ABSTRACT
In the book’s final chapter, I draw on my previous scholarly work developing an ‘ethics of improvisation,’ a set of norms that can guide us as we improvise new stories for better futures. In part, that normative guidance is provided within the empathy-driven community building that I theorised in the last chapter as ‘me too’s transformative potential. Here I link it to discussion of culture-jamming, which I present through the lens of a peace studies-inflected improvisation theory. I explore the question of how we can ‘culture-jam’ our present inadequate social relations through deployment of feminist/woman-oriented subversions and readings of cultural productions, with particular emphasis on the entertainment industry as a site of representations needing to be critiqued and subverted. In the course of analysing stories we have told and stories we could re-tell, I argue, first, that this culture-jamming strategy has always been with us, and, second, that we need to be doing it more widely (in a more sustained manner) and more broadly (in a greater range of areas). I close the chapter with a discussion of the extent to which we can already see transformation at work in perhaps the most regressive depictions in mainstream film of women’s potential: Walt Disney’s fairy tales (the definitive versions I have been subverting in codas to previous chapters).
