The MA in International Studies in Media, Power and Different invites you to this year’s opening lecture:

“The complicated entanglement of feminism, postfeminism and neoliberalism”, by Rosalind Gill, University of London

Tuesday 6 November 2018, 12.30pm - Sala de Graus (55309), Tanger Building

In this talk professor Gill will argue that the notion of postfeminism is still relevant – even at a time that feminism is undergoing a resurgence in many western societies. Gill will highlight what she see as the main features of a postfeminist sensibility including the focus on the body as women’s source of value, the emphasis upon choice and individualism, and the key power of monitoring and surveillance of women (including by other women). She will also argue that postfeminism is increasingly taking on a psychic life and an affective one as we are exhorted to live by the ‘feeling rules’ of postfeminism – the need to be upbeat, confident, resilient and to ‘live your best life’. She will argue that the sensibility has become almost hegemonic, operating as a kind of gendered neoliberalism. 

Rosalind Gill is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at City, University of London. She has worked extensively around questions of labour, the body and media. Her books include Gender and the Media (Polity 2007); Theorising Cultural Work(with Mark Banks and Stephanie Taylor, Routledge, 2013); Aesthetic Labour: Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism (with Ana Elias and Christina Scharff, Palgrave 2015) and Mediated Intimacy: Sex Advice in Media Culture (Polity, 2018, with Meg-John Barker and Laura Harvey).