Jackie Stacey
My academic background is an interdisciplinary one, combining European Studies (Sussex), Women’s Studies (Kent) and Cultural Studies (Birmingham). Coming to RICC from Lancaster University where I have been Professor of Women’s Studies and Cultural Studies since 2001, I bring a specialism in feminist cultural theory and its bearing upon questions of political transformation. As well as being a co-editor of two journals: Screen and Feminist Theory, my publications include: Star Gazing: Female Spectators and Hollywood Cinema (1994) and Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (1997) and (as co-author with Sarah Franklin and Celia Lury) Global Nature, Global Culture (2000). I have also co-edited a number of books, including Romance Revisited with Lynne Pearce (1995), Screen Histories: A Screen Reader with Annette Kuhn (1998), Thinking Through the Skin with Sara Ahmed (2001) and Queer Screens with Sarah Street (2007). I am currently completing a new book for Duke University Press entitled The Cinematic Life of the Gene.
Running across these research projects (on subjects as diverse as the transnational modes of spectatorship in Hollywood cinema, queer film and video, the visualising technologies of medical science, and the new genetic constructions of sexualised and racialised bodies in popular culture) has been a concern with changing formations of fantasy, processes of subjectivity and modes of embodiment. Starting from the premise that studying the cultural relations of power requires attention to the inextricability of psychic and social formations, I have been interested in the production of imaginary subjects through located cultural forms and the ways in which these limit particular political possibilities. Uniting these ongoing research agendas has been a focus on how questions of visibility and visualisation are translated into forms of cultural intelligibility.
In RICC I shall draw upon my ongoing research in the field of screen studies, as well as my work in feminist studies of globalising cultures. In the co-authored Global Nature, Global Culture, we offered a critical reading of the mobilisation of a universalised notion of Nature in the project of globalising cultures (be it in the use of foetal photography, in the circulation of genetic knowledge or in the non-Western practices of self-health). Current debates about cosmopolitan cultures present a set of research agendas which both extend and critique understandings of the impact of globalisation, and outline a sense of specificity about post-nationalist sensibilities and urban modes of habitation that unite practices across conventional geographical boundaries and traditional feelings of located belonging.
My approach to developing research activities in this highly contested field of study begins from the premise that cosmopolitan culture should not be seen as a self-evident field of critical enquiry nor be assumed already to exist in the world as an object that can simply be found and scrutinised. Instead, we might examine the cosmopolitan subject as the product of national and transnational cultural fears and desires, as well as of corporate interests and new global technological flows. Moreover, rather than assuming that the bid for universal claims to ethics, citizenship and mobility in the name of a cosmopolitan future is equally open to all, my starting point is to examine the production of social differences and inequalities so central to, and yet often obscured within, the project of cosmopolitanism.
Bringing these questions to bear upon the burgeoning field of the study of cosmopolitan cultures, my work in RICC will bring debates in film and media studies into dialogue with theories of European modernity, American imperialism, and of postcolonialism, multi-culturalism and diversity. In my new post in RICC, my starting point will be a critical interrogation of the tensions between universalising projects of Western modernity and the specificities of difference and particularities of location that have been at the heart of my work for over two decades now.