This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
News
Exhibition explores gender and nightlife
A new UK art exhibition is set to explore the complexities of gender relations in bars and clubs and raise funds for The Homeless Period charity.
Gender Dilemmas: Negotiating Femininity and Masculinity in Contemporary Night Life takes place in Liverpool this weekend
Gender Dilemmas: Negotiating Femininity and Masculinity in Contemporary Night Life will run from 26-28 August at Road Studios, Liverpool, as part of the wider Liverpool Biennial art festival.
The exhibition, curated by artist and researcher Amanda Marie Atkinson, aims to draw attention to public drinking environments and their context in which femininity and masculinity are performed.
Themes explored through the exhibition include the “pornification” of nightlife and the mainstreaming of pole/lap dancing clubs; how young women approach intoxication and the “hyper-sexual” self; the sexist nature of alcohol advertising; masculinity in alcohol and “stag nights”, and how public bathrooms reinforce the gender binary.
A donation bar at the opening of the exhibition will feature alcohol with alternative marketing produced by women and the feminist community, including men.
All proceeds from the bar will go to The Homeless Period, a voluntary organisation providing sanitary items to homeless women in Liverpool.
A piece of art created by University of Leicester researchers will feature in the exhibition.
Dr Clare Gunby, criminology lecturer at the University of Leicester, said: “We hope that our contribution to the exhibition will highlight the tensions between sexually aggressive alcohol advertising, victim-focused crime prevention messages and the emotional labour women invest in trying to reduce their perceived vulnerability, when out in the evening.”
Dr Anna Carline, senior lecturer in the Leicester Law School at the university added: “The exhibition is a great opportunity to engage with the public about the gendered dynamics operating within bar and club spaces and to do that in a non-traditional academic way.”
Gender Dilemmas: Negotiating Femininity and Masculinity in Contemporary Night Life is free and open to the public, and runs from 6-9pm on 26 August, and 12-5pm on 27 and 28 August.
The exhibition follows a controversial announcement from Stanford University earlier this week that it is to ban spirits on its undergraduate campus following a serious sexual assault.