Angela McRobbie: Feminism, Culture, Politics (part 1)

Well, firstly, Angela McRobbie is a very famous and very influential sociologist and scholar of media culture, who since the 1970s has really been a key figure in developing feminist approaches to the study of popular culture, the study of media culture, and the study of the creative industries.

Her work comes out of the same cultural studies tradition as people like Stuart Hall and John Clarke, And I think her work is quite notable for often wanting to integrate some of the most recent developments in theory and even philosophy with an approach which is always paying attention to developments at the level of economics and politics.

And I think that makes the work always compelling and always interesting.

So Angela first made her reputation in the 1970s when she was still a PhD researcher, really, at the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies.

And the thing she first became really famous for was...

this work about girls' magazines and girls' media, a kind of girls' position within popular culture at the time.

So she was writing about things like Jackie magazine, which was a famous, very popular girls' photo comic at the time.

She famously wrote about, she was one of the people, she wasn't the only person, I think she was the first person, But she was one of the people writing about the ways in which most girls' media at that time really emphasised a kind of very conservative ideology, according to which the ambition for all teenage girls was essentially to get married and become a housewife as soon as humanly possible.

And even kind of sexual desire and kind of romantic feelings towards other people was largely mediated through that kind of fantasy.

And as I say in the interview, I first encountered that word when I was starting to study sociology at the end of high school and really found it very compelling because it seemed to be such an accurate and meaningful description of elements of the culture I'd been being exposed to for most of my life, having two younger sisters.

OK, the first thing we talk about in the interview is this recently published book by Angela called Feminism, Young Women and Cultural Studies.

And as she explains in the interview, the first few chapters of that book are actually sort of their reflections on some of these classic essays for which he's become so famous.

And they're sort of updates of them.

So it's a very interesting procedure.

Actually, in the interview, Angela keeps referring to four chapters.

I think there's actually five chapters, five of these.

I think one of them... is less directly tied to an earlier classic essay than the others.

But either way, they're really very sort of interesting.

The first one is called The Contemporary Field of Feminism for Girls, and she looks at the way ideas about what kind of feminist or anti-feminist culture are appropriate for women really for women for young women in their teens and have changed ideas about that have changed over the past few decades uh the second chapter is called the girls and women's magazine a disappearing genre question mark and she talks about well what's happened to the idea of the magazine in the age of the internet and it's very interesting to think about this because really Yeah, one of the things that the internet has done is it killed the idea of the print magazine as really one of the major forms of popular print media.

And I think you can think about the ways in which today, you know, it's sites like Instagram, which really fulfill the function of basically telling, especially young girls, especially young women today, sort of what kind of a person they're supposed to be in the world today well but before that it was quite easy to say that the primary medium which served that kind of function was the magazine so angelo looks at that stuff The third chapter is called Youth Cultures from Street Corner Society to Studentification? Which is very interesting.

And again, it's really looking at the way in which the assumptions about what the site of youth culture actually is or the site that it are have shifted so much over the past 50 years.

from a situation in which it was largely assumed that youth culture was something happening out in the physical world, in the streets, in youth clubs, at local music venues, to a situation in which increasingly youth culture happens online, happens in people's bedrooms, happens in private spaces.

But of course, Angela was one of the people first pointing out, even in the 1970s, that for girls, it was always the case that the places where their culture happened was often more at home than out on the streets, where boys were supposed to be kicking footballs around, getting into gang fights or forming bands.

Of course, the place who actually formed bands was also at home, in the garage, being a garage band.

And that kind of fetishization of the street was always sort of a bit romantic and a bit problematic, even in the 70s.