Page 159 - Decoding Culture
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152  D E C O D I N G   C U L TURE

           with feminism. Feminist interventions in the sociology of the 1970s
           characteristically  (and  rightly)  observed  that women were ren­
           dered invisible in much research, concepts of gender being largely
           absent from sociological theory. McRobbie is explicitly concerned
           to 'redress this balance' in the area of youth studies by examining
           the ways in which the culture of femininity is constituted and the
           impact it has had on the girls' lives. And while class remains for her
           the centrally significant reference point that it was for contempo­
           rary  CCCS  work,  in itself she  considers  it insufficient for a full
           understanding of the girls' social situation. The culture of adoles­
           cent working class girls can be seen as a response to the material
           limitations imposed on them as a result of their class position, but
           also as  an  index of, and  response  to  their sexual  oppression as
           women' (ibid: 108) . Then, invoking a tension between positive and
           negative  aspects  of women's culture that was to  become  much
           more prominent in later feminist cultural  studies,  she  adds  that
           the  girls  'are  both  saved  by  and  locked  within  the  culture  of
           femininity'.
             Thus far, then, we can see feminism seeking to: (a) combat the
           'invisibility' of women in sociological and cultural studies research;
           (b)  incorporate  gender  into  prevailing  theoretical  models,  espe­
           cially those of the marxist tradition; and  (c) begin to address the
           tension between a positive appreciation of women's distinctive cul­
           ture  and  its  role  in  their  continuing  oppression.  Subsequent
           feminist  cultural  studies  progressed  along  all  these  lines.
           McRobbie herself continued  to  mount a critique  of subculture
           research in  the  late  1970s  (see  Chapters  1  and  2  in  McRobbie,
           1991a)  taking to task both Willis  (1977)  and  Hebdige  (1979)  for
           their failure to introduce gender into their analyses. More impor­
           tantly, as she herself observes (McRobbie,  1991a: xvii), her work
           'turned away from subcultures to the terrain of domestic life', the
           social context that she deemed most appropriate for understanding





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