Thursday, April 28

66 W 12th Street, 6:00-7:15pm,

Room 512 (Klein Conference Room)

GENDERING THE RECESSION

DIANE NEGRA

Professor and Department Head, Film Studies and Screen Culture, University College Dublin

The post-boom period is certainly a complex one, involving competing discourses of anger, nostalgia, denial and loss and it seems clear that the global recession is ushering in new representational protocols that extend and sometimes re-calibrate the cultural logics of postfeminism.  Examinations of media flashpoints and emergent or resurgent tropes and subgenres gives a sense of this complexity and in this talk I consider some of the ways that media forms and popular culture in general are responding to the uncertain citizenship of this period.  In particular, I focus on the ways that recessionary culture is inflecting, intensifying and altering postfeminism in ways that are still under formation.

Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture and Head of Film Studies at University College Dublin.  She is the author, editor or co-editor of seven books including What a Girl Wants?: Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (2008), Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (2007) and In the Limelight and Under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity, which will be published in March.