Event Details

Gender, Celebrity and Popular Culture Summer School: Doing Feminist Cultural Studies in a Time of Crisis

Our first digital feminist media and cultural studies summer school is a four day postgraduate online course, run by the Centre for Gender & Women’s Studies at Lancaster university. The summer school will be led by Debra Ferreday, Eva Li, Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia and Helen Wood.

Registration is free to Lancaster University students and staff and external applicants, but numbers are limited to 40 participants. To apply, please send a CV and statement of interest to pgsociologyqueries@lancaster.ac.uk.

The application deadline is 5pm on 27th April. Please do not register until advised to do so.

Full Summary

This year’s annual Gender and Women’s Studies summer school takes place at unprecedented times: times that call on us to look at popular culture, and its place in our world, through similar but also different eyes. This year, our planned theme is gender and celebrity. What makes a celebrity? How do celebrities connect with gender politics and to our construction of ourselves as gendered beings? How might we ‘think with’ and ‘against’ celebrities? How would we produce a feminist analysis of celebrity figures, machines and economies? What new questions are ignited by recent celebrity tragedy and questions of mental health? These are some of the questions we are planning to explore. This year, though, we are mindful that the delivery of the course has changed, as part of a wider context in which education, working practices, and everyday life are subject to seismic disruption. This challenges us to think about feminist research and pedagogy in new ways. With this in mind, we are combining the theme of gender and celebrity with the theme of feminist pedagogies and the home as a way of touching upon this new unsettled reality.

This moment of ‘panicgogy’ (Kamenetz 2020) seems to particularly resonate with central themes in feminist pedagogy and research praxis: what does it mean to build feminist community when traditional learning spaces are no longer available? How might feminist critiques of technocentrism shape our understanding of learning technologies? How do we build a learning practice that pays attention to issues of accessibility and inequality, while recognising the multiple responsibilities and pressures we face as co-learners and co-educators? And how can we draw on knowledge from activists, educators and those whose circumstances mean they are already highly skilled in working with the limitations and possibilities offered by digital learning spaces?

This summer school invites you to examine popular culture through a feminist lens, and in doing so to critically explore questions of media production, identity and representation, desire, capitalism and value, visibility, regulation, activism and social and cultural change that are made all the more urgent and visible through the current crisis. Alongside this central theme, we will use this feminist learning space to consider what it means to do feminist pedagogy in these strange times. Currently, there is much discussion about the consequences of the pandemic for research and teaching as we adapt to new ways of working and organising. In progressive spaces, these discussions have focussed not only on technology, but on questions of community, participation and care. As Robin DeRosa writes, ‘we are not building online courses or converting your face to face courses to online learning. Really, what we're doing is we are trying to extend a sense of care to our students and trying to build a community that's going to be able to work together to get through the learning challenges that we have’ (cited in Kamenetz 2020).

Central to these new ways of learning are age-old feminist questions of intimacy, domesticity and home; questions which may be recast in a new light under current times. Indeed, as a new culture of celebrity ‘quarantine diaries’ allows us apparently privileged access to stars’ homes while also enabling the expansion of commodified ‘family brands’, we will reflect on the way and scale in which the intimate space of home/domestic is being revealed online across the globe, across professional sectors and how this might entail a reimagining of our learning environments based on invited transgressions of the home. Questions to be asked include: are we witnessing a re-valuation or re-constitution of the traditionally gendered sphere of the home and social reproduction? What continues to be silenced or excluded? And, how may a feminist critique of housing and home challenge us to think about our relative spaces of embodied and material in/security vis a vis the alarming exacerbation of homelessness and violence against women in COVID-19 times? This will involve thinking relationally about the personal and the public, the on and off line, the material and the emotional, the local, to the national to the global, as well as through the range of hopeful activist responses emerging around the world to some of these transformative issues.

Themes include:

• Celebrity feminism and digital activisms
• Celebs in quarantine: thinking through domestic spectacle
• Queer celebrity and representations of mental distress
• From home: social reproduction in times of crisis
• K-pop, androgyny, and East Asian Soft Masculinity
• Fame whores: illegitimate celebrity, regulation and tragedy