Jackie Stacey
Email: jackie.stacey@manchester.ac.uk
My academic background is an interdisciplinary one, combining European Studies (Sussex), Women’s Studies (Kent) and Cultural Studies (Birmingham). As well as being a co-editor of Screen and Feminist Theory, my publications include: Star Gazing: Female Spectators and Hollywood Cinema (1994) and Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (1997) and (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). My most recent book published in 2010 with Duke University Press is The Cinematic Life of the Gene.
Running across my research interests (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 agendas has been a focus on the relationship between visibility and visualisation and forms of cultural intelligibility.
My work in RICC has 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. In outlining 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, the current cosmopolitan project sets an urgent agenda.
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 brings debates in film and media studies into dialogue with theories of European modernity, American imperialism, and of postcolonialism, multi-culturalism and diversity. In dialogue with colleagues in RICC, I have begun 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. I am currently beginning a new research project on ‘Cosmopolitan Cinemas’.
Selected Publications:
Books
2010. The Cinematic Life of the Gene. Duke University Press, pp. 1-326
2007 (co-edited with Sarah Street). Queer Screen: A Screen Reader. Routledge, 1-304
2001 (co-edited with Sara Ahmed). Thinking Through the Skin. Routledge, pp. 1-239
2000 (co-author with Sarah Franklin and Celia Lury). Global Nature, Global Culture. Sage, pp. 1-280
Special Issues2010, forthcoming (co-edited with Erica Burman). Feminist Theory, Special issue on the child in feminist theory. Volume 11, number 3.
Refereed journal articles
2010, forthcoming. ‘Capturing Maggie: Marcus Harvey and Thatcher Thirty Years On’. New Formations, issue 70.
2010, forthcoming. (co-authored with Erica Carter) ‘The Child and Childhood in Feminist Theory’. Feminist Theory, vol. 11, no 3.
Jackie Stacey full list of Publications.