Innocent until proven filthy: new lad masculinity in women's magazines

The Inequality, Culture and Difference research seminar series presents:

“Costumes and fashion in Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale”

Dr. Karen A. Ritzenhoff, Department of Communication and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies (WGSS), Central Connecticut State University

Wednesday 24^thOctober, 12-1pm in MAE 206

Gender politics and access or lack of power are core themes in the The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopic novel about a sexually corrupt society where Puritan ideals have led to the enslavement of young women in the country of “Gilead”, located in the borders of the United States. The Handmaid’s Tale provides ample narrative materials and a particularly prescient basis to discuss many pressing contemporary social issues in different academic contexts. The war front in The Handmaid’s Tale has been relocated in the domestic sphere of the American white, upper middle-class home where women’s actual bodies are the battleground. 

One of the ways to force the handmaids into submission is by robing them into red cloaks that are standard costumes.

The School of Arts and Humanities

Modern Languages and the Centre for Inequality, Culture and Difference

Present 

a seminar with

Dr Jim Wolfreys, from Kings College, London

Republic of Islamophobia: The Rise of Respectable Racism in France

Islamophobia in France is on the rise, with Muslims subjected to unprecedented scrutiny of what they wear, eat and say. This book examines the role played by France’s ‘new secularism’ in giving racism a respectable veneer and assesses the impact of the political mainstream’s adoption of an authoritarian neoliberal outlook on France's Muslim population. This officially sanctioned Islamophobia risks going unchallenged. It has divided the anti-racist movement and undermined the left’s opposition to bigotry. Drawing on interviews with anti-racist activists, Republic of Islamophobia situates these developments within a wider historical and international context.