Europe’s austerity fetish and longer term neo-liberal reforms promoted by Big Business, Governments and the EU Commission hurt women disproportionately. Here’s a few facts to illustrate the point. Europe wide The gender pay gap is around 16% It ranges from more than a quarter (27%) in Estonia to around a fiftieth (2%) in Slovenia. The latest figures […]
Posts under ‘Sexual Politics’
Intersectionality and Postmodern Feminism
Feb 27th, 2014 by Phil Burton-Cartledge.We left the last post having worked through the basic conceptualisation of intersectionality. If you can’t be bothered to trudge through its thousand or so words, simply put it is the appreciation of how different oppressions rooted in ostensibly discrete sets of violent (symbolically and physically) social relations can intersect and condition the lives of whole groups of people. […]
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What is “intersectionality” for? And where does it leave class?
Feb 24th, 2014 by Phil Burton-Cartledge.Intersectionality is the study of intersections between different disenfranchised groups or groups of minorities; specifically, the study of the interactions of multiple systems of oppression or discrimination. Julie Burchill wrote this. Paris Lees rejoined with this. Burchill (paraphrased): “intersectionality is about scoring points off multiple oppressions”. Lees (paraphrased): “intersectionality is about respecting difference”. Who’s right? Both of […]
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Celebrity Big Brother: hyper-sexualised link bait, and bloody entertaining
Jan 9th, 2014 by Lucy Reese.So what does this year’s Celebrity Big Brother say about our wider culture? Obviously the recycling of ‘reality’ celebrities like Sam or Luisa or Ollie is very much part of the story – we live in a culture where television spawns these creatures on an almost hourly basis. But what strikes me most is how sexualised the house has become – endless talk about orgies, bisexuality, Luisa plotting to win by cuddling up with Jasmine and Lee playing Casey and Jasmine off against each other. Sex sells – gets tweeted, shared, you name it – something known only too well by Channel Five’s proprietor Richard Desmond who famously cut his publishing teeth on ‘Asian Babes’. Celebrity Big Brother is hyper sexualised link bait – soft porn for the masses.
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Mayoral candidates: a manifesto for London’s women?
Sep 28th, 2013 by Christine Quigley.One of the most interesting fringes at Labour conference was a Demos fringe on London after Boris. Given the speaker list (Andrew Adonis, Tessa Jowell, Sadiq Khan and David Lammy), I was fully expecting it to be the first hustings for London’s Labour Mayoral candidate in 2016. And given the large numbers queuing to enter […]
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Review: Cybersexism by Laurie Penny
Aug 31st, 2013 by Phil Burton-Cartledge.Misogyny. No other word can capture the avalanche of abuse that was heaped upon Caroline Criado-Perez, Stella Creasy, Mary Beard and other women just under a month ago. It was frightening and disturbing. Misogyny, after all, is one of those things official society thought was dealt with in the dim and distant. If women marched […]
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Eddie Shah’s Conceit
Aug 12th, 2013 by Phil Burton-Cartledge.Given Eddie Shah’s anti-union history, I’m quite pleased to see him drag his own name through the mud. But his comments that basically amount to “sometimes, underage girls are gagging for it” still, unfortunately, has wide currency. Let’s get some things out the way. Since Freud, if not before, childhood sexuality has been acknowledged in medicine and psychology […]
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Progress bemoan the plight of men: why we still need privilege checks
Jul 31st, 2013 by Conrad Landin.For those who needed further confirmation that Blairite party-within-a-party Progress has fallen into the realm of self-parody, you need only look to one of the latest gems to appear on the website of the “magazine”. Labour is not listening to rural England, writes Chris Calland. And how better to start the reparations by maximising the […]
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Rape threats, Twitter and masculine crisis
Jul 30th, 2013 by Phil Burton-Cartledge.Caroline Criado-Perez wages a successful campaign to get Jane Austen onto the £10 note and a pledge that, in future, the Bank of England’s designs will better reflect the actual look and shape of British society. A welcome happenstance for everyone who isn’t white, male and posh. But not all. Unfortunately, the bigger story has […]
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Louise Mensch and Conservative Feminism
May 31st, 2013 by Phil Burton-Cartledge.When I was an undergraduate I probably spent more time dosing up on heavy duty social theory than drinking until blindness set in. One module I took was on feminist social theory because, at that time, I was deeply concerned with questions around revolutionary subjectivity and the place socialism had in a fragmenting and media […]
