GENDER
UNDERGRADUATE DISSERTATION SYMPOSIUM
A Gender Research Group Event
Friday, 28 January 2011
Research Beehive, Newcastle University
Organisers: Jodie Laird and Rosalie Tuplin
1.00-1.30
PANEL ONE: MANIFESTATIONS OF OTHERNESS
Chair: Prof Kate Chedgzoy (English)
 ‘Dead is the New Alive: The Embodiment and Sexual Politics of the
New Vampire’ – Andrew McArthur (English)
 ‘(Mis)Reading Into Reality: Female Readers in Maria Edgeworth’ –
Barbara Williams (English)
1.40-2.10
PANEL TWO: THE POLITICS OF (DIS)EMPOWERMENT
Chair: Dr Carolyn Pedwell (Media, Arts & Culture)
 ‘“They look like monsters to you?”: The Monstrous-feminine and the
Male Subject in the Silent Hill series’ – Christopher McLaughlin
(English)
 ‘The Sexualised Female Body in Newcastle’s Nightscape: Power or
Subordination? – Sarah Melton (Sociology)
2.10-2.30
Tea and Coffee
2.30-3.00
PANEL THREE: DEATH AND TORTURE
Chair: Dr Stacy Gillis (English)
 ‘“Death is an Occupational Hazard”: Why Society Does Not Grieve
Prostitutes’ – Jacqueline Close (Sociology)
 ‘“You can’t rape a machine”: Torture, Homo Sacer and the
Posthuman in Battlestar Galactica’ – Jodie Laird (English)
3.10-3.40
PANEL FOUR: CONTEMPORARY FEMINISMS
Chair: Emma Short (English)
 ‘Feminist Issues and Female Musicians: Popular Music in the Past Two
Decades’ – Leanne Lawson (Northumbria – Media)
 ‘The Contemporary Identification of Young People with Feminism’ –
Jessie Shaw (Sociology)
3.40-4.00
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION
Chairs: Jodie Laird and Rosalie Tuplin
4.00-5.00
Wine Reception
1
GENDER
UNDERGRADUATE DISSERTATION SYMPOSIUM
PANEL ONE: MANIFESTATIONS OF OTHERNESS
(Mis)Reading into Reality: Female Readers in Maria Edgeworth
Barbara Williams
As a female pedagogical figure, Maria Edgeworth placed a high value on educating women through
reading and for reading. Speaking of the novels of the long eighteenth century, Joe Bray claims ‘the
heroine must learn especially how to read, or interpret, the opposite sex.’ Focusing on Belinda and the
moral tale, Angelina, in this paper I explore Edgeworth’s representation of reading, and the dangers of
misreading. Edgeworth’s texts imply that, for the eighteenth-century woman, reading was not confined to
books, but, in contrast with Bray’s view, to the manners and countenance of both sexes. Edgeworth
implies that in order to take their rightful place in the world, women, with the help of books, must first
learn to read it.
Dead is the New Alive: The Embodiment and Sexual Politics of the New Vampire
Andrew McArthur
I argue that the figure of the vampire and by extension the vampiric Uncanny have in recent years
undergone a re/de-familiarisation. Certainly, now more than ever, the vampire population seems to be at
its highest. With such numbers rising, I ask what this says about our contemporary fears, with the vampire
as an allegory within the AIDS dialectic, terrorist and anarchist movements? What happens when a
vampire demands equal civil rights to humans? In texts such has True Blood, Daybreakers and Anne Rice’s
Vampire Chronicles I examine the sticky vein of vampire existentialism, their self-perception, and how they
come to form themselves unified beings in relation to others in their nests, covens and kingdoms, but
most importantly in relation to their human companions, lovers and slaves.
PANEL TWO: THE POLITICS OF (DIS)EMPOWERMENT
“They Look Like Monsters to You?”: The Monstrous-Feminine and The Male Subject in the
Silent Hill Series
Christopher McLaughlin
I take a psychoanalytic reading of the gender politics in the Silent Hill video game series; considering the
games’ use of the feminine as a figure of horror for the male subject (both player and character). My
main theoretical frameworks cover psychoanalysis, abjection, and the body, drawing particularly on the
works of Julia Kristeva, Barbara Creed, and Jacques Lacan. I cover three main themes. First, I examine
the changes seen by the player in the female body as it transforms from an acceptable to a monstrous
state. I attend specifically to the terminal illness of the character Mary, which renders her mentally and
physically repulsive, and her grotesque transformation at the end of Silent Hill 2. I then consider how the
town of Silent Hill, with the monstrous ability to birth life from the male imagination, and the character
Maria as a product of male desire, represents a fear of the female’s creative and reproductive powers.
Finally, I perform a close reading of the apartment in Silent Hill 4, linking it to the mother’s womb as a
site of abjection.
The Sexualised Female Body in Newcastle’s Nightscape: Power or Subordination?
Sarah Melton
A dark dingy pit filled with alcohol-fuelled young people. What is it that makes this bar so attractive? Is it
the generic cheesy R n B music? Is it the treble vodkas for a mere two pounds? No matter what the
reason, this is one of the busiest bars in Newcastle’s city centre. It is also one of the sites in which I have
based my ethnographic study of how the sexualized female body is presented and experienced in
Newcastle’s night life. In this paper, I pay particular attention to male and female power relations as
centred around female bodily appearance and presentation. For whose benefit is the time and effort
women put into getting ready for a night on the ‘Toon’, from silky smooth legs to flawless hair? Liberated
and empowered woman or a repressive patriarchal society?
2
PANEL THREE: DEATH AND TORTURE
“Death is an Occupational Hazard”: Why Society Does Not Grieve Prostitutes
Jacqueline Close
My research considers the case of five women sex-workers, murdered in Ipswich in 2005 to examine
whether and to what extent, in a liberal democracy such as Britain, it is possible to degrade human beings
to such a degree that they are not simply excluded, but abandoned by some sections of society. The
research undertakes an analysis of newspaper representations of the murdered women to uncover the
gendered and classed constructions of ‘prostitutes’ as devoid of the normative qualities of a selfregulating citizen and how this may nourish a discourse which positions them outside of even the most
basic ethic of care and respect. A central theme of the research is the reduction of some individuals to a
singular pejorative identity as a device to attribute differential value to human beings and thus sustain the
relative positions of the socially more powerful.
“You can’t rape a machine”: Torture, Homo Sacer and the Posthuman in Battlestar Galactica
Jodie Laird
While the ethico-political discourses of Battlestar Galactica and post-9/11 America are clearly linked,
particularly with regard to representations of the Cylons as racial and cultural Other, little attention has
been given to the series’s dramatization of (heterosexual) rape as a weapon of war and the explicit
parallels drawn between sex and torture. The notion of the non-human female as sexual object is not new
– indeed, the hypersexualised cyborgic woman is as much a feature of science fiction as is the genre’s
ambivalent relationship to technology. However, the presentation of rape as a viable form of torture in
Battlestar Galactica portrays a violent reimagining of the interface between human and machine, one in
which the female body becomes the locus for an examination of at what point (if ever) it becomes
acceptable to suspend the ‘human’ rights of the enemy. At the crux of my argument is the paradox
implicit in Colonel Fisk’s contention that ‘[y]ou can’t rape a machine’: drawing on the work of Giorgio
Agamben and N. Katherine Hayles, my paper explores questions of ethics and affect surrounding the
human and the post-human in Battlestar Galactica.
PANEL FOUR: CONTEMPORARY FEMINISMS
Feminist Issues and Female Musicians: Popular Music in the Past Two Decades
Leanne Lawson
Focusing on the 1990s and 2000s, this paper explores current feminist thought and research whether or
not these ideas are reflected by female popular musicians during this period. The Spice Girls, Alanis
Morissette, Britney Spears, Beyonce and Lily Allen have been selected as an indicative sample of
successful female artists taken from UK chart archives. Their lyrics and image will be analysed in relation
to current feminist thought, with the view to ultimately arguing that feminist ideas and issues are echoed
by popular female musicians. This paper incorporates existing theories including feminism, postmodernism and cultural theories and different feminist perspective
The Contemporary Identification of Young People with Feminism
Jessie Shaw
The aim of my research is to discover what feminism meant to young people, how they identified with it,
and how it applied to them as people with regard to their everyday lives and activities. I wish to find out
whether patterns emerge regarding the concept of feminism within people’s identities, and whether
individuals were openly, self-proclaimed feminists or saw it more as something to be suppressed/hidden
from society. I investigate reasons as to why participants adopted the identity to their sense of selves in
certain ways for example many participants joined Newcastle University’s Feminist Society, wanting to
involve the identity within their everyday selves, and help improve others’ knowledge on the topic. The
project provides an insight into the contemporary identity of a modern feminist within current society.
3