Feminist Encounters with Evolutionary Psychology

This Section of Australian Feminist Studies is the product of an event that took place at King’s College London in January 2015, hosted as part of the UK-based ‘Critical Sexology’ seminar series. Participants at this event – feminist scholars working across the fields of lin- guistics, cultural studies, sociology, and psychology – were invited to reflect on their encounters with evolutionary psychology (EP). As the event organiser, I was interested to prompt a discussion about how EP shapes the contours of contemporary feminist scholarship, insofar as arguments from EP are something feminist scholars continually find ourselves coming across and coming up against both within and outside the academy. Conversely, I was interested in thinking about how encounters with EP might illuminate certain limit-points in contemporary feminist theorising

By, for, with women? On the politics and potentialities of wellness entrepreneurship

Based in original ethnographic research, this article examines the motivations and experiences of those seeking to forge careers in the UK’s burgeoning wellness industry. As a movement-market centred around health-enhancement and encompassing a broad array of practices and products, this industry has recently grown to prominence in Britain, driven significantly by the aspirational economies of social media. While the promise of wellness is manifold — including, most obviously, that of health and well-being — here I examine its operation in relation to questions of work and employment. Drawing on interviews with those who already work or aspire to work in wellness — generally on a self-employed basis, but often operating under the sign of a more glamourised ‘entrepreneurship’ — I explore why women are drawn to participate in this arena in a professional as well as personal capacity. I focus in particular on the lure of wellness work among participants who had already established careers in other settings, for whom the transition entails relinquishing relative economic security to instead pursue an inherently risky pathway. This research reflects critically on existing accounts of ‘passionate work’ (McRobbie, 2016) by arguing that wellness entrepreneurship functions as both an individual and collective endeavour. In doing so it grapples with the politics and potentialities of wellness entrepreneurship as a feminised mode of self-employment, situating this analysis within the continuing aftermath of feminism (McRobbie, 2009) in an era marked by new feminist visibilities (Gill, 2016) and discourses of female empowerment (Banet-Weiser, 2018)

Glow from the inside out: Deliciously Ella and the politics of ‘healthy eating’

This article examines the branded persona of Ella Mills, founder of the multi-platform, multi-product and multi-million pound food brand Deliciously Ella. It begins from the premise that Mills represents a new kind of cultural intermediary: that of the wellness entrepreneur. Through a discourse analysis of Mills’ own media productions alongside news and magazine features about the entrepreneur, I consider how ‘healthy eating’ is being sold to young women as a means to realise physical and financial empowerment. Commercial entrepreneurship is made to function in tandem with health entrepreneurship, as Mills makes it her business to model a healthy lifestyle and enjoins others to follow this example. The article further examines how the Deliciously Ella narrative perpetuates already dominant understandings of health as a private good and personal responsibility through its emphasis on healing and recovery through food. Relating this analysis to recent debates about the shifting terrain of postfeminism in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, I argue that the spotlighting of Mills elevates self-care as a gendered imperative while obfuscating the classed and racialised privileges that attend this

Author interview: Q&A with Rachel O’Neill on Seduction: men, masculinity and mediated intimacy

In this author interview, we speak to Rachel O’Neill about her recent book, Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy, which offers an ethnographic study of the ‘seduction industry’. In the interview, she discusses the seduction industry as part of a continuum of mediated intimacy, the ways in which neoliberal rationalities are shaping masculine subjectivity today, how the book relates to contemporary discussions surrounding consent and women’s sexual agency and the particular challenges of undertaking this fieldwork. If you are interested in this interview, you can read a review of Seduction on LSE RB here. Q&A with Rachel O’Neill, author of Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy (Polity, 2018

Notes on not knowing: male ignorance after #MeToo

The essential premise of #MeToo is that, while large numbers of women are subject to sexual harassment and assault, this reality is not known to or understood by unnamed others. This article interrogates the subject of non-knowing that #MeToo points to but does not name, asking: who exactly does not know, and why? These questions provide the starting point to elaborate the concept of male ignorance. While this lexicon has been fleetingly deployed in canonical feminist works – where it denotes something so obvious that it does not require explanation, functioning instead as a kind of feminist common sense – I develop it here so it might be put to greater use as a dedicated analytic. The work of Charles Mills, particularly his writings on white ignorance, provides a critical precedent in this regard. Following Mills in foregrounding the ideological operations of not knowing, I conceive male ignorance as a structure of concerted if unconscious epistemic occlusion which both stems from and serves to protect male privilege. As such, it plays a crucial role in securing the overall relation of domination and oppression within which gendered lives are lived. While male ignorance is itself multiple and has a variety of stakeholders, I argue that the non-knowing that surrounds sexual harassment and assault – which #MeToo draws attention to and seeks to undo – constitutes a paradigmatic manifestation, one in which cisgender heterosexual men have a particular stake

Pursuing “wellness”: considerations for media studies

In this short piece, I discuss the necessity of employing more-than-textual methods to understand more-than-textual phenomena. My case study is the feminized world of wellness, where stylish young entrepreneurs sell strategies of health-enhancement. While existing commentary typically frames wellness as the exclusive and somewhat risible preserve of wealthy white women—a framing enabled by the prominence of figures such as Gwyneth Paltrow—this narrative risks obscuring a more complicated story about the desire for health and well-being in an era of heightened precarity. Against this backdrop, I argue that the rise of wellness as a novel cultural formation and new commercial development must be situated within the broader social, economic, and political terrain of contemporary Britain. Methodologically, this means grappling with the glamorous trappings of wellness media and excavating the psychic investments and embodied experiences that animate this movement-market