ABSTRACT
It was a truth acknowledged by all women studying at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in the 1970s that no woman there had ever completed a PhD.1 Nor was likely to, we muttered, if the chosen topic left the domain of the public, the state and the male working class-the boyzone. And it wasn’t that no women were recruited to do graduate work. Women’s magazines, girls’ subcultures, romantic love, girls’ comics and the culture of working-class women were some of the topics for which postgraduates were recruited. Although research was done in these areas, what seems, in memory, much more of the time was spent trying to work out what feminist intellectual work would be, and how it related to the endeavours understood as cultural studies. It is to the mapping of this tricky and unresolved set of relations that I want to turn here, with particular reference to the account given by Stuart Hall at the 1990 Illinois conference (Hall, 1992, reprinted pp. 262-75, this volume).
