Gender Studies MA

War on sterilisation documentary - links between nation and fertility Juxtaposition between male doctor and female communal circle (focus group) The women drawing the figure of the woman - talking point North Indian focused documentary Reproduction as a way to serve the nation (doctor) Conflicting message of 'have children for us' rather than 'have children for you' Global inequalities - reproductive policy that a state would follow Men of less developed countries are targeted in a similar way to women - vulnerable - they live in easy-to-target places Patriarchy of doctor, but men of poorer countries suffer consequences Poverty constructs poor men as useless when they are robbed of their masculine identity of being a bread-winner Informed consent and forced sterilisation - incentives to accept with consent and implications/side-effects

McRobbie, Angela: “'What not to wear' and symbolic post-feminist violence” in The Aftermath of Feminism. Sage, 2009. "T his is a key function of the make-over format of programme, to move women from one state, now deemed unacceptable, to another, which is a greatly improved state of good looks and well-being." p.124 The movement of women from one state to another is to make them eligible to work and participate in consumer culture, as their disposable income makes them important participants in the market. It is also the movement from being in the shadows, to being in the spotlight - from being hidden women to being visible.  Whereas the 'Top girl' was a middle-class woman who was expected to go to university and succeed financially, the make-over TV show not only appeals to the work-class woman, it actively directs them so that they can make the right choices. " The transformative effect results in healthier subjectivities, cheer­ fulness, better ...

McRobbie - problem with the empiricist approach to feminist criticism of pop culture and media. Problematic - ends up in moralising. She proposes instead to: What does McRobbie say about the empiricist approach? Why does it end up in moralising? What drives feminist empiricist research into moralising? What does McRobbie offer instead, which she understands as doing for us in this chapter? Empiricist project - trying to establish a correlation between images of women and certain pathologies AKA cause and effect, where your assumptions are based on the material as a given - experience, factuality Our claims about this world are literal representations when we believe it documents reality (empiricist). What we get in the media/pop culture/images of women is whether it is true to life or not - is it a simplification (stereotyping), or are these representations like their lives or are their lives different - we would want better images (how they really are/live their lives/dive...

McRobbie, Angela: “Illegible Rage: Post-Feminist Disorders” in The Aftermath of Feminism. Sage, 2009. "I propose that feminism has become, for young women, in rather indiscernible ways, an object of loss and melan­cholia." p.94 "I do want to interrogate through a reading of Butler's work, how we might think afresh about self­ harm and femininity in the context of heterosexual melancholia and the loss of feminism." p.95 "The more change there is to the gender regime, let us say the need on the part of capitalism for young women's labour power, the deeper is the anxiety on the part of the less vis­ible 'patriarchies'." p.95 "Better to be an ill girl than a girl who gets up out of her sickbed and challenges the power of the heterosexual matrix. Pathology as normality is preferable to a new form of women's movement." p.96 "The most common non­ medical responses to these various forms of distress by medic...

Neurodiversity and Medical Arts & Humanities An emerging field of study Medical Humanities can be defined as an interdisciplinary endeavour that draws on the creative and intellectual strengths of diverse disciplines in pursuit of medical educational goals Critical medical humanities is an approach which argues that the arts and humanities offer different ways of thinking about human history, culture etc which can be used to dissect and critique healthcare practices and priorities. Health humanities is the application of the creative or fine arts and humanities disciplines to discourse about, express and/or promote dimensions of human health and well being 60% of caregivers for Alzheimer's are women Women have a 1 in 5 chance of developing Alzheimer's Butler - psychology of vulnerability, when someone is lost, that person is lost to others too Relationship with parent Allegranti - tries to deal with the issue of representation by showing it is not a clear rep...

Bülow, Morten Hillgaard, and Marie-Louise Holm. “Queering ‘Successful Ageing’, Dementia and Alzheimer’s Research.”  Body & Society , vol. 22, no. 3, 2016.   "My grandmother embodies a central problematic within ageing research and western societies today that we will address in this article. A problematic that can be described as the question of how to deal with the frailty of ageing human bodies and the inevitable failure of ideals of the embodied subject – the subject in its corporeality – related to the present widespread aim for successful ageing." p.78 "in the face of ageing, such medical approaches seem to (re)produce an impossible ideal of autonomy, independence, and stable, well-ordered bodies." p.79 "bodies perceived as monstrous evoke a sentiment of un-control and un-knowing, and thereby point to a temporal and performative state of being that reminds us of life’s fundamental material, discursive and normative instability" p.80 "...

"the researcher begins by coding data in close, systemic ways so that he can generate analytic categories. He further elaborates, extends, and integrates these categories by writing theoretical memos." p.143 Reading fieldnotes as a data set Re-read notes and look out for themes, patterns and variations "Reading notes as a whole encourages recognising patterns and making comparisons." p.145 Some might feel that analysing their work with such a cold, scientific eye feels like betrayal to their respondents who they have become close with. A solution is to co-author the work with a writing assistant. Asking questions of fieldnotes "writing down codes - putting an idea or intuition into a concrete relatively concise word or phrase - helps stimulate, shape and constrain the fieldworker's thinking and reflection." p.146 Questions to begin examining fieldnotes: What are people doing? What are they trying to accomplish? How do they do this? What s...

McRobbie, Angela: “Top Girls? Young Women and Post-Feminist Symbolic       Violence” in The Aftermath of Feminism. Sage, 2009. Resurgent patriarchies and gender retrenchment 'Feminine citizenship' - the right to work, to control fertility, to earn money and participate in consumer culture This citizenship is invoked through making young women visible - shining a light on them. " emerging from largely First World scenarios, the attribution of apparently post-feminist freedoms to young women most manifest within the cultural realm in the form of new visibilities, becomes, in fact, the occa­sion for the undoing of feminism." p.55 "Walby implies that institutionalisation and capacity-building and indeed participation as well as the growth of feminist expertise and the presence of women professionals on the world stage, have come about in a progressive way." p.56 "This chapter asks the question: how do we account for the range ...