A Mcrobbie
Biographic Data
| ID | 14649 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Mcrobbie |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcrobbie |
| SIGNATURE | MCROBBIE A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Goldsmiths University of London |
| ORCID | 0009-0005-6443-825X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 72 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1636 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 72 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
On phantasms of gender: A feminist cultural studies perspective
This article provides a response to Judith Butler’s recent book Who’s Afraid of Gender? making the case for the volume as a key contribution to feminist cultural studies, an exemplary pedagogic text, close to Stuart Hall’s style of writing. The book works as a counter to the anti-gender currents which have demonised genderqueer and trans people through the unleashing of populist sentiments securing these to a right-wing agenda. The article draws …
Emergency thinking
Lyndsey Stonebridge, We Can Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience, Jonathan Cape 2024
No such thing as peacetime: Notes on Gaza, Hannah Arendt and cultural studies
This comment piece, prompted by the ongoing conflict in Gaza and the terrible toll of lives of Gazan people following the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, argues that the field of cultural studies has its origins in a notion of post-war peacetime and that this has created a vocabulary deficit in regard to war, genocide and state violence. Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall have confronted patterns of violence in regard to the urban environment …
From rag market to creative economy: Interview with Angela McRobbie
In this interview, Angela McRobbie reflects on her intellectual and professional trajectory from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, amid her associations with Stuart Hall and the emerging cultural economy agenda at the Open University. The interview expands on, and incorporates elements from, her contribution to a 2020 workshop marking two decades since Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke convened a ‘Workshop on Cultural Economy’ at the OU in Milton Key…
Introduction to February’s Theme: Covid Refigurations
The pandemic gave us a vision of how society might be refigured, but was it merely wishful thinking? Angela McRobbie, Emma Jackson and Priya Sharma on urban regeneration, public spaces and economies, social institutions and media, post-Covid
Stuart Hall, a peerless mediator
The authors discuss Stuart Hall's lifelong critical engagement with Marxism - though his was a complex, subtle, agonistic, Marxism, where nothing is taken for granted. This engagement continued even as postcoloniality, ethnicity, race and identity steadily came to the centre of Hall's attention, constituting ways of thinking that in some ways represented a departure. Hall can be seen as a mediator, both within Marxism - for example structuralism …
Beyond anti-welfarism and feminist social media mud-slinging: Jo Littler interviews Angela McRobbie
In this wide-ranging interview, which took place in spring 2021, Angela McRobbie talks about her work in relation to social politics, the contemporary conjuncture, cultural studies, decolonisation and feminism. Beginning with a discussion on her experience of Covid, it contextualises these reflections through a discussion of anti-welfarism and the scapegoating of dependency, drawing from her new book Feminism and the Politics of Resilience. It mo…
History, language, time
Inside the socialist nursery: Welfare maternity and the writing of Denise Riley
This article considers Denise Riley's contribution to a feminist history of the British welfare state apparatus, with a focus on maternity and reproduction. Drawing attention to the inter-locking of historical method with the emergence of feminist theory, the article comments on the importance and originality of this encounter. There is also an abbreviated attempt to convey a line of argument subsequent to Riley's early work, with reference to th…
Overview on a grounded précarité
In this interview with Angela McRobbie, the author, who is a specialist in creative labor, traces the path which led her to contribute introduce into cultural studies the elaborations – notably from France and Italy – of the notion of precariousness. This scientific and epistemological trajectory shows the importance of the international circulation of the notion of precariousness, but also the limits of notions that claim to be inclusive and may…
Feminism and the Politics of Creative Labour: Fashion Micro-enterprises in London, Berlin and Milan
This article makes the case for fashion – as part of the creative industries and a major employer of women, as well as a significant space for self-organised work – to attract more sustained attention from feminist scholars in order to develop a stronger policy lobby for the sector with priority given to quality livelihoods. Drawing on interviews and observations carried out within the course of a three-year study which investigated working lives…
Stuart Hall: Art and the Politics of Black Cultural Production
This article makes three specific and interrelated arguments. First, it argues that the power of Stuart Hall's pedagogy can be understood as having established a "third space" between political activism and academic research, a space that in the 1970s and early 1980s permitted the development of British cultural studies as an anti-elitist, theoretically informed approach to the field of culture, in particular popular culture. Second, I propose th…
Towards a Sociology of Fashion Micro-Enterprises: Methods for Creative Economy Research
This article argues that the emerging field of creative industry studies, for reasons of its inter-disciplinary origins, has tended to sidestep questions of method. Sociology can play a role in rectifying this deficit for three reasons; first, the long-standing attention to qualitative, interview and observation-based research is useful, especially for scholars investigating the experience of work and labour in the creative sector, second because…
Notes on the Perfect: Competitive Femininity in Neoliberal Times
This article argues that at a point in time when feminism (in a variety of its forms) has re-entered political culture and civil society, there is, as though to hold this threat of new feminism at bay, an amplification of control of women, mostly by corporeal means, so as to ensure the maintenance of existing power relations. However the importance of ensuring male dominance is carefully disguised through the dispositif which takes the form of fe…
In the Culture Society: Art, Fashion and Popular Music
How do different artistic and cultural practices develop in the contemporary consumer culture? Providing a new direction in cultural studies as well as a vigorous defence of the field, Angela McRobbie's new collection of essays considers the social consequences of cultural proliferation and the social basis of aesthetic innovation.In the wake of postmodernism, McRobbie offers a more grounded and even localised account of key cultural practices, f…
Fashion matters Berlin; city-spaces, women's working lives, new social enterprise
Available, well-positioned urban space at relatively low cost has permitted the growth of a lively small-scale and independent fashion sector in Berlin, mostly female-led. These shops, workshops, boutiques and 'ateliers' have also benefited from support in the form of reduced rents for business start-ups (Zwischennutzung) and other provisions which encourage job creation and self-employment. Within and alongside the imperative to self-organise ac…
Angela McRobbie Interviews Herself: How did it happen, how did I get there
Feminism and the New ›Mediated‹ Maternalism: Human Capital at Home
The article focuses on maternity in the new bio-politics of the family. The work "The Anti-Social Family" is considered as an instructive material as it also discusses the oppressive aspects of domesticity and the tyranny of maternity as well as the exclusion of lesbian women who had few possibilities for maternity. The author says the post-feministry view of maternity puts young mothers in a field of anxieties caused by the promise of perfection
A Good Job Well Done: Richard Sennett and the Politics of Creative Labour
Reflections On Feminism, Immaterial Labour And The Post-Fordist Regime
In the many articles and books written in recent years on the topic of precarious labour, immaterial and affective labour, all of which are understood within the overarching frame of post-Fordist regimes of production, there is a failure to foreground gender, or indeed to knit gender and ethnicity into prevailing concerns with class and class struggle.I seek to rectify this by interrogating some of the influential work in this terrain.I draw atte…
Unveiling France's Border Strategies: Gender and the politics of the headscarf ban
This essay examines some of the issues at stake in the foregrounding in France of the teenage Muslim girl wearing what has come to be known, in common parlance, as a “headscarf.” In particular, the
Girls and subcultures
Making a living in London’s small-scale creative sector
Top Girls
Cultural Studies: Genèse, objets, traductions
Né en Angleterre dans les années soixante, le courant de recherche des Cultural Studies invite à questionner la notion de culture dans toutes ses dimensions. Attentives aux cultures populaires, aux « subculturesé » et à la réception des médias de masse, résolument transdisciplinaires, les Cultural Studies ont ouvert de multiples champs d'étude : genre, génération, fans, queer, postcolonialisme... Quel que soit leur objet, elles s'attachent à mett…
Post‐feminism and popular culture
Top Girls: Young Women and the Post-Feminist Sexual Contract1
This article argues that, particularly in the last decade, an address by government to young women in the 'advanced democracies' of the west, and in this case in the UK, entails the provision of what might be understood as a new sexual contract. In the post-feminist guise of equality, as though it is already achieved, young women are attributed with capacity. They are urged to become hyper-active across three key sites where their new found visib…
Notes on the Perfect: Competitive Femininity in Neoliberal Times
This article argues that at a point in time when feminism (in a variety of its forms) has re-entered political culture and civil society, there is, as though to hold this threat of new feminism at bay, an amplification of control of women, mostly by corporeal means, so as to ensure the maintenance of existing power relations. However the importance of ensuring male dominance is carefully disguised through the dispositif which takes the form of fe…
Rethinking 'Moral Panic' for Multi-Mediated Social Worlds
It is now over twenty years since the well-established sociology of deviance along with the emergent sociology of mass media produced the concept of 'moral panic'. The various studies of youth culture, drugtakers and the media reaction to these and other phenomena produced some of the most important work in post-war British sociology. This article argues that it is now time that every stage in the process of constructing a moral panic, as well as…
Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded Up Creative Worlds
This article proposes a recent acceleration in the nature and pace of work and employment in the UK culture industries. Multi-skilling and de-specialization are a result of growth, change and competition in the arts and media sector. Creative work increasingly follows the neo-liberal model, governed by the values of entrepreneurialism, individualization and reliance on commercial sponsorship. One consequence for the relatively youthful workforce …
Notes on ‘What Not to Wear’ and Post-Feminist Symbolic Violence
meeting ground for mainstream social theory and contemporary feminist theory. Brings feminist theory face to face with Pierre Bourdieu s social theory. Demonstrates how much Bourdieu s theory has to offer to contemporary feminism. Comprises a series of contributions from key contemporary feminist thinkers. Defines new territories for feminist theorizing. Transforms and advances Bourdieu s social and cultural theory
The Politics of Feminist Research: Between Talk, Text and Action
For feminists engaged in research; historical, anthropological, literary, sociological or otherwise, there is really no problem about answering the question, ‘who do we do feminist research for?’ Yet to state simply ‘for women’, is to obscure a whole range of issues which invariably rise to the surface in the course of a research project. Exactly how these issues are handled plays an important part in shaping the entire research procedure. That i…
Young Women and Consumer Culture: An Intervention
This article is presented as an intervention in the field of feminist media and cultural studies with particular reference to consumer culture. It is concerned with the seeming evasion of critique which can be detected in a number of recent feminist responses to the way in which modalities of ‘popular feminism’ have found themselves incorporated into women's genres of television, such as, in particular, the US series Sex in the City. This usage o…
Shut up and dance: Youth culture and changing modes of femininity
also in Youth: Nordic Journal of Youth Research and translated into Italian for Annali dell Instituto Gramsci
A Mixed Bag of Misfortunes: Bourdieu's Weight of the World
En se penchant sur les interviews restitues dans La misere du monde par Pierre Bourdieu et son equipe, l'A. en deplore le manque de contextualisation socioculturelle. En effet, selon lui, cette approche nuit au projet affiche de rendre la parole a ceux qui en sont prives, en ne mettant en avant que les elements de privation et de souffrance sociale
Feminism and the Third Way
This article argues that the Third Way', as the ideological rationale for the New Labour Government in the UK, attempts to resolve the tensions around women and social policy confronted by the present Government. The Third Way addresses 'women' without 'feminism', in particular those floating women voters for whom feminism holds little attraction. But affluent, middle England, corporate women, though central to the popular imagination of the Dail…
Postmodernism and Popular Culture
Postmodernism and Popular Culture brings together eleven recent essays by Angela McRobbie in a collection which deals with the issues which have dominated cultural studies over the last ten years.A key theme is the notion of postmodernity as a space for social change and political potential. McRobbie explores everyday life as a site of immense social and psychic complexity to which she argues that cultural studies scholars must return through eth…
Bridging the Gap: Feminism, Fashion and Consumption
The article confronts two issues, first the question of women and consumption and second the fashion industry as a feminized sector. In the first instance the argument is that recent scholarship on consumption has been weakened by an inattention to questions of exclusion from consumption and the production of consumption. Income differentials as well as questions of poverty have dropped off the agenda in this debate. Attention instead has been pa…
Fashion Culture: Creative Work, Female Individualization
This article explores some of the key dynamics of the UK fashion sector as an example of a post-industrial, urban based, cultural economy comprising of a largely youthful female workforce. It argues that the small scale, independent activities which formed the backbone of the success of British fashion design as an internationally recognized phenomenon from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s, represented a form of female self-generated work giving ri…
Towards a Sociology of Fashion Micro-Enterprises: Methods for Creative Economy Research
This article argues that the emerging field of creative industry studies, for reasons of its inter-disciplinary origins, has tended to sidestep questions of method. Sociology can play a role in rectifying this deficit for three reasons; first, the long-standing attention to qualitative, interview and observation-based research is useful, especially for scholars investigating the experience of work and labour in the creative sector, second because…
Feminism, Postmodernism and the Real Me
Mothers and Fathers, Who Needs Them
What follows in this review essay of Antigone's Claim:kinship between life and death by Judith Butler is a deliberately wide-ranging, even loose, reading of the text, for the very reason that this short book (three lectures given for the prestigious Wellek annual lectures at University of California, Irvine) points to the need for far-reaching feminist re-attention to questions of family and kinship in contemporary political culture (Butler, 2000…
Shut up and dance: Youth culture and changing modes of femininity
also in Youth: Nordic Journal of Youth Research and translated into Italian for Annali dell Instituto Gramsci
Feminism and the New ›Mediated‹ Maternalism: Human Capital at Home
The article focuses on maternity in the new bio-politics of the family. The work "The Anti-Social Family" is considered as an instructive material as it also discusses the oppressive aspects of domesticity and the tyranny of maternity as well as the exclusion of lesbian women who had few possibilities for maternity. The author says the post-feministry view of maternity puts young mothers in a field of anxieties caused by the promise of perfection
Folk Devils Fight Back
The current set of moral panics being orchestrated by the Conservative government surfaced early in February 1993 with the death of two-year-old James Bulger. The flurry of debate which followed revolved around the breakdown of the family, the growth of crimes committed by children, and the powerlessness of
All the world's a stage, screen or magazine: When culture is the logic of late capitalism
The Modernist Style of Susan Sontag
Situating Sontag Who is Susan Sontag? Feminist and cultural analysis today suggests that we scrutinize the image, examine the photograph on the book jacket, in order that we can make some putative connexion between the woman and the work. Sontag has done this herself, in her well-known essay on Walter Benjamin, 'Under the sign of Saturn', where she fondly compares the photographic image of Benjamin as a younger man ('the downward look through his…
Feminism and the Politics of Creative Labour: Fashion Micro-enterprises in London, Berlin and Milan
This article makes the case for fashion – as part of the creative industries and a major employer of women, as well as a significant space for self-organised work – to attract more sustained attention from feminist scholars in order to develop a stronger policy lobby for the sector with priority given to quality livelihoods. Drawing on interviews and observations carried out within the course of a three-year study which investigated working lives…
Stuart Hall: Art and the Politics of Black Cultural Production
This article makes three specific and interrelated arguments. First, it argues that the power of Stuart Hall's pedagogy can be understood as having established a "third space" between political activism and academic research, a space that in the 1970s and early 1980s permitted the development of British cultural studies as an anti-elitist, theoretically informed approach to the field of culture, in particular popular culture. Second, I propose th…
Unveiling France's Border Strategies: Gender and the politics of the headscarf ban
This essay examines some of the issues at stake in the foregrounding in France of the teenage Muslim girl wearing what has come to be known, in common parlance, as a “headscarf.” In particular, the
The Politics of Feminist Research: Between Talk, Text and Action
For feminists engaged in research; historical, anthropological, literary, sociological or otherwise, there is really no problem about answering the question, ‘who do we do feminist research for?’ Yet to state simply ‘for women’, is to obscure a whole range of issues which invariably rise to the surface in the course of a research project. Exactly how these issues are handled plays an important part in shaping the entire research procedure. That i…
All That Is Solid Melts into Air
Postrnodernism and Popular Culture
Rather than stariing with a definition of postmoderuism as referring either to a condition of contemporary life, or a textual, aesthetic practice, I want to begin by suggesting that the recent debates on postmodernism possess both a positive attraction and a usefulness to the analyst of popular culture. This is because they offer a wider, and more dynamic, understanding of contemporary representation than other accounts to date. Unlike the variou…
The politics of race
An Interview with Juliet Mitchell
Angela McRobbie: I would like to begin with a question which I’m sure you’ve been asked before. What led you to Freud in the first place—how would you describe the political and cultural route you followed
New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s
Entrevista con Juliet Mitchell
Entrevista con Juliet Mitchell
Feminism and Youth Culture: From 'Jackie' to 'Just seventeen'
Feminism and Youth Culture collects together eight separate essays on female youth culture written by Angela McRobbie over a period of almost 13 years. Topics include the changing place of romance in
Patricia Mellencamp, Indiscretions: Avant-Garde Film, Video and Feminism
Journal Article Patricia Mellencamp, Indiscretions: Avant-Garde Film, Video and Feminism Get access Patricia Mellencamp, Indiscretions: Avant-Garde Film, Video and Feminism (Theories of Contemporary Culture Series). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990, 234pp. Angela McRobbie Angela McRobbie Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 32, Issue 3, Autumn 1991, Pages 345–349, http…
The Modernist Style of Susan Sontag
Situating Sontag Who is Susan Sontag? Feminist and cultural analysis today suggests that we scrutinize the image, examine the photograph on the book jacket, in order that we can make some putative connexion between the woman and the work. Sontag has done this herself, in her well-known essay on Walter Benjamin, 'Under the sign of Saturn', where she fondly compares the photographic image of Benjamin as a younger man ('the downward look through his…
Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen
The Passagenwerk and the place of Walter Benjamin in cultural studies: Benjamin, cultural studies, Marxist theories of art
(1992). The Passagenwerk and the place of Walter Benjamin in cultural studies: Benjamin, cultural studies, Marxist theories of art. Cultural Studies: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 147-169
Cultural Studies for the 1990s
This article engages with the future of cultural studies as an interdisciplinary field. First, there are what could be perceived as some of the costs of gaining academic respectability. While it is gratifying to see so many universities developing cultural studies programmes, there is also the danger that this critical and sometimes ‘undisciplined’ area of study will lose the social and political urgency of the early work. Second, there is the im…
Shut up and dance: Youth culture and changing modes of femininity
also in Youth: Nordic Journal of Youth Research and translated into Italian for Annali dell Instituto Gramsci
Feminism, Postmodernism and the Real Me
Shut up and dance: Youth culture and changing modes of femininity
also in Youth: Nordic Journal of Youth Research and translated into Italian for Annali dell Instituto Gramsci
Folk Devils Fight Back
The current set of moral panics being orchestrated by the Conservative government surfaced early in February 1993 with the death of two-year-old James Bulger. The flurry of debate which followed revolved around the breakdown of the family, the growth of crimes committed by children, and the powerlessness of
Recent rhythms of sex and race in popular music
Rethinking 'Moral Panic' for Multi-Mediated Social Worlds
It is now over twenty years since the well-established sociology of deviance along with the emergent sociology of mass media produced the concept of 'moral panic'. The various studies of youth culture, drugtakers and the media reaction to these and other phenomena produced some of the most important work in post-war British sociology. This article argues that it is now time that every stage in the process of constructing a moral panic, as well as…
Catholic Glasgow: A Map of the City
Journal Article Catholic Glasgow: a Map of the City Get access Angela McRobbie Angela McRobbie Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar History Workshop Journal, Volume 40, Issue 1, AUTUMN 1995, Pages 173–180, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/40.1.173 Published: 01 October 1995
All the world's a stage, screen or magazine: When culture is the logic of late capitalism
Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Cultural History
Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance
Markets, margins and migrants
Dance Narratives and Fantasies of Achievement
Sociology (61 works) · Gender Studies (33 works) · Political science (32 works) · Art (27 works) · Law (27 works) · Feminism (24 works) · Politics (20 works) · Cultural Industries and Urban Development (17 works) · Aesthetics (14 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (14 works)