feminist blogs in english

Sorry for the lack of posts! I’ve been sick, and will post like mad as soon as I’m feeling better (tomorrow, hopefully!).

-Lucy

Jess Fogarty

(photo by Jaqueline Jane)

I always wanted to be in a band.

When I was 14 or 15, my mother bought me a bass and I taught myself how to play. Why a bass and not lead guitar or a drumkit? Because all of the best bands (the ones I loved at the time, at least) had female bass players. At the time I had bleached platinum hair and wore a lot of black lace and combat boots and I really, really wanted to be D’arcy Wretzy from The Smashing Pumpkins – a woman with the power to stand up to the legendary ego of Billy Corgan.

Earlier that year, I’d taught myself a whole heap of easy skate punk tunes and tried to convince my friends to start an all-girl punkrock band. We’d be awesome, and there wasn’t really anything that I’d seen like that around. I mean, sure, there was the Riot Grrl movement (KATHLEEN HANNA!) but the music we listened to was all male-dominated, singing about blowjobs and girls (thanks, Blink 182). Alas, whilst I spent my post-homework evenings trying to write songs, the other girls spent their time chatting online to their latest crushes.

Fast-forward about five years. I was 19, at the Hydey watching my friends debut their band on a bill with another friend’s band. During the in-between I’d gotten an acoustic guitar and taught myself how to play chords (our uni parties invariably involved drunken singalongs accompanied by piano and guitar), and also how to play Nine Inch Nails songs on piano. I turned to my friends and said “I want to do this. I really want to be in a band.”

One of my friends turned around and said ‘What do you play? Our bassist wants to play keys, so we’re looking for a bass player.” I replied with the standard: “I’m not that good, I taught myself”-self-deprecating answer and we arranged a practice – which led to me becoming (as I would refer to it) the ‘cliché-female-bass-player’ in an otherwise all-male band.

The first few months were strange. The boys had been playing together for so long, that it was a bit like being the new kid at school, even though I already knew them. The band already had so many songs and I just kept quiet and learned them and didn’t really offer any creative input, but as I became more comfortable with the boys, I began to change parts (the bassline on ‘Noise Pop Band’ being a particular victory that set me against Jim, our singer-songwriter, but with the other boys saying “Jim, that sounds awesome, you can change your part to make Jess’s bassline work!”).

I finally stopped feeling like a girl who’d accidentally joined a boy’s club.
Our first gig was a Campus Bands competition at Curtin University. Out of the thirty-ish musicians in the six bands playing, I was the only girl. And I felt that. Being onstage as the only female, not only in your own band, but in every band on the bill - you feel like you’re being judged because of your gender. I’ve heard people say that “having a girl in the band” is a good thing. The reason has nothing to do with subverting the paradigm that males make superior rock stars, or showing that gender has no effect on a person’s ability to rock-out, or that the woman in question might be amazingly talented. No, the main reason that it’s good to “have a girl in your band” is because “if the band sucks, at least there’s eye candy.”

I remember fretting about what to wear to the gig. Should I emphasise my femininity as a fuck-you to those people who think that girls can’t play instruments? Should I dress in a manner that wouldn’t draw attention to the fact that I was female? I don’t remember my exact decision, but I do remember that my skirt ripped as I got into the car and I had to change my outfit last minute – plain black skirt, black t-shirt and black flats. Looking at the photos, I’m quite definitely female, but not particularly eye-catching.

After a few gigs, I finally became comfortable being “cliché-female-bass-player” and realised that I was actually playing in a band, and I was actually a musician (I kept feeling like someone was going to call me out on the fact that I’m not that good and all the fun would be over – although this probably had more to do with being nervous about playing gigs). As our band established itself a little more, I became confident enough to ask for what I wanted, rather than deferring to the knowledge of the sound techs (invariably cranky aging men who know better than everyone and look at everyone as though they’re annoying small children), and admittedly even used my “feminine wiles” (read: manners) a few times to get some particularly ornery techs on side.

During the year or so that the band played shows, as I became more confident in my skills as a musician, I started to flaunt my femininity. Short dresses, make-up, heels. I even sang and played toy accordion on one song (although, a comment from a friend after one gig which implied that I was intentionally acting cutesy and pretty when singing and playing my accordion never sat well with me). I was told that I was the only person worth watching in the band – not because I was “the girl” but because I was the only person that didn’t stand stock still on stage. And the best praise I’d ever gotten had nothing to do with my gender, but my talent as a musician. There was no barbed comment of “you’re pretty good – for a girl.” One of musicians from one of the bands we used to play with told me that I was the constant in the band. I held everything together when the singer was off-key, or the drummer lost the beat entirely, or whatever else went wrong.

That moment felt like a victory.

A silly quiz from The Guardian to see how informed you are about books published in the past year!

2009: In Books

This week’s question:

Do you call yourself a feminist?

Note: to comment, click the post title and respond on the following page, or click the little blue number next to the gray speech bubble on the upper right hand corner of the post.

Top posts from the past week:

- Is fantasy more accepting of women authors?
- If you want to be a great writer, be a man.
- Veiling and Resistance
- Why write?

Feminist SF is a pretty awesome blog dedicated to women in science fiction.

Who are your favorite female fantasy/sci fi authors?

Mine:

Lois McMaster Bujold

Marion Zimmer Bradley

Ursula K Le Guin

-Lucy

From wikipedia:

“Women’s fiction is an umbrella term for a wide-ranging collection of literary sub-genres that are marketed to female readers, including many mainstream novels, romantic fiction, “chick lit,” and other sub genres.”

According to Susan Elizabeth Phillips, “Women’s Fiction is about women’s empowerment.”

Do you agree?

Some articles claim women’s fiction is any fiction, aimed at women, that centers around a relationship plot. Others believe that women’s fiction is simply any fiction written for women about the lives of women. What do you think?

Upenn hosts an online collection of books by women and information about female authors, some of which is quite difficult to find elsewhere.

From the site:

The Celebration of Women Writers recognizes the contributions of women writers throughout history. Women have written almost every imaginable type of work: novels, poems, letters, biographies, travel books, religious commentaries, histories, economic and scientific works. Our goal is to promote awareness of the breadth and variety of women’s writing.

All too often, works by women, and resources about women writers, are hard to find. We attempt to provide easy access to available on-line information. The Celebration provides a comprehensive listing of links to biographical and bibliographical information about women writers, and complete published books written by women. (See What’s New! for the most recent authors and books added to the listing.)

We are also actively involved in extending those resources. A major focus of the Celebration is the development of on-line editions of older, often rare, out-of-copyright works. We choose works from a range of areas to indicate the variety of interests of women writers. (See “What’s Local!” By Author or By Category for a listing of books and biographical information made available on-line by the Celebration of Women Writers.)

One of the neatest things about this collection is that they have info on women authors (and the texts themselves) from all over the world. It’s pretty interesting!

Check it out.

I really, really love the raging grannies.

Stripping, I thought, wasn't designed to turn me on, a not-really-straight-nor-really-bi pan with a fetish for men in drag and rich voices (so....Tim Curry).


If someone made a striptease designed to arouse me, what would it look like (and I'll allow that notion to entertain you throughout your working day)?

The question of how to arouse straight women through striptease has not been ignored, male striptease does exist, where men perform naked and oiled for the arousal of straight women on hens nights. But the women don't get wet, they laugh. Business deals aren't closed during lap dances and strip joints with male entertainers are rarely 'the local pub'.

I, of course can imagine what a male stripper could do to arouse me, and it involves fishnets, but I don't for a minute imagine the rest of the population shares my tastes. And I find it hard to believe that mens tastes are similarily homogeonous. I do not believe that when men watch a woman take her clothes off in a club, an erection is all they're seeking. And so, the first mistake I made when considering stripping was that its objective was arousal, and arousal only.


Sex work and its position in feminism is a long, bloody, battle ground strewn with arms and legs and hearts of the well-meaning fallen. A battle sex workers themselves are rarely asked to fight.

"The opinion of sex workers is only consulted...when they confirm one or the other postions" (Barton, 2002: 587).

Those postions being Radical (Your work is inherently exploitative and an example of the dominance of the patriachy!) and Sex Radical (We are subverting the patriachy by our engagement in sex work!). Academicaly, these two positions are tearing at each others throats; leaving the sex worker in question standing there on the sidelines, bemused, muted, and waving a feeble hankerchief crying "Stop! O! Stop!". They reduce the agency of the womans body far more than the work itself has been accused of doing.


"When I hear about stuff written by so called feminist allies, it feels as if they are fighting over our bodies" (Barton, 2002: 587).


Radical feminists focus on the disempowering and exploitative incidences in stripping. Sex radicals focus only on the liberating. Both delegitamize the examples of the other. I cannot see how this is productive.


If a stripper feels that a certain incident that occured during her shift was liberating, or empowering, no one else has the right to take that feeling from her, or delegitamize the truth or strength of that feeling.


But these incidents should not act as blanket that covers up or excuses the abusive occurences. I do not believe that strippers should have to "toughen up or get out of the industry". Or that abuse is an occupational hazard. It might be the case, but it shouldnt be accepted, and it shouldnt be the ideal. A stripper should not have to suffer abuse just because shes a stripper.


The seperation between the body performance and a sense of self appears difficult. In an industry which sees the women paid according to the performance and attraction of her body and personality, it is hard to argue against a consequent commoditiastion, and hence objectification, of that body and self (and this commoditastion of self can be seen in almost all performing arts). Strippers enact crippling amounts of emotional labour, and are perhaps paid a compensatory amount.


It is over money that the two Radical and Sex Radical positions also differ. Sex Radicals see the amount earned as a site of liberation, almost exploitative of the men viewing, and paying for the dance, however in this industry, money "goes beyond the means of its purchasing power...", and starts to signify self worth. More powerfully than a salesman who must reach a certain quota, and experiences feelings of increased self esteem when s/he excells, it makes sense that it would be harder for a stripper to seperate the amount of money paid to them and their feelings of self worth, when their body and personality are the earners, rather than a product to which they are not as emotionally attached.


However, these moments, whilst empowering and liberating, are dangerously transient and fragile in nature. I say dangerously, because I imagine the fall from feeling like a goddess to feeling like a whore because of some assholes behaviour must be a sharp one. To ignore one feeling to preface another would be to turn a blind eye to abuse within the industry, or to delegitamize the empowering moments. Neither is fair. Whilst there are rules governing the extent of contact and behaviour, transgression of these rules are common, and like all performance, the performer is incapable of controlling the way in which the performance is recieved. This leaves the performer in a state of frightening vulnerability.

And so, there are two things that still puzzle me.

Status in the community often seems to be attached to how much money you make. Why are strippers constantly at the bottom of the food chain? In an alternate universe, women who deign to show their naked bodies to the public and accept, in some cases, huge amounts of money for doing so, should be hailed as goddesses. Instead they're apparently whores with low self esteem, without any skills other than getting naked for hoards of drunken men. Perhaps a certain element of respect is missing here.

And is there a Gay, Lesbian, Bi, or even straight woman equivalent? To find one would involve figuring out why men invest in the stripping industry, and I would say that alchohol and nudity are only a small part of it. It could be that strippers fill a heterosexual need or insecurity not held by other facets of the community. Maybe.

Stripping and where it sits in my own feminism has puzzled me for a long time. Above is an introduction, and below is a more academic attempt, if you're interested.

Lucy

Barton, Bernadette. 2002. "Dancing on the Mobius Strip: Challenging the Sex War Paradigm" in Gender and Society, 16:5 pp 585-602.

The Sex Wars

According to Bernadette Barton, in her article “Dancing on the Mobius Strip: Challenging The Sex War Paradigm”(2002), the “Sex War” began in 1982 (Barton, 2002: 585), at the Barnard Conference on Women and Sexuality. In the twenty years that have passed since that conference, what has remained a firmly polarized feminist discourse on feminine sexuality and power has used the performing body of the exotic dancer as its standard bearer, and in both position’s fight for dominance, has objectified and reduced the agency of that body almost as effectively as any abusive customer . Barton, borrowing from a concept elucidated by Wendy Chapkis (1997), explains these two polarized positions as ‘Radical’ and “Sex Radical” feminisms. Radical feminists ‘find any kind of sex work, and often even sexuality itself, inherently and irrevocably exploitative within patriachy’ (Barton, 2002: 586), almost to the extent that it attempts to expose ‘deep structures that underlie captivating surfaces...show long standing histories of suffering and sub-ordination’ (Felski, 2006: 73). In direct contrast, “Sex-radical’ feminists ‘theorize sex work as subversive of patriachy’s definition of conventional feminism and...strongly support sex workers right to perform erotic labour’ (Barton, 2002: 586). Both positions ‘assess particular acts as either liberating or oppressive’ (Barton, 2002: 586) . Within this analysis, these acts are gendered, and when employed within these discourses, serve as evidence of an entire genders power or disempowerment within the industry. These examined acts are often both individualized and decontextualized, and as a result highly subjective and easily manipulated, with the “The opinion of sex workers ...only consulted when they confirm one or the other positions” (Barton, 2002: 587). This creates a narrow and inaccurate view of the power mechanisms operating within the industry, a view which either delegitimizes the damage suffered by the dancer, risks entering into an uncritical victim/perpetrator discourse, or exaggerates the agency of one gender over another, whilst ignoring the context in which such power operates. In this circumstance, situating both discourses within a Foucaultian framework serves to illuminate the way in which both feminisms have utilized language to construct two irreconcilable arguments, but also new sites of recontextualized oppression and dominance within the industry.

Barton (2002) attempts to move away from a Radical or Sex Radical discourse by adopting a methodology that “Avoided asking about her (the dancers) career in terms of oppression and empowerment, rather in terms of like and dislike, bad and good experiences...”(Barton, 2002: 589). In her study, she discovered that “depending on when you question a dancer about her feelings about her career, when she begins or later in her career-you are likely to get a different self-assessment of her power or oppression, as what dancers initially experience as pleasurable becomes increasingly fraught with problems”(Barton, 2002: 589). Barton agrees that ‘as the sex radicals articulate, individual women can experience dancing as liberating and rewarding, at least for a while’ (Barton, 2002: 597) , whilst also acknowledging that ‘structurally, dancing is exploitative and destructive to women both as individuals and as a group –supporting a radical feminist analysis’(Barton, 2002: 597). The acknowledgement of the structural implications on the oppressive nature of dancing is important (Barton, 2002: 586), as it has the effect of obscuring the gender of the oppressor, moves away from a style of analysis that focuses on the ‘individual’, and offers a context for the oppression.

Barton (2002) finds abuse and oppression evident both within the ‘structure’ of the operation of a Strip Club itself, and present within the consequences of gender roles in the broader society within which the strip club is operating. An example that serves as evidence of the tension between individual empowerment and disempowerment caused by the structure of the management of the Strip Club and gender norms that operate within society is ‘the number one thing that every dancer appreciates most about dancing...the money’ (Barton, 2002: 589). Barton states that “it is difficult for a woman with less than a high school diploma to make this much money, even a bachelors degree does not guarantee this much income”(Barton, 2002: 589). This wealth is in itself ‘liberating’ (Barton, 2002: 589), but Barton (2002) states that the ‘meaning of money goes beyond its purchasing power’ (Barton, 2002: 589) and is ultimately tied to feelings of self worth. This, however, whilst containing the potential to make the dancer feel empowered, serves as ‘a constant reminder that a woman’s worth in the world is tied to how beautiful and desirable they are...” (Barton, 2002: 594), in ‘a society that still reserves its highest paying and most prestigious jobs for men’ (Barton, 2002: 599). In an industry which sees women paid according to the sexual attraction of her body, it is hard to argue against a consequent commoditisation and hence, an objectification, of the women involved.

However, it is this aspect of the job which serves as a point of contention for Radical and Sex Radical feminists. For Sex Radical feminists, earning money for this reason is not viewed as a site of oppression, but in fact liberating, and almost exploitative of the men viewing, and paying, for the dance. April, a dancer interviewed by Barton (2002), articulates this sense of liberation and power:

“It's a power trip though. It takes hearing how beautiful you are and how sexy you are and just, it takes just taking people's breath away whether they're drunk or not. If you're hearing it 20 times a day, it's slowly healing you and you start to believe it. That's how all of the girls are the same. You see, everybody thinks that girls that dance, they have this very high self-esteem; and they believe that they're beautiful and all that. And that couldn't be further from the truth. It's your other personality there. If you were told 50 times a day that you are the most beautiful woman that person had ever laid eyes on, wouldn't that make you feel better?” (Barton, 2002: 589)

For April, feeling beautiful and sexy are linked to feelings of ‘power’, to ‘feeling better’ and regarded as ‘slowly healing’. However, a ‘discourse of empowerment’ can delegitimize negative experiences in its attempt to emphasis those it views as empowering (Gill, 2008: 34), and ‘over-emphasise its transgressiveness” (Attwood, 2007: 239). While these feelings may in themselves be empowering, they are both fragile and transient in nature. In her conclusion, Barton points out that both Radical and Sex Radical feminists view power, from either standpoint, as static(Barton, 2002: 599). However, the feelings of power experienced, due to their personal nature and intrinsic attachment to self worth, are not static but are capable of being inverted (hence Barton’s analogy of a Mobius strip), and whilst valid as events in their own right cannot be, due to their transient nature, indicative of a dancer’s sexual power. “Many men act as if this is what their paying for: their right to treat naked or near naked women with contempt and abuse”(Barton, 2002: 592). Barton gives an example of the unstable nature of this feeling of power:

“A dancer may feel as if she is queen of the universe when a man tips her $100 for her conversation. The next potential customer, how- ever, may make a nasty comment about the size of her breasts, or stick his tongue down her throat before she has a chance to push him away. On the other end of the spectrum, she may get no attention whatsoever, a rejection that wounds dancers both financially and emotionally.” (Barton, 2002: 598)

Within the dancer/spectator relationship, “women do the approaching rather than men and thus face the possibility of rejection” (Frank, 2003: 65). Whilst there are rules that govern the extent of contact allowed and code of conduct, abuse and transgression of these rules are common and men within the club wield the power to accept or reject the woman’s offer, but more than that, the power to emotionally or physically abuse the woman. The spectator holds the power of interpretation. No matter how empowered the dancer may feel, she is incapable of truly controlling the way in which her performance is received. Katherine Frank, who ‘worked as a stripper to get funding for graduate school and research her PhD dissertation on strip clubs and their patrons’(Jeffreys, 2008: 153), experiences this limit in power, asking “what is the effect of my double agent approach to womanhood on the men who gaze up at me? The hard truth is that I cannot predict or prescribe how my performances will be interpreted” (Jeffreys, 2008: 153).

This power of the customer is considerable. “Customers spit on women, spray beer, and flick cigarettes at them...they are pelted with ice, coins, trash, condoms, room keys, pornography and golf balls...”, dancers reported that customers would “pull women’s hair, yank them by the arm, rip their costumes, and try to pull their costumes off”...they had been “bitten, licked, slapped, punched and pinched”. Customers would “attempt to penetrate women vaginally and anally with fingers, dollar bills and bottles” (Jeffreys, 2008: 163). These are not isolated incidents, at an isolated strip club, but common experiences collated from different dancers working at different strip clubs, in different countries, on different nights. They are incidences that have the potential to (and often do) happen on any given night. The dancers have the power to have the offending patron removed from the club, but not the power to stop the abuse from occurring.

It is from this stand point that Radical feminists argue, and however true or frequent the reports of abuse are, they are still ‘decontextualized’ (Jeffreys, 2008: 158) events isolated within the discourse from the institutions and structures within which they are operating. A ‘decontextualized discourse is inappropriate because entrepreneurs are very organized nationally and internationally, they are not operating simply as individuals’ (Jeffreys, 2008: 158). It is often within ‘the context of huge profits to club owners, of organized crime, and trafficking that women strip in clubs’ (Jeffreys, 2008: 159). In an environment where owners and managers are largely male, and these managers ‘pressure dancers to completely shave their pubic hair, acquire year long tans, and undergo surgical breast augmentation’(Jeffreys, 2008: 159), dancers are disempowered by the appropriation of their bodies by a company as a commodity. And a discourse on the empowering nature of stripping is of course irrelevant when considering incidences of trafficking, which have ‘become a common way of supplying clubs with dancers’(Jeffreys, 2008: 159). These are incidences where women who have entered the industry initially by consent, or by force, are kept there by debt bondage or ‘controlled by threats to themselves or their families’, or ‘deprived of travel documents’ (Jeffreys: 2008, 159).

Strip clubs are sites that are highly gendered. In an environment where the dancers are female, and are at the risk of potential abuse by males who are either in control as managers or as spectators, and are placed in such a position of power by structures within society or within the business, a discourse which views one gender as the oppressor and the other as oppressed is a valid, but narrow, perspective. It is however, not valid to view these incidents of abuse as more legitimate than incidents that feel empowering to the dancer, and it is on this point that Radical and Sex Radical feminists differ so passionately. Each ‘empowering’ or ‘disempowering’ event is considered within a decontextualized, individual framework and both incidents are transient, rather than static in nature. Interpretive studies that investigate these events exist, however no analytical comparative studies were found in the literature regarding the frequency of the ‘empowering’ events in comparison to the ‘disempowering’ occurrences. Taking this into consideration, whilst it is quite valid to comment on the nature of occurrences and the impact the individual events have on the dancer or the spectator, it is not valid to claim that the practice of stripping is disempowering or empowering to a specific gender.

Of the feminists discourses surrounding prostitution, Barton (2002) records one sex workers as saying “it’s like prostitutes are just these bodies who are somehow connected to something evil or something good and on the cutting edge of revolution. They just turn us into symbols” (Barton, 2002: 587). Radical feminists and Sex Radical feminist positions are perhaps so irreconcilable and contentious because as discourses, they fail to accurately represent the full picture of the parties they claim to champion.

A Foucaultian framework explains that a discourse (the production of knowledge through language)(Barker, 2003: 101) is regulatory in nature, in that it dictates not only ‘what can be said under determinate social and cultural conditions but also who can speak, when and where’(Barker, 2003: 101). It is these regulations produced by both feminist discourses that render them ineffective and subject to criticism. Taking Barton’s claim that “The opinion of sex workers is only consulted when they confirm one or the other positions” (Barton, 2002: 587), the experiences of the dancers are regulated within the discourse in such a way that they are only rendered valid when in support of the given discourses political standpoint. Academics can be said to have appropriated this discourse to the extent that they regulate where the sex worker ‘can speak, when and where’, and this is seen by the way in which Radical feminists or Sex Radical feminists emphasise an empowering experience or disempowering experience over the other, ‘regulating’ the way in which the opposing experience is discussed, and thereby rendering it less legitimate. The appropriation of this discourse by academics has recast the dancers as ‘docile bodies’, capable of being ‘subjected, used, transformed and improved’ (Barker, 2002: 587). By the subjection of the dancer’s bodies and subsequent regulation of their experiences, it is unsurprising that both discourses struggle for dominance, as one discourse is produced in such a way as to completely disclude the ideas and politics of the other. Sex Radical feminism dictates simply that the “Pro-stripping line is the correct feminist position” (Jeffreys, 2008: 153), whereas the focus of Radical feminism on abuse and oppression over, and in some cases to the exclusion of, any positive or empowering experiences makes it incapable of including this position uncritically within its discourse. Sex Radical feminism, in its lack of attention to abusive experiences, ‘normalizes’ (Heyes, 2007, pg 100) the abuse within the industry. Both discourses are an example an attempt to exercise power through the ‘discursive production and control of sexuality’ (Howe, 2008, pg 27).

Radical and Sex Radical feminisms consider within their discourses experiences that are both disempowering and empowering for the dancer. However, in their exclusion of the other’s salient points, they fail to accurately represent the lives of the women on whose behalf they claim to speak. A discourse that rejects empowering experiences will attack the very reason the dancer chooses to stay in the industry, whilst a discourse that delegitimizes the horrifying effects of abuse runs the risk of alienating the dancer, and tacitly permits and normalizes the abuse. Therefore a discourse which instead takes into account the context and power structures within which the dancer performs is an inclusive strategy which affords the dancer agency and control in an arena where the power she wields is not static, but transient, fragile, and unstable.

Bibliography

Attwood, Feona. 2007. “Sluts and Riot Grrrls: female identity and sexual agency.’ Journal of Gender Studies. 16:3. Pp 233-247.

Barker, Chris. 2003. Cultural Studies Theory and Practice. London: Sage Publications.

Barton, Bernadette. 2002.“Dancing on the Mobius Strip: Challenging the Sex War Paradigm” in Gender and Society, 16:5 pp 585-602.

Felski, Rita. 2006. “Because its Beautiful”: new feminist perspectives on beauty’ in Feminist Theory. 7 pp 273-282.

Frank, Katherine. 2003. “Just trying to relax: Masculinity, Masculinizing Practices and Strip Club Regulars” in Gender and Sexuality pp 61-75.

Gill, Rosalind. 2008. “Empowerment/Sexism: Figuring Female Sexual Agency in Contemporary Advertising’. Feminism and Psychology. 18:35. Pp. 35-60.

Heyes, Cressida J. 2007. ‘Cosmetic surgery and the televisual makeover’ in Feminist Media Studies. 7:1. pp 17-32.

Howe, Adrian. 2008. ‘Lets talk about sex, baby’. Sex, Violence and Crime: Foucault and the ‘Man’ Question. Oxen: Routledge-Cavendish. Pp 22-53.

Jeffreys, Shiela. 2008. “Keeping Women Down and Out: The Strip Club Boom and Reinforcement of Male Dominance” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 34: 1 pp 151-167.