Madonna: like a crone

For female pop stars, whose star bodies and performances are undisputedly the objects of a sexualized external gaze, the process of ageing in public poses particular challenges. This chapter explores the strategies used by Madonna to destabilise the compelling weight of expectations around ageing by employing resistance through persona re-invention and postmodern intertextuality. It also examines whether older women can compete in an ageist industry, or whether they should redefine it on their own terms

Can I have a taste of your ice cream?

This article will explore the gender politics of Post Punk in Leeds in the early '80s. It links the brutalist architecture of the university (now listed buildings), with the rigorous sound of Gang of Four and Delta 5, and how that reflected the austere mood of the late '70s/early '80s. It will also look at how radical feminism flourished in a post-industrial city affected by the National Front, the Yorkshire Ripper and an aggressive male culture, and how it found a soundtrack in female Post Punk bands like Delta 5 and the Au Pairs

PJ Harvey records a new album in public

Rock artist PJ Harvey set up a studio in Somerset House for her album The Hope Six Demolition Project for a four-week period during January and February 2015, and the public came in to view the recording process in real time. This article is about the effectiveness of 'Recording In Progress' as a live art installation. Is it possible to record an album while the public watches? And how does the audience become part of the creative process

Solipsism and Self-Reference

Articl

Madonna: like an icon

2nd edition with a new introduction, two new chapters and updated content

Self Matters

We argue that relating to myself as me provides, as such, a reason to care about myself: grasping that an event involves me, instead of another, makes it matter in a special way. Further, this self-concern is not simply a matter of seeing in myself some instrumental value for other ends. We use as our foil a recent skeptical challenge to this view offered in Setiya (2015). We think the case against self-concern is powered by unwarrantedly narrow construals of three key notions. One is the notion of a first-personal way of relating to oneself. A narrow account of the first person in terms of special epistemic relations to oneself makes it easy to overlook a source of non-instrumental reasons of self-concern, located in the special relation a subject has to herself as agent. Two is the notion of what it is to be a reason. And three is the notion of self-concern itself. We show that the skeptical case rests in part on a slide towards neighbouring but distinct notions of egoism and selfishness. We also argue that Setiya’s notion of self-love, offered to capture the pre-theoretical intuition of self-concern, cannot do it justice