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Budapest W3: Feminist Research - Class notes

How are gender issues understood in cultural studies?

- Psychoanalysis - brought into cultural studies - breaks down gender culture, shifting from additive - its still self-reflexive - ignores the context and intersectionality and universalises claims
- We are not supposed to recognise layers of oppression through additive feminism. This does not result in a politically subversive cultural studies.
-Notion of culture is defined by an exclusion of an aspect of the social.
- Problem of taking culture as known. Neither the social/cultural is a given.
- The representation of women is the same logic - use of culture for or against women.
- This use of culture emphasises binary dinstinctions. How do we not do this with cultural/social or women/women or theory/methods?
- How to understand the duality of women?
- Prominance of the cultural where race is ethnicised as a result of cultural difference?

Why is there a concern about the plurality of women? The relationship between social and culture - as explanation for the multiplicity/homogeneity of women.
How is gender imagine? Any model that deals in nouns is static - unable to analyse the dynamic.
What does Lury propose instead of representations of women? She doesn't argue for a construction of femininity. Women are not only consumers but also producers of culture - market will lose them through essentialism.
Who is able to be an individual? To create an individual in media is a step towards creating identity of women. Representation of individuals.
How are women able to gain membership in collective social characteristics?

Identity is always exclusionary - I understand myself because I am not like anyone else.

Lury - You must explain the intelligible to be recognised as an identity change in relation to social relations of power.

Gender as a verb - processes/practices of gendering. Mass culture emerges with meanings of class (mass production in factories) and gendering (middle class).
Neither literal/constructionist representation of women. Lived experience instead.

Difference - experience/construction of women's lives. Women's lived experience. Cultural representation creates a construction - defines what lived experience should look like. Leads to a feeling of not being represented/being represented poorly.
Lived experience - blurring fictional/factual narratives.
Social/cultural both needed in a blurred way (intersected)
Fictional narratives - lived experience (cultural/social unclear boundaries). Woman is not exhausted only in either - understood through blurred boundary at the intersection.

Socially regulated practice - individual performance = historical contextual formation.

Lived experience (mediated understanding of life through signification through power structures) vs. Experience

Mediated experience - not unique/shared
Signification is a socially individualistic story.

Female spectator as consumer-spectator. Femininity threatens subject/representation - collapse of a fantasy of Cartesian subject.
Figure of contemporary anxiety - social and cultural are in a complex feedback loop.

Everyone is positioned - how do genders become in consumer culture - this happens to women as consumers and spectators but not as a producer.
- Women's work of love/sex/beautifying are not recognised as running late capitalism smoothly
- Womanhood comes to mean spending the family income (consumer)
Your sense of who you are becomes commodified.

Woman as sign-gendering distinction as an act of becoming.

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