Miss Melissa Gregg
Melissa writes in the Department of Gender Studies and her PhD looks at resources for political intervention offered in the history of cultural studies, with an eye for unsettling the developmental or linear perspective that attends histories of the field. These arguments are evidenced in her "Remnants of Humanism" published in 'Continuum', Vol 16, 3 and "A Neglected History: Richard Hoggart's Discourse of Empathy" forthcoming in 'Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice', Vol 7, 3.
Five Bonds T-shirts from K-Mart
In her treatise on 'Banality in Cultural Studies' some 15 years ago, Meaghan Morris claimed that "the term 'production' in cultural theory has atrophied instead of being re-theorized." Her point was that our means of appreciating the politics of the everyday had become too reliant on providing instances of 'agency' and 'resistance' - a legacy of some of the less engaging British Cultural Studies of the 80s - and perilously disinterested in the effects of changing economic trends on particularly women's quotidian experience. Revisiting another of her classic essays of the period, 'Things to do with Shopping Centres,' this paper draws out Morris' canny critique of a complacent cultural studies, and by extension, a lazy left, which in its habitual rules of genre ('signify optimism here') can lose the complexity of a more situated and sustained analysis. Through Morris' reading of shopping town aesthetics, I want to draw attention to the more mundane side of fashion: the irrelevance of agency in the sometimes claustrophobic routes of neo-liberal suburbia, and by contrast, the forgetful cycles of an overly urban-centred leftist cultural critique.
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