ANGELA McROBBIE INTERVIEWS HERSELF

Abstract

I owe so much to Birmingham and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). Often when colleagues ask me about it I freeze for a moment, ashamed that I did not make more of it, as though I squandered something and was unable or incapable of making the most of this incredible opportunity. I was quite sure during my undergraduate years in Scotland that I wanted to teach and do research. I was interested in gender, popular culture and sexuality. This was 1972–1973 and topics like these came under the rubric of ‘deviancy’. Actually, it was romance and feminine conformity that was the problem I wanted to investigate, but only deviancy theorists were keen to support my studies. They were enthusiastic, and I still thank them for their support (people like Laurie Taylor, the late Paul Walton, Jock Young, and the late Stan Cohen) but they were mostly obsessed with football hooligans, drug-takers, or with Mods and Rockers, and so criminology did not feel like the right academic home for me. Only in Birmingham was there the academic space which connected everyday phenomena with the serious study of cultural forms, such as girl's magazines. I still love those Jackie covers and the whole visual world of that teenage magazine, with the line-drawing romance stories and the fashion sketches of girls with vast eyes and bell-bottom trousers.