Book Chapters by Alex Franklin
Down the Road and Back Again: Critical Approaches to The Golden Girls, 2025
This chapter examines the representation of medical gaslighting in the double episode, “Sick and ... more This chapter examines the representation of medical gaslighting in the double episode, “Sick and Tired,” which opened the fifth season of The Golden Girls. The episode follows Dorothy’s arduous quest for medical aid with a mysterious and debilitating illness, which is eventually diagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) (elsewhere known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME)). Through discussion of Dorothy’s difficult experiences (which are a proxy for those of series writer, Susan Harris), this chapter explores some of the ideological underpinnings of medical gaslighting – such as the low status of chronic conditions within the prestige hierarchies of the medical industries, persistent structural and institutional inequalities in the medical profession, and the broader neoliberal project of disciplinary biopolitics in which poor health is positioned as a personal and moral failing – ultimately positioning medical gaslighting as a social pathology rather than an individual failing. The chapter also addresses related themes, such as Dorothy’s (and her friends’ and families’) self-advocacy and ongoing resilience in the face of institutionalized prejudices.
Funding multi-purpose urban spaces
Priorities for Play: Towards 2030 and Beyond, 2023
Spaces in which children can engage safely in physical activities always seem to be under threat ... more Spaces in which children can engage safely in physical activities always seem to be under threat in urban areas. That being so, it seems logical to seek collaborations between those working to secure spaces for play and those seeking spaces for sport. However, sport and play spaces are often separate, reflecting that the differences are emphasised between sport (often understood as ‘formal’, purposeful, rules-centred, elite, and competitive) and active/energetic play (which is conceived of belonging to younger children). Funding streams have been siloed accordingly, normalising and promulgating the artificial segregation of play and sport.
Overarching bodies that govern sport often assert their commitment to promote accessible healthy activities for all (e.g., Sport England’s Uniting the Movement campaign), but the reality is that individual sporting organisations are often obligated – due to the conditions imposed by their funding sources - to focus their investment on tightly-defined projects which prioritise their specific sport. This makes it more difficult to collaborate with other organisations concerned to promote health and wellbeing in their communities. Indeed, it can lead to local representatives of governing bodies promoting the primacy of their sport to the detriment of other considerations and potential partners.
Gill (2017, p. 5) rightly identified that the child-friendly cities movement’s “values were and are beyond reproach, [but that] it has had very little influence on the built form of cities.” At least some of the reason for this lack of progress lies in segregated administrative and financial structures which actively promote mono-functional spaces and projects. If policy makers, funding bodies and planners want to create child-friendly cities – with multipurpose spaces for play, sports, and other activities – then administrative systems, structures and metrics must be altered.
Time to ACT: Community-Led Projects, Sustainability and Institutional Time
Proceedings 10th International Conference on Sustainable Development, 2022
The thesis outlined herein is that if sustainable collaborations between large institutions and c... more The thesis outlined herein is that if sustainable collaborations between large institutions and community-led groups/charities are to be established and maintained then their divergent temporalities must be contended with.
The case study and findings presented originate from the lead author’s work over 10+ years of founding and running a self-sustaining Community Trust – Ardagh Community Trust (ACT) - in Bristol, UK, with both authors’ operating as independent Community Researchers.
Large institutions - such as councils, funding bodies, universities and sports’ governing bodies - adhere to established cyclic and linear temporalities, driven by their own internal and external logics. While these may facilitate the institution’s broader operations, they risk clashing with those of smaller, more localised entities who are beholden to the social microecologies and attendant microtemporalities in which they operate.
Through analysis of examples of ACT’s work with large cultural and political institutions, this paper details the real-world impact of such conflicting temporalities and describes how institutional practices of accelerating or decelerating ‘time’, e.g. via the setting of unrealisable deadlines and acts of postponement and delay, can be understood as the assertion of coercive temporalities and experienced as an alienatory disciplinary technology running counter to goals of mutuality and enrichment.
'There’s no b’ness like ho b’ness': Deconstructing the hip-hop ‘ho’
Fashion Crimes: Dressing for Deviance, 2019
Fashion has long been used to differentiate between prostitutes and ‘respectable’ members of soci... more Fashion has long been used to differentiate between prostitutes and ‘respectable’ members of society. Whether through state enforced sumptuary laws or less formally imposed but equally codified visual markers, the identity category of ‘prostitute’ has been constructed in such a way as to annul all others, defining the bearer of the title according to their illegality, sexuality and perceived immorality. Nowadays, however, from the mainstreaming of the thong – a garment devised to censor the bodies of ‘exotic’ dancers – to the street walker chic of wet-look leggings, few areas of Western popular culture today remain impervious to the power of the aesthetics of the sex industry.
Nowhere is this influence more acutely apparent than in the products of contemporary hip-hop culture, wherein the hegemonic hyper-sexualised caricature of woman as ‘ho’ belies the early emancipatory messages of female artists such as Salt-N-Pepa, Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, et al. Hip-hop is a multi-million dollar global phenomenon and - when the combined revenues of music sales, fashion labels, films, TV series, advertising endorsements, video games, cars, jewellery and other ‘lifestyle’ accessories are factored in - it generates more money annually than the GDP of a small country. Its influence can be felt world-wide, with distinct hip-hop cultures evolving on nearly every continent and with the dichotomous gender roles that it endorses embedded in all its various manifestations.
The ‘ho’, as one of the dominant representations of womanhood discussed by male hip-hop artists, presents a paradoxical image that is both threatening and desirable; ‘hoes’ are needed in order to effect a ‘pimp’ identity and display the ‘pimp’s’ business and sexual prowess, but the seeming avaricious nature of the ‘ho’ threatens the ‘pimp’s’ financial and social status if not perpetually kept in check. The ‘ho’s’ complex contemporary signification, from the ‘pimp’s’ reliance on her as a defining status symbol to her implied mastery of both male and female sexuality will be examined here. Further, the ambivalent role that high end fashion labels play in indicating both her ‘keptness’ and her acquisitive autonomy will be explored; for as 50 Cent states in his 2003 single P.I.M.P., ‘She got a thing for that Gucci, that Fendi, that Prada, That BCBG, Burberry, Dolce and Gabbana, She feed them foolish fantasies, they pay her cause they wanna’.
Papers by Alex Franklin
Ardagh Community Trust: transgressing boundaries, asserting community [Open Access]
Architecture_MPS, 2023
Administrative boundaries are ubiquitous. A vital technology of power within the modern nation-st... more Administrative boundaries are ubiquitous. A vital technology of power within the modern nation-state’s mode of bureaucratic governance, they carve up and abstract land and water alike into conceptual totalities that, in their simplification, render them legible to centralised administrative bodies. This is a foundational tool of state planning, the impact of which permeates all aspects of socio-economic life. These boundaries are not passive; they do not simply define a geographical area. Rather, they are selective in what they encompass and, as a result, what they include and exclude and what is rendered visible and, hence, valuable. This article describes an example of the real-world impact of this selectivity through discussion of the experiences of a community-led charity (Ardagh Community Trust) and the community group that founded it (Friends of Horfield Common). In their work to demonstrate that an administrative-boundary-spanning public green space (Horfield Common) and leisure facility (the Ardagh) was a vital community resource and hub, this article focuses on the work of Friends of Horfield Common/Ardagh Community Trust to ensure that their local community, one dissected by multiple administrative boundaries, was recognised and acknowledged when, in 2008, Bristol City Council in the UK proposed the sale of multiple publicly owned green spaces through their Parks and Green Space Strategy. Administrative boundaries played a key role in defining and determining which sites in the city were proposed for sale and in structuring the accompanying public consultation process, thereby determining which communities were recognised as communities in relation to this policy and, hence, which communities’ opinions were actively sought and heard. This article concludes by highlighting some of the potential political and economic costs attendant on reifying administrative boundaries rather than lived communities in both planning and consultation processes.
Editorial: Intersectional dress
Clothing Cultures, 2018
The study of dress and adornment practices is perforce the study of the materialisation of inters... more The study of dress and adornment practices is perforce the study of the materialisation of intersecting identities. Class, gender, sexuality, age, race, dis/ability and other identity markers are all writ large on an individual’s clothed body and Crenshaw’s (1991: 1296) suggestion in her influential Stanford Law Review article, ‘Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color’, ‘that intersectionality might be […] broadly useful as a way of mediating the tension between assertions of multiple identity and the ongoing necessity of group politics’ sits at the heart of this issue of Clothing Cultures. Both explicitly and implicitly, the papers herein respond to Crenshaw’s behest that intersectionality ‘be expanded by factoring in issues such as class, sexual orientation, age, and color’ (1991: 1245). They reveal and explore the power of such socially constructed identity categories and in doing so corroborate her belief that categories do indeed ‘have meaning and consequences’ but that the ‘most pressing problem, in many if not most cases, is not the existence of the categories, but rather the particular values attached to them, and the way those values foster and create social hierarchies’ (1991: 1297).
[…]
Editorial: Why ageing matters!
Clothing Cultures, 2017
The special issue of Clothing Cultures that this editorial introduces is concerned with the relat... more The special issue of Clothing Cultures that this editorial introduces is concerned with the relationship between ageing and dress or, more specifically, ‘old age’ and dress.
It outlines the rationale behind why the Special Issue: Ageing and Dress is both necessary and timely, as well as introducing the research articles and drawing out shared drivers that motivate the international scholars whose works it contains.
Chronically angry [Blog post for International Day of Persons with Disabilities]
Emerald Publishing, 2019
I have an ‘acquired disability’. As a phrase it’s intended to pithily communicate that my disabil... more I have an ‘acquired disability’. As a phrase it’s intended to pithily communicate that my disability is one that I wasn’t born with, but it annoys me. I keep coming back to it and poking it, in much the same way as one would a sore tooth or a splinter. It’s a benign, polite description and, as such, one deliberately intended to obfuscate the bodily trauma of those it describes for the comfort of the addressee.
In polite (read, wealthy) circles one ‘acquires’ a painting or a horse or - if you’re a Jane Austen character - a fortune. ‘Acquired’ suggests a level of pleasurable and agentic choice; that one shopped around and, after careful consideration, decided upon the disability that best went with one’s other acquisitions. As such, it appears an extension of the normalised acquisitiveness of contemporary late-modern consumer culture… and in a way it is.
For every kind of disability there is someone trying to sell you a person-centred fix. ‘Person-centred’ sounds good, but what it actually means is that it is the individual who is expected to change, not society or the actors in it. Whether it’s the latest in (terrifying) stair-mounting wheelchairs, esoteric diets or the apparently universal panaceas of yoga and mindfulness, the onus of responsibility is on the disabled person to “fix” their unruly body or at least have the decency to appear “normal”. As a disabled woman that means (still) not complaining, not making demands, not taking up space, not inconveniencing other people, continuing to put energy into appearance maintenance and keeping on smiling. Smiling to put everyone else at ease, to hide the pain and, most notably, to hide the anger.
I am so angry! Not at my being disabled, although I am not best pleased about that, but rather at myself and increasingly at many of my peers. For my condition revealed in me and (many of) mine an axiomatic ableism that I continue to find profoundly shocking. For all of my wokeness regarding the myriad effects and permutations of intersections of gender, race, age, sexuality and class on one’s experience of being-in-the-world, I now realise how little appreciation I had of the impact of dis/ability. Intellectually I understood that ‘disabled’ is an identity category determined by the neoliberal body project, within which the dissident body (whether through disability, weight, age or illness) is framed as an elective (i.e. individual moral) failing, thus rationalising the poor treatment of those thus labelled. Rationally I have always understood this as hateful rubbish and have sought to act accordingly but this intellectualisation failed to insulate me against its effects.
I am angry at my deep-rooted internalised ableism: that I blame myself for my condition, that I feel guilty for being a burden, that I’m not doing enough to get “better”. I am angry at my ambivalence towards my body; that I default to seeing my body as a thing that has failed me, a “failed” thing that I get impatient with and embarrassed by. As a feminist scholar, I am especially angry at the deep-seated self-objectification that this evidences and how rooted these responses are in an internalised acceptance that my value is dependent on my ability to perform both paid and unpaid physical and emotional labour for others. I am angry that others now find me and my failed body “difficult” and “demanding” and I am really angry that on one level, a level I am working hard to resolve, I still agree with them.
Acknowledging the multiplicity and depth of my anger has been both a liberating and sobering process as it has become increasingly apparent that it was not an anger that I ‘acquired’ along with my disability.
I’m mad as hell and I have every right to be. I know I am not alone in that anger.
Spirit of '68. The 'next' role of the art/design school
The Design Journal, 2017
From the current political and cultural landscape, the workshop sought to develop discussions sur... more From the current political and cultural landscape, the workshop sought to develop discussions surrounding the potential for art and design education to instigate and make socio-political comment and change. The rationale for the study coincides with the forthcoming 50th anniversary of the ‘Spirit of ‘68’, in which dominant ideologies across Europe were interrogated, attacked and in some cases, overturned. Integral to this historical climate were the role of students, particularly those engaged in art and design courses, who challenged and changed educational policy and the future landscape of the arts. Much like the cultural climate of the late 1960s, our own times seem to question the validity of the arts within education (particularly in relation to funding and the provision of courses) whilst promoting a distrust in a liberal elite and a de-politicised population.
The aims of the workshop were twofold; to consider the ways in which Art School (and in the UK this includes Design Schools too) education had changed since the student led revolutions in 1968, and, to consider the ways in which Art School Thinking could be integral to daily life in the 21st century.
Cole's from Newcastle
Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture, 2013
Cheryl Cole – ex-judge of UK TV’s The X Factor (Freemantle Media Ltd, 2004-present), ex-WAG of Ch... more Cheryl Cole – ex-judge of UK TV’s The X Factor (Freemantle Media Ltd, 2004-present), ex-WAG of Chelsea and England footballer Ashley Cole, celebrated Geordie, sometime singer, fulltime ‘style icon’ and possessor of aspirational hair – represents a prime example of a hegemonic performance of femininity that is being normalized and presented as desirable by the mass media in the United Kingdom and beyond. This article examines the ambivalent relationship between class, power, regional identity and beauty that is Cole embodies.
Phenomenal dress! A personal phenomenology of clothing
Clothing Cultures, 2013
The principle aim of this article is to contribute to the development of a phenomenology of fashi... more The principle aim of this article is to contribute to the development of a phenomenology of fashion through an analysis of my relationship with clothing using Heidegger’s phenomenology of Being as outlined in Being and Time (1997) to provide the study’s methodological foundations.
Nicole
This article was downloaded by: [66.249.68.104] On: 10 July 2011, At: 16:50 Publisher: Routledge ... more This article was downloaded by: [66.249.68.104] On: 10 July 2011, At: 16:50 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Symposiums by Alex Franklin
Co-Producer by Alex Franklin
Conference Presentations by Alex Franklin
Playful ACT: giving play a sporting chance
Play: Rights & Possibilities, 22nd International Play Association Triennial World Conference, Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland, 2023
Ardagh Community Trust (ACT) is a charity in North Bristol, UK, that manages The Ardagh, an ex-lo...
Uploads
Book Chapters by Alex Franklin
Overarching bodies that govern sport often assert their commitment to promote accessible healthy activities for all (e.g., Sport England’s Uniting the Movement campaign), but the reality is that individual sporting organisations are often obligated – due to the conditions imposed by their funding sources - to focus their investment on tightly-defined projects which prioritise their specific sport. This makes it more difficult to collaborate with other organisations concerned to promote health and wellbeing in their communities. Indeed, it can lead to local representatives of governing bodies promoting the primacy of their sport to the detriment of other considerations and potential partners.
Gill (2017, p. 5) rightly identified that the child-friendly cities movement’s “values were and are beyond reproach, [but that] it has had very little influence on the built form of cities.” At least some of the reason for this lack of progress lies in segregated administrative and financial structures which actively promote mono-functional spaces and projects. If policy makers, funding bodies and planners want to create child-friendly cities – with multipurpose spaces for play, sports, and other activities – then administrative systems, structures and metrics must be altered.
The case study and findings presented originate from the lead author’s work over 10+ years of founding and running a self-sustaining Community Trust – Ardagh Community Trust (ACT) - in Bristol, UK, with both authors’ operating as independent Community Researchers.
Large institutions - such as councils, funding bodies, universities and sports’ governing bodies - adhere to established cyclic and linear temporalities, driven by their own internal and external logics. While these may facilitate the institution’s broader operations, they risk clashing with those of smaller, more localised entities who are beholden to the social microecologies and attendant microtemporalities in which they operate.
Through analysis of examples of ACT’s work with large cultural and political institutions, this paper details the real-world impact of such conflicting temporalities and describes how institutional practices of accelerating or decelerating ‘time’, e.g. via the setting of unrealisable deadlines and acts of postponement and delay, can be understood as the assertion of coercive temporalities and experienced as an alienatory disciplinary technology running counter to goals of mutuality and enrichment.
Nowhere is this influence more acutely apparent than in the products of contemporary hip-hop culture, wherein the hegemonic hyper-sexualised caricature of woman as ‘ho’ belies the early emancipatory messages of female artists such as Salt-N-Pepa, Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, et al. Hip-hop is a multi-million dollar global phenomenon and - when the combined revenues of music sales, fashion labels, films, TV series, advertising endorsements, video games, cars, jewellery and other ‘lifestyle’ accessories are factored in - it generates more money annually than the GDP of a small country. Its influence can be felt world-wide, with distinct hip-hop cultures evolving on nearly every continent and with the dichotomous gender roles that it endorses embedded in all its various manifestations.
The ‘ho’, as one of the dominant representations of womanhood discussed by male hip-hop artists, presents a paradoxical image that is both threatening and desirable; ‘hoes’ are needed in order to effect a ‘pimp’ identity and display the ‘pimp’s’ business and sexual prowess, but the seeming avaricious nature of the ‘ho’ threatens the ‘pimp’s’ financial and social status if not perpetually kept in check. The ‘ho’s’ complex contemporary signification, from the ‘pimp’s’ reliance on her as a defining status symbol to her implied mastery of both male and female sexuality will be examined here. Further, the ambivalent role that high end fashion labels play in indicating both her ‘keptness’ and her acquisitive autonomy will be explored; for as 50 Cent states in his 2003 single P.I.M.P., ‘She got a thing for that Gucci, that Fendi, that Prada, That BCBG, Burberry, Dolce and Gabbana, She feed them foolish fantasies, they pay her cause they wanna’.
Papers by Alex Franklin
[…]
It outlines the rationale behind why the Special Issue: Ageing and Dress is both necessary and timely, as well as introducing the research articles and drawing out shared drivers that motivate the international scholars whose works it contains.
In polite (read, wealthy) circles one ‘acquires’ a painting or a horse or - if you’re a Jane Austen character - a fortune. ‘Acquired’ suggests a level of pleasurable and agentic choice; that one shopped around and, after careful consideration, decided upon the disability that best went with one’s other acquisitions. As such, it appears an extension of the normalised acquisitiveness of contemporary late-modern consumer culture… and in a way it is.
For every kind of disability there is someone trying to sell you a person-centred fix. ‘Person-centred’ sounds good, but what it actually means is that it is the individual who is expected to change, not society or the actors in it. Whether it’s the latest in (terrifying) stair-mounting wheelchairs, esoteric diets or the apparently universal panaceas of yoga and mindfulness, the onus of responsibility is on the disabled person to “fix” their unruly body or at least have the decency to appear “normal”. As a disabled woman that means (still) not complaining, not making demands, not taking up space, not inconveniencing other people, continuing to put energy into appearance maintenance and keeping on smiling. Smiling to put everyone else at ease, to hide the pain and, most notably, to hide the anger.
I am so angry! Not at my being disabled, although I am not best pleased about that, but rather at myself and increasingly at many of my peers. For my condition revealed in me and (many of) mine an axiomatic ableism that I continue to find profoundly shocking. For all of my wokeness regarding the myriad effects and permutations of intersections of gender, race, age, sexuality and class on one’s experience of being-in-the-world, I now realise how little appreciation I had of the impact of dis/ability. Intellectually I understood that ‘disabled’ is an identity category determined by the neoliberal body project, within which the dissident body (whether through disability, weight, age or illness) is framed as an elective (i.e. individual moral) failing, thus rationalising the poor treatment of those thus labelled. Rationally I have always understood this as hateful rubbish and have sought to act accordingly but this intellectualisation failed to insulate me against its effects.
I am angry at my deep-rooted internalised ableism: that I blame myself for my condition, that I feel guilty for being a burden, that I’m not doing enough to get “better”. I am angry at my ambivalence towards my body; that I default to seeing my body as a thing that has failed me, a “failed” thing that I get impatient with and embarrassed by. As a feminist scholar, I am especially angry at the deep-seated self-objectification that this evidences and how rooted these responses are in an internalised acceptance that my value is dependent on my ability to perform both paid and unpaid physical and emotional labour for others. I am angry that others now find me and my failed body “difficult” and “demanding” and I am really angry that on one level, a level I am working hard to resolve, I still agree with them.
Acknowledging the multiplicity and depth of my anger has been both a liberating and sobering process as it has become increasingly apparent that it was not an anger that I ‘acquired’ along with my disability.
I’m mad as hell and I have every right to be. I know I am not alone in that anger.
The aims of the workshop were twofold; to consider the ways in which Art School (and in the UK this includes Design Schools too) education had changed since the student led revolutions in 1968, and, to consider the ways in which Art School Thinking could be integral to daily life in the 21st century.
Symposiums by Alex Franklin
Co-Producer by Alex Franklin
Conference Presentations by Alex Franklin