FEMINISM, CULTURE AND THE INTELLECTUAL PROCESS Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy MICA NAVA BSc (London) University of London Institute of Education September 1990 ABSTRACT This submission to the University of London for a PhD by publication is composed of ten articles published in journals and edited collections between 1980 and 1990. The work covers a wide span chronologically and thematically and for the purpose of this presentation has been divided into four sections. The articles in Section I examine the history and implications of key debates within feminism and were published between 1980 and 1983. An additional piece of the same period, which covers some of the same ground but was written and published in Spanish, is included in the Appendix. The articles in Section II were published between 1982 and 1984 and focus on gender in youth work and schooling. The first piece is an ethnographic study of young women in north London who attended a girls project. The second is a historical analysis of gender difference in youth service provision and the third explores the symbolic meaning of the urban and the domestic in the education of girls. Section III contains two pieces on child sexual abuse. The first, published in 1984, looks at questions of power and policy in the context of a school; the second, published four years later, focuses on the politics of representation. The three articles in Section IV, published since 1987, confirm this movement into cultural analysis and investigate theorisations of consumerism, advertising and identity. The ten articles are linked to each other by the introduction which traces the historical, biographical and conceptual context in which the work was produced and provides a framework in which the intellectual process itself becomes an object of study. The commentary, which explores in greater detail aspects of the production and reception of each piece and highlights key themes, provides an additional connecting thread. CONTENTS Acknowledgements 6 INTRODUCTION: The Production of Intellectual Work 1980-1990 7 Section I FEMINISM 22 Gender and Education Feminist Review No 5 (1980) 23 Comment 33 From Utopian to Scientific Feminism? Early Feminist Critiques of the Family What Is To Be Done About The Family? edited by Lynne Segal, Penguin (1983) 41 Comment 82 Section II YOUTH WORK AND EDUCATION 84 'Everybody's Views Were Just Broadened': A Girls Project and Some Responses to Lesbianism Feminist Review No 10 (1982) 85 Comment 108 Youth Service Provision, Social Order and the Question of Girls Gender and Generation edited by Angela McRobbie and Mica Nava, Macmillan (1984) 119 Comment 149 The Urban, the Domestic and Education for Girls Education and the City edited by Gerald Grace, Routledge and Kegan Paul (1984) 152 Comment 186 Section III CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE 187 Drawing the Line: A Feminist Response to Adult-Child Sexual Relations Gender and Generation edited by Angela McRobbie and Mica Nava, Macmillan (1984) 188 Comment 215 Cleveland and the Press: Outrage and Anxiety in the Reporting of Child Sexual Abuse Feminist Review No 28 (1988) 218 Comment 237 Section IV CONSUMERISM AND ADVERTISING 243 Consumerism and Its Contradictions Cultural Studies Vol 1 No 2 (1987) 244 Comment 252 Discriminating or Duped? Young People as Consumers of Advertising/Art (with Orson Nava) Magazine of Cultural Studies (MOCS) No 1 (1990) 255 Comment 262 Consumerism Reconsidered: Buying and Power (forthcoming) Cultural Studies Vol 5 (1991) 267 Comment 290 AFTERWORD 292 Appendix: 294 Teoria y Politica Feminista: Aspectos de su Desarrollo en Inglaterra desde 1968 Anales del Centro de Alzira de la Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia No 1, Alzira, Spain (1980) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many people have contributed directly and indirectly to the ideas developed in this submission. The helpful comments made by some of these are acknowledged in the endnotes of the published articles. I would also like to thank the following for their support and constructive criticism over the last few years: Sally Alexander, Bob Chase, Catherine Hall, Peter Horne, Alan O'Shea, Bill Schwarz and other colleagues at the Polytechnic of East London; James Donald; Clara Connolly, Helen Crowley, Cora Kaplan, Alison Light, Mary McIntosh, Lynne Segal and other members of the Feminist Review collective; Lesley Caldwell, Pat Dyehouse, Janet Holland, Catherine Kenrick, Maureen McNeil, Sara Rance; Erica Carter, Diana Leonard, Angela McRobbie, Mitra Tabrizian, Sarah Thornton; Gillian Capper, Jake Nava, Jose Nava, Orson Nava, Zadoc Nava, Richard Rudnicki, Ann Weisselberg; Peter Chalk. INTRODUCTION The Production of Intellectual Work 1980-1990 This submission to the University of London for a PhD by Publication is composed of ten articles published between 1980 and 1990. As a form of recognizing intellectual work this is relatively new within academic institutions in Britain and has been introduced somewhat hesitantly and unevenly across the sector in order to give credit to what is increasingly - with the scarcity of official funding and private incomes - a commonplace mode of intellectual production. That is to say articles today are written in the interstices of working and domestic life: in response to the exigencies of teaching, as contributions to continuing theoretical and political debate or as commissioned pieces for thematic collections. The commitment for a piece of sustained scholarly research which addresses at the same time the important theoretical questions of our moment has been increasingly difficult to achieve. Moreover it is work within the academic fields of the social sciences and humanities which has been most afflicted in this respect. The changing form of PhD thesis is thus not only a consequence of fewer grants and more demanding job situations, it is also a contemporary feature of specific disciplines. A contributing factor to this situation may paradoxically be the liveliness of intellectual debate within the fields of social and cultural theory in Britain over the last dozen years and the rapidity of its transformation. Conventional research carried out over a period of four or more years must necessarily suppress an engagement with these transformations if it is to maintain its own internal coherence, whereas shorter articles can be much more immediately responsive to developments and change. They are one of the means by which regular participation in current debates and the Introduction intellectual culture is made possible. These dynamic exchanges, which are reflected in the proliferation of magazines, journals and edited collections of articles, particularly in the areas of feminism and culture, may well militate against the more traditional type of specialised yet isolated work. The new university regulations, therefore, which allow the submission of published articles and thus the recognition of a different kind of work - wider in range and more interventionist - are to be welcomed (1). The intellectual culture to which I refer has its roots in the political upheavals of the late sixties and early seventies, in the student movement, the new left, decolonisation struggles and, not least, the re-emergence of feminism (2). A significant legacy of these new movements and of feminism in particular has been the challenge to the boundaries of formal academic disciplines and to what counts as knowledge, or indeed the 'truth' (3). Knowledge, culture, identity and the complex structuring of power have been central theoretical preoccupations in this scenario. Higher Education, particularly the polytechnic sector, has both contributed and responded to this intellectual flowering with the provision of innovative new degree courses at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences. Based on a recognition of 'the deep cultural coding of the social' (4) these courses integrate spheres of study formerly kept separate - like philosophy, history, literary and media studies, sociology and psychoanalysis - through asking the political questions and applying the critical analyses generated in the first instance by the new movements (5). Although this is an account of certain general historical developments in Britain over the last decades, it is at the same time a snapshot of my own trajectory. My passage - from women's liberation and mature student of sociology at the London School of Economics in 1970, to PhD student (thesis uncompleted) and part- time temporary lecturer in the sociology of education in 1980, to senior lecturer in cultural studies at a London polytechnic and member of the editorial board of Feminist Review today - is both specific and typical of my generation. It provides the context for the articles included here as I shall go on to spell out in greater detail. Introduction Another aspect of the intellectual climate of the last decades which is relevant to the production of my work has been the focus on the personal and the significance of experience. One of the most enduring and influential contributions here has been made by feminism, which has had as a fundamental tenet since the late sixties the politicisation of the personal: the family, relationships, sexuality and the minutiae of everyday life. As Juliet Mitchell put it then: 'Women's Liberation is crucially concerned with that area of politics which is experienced as personal. Women...find that what they thought was an individual dilemma is a social predicament and hence a political problem' (6). A major project of feminism since that