Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

3E
Youth, gendered embodiment and mobility (Chair, Victoria Cann)
Lisa-Polly Farrance
“Overcoming the chaos”: the moments of self-valorisation on a roller derby track
In the Preface to Marxism, Cultural Studies and Sport, Harry Cleaver argues for recognising and
understanding the “moments of self-valorisation as they emerge within and against the constraints of capital
and the degree to which they are able, however temporarily, to break free of those constraints” including in
places like sport. Within these moments, he argues, are the seeds of broader movements for liberation.
Cleaver’s words echo those of CLR James in his prolific writings on the politics of sport and cultural
expression. They also echo the words of roller derby participants, who describe a liberation that comes from
not only becoming physically strong, but becoming physically competent in a difficult and extremely complex
sport. “Overcoming the chaos on the track” is a strong theme in the language of those who compete in roller
derby. Importantly, they also overcome chaos within a subculture that reshapes both gendered subjectivity
and women’s inter-subjectivities, and in ways they describe as profound and life-changing. This paper will
explore these moments of liberated intersubjectivity and self-valorisation, through a five-year case study of
women and gender diverse participants in roller derby, based in Melbourne, Australia.
Karen-Anne Wong
Homosociality, Intimacy and Awareness: Gender and Sexuality in Yoga with Adolescents
This paper draws on the final chapter of my PhD thesis, which is an ethnographic study of children’s and
teen’s yoga. Using interviews with participants, and participant observation of yoga classes, I suggest that
teen girls who participated in this study unanimously called for yoga as a practice of resistance to
heteronormativity. I suggest that this is particularly pertinent within a 21st century context where the
parameters of children’s gender and sexuality are fiercely guarded on the one hand (for example, by child
protection discourse) while increasingly challenged by arguments for children’s agency (and, more cynically,
a market which has a vested interest in creating children as powerful consumers). Children’s yoga classes
exist within these contexts and the debates around them, and provide an opportunity for diversified
understandings and experiences of gender and childhood sexuality. In many respects the degree to which it
happens is, of course, highly dependent on the individual participants and class context, as I will
demonstrate.
Penny Tinkler Teenage girls on the move: spatial mobility and the cultural lives of girls growing up in Britain in the
1950s and 1960s
Studies of the cultural lives of young people in postwar Britain have focused mainly on leisure, consumption
and style. Moreover young men, particularly from the working classes, have been the principal subjects. This
paper places teenage girls in the foreground and focuses on a hitherto neglected aspect of their cultural lives
– spatial mobilities. Drawing on girls” magazines, advertising, newspaper reports and films targeted at young
people, I argue that there was a proliferation of representations of youthful female mobility in Britain in the
late 1950s and 1960s. Spatial mobilities were constructed as integral to the experiences of teenage girls and
the processes, pleasures and risks of growing up in the postwar period. I argue that these representations
contributed to the discursive framing of shifts in the actual mobilities of postwar youth and to the creation
of an “imagined community” of teenage girls who were on the move and enjoying new places and spaces.
3F
Performance and mediatisation in popular music (Chair, Azmyl Yusof)
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