Gender, Words and Power: Meanings of Inequality at a Time of Neo-Liberalism

 

 

Recording

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Abstract

In 2011 the proposed cuts in government spending are likely to have a greater negative impact on women than men. Professor Mary Evans' Centennial lecture explores some of the possible forms of resistance to continuities in various aspects of gendered social inequality.

The vocabulary of feminism in the 1970s invoked ideas about women as 'hidden' and 'oppressed', suggesting identifiable structures of power which exclude or marginalise women.  Forty years on, various re-negotiations have taken place in certain aspects of the social organisation of gender relations and a new vocabulary, drawing on theoretical innovations about the meaning and diversity of gender identity, informs feminist discussion.  From these innovations, new forms of narrative have been created that challenge aspects of an emancipatory reading of feminism and suggest forms of possible feminist engagement across disciplines.

These developments have allowed us to recognise important aspects of individual subjectivity, including, for example, the emotions and the multiple identities that all our lives encompass. But we also live both in a political economy and in forms of politics that maintain social division through all too coercive identities. Within feminist theory intersectionality offers us a form of politics, and political engagement , that is – paradoxically for all its emphasis on difference – a politics of the shared similarity of the diversity of individual human experience. Yet we perhaps have to ask if that form of recognition is sufficient to challenge interests that assume and  reward individualism, and  maintain widespread individual material  inequality as well as a generalised aesthetic of individuality. Inequality it would appear, has now increased  between women.  Without returning to vocabularies and politics that fail to allow the complexity of human lives, this lecture will explore the possibilities of a new political language and forms of politics.

Biography

Mary Evans is a LSE Centennial Professor attached to the Gender Institute from 2010 to 2013. Prior to coming to the LSE as a Visiting Fellow she taught Women's Studies and Sociology at the University of Kent.  In 1992 Mary Evans was made the first Professor of Women's Studies in the UK.

Much of her work has been interdisciplinary and has crossed the boundaries between the Social Sciences and the Humanities.  Professor Evans has longstanding interests in narrative fiction and has written on Jane Austen and Simone de Beauvoir as well as on the genres of auto/biography and (most recently) on detective fiction. In this work her essential concerns are the themes of gender and class and most recently she has become interested in narratives of 'loss' by women who have been upwardly socially mobile.  This theme will form part of a much longer project on the ways in which social class is portrayed and discussed in contemporary Britain, examining the ways in which we 'imagine' both the reality and the relationships of class, how these perceptions are gendered and how they inform the politics of inequality.

A final (and continuing) strand to her work is that of the impact of gender in the academy.  She has has written about the general constraints on contemporary British academics (and the pressures of the changing relationships between the state and the universities) but it is the gender divisions within universities – and the gendered tensions around the definition, choice and judgement of subject matter - that is of particular interest.

Professor Evans is also working (with Barbara Einhorn) on a book on Gender, Religion and the State which will examine some of the ways in which 'the body' and in particular the female body is a central concern of the state and international politics.  She has just completed an edition (with Kathy Davis) entitled Transatlantic Conversations in which feminists discuss the ways in which they encountered the diverse feminisms of Europe and North America.