Angela McRobbie: “Top Girls? Young women and the sexual contract.”
Lecture for the Harriet Taylor Mill-Institute for Economic and Gender Research
at Berlin School of
Economics and Law (08.04.2011)
5
again against the spectre of the unfashionable feminist, who is like a disapproving
mother, the young woman chooses to indulge her obsessions in body image in fashion
and consumer culture. On the one hand this lifts the young women outside the remit
of the male gaze, her fashionista obsessions explicitly disregard the field of male
approval. On the other hand in the workplace, the over concern with feminine
appearance, the way in which the girl reader of Grazia magazine
is literally weighed
down with accessories with jewellery with heels, with new dresses every week, with
body treatments and especially with bags….and shoes….means that she herself
undermines her occupational identity with the visible signs of so many other items
which need her attention. She surrounds herself with objects which, even when she
ironically refers to their presence as constraining and superficial in some way displays
a signal of feminine weakness, vulnerability, and the need for approval, there is
something girlish in the post-feminist masquerade which is re assuring to men. She
has shown herself to be too slavishly observant of fashion
rules to be a really
confident woman. This is something of a throw back to an earlier time, as Riviere
(1928) argues the woman is masquerade, she feigns being ‘foolish and bewildered’ as
a way of not displeasing her male counterparts for whom she cannot be anything other
than a threat in the workplace. In post-feminist times this is performed knowingly and
with a sense of irony. But its final effect is to secure the place of the consumer culture
as a source of authority and domination in the everyday lives of young women. This is
a displacement for the position once occupied by patriarchy.
There are three other figurations which come into play alongside the post-feminist
masquerade.
B.
The ‘working girl’/woman has been a recipient of education and
access to the labour market. She exemplifies success also through marriage and
motherhood. This gives rise to difficulties in maintaining
high achievement in work,
and in a post-feminist move she ascribes to the work-life balance as an attempt at a
practical solution. There is no prospect of a feminist politics of the household or of
childcare once again being revived or gaining recognition. Individualisation requires
she jostles and juggles. If she can afford it she spends some of her earnings on paid
help. Instead of requesting of her husband that he plays an equal role she sub contracts
out the housework. The sociologist Rosemary Compton refers to the social
compromise for women. She reduces the commitment to work so as to fulfil the
requirements of motherhood and as compensation she ensures that the bodily
perfection required of the post feminist masquerade is pursued into motherhood.
C.
The phallic girl is technology of hyper-sexualised femininity again informed by
feminism but hostile to it. Here the young woman mimics the privileges in leisure and
sexuality normally ascribed to men.
She drinks in excess, and has sex when she
pleases without seeking security or marriage or motherhood. As long as she is not
poor or dependent on state benefits she is blame-free since in a post-feminist society
Angela McRobbie: “Top Girls? Young women and the sexual contract.”
Lecture for the Harriet Taylor Mill-Institute for Economic and Gender Research at Berlin School of
Economics and Law (08.04.2011)
6
there no longer exists the sexual double standard. Her brazen enjoyment of sex can
even be taken up by agencies as a sign that western freedoms have been realised even
if in anti-social ways. Even a disgraceful woman can be more than a source of tabloid
newspaper scandal and social comedy; she can be tolerated, sometimes admired. Her
sexual freedoms intersect with the relaxation in laws of prostitution,
sex entertainment
and the mainstreaming of pornography. We have no time to spend examining this
terrain in depth, but the phallic girl emblemises the changes which make pornography
socially acceptable. In fact the commercial availability of various forms of soft
pornography again both pitches itself against the spectre of the disapproving or
condemning feminist and at the same time legitimates itself on the basis that the new
pornography involves high levels of female participation and approval. Like so many
other areas of contemporary life it is a matter of personal choice. The feminist is
routinely expected to take a stance against pornography such that this is almost an
institutional role for her left to play as an elderly policewoman.
These technologies are also extended beyond the west to the east and the developing
world.
D.
The global girl marks out a space for the
production of s new subject
position which is also predicated on freedoms inflected so that they respect cultural
differences. Consumer culture develops an image of young women through the
various global editions of a range of magazines, Marie Claire and Elle in China, India
Vogue etc. What is marked in these figurations is an orientalist ‘eagerness to please’
and a ‘readiness to work’. As Spivak comments practices of ‘gender training’ are
focused towards young women who come to occupy a ‘space of attention’ on the part
of western governments whose concerns are about security, and also global capital
looking to ensuring the right quality of off shore labour.
It is on the basis of these technologies that what we could term a new sexual contract
comes to be made available to young women. It is requested that they come forward
as subjects of agency and capacity.
The attention paid, the opportunities provided
come to operate as a substitute for feminism which has been cast into the past.
Governmental and commercial forces intersect to produce a horizon of possibilities
for young women now informed by, even shaped by, former feminist ideals.
Sexuality, access to consumer culture and the gaining of qualifications and thus the
capacity to work define the terms of the sexual contract while political participation is
relegated to a marginal role. Such a contract in effect leaves the gender hierarchies
that exist more or less intact, while women appear to have won a range of freedoms
and entitlements which make the case for a renewed feminism irrelevant or
unconvincing.
Angela McRobbie: “Top Girls? Young women and the sexual contract.”
Lecture for the Harriet Taylor Mill-Institute for Economic and Gender Research at Berlin School of
Economics and Law (08.04.2011)
7
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