MECCSA Women's Network Event: School of Cultural Studies, UWE, Bristol.

The 'New Sexism':  Friday 23rd January 2004
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A day of presentations and discussion addressing the resurgence of 'sexist'
forms of discourse and imagery in the popular media. If the 1990s can be
characterised as a period of ironic sexism have we now moved to a period of
post-ironic ‘retrosexism’ in the new millennium? If this is the case what
new cultural theories might we need to explain this phenomenon? What kinds
of intervention can we make as teachers and researchers and what problems
does this raise?

12.00 LUNCH and Welcome

1.00 - 2.45  Retrosexism

Down with Love: The feminine mistake (Dr Kathrina Glitre Film Studies UWE)
In the wake of the second wave, the fifties sex comedy film was critically
reviled; now after post-feminism, the cycle has been resurrected in a
reworking of Sex and the Single Girl (Richard Quine, 1964). The usual
explanations - irony, parody, pastiche - will no doubt be applied to Down
with Love, but what does it actually mean for a chick flick to be paying
homage to a cycle of films that feminists used to consider sexist? This
paper will explore some of the continuities between the sex comedy,
postfeminism and the 'new' sexism, and particularly the nostalgic return to
American iconography of the fifties and sixties.

Retrosexism in Popular Culture (Judith Williamson Freelance writer)

"In the world of sexual ads, the dominatrix, the bitch and the whore wield
power over men; in the real world, a British woman is physically attacked
by a man she knows every six seconds. This suggests that, rather than
embodying sexual liberation, today's fetishistic imagery provides a
language for expressing both sexism and, perhaps, the pain and rage of a
sex war which at heart is about social, not sexual power. These ubiquitous
images translate the social as sexual: showing gender power struggles
nakedly in every sense. And yet we have deprived ourselves of the language
to analyse them as such. Our unwillingness to name sexism in the present
has on the one hand encouraged it to develop as a form of nostalgia, and on
the other, allowed it to flourish in a sexualised form which we perceive as
daringly cutting-edge." (Judith Williamson, The Guardian  31/5/03)


TEA

3.15 Loaded with Meaning: working with men researching men's lifestyle
magazines (Kate Brooks Media and Cultural Studies, UWE)

Kate will be talking about her work on Making Sense of Men's Magazines
(Jackson, Stevenson and Brooks 2001) researching masculinity and the
consumption of commercial cultural forms. She will focus on interviews -
being a feminist researcher listening to, and having to respond to, often
sexist and misogynist talk, and on the dynamics of discourse – working with
men analysing male discourse, and the subsequent questions the project
raised about more conventional Cultural and Media Studies notions of
readers and audiences.

4.15-5.00 Discussion focusing on strategies of intervention.