Gender and Education in the Asia Pacific: Possibilities and provocations

We would like to invite you to the Gender and Education Association Biennial Interim Conference, which is being held in the Southern Hemisphere for the first time at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education (MGSE), University of Melbourne.

The conference themes address the knowledge and politics of place and speak to a wide range of concerns and settings, and is not limited to specific regions or countries. The questions raised by such a focus are prompted by, but not restricted to, the complexities of Australia’s geopolitical location in the Asia-Pacific region, its history as both colonised and coloniser, and its current position as part of the ‘global north and the global south’.

We welcome abstract submissions for individual papers, symposia as well as ‘non traditional’ presentations such as performance pieces, poetry and pecha kucha: http://www.pechakucha.org/

For more details including submission please visit the conference website:

http://education.unimelb.edu.au/news_and_activities/events/upcoming_events/conferences/GEA2014#home

e-mail enquiries: gea2014@gmail.com

By Nancy Lombard, Glasgow Caledonian University

The FRA study from the EU agency for Fundamental Rights released last Thursday did the usual rounds with the same old figures: 1 in three women have experienced abuse in their lifetime, 1 in 10 within the last 12 months.  We know this; we can recite these figures off by heart. The report is simply more evidence of the pervasive extent of women’s experiences of violence that is so engrained in our societies.

Liz Kelly once said that the continued recognition of the magnitude of violence against women results in further normalisation rather than leading to resistance.  We know globally, nationally and locally men’s violence against women is an endemic social problem and an enduring human rights issue within all societies and cultures (Amnesty International, 2004; Bond and Philips, 2000). The prolific extent of male violence against women is confirmed by official data, reproduced worldwide, year after year.

I have been a volunteer, activist and researcher in the field of violence against women since I was 18. My most recent research looked at what primary school children think about men’s violence against women. When I was writing up the research I reflected upon what sociologist Ann Oakley calls my autobiographical path, thinking about why I became interested in this field.

Often women become involved in the area of working against men’s violence because of direct experience but I had always assumed that I was not one of them, as I didn’t have any personal history. However when I sat down and reflected I was shocked, not only by the list of abuses I had experienced, but by my normalisation and minimisation of them – and how I still remained affected by them. Kelly (1988: 23) claims the experience and /or naming of violence is not always an immediate or present one, rather it can be ‘experienced by the woman or girl at the time or later, as a threat, invasion or assault’. My own recalled experiences of abuse included: physical abuse, experiences of coerced sex, flashing and indecent exposure, sexual assaults, physical assaults, verbal sexual abuse. Being aware of my own normalisation of personal experiences of violence made me acutely sensitive to the young people’s narratives of their own experiences and conceptualisations of men’s violence against women.

When I spoke to boys and girls aged 11 and 12 I asked them about what they understood violence was, about why it happened and why. I also spoke to the young people about their own lives, their friendships, their experiences. For the majority of young people violence was something that happened in a public place, between adult men who were physically fighting. Crucially there were visible injuries and official intervention and consequence. That is the men’s behaviour was stopped, they were told they were wrong and suffered consequence (such as jail). This same sequence was replicated at school. Boys would physically fight in public and be told by the teachers or playground assistants that their behaviour was wrong and they were chastised for it.

But that didn’t happen for the girls. Girls told me about of a multitude of experiences; of being pushed, shoved, kicked, followed, called sexualised names from their male peers. These examples did not fit the standardised constellation structure of ‘real’ violence: age (adult); gender (man) space (public) action (physical) and crucially, are generally without official reaction or consequence. Time and time again the girls – when they approached teachers or those in authority were dismissed for telling tales, ignored because of the ‘trivial’ nature of their complaint or relayed that old adage, ‘he’s only doing it because he likes you’. Thus their experiences were minimised and the behaviours, normalised.

This not only results in girls being unable to access a framework by which to make sense of their own experiences, but it also serves to invalidate and minimise many of their own experiences of violence and violent behaviour which is then replicated in their adult lives where much behaviour is seen as what Dobash and Dobash (1992) termed the ‘everyday interactions’ between men and women; the everyday sexism documented here.

The feminist project of ‘naming’, ‘involves making visible what was invisible, defining as unacceptable what was acceptable and insisting what was naturalized is problematic’ (Kelly, 1988: 139). It enables women to name, understand and challenge what had happened to them, by moving the private into the public domain and shifting the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour.

For me this also explains why countries such as Denmark and Sweden had higher figures for men’s violence against women in the recent study. Those countries with greater levels of gender equality are more likely to provide ‘official’ recognition for women which enables them to not only name but also define their experiences as violence.

We need to start acting upon these figures, rather than finding different ways of presenting the same old story. Preventive education and public awareness campaigns to encourage resistance to violence are essential. But we also need to challenge the normalisation of violence. We must contest the dynamics in heterosexual relationships where men’s power over women is naturalised, normalised and used as a justification both of and for the violence.

The Gender and Education journal are currently inviting scholars to review the texts outlined on this list. If you would like to review one of these texts then please do contact the reviews editor: Dr Alexandra Allan (A.J.Allan@exeter.ac.uk).

We usually ask for reviews to be completed within two months of the text having been received, but we can negotiate deadlines where needed. Please see our additional guidelines for further advice on length and types of review and expected style.

In addition, please do get in touch with the reviews editor if:

• You are an author of a text which you would like to have reviewed in the Gender and Education journal
• You are aware of/have recently read a text which you think should be reviewed in the Gender and Education journal

Books for review:

1) Kosmala, K. (2013) Imagining Masculinities: Spatial and Temporal Representation and Visual Culture. London: Routledge.

2) Swartz, C. and Arnot, M. (2013) Youth Citizenship and the Politics of Belonging. London: Routledge.

3) Bradley, H. (2013) Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press.

4) Fuller, K. (2013) Gender, Identity and Educational Leadership. London: Bloomsbury Press.

5) Hearn, J., Blagojevic, M. and Harrison, K. (2013) Rethinking Transnational Men: Beyond, Between and Within Nations. London: Routledge.

6) Cooper Stoll, L. (2013) Gender in the Classroom: Teachers, Privilege and Social Inequalities. Plymouth: Lexington Books.

7) Sharma, S. (2013) Reclaiming Education in Transformative Spaces. London: Bloomsbury Press.

8) Jones, D and Evans, R. (2013) Men in the Lives of Young Children: An International Perspective. London: Routledge.

9) Evans, M. and Williams, C.H. (2013) Gender: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge.

10) Malabou, C. (2011) Changing Difference. Cambridge: Polity Press.

11) Hampton, E. (2013) Anay’s Will To Learn: A Woman’s Education in the Shadow of Maquiladoras. Texas.

12) Pierre-Moreau, M. (2011) Les Enseignants et le genre: Les inegalites homes-femmes dans l’enseignement du second degre en France et en Angleterre. Paris: Press Universitaires De France.

13) Egan, R. D. (2013) Becoming Sexual: A Critical Appraisal of the Sexualisation of Girls. Cambridge: Polity Press.

14) Spade, J.Z. and Valentine, C.G. (2014) The Kaledioscope of Gender: Prisms, Patterns and Possibilities. London: Routledge.

15) Tice, K. (2012) Queens of Academe: Beauty Pageantry, Student Bodies and College Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

16) Bae, M.S. and Ivashkevich, O. (2013) Girls, Cultural Productions and Resistance.

17) Nairn, K., Higgins, J. and Sligo, J. (2012) Children of Rogernomics: A Neoliberal Generation Leaves School. Dunedin: Otago University Press.

18) Taylor, Y. and Addison, M. (2013) Queer Presences and Absences. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

19) Brown, R.N. and Kwayke, C.J. (2012) Wish to Live: The Hip Hop Feminism Pedagogy Reader. New York: Peter Lang.

20) Livholts, M. (2012) Emergent Writing Methodologies in Feminist Studies. London: Routledge.

21) Bleich, D. (2013) The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics and the University.

22) Maxwell, C. and Aggleton, P. (2013) Privilege, Agency and Affect: Understanding the Production and Effects of Action. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

23) Duckworth, V. (2014) Learning Trajectories, Violence and Empowerment amongst Adult Basic Skills Learners. London: Routledge.

24) Coleman, R. and Ringrose, J. (2013) Deleuze and Research Methodologies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

25) Thayer-Bacon, B.J., Stone, L. and Sprecher, K.M. (2014) Education Feminism: Classic and Contemporary Readings. New York: SUNY.

26) Spatig, L. and Amerikaner, L. (2014) Thinking Outside the Girl Box: Teaming Up With Resilient Youth in Appalachia. Ohio: Ohio University Press.

The ESRC Seminar Series ‘Critical Diversities @the Intersection’ (2012-
2014) has reflected a current wave of work within the social sciences,
humanities and arts, which offer new ways of conceptualising and
empirically researching ‘diversity’. Our 2-day conference hopes to build
on thoughts, presentations and debates, with keynotes including:

Prof. Kimberlé W. Crenshaw (UCLA) ‘Intersectionality, Research and
Activism’

Prof. Davina Cooper (University of Kent) ‘Imagining the state otherwise:
Between utopia and critique”

Prof. Tracey Reynolds (Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research,
LSBU) ‘Borders, ‘diversity’ and intersections: A black feminist reflections
on the everyday lives of black women in Britain’

We welcome papers from across the career stage and from outside
academia. There will be prizes, book launches & panels. Please send
abstract to: CriticalDiversities2014@lsbu.ac.uk

Registration details to be posted soon.  Conference cost will be £25 for two days, places limited!

By Professor Miriam E. David

Benn, Melissa (2013) What should we tell our daughters? The pleasures and pressures of growing up female (London: John Murray) ISBN 978-1-84854-827-1 pp 343 £20

Three cheers for Melissa Benn! Members of the Gender and Education Association (GEA) should be delighted to have such an excellent advocate of feminist work on women and education in today’s complex and contradictory society. Whilst this is a journalistic account, it is an engagingly written and pleasurable read about the dilemmas of being a woman in today’s increasingly pressurized, pornified or sexualised and hyper-capitalist society. What Melissa sets out to do is to provide a map of where we, as women are today, and what we can do for the future. She specifically wants inter-generational conversations about how feminists have dealt with the past and how that can frame arguments about how to work for a feminist-friendly future. She is not starry-eyed about the gains that feminists have made over the last century or so and sets those against the increasing gulf between rich and poor women, and the rise of the austerity culture. She decides to interrogate second-wave feminists mainly about what they have done, and what evidence they can muster about the changing culture, politics and society, together with some choice male writers and academics, to set an agenda for ‘our daughters’.  She organizes her arguments into three parts, each of which has an aphorism for its concerns: the first she calls ‘uneasy beginnings’, the second ‘promises, promises’ and the third ‘rebellions and resources’ and she has an epilogue which is her manifesto for the future.

From the perspective of educators and parents, mothers especially, the first part of the book is where she presents what we know today about schooling and higher education linked together with the increasingly important feminist work on sexuality, sexual abuse and the pornification of our culture for young women. She provides a quick romp through recent work on how girls are doing better than boys in educational achievements at school and university but how this poses a huge problem given the pressures to be a particular kind of sexually attractive woman almost to the point of becoming invisible. Girls have to be  good but thin in a tick box culture. She contrasts this evidence with the important work on how the culture of laddism – male, macho, popular and raunchy – is increasingly pervading higher education. She questions what advice mothers can offer their daughters about sex in this kind of culture of objectification and the myth of perfection. Here she revisits the debates about puberty and adolescence in the context of single-sex versus co-educational schooling and the changing role of fathers in relation to their daughters. And she relies on a couple of key male writers here for her evidence, ignoring younger feminist academics such as Emma Renold and Jessica Ringrose, who have done such sterling work on children’s gender and sexual cultures based on interviews. She also doesn’t think to question the young people themselves for their views about growing up and living in a sexualized and pornified culture. This might have been the start of an interesting new conversation about relations between the generations and the futures of feminist studies.

The second part of the book considers what we know about women’s adult lives today in terms of work or employment, sex and love, and balancing work and life: this last is what she calls breakpoint. Again she romps through some interesting work on graduate employment and looks at highly achieving women as professionals and corporate feminists. She uses as part of her title of the first chapter in this part of the book the title of Sheryl Sandberg’s liberal feminist manifesto Lean In. Sheryl Sandberg is the chief operating officer of Facebook and has written about, as the sub-title puts it, women, work and the will to lead. Melissa takes this as the starting point of her critique and yet also uses it seriously as others have also done, about female professional achievements in the business world such as Alison Woolf in The XX Factor . Melissa does also look at the downsides and raises important questions, for example, about sexual harassment at work. And she goes on to provide a sober reappraisal of feminism as not being about the corporate world but women entering an unequal world of work. This is followed by a chapter about changing forms of sexual relations in an increasingly neo-liberal society. Here she also discusses changing feminist critiques of women’s understandings of sexuality and their bodies. And she moves swiftly into changing forms of work and motherhood, so that work-life balances are no longer the same as they were for older generations of feminists, so-called vintage feminists. Indeed, her Melissa argues that we have reached ‘breakpoint’.

The final part of the book considers what we now know about how to campaign for change and how to effect that change. She reviews feminist evidence about the uses of political campaigning and argues that there is a need for anger, but that it can easily be subverted particularly in an internet age. She provides a long discussion of how women’s anger is, and has been socially unacceptable, using the phrase that ‘anger means social and romantic isolation, imprisonment in the attic of social unacceptability’. (p.244) So she recognizes how difficult it is for women to learn how to be confident and powerful feminists. However, this part of the book, it seems to me, is the weakest section, as Melissa seems to have lost the will for collective and political campaigning and is more concerned with addressing the question of how individual women need to learn resilience and confidence in an increasingly individualized and competitive society. And yet she tries in her final chapter to think through the new politics of campaigning in an age of austerity and one where more women now have entered traditional democratic politics. She does not consider here more local or community-based activism but focuses more on singling out some key feminists in trade unions and the dilemmas of being a woman Labour politician. But she does conclude that ‘…our daughters may need help and support in order to learn to speak up and speak out for themselves; collectively, we need to move away from the traditional rhetorical, quasi-Oxford-Union/parliamentary form of public discussion and explore other ways of holding conversations’.

This is one of the final boxed statements (see below) and it does seem to me to indicate a weakness at the heart of the project. This book is not for an academic and certainly not for an academic feminist audience. This is also clear in the manifesto in the epilogue. This is a short and poetic piece of writing, using feminist polemicists such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Toni Morrison, as well as addressing the question of ‘the exceptional woman who refuses exceptionality’, taking the term from Carol Gilligan. Here the book ends as an advice rather than campaigning manual to be read in a cosy armchair, perhaps with one eye on the ipad, internet, twitter or whatever.

Whilst this is a most important book, there are several problems with it. First and perhaps most importantly, whilst Melissa discusses anger as important to this feminist political project (in part 3) she tells us she shies away from anger and recognizes that this means that a broader feminist politics based on a thorough-going critique of a misogynistic or patriarchal culture is not what she intends. Hers is a liberal politics of cosy conversations. Second, and equally important is the selective use of evidence, without much explicit theory to explain it. Post-structural feminists might be surprised to note absolutely no references to Judith Butler! There is also no questioning of the younger generations of women, whether feminists or academics or both or none. Melissa is an excellent journalist and superb at summarizing a mass of evidence. I was totally in awe of her knowledge of a huge range of feminist books and texts, especially those that have come out in the 21^st century, and mainly of the genre of market feminism, like the Fifty Shades of Feminism which was produced without any critical edge at all. But in the end this needs to be located in more critical theory not just represented as if it were now the truth. Third, and perhaps this is the key point – this book is for a large and wide market and it shows in presentation and style. The shocking pink cover print together with a naked girl covered with a towel is a most odd marketing device, as is the use of highlighted boxes of comment dotted across the text one of which I mentioned above. These are not in service to the bigger project of transforming the world for a feminist-friendly future.

Co-Convenors: Dr Emily Gray (RMIT University), Dr Anne Harris (Monash University) & Professor Julie McLeod (The University of Melbourne)

Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne

234 Queensberry Street, Parkville, Melbourne, Australia

The Gender and Education Association (GEA), in association with the University of Melbourne, Monash University, and RMIT University, is inviting abstracts for the 2014 Gender and Education Biennial Interim Conference

We would like to invite you to the Gender and Education Association Biennial Interim Conference, which is being held in the southern hemisphere for the first time. The conference focus reflects the complexities of Australia’s geopolitical location in the Asia-Pacific region, its history as colonised and coloniser, and its current position as part of both the ‘global north and the global south’.

The conference themes underscore the breadth of concerns and questions within the field of gender and education, the diversity of current challenges and emerging possibilities, and the pressing need to consider the relevance of context, place and history in understanding these matters.

We welcome abstract submissions for individual papers, symposia as well as ‘non traditional’ presentations, such as performance pieces, poetry and pecha kucha: http://www.pechakucha.org/.  Abstracts for single papers should be 250 words; and for symposia 250 words for each paper. For symposia, please include an overview rationale of up to 200 words.  Performance pieces and pecha kucha should also submit a description of the proposed presentation of 250 words.  All abstract submissions need to include the name of presenter/s, affiliation, title of presentation, a brief biographical statement of up to 50 words, and up to 5 keywords to describe the focus and themes of the presentation.

For more details including submission please visit the conference website: http://education.unimelb.edu.au/go/GEA2014#papers

or

e-mail enquiries or abstracts as Word documents to: gea2014@gmail.com

Deadline for submission: 30 April 2014

Confirmation of participation: by 16 June 2014

Call for Papers PDF

By Miriam E. David, Institute of Education, London.

The Centre for Higher Education & Equity Research (CHEER) at the University of Sussex hosted yet another unique and seriously important event on Monday last, December 2^nd 2013. This was feminist reflections on the Robbins report on higher education, which had been published 50 years ago, in October 1963(London: HMSO, Cmnd. 2154) (http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/robbins/)

Given that this report was seen by most policy-makers and political commentators as inaugurating the mass expansion of higher education there have been a number of celebratory anniversary events, for example at the London School of Economics (LSE), where Sir Lionel Robbins was then a professor of economics, and at the University of London’s Institute of Education, hosted by its Centre for Higher Education Studies (CHES). What was remarkable about the various other events was the lack of attention to questions of gender and equality in higher education.

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This lacuna was more than amply filled by the event at CHEER on Monday. (All the papers and videos can be downloaded from the CHEER website http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer/).  As was announced before the event, the University of Sussex, founded in 1961 as one of several new universities to open up opportunities, was delighted to host the event. And arguably as a product of that important period of democratisation and expansion, CHEER wanted to revisit a core value of the Robbins Report , namely that university places should be available to anyone qualified to apply for them. Robbins also foregrounded gender: in the 1960s fewer women undertook higher education than men. So has the expansion of higher education encouraged democratisation and how has the gender agenda unfolded and unravelled in the last 50 years?

Professor Carole Leathwood, director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Education (IPSE) at London Metropolitan University provided a superb analysis of what she called ‘the genealogy of the woman student’. First of all, she invited us all to consider her approach, using a Foucauldian analysis to show how history meshed with current and contemporary issues. Secondly she had undertaken a documentary study of the text of the Robbins report and of a number of popular publications, most especially the Beaver, the student newspaper at LSE, as well as other national newspapers and feminist texts, such as the work of her namesake Carol Dyhouse. Carol, a social historian at Sussex, had published two feminist studies of women and universities, namely No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities, 1870-1939 (1995) and Students: A Gendered History (2005).

The essential point of both Carols is that women were considered entirely in relation to men as sexual and social beings. So both the Robbins report and the various newspaper clips that we were shown were about seeing young women students as ‘dolly birds’ or as sexy, and as available on ‘the marriage market’ rather than for the labour market. Interestingly, the Robbins report spent time considering where women students were and developing arguments about how to expand provision that would take account of women, but it never once considered women in the academic profession, as lecturers or researchers. And of course, it never considered the question of anything other than heterosexuality. On the other hand, there were discussions about pregnancy and motherhood and about adult learners, raised in the Robbins report. Indeed Carole Leathwood argued that the start of the British notion of lifelong learning might stem from this era, along with the mature woman student, although social class was barely mentioned.

Miriam David, Visiting Professor in CHEER, followed this discussion, by providing more detail about the position of female and male students at the time of Robbins and nowadays, contrasted with female academics, and the role of feminist activists in academia (based upon her forthcoming book Feminism, Gender & Universities: Politics, Passion and Pedagogies (Ashgate, 2014)). Her paper was entitled HE and SHE: Gender and Equality in Higher Education. She drew on David Willetts, the Minister for Universities and Science, in the coalition government, who had written a pamphlet for the 50^th anniversary of the Robbins Report entitled Robbins Revisited: Bigger and Better Higher Education (and published by the Social Market Foundation, 2013). Willetts had had the figures re-analysed by government statisticians from the report. What it showed most clearly is a changing gender balance from female students being 25% of the then student body of less than a quarter of a million, to being about 55% of undergraduates today, when there are over ten times as many – well over 2 million in the UK. Willetts acknowledges the changes but he does not bother to comment on what is happening to staff in academia, tending to agree with the old-fashioned views expressed in the Robbins report about the marital and power relations between men and women. Whilst these changing student figures mirror international studies, such as UNESCO’s Atlas of Gender Equality in Education (March 2012) (see previous blog on the GEA website), in Europe and the USA, all also contend that women tend to disappear the more they are educated, such as through doing a doctorate. She Figures, statistics from the European Union, makes this point very strongly. Perhaps the point is made most strongly though in the UK through two contrasting reports of the now independent Equality Challenge Unit. It publishes annual statistics on staff and students in higher education across the UK in separate volumes. What is most alarming is that gender inequality is rampant amongst staff in UK universities, with 80% of professors being white men, whilst gender equality is so normative amongst students, as no longer worthy of comment. So what can be done to create a more feminist-friendly future in universities?

The afternoon session of the seminar was devoted to Professors Valerie Hey and Louise Morley both of CHEER, acting as Pollyanna and Cassandra respectively and considering how to change the situation and imagine the university of the future, and especially in 50 years’ time, and the position of feminism within it. These discussions had been prefigured in an ESRC seminar series, http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cheer/esrcseminars.

 We were all then invited to consider various scenarios in small groups, chaired and led by Rebecca Webb, a doctoral researcher in CHEER and affiliated to the Centre for Teaching and Learning Research in Sussex. This was a most lively and invigorating session, in which we began to consider an alternative to austerity, to a university in which critical and creative thinking once again had centre stage, and where ethical values, not economic value, as Louise Morley put it so passionately, was pre-eminent.  We all left the seminar feeling exhausted but hopeful: CHEER had created an inclusive and open space for feminist debate and discussion to thrive, whilst the immediate outside context remained severely constricting and constraining by an intransigent and intellectually vacuous government. The two key ministers for education – David Willetts for Higher Education and Michael Gove for Schools – vie with each other for presenting the stern and firm smack of government or ‘back to the future’, where ‘boys will be boys’ and girls don’t exist except as bystanders.

By Shauna Pomerantz, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON.  

Now that the dust has settled on one of the most publicized popular culture controversies in recent history, it is time to reflect on what Miley Cyrus has done for feminism. Yes, I said feminism. The debates surrounding Miley’s infamous Video Music Award (VMA) performance and her subsequent Wrecking Ball video have left me feeling surprisingly optimistic about the future of feminism. And for this reason alone, I am grateful to the twenty-one-year-old for her provocative style, sound, and sexual display. More than any other female pop star—more than Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, Pink, and even Madonna—Miley brought feminism to the public fore. Here’s why: by controversially performing young, white, pop star femininity, she ignited a conversation that still has people discussing what it means to be a young woman in the 21^st century. And perhaps most surprisingly, this conversation has been multifaceted and intellectually engaged. I have been riveted by the various strands of these arguments, from aging pop stars to punk bloggers, media pundits to feminist academics, and young girl fans to male hipsters—all of whom have something interesting to say about not just Miley’s performance of femininity, but also what power can or might mean for girls and women at this time and place in history.

Never before has there been so much talk, text, and tweeting about feminist issues: gender performativity, empowerment versus oppression, misogyny in the music industry, sexual agency, slut shaming, racism and racialization, and why women receive so much criticism in popular culture when men receive almost none. What matters most in these debates is not who has the definitive perspective—the piece that decides if Miley is “good” or “bad” once and for all—but rather the sheer volume of discussion about young womanhood, sexuality, and power. Acting as a lightening rod, Miley provided people with an outlet for expressing feminist views about things that truly matter in our global capitalist, socially networked, celebrity obsessed culture. And each opinion continues to broaden previous statements—constantly re-shaping the discourse, but thankfully never quite nailing it down.

Take, for example, Sinead O’Conner’s powerfully worded “maternal” letter to Miley, suggesting that the music industry is pimping her out. She writes to Miley:

“The music business doesn’t give a shit about you, or any of us. They will prostitute you for all you are worth, and cleverly make you think it’s what YOU wanted …”

This intense warning of exploitation then ignited discussion on a number important feminist questions: What does it mean to be oppressed or empowered in the music industry? What about agency and sexuality? Who is in control? Is sexual empowerment “real” power? Under global capitalism, do human beings even count? In response to Sinead’s doom and gloom came a treatise on individualism and freedom of expression from Amanda Palmer. She writes to Sinead,

“Miley is, from what I can gather, in charge of her own show. She’s writing the plot and signing the checks, and although I think it’s tempting to imagine her in the boardroom of label assholes and management, I don’t think any of them masterminded her current plan to be a raging, naked, twerking sexpot. I think that’s All Miley All The Way.”

Then, in response to these two polemic pieces came Lisa Wade’s more academic effort to show how both Sinead and Amanda were equal parts right and wrong.

“On the one hand, women are making individual choices. They are not complete dupes of the system. They are architects of their own lives. On the other hand, those individual choices are being made within a system.”

And most recently, Laurie Penny made the exquisitely elegant case that we have turned Miley into a gruesome symbol for all girls, doing grave violence to the multitudes of girls out there who live brave and fabulous lives.

“In the real world, girls are not all the same. Attempting to make any one woman stand in for all women everywhere is demeaning to every woman anywhere. It tells us that we are all alike, that for all society’s fascination with our feelings and fragility we are considered of a kind, replaceable. We’re all the same, and we’re all supposed to have the same problems. And that’s the problem.”

And the conversation just keeps on exploding. So suddenly, it does not matter to me whether Miley has done something “right” or “wrong”. I no longer care if she is “good” or “bad” for girls. All that matters is that for this glorious period in time, it seems as though the entire western world is talking about feminism. And the feminism under discussion is never just one kind, but always multiple and diverse. It is intersectional (at times focusing on race, gender, class, and sexuality); it is academic (at times focusing on identity, power, and agency); it is everyday (at times focusing on raw emotion and opinion); it is everyone (and anyone with a keyboard and an Internet connection); and it is everywhere (emerging at work and parties between people of all ages and cultures).

No matter what you may think of Miley, her videos, or her media image, there is no denying that she has done something truly important for feminism. She made it a household word, a water cooler topic. She incited an impassioned and textured conversation about feminism; she proved that feminism is still relevant and necessary; and she exemplified the powerful and contradictory possibilities both young womanhood and feminism hold. So thank you for bringing feminism back, Miley. Maybe it never really left, but it has certainly been driven underground in the popular realm for quite some time. Denied, faded, and deemed a “dirty” word, thank you for helping to illuminate feminism in the floodlights of public discourse.

By Hannah Iqbal, Cardiff University.  

On Friday 11th October, at 7.30am, 200 women and girls gathered in the foyer of the Queen Elizabeth Hall at London’s Southbank Centre. Why were these women and girls were taking time out of their schools, work and daily routines to gather together so early on a cold October morning?

Friday 11th marked the second International Day of the Girl, a day introduced by the UN to highlight the experiences of girls across the world and the multiple barriers to equality they face. This gathering at the Southbank Centre was part of an international day of events focusing on girls’ rights globally, and more specifically, their right to education.

Currently there are 66 million girls worldwide who are prevented from receiving an education. The threat of sexual violence, stigma and the experience of forced marriage are all common barriers that keep girls from attending school. Recent evidence suggests that 10 million girls under 18 marry each year, with some as young as 8 years old. In developing countries, 1 in 3 marries before they are 18.  Alongside this, 150 million girls under 18 have experienced rape or sexual violence. In a school setting, this can be from other pupils or teachers.

The event at the Southbank Centre aimed to draw attention to these global issues whilst also providing a platform for young girls from across the UK to discuss their fears and aspirations. Girls from between 11-18 were matched at random with women from the media, police, academia, music, arts and politics. Each girl had three 15-minute slots with some of these women, creating space to discuss any challenges they were facing.

The speed mentoring took place in the London Eye. I was placed in a capsule with 7 girls aged 10-11 and amongst others, a photographer, BBC presenter, graphic designers and a leadership coach. After initial greetings, we set off the first mentoring session. Each of the girls I spoke to expressed fears about going to secondary school in the next year, with one girl bursting into tears as she began to articulate this. Through the next hour, it was a real privilege to chat to each of these young women and hopefully by the end of the time, ensure they were feeling more encouraged and positive about the challenges they were facing.

Following these mentoring sessions, we watched a performance from an all-female jazz band and some interviews with prominent figures in literature and performing arts industries. The mentors then left and the girls took part in an afternoon of workshops tackling issues such as body image.  The Women of the World Festival at the Southbank Centre provides a unique and important range of events to celebrate women’s achievements and discuss the obstacles they face across the world. It is one of the most innovative, engaging and inspiring set of events I have ever taken part in and I highly recommend that more of us in academia get involved with it.

By Yvette Taylor, GEA Member

I was excited to be invited to speak at ‘The Rebirth of Feminism’ conference, with the title posing potential… and, perhaps, problems or even pain. A ‘rebirth’ is loaded with prospects and (re)production, as enduring feminist labour. This is messy and, while something (and someone) ‘arrives’, the potential, problems and pain arguably carries on (see ‘feminist failures’).

Intrigued, I wondered what (and who) was being re-birthed, pondering on the newness implied, and the feminist lines and lives continued, renewed or rejected.  Feminism(s) have long articulated and circulated the language of ‘family’, of ‘sisterhood’, and generational ‘waves’, suggestive of a generational inheritance and ‘passing on’; these notions can veer between a ‘never had it so good’ to a ‘failing the future’ sentiment. As the recent Gender and Education Association 2013 conference variously considered, I wondered ‘who gets to inherit and what is accumulated and lost in renewing feminism?’

I considered these questions as I searched for an object’ to bring to the conference, as instructed by the organisers. The chosen object was intended to foster discussion, deliberately deviating from a stand-and-speak format of knowing-feminist speaker versus feminist-in-training audience. Conscious of these knowledge exchanges, often bound up with generational positions, I chose to speak about my own retrieved school report cards, marking my own educational trajectory. Which I wouldn’t easily describe – or feel – as an ‘arrival’ (see here).

Report cards are something we’ve all likely experienced (arguably continued and self-audited as our own academic CVs). We’ve all been evaluated, and as educators, we all evaluate, celebrating potential and lamenting failure. When the question of our own academic biographies intersects with questions of women’s entry into the world of employment and education more generally, questions of potential can quickly become problematic – even recast as feminist failure.  As Angela McRobbie highlights in the Aftermath of Feminism, women’s entry into the workforce, as beneficiaries of and achievers in education, has become a sign of ‘arrival’, that she has found her place in a (post)feminist world. But she can also go ‘too far’ and (some) women’s achievement has also been seen as a cause and symptom of a male-underachievement and ‘crisis of masculinity’ (even with his pay differential).

In presenting, I hoped to remind everyone of this story beyond me, even as I placed my report cards on the floor, in the group circle; as we report on feminist potential (and failure) we must, of course, move beyond our own stories. But here is mine: I rediscovered my school report cards, held as valued and treasured objects, even though what they conveyed on the pages was frequently a ‘failure’ rather than a ‘success’. In reading these educational (mis)representations of me, my initial curiosity moved to an anger and even dismay as I realized the emotional (and material) pull these stories still had for me as an adult.

I am deeply skeptical of the story of meritocratic promise, of working really hard (and, romantically, ‘against all the odds’) and so I certainly didn’t want to convey a problematic beginning, transformed by an educational ‘becoming’. Instead, I wanted to query these official stories, which seem profoundly marked by classed and gendered terms and anticipated trajectories. My own reports are littered with ‘lapses into idle chatter’, of being ‘easily distracted’ and rather ‘slap dash’ in approach: the phrase ‘continual underachievement’ is, for one subject, underlined and in my physical education report a rather harsh judgment is made that I have, in fact, ‘not mastered the basic skills’ (of badminton).

So, when the ‘girl with potential’ becomes celebrated, anticipated and lamented, as a sign of feminist future/failure, we need to be attentive to the re-birthing and recirculation of enduring inequalities, so as to report feminist potential for everyone.