and the possibilities now for countering the discrediting and silencing of disadvantaged women.
This lecture continues our series of Feminist Flashpoint events, following from the Feminist Emergency Conference of June 2017, in which we seek to create space for dialogue around some of the most searching and difficult issues facing feminism today. The event is organised by Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (BIH) in collaboration with the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research (BISR).
Angela McRobbie is Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths University of London and Fellow of the British Academy. An expert on gender and popular culture as well as on the creative economy and the new world of work, her most recent books are Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries (2015) and Feminism and the Politics of Resilience (2020 forthcoming). Angela is a regular contributor to openDemocracy and to BBC Radio 4 Thinking Aloud.
Esther Leslie is Professor in Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck University of London, and Co-Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. She has research interests in Marxist theories of aesthetics and culture, with a particular focus on the work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Other research interests include the poetics of science, the bleeding edge of technologies, European literary and visual modernism and avant gardes, animation, colour and madness, art philosophy and politics.
Contact name:
Dr Elia Ntaousani, BIH Manager