Page 159 - Decoding Culture
P. 159
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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