The Girlfriend Gaze - 20 March 2013
Mon, 18 Mar 2013 15:31:00 GMT
Dr Alison Winch (Middlesex)
Wednesday 20 March 2013 at 16:15 in JM3/06
This paper has been developed from my forthcoming book Girlfriends: Postfeminist Sisterhood (Palgrave 2013).
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Popular culture marketed to women has always positioned the female body as an object of scrutiny, anxiety and aspiration. However, I want to suggest that there is a new culture of homosocial bonding through the bodies of women by women. Across media platforms, the male gaze is rendered benign, and instead it is women who are represented as looking at other women’s bodies.
In addition, female sociality and female networks such as internet forums (Mumsnet, digital wedding media) are sites where women can congregate through systems of mutual control over body image. This homosocial surveillance is marketed as solidarity or sisterhood through the rhetoric of postfeminism; it is sold as entitlement.
I look at the girlfriend gaze as it is enacted in magazines like Heat where the female body is relentlessly scrutinized and analysed. I also look at Reality TV, arguing that the ‘girlfriend gaze’ is highly punitive. It is white and middle class, and consequently exploits and reinforces divisions among women, particularly along the lines of race and class.
However, across these popular media these knotty emotions are exploited for destructive means. Indeed, I want to suggest that the answer is not to put forward an idealistic understanding of female relationships. On the contrary exploring the complexities of these relationships – including conflict – can be a means to strengthen feminist movements. Understanding and examining ‘ugly feelings’ as potentially productive ways of relating can be a way of loosening the pervasive grip of a control society.
