Professor Anja Louis’ Inaugural Lecture – “The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful: Women, Law and Pop Culture”
Professor Anja Louis’ Professorial Inaugural Lecture
“The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful: Women, Law and Pop Culture”
Sign up here! All welcome.
1800 – 2030, Wednesday 06 March 2024
Sheffield Hallam University – Peak Lecture Theatre, Level 5 Owen Building, City Campus, Hallam Square, Sheffield, S1 2LX
As an early celebration of International Women’s Day (8 March), this interactive professorial lecture looks at the relationship between gender, law and popular culture.
Professor Anja Louis will draw on her research and lived experience. She will explore how much power law and culture have in terms of women, and what we can learn from it.
But how can this knowledge transform our lives? Will a film turn us into activists? Will a fictional role model help us find our own form of success? Does reading books make you a better person? Do we learn something when watching television and if so, are we aware and critical of it?
During the lecture, Anja will explore common themes in law and popular culture from early 20th-century feminist writings to 21st-century film and television. She will look at so-called ‘difficult’ and ‘ditsy’ women, pretty professionals and action heroines. Anja will also discuss female writers, female genres, feminist issues, feminist humour, and female footballers.
Come and join Anja to celebrate women!
Anja’s Bio
Anja Louis is Professor of Transnational Popular Culture at Sheffield Hallam University, where she is REF coordinator and member of various research leadership teams. She has published widely in the fields of gender studies and popular culture. Her monograph Women and the Law: Carmen de Burgos, an Early Feminist is a seminal study on the Spanish feminist Carmen de Burgos.
Recent research projects examine the representation of female lawyers and law enforcement officers in Spanish film and television. She is currently working on a monograph on ‘Femininity and Feminism in Spanish TV drama’ and is co-editing a book on ‘Gender and TV in Iberia and Latin America’.
Agenda
18:00 – Guests arrive
18:30 – Professorial lecture and Q&A
19:30 – Drinks reception
20:30 – Event close
Book your place by filling in the form here or on the Welcome to Sheffield website here.
Event Organised by Sheffield Hallam University (events [at] shu [dot] ac [dot] uk)
Below is an excerpt from a recent Q&A featuring Anja, produced by the Sheffield Hallam University Media Team:
Most of us enjoy TV, drama, literature, films and plays – many, of course, featuring characters identifying as women.
But how far has pop culture evolved from the age-old female stereotypes of ‘damsel in distress’, ‘mother figure’, ‘ditsy girl’, and ‘difficult woman’, for instance?
Hallam’s Professor Anja Louis, an expert in women in popular culture and its relationship to societal change, explains…
What are some of the ways that women are portrayed in films and TV drama?Think of your favourite characters. Are they to be found in Game of Thrones, The Devil wears Prada, Murder She Wrote, Killing Eve, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Wonder Woman, The Good Wife, or Gentleman Jack, for instance?
My favourite characters are Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote; Alicia Florrick in The Good Wife, Wonder Woman, and Gentleman Jack. That tells us something about me.
Once we start analysing these portrayals in detail, we realise that there are patterns and stereotypes: there are ‘difficult’ women, ‘ditsy’ women, ‘action babes’, unmarried women, wives, mothers, daughters and so on. What interests me is why and how women are often ‘framed’ by the storytelling and the camerawork.
‘Social change is slow, bumpy and hard work for those who try to bring it about.’
The Bechdel Test, or more precisely the Bechdel-Wallace test, was created by cartoonist Alison Bechdel in 1985, but only gained wider use in the early 2000s. It’s a simple way to see how women are portrayed in a particular film or drama. To pass the test, the production must have:
- at least two women in it, who
- talk to each other about
- something other than men.
The statistics on bechdeltest.com (in 2015, so 30 years after its creation) state that:
- there are 9802 movies in the database
- 5594 (57.1%) of which pass all three tests
- 1000 (10.2%) pass two tests
- 2124 (21.7%) pass one test
- and 1084 (11.1%) pass no tests at all.
As a crude measure that tells us we’re moving in the right direction. The test is useful in its simplicity and creates an awareness of how women are portrayed in films and TV dramas. However, it makes no statement about the quality of the storytelling, so it is nothing but a good starting point.
Are things changing for the better?
Definitely! But social change is slow, bumpy and hard work for those who try to bring it about. Asserting your rightful place in society is draining, because you’re rocking the boat that’s full of people who don’t understand what the problem is. It’s therefore important to look at feminist history to make sure that every generation of women doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. What have our foremothers done before us, how has that changed society, and what’s left to do?
‘Asserting your rightful place in society is draining, because you’re rocking the boat that’s full of people who don’t understand what the problem is.’
Why did you become interested in researching women in popular culture – and focusing on Spanish-language pop culture in particular?
I think the topics we’re drawn to often have something to do with the environment we grew up in, which I’ll expand on in my upcoming lecture. I started my intellectual journey with popular fiction that was used as a political tool to bring about social change in early twentieth-century Spain. Yesterday’s pop fiction is today’s film and TV, so I moved into visual culture, but the common thread throughout my entire work is pop culture as a catalyst for social change. And again, that has to do with my family background.
My focus on Spain’s pop culture stems from a life-long love affair with the country. Often unbeknownst to us in ‘Northern Europe’, it is a very progressive country from which we can learn a lot.
What will you be discussing in your upcoming lecture?
I’ll be drawing on my research and lived experience to explore how much power law and culture have in terms of women, and what we can learn from it. We’ll be looking at common themes in law and popular culture from early 20th-century feminist writings to 21st-century film and television.
I want to start from the personal and explain how we move to the political – why visual culture can change the world. As we say in Spain, ¡Otro mundo es posible! (A different world is possible!)