Rosalind Gill

Rosalind Clair Gill FBA (born 1963) is a British sociologist and feminist cultural theorist. She is currently Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at City, University of London. Gill is author or editor of ten books, and numerous articles and chapters, and her work has been translated into Chinese, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.

Gill was born on 22 April 1963, the daughter of Janet and Michael Gill, whom she describes as left-wing and politically engaged parents. In an interview she says she grew up to be "a young, politically active, left-wing person" with a particular interest in "how culture, and ideology gets inside us and shapes us."

She received her doctorate, which was concerned with new racism and new sexism in British pop radio, in social psychology from the Discourse and Rhetoric Group (DARG), Loughborough University in 1991. In an interview, she has identified Michael Billig (her PhD supervisor) and Stuart Hall as major influences and, together with Christina Scharff, she dedicated the book New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity to Angela McRobbie. Gill's work is interdisciplinary, and she has worked in departments of Psychology, Sociology, Media and Communications, and Gender Studies. Based mainly in London, she has held posts at Goldsmiths College, King's College and the LSE, where she was the first tenured member of staff in the Gender Institute (1997–2007). She took up her position at City, University of London, in 2013.

Gill was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2023.

Gill is known for her research interests in gender and sexuality, media and new technologies, the cultural and creative industries, and work and labour. Substantively her work has made major contributions to debates about postfeminism and neoliberalism; the persistence and dynamics of inequality; constructions of sex, sexuality and intimacy; and changing experiences of work in creative and academic fields. Her work is shaped by her interdisciplinary background, located between sociology, psychology, media and communications, and gender and sexuality studies. It is animated by psychosocial questions about power, inequality and the relationship between culture and subjectivity. She also has a long-standing interest in methodology and the research process, and has authored books and articles about discourse analysis, reflexivity, and secrets and silences in research.

One of Gill's most significant theoretical contributions is her discussion of postfeminism, which she claims is "one of the most important and contested terms in the lexicon of feminist cultural analysis". She argues that though the term has been used by scholars for decades there is still "no agreement among scholars about what postfeminism means. The term is used variously and contradictorily to signal a theoretical position, a type of feminism after the Second Wave, or a regressive political stance".

In a highly cited article in European Journal of Cultural Studies (ECJS) in 2007, Gill argued that postfeminism should be thought of as a contemporary “sensibility”, shaped by neoliberalism and “by stark and continuing inequalities” related to gender race and class. Elements of this sensibility include:

This framing of postfeminism has been very influential, with well over 1000 academic citations. In 2017, in the 20th anniversary issue of EJCS, Gill was asked to reflect on the piece and developed her argument in three important directions: emphasising the significance of intersectional analyses of postfeminist culture; highlighting the “psychic life” of postfeminism; and setting out directions for considering the affective dimensions of postfeminism, organised around confidence, resilience, positive thinking and “inspiration”. In another significant intervention in the journal Feminist Media Studies in 2016 Gill explored the status of postfeminism in a moment characterised by both a resurgence of feminist activism and a heightened popular misogyny, and defended the continued relevance of the term to signify an object of critique.