The 'New Sexism'

School of Cultural Studies, UWE, Bristol

Venue: Watershed Media Centre
Friday 23 January 2004

Contact: jane.arthurs@uwe.ac.uk

A day of presentations and discussion addressing the resurgence of 'sexist' forms of

discourse and imagery in the popular media. If the 1990s can be characterised as a period
of ironic sexism have we now moved to a period of post-ironic ‘retrosexism’ in the new
millennium? If this is the case what new cultural theories might we need to explain this
phenomenon? What kinds of intervention can we make as teachers and researchers and
what problems does this raise?

Programme
12.00

Lunch and Welcome

1.00 – 2.45

Retrosexism

Down with Love: The feminine mistake

Dr Kathrina Glitre, Film Studies UWE

In the wake of the second wave, the fifties sex comedy film was critically reviled;
now after post-feminism, the cycle has been resurrected in a reworking of Sex and
the Single Girl (Richard Quine, 1964). The usual explanations – irony, parody,
pastiche – will no doubt be applied to Down with Love, but what does it actually
mean for a chick flick to be paying homage to a cycle of films that feminists used
to consider sexist? This paper will explore some of the continuities between the
sex comedy, postfeminism and the 'new' sexism, and particularly the nostalgic
return to American iconography of the fifties and sixties.

Retrosexism in Popular Culture

Judith Williamson, Freelance writer

"In the world of sexual ads, the dominatrix, the bitch and the whore wield power
over men; in the real world, a British woman is physically attacked by a man she
knows every six seconds. This suggests that, rather than embodying sexual
liberation, today's fetishistic imagery provides a language for expressing both
sexism and, perhaps, the pain and rage of a sex war which at heart is about social,
not sexual power. These ubiquitous images translate the social as sexual: showing
gender power struggles nakedly in every sense. And yet we have deprived
ourselves of the language to analyse them as such. Our unwillingness to name
sexism in the present has on the one hand encouraged it to develop as a form of
nostalgia, and on the other, allowed it to flourish in a sexualised form which we
perceive as daringly cutting-edge." (Judith Williamson, The Guardian 31/5/03)

Tea

3.15

Loaded with Meaning: working with men researching men’s lifestyle

magazines
Kate Brooks, Media and Cultural Studies, UWE

Kate will be talking about her work on Making Sense of Men's Magazines
(Jackson, Stevenson and Brooks 2001) researching masculinity and the
consumption of commercial cultural forms. She will focus on interviews – being a
feminist researcher listening to, and having to respond to, often sexist and
misogynist talk, and on the dynamics of discourse – working with men analysing
male discourse, and the subsequent questions the project raised about more
conventional Cultural and Media Studies notions of readers and audiences.