This lecture provides a conjunctural account (echoing Stuart Hall) of feminism and gender
politics in the UK over the last two decades with reference to the analytic purchase of a series
of figurations (top girls to tradwives) which permit a fuller understanding of the passage from
neoliberal cultural formations to the new authoritarianism. Contesting the landscape of recent
‘popular feminisms’ the lecture makes the case for feminist theory rather to endorse ‘pedagogic
feminism’ conjoining this with a re-visiting of the category of the ‘ordinary woman’ if not the
‘housewife’.

Angela McRobbie is Prof. Em. Goldsmiths College University of London and Fellow of the
British Academy. Her academic career began at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
University of Birmingham in 1974. The most recent books and publications include ‘On Phantasms
of Gender: A Feminist Cultural Studies Perspective’ in European Journal of Cultural Studies
(2025); Ulrike Ottinger: Film, Art and the Ethnographic Imagination (2024); and Feminism, Young
Women and Cultural Studies: The Birmingham Essays from 1975 Onwards (2024).

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