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Seem to have two reading heads at the moment, the deadhead:
Which is rereading the Harry Potter books, cause they're easy, and Clouds of Witness, because I can never get enough DLS, and Vertigo Pop! London, cause it makes me very happy.
and the semiintelligenthead:
which has just finished On Becoming a Pychotherapist, given to me by the lovely Bill Posters, which is fab. A really inspiring, open and touching book in which various pyschotherapists/psychologists counsellors/analysts talk about why they think they've become therapists. They talk about family life, education, class, nationality, personal traits, pivotal moments.
It's really inspired me to think *hard* about what I want to do with my life.
And, halfway through Angela McRobbie's Feminism and Youth Culture, I think I have a new academic crush. She begins by talking about her own encounters with punk, setting this into the context of being a postgrad researcher and youngish mother... And by facing and critiquing her position re the class tensions raised by middle-class grad. students poking around working-class youth clubs.
In the chapter I've just finished, she performs the best feminist deconstruction of notions of youth culture and subculture that I've ever read. She demonstrates how these terms always invisibly mean (male) youth culture, (male)subculture, and points out how the street/urban scenary-based analysis just doesn't work when applied to young girls/women who for many reasons, just one being fear/safety issues, have much more of a 'bedroom' culture than young boys/men.
She refuses to dismiss teen magazines outright, instead indentifying and exploring the complex mix of ideologies they put forward, and the nuances of the relationship their readers have with them.
Am also dipping in and out of Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures, which looks at the spaces that young people inhabit, and how they intersect with ideas of cool.
And still enjoying Peggy Nutiello's A Passionate Presence, about working with pyschotherapeutic groups. |
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