The secret life of a feminist academic: Heterosexuality, masculinity, shoes and power – POSTPONED

This event is postponed.

Monday 26 February 2018, 4.30pm to 6.30pm

Speaker: Professor Victoria Robinson, Centre for Women’s Studies

The Centre for Women’s Studies Annual Lecture

Victoria’s inaugural lecture traces her intellectual and research passions since the mid 1980’s to the present. She also reflects on how her everyday life over this period has informed and shaped this scholarship, and considers how the interaction of ideas meshes with the changing face of UK higher education, the wider political scene, as well as the messiness and enchantment of the everyday.

The overarching context for this lecture is the radical re-visioning of patriarchal knowledge in the academy, through the establishment of Women’s, Gender and Masculinity Studies. She traces their revolutionary contours from the mid 1980’s to the present, as well as her institutional trajectory as a feminist over this period, to consider why and how her research has been imagined, brought into being and evolved.

In this endeavour, four funded and interrelated qualitative research projects are discussed and re-evaluated. In the first study, through interviews with three generations, heterosexuality was seen as the primary organizing principle of everyday lives and investigated as both a social and sexual category. The second, explored the lives of men and their masculine identities as firefighters, estate agents and hairdressers, as they move across and between public and domestic spaces and asked what is the nature of contemporary masculinity. The third, was the first in-depth study of rock climbing in the UK, where she explored what this ‘extreme’ sport revealed about the construction and performance of masculinities, and the relationship between everyday masculinity and the pursuit of the extraordinary. Lastly, footwear within contemporary processes of identity formation was explored through the perceptions, experiences and memories of shoes among women and men in the North of England. A fundamental issue explored here was the idea of transformation and how this changes every day experiences from the ordinary to the magical.

Location: The Treehouse, Berrick Saul building

Admission: is by free ticket only. Please book below.