Seminars

Title: Feminist Identities: Waves, Generations, and Consumer Pleasure

Presenter: Astrid Henry, author of Not My Mother's Sister: Generational Conflict and Third Wave Feminism

Astrid Henry is associate professor and chair of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at Grinnell College, a liberal arts college in the midwest of the United States. At Grinnell, she teaches courses on feminist theory, sexuality studies, LGBTQ studies and queer theory, critical whiteness studies, pop culture, feminist memoirs, and third-wave feminism.

Henry is the author of Not My Mother's Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism (Indiana University Press, 2004), a book which examines contemporary generational conflicts as they have developed between feminism's third and second waves in the U.S. over the last two decades. Excerpts from Not My Mother's Sister have been reprinted in The Women's Movement Today: an Encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism (2006), Gender Inequality: Feminist Theories and Politics (2005), and the Chronicle of Higher Education (2004). Henry's articles on third-wave feminism and generational relationships within U.S. feminism appear in Women's Studies Quarterly and PMLA, as well as in the anthologies Fashion Talks: Undressing the Power of Style (forthcoming), Different Wavelengths (2005), Reading Sex and the City (2003), Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century (2003), and Mothers and Daughters: Connection, Empowerment and Transformation (2000). Her new book project, currently titled Writing a Feminist's Life, is a study of memoirs by U.S. feminists since the 1970s. She currently serves as Secretary of the National Women's Studies Association, a U.S.-based organization for scholars in the field of feminist studies.

See the website of Astrid Henry.

Presentation:

Astrid Henry will provide a brief history of third-wave feminism as it has developed in the U.K., Canada, and the U.S. over the last two decades, paying particular attention to how third-wave feminists have portrayed themselves as a new "generation" succeeding the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s. This generational difference has also been described as a metaphorical—and sometimes literal—conflict between "mother" and "daughter", with the daughter rejecting her mother's ideas. Henry will discuss how different views toward consumption, sexuality, and fashion have served to perpetuate the generational metaphor, which is not as clear cut as it might seem. She will also explore the promises and perils of defining feminist identity through consumer pleasure.

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Title: Embodying the Second Wave. Revisiting 60s fashion.

Presenter: Hilary Fawcett, senior lecturer in media, at University of Northumbria, and author of Fashioning the Feminine

Hilary Fawcett has been a senior lecturer in Design and Cultural History at Northumbria University since 1986. Her research is in the areas of gender, sexuality and representation in relation to fashion cultures. She has a particular interest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and in the period from 1955 to 1975.

Fawcett has engaged with material concerning gender and representation in the 1960s in a number of publications and other academic enterprises. The book (2002) Fashioning the Feminine, Representation and Women's Fashion from the Fin de Siecle to the Present, London: I B Tauris, was co-written with Dr Cheryl Buckley. Fawcett also co-edited, "Women, Age and Difference", a special edition of Studies in the Literary Imagination, and contributed the essay "Fashioning the Second Wave: Issues Across Generation", which examines the relationship between feminism and fashion cultures in the 1960s. Her current research is on the relationship between women, art and style in 1950s and 1960s Art College cultures.

See the website of Hilary Fawcett.

Presentation:

In the early 1990s Post Feminist writers such as Camilla Paglia in the USA and Natasha Walter in Britain, argued that the concerns with sexual objectification of women so central to Second Wave 'consciousness' were no longer relevant to a subsequent generation who experienced fashion as playful and fun and as part of their own sexual empowerment. However more recent work by younger academics such as that by Gillis, Howie and Monford has challenged these earlier positions on the significance of the Second Wave. The generational divide between the Second and Third Wave has been identified as a as 'a family affair' and located in a reproductive narrative in the marginalizing of the aging body of the Second Wave in Third Wave literatures. Yet if as Elizabeth Wilson states: 'Dress is a cultural metaphor for the body, it is the material with which we write or draw a representation of the body into a cultural context', then many Third Wave Feminists could be said to inhabit the young body of the Second Wave through the obsession of the fashion industry and the media with the 'look' of the 1960s. From the Spice Girl's espousal of union jack mini skirts in the mid 1990s to the recent use of Twiggy to advertise Marks and Spencer's sixties inspired fashion lines, the 1960s has been a consistent and emphatic presence in women's fashion.

I will examine the significance of this preoccupation with the 1960s in contemporary fashion markets and will engage with issues of femininity, feminism and sexuality in relation to the 'politics of appearance' across generation.

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Title: Are you wearing THAT? 70 Years of Mother-Daughter Relationships in American Comics

Presenter: Trina Robbins, graphic artist and historian of comics, author of Girls to Grrrrls and Eternally Bad: Goddesses with Attitude

Award-winning herstorian and writer Trina Robbins has been writing graphic novels, comics and books for over thirty years, ever since she produced the first all-woman comic book, It Ain't Me, Babe, in 1970. Her subjects have ranged from Wonder Woman and the Powerpuff Girls to her own teenage superheroine, GoGirl!, and from women cartoonists and superheroines to women who kill. She is considered the expert on the subject of early 20th century women cartoonists, and is responsible for rediscovering many brilliant but previously-forgotten women, including Golden Age Fiction House cartoonist Lily Renee, and the great Nell Brinkley. Her full-color book, The Brinkley Girls: the Best of Nell Brinkley's Cartoons from 1913-1940 (Fantagraphics), published in April, 2009, was nominated for an Eisner award and a Harvey award.

Other books by Trina to look for: in 2010: a 3-book graphic novel series, The Chicagoland Detective Agency (Lerners Books), and a 2-part Honey West comic book (Moonstone Press). In 2011: Tarpe Mills and Miss Fury (IDW) and The Great American Superheroines.

She lives in San Francisco with her longtime partner, cartoonist Steve Leialoha, and several cats.

See the website of Trina Robbins.

Presentation:

Comic book mothers in the 1940s and 50s, almost always written and drawn by men, are invariably fat and white-haired, looking more like grandmothers than mothers. Archie would have taken one look at Betty's fat, gray-haired mother, thought, "In 20 years, Betty will look like that!" and run like hell.

In romance comics, these mothers represented the status quo, usually advising their rebellious daughter against careers, in favor of becoming traditional wives and mothers. Depressingly, the daughters usually came around to their mothers' viewpoint by the end of the story, happily cooking and cleaning house. These comics were widely read by working class teenagers, and the stories were often about working class people. There's a strong possibility that the mothers of these girls really were worn-out by the age of forty.

Mothers in the teen humor comics, while rarely understanding their often whacky teenage daughters, tended to be supportive rather than critical. Occasionally some of the mothers even still looked young and attractive, with husbands who still behaved romantically towards them.

Mothers in the few comics of that time aimed at little girls are also supportive and loving, and while Little Lulu's mother is fat, as are all grown women in Little Lulu, Little Dot's mother is a beautiful young woman who's gotten fed up with her daughter's obsession with dots. Little Dot has a fantasy that she is a mother indulging her love of dots, but with a daughter who hates dots! These stories, with their gentle good mothers, provided a positive mother image for the little girls who read them, and even, as in the case of Little Dot, helped girls understand what it must be like to be a mother.

Superheroines have no mothers.

There are 2 exceptions to that rule: warm mother and daughter relationships between the Golden Age Wonder Woman and her mother, Amazon Queen Hippolyta, and my own GoGirl!, whose mother was a superheroine named GoGo Girl. The two cooperate to become a mother-daughter superheroine team, the only one in comic books.

By the late 1990s and early 21st century, more comics are being created by women, and for the most part they depict mothers and daughters on equal, loving footing. One rare exception is the nightmare image of Aline Kominky's mother, "Blabette".

More and more of the women who create comics today are mothers, and the viewpoint switches from a daughter's to a mother's. In "Hello, Daughter", Sandra Bell Lundy deals with a subject no male comics creator has handled: she adopts a baby daughter.

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Title: Revolting Daughters, Mamma and Mrs Grundy: Generational conflict, consumption, and the New Woman at the fin de siècle

Presenter: Ann Heilmann, professor of English at the University of Hull, author of New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism and International Consumer Culture

Ann Heilmann is a Professor of English at the University of Hull, where she directs the Centre for Victorian Studies. The author of New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism (2000), New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird (2004) and (with Mark Llewellyn) Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2009 (2010), she has edited (with Mark Lewellyn) a critical edition of The Collected Short Stories of George Moore (2007). Among her other publications are four anthologies on Victorian and Edwardian (anti)feminism and three essay collections, on Feminist Forerunners (2003), New Woman Hybridities (2004), and (with Mark Llewellyn) Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women's Writing (2007). She is the general editor of Routledge's Major Works History of Feminism and Pickering and Chatto's Gender and Genre series, and acts as the chair of judges of the Women's History Network Book Prize competition.

See the website of Ann Heilmann.

Presentation:

My paper about late-Victorian female contestations of femininity and feminism takes as its starting point a popular Punch cartoon of 1894. 'Donna Quixote' constructs the New Woman (the first-wave feminist) as the product of three intersecting contexts: European literature and authorship, the political women's movement, and consumerist culture. Significantly, the New Woman debate is figured as a generational conflict among women. The 'Revolt of the Daughters' gained public resonance in the pages of the periodical press when 'mothers' and 'daughters' launched into an animated discussion about their divergent expectations. This 1890s debate between two generations of women was preceded by earlier popular press explorations of generational discord among women. In her influential indictment of 'The Girl of the Period' (1868) the journalist Eliza Lynn Linton had attacked modern young women for their mindless pursuit of hedonism. In the 1880s and 90s Linton's juxtaposition of 'serious' versus 'frivolous', authentic and inauthentic models of femininity was reiterated by the proponents of the New Woman. Feminists also deplored the shallowness of the society woman and propounded civic responsibility as qualities of 'true' femininity, but reversed the generational paradigms by redefining self-indulgence as pertaining to the 'Old' as opposed to the 'New' Woman. It was this primarily generational conflict, pinpointed as a 'gynecian war' by Linton, which led to the public conceptualization of the New Woman in the course of a series of journalistic exchanges in the 1890s. What made the New Woman (writer) so much more marketable at the turn of the century than her 'mother' was her strategic conjunction of femininity, consumption, elegance and feminism. This is what attracted young middle-class women to the label even when they had no professional aspirations or wider political concerns. The tactical appeal to the desire for fashionable feminist femininity was nowhere more successfully developed than in Sarah Grand, who explicitly called on feminists to perfect the art of (political) seduction. Similarly, across the Atlantic African-American women activists and writers invoked aesthetic fashion to promote the black human rights feminist as the quintessence of femininity.

This paper will draw on a range of textual and pictorial examples to examine female generational tensions about the nature and interconnections of models of femininity, consumption, (first-wave) feminism and mother-daughter relations at the turn of the century.

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Title: Much less religious, a little more spiritual: The religious and spiritual views of young British feminists

Presenter: Kristin Aune, author of Reclaiming the F Word: The New Feminist Movement

Kristin Aune is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Derby. She has published widely on gender, religion and feminism. Her most recent book, on the resurgence of feminism in twenty-first century Britain, is Reclaiming the F Word: The New Feminist Movement (co-authored with Catherine Redfern, Zed Books, 2010).

See the website of Kristin Aune.

Presentation:

How religious or spiritual is the new generation of feminists? This paper will outline findings from the first survey-based study of feminists' spiritual attitudes to be undertaken in recent years. Drawing on data from a survey of contemporary feminists carried out for a recent book (Reclaiming the F Word: The New Feminist Movement) on the resurgence of feminism in the UK (Redfern & Aune, 2010), it will explore the religious and spiritual views of 1,265 British feminists, most of whom are female and in their twenties and thirties. Comparison with surveys of religion adherence in the UK reveals that feminists are significantly less religious and somewhat more spiritual than the general population. The paper will ask why this might be, and suggest three explanations: feminism's alignment with secularism, feminism's role in secularization, and feminism's association with alternative spiritualities. The detraditionalization of women's and feminists' lives in post-industrial societies (especially in relation to family, partnership, sexuality and employment) is, the paper will argue, central to understanding these feminists' religious and spiritual attitudes.

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