Murdoch University
The Krishna Somers Foundation announces the third lecture/talk of the year. The presentation is by
Professor Hilary Radner.
Please come to the lecture and engage in a dialogue with Professor Radner over some excellent Western Australian wine (or orange juice).
The ethics of discipline: embodying woman in contemporary popular culture
or
Jane Fonda meets Michel Foucault
In 1981, Jane Fonda in her eponymous Workout Book (Simon and Schuster), comments that during her visit to Vietnam she realized that a prostitute could raise her prices if she "Americanized" her face through cosmetic surgery. The cover story of the 10 November 2003 issue of Newsweek International reads"The Perfect Face: How a global standard of beauty is emerging and what people are doing to get it." The cover "face" is that of "Supermodel Saira Hohan--part Indian, part French and part Irish." The questions raised here: in the twenty-odd years since Fonda published her then controversial workout book, has the representation of "woman" changed? Are these possible changes are in the interests of woman herself?
I will use the methodology and theoretical framework developed by Michel Foucault to investigate what he has termed the "Technology of the Self." (See Ethics: the essential works 1954-1984, vol. 3, Penguin, 2000.) I propose to define and interrogate the representation of "woman" as what I will call a "technoloy of embodiment" in an international market with a view to its evolution over the past twenty years. I will look in particular at the ways in which the rhetoric surrounding this "technology" is inflected by local as well as international concerns within the Australasian context in magazines such as Vogue Australia and NW.
Professor Hilary Radner is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of
Otago. She is the author of Shopping Around: Feminine Culture and the Pursuit of Pleasure (Routledge Press, 1995), and the co-editor of Film Theory Goes to the Movies (Routledge Press, 1993), Constructing the New Consumer Society (St Martin's Press, 1997), and Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1960s (University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
