Catherine Driscoll is anAustralian researcher and expert ingender issues andcultural analysis. She is a professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at theUniversity of Sydney.[1] She has worked at theUniversity of Melbourne, theUniversity of Adelaide, and joined the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at theUniversity of Sydney in 2003. She has held visiting fellow positions atDuke University,Columbia University,Cardiff University, and theAustralian National University.[2][3]
Driscoll served as Vice-Chair and then Chair of the international Association for Cultural Studies (2016-2022),[4] and helped found the International Girls Studies Association in 2011.[5]
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She grew up inWauchope, New South Wales and was educated at Wauchope High School. She subsequently has degrees from theUniversity of Newcastle (Australia), and theUniversity of Melbourne.[6]
Driscoll's most influential work focuses on ideas about girls and their experiences and identities. This work helped define the field ofgirls studies,[7] particularly through the influence of her bookGirls (2002), which "analyses a vast range of sites, texts, case studies, and discourses from the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century" while addressing "debates about post-feminism, girl culture, and feminist generations".[8] Scholarship in girls studies has expanded considerably since Driscoll's work leading up toGirls, but at the time this book was described byAngela McRobbie as "the first sustained account of how young women come to understand themselves through the world of images, texts and representations".[9] It "sought to correct the "invisibility of girls in cultural studies as the discourse most likely to consider their involvement in the production of the world that defines them", offering "a history of 'feminine adolescence' as the category through which we understand girls today, and by extension, through which girls understand themselves and their lives".[10]
As well as many essays on girlhood and girls' media culture,[11] and related work on rural girls,[12] Driscoll teaches and researches more broadly incultural theory,cultural studies, andyouth studies, with specific attention topopular culture,modernist studies,rural studies, andcultural policy. Her work is also interesting for its innovative interdisciplinary method and a "relational" or "conjunctural" approach that Margaret Henderson compares toMichel Foucault'sThe Order of Things[13] andBen Highmore compares toWalter Benjamin'sThe Arcades Project.[14] Driscoll herself stresses a debt to Foucault[15][16] and Benjamin[17] but also to feminist scholars likeAngela McRobbie[18] and to cultural studies scholars likeRaymond Williams[19][20] andMeaghan Morris.[21] This interdisciplinary relational model for feminist cultural studies stretches across Driscoll's books on seemingly very different topics. Highmore argues that in her work onmodernism andmodernity, "the cultural becomes the way of getting a line on the conjunctural" and modernism is understood as "a deep condition of gendering affect" in analysis that "is profoundly, productively and constitutionally feminist in orientation".[22] Regarding Driscoll's work on rural girlhood, Katherine Murphy notes that she "is able to put historians into conversation with cultural studies, girls studies, and rural studies scholars. Bringing these discussions together with her own ethnographic research, Driscoll demonstrates the ongoing resonance of powerful cultural (and gendered) ideas about the rural and the urban".[23] Even Driscoll's less theoretical work, such as the bookTeen Film (2011), features the kind of unexpected directions, for example into media regulation,[24] that Highmore calls her "conjunctural and contextual enquiry".[22]
Her nationally funded research includes projects on ideas and images of girlhood, the history and experience of Australian country girlhood, cultural sustainability in rural communities, age-based media classification systems,[25] and ideas about boys and boyhood, especially in Australia.[1] She is currently leading a Sydney-based team of feminist researchers on boys studies.[26][27]
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