Young Women Then and Now: Music and Subculture Revisited

This event is part of the CAMRI Seminar series. The current event is an in person/on campus event only.

In this seminar, Angela McRobbie will use her new book, Feminism, Young Women, and Cultural Studies: Birmingham Essays from 1975 Onwards (Goldsmiths Press), to reflect on the last fifty years of her work. The book re-prints her Birmingham CCCS essays of the 1970s and includes four new chapters of updated analysis on music, magazines, vintage fashion and youth culture. It provides both a feminist analysis of young women and popular culture (including magazines, dance, and fashion) as well as a forceful critique of male domination in youth culture and the ways in which an ideology of adolescent femininity functioned so as to subdue and restrain young women in passive and subordinate gender unequal positions. The collection also shines a light on the kinds of methodologies being developed at Birmingham University CCCS as cultural studies was emerging as a distinct field of study. These essays when first published found their way onto the university undergraduate curriculum across the world and were translated into various languages. The author in this new edition provides a lively up-to-date introductory essay to each chapter as well as an engaging full introduction to the book as a whole that draws attention to race and ethnicity and intersectionality in studies of girlhood. It also considers the category of "girl" from queer perspectives and reflects on new inflections of teen femininity in popular fiction.

Biography

Angela McRobbie is Emeritus Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she made pioneering interventions into developing the study of media, communications, gender and the cultural industries since the end of the 1990s. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Glasgow University. Her research expertise is on the creative economy and the fashion industry with reference to the small-scale independent sector. As a sociologist and cultural studies scholar, Angela has books and publications on gender, sexuality, youth culture, girls’ magazines and popular culture that date back to the mid-1970s and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS).

During the 1980s and 1990s she investigated the fields of cultural production and the early developments in the UK creative economy with articles and books on second-hand clothes and youth subculture labour markets, alongside writing on leading figures such as Susan Sontag and Walter Benjamin. Since 1998, her research has encompassed the new creative economy, writing about precarity, self-employment and the ‘creativity dispositif’, with reference to the fashion sector. Angela is also a feminist social and cultural theorist looking at the gendered dynamics of contemporary neoliberal society. Angela’s research, spanning more than four decades, is fully embedded into the contemporary study of British cultural and media studies and has been translated into many languages.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

University of Westminster - Room RS UG.04, 309 Regent Street, London, United Kingdom