Oyyy, those waves of feminism are once again washing over me. We've moved from the first, and the basics of legal and political parity and through to the second, the social, cultural, biological. But as I watch the tide roll in and out on Brighton beach these Tuesdays of my Masters degree, I wonder if the sands ever really shift at all.
My girls are probably watching Lady Gaga at the moment, playing with notions of self expression, pushing the boundaries of what women can be - so much so that for a while, she was even thought to be a man. And all the while, beneath those Emperor's clothes, can we admit that there's little she deliberately leaves to the imagination? Surely that was always the overriding proof that that gushing, whispering, weeping award accepting popster was so not a bloke. But what do the kids see? That must be the test of which wave we're currently surfing, and if there's ever any real rip in the tide.
But I am loving Carolyn Steedman's 'Landscape of a Good Woman', her autobiography which offers a more individual understanding of women at a certain place in a certain time. That I read my own biography - and my mother's and hers - in it is for another time (and maybe I'll even write the book myself one day), but for now, the question is did the fracture of Feminism in the '80s create a stronger generation of women who are free, in Britain in 2011 anyway, to make their own choices? I'm sure it did, but do they know it, and if not, does it matter? Do my kids need to deconstruct the way Gaga plays with perceptions of women or do they just absorb the mixed message that women can do anything as long as they're fit and happy to get their kit off?
'Consciousness' was my conclusion about what the tide reveals as we made our way out of Cultural Theory this morning. If we grow ever more aware of the politics of identity, of the language that shapes our thinking, of the frameworks in which we make our life choices, has the revolution already happened? Perhaps, but maybe with less of a bang than a whimper.
Tuesday 22 February 2011
Tuesday 15 February 2011
MRes Land - A World of Possiblities
Sebastian Faulkes in 'Engleby' had a similar problem with his tutors; 'Most of the history dons are Marxist' he wrote as he blagged his way through Oxford. 'They are careful to define whether they are 'pure' Marxist-Leninist or Communist...or Trotskyist or Menshevik or Gramsci-ist or Eurosocialist or Luckacist or something even more refined'. I haven't even discovered Mensheviks yet, but I'm plumping for Adorno.
Despite the deliberately elitist academic language that is designed to keep the proletariat out of lofty revolutionary thinking, I'm really enjoying my Masters in Arts and Cultural Research, and in particular, revisiting the cultural theory of my undergraduate days. Marx is wasted on the young; I had no idea that Stuart Hall and his cronies at The Birmingham School who I was studying in the 80s just down the road in Coventry would be presented to me 30 years later in the same module as The Frankfurt School, Gramsci, Said and of course Marx himself. Nor did I think that I would be teaching my own students that there is no such thing as Truth, that 'the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.' It's all come back to knock on my door; we are all constructed by our history, our culture, our class, and there's very little that anyone is going to do about it.
But from Stuart Hall and the creation of black identity, to Spivok's 'subalterns' who were silenced by the colonisers who made them 'other', to feminism and just about every other differentiated group, it's all about language. And without language, thought is tough. And tough means pain, the land of Adorno who never got over the horror of Nazi Germany. For him, the con of culture is designed to distract us from the pain and keep us keeping the wheels in motion. The idea that anyone who spotted the doom of it all would stop and look must have driven him to hide his philosophy in those dense, inaccessible texts. That angst of my teens and twenties - it was real. I was right to worry about the world. No wonder Disney has its own channel now - get 'em early before they realise that there's no hope!
There really is a trail of destruction in everything we do. From colonialism to the exploitation of workers, we've got blood on our hands. Those rivers of blood Powell predicted had their source in the mountains of Western Imperialism. Adorno would have been right behind me when I told the kids not to shop at Primark. Not that they listen. Adorno blamed Disney too.
I feel strangely good about spending my Tuesdays picking at the seams of society, even if the absurdity of the elitist language of academia - including Adorno's deliberately obscure writing - is ignored by our tutors. It provides a rather neat narrative that is all about identity, language and awareness. The question is: is it enough? If we are mere constructs, defined by the rulers of the moment who set the cultural agenda - our very own colonisers - and then blended with a dash of history and sprinkled with a bit of enlightnement, is that it? Yes, it'll change the taste, and it must be for the better if it makes our world more palatable. Political correctness may be its bitter pill, but is the simple act of awareness the spoonful of sugar that leads to acceptance? I do hope so because I can't imagine much of a revolution coming out of the University of Brighton.
Despite the deliberately elitist academic language that is designed to keep the proletariat out of lofty revolutionary thinking, I'm really enjoying my Masters in Arts and Cultural Research, and in particular, revisiting the cultural theory of my undergraduate days. Marx is wasted on the young; I had no idea that Stuart Hall and his cronies at The Birmingham School who I was studying in the 80s just down the road in Coventry would be presented to me 30 years later in the same module as The Frankfurt School, Gramsci, Said and of course Marx himself. Nor did I think that I would be teaching my own students that there is no such thing as Truth, that 'the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.' It's all come back to knock on my door; we are all constructed by our history, our culture, our class, and there's very little that anyone is going to do about it.
But from Stuart Hall and the creation of black identity, to Spivok's 'subalterns' who were silenced by the colonisers who made them 'other', to feminism and just about every other differentiated group, it's all about language. And without language, thought is tough. And tough means pain, the land of Adorno who never got over the horror of Nazi Germany. For him, the con of culture is designed to distract us from the pain and keep us keeping the wheels in motion. The idea that anyone who spotted the doom of it all would stop and look must have driven him to hide his philosophy in those dense, inaccessible texts. That angst of my teens and twenties - it was real. I was right to worry about the world. No wonder Disney has its own channel now - get 'em early before they realise that there's no hope!
There really is a trail of destruction in everything we do. From colonialism to the exploitation of workers, we've got blood on our hands. Those rivers of blood Powell predicted had their source in the mountains of Western Imperialism. Adorno would have been right behind me when I told the kids not to shop at Primark. Not that they listen. Adorno blamed Disney too.
I feel strangely good about spending my Tuesdays picking at the seams of society, even if the absurdity of the elitist language of academia - including Adorno's deliberately obscure writing - is ignored by our tutors. It provides a rather neat narrative that is all about identity, language and awareness. The question is: is it enough? If we are mere constructs, defined by the rulers of the moment who set the cultural agenda - our very own colonisers - and then blended with a dash of history and sprinkled with a bit of enlightnement, is that it? Yes, it'll change the taste, and it must be for the better if it makes our world more palatable. Political correctness may be its bitter pill, but is the simple act of awareness the spoonful of sugar that leads to acceptance? I do hope so because I can't imagine much of a revolution coming out of the University of Brighton.
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