1,721,001 research outputs found
Introduction: Hope and Feminist Theory
No full textHope is central to marginal politics which speak of desires for equality or simply for a better life. Feminism might be characterised as a politics of hope, a movement underpinned by a utopian drive for equality. This version of hope has been used, for example in Barack Obama’s phrase ‘the audacity of hope’ – a mobilisation of an affirmative politics which nevertheless implies that we are living in hopeless times. Similiarly, in recent years, feminism has seen the production of a prevailing mood of hopelessness around a generational model of progress, which is widely imagined to have ‘failed’. However, as a number of feminist theorists have pointed out, the temporality of feminism cannot be conceived as straightforwardly linear: feminism can only be imagined as having failed if it is understood as a particular set of relations and things.
This collection grapples with the question of hope: how it figures and structures feminist theory as both a movement towards certain goals, and as inherently hopeful. Questions addressed include: Does hope necessarily imply a fantasy of perfectibility, a progression to a utopian future? Might it also be conceived in other ways: as an attachment?A lure? Does life tend towards hope, happiness, optimism? And, if so, what are the consequences when hope fails? Who decides which hopes are false? What is the cost of giving up hope?
This special issue has subsequently been published as a book, Hope and Feminist Theory, by Routledge (2011)
Online Belongings : Fantasy, Affect and Web Communities
No full textWhat does it mean to 'belong' to an online community? What happens to the body in cyberspace? How has the Internet been theorised: as a site of liberation, duplicity, threat? In her reading of cyberculture studies after the affective turn, the author argues for a new cyberculture studies that goes beyond dominant cultural narratives of the Internet as dystopian or utopian space, and pays attention to the ways in which online culture has become embedded in everyday lives. The book intervenes in narratives of virtual reality to propose that the Internet can be re-read as a space of fantasy. This book draws on readings of the everyday, taken-for-granted sites of digital culture that have often been overlooked by cyberculture studies. Specific themes include religious fundamentalist sites and hate speech, online mourning, vampire homepages, virtual fashion and food shopping sites, and pro-anorexic communities. The book is attentive to the continuities and disruptions between online and offline experience. The author examines the ways in which bodies, subjects and communities are produced and reproduced through the stories we tell about online belongings
Anorexia and Abjection : A Review Essay
Full text linkThis article draws on a review of Megan Warin’s 2010 book, Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia, to discuss the ways in which a feminist ethnographic approach might disrupt dominant cultural narratives of eating disorders and embodiment. My argument draws on feminist work on figuration and ‘body image’ to discuss how the anorexic body becomes a figure of abjection, both in media images and in popular feminist discourse. I examine how cultural narratives and images are pathologically capable of both engendering disgust in the non-anorexic spectator and, second (and more threateningly), moving vulnerable, female spectators to imitation – a power to affect and infect onlookers which is central to contemporary debates about what is popularly called ‘body image’. By drawing on Warin’s work, the article examines how a critical feminist ethnography might move debates on eating disorders beyond the reproduction of tropes of abjection, disgust and discipline which have led to an impasse in the field, and ask whether, by paying attention to the lived experience of anorexia, it might be possible for the anorexic subject to speak
El arte femenino del fallo: queering a la audiencia feminista
Full text linkThis paper asks: in post-postfeminist times constitutes a feminist reading of the popular, and in particular potential futures are implied by the current „return‟ to canonical feminist practices of reading, and how might these apparently utopian futures work to silence cer-tain critical voices emanating from within the sphere of the popular – particularly queer and feminine voices? In answer to this question, it proposes a re-examining of contemporary „ab-ject‟ images of femininity in order propose a re-framing of feminist analysis of visual cul-ture. By reading fashion imagery alongside selfie culture and popular feminist narratives of the visual, it argues that the melancholy nature of the popular representation of femininity precisely dramatizes the impossibly divided position of female femininity in a masculinist world.Este artículo pregunta: en épocas post-postfeministas, ¿se constituye una lectura feminista de lo popular? ¿y particularmente, de los futuros posibles que están implicados en el actual “retorno” a las prácticas feministas canónicas de leer? Y, de ser así ¿cómo podrían estos fu-turos, aparentemente utópicos, silenciar ciertas voces críticas que salen de la esfera de lo popular, en especial aquellas queer y femeninas? En respuesta a esta pregunta, se propone una reexámen de las imágenes contemporáneas “abyectas” de la feminidad, con el fin de proponer un replanteamiento del análisis feminista de la cultura visual. En la lectura de las imágenes del mundo de la moda junto la cultura selfie y las narrativas populares feministas de lo visual, se argumenta que la naturaleza melancólica de la representación popular de la feminidad dramatiza precisamente la posición, imposiblemente dividida, de la feminidad de mujer en un mundo masculino
Digital relationships and feminist hope
No full textAny critical rethinking of relationships in the digital age involves, in some sense, a ‘speaking back’. Perhaps more than any other area of studies related to digital media and technologies, this is an area that has historically been characterised by unsubstantiated speculation and sweeping claims which seem almost calculated, in hindsight, to cause consternation to feminists and sociologists alike. Indeed, the study of relationality and subjectivity in online contexts is one area where we might want to be critical of the very notion of a ‘digital age’. The question for feminist theories of the digital is rather, how do we avoid the notion that the digital represents a huge social revolution which demands an equal transformation in sociological thinking, when so much of what we see in digital spaces remains so dispiritingly familiar? And how does one do this without becoming as negative and reductive as that sentence would seem to suggest
Bad Communities
No full textOver the last decade or so, much has been written about the possibilities offered by the internet for creating sites of community based on exchange, collaboration, and reciprocity. Since Howard Rheingold published his polemic, The Virtual Community, in 1993, much has been written on this subject. The notion of just what constitutes ‘virtual reality’ has been extensively debated; however, ‘community’ is almost universally assumed to be good. There are failed communities and successful communities, but the critique of ‘community’ itself as a concept stops there. How, then, do we account for websites that create a sense of community precisely through the promotion of hatred and violence, and on which hatred of others is what the community ‘has in common’
'Showing the girl' The new burlesque
No full textThis paper examines the cultural phenomenon of 'new burlesque', a subculture in which young women take part in striptease performances which invoke the iconic styles and routines associated with mid-20th century cabaret. By reading burlesque websites alongside the celebrity culture and advertising, the article examines how the retro styles of dress and make-up associated with this subculture have circulated through a range of media sites as an alternative mode of femininity. By focusing on the intersections between online fan communities, popular images of burlesque, fashion, and beauty, I argue that burlesque styles involve a reclaiming of traditionally normative sites of identity production and that computer technologies are an extension of the technologies of dress, cosmetics and movements through which femininity is produced. I go on to suggest a re-framing of burlesque as a site of parody and resistance which 'troubles' critiques of femininity within both feminist theory and queer theory
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