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Tuesday, 01 May 2007
Saturday Schools 2007
9th June 2007 ‘Older’ Women in the Media
£60 standard / £30 student/unwaged*
Images of older women are increasingly visible across a range of media including magazines, TV shows and films. At first glance, this might seem as if this previously invisible social grouping is finally achieving some recognition. However, there is a skewing of representation that variously celebrates the potential for youthful looks, (in TV shows such as Channel 4’s 10 Years Younger with its strap line ‘Look Young, Feel Good’ and in Saga magazine), or we see these figures played by a man (eg Tootsie, Mrs Doubtfire) or a much younger actress (eg Helen Mirren in The Queen).
At the the other end of the spectrum older women’s bodies are displayed as an example of degeneration leading to death (Gunther von Hagen’s programmes on Channel 4). What is missing from these various representations is the woman who is no longer young, is postmenopausal, but has not yet reached the time of approaching death. This indicates a prevailing cultural preoccupation with a ‘youthful femininity’. Dr Josie Dolan and Dr Sherryl Wilson will provide talks, screenings and workshop activities that will enable participants to explore this gap by looking at a range of media representations and will offer the opportunity to (a) think about what representations are popularly available to mass audiences and (b) consider what is missing from them.
16th June 2007 Sex in the Media
£60 standard / £30 student/unwaged*
A day event for people who are interested in current debates about the way that sex is portrayed in film and television, and the systems that regulate what we can watch. Professor Tanya Krzywinska, author of Sex and the Cinema (Wallflower Press 2006) and Jane Arthurs, author of Television and Sexuality, Regulation and the Politics of Taste (Open University Press 2004), will lead the day’s activities of talks, screenings, and discussion. Given the controversial nature of the subject, participants should be prepared to view potentially sensitive material and to engage respectfully with other people’s views on the issues raised.
Adultery in the Cinema: Domestic Transgression
Across the breadth and depth of cinema, adultery has proved an extremely popular topic. Representations of adultery under the aegis of the Hollywood Production Code were subject to the rule of retribution—always punished, often fatally. But adultery lends itself so very well to drama and rather than give it up as a completely taboo topic, due punishment allowed Hollywood studios to continue making films on the subject. A certain type of narrative came out of this regulatory system which can still be found in recent films focused on adultery. This session will take the form of an interactive lecture, there will be film clips and participants will be able to discuss the degree to which representations of adultery are informed by real life issues or other factors. Films that will be discussed include: Red Dust (1932), Frenchman’s Creek (1944) Zandalee (1991), The Good Girl (2002), Unfaithful (2001) BrokebackMountain (2005).
Television and the Boundaries of Taste
Have you ever felt embarrassed or offended by what you have seen on television and wish there were tighter controls on what gets shown? Or do you think there should be more freedom, letting people decide for themselves what to watch? This session will explore how these issues are decided and how this is changing as television converges with the internet. We will also discuss particular controversies, and why programmes such as Queer as Folk, the drama about gay lifestyles, or the Brass Eye satire on the media coverage of paedophilia, have caused offence while others, like Sex and the City, have been welcomed for being open about women’s sexuality. The workshop will invite participants to decide for themselves what kind of boundaries they would impose, if any, and who should be in control of what we watch on television.
These events run from 10am – 5pm and lunch and refreshments are provided.
All participants will receive a certificate of attendance.
For further information please contact Helen Kennedy, SaturdaySchool Programme Coordinator
* There is a discount for booking both events as well as special rates for UWE Staff and Students.
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Spaces are limited and must be booked by 24th May 2007
Monday, 14 March 2005
This is the website for the Feminist and Women's Studies Association 18th Annual Conference, held in Aberdeen on September 9-11th this year. Titled 'Gender and Violence: an interdisciplinary exploration'. http://www.abdn.ac.uk/womens/conference.htm Deadline for proposals is 30th April.
Monday, 07 March 2005
Hello all. I'm wondering if anyone is planning on attending the 5th annual Gender and Education conference - Gender, Power and Difference - at Cardiff University on 29-31st March. It certainly looks worthwhile in terms of our broader concerns as a group, and I think it would be useful if at least one of us was to attend and report back to the group if interesting questions are addressed. I am currently investigating whether I can attend on a pay as you go basis given the unpredictable nature of things at the mo. Anyway, Bev Skeggs is the closing plenary speaker which should be interesting although she does say that she's presenting work already published. The website for information is http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/sexualitiesandgender/gpd/index.html but although a list of abstracts for all parallel sessions was accessible yesterday, it now seems to have disappeared temporarily...
Thursday, 03 March 2005
can i be cheeky and suggest that you check out my son's blog www.bigstimeout.motime.com I think it is fascinating (well I would!) that he actually begins by roleplaying a rather grumpy middleaged person (or so it appears) but gradually you see more evidence of his age and identity creeping in. Seth and Rune (our Norwegian visiting scholar that was) have been very sweet in posting to the site. helen
Bristol School of Art, Media and Design
Predicaments in Visual Culture: Mediated Pleasures in (post)Feminist Contexts
Nine years after October published responses to a questionnaire on the value of Visual Culture as a field of study, its position within the academy remains uncertain. Occupying spaces in between existing disciplinary sites, Visual Culture might usefully be described as a series of tactics enabling cross-disciplinary modes of enquiry and investigation of cultural forms that cuts across more established areas of study. Taking this form of analytic mobility as its starting point, the ‘Predicaments in Visual Culture’ series addresses a number of contemporary cultural concerns and in so doing raises questions about the status of Visual Culture both as a still emerging academic field and as set of strategies to interrogate the complexities of visuality.
Each of the one-day symposia, although adopting different perspectives, share a desire to consider the ways in which contemporary art, media and design practices, industrial production and active modes of consumption together demand a re-evaluation of the nature and place of the central tenets of Visual Culture. By thus shifting the emphasis away from the conception of Visual Culture as yet another mode of reception and reading, it is hoped that a fuller engagement with the production of visual meaning will signal a shift to a mode of theorising that is more responsive to emergent patterns of visuality, creativity and political praxis.
Implicit in this series is a suspicion that the areas of debate which initially gave rise to Visual Culture as a discipline have “stalled” in the last decade. These symposia are an opportunity to re-energise them by moving beyond established arguments and positions, challenging distinctions between theory and practice, re-thinking the nature of interdisciplinarity and re-assessing the possibility of critical and political thinking particularly within the context of recent debates around gender, identity and difference.
Mediated Pleasures in (post)Feminist Contexts Watershed, Bristol, Saturday 19th March 2005
This symposium will explore the generational relationship between second-wave feminism and contemporary debates about ‘third-wave’ or ‘post-feminist’ identities as they are articulated in visual culture. In particular we are interested in the relationship between popular culture and fine art in terms of female subjectivity. The symposium aims to challenge the binary model through which artworks or media texts are understood as either complicit with, or subversive of, patriarchal representational structures. Debates about post-feminism often continue to legitimate the division between ‘good’ feminist ‘mothers’ and ‘bad’ post-feminist ‘daughters’. But, are there trajectories within second-wave feminism, both in theory and practice that might provide grounds for a rapprochement? Is third-wave feminism marked by a different model in which the relationship between femininity and feminism is fluid, ambiguous or uncertain? To what extent can practice drive theory in this regard? How might feminist understandings engage positively with contemporary representations of femininity when these speak of visual and bodily pleasures that are always-already mediated through popular culture?
Our position is that the strategic imperatives that informed second-wave feminism have shifted and, now that we are in a period of reassessment, there is an urgent need to develop feminist thinking that acknowledges mediated female pleasures in women’s art practice.
Email Clare.Johnson@uwe.ac.uk or Sue.Tate@uwe.ac.uk
Wednesday, 02 March 2005
I dont know how many of you already know about the Chloe Delaume's Corpus Simsi project - you can scroll down this link and read about it and then follow the links in the text to bits of the project itself. http://http://www.livejournal.com/users/imomus/9597.html This is a snip from the end of the posting describing the project: Just as Loquet's Maxed-up MSP computer sounds contain the voices of dead folk singers, Delaume's books contain in their aspic characters from the video games of yesteryear. They prompt a startling thought. Maybe a time will come when all our computer software is unplayable, all our formats incompatible, all our machines useless. When that day comes, maybe the only remaining memory of the virtual worlds we created in the digital age will be encoded in books. The book, the original portable simulated world, might have a strange, phoenix-like destiny: to be electronic simulation's only enduring body. SimWorld's parent... and its child.
Monday, 17 January 2005
Press release Independent Heroines 2005 film festival February 4-10th 2005 at The Cube Cinema Bristol Independent Heroines 2005 film festival: seven days of films, discussions, seminars, workshops, live music and performance at the Cube Cinema, Bristol. Independent Heroines 2005 is a feminist film festival programmed around the theme of heroines; women who work, create and exist on their own terms, outside the narrow confines of what society says a woman can be. Themed events reveal inspirational figures past and present from such diverse fields as film, music, art, literature, burlesque dancing, radical cheerleading, skateboarding and politics. Features, shorts, performers, experts and artists are brought together to celebrate and explore these women's lives and work. The festival includes a number of UK premieres including an all-girl skateboarding video, 'Getting Nowhere Faster', and 'The Velvet Hammer Burlesque', a documentary about the US burlesque troupe of the same name. Also screening are 'Year of the Woman' a 'lost feminist classic' documentary from 1973, a night of feminist B-movies, 'Edgeplay' a documentary about 1970s girl rock group The Runaways, and 'An Angel at My Table' as part of a tribute to late author Janet Frame. Curated by Lady Lucy and Lisa Brook the Independent Heroines film festival started as part of Ladyfest Bristol, a music, film, art and poetry festival dedicated to female creativity and expression which took place in August 2003 at venues all around Bristol and led to the establishment of the Here shop on Stokes Croft and Local Kid, Venue's 'top banana' promoter of the year 2004. The Independent Heroines 2003 programme can be viewed at: http://sparror.cubecinema.com/ladyfestbristol/ladyfestfilm.htmSupported by South West Screen, The UK Film Council, The Feminist Review Trust, and The Cube Microplex. website: http://filmfest.independentheroine.orgemail: independentheroines@yahoo.co.ukphone: Lisa Brook: 07817617788 Lady Lucy: 07946039683 postal: c/o Cube Cinema, 4 Princess Row, Kingsdown, Bristol, BS2 8NQ.
Friday, 07 January 2005
Perhaps you could share with us what you thought of the Irigaray talk early in December. As you know I arrived too late for the talk but caught the discussion afterwards which was very interesting. I bought one of her books and I have been dipping in to over the holidays and find there is lots there that is relevant to our concerns. Happy 2005 Helen
Wednesday, 05 January 2005
Wednesday, 5 January 2005
Happy to have at last located the blog and privileged to make the first posting of the new year, I find myself at a loss at to what to say. Increasingly, I am concerned about the personal impact of my understandings about gendered relationship. Clearly, this is slippery territory and I am hoping that dialogue with others will enable me to get a stronger grasp on a relational landscape which looks very different from the early days of feminism.
Terryl
Wednesday, 29 September 2004
Could we do something as a group for the Camera Obscura - seems like too good an opportunity to miss?
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