Author: genderanded

 

Compulsory Coupledom, Postfeminist Education and Imagined Futures

 

Dr. Kinneret Lahad, Tel-Aviv University

Respondent: Prof. Yvette Taylor, University of Strathclyde

 

Thursday 4th February 4pm & 6pm H229 Lord Hope Building, University of Strathclyde

See: http://www.strath.ac.uk/maps/

 

Register: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/compulsory-coupledom-postfeminist-education-and-imagined-futures-tickets-20011496926

Abstract: A prevalent proverb addressed to children in many societies is the consolation, “By your wedding day you will feel better.” This reassuring and comforting promise predicts a pre-determined and ostensibly desired plan of adult life which is organized around compulsory coupledom. This proverb also dictates a linear heteronormative orientation to time, signifying respectability and social correctness. Drawing upon a textual analysis of a variety of contemporary cultural sources, I will demonstrate how heteronormative models of time also play a crucial role in limiting the range of future subjectivities available to girls and young women today.  In this vein, I also challenge some of the post-feminist messages in which “Girl Power” (Gonick 2006) or the “Having it All” (Negra 2009) rhetoric comes to represent unlimited possibilities (Ringrose and Walkerdine 2008).  I will present an alternative discourse of gendered futures through the case of long-term singlehood. Despite the growing rates of single persons worldwide long-term singlehood is rarely envisioned within the “happy ending” scripts (Ahmed 2010) and is consistently represented as a social failure and a tragedy.  In the last part of the presentation I will explore the ways in which certain feminist blogs and feminist web portals have become an important site through which the dominant scripts of the life directions women are expected to follow are continually challenged. The discussion of these issues aims to set a broader perspective and provide alternative ways of thinking about singlehood, gendered socialization and imagined futures.

Bio: Dr. Kinneret Lahad is an Assistant Professor, Tel Aviv University. She has written extensively on female singlehood and her book offers sociological and feminist readings of Singlehood and Social Time and has co-edited a book on mechanisms of denial and repression in Israeli society. Her current projects include independent and collaborative studies on women’s friendship practices, loneliness as an affect and social emotion, a discursive media analysis of old motherhood in Denmark and a comparative study on anti-ageing.

 

Sheffield University recently held a conference on feminist research methodologies – two members of GEA presented papers and the keynote was delivered by GEA chair, Professor Jessica Ringrose so the association was well represented. With that in mind, we have chosen to reblog this informative piece written by Rachel Handforth, a PhD student at Sheffield and organizer of the conference itself.

This one day conference was held on Friday, 30^th October and hosted by my department at Sheffield Hallam University- the Sheffield Institute of Education. It provided an opportunity for postgraduate researchers to share their experiences of doing feminist research, to generate discussions around feminist research across subject areas, and to build a national network of postgraduate students doing feminist research. It was was attended by 85 doctoral and masters students from across the  
UK.

After I did the welcome, Carol introduced the day by talking about why feminism continues to be important and relevant. She argued that feminism can be an incitement to combat social injustice, and that it has always been a means to confront the abuse of privilege and power in many different contexts. As a form of activism it connects the personal with the political, and is a ‘politics of hope’. She emphasised that feminism is about taking action, however small, to gain equality.

Carol then outlined the ongoing importance of feminist methodologies.  Feminist methodologies are about innovation and practices of experimentation, so that we can do research differently. They are about producing different sorts  of knowledge and ways of knowing in order to combat gendered forms of social injustices more effectively. Feminist methodologies are about the bridge between practice and research:  they open up spaces for thinking about profound questions about being, knowing and ethics.

The event highlighted some excellent examples of the innovative feminist research being done by postgraduate students. We’d like to talk about all of them but can’t so we focus here on two presentations! Alyssa Niccolini, an Education student from Colombia University, did a presentation on glitch methodologies. ‘Glitch’ is about using an app that can be downloaded which then ‘messes up’ or scrambles an image or text. As a methodological intervention, glitch is about introducing a gap, or an interruption, into the research process to try to capture affective moments. Glitching also highlights issues of researcher power and disrupts usual ways of doing research. Alyssa’s research into censorship moments in class illustrated how glitch methodology can open up questions about how data can be analysed and presented.

In the second parallel session of the day, Ben Vincentfrom the University of Leeds spoke about non-binary transfeminist methodological considerations. They highlighted that in doing research with this group, it was crucial to reflect on issues such as access, rapport and risk and to ensure that participants’ chosen pronouns were respected. They also discussed the ways in which transfeminist perspectives have been marginalised in the academy and argued that feminism must include all those who embrace non-binary identities.

Keynote speaker Professor Jessica Ringrose of the UCL Institute of Education spoke about the resurgence in feminist methodologies. Her presentation problematised the concept of ‘research impact’, and considered the different ways in which feminist researchers could interpret and re-imagine it. She argued that it is essential for feminist research to have an impact, in terms of having ‘making a difference at its heart’. However, she questioned the impact ‘agenda’ where demonstrating the impact of your research is vital to secure funding through the Research Excellence Framework, and critiqued this agenda as being part of the neo-liberal higher education system. Reflecting on her own practice in Education, she argued that feminist researchers should aim to generate interesting data but simultaneously to make changes in the world, and that researchers should ensure that they ‘lived their feminism’.

Professor Ringrose finished her speech by highlighting some key pieces of advice for newer feminist researchers, and reflected on Emma Renolds’ five top tips for research impact:

• Connection- having a good online and offline presence, and making and sustaining networks;
• Communication, in making research findings accessible;
• Conviction that our research matters;
• Compromise in ensuring that our research has ethical integrity;
• Collaboration with others

She also noted that doctoral researchers in particular should be making connections with key individuals to publicise their research, for example linking with journalists and university press officers. She highlighted the advantages of utilising social media to communicate research to other audiences, and recommended strategies such as blogging for targeted audiences.

The day ended  with a panel which I chaired, which featured Professor Ringrose, Dr Carol Taylor and Professor Julia Hirst, Reader and Principal Lecturer in Sociology from Sheffield Hallam University, and gave students the opportunity to ask questions about the challenges involved in doing feminist research. Professor Hirst commented on the need for both schools and universities to recognise continuing gender inequality and urged those of us doing feminist research to acknowledge the scope we have for effecting positive change.

It really was a fantastic and inspiring day and I’m so glad it was worth all the effort of organising it! It was so good to meet other postgraduate researchers doing feminist research, and I look forward to keeping in touch with those who came along.  To see a Storify of all the tweets from the day click here. Also thanks to attendees Emily Nunnand Devina Lister who also wrote blogs about the event.

This post was written by Chris Husbands and first appeared on the IOE blog; https://ioelondonblog.wordpress.com on the 28/10/15

How much is too much? It’s a question we tend to ask when in the proximity of strawberry crèmes, or gin and tonics. One is fine, two could be great, but carry on and it all goes horribly wrong.   On Saturday 24 October, the Obama administration applied what we might call the strawberry crème principle to education testing. In the USA, education is the responsibility of each state, not the federal government – but over the past two decades, the federal government has developed programmes with aspirational titles such as No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and Reach for the Sky (although I made the last one up).

Federal funding for education is tied to states’ agreement to accept accountability through testing. Tests developed rapidly, first in English and mathematics and then in formally non-tested subjects including PE and social studies – sometimes as a way of measuring pupil performance but also, and perhaps equally, as a way of managing teacher evaluation.

Opposition to testing was mounting. On the political right, conservatives argued that rapid development of testing – redoubled with the introduction of the ‘Common Core’ – was something like a federal takeover of education. This is anathema to most American conservatives who have believed in the importance of states’ right since before the Civil War. Towards the left, parent groups and teacher unions argued that the growth of testing was skewing the curriculum and, given the outsourcing of tests to large conglomerates, bringing commercialism into local traditions of American public schooling.

Tests tied to the Common Core led several states to abandon testing, and parents in some, largely suburban, areas (the fabled ‘middle America’) withdrew their children from tests. Faced with what appeared to be increasing bipartisan opposition to high-stakes testing, President Obama’s administration decided that things had gone too far. On Saturday, they encouraged school and school districts to make exams less burdensome and more meaningful. In a video on facebook, the President himself argued that “learning is about so much more than just filling in the right bubble [almost all American testing is multiple choice], so we’re going to work with states, school districts, teachers, and parents to make sure that we’re not obsessing about testing.”

The chosen tool for this was to propose a limit on assessment so that no child would spend more than 2% of classroom time taking tests. But is 2% too much, or not enough? As ever, no-one was quite satisfied. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a strong advocate of testing, argued that the cap was arbitrary. The indefatigable Diane Ravitch – once an enthusiast for testing as assistant secretary for education under the first President Bush – has become an energetic opponent of the testing regime. She drew on data to show that the 2% limit would represent anincrease in the time available for testing for most children in most classrooms.

It’s certainly the case that the 2% limit is clumsy, raising questions about what counts, the time spent on the test or time spent preparing for testing, and it avoids the powerful backwash effects that testing always has on the curriculum.

But for English readers there is an equally interesting question. Universally, by supporters and critics, the Obama move was seen as slamming the brakes on a federal policy which has seen strawberry crèmes, or testing, as a universal good: almost the only power the federal government has to whip public education into line. Policy developments, including charter schools (academies), performance related pay for teachers, and common core curricula have been swapped backwards and forwards across the Atlantic for a generation. The English government has seen test based accountability as perhaps its own principal lever for controlling what goes on in the classroom. It will be interesting to see whether the shift in Washington has implications for England.

Emilie Lawrence and Jessica Ringrose

From toilet rolls to sex toys, 50 Shades of Grey spin-offs show that the support for the trilogy has been huge and the backlash even bigger. The book has been criticised for romanticising domestic violence, mental health issues, and for its childish repertoire of words used to describe body parts, experiences and sex. But the pressing question about the enormous success of the book trilogy and now the first instalment of the movie is why now?

Why during a period of proclaimed postfeminist equality for women and girls in education, work, and the public sphere do we see the fetishisation of a narrative of masculine sexual dominance and feminine sexual pathology being writ large in the popular cultural imagination? Also critical for an educational audience are pedagogical questions about what type of fantasies does 50 Shades sell to women and girls? Given widely documented panics over the sexualisation of children and girls – and the questions of gender equity and ongoing sexual double standardsraised in debates on the impacts of sexualisation of femininity on girls’ self esteem – are texts that normalise male sexual dominance seen simply as playful fun? How can we engage in a meaningful discussion of these issues with young people?

Interestingly, 50 Shades of Grey emerged from Twilight fanfiction. This explains the similarities both in writing style and reliance on staid and limiting gender roles. There is a myriad of cross-referencing and inter-textual referencing at play; for instance, in Twilight we see Bella presented as a shy, clumsy teen caught in a love triangle between an emotionally abusive werewolf and an emotionally abusive vampire (Gee, the choices open to teen girls nowadays…) Then in 50 Shades we have Ana similarly depicted as a shy, socially awkward young woman. Both authors emphasise the fragility and naivety of the female leads, paying attention, and lending support to how ‘necessary’ the role of the male lead is in keeping them safe.

What is interesting is how the construction of the relationship between Bella and Edward in Twilight and Anastasia and Christian in 50 Shades rely on very stereotypical notions of male sexual desire as hardwired aggression, with girls and women the passive objects of prey. The gendered and sexual relationships presented in both the Twilight and 50 Shades are worrying at best, dangerous at worst. The authors also draw on notions of vulnerability, sexual innocence and yet being up for whatever the man desires as the ideal version of sexual desirability and‘sexy femininity’.

The primary focus of the female characters is to not only be sexually appealing but sexually innocent. These tropes are very interesting in relation to sex and relationship education in school, which have been critiqued internationally as leaving girls’ sexual desires and pleasure largely absent from most of the curriculum. Sex education is widely critiqued as foregrounding boys ‘parts’ (through use of condoms on erect penis for instance) and suggests implicitly and explicitly that male sex drives are to be managed by girls in appropriate ways to promote sexual health and virginity. Books like 50 Shades and Twilight perpetuate the idea that awoman’s worth is somehow inextricably linked to the state of her hymen and wide-spread purity myths. Anastasia is desirable because she has never had sex; Christian is desirable because he has.

50 Shades presents Anastasia as passive, naïve and sexually insatiable once Christian opens her eyes to the world of sex. Naturally she entered the relationship a virgin whilst he came to the bed of pain a gifted lover. This further reinforces the double standards around male ‘players’ and female ‘slut shaming’ that are so pervasive in society in relation to female sexuality. Broadly speaking women are expected to be sexy but not sexual; sexually active women run the wrath of being morally condemned for sexual activity whereas sexually active men are able to maintain both a moral high ground and ‘legend, top lad’ status. This plays out in very interesting ways in relation to the contemporary problems with lad culture and rape culture we are seeing in schools.

50 Shades presents a heady account of one man’s sense of entitlement and the unpaid, unappreciated emotional labour performed by Anastasia. She is constantly checking herself throughout the books; wary of upsetting, angering or confusing Christian. She is reluctant to open up or be honest with him because she ‘knows what he is like’ and at one point.

Anastasia breaks down at several points in the story, crying and blaming herself for Christian’s inability to love her the way she wants to be loved. This victim blaming response has again been widely critiqued in legal and criminological debates, as neglecting attention to gendered power dynamics and debates around sexual consent. Anastasia justifies his aggressive behaviour, brushing it off as the result of a bad childhood (which coincidentally involved being abused by a powerful woman). She also makes repeated allowances because she has never had a relationship before. She is isolated from her friends and family; add or change a few words and you have a crime report on domestic violence in your hands – all under the romantic guise of wanting to keep her safe and loving her so much.

In Twilight and 50 Shades, the relationships the women have with the men in their lives are presented as paramount but also literally integral to their bodily survival. Girls and women are presented as incomplete if they are not sexually desired (and loved) by men. Men are the granters of esteem to women in a classic binary of male superiority and human-ness against which women and girls are measured and dependent, particularly in relation to desire.

Without the affections of the male Bella and Ana literally fall apart when their relationships break down; both stop eating. This aspect of bodily breakdown is significant. The internalisation and self-punishment through bodily control in the face of male rejection echoes psychological notions of women’s internalisation and pathologization of aggression. Women are unable to cope rationally with aggression therefore they internalise and self-destruct. Endorsing and legitimating this narrative is relevant in relation to debates that naturalise female passive aggressive behaviour as well as debates on anorexia and self-harming. By shrinking themselves into insignificance and further infantilising themselves the narratives play into a story of male power and heroism, which relies on an idea of male saviours, duty bound to swoop in and ‘save’ girls and women. Anastasia regularly refers to how empty she feels, how she is unable to manage to eat and on reuniting with Christian, this is the first thing he notices. Instantly angry with her he forces her to eat; thus asserting his position as dominant and in control. This echoes discourses around eating disorders in ways that celebrate rather than question body shaming and body harming practices.

If we think of the books as sex education writ large in popular culture, there is a worry that they will leave girls and boys and men and women feeling inadequate about their sexual experiences; men will think it is as easy as providing a quick fumble and nipple bite to please a women, whereas girls might worry that there is something wrong with them if it takes them longer than thirty seconds to be in the mood and in a position where they can orgasm.

Feminist critiques argue that mainstream pornography neglects attention to the mechanics of arousal for women, focusing instead on fulfilling masculine fantasies for quick ejaculation. In the same way, the sex depicted in 50 Shades is unable to open up avenues for ordinary sexual play for women. Perhaps a fantasy of being suspended from the ceiling for a spanking twice a day does provide a potent if perhaps ridiculous fantasy for some, and maybe some of 50 Shades is partly innocent play and fun. kindprotect But the story lines that legitimize the sexual pathologization of women and celebrate male sexual and economic dominance, mean that, as feminists, we have much to do. We need to keep opening up debate and discussion about forms of femininity that do not subsume questions of feminine pleasure, desire and fantasy to the role of sexually and emotionally servicing men.