Gender, space and culture

Presentation notes

find an issue of media

e.g historical, any national context,
present and analyse

develop concerns developed in this module

not handouts needed

presentation week will be 2hours

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-47281926?
intlink_from_url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cq23pdgvyr0t/gender&li
nk_location=live-reporting-story

https://hollywoodlife.com/2019/03/12/johnny-depp-amber-heard-lawsuit-
overwhelmed-fan-support/

week 4: home

things that make a home not feel like home

hierarchy- power dynamic

abuse, violence

home labor maintains the home

“the avoidance of materiality connected to sexuality is a powerful act in and

of itself” (Pilkey, 2014:1150)
Week 5

What is sexual harassment?

How and why it happens in a work place?

Is about hierarchy and power

It can happen physically or verbally and even with the media/smartphones

Transactional: sex for exchange smth else (quid pro quo)

Mutually agreed things of exchange

Glass ceiling: you can see but you can reach, you are limited.

What are the limitations of a disabled individual changing working environment?

Physical infrastructure
Colleagues- boss
Week 6

Lecture

*‘Geek(futouklas,computeras) masculinity’
* Counterpublic: From the above it seems to me that a "public" is a group of
people who have a collective set of beliefs. A counterpublic is another group of
people who have conflicting beliefs.

- Free time VS leisure

The experience that is responsible for changing the meaning of free-time activities
and converting them into leisure experiences

Leisure increasingly centred around consumption and consumerism

•Consumption: Practice of buying, using and displaying goods, services and
experiences
•Consumerism: an ideology, logic or set of values promoting and underpinning
consumer culture

- The liminal

Is “where normal rules of conduct are suspended, in times and spaces apart from
the everyday” (Crang, 2004:76)

Liminal spaces are “limbo-like space[s] often beyond normal social and cultural
constraints. In these spaces can be found brief moments of freedom and an
escape from the daily grind of social responsibilities..

- Gaming
Predominantly constructed and imagined as a male subculture (‘geek subculture’)

 Games designed by men for men (by and for white men, more specifically)
Limited representations of female characters in games: sexualised, ‘in-distress’, violence

•Harassment and trolling of female gamers (#gamergate)•“toxic techno-cultures”

(Massanari, 2017)

*intoxication: methoi, narkosi

Article

*Wistful: melanxolikos
*Evade: ksefeugo, diafeugo
*Onset: star, beginning, or attach
*Ballot box: kalpi
*Ballot: psifoforia (he was elected by ballot)

 Jim Crow was active white resistance to black people’s freedom both at the ballot
box and at the local shop.

 Every time black Southerners went to a local store, they were forced to wait as
white customers were served first
 Serving white customers before black ones might seem a relatively small insult,
but behind that racial ordering was an omnipresent (present everywhere) threat
of violence.
 The catalog, which was introduced around 1891, undid the power of the
storekeeper, the landlord and, by extension, the racially marked consumerism of
Jim Crow
 Readings

"The Top Shelf" by Mehita Iqani

1. What messages does Iqani argue 'the top shelf' sends about sexual
desire and pleasure, and to whom?  Do you agree with her
argument?

Labelling as a space for men only, thus prioritizing the male gaze.

The top shelf’s ‘men only’ semiotic code is not simply outdated: it also functions as a sign of the
anxieties produced in the neoliberal patriarchy (by forms of desire that do not toe the
heteronormative line)

The top shelf communicates a doubled message, shaped by the complex relationship between
power and pleasure.

My opinion: If we consider the public not as a space of dialogic participation (Habermas 1992)
but as ‘a space of appearance’ (Arendt 1958; Chouliaraki 2006; Silverstone 2007; Iqani 2012), it
becomes defined by characteristics of brilliance and visibility.

2. What do you think of recent campaigns to ban or cover up 'lads

mags'  like 'Object', or 'Lose the Lads Mags'? What arguments do
they make? 

* lads' mag: a magazine aimed at young men, typically featuring interviews

with and suggestive photographs of female celebrities together with articles
on topics such as sports, cars, and popular culture.

For example, UK anti-porn organization Object runs a campaign against lad

magazines, arguing that their presence in the mainstream retail space is a
form of discrimination and harassment against women, and that the
magazines should be grouped with soft porn magazines on the top shelf.

3. What does Iqani mean by saying that sex has been increasingly
mainstreamed in public spaces of consumption? (pgs 36-37) If you
agree this is the case, do you think it is a positive or negative
development? What counter-arguments could be/are made?

The success of sex store franchise Ann Summers in the United Kingdom is an
example of the mainstreaming of sex positivism. Such developments also
bring up the complexities of a post- feminist sensibility in which ‘sexiness’ is
something women are expected to master in order to please men
4. The methods Iqani used for her research are similar to those you
will need to use for your final assessment. What were her methods?
What did she do to gather the 'data' she provides in the article?
What kinds of challenges might she have encountered?

Methodologically, this paper reports on a reflexive participant observation of

newsstands, and then presents a visual essay of the top shelf as a basis for
an analysis of the semiotics of that space

New/Key Concepts
 Semiotic landscapes and visual consumption
 The public as a space of appearance (38)
 Methodological reflexivity (38)
 Public morality (43)

Cultures of Abstinence" by Gill Valentine et al.

*abstinence: self-restrain, not drinking alcohol

1. Drawing on other researchers, the authors argue that alcohol has

agency. What do they mean by this? 

Latham and McCormack (2004, page 717) have argued that alcohol has
agency in that ``the affects of alcohol are implicated in particular forms of
sociality, of ways of being and relating through the urban, ways of moving,
gesturing, walking and talking variously identifiable as drunkenness and
intoxication.''

2. Why do Muslims who do not drink report feelings of disgust about

what alcohol appears to do? How does their abstinence shape their
experience of belonging/inclusion  and 'urban conviviality'?

Yet, for those Muslims who do not drink, alcohol has the reverse impact
on structures of feeling, generating emotions of disgust and repulsion.
- Comments of those who don’t drink: in particular, by changing
pleasant, respectable, individuals into loud, out-of-control, child-like
figures. Such behaviour runs counter to cultural expectations of
modesty and embodied respectability. Other informants described
how, because alcohol is a `con- fidence booster', it can make people
act in assertive or aggressive ways which can generate conflict and
violence amongst normally law-abiding citizens.

- All of the Pakistani Muslim interviewees in this study described encountering such peer
pressures to drink in order to belong and be accepted.

3. Why is drinking by Muslim women versus men more strongly

prohibited, according to the authors? 

4. How do space and ideas of publicness factor into the experiences and
practices of those Muslims in the study who do drink?

New/Key Concepts
 Night-time economy
 Embodied respectability (12)
 Absent presence (12)
 Urban conviviality (18)