Diversity, Democratisation and Difference: Theories and Methodologies
Past Perfect – Present Dis/Possessive - Future
Conditional? : Generation, Gender, Class and Feminism
Valerie Hey
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer
2 Some Affective Prompts or the
Unconscious of Thinking
The Traction of ‘Generation’
 Commemorating the Robbins Report
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer/events
 Dissident Daughters – real and metaphoric
 Students as Bright Young (Feminist) Subjects
 Age and Wisdom - The increasing recognition of ‘living a precarious
life’ i.e. one that is contingent and definitively finite!
3 Dividing Lines – Getting On – ‘The
Academy Generation’
Aims of the Keynote : to present:
A situated cultural sociology of academic feminism
that entails:
Recognising the way the affective pulses in our
commitments as expression and repression
Acknowledging the ‘obstinate fragility of our
passions’ and the weight of history
4 Expressed and Repressed
 Expression of WS
Democratic impulse &
impetus
 Overcoming 5 evils
including ignorance
 Role of LSE public
intellectuals Titmus – the
solidarity supportive state –
evidenced based policy
 Liberal Education – reform
 Egalitarian – women & wc
5
The Robbins Report (1963)
The Law of Unintended Consequences
Access to higher education for
women:
Spearheaded staking political
claims;
Demanded new forms of
knowledge and pedagogy;
Facilitated entry into professions;
Introduced Curriculum innovation
e.g. women’s studies;
Strengthened the women’s
liberation movement.
6 Re/Citing/ ‘The Affective Turn’
Righteous Anger & Feminism’s politics
 The politicisation of
‘experience’ involved action
and theory-making
 The production of a new
language of analysis
 The jouissance and ‘ugly
feelings’ of women’s liberation
 Identities and difference
23 March, 2016
7 ‘Dreaming in code’ Lucas, (2010)
In context of ‘academic capitalism’ &
Lucas’s critique of immaterial
labour do feminist words matter?
 Excessive production – driven
maniacs (Skeggs, 2008)
reproduction not resistance or
both but then how?
 Thus a tongue-in –cheek question
posed in CHEER is Why Bother’?
in the context of ‘Who Cares’?
23 March, 2016
8 The Care-Less Academy (Lynch,2009)
Talking Age, Bodies and the Academy :
Does Seniority have any capital in a performative
culture?
Do Institutions have any memory?
Do we learn from and about each other outside
of texts?
9 The Vexed Politics of Feminist
Reproduction
“The family, especially this
devoted and Oedipal version of
the family, is a particular
historical patriarchal formation
linked to both ideology and the
exigencies of capitalism’ (1997,
85).
History repeats itself in the form
of patterns, but also ‘habits of
mind’; the familial paradigm
imports notions of ‘debt, legacy,
rivalry, property”
(Roof, 1997, 84, emphasis added).
10 Biased Sentiment & Blurred Vision :
The Eye Mote (Plath, 1959)
Blameless as daylight I stood looking
At a field of horses, necks bent, manes
blown,
Tails streaming against the green
Backdrop of sycamores. Sun was striking
White chapel pinnacles over the roofs,
Holding the horses, the clouds, the
leaves
Steadily rooted though they were all
flowing
Away to the left like reeds in a sea
When the splinter flew in and stuck my
eye,
Needling it dark. Then I was seeing
A melding of shapes in a hot rain….
11 Aftermath - The Lost Subject of
Feminism
 Luminosities - Refers to a kind of theatrical effect, a space of attention.
4 Luminosities of Apha femininities
 the fashion and beauty complex’ from ‘within which emerges a postfeminist masquerade’;
 the space of education;
 the space of sexuality, fertility and reproduction from which emerges the
‘phallic girl’ and :
 the space of globalisation and the production of commercial
femininities in the developing world.
12 Illegible Rage
McRobbie suggests that it is the psychic threat of a
threatened masculine antagonism that leads
successful girls to collude with the ‘post-feminist
masquerade’. This positioning serv[es] to disguise
and transmute the rage that is rendered ‘illegible’
and inadmissible. Hence young women’s
investment in perfectibility carries the psychic
force of a lethal disavowal—of the silencing of a
collective voice signalling a collapse of a potentially
solidary form of resistance. BUT ….
13 Academics Anonymous
Academics are rarely short of things to say. But when it
comes to what's happening inside our universities,
there are times when people might like to speak up
without fear of consequence. That's why we've
launched our new series,
Academics Anonymous Guardian Higher Education Network
claire.shaw@theguardian.com
Twitter @gdnhighered @clurshaw
....Go on, no one will know…
14 Re/Tweet the Revolution ?
Occupy Sussex
@facebook
Old Battles
Old Battles & New Voices
Digital logics& networks
 http://sussexagainstprivatization.
wordpress.com/
15 Standing Up for Feminism
 Manchester Met
Wednesday 5th March 2014
 ‘Feminism in the 21st
Century: Privilege, Bias
and Feminist Practice’
 ‘feminist thinkers will
discuss the feminist now
and the feminist future,
alongside a day of
networking opportunities
and activities’
16 Surge in student feminism: Meet the new
generation of 'bold, hilarious feminists‘ Telegraph
17 Surge in student feminism: Meet the new
generation of 'bold, hilarious feminists‘
18 Surge in student feminism: Meet the new
generation of 'bold, hilarious feminists
19 ‘We inherit the future, not just the past’
(Barad, 2010: 257).
 Feminist Futurology is imbricated in debt, legacy,
property, inheritance but now feminist are our
students
 Feminism – as ‘the war of (political) & conceptual
attrition’ (After Bev Skeggs, 2008)
http://eprints.gold.ac.uk/2220/
 Affective solidarity not identity – Hemmings
(2013, Feminist Theory 13 (2) 147-161)
20 From Affective Dissonance to
Affective Solidarity ?
‘ it is the question of affect – misery, rage,
passion, pleasure – that gives feminism its
life’ (Hemmings, 2012; 150)