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Rosalind Gill is a British cultural theorist, feminist, and media commentator. Her work focuses on representations of gender, media culture and work in the creative industries. She is currently the Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at King's College, London.

Biography

Gill is the daughter of Janet and Michael Gill, whom she describes as "Marxist parents". In an interview she says she grew up to be "a young, politically active, left-wing person" with a particular interest in "how culture, and ideology gets inside us and shapes us."

She received her doctorate, which was concerned with new racism and new sexism in British pop radio, in social psychology from the Discourse and Rhetoric Group (DARG), Loughborough University in 1991. She has since worked in Sociology, Gender Studies and Media and Communications departments at Goldsmiths College, the Open University, and the London School of Economics, where she taught for ten years. She moved to King’s College in 2010 to take up the position of Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, a title which at the request of the university she invented for herself.

Gill is part of the Culture, Media & Creative Industries department and teaches in their masters program, as well as supervising a number of PhD students.

Research

Gill is known for her research interests in gender and media, cultural work, new technologies and mediated intimacy. Her most famous book, Gender and the Media, was published in 2007. In it she gives a comprehensive outline of the trajectory of feminist media studies, the debates that exist concerning gender and the media, as well as examining specific genres of media – women’s magazines, ‘lad mags’, talk shows, news and romances.

She has also produced considerable work on methodologies, and the academic process

Postfeminism

One of Gill’s most significant theoretical contributions is her discussion of postfeminism, which she claims is “one of the most important and contested terms in the lexicon of feminist cultural analysis”. She argues that though the term has been used by scholars for decades there is still “no agreement among scholars about what postfeminism means. The term is used variously and contradictorily to signal a theoretical position, a type of feminism after the Second Wave, or a regressive political stance”

Gill states that postfeminism should be thought of as “a sensibility”, that is it should be acknowledged to be the cultural mood regarding gender that pervades Western countries in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. According to Gill, this sensibility is characterised by:

• An obsessive preoccupation with the body
• The pervasive sexualisation of contemporary culture
• The shift from women being portrayed as submissive, passive objects, to being portrayed as active, desiring sexual subjects
• The preeminence of notions of choice, 'being oneself' and 'pleasing oneself'
• A focus on self-surveillance and discipline
• A makeover paradigm
• The reassertion of sexual difference
• Media messages that are characterized by irony and knowingness

As well as these characteristics, the postfeminist sensibility as defined by Gill is notable for “the entanglement of both feminist and anti-feminist themes” in contemporary culture and in media discourses.

In a postfeminist society, Gill writes:

“feminism is now part of the cultural field… Feminist-inspired ideas burst forth from our radios, television screens and print media in TV...

However, it would be entirely false to suggest that the media has somehow become feminist and has adopted unproblematically a feminist perspective... In this postfeminist moment… feminist ideas are simultaneously, as Judith Stacey (1987) put it, 'incorporated, revised and depoliticised', and - let us add here - attacked.

What makes contemporary media culture distinctively postfeminist, rather than pre-feminist or anti-feminist is precisely this entanglement of feminist and anti-feminist ideas… A certain kind of liberal feminist perspective is treated as common sense, while at the same time feminism and feminists are constructed as harsh, punitive and inauthentic, not articulating women's true desire.”

Sexualisation of culture

A significant contribution of Gill’s research is in debates concerning the sexualisation of culture. Her writing raises questions about the pervasive sexualisation of contemporary culture. She defines sexualisation as both “the extraordinary proliferation of discourse about sex and sexuality across all media forms” as well as “the increasingly frequent erotic presentation of girls', women's and (to a lesser extent) men's bodies in public spaces”.

During 2010 and 2011, Gill hosted an ESRC seminar series titled, ‘Pornified? Complicating the debates about the sexualisation of culture’. The series featured artists, academics, policy -makers and activists presenting different aspects of contemporary concerns about 'sexualisation'.

In her writing she has explored how this sexualisation of culture has led to both female empowerment and new, and more pernicious, forms of sexism. She argues that in such a sexualized culture women are forced to become sexual entrepeneurs, responsible for “producing themselves as desirable, heterosexual subjects, as well as pleasing men sexually, protecting against pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, defending their own sexual reputations and taking care of men's self-esteem. Men, by contrast, are hailed as hedonists just wanting a 'shag'.”

In her writing, Gill also examines case studies of contemporary examples of sexualisation of culture, from advertisements featuring David Beckham’s naked body, T-shirts featuring sexual slogans, sex and relationship advice columns in women’s magazines, and the sexualisation of women in advertising.

Rosalind is currently working on a 4 year Marsden project for the Royal Society exploring how “tween” (9-12 year old) girls negotiate living in an increasingly sexualized culture.

Public engagement

Gill has received funding from and worked on projects commissioned by the Arts Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), The British Academy (BA), The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the European Commission and the United Nations (both UNESCO and the UNCSW .

Selected Publications:

• Theorizing Cultural Work: Labour, Continuity and Change in the Creative Industries (ed. With Mark Banks and Stephanie Taylor) Routledge, 2013
• 'Postcolonial Girl: Migrant audibility and Intimate Activism Interventions', International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (with Imogen Tyler), 2013
• ‘Agency, sex and postfeminism’ in Madhok, S., Phillips, A. & Wilson, K. (eds) Gender, Agency and Coercion. Palgrave Macmillan (with Ngaire Donaghue), 2012
• ‘The sexualisation of culture?’ Social and Personality Psychology Compass vol 6 / 7 : July 2012
• ‘Media, Empowerment and the "Sexualization of Culture" Debates’ Sex Roles vol. 66: May 2012
• New Feminitities: Postfeminism, Identity and Neoliberalism (Ed. with Christina Scharff), Palgrave 2011
• ‘Spicing it up: Sexual entrepreneurs and The Sex Inspectors’ in Gill, R & Scharff,C. (eds.) New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neo-liberalism and Subjectivity. Palgrave (with Laura Harvey)
• ‘Lad flicks: Discursive reconstructions of masculinity in popular film’ In Radner, H & Pullar, E. (eds.) Feminism at the Movies (with David Hansen-Miller), New York: Routledge
• ‘Bend it like Beckham? The challenges of reading gender in visual culture’ in Reavey, P. (ed) Visual Psychologies. London & New York: Routledge
• Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections, Ed. Róisín Ryan-Flood, Rosalind Gill, 2009, Routledge
• Gill, Rosalind, Discourse Analysis, Open University Press, 2008
• Gill, Rosalind, Gender and the Media, Polity Press, 2007
• Gill, Rosalind, 'Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility', European Journal of Cultural Studies 2007 10
• The Gender-Technology Relation. Contemporary Theory And Research: An Introduction, Ed. Rosalind Gill & Keith Grint, Taylor & Francis, 1995