Remembering Rock and Roll with P. P. Arnold

This chapter asks how American singer P. P. Arnold’s vocal performances in the 1960s shaped British popular music production and how she renarrates rock history today. The story of Arnold’s music career reveals how the Black feminine vocality exemplified by Arnold’s style of singing shaped 1960s rock, and how Black women singers navigate experiences of marginalization and narratives of authenticity. Arnold’s recordings for Immediate Records and her work with the Small Faces on songs like “Tin Soldier” reveal how this dynamic manifests musically, while the story of her “lost” album The Turning Tide illustrates the effect that it had on her career. The chapter closes with a section on Arnold’s recent live performances, using Black feminist thought to understand the implications of Arnold’s engagement with 1960s stereotypes of rock authenticity and sexual expressivity in her new work.

The Prisoner of Gender: Panopticon, Persuasion, and Surveillance of Women in Kavita Kané’s Menaka’s Choice

In the mythology-inspired novel Menaka’s Choice (2016), Kavita Kané discovers that the female body is continuously perceived both as an object of sexual desire and as an individual being by disrupting the conventional understanding of Apsara Menaka. Using Foucault’s concept of docile bodies and organic individuality the paper studies how power, in the form of ‘system’, imposes docility on women’s bodies. The paper weaves the potential for feminist thought as the novel rediscovers the recondite experiences that have been shrouded for centuries by giving central position to silent agents of Hindu mythology. Eventually, it attempts to analyse the act of seduction from the context of gender and how the individual tries to resist that disciplinary system.

Interrupting “The Sadist’s Gaze”

This article proposes that returning Denise Riley’s work on (and troubling of) the category of “women” offers a feminist theorizing and politics that remains both critical and relevant to the political present. It argues that reading Riley again, alongside other anti-essentialist feminist thinkers, reveals the distinctiveness, force, and capaciousness of her project, which lay in her attention to historicity, form, language, and affect. It is precisely the poetics of Riley’s feminist thought that sustain the critical orientation that must animate feminism’s utopian desires.