Beyond “Separate Spheres”: Feminism and the Cultural Studies/Political Economy Debate:
TL;DR: The authors traces the developments between feminism and Marxism and cultural studies and political economy, suggesting that the answer to the problem of separate spheres is not to populate one sphere at the expense of the other.
Abstract: When scholars debate the theoretical, methodological, and political differences between cultural studies and political economy through allusions to feminist sites of conflict such as “separate spheres” and “the unhappy marriage,” this is also indicative of the scholarly population inhabiting each approach, with the greater number of Western feminists pursuing cultural studies and neglecting political economy. In recognizing the feminist influence in the development of cultural studies, it is also important to acknowledge that this implicates feminism in an approach that often overcompensates for traditional Marxism's determinism and neglect of cultural experience by ignoring the structural constraints imposed by political and economic realities. This article traces the developments between feminism and Marxism and cultural studies and political economy, suggesting that the answer to the problem of separate spheres is not to populate one sphere at the expense of the other. Rather, what is needed is a femin...
Citations
More filters
01 Jan 1992
TL;DR: The body politics of Julia Kristeva and the Body Politics of JuliaKristeva as discussed by the authors are discussed in detail in Section 5.1.1 and Section 6.2.1.
Abstract: Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics
1,125 citations
TL;DR: Martin et al. as discussed by the authors analyzed the development of the telephone system in Canada, particularly in Ontario and Quebec, from 1878 to 1920, drawing on the rich and unexplored Bell Canada archives in Montreal.
Abstract: Drawing on the rich and unexplored Bell Canada archives in Montreal, Martin analyses the development of the telephone system in Canada, particularly in Ontario and Quebec, from 1878 to 1920. Bell Telephone originally envisaged the telephone as a business tool for a relatively small group of male professionals. The women who worked as operators -- an occupation which rapidly became a female ghetto -- played a key role in mediating the demands of telephone users and the limitations of the new technology. The many women who began to use the telephone for domestic, two-way communication eventually forced Bell Telephone to change its approach and ultimately transformed the telephone's social impact. Through a critical examination of the political and economic aspects of the development of telephone systems, Martin outlines changes in the nature of women's economic experience and in their participation in the community. She analyses the transformation of the telephone into a \"public utility,\" stressing the ever-present economic incentives at the base of Bell Canada's decision making. She also examines the impact of this new technology on women and the labour process and on women's social and cultural practices. Her study not only provides an important understanding of a particular period but also insight into the effect of new communication technology on social structure.
82 citations
Book•
29 Jan 2002
TL;DR: The authors provides a critical analysis of how communication technologies have been gendered through the social practices that are promoted and put to use, with a particular look at the diverse women's cultures and communities that are using the Internet.
Abstract: From the Publisher:
This book provides a critical analysis of how communication technologies have been gendered through the social practices that are promoted and put to use, with a particular look at the diverse women's cultures and communities that are using the Internet. Emanating from a critical feminist and political-economic perspective, this book provides a policy-oriented framework on access to the Internet from a feminist perspective, as well as suggestions for ensuring that women become actively involved in the continued shaping of digital culture and technology.
70 citations
01 Jan 2010
TL;DR: The work in this paper offers a reconstruction and critical evaluation of globalization theory, a perspective that has been central for sociology and cultural studies in recent decades, from the viewpoint of media and communications.
Abstract: This study offers a reconstruction and critical evaluation of globalization theory, a perspective that has been central for sociology and cultural studies in recent decades, from the viewpoint of media and communications. As the study shows, sociological and cultural globalization theorists rely heavily on arguments concerning media and communications, especially the so-called new information and communication technologies, in the construction of their frameworks. Together with deepening the understanding of globalization theory, the study gives new critical knowledge of the problematic consequences that follow from such strong investment in media and communications in contemporary theory. The book is divided into four parts. The first part presents the research problem, the approach and the theoretical contexts of the study. Followed by the introduction in Chapter 1, I identify the core elements of globalization theory in Chapter 2. At the heart of globalization theory is the claim that recent decades have witnessed massive changes in the spatio-temporal constitution of society, caused by new media and communications in particular, and that these changes necessitate the rethinking of the foundations of social theory as a whole. Chapter 3 introduces three paradigms of media research – the political economy of media, cultural studies and medium theory – the discussion of which will make it easier to understand the key issues and controversies that emerge in academic globalization theorists’ treatment of media and communications. The next two parts offer a close reading of four theorists whose works I use as entry points into academic debates on globalization. I argue that we can make sense of mainstream positions on globalization by dividing them into two paradigms: on the one hand, mediatechnological explanations of globalization and, on the other, cultural globalization theory. As examples of the former, I discuss the works of Manuel Castells (Chapter 4) and Scott Lash (Chapter 5). I maintain that their analyses of globalization processes are overtly media-centric and result in an unhistorical and uncritical understanding of social power in an era of capitalist globalization. A related evaluation of the second paradigm (cultural globalization theory), as exemplified by Arjun Appadurai and John Tomlinson, is presented in Chapter 6. I argue that due to their rejection of the importance of nation states and the notion of “cultural imperialism” for cultural analysis, and their replacement with a framework of media-generated deterritorializations and flows, these theorists underplay the importance of the neoliberalization of cultures throughout the world. The fourth part (Chapter 7) presents a central research finding of this study, namely that the media-centrism of globalization theory can be understood in the context of the emergence of neoliberalism. I find it problematic that at the same time when capitalist dynamics have been strengthened in social and cultural life, advocates of globalization theory have directed attention to media-technological changes and their sweeping sociocultural consequences, instead of analyzing the powerful material forces that shape the society and the culture. I further argue that this shift serves not only analytical but also utopian functions, that is, the longing for a better world in times when such longing is otherwise considered impracticable.
42 citations
Cites background from "Beyond “Separate Spheres”: Feminism..."
...…common people or their habitual media consumption practices can be valorized as politically resistant by the populist-postmodernist wing of cultural studies, which is by no means limited to Fiske’s work (see McLaughlin 1999, 335–338; Philo and Miller 2001, 55–59; McGuigan 1992, 72, 126–127)....
[...]
...Questions of material circumstances that undermine the conditions of possibility for political agency […] are often noted but dropped from the analysis” (McLaughlin 1999, 343)....
[...]
...One of the key effects of the postmodernization of cultural studies is an increasing indifference to the category of class (McLaughlin 1999, 341ff) and to the systemic features of capitalism in general....
[...]
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore important correspondences between scholarly work and historical contexts to evaluate taken-for-granted interpretive frameworks and thus aid the formation of fully critical approaches to communication research.
Abstract: Differences in scholarly interpretations of a situation or event reveal the ways in which interpretations are shaped by historical contexts. Thus, investigating historical contexts is crucial for understanding interpretive frameworks. Such investigations are a necessary corrective to positivist assertions for ‘timeless’, ‘universal’, or ‘neutral’ results, and are as well a necessary critique of the political uses of such claims. By exploring important correspondences between scholarly work and historical contexts, one can evaluate taken-for-granted interpretive frameworks and thus aid the formation of fully critical approaches to communication research [1]. Such a position informs the purpose and method of this essay, which seeks to begin an historical excavation of interpretive frameworks used to make sense of alternative media as it has been thought and written about in prominent or paradigmatic works by scholars in the US and the UK. Limiting this discussion to these countries does not imply the lack of important scholarship done elsewhere. Nor does the use of a nationalist framework negate the value of ‘un-national’, international, transnational, comparative, and/or non-Western approaches to communication research, as a number of recent works attest [2]. Indeed, the study of alternative media continues to broaden productively in just this way [3]. Rather, it is hoped that the US/UK frame used here serves not only to necessarily focus an essay-length discussion, but also as an example of the value of future, similar efforts concerning alternative-media scholarship—and communication scholarship in general—regarding other countries and social formations. The common roots of the US and the UK in Anglo social, political, and economic traditions and practices help explain some important commonalities between the two alternative-media literatures. Until recently, much of the work on alternative media done in the US and the UK consisted of chronologies of institutional developments, themselves linked to grand narratives that equate the political (instead of economic) ‘independence’ of mass media to a similar increase in democracy. Indeed, one speci c commonality between US and UK scholarship is the equating of the struggle for press freedom with the struggle for popular freedom [4]. Stemming from this equivalence is a second commonality of framing such chronologies within a narrative of vanguardism through the form of biographical accounts of ‘great men’. As will be discussed, such a perspective tends to downplay or ignore issues of economic (as opposed to exclusively political) freedom as well as systemic (as opposed to personalized) inequalities. It also naturalizes (explicitly or implicitly) class
39 citations
References
More filters
Book•
01 Jan 1990
TL;DR: The body politics of Julia Kristeva and the Body Politics of JuliaKristeva as mentioned in this paper are discussed in detail in Section 5.1.1 and Section 6.2.1.
Abstract: Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics
21,123 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1991
TL;DR: In this paper, a wide-ranging survey of postmodernism is presented, from high art to low art, from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature.
Abstract: Now in paperback, Fredric Jameson’s most wide-ranging work seeks to crystalize a definition of ”postmodernism”. Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature.
6,317 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1977
TL;DR: The role of ideology in cultural forms and social reproduction has been studied in this paper, where the authors propose a theory of cultural forms, including power, culture, class and institution.
Abstract: Contents: Key to transcripts Introduction. Part I Ethnography: Elements of a culture Class and institutional form of a culture Labour power, culture, class and institution. Part II Analysis: Penetrations Limitations The role of ideology Notes towards a theory of cultural forms and social reproduction Monday morning and the millennium. Index.
4,737 citations