Page 223 - Cultural Theory

Edwards-3516-Ch-11.qxd 5/9/2007 5:56 PM Page 212

••• Maggie O’Neill •••

art, performance art and life story narratives, and engages dialectically with lived
experience through critical interpretation, towards social change. In the Chapter, two
examples of ethno-mimesis are introduced and discussed as cultural sociology in practice.

Feminism, Cultural Sociology and Prostitution

Western feminisms can be charted through a trajectory that begins with concerns
about sex and gender, nature and culture; through concerns with racial or sexual exclu-
sion and emergent theories of power, and gender in constituting the subject
(Hemmings and Brain 2003: 21). The intersection between feminism and postmod-
ernism developed out of critiques of Enlightenment and modernism, structuralism and
psychoanalysis. Linda Nicholsen (1990) states that the postmodern turn has been an
important one for feminist scholars, signified by diversity, difference, plurality, and
multiple voices. Freed from the need to root feminist politics in identification, van-
guard parties, purity or mothering, we can instead embrace the possibilities of multiple
and contradictory aspects of our individual and collective identities. Taking a historio-
graphic approach, Hemmings and Brain in a most interesting article reflect on the idea
that the feminist 1970s shaped the feminist present. ‘In this historiographic approach
we join other writers in thus understanding the past as imaginatively taking place in
the present, and as securing the means of the present’ (2003: 11).
The feminist trajectory can be compared with the emergence of cultural studies.
‘Cultural studies designates a wide-ranging and expanding domain of research-
questions concerning processes and structures of sense-making and, more specifically, the
way in which “sense” becomes “lived” in practices of everyday life’ (van Loon, 2000).
Cultural studies is eclectic in its use of various theoretical infrastructures, research
questions and methodologies (McGuigan, 1997). Van Loon identifies a set of historical
trajectories through which ‘cultural studies’ has evolved in the UK, North America and
Australia. First, the origins of cultural studies and the importance of Marxism is rooted
in the work of Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart in the 1950s. Their work gave rise
to such questions as – under what conditions did reading or making books, watching or
making films matter? Second, ethnography has emerged as an effective and popular
approach to researching cultural processes. Third, an important distinction between cul-
turalism and structuralism was made by Stuart Hall (found in Bennet et al., 1982) that was
to be conceptually foundational for the emergent cultural studies. Finally, the impor-
tance of the ‘linguistic turn’ (Alasuutari, 1995: 24) in cultural studies. For Van Loon
(2000), this ‘has produced a sensitivity to culture as an ensemble of sense-making prac-
tices that demand a dialogic and reflexive engagement’.
Feminisms and cultural studies share a methodological and epistemological focus upon
a primarily phenomenological approach to understanding the processes and practices of
our socio-cultural worlds, and the everyday lived experiences and meaning – making
practices we engage in. Although there is an explicit interest and focus on the transfor-
mative possibilities of feminism and cultural studies, very few texts identify PAR as a
method/methodology. For me, the emergence of postmodernism and the cultural turn

• 212 •